Mind & Physicalism
Let's get right down to business.
Physicalism claims everything is matter and/or energy.
Matter is anything that has mass and volume.
Energy is the capacity to do work.
Here's me, I'm thinking about Aphrodite (goddess of beauty).
My brain neither gains mass nor increases in volume. Ergo, my thought about Aphrodite isn't matter!
I'm not so sure about this but
1. If my thought about Aphrodite isn't matter, as per Einstein's famous mass-energy equivalence equation E = mc², it can't be energy
2. I can't seem to do any work with my thought about Aphrodite. I mean my thought about Aphrodite can't seem to deflect even a single air molecule off its path let alone do anything else physical.
Conclusion: Thoughts are neither matter nor energy.
In other words, thoughts are nonphysical.
Question: Is mind also nonphysical? If I see triangular objects (nonphysical things) popping out of a machine (the brain), there must be something triangular in that machine (the mind must be nonphysical).
Physicalism claims everything is matter and/or energy.
Matter is anything that has mass and volume.
Energy is the capacity to do work.
Here's me, I'm thinking about Aphrodite (goddess of beauty).
My brain neither gains mass nor increases in volume. Ergo, my thought about Aphrodite isn't matter!
I'm not so sure about this but
1. If my thought about Aphrodite isn't matter, as per Einstein's famous mass-energy equivalence equation E = mc², it can't be energy
2. I can't seem to do any work with my thought about Aphrodite. I mean my thought about Aphrodite can't seem to deflect even a single air molecule off its path let alone do anything else physical.
Conclusion: Thoughts are neither matter nor energy.
In other words, thoughts are nonphysical.
Question: Is mind also nonphysical? If I see triangular objects (nonphysical things) popping out of a machine (the brain), there must be something triangular in that machine (the mind must be nonphysical).
Comments (594)
Um ... wtf.
:nerd:
Quoting 180 Proof
I think I get it now! At best this is a fairly good attempt at descrbing the process of thinking but it contains absolutely zero information about what thinking is, what thoughts are. I can describe the process of urine formation in kidneys but that doesn't necessarily mean I understood what pee is, right? :chin:
Apparently, you didn't take enough time to process what I clearly wrote ...
Quoting 180 Proof
Ahem. When you think of Aphrodite, it's not your brain that gains mass.
Couldn't resist.
:rofl: I'm experiencing a moment of Zen here. Give me a second. What should've happened didn't happen! :chin:
I agree, I couldn't parse it well. However, if there's any truth in what I said, you're changing the subject, deliberately or unwittingly dragging that rotting red herring across the scent trail. I'm interested in the relationship between matter, energy and thoughts/mind. Stick to the script, 180 Proof. Your improvisational skills are legendary of course.
Quoting 180 Proof
Alzheimer's, for instance, consists, in part, in plaque deposits in the brain that inhibit thinking as well as memory and which can only happen if thoughts-memories are physical systems that physically process thinking & memorizing.
Quoting 180 Proof
[quote=Feser]Brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, the motion of water molecules, electrical current, and any other physical phenomenon are clearly devoid of inherent meaning. By themselves they are simply meaningless patterns of electrochemical activity. Yet our thoughts do have inherent meaning – that’s how they are able to impart it to otherwise meaningless ink marks, sound waves, etc. In that case, though, it seems that our thoughts cannot possibly be identified with any physical processes in the brain. In short: Thoughts and the like possess inherent meaning or intentionality; brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, and the like, are utterly devoid of any inherent meaning or intentionality; so thoughts and the like cannot be identified with brain processes.[/quote]
Furthemore, if this post causes anxiety, then that will have metabolic i.e. physical consequences, in terms of blood pressure etc. But the proximate cause of those changes is not physical, it's purely because of a perceived conflict or disagreement.
Please take a close look at the underlined bit above viz. "...[irreducible] electrochemical events..." Surely, if what I know about science is true, the "...electrochemical events..." must be expressible in terms of matter and energy but as I've demonstrated, as best as I could, thoughts are neither matter nor energy.
Good one! :up:
What do you think of this:
On Consciousness
What the meaning to this play we’re befit,
From dirt to dust within the script that’s writ?
The wise in search have thrown themselves to waste;
Experience alone is the benefit.
Physics describes but the extrinsic causes,
While consciousness exists just for itself,
As the intrinsic, compositional,
Informational, whole, and exclusive—
As the distinctions toward survival,
Though causing nothing except in itself,
As in ne’er doing but only as being,
Leaving intelligence for the doing.
The posterior cortex holds correlates,
For this is the only brain region that
Can’t be removed for one to still retain
Consciousness, it having feedback in it;
Thusly, it forms an irreducible Whole,
And this Whole forms consciousness directly,
A process fundamental in nature,
Or’s the brain’s private symbolic language.
The Whole can also be well spoken of
To communicate with others, as well as
Globally informing other brain states,
For nonconscious parts know not what’s being made.
Missed that part. Good point! Physical changes can affect the mind, to be precise its functions. There seems to be a correlation between brain plaques and thinking cum memory. In short there are physical correlates to mind function.
However, is this a watertight case for physicalism? No loopholes, no ifs, and, and buts? Somehow the answer that I think of is "no".
At any rate, it seems to be inconsistent with my interpretation, I employed the best science I could muster.
Which would take precedence I wonder? My argument or yours?
Mine is deductive so far as I can tell, yours is inductive.
Okay, with that out of the way, account for Alzheimer's adverse affects on "nonphysical thoughts". :brow:
All I can say is, it isn't deliberate.
[quote=Robert J. Halon]Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.[/quote]
aka Hanlon's Razor
Quoting 180 Proof
Truth be told, Alzheimer's or any other organic brain disorder and their correlation with altered brain function is not a 100%. Not all brains with plaques develop Alzheimer's and not all those who have Alzheimer's have brain plauqes. I'm afraid the ball is still in your court!
First, physicalism is a methodology and not a scientific theory (explanation). Second, it's demonstrably more useful than any non/anti-physicalist alternative. Third, apparently you don't understand physicalism well enough not to pose such a nonsensical question.
Also, I gave 'a conceptual description of thoughts' and not 'an argument for or against thoughts', so your characterization of "inductive" is a non sequitur. Are you stoned? drunk? off your prescribed meds, Fool? Something physical distorting your "non-physical
mind"? :sweat:
If I have a sorted series of red and blue boxes, RRRBBRBRRB for example, is the series physical? As in is the pattern itself, the structure physical? I frankly don't care about the answer to that question because it's definitional. But since you want to define whether or not something is physical by whether or not it possesses mass and volume, then for you probably the pattern is not physical (since the pattern does not possess mass).
For the record, since the pattern is a pattern of physical stuff (boxes) I would call the pattern itself physical, which is maybe why a lot of people on the site think I'm disagreeing with them when I'm not. Maybe my use of physical is weird. Anyways.
I would say this structure is mind. Mind is a structure of matter, specifically brains. Now, here is where you need to be careful not to separate the structure as a separate sort of thing. That's what dualists do. They think "Ah, here is something that doesn't have mass, namely mind! So there must be 2 sorts of things!" but there is no need for that. It's not that there is a something that doesn't have mass, it's just that there is a pattern, and we call that pattern mind.
Because when you make it so that there is something that doesn't have mass that does all the thinking at best you're going to end up with epiphenomenalism, or at worst you're going to try to go against the science (conservation of energy, momentum), and no one likes that. Though there is a way out for dualists, that is shoving the role of mind into QM. As in, although this is true:
Quoting TheMadFool
What the thought of Aphrodite does is that it somehow resolves the Quantum Wavefunction in your brain in such a way that the neural correlates of "thoughts about aphrodite" happen (such as an increase in volume. Not in your brain though). That way you can keep your non material mind and have it be doing something without violating the laws of physics. Take this to the extreme and you get panpsychism or whatever Donald Hoffman is doing.
That or you can just hold that a mind is a pattern of matter and that way you get all the same stuff you would get with the dualist/panpsychist route but with a simpler explanation and no need for QM wizardry. Also there is debate over whether this role of mind would be significant at all. QM has very little impact on big objects. So if you claim that mind is an immaterial thing which has the job of resolving wavefunctions in the brain, you might end up with a mind that can't do anything impactful. Frankly, I have no clue how big a role QM plays in the human brain, all I know is there is debate about it.
[quote=www.rit.edu]So the physicalist view is that we can reduce any mental state so that it is completely described as events in neurons that are made up entirely of matter and energy.[/quote]
:chin:
Quoting 180 Proof
Noble, nevertheless a lie
Quoting 180 Proof
Like I said,
However, you've not said anything with regard to the deductive nature of my argument (OP) and the fact that Alzheimer's disease is based on induction.
Quoting 180 Proof
:rofl: Possible, very possible but probably not.
Why is it a non sequitur? You brought up Alzheimer's as evidence for physicalism and I, with full warrant, pointed to the fact that the correlation between brain plaques and mind functions is not a 100% i.e. some with Alzheimer's don't have brain plaques and some with brain plaques don't have Alzheimer's. Anyone claiming causation between brain plauqes and mind function must, logically speaking, have an explanation for these exceptions in terms of physical correlates if physicalism is true. None exist!
A better option for you would've been to look at the correlation between complete traumatic brain injury (gunshots, vehicular/industrial accidents, etc.) and mind function. In this case the correlation is 100% - complete traumatic brain injury is always associated with loss of mind function.
However, total loss of mind function caused by complete traumatic brain injury doesn't seem to square with the fact that while the brain is functioning normally, as described in the OP, the mind seems to be neither matter (no increase in brain mass/volume, mass/volume of a thought =0) nor energy (E = 0 × c², since m = 0). Also, a thought can't do physical work, you can't, for example, lift a paper clip by thinking.
You need to separate your variables. In this case there was a visual input and supposedly some perceived conflict. If you want to claim that the metabolic effect took place because of the perceived conflict, and not because of any visual or auditory input, you'd have to find a case where a metabolic effect takes place due to "perceived conflict" alone without any accompanying physical inputs. Otherwise one can easily make the claim that it is the physical input causing the metabolic effect. Good luck with that one!
I'm not trying to please anybody although, I would wanna "tread softly" because "you (I) tread on my (other's) dreams".
Quoting khaled
:ok:
Anything that is read by a human is obviously a matter of interpretation. If I write something that annoys you or alarms you, and your blood pressure and heart-rate go up, that effect is wholly and solely reliant on your interpretation of what I wrote, unlike if I injected you with a drug, or physically hit you, which would obviously be physical.
Uh...huh...
Anyways we already did this on my thread and got nowhere. Maybe try again in like a week or something but not 2 days later. Cheers!
But I will add, I think we're more agreed than disagreed, we just use different words for the same stuff. I would never say "It's neurological but not physical" for one.
This is a critical point and coming from a scholar in Buddhism, makes that much more significant. Meaning, as I understand it, is apart frome a sign-referent schema, the usual, also includes coherence aka that which can be made sense of.
Do recall our previous discussions on the so-called Mu (Negative) and Mushin (the mind without mind)? These are mind states attained when we're asked to, let's just say, parse the irrational/meaningless in whatever form or shape.
I've had a lot of experience with the Mu mind state but they were of a quality that left much to be desired. Can't complain though, it was the best available in the market in a manner of speaking.
So, in a way, meaning ain't what's important. Au contraire, the key to realizing what the mind really is, in Buddhist terms, is the meaningless (koans) but, my hunch is, it'll eventually circle back to meaning at some point.
Another idea, again of Japanese origin, is Shoshin (Beginner's mind) described as the trio of,
1. Openness
2. Eagerness
3. Free of preconceptions
A Zen master might, in order to instill shoshin in faer students, ask them to meditate on a koan (essentially meaningless/irrational from a conventionally logical point of view), the objective being to break decades of well-practiced but stymying thinking habits that students find impossible to see past until they encounter Mu.
Insofar as this post is concerned, Zen in particular & Buddhism in general attacks physicalism by inverting the problem as it were. A Mu state is basically the brain on but the mind off - something impossible if the mind were physical, right? A physicalist can't have the cake and eat it too - physicalism "explains" both brain on & mind on (normal consciousness) on AND ALSO brain on & mind off (Mu).
Guess physicalists can't explain sleep either :roll:
So?
But there is a bridge between neurology and the laws of logic no?
Think about this: the simplest proposition can be written in any language, any medium, any material.
The material form is different in every case, but the meaning stays the same.
So how then could the meaning be something physical?
The brain shuts down for the night or the day, if you're napping. :chin:
You might find it interesting that zoning out sounds very much like Petit Mal (Absence Seizures) but the latter has physical correlates which can be picked up by EEG I believe.
Anyway, zoning out definitely isn't a petit mal seizure.
That's my Zen moment right there!
Absent-mindedness (Zoning out) & Philosophical Zombie
I don't know why and how but these two ideas seem connected at some level.
Indeed! Indeed!
[quote=Ludwig Wittegenstein]Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent[/quote]
[quote=Proverb]Speech is silver, silence is golden[/quote]
[quote=Laozi]Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know[/quote]
.......Sorry, are you serious?
What's the difference between someone who is dead and someone who is sleeping do you think? When the brain shuts down what keeps the heart going? Cmon mate you could figure this one out with a bit of thinking or a quick google search.
As I said to fool:
Quoting khaled
TLDR: I don't particularly care whether or not you want to call the meaning physical, for me if someone is a pattern of physical things then that pattern I call physical. So long as to you the meaning is a structure of physical things not a new separate sort of thing. Not something that you add to the physical.
Many of the things you ‘don’t particularly care about’ are actually fundamental to the kinds of questions you’re asking. But then, you probably don’t particularly care about that, either.
My argument is that the ability to detect meaning and then to represent it in abstract terms via language, is something for which physicalism fails to account. The counter-argument is, ‘oh yes, physicalism does account for that. It does it by [x]’.
So - what is ‘x’?
Quoting khaled
Do you agree? Because I think our disagreement may be more about which words we use rather than what we mean by them.
Right and I'm asking what "meaning" is for you. Is it a pattern of physical things, or a new sort of thing entirely? Do you have a bunch of ink and then you "add meaning" to it like a chef adds ingredients to a stew or is meaning simply the pattern of ink? Or something else? I think meaning is the pattern of ink.
We have to make sure we're talking about the same thing here in the first place. Then we can start to ask whether or not the thing we're talking about is physical.
It’s not any kind of thing. There are patterns in nature - crystals, snowflakes and the like - but ‘meaning’ is not a pattern. Like, in language, the structure of grammar is not a pattern, because it’s irregular - different languages have different syntax, even English syntax is too irregular to define in terms of a pattern.
The ability to perceive and represent meaning is clearly basic to language use, generally. Humans alone can do that - birds and other animals communicate through sounds, but only humans can perceive the relationship between symbols.
The physicalist answer to all of that is simply that it is an evolved ability - which is true, in some respects, but it begs many questions regarding what ‘physical’ means, again.
So in answer to your question, yes, the ability to perceive meaning is an ability which emerged with h.sapiens, and in that sense is new or novel. It’s not something which can be explained in the terms which physical theories operate.
Don’t be surprised that this is a deep question, because it’s a deep question.
Let me get this straight, what you're saying is the Mu state is identical to sleeping? Doesn't seem likely, Mu is a state of consciousness but sleep is a state of unconsciousness. When in Mu state, the EEG reads: conscisous. When asleep, the EEG reads: unconscious.
So it's not a structure of a thing.
Quoting Wayfarer
Nor any kind of thing.
So what the heck is it? Because I think that exhausts your options.
Quoting Wayfarer
"Irregular" =/= "Not a pattern".
Language and grammar aren't random either. The only difference between a grammatically correct sentence and a grammatically incorrect sentence is whether or not they conform to a pattern.
Like seriously, "the structure of grammar is not a pattern"? Really? "Pattern" and "Structure" are synonyms.
Quoting Wayfarer
Where do you get this? There is mountains of experimental evidence of animals reasoning. Even solving puzzles.
Quoting Wayfarer
Let's just first get agree "meaning" means. What is meaning? Not a pattern and not a new sort of thing. So what? I just can't understand what you're getting it.
No I'm saying that your brain doesn't shut down when you're sleeping. Idk how you got that from what I said.
This is to imply that your idea about "mind off brain on" is not very difficult to a physicalist to deal with. Physicalism wouldn't have gotten off the ground if it couldn't explain what sleeping was. Even though in sleeping it's also "mind off brain on". Outside of dreams anyways.
Physicalism is about the observable universe. This includes the states of massive and non-massive bodies, but also about the changes of those states. There is no requirement that when the state of the brain changes from A to B, the brain must change mass or volume, or have done work on something.
A fundamental part of the physics that physicalism endorses is entropy. Thermodynamics states that if a system such as the brain changes to a more ordered state, there must be an over-compensating increase of disorder in the environment. When you think of Aphrodite, assuming you were thinking of nothing else, your brain releases heat. Of course, your brain is *always* thinking about something, so it's always releasing heat: you cannot isolate a single thought and say "The brain changed from state A to state B and released energy C". But you can observe the physics of thinking generally.
Oh! I see what you mean. You're taking sleep as a case of brain on but mind off. Sleep isn't some kind of uniform state that we can talk about it as a whole. Let's focus on REM and NREM sleep. The latter (NREM sleep) is not problematic because the brain is off and the mind is off. The former (REM sleep), oddly, isn't problematic either, the brain is on and the mind is on. :chin:
The brain is very much on. Or you'd be dead. That's the point......
The brain is very much off. Or you'd be awake. That's the point...
Anyway, as @180 Proof likes to say, I'm paraphrasing, Death is the true religion and Sleep is her prophet.
The subject of various disciplines, including linguistics, languages, and semiotics. I can't see how you can define what meaning means without falling into obvious circularity.
I would say it's a structure of a material. What's the issue with that? And what is it for you instead?
If you want to argue against strawmen feel free, just declare you intentions from the outset so you don't waste people's time.
Strictly speaking, the propositions of physics are senseless, like an unexecuted computer program, until as and when the propositions are used by an agent and thereby become grounded in the agent's perceptual apparatus in a bespoke fashion, at which point Locke's secondary qualities become temporarily welded to the physical concepts.
Classical physical concepts are therefore by design irreducible to mental concepts; something has been a central feature of physics rather than a bug, at least up until the discovery of special relativity and quantum mechanics, both of which show that even the Lockean primary qualities of objects are relative to perspective.
:100:
Then you typing this post about your thought of Aphrodite isnt a physical action? What about the statues and paintings of Aphrodite? Those were not produced by physical actions? How can one produce a statue or hit keys on a keyboard spelling out Aphrodite without first having the thought of Aphrodite?
Of course I don't believe that! However,
1. NREM sleep -> Brain off/Mind off -> Sleep/Unconscious
2. REm sleep -> Brain on/Mind on -> Sleep/Conscious but no memory
3. Awake -> Brain on/Mind on -> Awake/Conscious with memory
4. Mu -> Brain on/Mind off -> Awake/Unconscious
If physicalism were true, Brain on/Mind on and Brain off/Mind off is how it should be. The Mu state contradicts that directly!
If you don't believe that then brain not off. Brain always on.
Let's not get bogged down. I hope to extricate the two of us from this bog ASAP.
First, if the brain is always on, what happens to consciousness between awake states and sleep states? There's, if some experts are to be believed, a definite change occurs in the level of consciousness between being awake and being asleep. You sleep, surely! I do too and I can say with a certainty unbecoming of a skeptic like myself that consciousness is altered between these two states (awake/asleep).
Second, if physicalism is true and if the brain is always on whether one's awake, sleeping, daydreaming, dreaming, whathaveyou, then consciousness doesn't have physical correlates. Is that what you want to say?
Non sequitor. First off, I think consciousness is a neurological state. It's not an independent existence that "has neurological correlates", no it's a pattern of neurological states. Mind is to a brain what an algorithm is to a computer.
Non sequitur?! You said "...the brain is always on." Consciousness is assuredly not always on. Ergo, the brain state and consciousness correlation coefficient is ZERO. Stop moving the goal post!
I did consider that side to the issue but it doesn't work like that. If my thought about Aphrodite is energy then that energy should be able to move something of the right mass but that's something that's not been observed.
Yes this is precisely the non sequitor. First off, it’s clear that you don’t know what correlation coefficients are. Just because the 2 variables don’t change identically doesn’t mean the correlation coefficient is 0. It can still be anywhere from 1 to -1. 0 is when they’re completely unrelated and we don’t use correlation coefficients on binary data (on/off) anyways….
Consciousness is a certain brain pattern. This brain pattern disappears when you sleep. Even though your brain is still on. Does that make sense?
If I have a series of blue and red lights, and I call the sequence RBRB “enlightenment”, then change the sequence to RRBB, then “enlightenment” is not occurring despite the lights being on. Capiche?
This is you going around in circles. It looked like it was fun and I joined in. Not any more. Sorry, you'll have to go on alone from here. Good bye!
The brain is physical, I think no one would doubt that. Without a brain we wouldn't have a mind. Of course, we need a body too: a brain by itself doesn't think or reflect, people do. But what are bodies? Surely they are physical stuff.
Unless I'm missing something crucial, it should follow that the mind is physical too. Given how "unsubstantial" fields are, which are physical, and given how unsubstantial thoughts are - they both seem to be made of the same underlying stuff.
This does not mean that physics can explain mind - that's asking too much from physics. What I take it to mean is that the physical is far broader and much stranger by far, than what we usually take it to be.
But there's no need to postulate "non-physical stuff" or anything else.
There seems to be 3 states of consciousness we need to be cognizant of:
1. Awake
2. Asleep
3. Dead
They all differ from each other in terms of physical activity and consciousness. Allow me to expand a bit more and let objective EEG activity stand for brain on/off and subjective conscious experience represent mind on/off
1. Awake.
Brain on 1 (EEG reports activity E) and mind on i.e
conscious (you're aware of the environment & yourself)
2. Asleep.
a) REM sleep: Brain on 1 (EEG reports activity E) and mind on i.e. conscious (you're dreaming but unless you're woken up, no memories)
b) NREM sleep: Brain on 2 (EEG reports activity F) and mind is off i.e. unconscious (you're not dreaming)
3. Dead.
Brain off (EEG activity reports NIL) and mind off i.e. unconscious (you're dead)
Now, Khaled seems to be fixated on 2 b) NREM sleep: Brain on 2 (EEG reports activity F) ajd mind off i.e. unconscious (you're not dreaming) but fae doesn't seem to realize that the on state of the brain in NREM sleep is indistinguishable from the off state in death. NREM sleep is as good as being dead insofar as consciousness is concerned.
This implies, being as charitable as possible to physicalism, the part of the brain that's associated with consciousness is off in NREM sleep i.e. it's in precisely the state it would be if the entire brain were off as in death.
Therefore, NREM sleep, even if the brain were on during that time, can't be used as a counterpoint against my claim that the brain is off insofar as the part responsible for consciousness is concerned.
In other words, NREM sleep can be treated as a brain off state and thus I italicized situation 2 b) above.
What do we have here then? To reiterate after making the necessary corrections,
1. Awake.
Brain on (EEG reports activity E) and mind on i.e
conscious (you're aware of the environment & yourself)
2. Asleep.
a) REM sleep: Brain on (EEG reports activity E) and mind on i.e. conscious (you're dreaming but unless you're woken up, no memories)
b) NREM sleep: Brain off (EEG reports activity NIL ) and mind is off i.e. unconscious (you're not dreaming)
3. Dead.
Brain off (EEG reports activity NIL) and mind off i.e. unconscious (you're dead)
Now, take a look at what Mu is,
4. Mu.
Brain on (EEG reports activity E) and mind is off i.e. practically unconscious
If phsyicalism is true, brain on must correlate with mind on and brain off must correlate with mind off (a positive binary correlation if memory serves).
However, in the Mu mind state, the brain is on and the mind is off.
This is a major setback for physicalism because it claims
5. Brain on means mind on
but, the Mu mind state demonstrates,
6. Brain on doesn't mean mind on
Where does the mind go when in Mu?
Philosophical Zombie
I leave it to the reader to connect the dots!
Thinking is an action. A thought is the act of thinking. We do not gain mass when we perform actions, but the body does perform work.
Why do some patterns of brain activity result in conscious awareness while others (the vast majority of what the brain does) don't?
If X(consciousness) = Y(neurological state), then knowledge of X should entail knowledge of Y. For example, knowledge of the behaviors of bachelors would necessarily lead to knowledge of the behaviors of unmarried men, since they're the same thing.
So, that being said, did ancient people who had knowledge of their minds also have knowledge of their brains?
This again displays a bias in asking the question. Again, certain patterns of brain activities are consciousness. This would be like asking "Why is this vanilla ice cream while that is not vanilla ice cream"? Why, because one is the pattern of vanilla ice cream while the other isn't!
The only way for your question to even make sense is to conceive as consciousness as something that is "produced by" neurological states. Then it makes sense to ask why this neurological state produces it and that doesn't. But even then, it would be akin to asking "Why is pi equal to 3.14"? Or "Why does H2O boil at 100 degress not 70 degrees in standard conditions"? It just happens that this is the case, there was no necessary reason why it had to be this way.
Let me actually ask you the question. Why do you think some patterns of brain activity "produce" consciousness and others don't? Stupid question right?
Quoting RogueAI
Well it's definitional. If you define consciousness as an animal or human capacity then obviously no. If you define it by having this or that pattern then I don't see why a similar pattern can't be reproduced in a computer. So yes, computers can eventually become conscious or already are according to your definition.
Quoting RogueAI
Firstly no, knowing that something is a pattern does not grant knowledge of that pattern in the first place. I know the video game I'm playing is a pattern of code, however I do not know the code in any way. I know this site is a pattern of code, however I don't know the code in any way. We can conceive of something as a pattern of something else, and talk about what that pattern does once actualized (allows me to play games/allows me to talk to strangers), without knowing what the pattern itself is.
Secondly, those same ancient people believed that consciousness is a spirit of some sort in a dualistic fashion. To them, consciousness =/= neurological state, but moreso a spirit, a ghost in the machine. I'm talking here about Descartes, don't know if that's "ancient enough". And you see the remnants of that today.
It's important to note that most of ancient people didn't believe in this dualistic split until Descartes. As for what they actually believed, I'm not an authority on that. But I would venture it was some sort of monism that was not idealism, considering Berkeley was in the 1700s and Descartes in 1600s (and he wasn't even a monist!). But I don't know much about ancient philosophies.
Quoting khaled
You're claiming ancient people did NOT have knowledge of their own minds?
What's up with people here and taking quotes blatantly out of context. No I'm claiming that people can have knowledge of their minds but not their brains. Knowledge of the pattern without knowledge of the specifics. Like how you know how to use this site without knowing the code that comprises it.
Actually read what I'm saying or it's a waste of time for everyone. If you're going to take something out of context at least bother to quote a sentence:
Quoting khaled
Or would that make it too difficult to take things out of context?
Then minds are not identical to brains. How are they different?
Minds are patterns of brains. They are not a separate sort of thing. No one said that minds are identical to brains, not even physicalists. Otherwise we wouldn't have 2 different words.
A mind to a brain is an algorithm to a running program. The algorithm is not a thing in itself. It's a pattern.
Point is, mind is not a new type of "mental stuff" that is distinct from "physical stuff" which is what idealism and dualism propose ontologically.
Let's take the mental state: stubbing your state. Is the brain state that corresponds to "stubbing your toe" identical to the mental state "stubbing your toe"?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-identity/
"The identity theory of mind holds that states and processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain."
Either brain states are identical to mental states or they're not. You seem to be claiming a mental state is identical to a brain state "pattern".
This is not the same sentence as "the mind is identical to the brain" which you falsely attributed to me. Mental states are brain states.
Now you would very easily know this if you were not in the habit of purposefully taking things out of context:
"The identity theory of mind holds that states and processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain. Strictly speaking, it need not hold that the mind is identical to the brain."
Literally the next line in your own link..... I find it hard to give you the benefit of doubt and think you're doing this by mistake anymore. Just, what do you hope to gain by distorting my view and arguing against a distortion in your own head?
Quoting RogueAI
Correct.
Yet the brain is not the mind.
Quoting RogueAI
Yes.
Ok, I have problems with that:
1. Mary's room: You're committed to saying that Mary can know what it's like to see red without having the mental experience "seeing red". I think that's a huge problem for you. It's certainly counter-intuitive.
2. The opposite of Mary's room: You're committed to saying that two people meaningfully talking about their mental states are also meaningfully talking about configurations of brain matter, since mental state = certain configuration of brain matter. So, two Ancient Greeks meaningfully talking about what bad days they had and how depressed they are are also meaningfully talking about configurations of brain matter? Again, very counter-intuitive.
3. You have no explanation for why certain patterns of matter are identical to the pain of stubbing a toe, while other patterns of matter are identical to the joy of a good book, while other patterns are identical to no experience at all.
4. Are these pattenrs substrate dependent, and how would you verify whether a non-organic pattern of matter that you conclude is conscious is actually conscious?
No because the meaning of "know" in both instances is different. When we tell someone "You don't know X emotion" or X color we mean "You haven't had X emotion" or seen X color, not "You don't know the neurological basis for X emotion". If the latter was what we meant we woudn't be able to talk about emotions or colors without knowing the neurology, yet we do so all the time. In the same way that you can use this site without knowing the code, so can we talk about emotions without knowing the neurology, and vice versa, EVEN THOUGH the emotion is no more than a neurological pattern (and the site is no more than the code). So no, Mary doesn't know red, even though she knows everything physical about seeing red.
Quoting RogueAI
Same as above. Two people talking about thephilosophyforum need not know about the code that comprises the site. Even though the site is no more than the code, or do we disagree there? Is there something more to this site than its code? Something that you need to add to the code to get thephilosophyforum? I've already mentioned this previously:
Quoting khaled
In other words: Yes two people talking about their mental states are talking about brain states, without knowing about the brain states. Just like programmers can discuss algorithms without knowing about hardware development.
Quoting RogueAI
Do you have an explanation for why vanilla ice cream is vanilla ice cream?
No this question doesn't make sense for identity theory. The only reason you're able to ask it is, again, you're coming from a dualistic framework where there is a difference between the pain and the patterns of matter. There is no difference. Once you can explain to me why vanilla ice cream is identical to vanilla ice cream, and not chocolate ice cream, then I'll explain to you why certain patterns of matter are identical to the pain of stubbing a toe and not to the pain of breaking a finger or feeling nothing.
Again, you've asked this "why is this state of matter corresponding to this state of mind and not that one" question before to me multiple times and each time I ask you to answer it and you provide no response. Why is that? Maybe because the question is nonsensical.
In your framework, why does this pattern of matter cause the pain of stubbing a toe, rather than the pain of breaking a finger? You have a problem with my framework not being to explain this so I assume yours can yes?
Quoting RogueAI
Definitional.
Quoting RogueAI
Again with the dualist view, suggesting there is a real object or property called "consciousness" that is added to physical stuff, that we can detect. There is no such thing.
Actually, again, let me return that question to you along with the last one. You believe there is a non material thing called consciousness right? How do you determine whether a given object possesses it? I hear qualia are private and ineffable so supposedly you're not able to either. So why is it a problem when I'm not able to but not a problem when you're not able to?
At t1, Mary has never seen red before
At t2 Mary learns all the physical facts about seeing red
At t3, Mary sees red for the first time.
Is Mary surprised when she sees red?
Quoting khaled
Are you saying the philosophy forum is identical to a computer code? I don't agree with that. The forum is computer code and a community of people talking about philosophy. Don't you agree that defining the forum as purely computer code is an incomplete definition?
Quoting khaled
I'm not a materialist. I'm not claiming the taste of vanilla ice cream is anything other than the taste of vanilla ice cream. YOU are saying the taste of vanilla ice cream is actually pattern of matter A,B,C. YOU must then provide an explanation for why pattern of matter A,B,C is the taste of vanilla ice cream and not pattern of matter X,Y,Z or E,F,G.
Quoting khaled
Oh, that's easy. OK, consciousness is an immaterial mind.
Definitional.
Quoting khaled
There is no real property called consciousness??? Are you conscious, Khaled? Yes. Now imagine you have a mechanical duplicate of your own working brain. Is it conscious? If no, why not? If yes, how would you prove it? "Definitional" does not cut it. YOU are asserting that the machine has a property you admit you have: consciousness. YOU need to be able to prove that somehow.
Yes.
Quoting RogueAI
I'm talking about the website itself. Is the website more than the code? No. Can we still talk about it without knowing the code? Such as saying "thephilosophyforum is awesome"? Yes.
Maybe a car is a better analogy. We can say "This car can move at X km/h", without knowing anything about the engine or how cars are built. You can know things about the pattern without knowing the specifics.
Quoting RogueAI
So it must be useless then? That's what you want to commit to? If it's immaterial then it can't interact with the material yes? Otherwise we'd just call it material.
Quoting RogueAI
Me: A car is actually this specific combination of parts
You: So why is a car not this other specific combination of parts?
Does that make sense to you? How would you begin to answer that question? We can agree that a car is a combination of parts and no more yes? Engine, wheels, steering wheel, etc. Now if someone asks you "Ok but why is a car not a combination of biscuits, chocolate, and cream" how do you respond to them?
Explain to me why a car is a combination of parts (engine, wheels, steering wheel, etc) and not (biscuits, chocolate and cream), then I'll explain to you why stubbing your toe is pattern ABC not XYZ ok?
Quoting RogueAI
Ah but you're claiming that the taste of vanilla ice cream IS IN FACT the taste of vanilla ice cream! I now ask you this: Why is the taste of vanilla ice cream not the taste of chocolate ice cream!!!!!!!!!!
Quoting khaled
No I don't think so, but some define them as such. That's what I meant.
Quoting RogueAI
Ok I misspoke. There is no real object called consciousness, material or immaterial. Consciousness is a pattern, not an object.
Quoting RogueAI
By scanning his brain and finding that he displays the pattern required for consciousness. In the same way that we can distinguish a car from a bus or an ice cream cone, by looking at whether or not it conforms to the structure of "car".
Let me ask you on the other hand, supposedly consciousness is an immaterial mind. How can you tell that your duplicate possesses an immaterial mind? You can't make a detector for it, because it's immaterial. So how could you tell? Or can you not tell?
Of course it is! Is the only thing you discover when you observe this website is that it's just computer code? Absurd. When you observe this website you observe philosophical discussions. You cannot claim that this forum/website/location in cyberspace is identical to computer code. That is a necessary, but not sufficient definition. It totally misses the fact that this is ALSO a place where people meet and discuss philosophy.
Quoting khaled
Why is Mary surprised? She already knows everything there is to know about seeing red.
Quoting khaled
Yes, but you're not claiming the car is identical to "moving at X km/h". I think what you're trying to say is that Hesperus is identical to Phosphorus, so talk of Phosphorus is talk of Hesperus even if the person has never heard of Hesperus. To which I would reply that that can be resolved by simply pointing out the labelling error going on.
Not so with ancient people meaningfully talking about their experiences. If experiences = brain configurations, then talk of experiences is talk of brain configurations and it's not just a labelling error going on. Ancient peoples had no idea what the brain even did. They were able to communicate meaningfully about their minds without exchanging any other meaningful communication, mislabeled or otherwise. If mental states = configurations of matter, and two people are meaningfully talking about their mental states, there should be meaningful communication about neurons and chemicals and action potentials and what not, but of course there's not. There's communication going on ONLY about mental states, which should not be the case if mental states are identical to anything else.
Quoting khaled
I think I addressed this with the Hesperus/Phospherus example.
But you're not sure. So how would you go about verifying whether anything other than neurons can be conscious? You have a definition that neural state XYZ is the same as tasting vanilla ice cream. I will grant you there's neural correlates to experience and that's a definite plus for materialism and a problem for idealism.
So, you start with a prima facie advantage that the brain sure seems involved in consciousness (I think this grants you a prima facie casual connection between mental and physical states, and not an identity relationship). But now you have to prove whether brains alone are conscious. And of course you can't. There's no way in principle to verify the consciousness of anything outside yourself. Whatever physicalist theory of consciousness emerges, a scientist is going to eventually point to a machine and say, "that thing is doing the same thing brains do, so it's conscious." But you already admitted you don't know if consciousness is substrate dependent. So how is that scientist going to verify whether the machine that's functionally equivalent to a human brain is conscious or not? She can't. Science cannot give us the answer. I think that has implications. I think the above also answers the part I snipped out.
Quoting khaled
I can't tell if there is more than one conscious mind or not. That is different than the situation the materialist finds herself in. Not only can she not disprove solipsism, she can't prove the material stuff she thinks brains are made of even exists (it's a non-verifiable belief), and she also can't prove whether a machine duplicate of a brain is conscious or not. I am not the in same boat. I only claim that mind and thought and consciousness exist. Unlike matter, we know that mind and thought and consciousness exist. My only problem is whether solipsism is true or not.
"A more serious objection to Mind-Brain Type Identity, one that to this day has not been satisfactorily resolved, concerns various non-intensional properties of mental states (on the one hand), and physical states (on the other). After-images, for example, may be green or purple in color, but nobody could reasonably claim that states of the brain are green or purple."
https://iep.utm.edu/identity/#H2
I think they do a good job (far better than I could) explaining it. I'm done for the night! Great discussion, Khaled. I'll reply tomorrow.
Quoting RogueAI
Which are no more than a pattern of of letters. Which are no more than than a pattern of lights on your screen lighting up. Etc.
Let's use cars, maybe that's easier:
Quoting khaled
Quoting RogueAI
Because she's never seen red before. No new knowledge was gained in the usual sense. Because again, in this case "know" has 2 meanings. There is the know in "know pythagorean's theorem" and the know in "know red". The latter simply means seeing something red. By the latter meaning, mary doesn't know red. Even if she knows everything about seeing red in the former meaning. No new knowledge in the former meaning is gained. The surprise comes from seeing red for the first time.
Quoting RogueAI
No. I'm pointing out that we can talk about Phosphorus despite not knowing what electrons and protons are, even though phsophorous is no more than electrons and protons.
Similarly, ancients could talk about their mental states, which are no more than brain states, without knowing what neurons are. Just like you can talk about Phosphorus despite not knowing what electrons and protons are. Does that make sense finally?
You don't need all the details to discuss the pattern as a whole. Another example is computer scientists who talk about algorithms without talking about hardware design. Even though the program in the end is no more than a pattern of electrical signals on a motherboard.
Quoting RogueAI
No, I'm sure. It's not substrate dependent. I'm sure about my definition. Also there are people who define it differently.
Quoting RogueAI
By seeing whether or not it meets the pattern that I defined.
How do you THINK we actually verify consciousness? Brain scans can tell you if someone's conscious or sleeping or dead. That alone should tell you that conscoiusness is not an "immaterial mind" because if it was, then brain scans should tell us nothing.
Quoting RogueAI
No you haven't. Because you still don't get what I mean there. It has nothing to do with labeling errors, and everything to do with the fact that you can discuss a pattern without knowing the specifics. Ancients can say "I am sad" which is a description of a physical pattern, despite having no clue what neurology is. Just like we can say "Phosphorous is a chemical element with symbol P" without having any clue what electrons or protons are, even though phosphorous is no more than electrons and protons.
Quoting RogueAI
Ugh. Again with the implied dualism that makes the question meaningless. No, consciousness, is a particular pattern. That pattern is defined by us. It is not an object with its own existence that we detect. How do you identify a car? By seeing whether or not it meets the definition that we set for cars. How do you identify a conscious person? By seeing whether or not they meet the definiton that we set for conscious people. Not by looking for ghosts (immaterial minds).
Quoting RogueAI
Materialists have as much trouble disproving solipsism as they have disporiving the theory that "I possess a car, and I'm not sure of the existence of any other cars". It is simple pattern recognition. Give a materialist an object, and he can check whether or not it's conscious very easily, just as easily as he can check whether or not it's a car. Because both "car" and "consciousness" are patterns of physical stuff.
It's idealists that generally struggle to tell whether or not anything is conscious, given that to be conscious for them is to posses some "non material secret sauce" that cannot be detected by any means.
Quoting RogueAI
Sure. And materialism is the further proposition that matter is fundamental, and that mind and consciousness are patterns of matter. The reason for this move is the fact that you can easily have the matter stay behind while the mind goes away, for isntance when you get knocked out. If consciousness was an immaterial mind, why do physical things impact it so much? Therefore something else must be fundamental, preceding mind, which mind is made of. We call that matter.
Seeing as they're patterns of matter, there is absolutely no issue when it comes to recognizing whether or not something possesses them. We have no problems with pattern recognition.
Quoting RogueAI
Not just that. Your problem is detecting any other mind other than your own. You have 0 reason to believe any other minds exists or any way to detect them if they do (since you defined them to be undetectable). Now, you'll note that this is the exact same problem you think is present in materialism. No more and no less:
Quoting RogueAI
Literally everything in that quote would apply to you as well. Can't disporve solipsism, can't be sure matter exists, and can't prove whether a machine duplicate is conscious. Additionally, your version of dualism/idealism whichever it is comes with the problem that you must conclude that concsiousness is useless. After all, it's immaterial, it can't move atoms, or do much of anything. You’re right you’re not in the same boat, you’re in a worse boat!
But for some reason it's fine for an idealist/dualist not to be able to do this but for a materialist it's a fatal flaw and reason to reject the theory. Additionally, as I've stated above, most of these are not problems in materialism. Being able to define precisely what consciousness is and isn't, and easily being able to detect it, is one of the big advantages to Identity Theory.
Quoting RogueAI
I'm having fun too. Finally someone that doesn't just bow out after 2 comments of disagreement. Looking forward to it.
Quoting RogueAI
First time I see this one. My initial thoughts are that it's not a serious objection. After images themselves are not green or purple. Experiences don't have colors (and yes, experiences are patterns of physical stuff. Patterns don't have colors). Just seems like misuse of language.
I can say an apple is red, I can't say the sight of the apple is red. I can say "I am seeing a red after-image" but I can't say the sight of a red after-image is red. So yes, no one can claim that the state of my brain while seeing a red after image is red, and neither can they claim that the sight of a red after image is red. I don't see a problem.
"What is the Mind-Body Problem? | Episode 205 | Closer To Truth"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TnBjLmQawQ
Well, this gets to the heart of my problem with materialist reductionism: it strips the world of meaning. You are claiming that this website is nothing more than computer code. OK, so the only difference between Plato's Republic and Lady Chatterly's Lover is the way the matter is arranged? Really? The only difference between this place and Breitbart is the amount/pattern of little switches turning off and on? Maybe you believe that, but if someone asked you to describe this website, I bet you wouldn't talk about computer code. You would say it's a website where people discuss philosophy. Because that's what it is!
The position you take is extremely counterintuitive and certainly does not map on to the way people talk. It also entails that a physicalist account of pain is a necessary AND sufficient definition for pain. I think that's preposterous. Any definition of pain has to include that it hurts. It feels bad. The physicalist account of pain doesn't mention the mental component of pain, and I think it becomes an absurdity by leaving subjective experience out of the definition and claiming it's a complete definition. I mean, if an alien asked you "what's pain?", you wouldn't talk about it hurting and feeling bad? Of course you would. That would be the first thing you would talk about.
Quoting khaled
You're arguing my case. There are indeed two kinds of knowledge going on in Mary's room: book knowledge and experiential knowledge. Are you sure you want to argue in favor of the existence of experiential knowledge? I certainly think it's a thing, but you're going to have trouble reconciling the existence of experiential knowledge in a purely physical world.
After reading ahead, I see we're too far apart on basic principles. You're willing to sacrifice meaning. I'm not. Sorry for how late the reply was! And the video I linked is really good.
Yes. If you think there is another difference please point me to it. It seems clear to me that if you change the way the letters are arranged, and the number of each letter used, that you can turn Plato's republic to Lady Chatterly's Lover. You don't need to "add anything" else to do so. So that tells me it's the only variable.
If I did change the arrangement and number of letters turning a copy of Plato's republic into Lady Chatterly's Lover by physically using glue and scissors, did I miss anything? Is it "really" still plato's republic. I mean... I didn't add or remove any non physical meaning in the process, but it seems in the end that I got Lady Chatterly's lover. Or, again, do you maintain that if I maim a copy of Plato's republic in this manner that after the operation the book is still "really" plato's republic and not Lady Chatterly's love letter? That's the conclusion you'd have to reach if you want to separate the meaning from the pattern. And I think that's a clearly absurd conclusion.
Quoting RogueAI
Those two things aren't mutually exclusive......
So, if I made a website with identical code to this one, with all the same post history and everything, and then switched the link between the new website and the original website, such that anyone going to the link is actually going to the new, cloned website, would I have missed anything? I don't remember adding "meaning" at any point in this operation. Yet it seems like I haven't missed anything.
This isn't to say that meaning doesn't exist, but that it is no more than the pattern. If you think "meaning" has its own existence, then tell me, if I did the procedure above, at what step do I add the "meaning" and the "philosphy" to the new philosophy forum clone site?
Answer: You don't "add meaning". Meaning is the pattern, not an object or substance to be added.
Quoting RogueAI
Example to back up this statement? The prevailing paradigm today is materialism. So this can't be true. Give me an example so I know what you mean.
Quoting RogueAI
It does. A physicalist account of pain includes that it hurts. Because "it hurts" is a description of a physical pattern.
Quoting RogueAI
Again, let's examine this idea. Now, first off, I'll disagree with the statement. The physicalist account of pain does mention the mental component of pain. Because the mental component is the pattern.
But going by your definition, you think the mental component is another sort of object. You first take the neurological state, and then add to it the mental component. You think that something like a philosophical zombie is conceivable, as in, a physically identical clone that has no "mental component"
Let me then ask you, when you're in pain and so yell "Ouch", how did pain, a non material thing, cause the movement of you mouth, a material thing? That is telepathy. And if our minds can cause physical changes inside our bodies somehow, then why are they limited to inside our bodies? Why can't I lift a water bottle with my mind the same way I can lift my arm with my mind?
Now if pain, and mind, are patterns of a physical state, it is very straightforward to explain how they bring about the effects. But if you want to divorce mind from matter like that, you're either stuck with violating the conservation laws, or admitting that mind is useless. You didn't yell "Ouch" beacuse you're in pain, how could you! Pain is just a non material thing, it can't move your mouth!
Quoting RogueAI
No of course not. What the heck does saying "Pain is what hurts" accomplish. Doesn't seem helpful at all.
This is a good exercise actually. Supposedly a materialist would fail at describing pain to an alien and this is a problem exclusive to materialism. Ok. Imagine I'm an alien. Describe pain to me. Supposedly idealists/dualists have no problem doing this.
Except y'all also hold that it's private and ineffable. So......
Quoting RogueAI
I won't. You think it's a thing, as in an actual object. Some "mental stuff" that you add. THAT I can't reconcile sure.
I think it's a neurological pattern. If you concede that I don't have trouble reconciling the existence of knowledge in general why would I have trouble with "experiental knowledge"?
To have experiental knowledge of X (the color red in this case) would mean to have a certain memory. To have a memory is to have a certain neurological pattern.
Quoting RogueAI
No, we just have different definitions of what meaning is. You think meaning is its own kind of "mental object". I think it's a pattern. And I've highlighted how useless and problematic posing such a "mental object" is, especially since it literally cannot do anything. You'd be stuck with meaning, philosophy, Qualia, and all this other mental stuff you want to exalt, ironically being useless. I mean, there IS a way out that I mentioned on my first post in the thread that would allow you to have a non material mind that can actually make physical changes without violating the laws of conservation, but it's not without its problems and quirks either.
what's the pattern of prime numbers? the laws of motion? English syntax? German syntax?
Reason, abstraction and language are all intimately linked and specific to h.sapiens. It is the ability to perceive meaning for which there isn’t a satisfactory physicalist account, other than in the vague sense that it evolved.
Numbers that are only divisible by themselves and one.
Quoting Wayfarer
You can easily look them up. They're simply differential equations.
Quoting Wayfarer
https://www.ego4u.com/
Quoting Wayfarer
https://www.learngermanonline.org/free-grammar-exercises/
The fact that any of these concepts were even deemed worthy to distinguish (so for example, prime numbers as opposed to the rest of the numbers) means they have a pattern.
Quoting Wayfarer
Weren't you the one talking about "the reason of the world" in other threads, and I was the one saying that reasoning is a developed capacity specific to h.sapiens?
Quoting Wayfarer
So there is a physicalist account for it....
And what about "it evolved" is vague? What more do you want? What's missing?
But that does not make it a pattern. The key characteristic of patterns are repetition. Crystals form patterns. Waves form patterns, and there are patterns in nature. But the sequence of primes are not a pattern (although some argue that a pattern can be discerned it’s a vexed point.) DNA does not form a pattern - it’s too complex to be reduced to a pattern. English syntax likewise does not form a pattern, as it’s irregular, even if there are some ‘patterns of use’ such as conjugation. So what you keep saying is incorrect - the ability to recognise meaning, perform mathematical operations and the like can’t be reduced to or explained in terms of patterns. It’s too simplistic.
Quoting khaled
Strictly speaking, evolutionary theory accounts for the biological origin of species - there’s nothing in it specifically to account for the nature of reason as such. Again, surely, h. Sapiens evolved to the point of being able to speak and reason, but that doesn’t mean that speech and reason can be understood solely through the lens of biological determinism, which I regard as reductionist. (Trying to find an affordable or library edition of this book.)
Quoting Wayfarer
Right so there is no hard pattern for everything.
Still, there is something that sets primary numbers apart from regular numbers. And something that sets DNA apart from other polynucleutides. Maybe not a hard and fast pattern, but something. And the only point I'm trying to make is that this "something" is not a new kind of object called "mind stuff". It is no more than the structure of the thing itself.
There is a structure to prime numbers: They are numbers that are divisible by only themselves and one.
There is similarly a structure to DNA and RNA. And English. And German. Even if it gets hazy at the corners.
And this Structure is not a new type of object, all that exists is structures of the physical. Meaning is not a new type of object added to physical stuff. It is simply the structure of physical stuff.
Maybe structure is a better word. I'll use that from now.
Quoting Wayfarer
But you just said:
Quoting Wayfarer
So if we can account for other features of h.sapiens like sight and hearing by accounting for the biological origin, why not reason?
Doubtful. I'm just tyring to understand idealists. But to me you just seem to be failing to commit to anything.
Quoting Wayfarer
And your problem is that you think any materialistic explanation is "reducing" or "demeaning" reason. You want to exalt it so badly you end up making it a new separate sort of thing, which in turn makes it useless. It's ironic.
Quoting Wayfarer
The two views are not mutually contradictory. And both are true.
Quoting Wayfarer
Even so, all I'm saying is that reason isn't a separate entity. You haven't agreed or disagreed so idk what you're trying to do here exactly.
Quoting Wayfarer
Calling it a pattern or structure is not being too simple. You underestimate how complicated and beautiful those can get.
Quoting Wayfarer
And you should reexamine your own "bias against matter" that litters your reply. The idea that matter is this dumb crude thing that can never rise to the exalted status of things like reason and thought, so reason and thought must be their own separate entities! Maybe it's because I have a background in computer science that I don't have that urge to exalt. Patterns of matter are exalted enough as they are.
The idea is simply that the laws of physics can't account for the laws of logic, as they belong to completely different levels. So
Quoting TheMadFool
Quoting RogueAI
Watched it. The only philosopher I really agreed with was Moreland, which vexes me, because he's an evangelical, and I'm not..
And why is that? What exactly woud it mean for the laws of physics to "account for" something. If you mean that by looking at the laws of physics we can deduce the laws of logic, obviously not. I don't think anyone would disagree there. Then again, you can't deduce much of anything by just looking at the laws of physics.
Can the laws of physics account for the capacity of sight?
Because they belong to different orders of explanation.
Physicalism, the belief that everything is physical, will say that logic supervenes on physics. It will agree that even though you can't directly explain logic in terms of physics, physical laws give rise to the kinds of beings that can, namely, humans. Looked at from the other end, logic, and everything else humans do, can be traced back to physics. That is what physicalism means - that 'everything is physical', that there is "nothing over and above" the physical, or that everything supervenes on the physical. (wiki).
What I'm arguing is that you can't perform this reduction, that there is no plausible means to reduce logic to physics because they belong to different ontological levels. So that probably means that I'm obliged to defend substance dualism.
That does not answer why one can't be reduced to the other. Physics and chemistry belong to different orders of explanation, yet one can be reduced to the other.
Quoting Wayfarer
Great. Seems exactly like what I think.
Curious to me that you don't count accounting for the evolutionary history of humans as "explaining logic". What exactly do you expect "explaining logic" to look like then? If someone were to explain how we evolved eyes, have they not explained sight? Anyways.
Quoting Wayfarer
Finally you commit to something.
So then, to you, logic is different ontologically from physics? There is "mind stuff" and "physical stuff", the laws of physics merely describe the physical stuff, with nothing to say about the mind stuff.
I find that really weird for multiple reasons. Firstly, on my thread, you kept insisting how mind is not a "new sort of thing" at all, and now you're saying you're a substance dualist, which means precisely that mind is a new sort of thing different from the physical. But I'll just take what you say now, that is substance dualism.
So, when you're thirsty, and go get a glass of water, how did your thirst, a "mental object" cause a physical movement? Or did it not?
If it did, how do you square that with the conservation laws? Here we would have a case where the "physical stuff", your body, moved in a particular manner, and supposedly this movement was not started by something physical but by "mind stuff", in this case your thirst. In other words, your mind caused a particular physical movement, it added momentum to some particle or other, and that resulted in you getting the drink. But that clearly violates the conservation laws, although it is a testable hypothesis (fundamentally, probably not practically). We can trace the causal chain that ended in you drinking the water, and your hypothesis is that within this chain, we'd find a seemingly uncaused movement. That there will be some unexplained movement we can point to and say: "Aha, that's where the mind came in". Do you expect that we'll find such a movement?
I know that's what it sounds like. It is related to your earlier comment:
Quoting khaled
Part of this confusion is because of the word 'substance'. It needs to said that the philosophical term 'substance' does not mean 'a material with uniform properties', which is the normal meaning of 'substance'. The philosophical term came from the Latin translation of Aristotle's term 'ouisia', which is a form of the word 'to be' or 'being'. But in the original context, 'ouisia' was a 'type of being' or 'bearer of attributes'. That's why you encounter the strange expression of what kind of 'substance' Socrates is. 'Substance' was derived from 'substantia', what 'stands under' or 'bears' the attributes (e.g. blue eyes). But in the transition to modernity, this original sense of the word became lost, and 'substance' became conceptualised as a literal kind of stuff or objective substance, which it isn't.
All of this was amplified by Descartes, who used the terms 'res extensia' and 'res cogitans' - extended material, and ‘thinking substance’, is how it's usually translated. Descartes' model is very much an abstraction, like an economic model - not a literal hypothesis. But because of the confusion over the meaning of 'substance', and the way that the supposed division of mind and matter was conceived, it lead to idea of the separateness of mind and matter as literal substances, which I think is a radical conceptual problem. That is what is behind your question:
Quoting khaled
There is no 'mind stuff' in any literal or objective sense. But that doesn’t say that the mind doesn’t exist - it’s just that the manner of its existence is not something which can be conceived objectively. Notice that ‘ontology’ doesn’t necessarily refer to ‘different kinds of things’; the distinction between ‘beings’ and ‘objects’ is an ontological distinction (although one that is not recognised by physicalism.)
Quoting khaled
Let's not take basic physiology to exemplify the rational power of thought. Thirst and hunger are characteristic of any living organism. And even that simple capacity may not be reducible to physics - non-reductionist biologists say that biology can’t be reduced to physics, because living organisms have attributes that are different in kind from physical objects. ‘The discovery of the genetic code was a breakthrough of the first order. It showed why organisms are fundamentally different from any kind of nonliving material. There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information with a history of three thousand million years!’ ~ Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought.
I share your sentiments on that score.
[quote=Aristotle]The whole is more than the sum of its parts[/quote]
I'm actually surprised that physicalists/reductionists find this a hard pill to swallow. They have a very good instance of what Aristotle's is saying right in front of their noses viz. the inanimate-animate gap [there's no physical explanation how the nonliving (chemicals) come together to produce life].
If we view universe as a massive (self) organizing system then we have warrant to believe that each level organizes in such a way that out of it emerges a different level that has properties/qualities and governing laws that are unique to it and is more than just the sum of the parts at the level below it. Since each level has its own distinct set of properties/qualities and laws, each level deserves its own corresponding explanatory theoretical framework.
Life even if physicalists/reductionists claim it's only physical is a case in point - failure of reductionism!
So then where is the idealism in your idealism?
Quoting Wayfarer
I didn't say that. A substance is a bearer of properties.
Quoting Wayfarer
That's all that's needed for my question to make sense.
You think there is a bearer of mental properties. I ask you how this bearer can actually cause a physical change, given it's not physical. Or is it incapable of causing physical changes? It's a simple question.
Quoting Wayfarer
That is.... precisely what substance dualism is. From SEP:
The SEP sticks to your definition of substance, that is, a bearer of properties (which is not something I disputed in the first place). And substance dualism is a belief that there is a bearer of mental properties over and above the physical stuff itself. So again I ask you, can this bearer of mental properties cause a physical change? If so how?
Quoting Wayfarer
What is this supposed to mean? It literally just reads like word salad to me. It exists, but not objectively? What other mode of existence is there? "Subjective existence"? I have no clue what you're saying here.
Quoting Wayfarer
Fossils store information with a history of three thousand million years.....
Through intentional action. We all intentionally do things, we carry out conscious acts. If you were unconscious then you couldn't do that.
Quoting khaled
From the passage you quoted:
[quote=SEP]one may also think that not only mental states are immaterial, but that the subject that possesses them must also be immaterial.[/quote]
That is close to what I'm saying, except that I think the expression 'immaterial thing' is an oxymoron. 'Things' are by their very nature material. But consider concepts - like natural numbers. They are real, in that they are the same for anyone who is able to count. But they're not things, at any rate, not material objects. There is a vast range of such concepts which are amongst the constituents of thought. They're not material objects, either. You have said, they're structures (after I pointed out that 'patterns' were too simplistic.) But, structures of what? In what? You can't say 'the brain', because of multiple realizability - the brain can be configured in an infinite variety of ways, but the structure of elementary logic is invariant. So, they're structures in thought, the relationships of ideas. They're not physical.
That said, I would take issue with this statement:
[quote=SEP]There are two important concepts deployed in this notion. One is that of substance, the other is the dualism of these substances. A substance is characterized by its properties, but, according to those who believe in substances, it is more than the collection of the properties it possesses, it is the thing which possesses them.[/quote]
It is not 'a thing'. Take away all the activities of consciousness, what remains? I don't think there is any residuum or core of 'pure consciousness', at any rate, anything which can be meaningfully discussed as an object. Saying that there is 'a thing that thinks', is just the kind of confusion that I referred to my previous post. There is no thing that thinks. Humans think, but humans are not things.
This is behind the traditional conception of dualism - the physical body animated by an immaterial mind (or soul). I can see how to make sense of that, provided that you understand that the immaterial mind is never an object of perception, it's not a thing among other things.
I'm asking you what this would look like under a microscope.
Let's again think about the example where you drink water because you're thirsty. There is a substance, called "you" or "your mind" that you think causes some physical change resulting in you drinking water. If we were to trace the causal chain that led to you drinking water (so we would record what every single atom and particle was doing and what caused that movement, and what caused that movement.....etc) what do you expect to find? Do you expect that we would find some neuron activation or other that seemingly has no physical cause? Since it was caused by the mind? Note that would directly violate the laws of conservation, and there hasn't been a case that those were violated since they were conceived of. Are you suggesting that all we have to do is do a very accurate brain scan, and we would find that we violate the laws all the time by impacting physical systems with our minds?
Quoting Wayfarer
Agreed. But they are structures of material objects. No more than that.
There is no need to pose two different substances, physical and material. All that is needed is the material, and its structure. The structure is not a substance, it's not a bearer of properties. I struggle to even call it a property.
Quoting Wayfarer
Matter. That is the point. Structures of matter. And not a separate substance.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
You seem to not use the word "thing" properly. "Thing" can stand in for any noun.
But ok, you at least commit to a mental substance right? Since you don't like "thing".
Within the causal chain that led to you drinking the glass of water, where does that substance interfere?
Quoting Wayfarer
"Thing" does not mean an object of perception. Again, "thing" is even more general than "substance" so if something is a substance, it's gotta be a thing (note the use of "something" in that sentence). But let's not debate the meaning of the word "thing". Whatever it is, we can agree that you commit to the existence of a mental substance correct? This mental substance would be undetectable by any physical means correct (since it's non-physical and all that)?
Actually, let me ask a slighly different question this time. When you get hit really hard at the back of the head, the mental substance seems to disappear doesn't it? You go unconscious. Or at any rate, you have to concede that material changes affect the mental substance. How did the physical impact affect the mental substance?
And I'm telling you why that couldn't happen. You can't infer the nature of intentionality from looking at neurological data. I told you about that Atlantic article about 'representational drift' in mice before. You didn't get the point at the time. This is the point. If you can't detect a correlation between stimulus and response in a mouse's brain, then how would you go about detecting the correlation betwen an intentional act and electrical signals in a human brain?
Quoting khaled
I've already showed why this is implausible. An idea can be represented in all different kinds of neural configurations, not to mention many different languages or types of media. Logic is the relationship between ideas, and ideas are not structures of matter.. They're structures of meaning.
Quoting khaled
Dualism says that humans are a combination of mental and physical. A physical blow can obviously affect the physical capacity to be conscious. But on the other hand, what if I tell you something, convey something to you, that makes you sick or fills you with dread? Then nothing physical has passed between us, but it has physical effects, like raising your blood pressure or making you throw up. And that's because the meaning has affected you, not anything physical. You know what it means, because you're a human, with an imagination, and the ability to interpret. The placebo affect is like that, in medicine - a subject's belief that they will be cured has physical affects, even though they've been given no physical medicine.
Quoting khaled
I want to break this down a bit. Since the beginning of modern scientific method, with Galileo, science places a fundamental but unstated emphasis on what can be objectively measured. As it happens, physical objects are the paradigmatic example of such things. Newton's laws of motion are amazingly accurate across vast ranges of such behaviour. That is why physics became paradigmatic for philosophy - it's why 'physicalism' is the mainstream view. It is, or was, paradigmatic for all science and so is deeply embedded in our way of thinking.
So there's no way to even deal with a 'non-physical' object in that framework. There are, as I understand it, spookily not-quite-physical things in quantum physics, like virtual particles that go in and out existence. But that's not what I'm getting at. In that formulaic picture of how science works, the mind is excluded as a matter of principle. It attempts to derive a view of what is objectively there, same for all observers, measurable and quantifiable. Physicalism is the view that whatever is measurable and observable in that sense, is the basis of all-there-is. Whenever you tallk about 'objects' or whether 'mind is a substance', then you're adopting that framework. And I suggest you're adopting it unconsciously, i.e. without thinking about it. That is why when I say that the mind is not an object, then you can't understand that, you think that I'm talking 'word salad'. What I'm actually doing, is analysing the question from a different perspective - I'm looking at it philosophically, in terms of the relationship of subject and object, not viewing it through the perspective of science.
Bingo! We talked about this on another thread. I know this is going to make Albert Camus turn in his grave but I have this feeling that he's been cremated. Anyway, life seems to possess...wait for it...purpose - it, as a whole and individually, seems to be on some kind of mission so to speak. Life wants to do something as opposed to a nonliving thing. Take the simplest of living organisms, a bacterium - it seems bent on foraging, feeding, and conjugating (sex). I recall you talking about the 4 F's (food, fight, feed, f**k) - primal drives that, to some degree, define life. Such are missing in nonliving things e.g. a stone - it just sits there and probably has been sitting there and will sit there for all of eternity. If memory serves, you used the word "intentionality".
This, incidentally, is why Franz Brentano’s idea of ‘intentionality’ became one of the hallmarks of phenomenology. Intentionality, or about-ness, is said to be one of the fundamental attributes of consciousness, which marks it off from the physical; thoughts are ‘about’ objects, in a way that has no correspondence in the domain of the physical.
Quoting TheMadFool
Right. But to those four, h.sapiens adds another ingredient - rationality, which opens horizons of possibility inconceivable to other species. Which is why I often argue that Darwinian theory is incomplete in this respect - which, incidentally, was also the view of Alfred Russel Wallace.
That's not what I'm asking you for though. I'm not asking you to reduce intentionality to a single physical process. I get you can't do that. What I'm asking is: What will it look like when the mental substance affects matter?
Say we call you drinking the cup of water Neurological State 1 (NS1). We can find out what caused NS1, let's call that NS2. And NS3 is what caused NS2. And so on.
Do you expect that at some point we'll find a NSX that was NOT caused by a previous NSY? A neurological state that was brought about by the mental substance doing something?
Quoting Wayfarer
So consciousness is a physical capacity now? Come on.....
How can the physical affect the mental substance and vice versa? Explain in terms of what the physical would look like as it is being affected. What do you expect we will see, when intentionality causes a movement? Or is intentionality incapable of moving anything (epiphenomenology)?
Quoting Wayfarer
This does not make it so that the idea is not a structure that is shared accross them. Exactly like the same algorithm can be implemented on any number of computers, and non computers. And yet, the algorithm is no more than the structure of physical stuff in every case.
Quoting Wayfarer
Really? Nothing physical? Not even sounds? Or lights on a screen?
Doubtful. I'll immediately become an idealist if you manage to convey something to me telepathically without any physical means, as you claim you can do...
Quoting Wayfarer
None of this has answered my question.
Incidently I don't disagree with any of the above. I disagree with your use of words such as "thing" and "object" but at least I know that you think mental substances exist. And that's all I need to formulate my question. Which you keep not answering.
You admit there exists mental substances yes? And you claim those mental substances can affect, and are affected by the physical world. We can observe the physical world. When a mental substance affects the physical world, what do you expect we will see?
Like you having a drink of water.
Quoting khaled
Programmed by humans. Without humans, no algorithms. Humans interface between the domain of ideas and those of matter. Dualism again.
You’re a great sport, Khaled. It’s helped me a lot having this conversation, and I thank you for it.
Well as far as I can tell, we have never found cases of a neurological event that wasn't entirely explained by the previous neurological event. So it seems to me like the mental substance isn't doing anything.
Quoting Wayfarer
Agreed.
Quoting Wayfarer
Non sequitor.
Again, you don't need to pose a new kind of substance. There is nothing so far that you've given that you can't explain with just the matter and its structures. And structures are not a substance.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't wanna sound like a dick but I wish I could say the same. You just keep dodging the problem. Maybe the SEP will get through:
Do you think that some physical effects are not caused sufficiently by physical causes? Because it's that or epiphenomenalism. And I think both are wrong. Or is there some alternative I'm not thinking of here?
I need to work on my observational skills. Either it's talent or practice and I lack the former and I'm just too scatter-brained for the latter. Woe is me!
Quoting Wayfarer
Saving this file for future reference. I hope I can access it when I need to.
You've been kind enough to remind me of this about-ness. How many times now? This is probably the 5th time. Patience is a virtue they say. :up:
I suppose this has something to do with subject-object distinction. Inanimate matter, a stone for example, can be an object but never a subject while the animate is capable of assuming a subject's role. That should be close enough to the truth for the likes of me.
Quoting Wayfarer
A gold star for Wayfarer for this gem!
The 5th F = Figure
Definition of figure: think, consider, or expect to be the case (intentionality/planning) and let's not forget the word also refers to numbers, something you seem interested in in an ontological sense.
Thanks! G'day.
Sorry to interject, but you guys should really consider quantum consciousness theory. Superposition explains subjective qualia, and entanglement explains the structural properties of matter as distributed in space (even a stationary column essentially consists in remote entanglement effects). Chemistry is basically entanglement with some tunneling thrown in, while sustained superposition emerges from quantum coherence within some systems of entangled wavicles, a blending into complex patterns of resonance that are the substance of sensation and feeling. Its explanatorily significant but not eliminative, for the phenomenology of intention and identify are still certainly a piece of the puzzle. Ignore me if I'm irritating lol but I speak the truth!
You mean, science knows all there is to know about the brain.
Quoting Enrique
You put one view among others.
I mentioned it in my first comment on this thread (though not by name). But it's weird. It doesn't seem to be what idealist (or anyone) wants. It's not clear at all how much quantum mechanics plays a role in the neurology so you'll likely end up with a useless mind anyways, because the brain is too big to be treated as a quantum system. And it's panpsychist to a weird degree. You'll end up with electrons being more free than us (since they're much more affected by quantum mechanics than a macro body like us would be).
No. But are you suggesting that we will find such a case? Since they've been proposed the laws of conservation have worked flawlessly. Nowhere have they broken down. Are you suggesting they break down within our brains every minute of the day this whole time?
And I'll just repeat the question again for the 100th time knowing you won't answer:
Quoting khaled
Not in respect of everyday life. Science has had to invent fancy concepts like 'negenrtopy' to allow for the fact that you can tidy your room up. You know the meaning of the philosophical term, 'procrustean bed'?
Quoting khaled
Action potentials are a quantum coherence event, molecular chemistry consists in entangled superpositions, and the brain's electromagnetic field as generated by billions of nearly simultaneous action potentials is the agent that binds these particularate phenomena into subjective stream of consciousness. Quantum concepts explain how soul can transcend the body, how consciousness can exist in a huge variety of different substances, it accounts for everything paranormal. I think its the perfect paradigm for uniting materialism with psychology and spirituality. Fight fight fight!
Quoting khaled
Quoting khaled
It's different from the question you've been dodging for 2 pages in that it asks nothing about minds It's purely talking about physical effects and physical causes. Things we can agree exist.
Quoting Wayfarer
What we study in physics.
See? Answers.
You say I’m dodging your questions, but you’re not understanding the answers. But, as I say, it has been an interesting conversation, and I’ve enjoyed the opportunity of explaining my stance, even if you haven’t understood it. I’ll leave it there for now.
Epiphenomenalism is true and we can prove it:
If there would be a mind effect, this effect could be captured by the physicists, they will eat everything what has an effect and define a force to it.
What remains can only be an epi. Q.e.d. !
This assumes that something will remain. I don't think so.
Is this going to be a weekly/biweekly thing? :rofl:
But quantum physics as thus far modeled barely scratches the surface of what material substance consists in. Quantumlike effects may pervade the behaviors of objects and forces at even macroscopic scales on some plane of causality, as they do in many lab settings, with action potentials throughout the body, in photon clouds, etc. The body's molecular complexes may be adapted by the evolutionary process for extreme sensitivity to energy fields that haven't even been discovered yet, but which we must honestly admit probably exist.
Quoting Enrique
Or it could be adapted to completely crush any semblance of quantum effects and to be as close to deterministic as possible in whichcase you'll have dug yourself into a hole. Until the extent to which quantum events affect the brain, and consequently behavior is determined I'm not putting any money on the theory.
It is the other way to eliminate qualia. However, this would mean that ethically speaking, any genocide would be the same as breaking stones.
I think that is not the whole truth.
Regular dude = R
Metaphysician = M
R: I think.
S: No you don’t. That’s the brain at work.
R: How does the brain work so it makes me think I think?
S: Damned if I know, but it couldn’t be any other way.
R: Oh, so...when you figure it all out, does that mean I won’t be able to claim I think?
S: Hell, you can claim anything you want, but you’d be wrong. All physical stuff.
R: Hmmmm.....I think I’ll just go ahead and disregard all that and just be me.
S: Fine. Guy can think whatever he likes, far as I’m concerned.
R: Wait. What? You just said I don’t think, it’s all brain work.
S: What I meant was, if push comes to shove, it all boils down to brain work.
R: So what you’re really saying is, before it all boils down, I actually am right in claiming I think.
S: Well...you’re right enough in claiming you think you’re thinking, because you don’t know any better, you don’t know the facts of the matter.
R: So if I go my entire life without knowing the facts of the matter, I can say I spent my whole life thinking.
S: I suppose. Like I said....we really don’t know how the brain works.
R: Then you’re no use to me at all, then, are you? Except for toaster ovens and penicillin. Credit where credit is due, I always say. Let’s get a coffee, bug the barista for a minute.
S: Fine. You’re buyin’.
Quantum consciousness certainly is a promising line of research, no doubt about that, though as you say still at the speculative stages.
I doubt qualia can be treated as a good basis for ethics. Especially given that you can't even tell anyone else has it other than yourself. How do you know the keyboard you're typing on right now isn't in extreme pain? Those are the questions you have to ask when you propose an ineffable, private, qualia.
Especially since you agree that these Qualia would be useless when it comes to enacting a physical change, so you can't use a physical change to infer a change in qualia. One could seriously maintain that the torture victim is in fact not suffering at all, as even if he/she had been suffering, that wouldn't lead to them screaming, it wouldn't lead to anything. For all we know they love the torture! Let's give em more!
How about: Yes you do, that's the brain at work.
Makes no difference.
Quoting Mww
Exactly. I cannot know it. But I can accept it as plausible that I am not the exception in the universe.
We are faced with the amazing situation of not being able to prove something intuitively true.
Which is more probable?
1) I am the only human being who has qualia.
2) There is a principle which material configuration has qualia.
Forest/trees.
“...We find, too, that those who are engaged in metaphysical pursuits are far from being able to agree among themselves, but that, on the contrary, this science appears to furnish an arena specially adapted for the display of skill or the exercise of strength in mock-contests—a field in which no combatant ever yet succeeded in gaining an inch of ground, in which, at least, no victory was ever yet crowned with permanent possession....”
Quoting khaled
But breaking stones eventually breaks you and could in extreme cases break society, even moreso when we are the cause of human suffering, and stones don't break you back. Human engagement has intrinsic moral consequences, and rather than try to weed out all the consequences, obviously impossible, why not try to make everyone as moral as possible, which is simply a byproduct of fostering the sound reasoning that recognizes moral consequences? Whether we suppress or actualize with culture is a multigenerational marathon either way, and actualization is a much more effective and universal behavioral incentive to my knowledge. Do we sell products by explaining how they will oppress someone or benefit us?
Some think many citizens are not reliable no matter how benevolently we attempt to condition them, but is this really true?
Quoting SolarWind
I wouldn't call it an "amazing situation" so much as "a problem". If your theory can't prove something inuitively true, either it's not intuitively true or your theory isn't very good.
Quoting SolarWind
Quoting SolarWind
Neither is more probable than the other or more reasonable to believe given your position. Because when Qualia causes no physical change, you have absolutely 0 inkling what others are experiencing. And you have 0 reason to believe they are experiencing the same qualia as you, if any qualia at all. One has just as much evidence for believing that the torture victim loves it, or hates it, or feels nothing at all, and that is 0 evidence. This is what happens when you divorce experience from matter, and propose that experience is its own substance.
There is an infinitesimally narrow gap of realization if someone has EXACTLY the inner configuration of oneself.
Then it is to be assumed that the equality also leads to equal qualia. Now it would be extremely implausible that a small deviation would lead to a completely different qualia (or no qualia). That would be very discontinuous.
Anything is possible, but that doesn't get us anywhere.
What? I'm reading this as "You will have the same qualia as a clone of yourself" or something like that. Well, by your formulation of qualia: No not necessarily. For this you have to assume that the physical is what results in qualia. But as you said, qualia must be completely separate from any physics, or else the physicists will consume it as some force or other. So you have no reason to believe that a clone of you, with the exact same matter configuration, would have the same, or similar, or any qualia.
There is no way for you to test any of the alternatives (same, similar, radically different, none), AND you have no reason to assume a physical similarity leads to a similarity in Qualia. It's a completely untestable hypothesis with no reason for us to believe it.
Quoting SolarWind
Again, you have no reason to believe there is a continuity of any sort. You cannot assume that a physical equality leads to the same qualia with the way you've cut qualia off so completely.
Quoting SolarWind
Right, but the problem is that in your system, you have just as much reason to believe any qualia-matter combination is the case. You have 0 evidence anyone else is experiencing the same or similar qualia, or any qualia at all. And you have no argument from plausability or implausibility as I'm trying to show above.
After all, I am a victim of my own arguments. That qualia can have no effect on the matter is logical, since every effect entails a contribution in a physics book. So it remains only matter->qualia and not vice versa.
That the arrow in matter->qualia, however, should result in different right sides with the same left side, would mean that the qualia would still have to depend on something else. What should be that?
Or be completely random. That too is an alternative. Or simply not exist for anyone other than yourself.
Quoting SolarWind
Heck if I know, a private ineffable substance called "qualia" is not my idea. But even if Qualia only depended on the physical configuration, you have absolutely no way of finding the significant variables. Maybe people born after 3 pm on Wednesdays actually enjoy torture (though they’ll act like the rest of us and scream). That’s just as reasonable a hypothesis than that they hate torture. Because both hypotheses have 0 evidence backing them up.
Again note, that this is assuming same physical configuration = same Qualia. Which you have no reason for believing either. But even IF you believe it the discontinuity argument doesn’t hold up. Even between you and a clone of you there is a vast array of physical and historical differences, so no reason to assume the same or similar Qualia.
If particular superpositions amongst entangled molecules give rise to particular qualia, then these qualia will be meaningfully and predictably similar or variable between individuals, just like current neuroscience to a more constrained extent. If subjects report seeing a specific color, and the molecules pinpointed as giving rise to that perception are comparable by some rubric, we will have objective proof that they are seeing the same color because the molecular qualia are the color. Within a tolerable margin of error, we will have a table of the perceptual elements. However, mechanisms we know nothing about at this point in a theoretical sense are probably in effect.
I assume that the "Qualia law" (matter->Qualia) is a law of nature similar to the other laws of nature, thus steady and time-independent.
Like Newton's law of universal gravitation, it has no jumps and is not different on Wednesdays than on Tuesdays.
If everything would be arbitrary, do you then go in the evening on the street and beat up people, because it can be that they are sad, if you do NOT do it?
Right. You assume. For no reason. Yet you claim you have a reason for doing so.
Anyways we've been going around in circles for a while now. I'll leave it here.
That is in the nature of things, that is philosophy.
Yes, I'm just making assumptions. I assume that an animal feels pain when you hit it. You have to decide what you believe. That is life.
Let's get right down to business.
Physicalism claims everything is matter and/or energy.
Matter is anything that has mass and volume.
Energy is the capacity to do work.
[b]Here's me, observing a wheel spinning.
The wheel neither gains mass nor increases in volume. Ergo, the spinning wheel isn't matter!
Conclusion: The phenomena of a wheel spinning is neither matter nor energy.
In other words, the spin of a wheel is nonphysical.[/b]
----------
1. The brain is made up of matter.
2. The mind is the name we give the core function of the brain.
3. A thought is an atomized unit of "mind".
Something is wrong.
So the wheel is matter, and the spin of the wheel is energy. So far, so physicalist.
Ah! Sorry, the typo threw me. Keep it up, comrade!!! :rofl:
You can do work with the spinning wheel i.e. the spinning (of the wheel) is energy - it's physical (matter & energy).
A thought on the other hand [s]can't[/s] hasn't been observed doing any work i.e. thoughts aren't energy. Thoughts aren't matter too because the brain doesn't increase either in mass or in volume when thinking.
Ergo, thoughts are nonphysical.
You might find psychokinesis relevant. Thoughts doing work! Woo-woo! Pseudoscience!
Quoting TheMadFool
Question: does a length of copper cable increase in weight when you pass electrical
current through it? Or does a piece of steel increase in weight when you heat it up?
I disagree.
The wheel is physical yes, but the “spin” of the wheel is a process that the physical object undergoes. The process itself is not physical. Similarly, the brain is physical, yet a thought it not.
Both the spin of a wheel and a thought in the brain are supported by energy, one through the force that set the spin in motion, the other by the energy it takes to fire the neurons that in sum create your thoughts.
If I drop a tiny piece of paper on the spinning wheel, will the paper not fly off at a tangent? Yes, it will. What causes the paper to fly off like that? Energy! Ergo, the spin of the wheel is energy.
In both cases, physical work is done. You can't do any work with thoughts, at least I haven't heard of such an event having occurred. Something smells fishy though. Mind if you take a look at what I'm saying.
Considering thoughts aren't physical, how are you ever going to detect that this event has occurred? What do you expect to see when a thought does something?
That's one of the vexing problems in ontology. There's no difference at all between perceivable (sensorily and/or instrumentally) and physical.
Vexing problems in dualist ontology*
Physicalism is literally hogging all the space - leaving no room for nonphysicalism. The instant a thing is perceived, it's automatically physical. You do see the problem with such a schema don't you. Existence is defined in terms of that which is perceivable and that which is perceivable is physical. How the hell can we claim anything nonphysical exists?
Existence takes precedence over physical/nonphysical i.e. first existence needs to be established and only then can we go about determining the physical/nonphysical nature of that which is claimed to exist. Unfortunately or not, to exist means to be perceived and to be perceived is to be physical. Ergo, nonphysical implies imperceivable and imperceivable means nonexistent! To cut to the chase, by virtue of how existence & physical are defined (both perceivable), nonphysical = nonexistence.
When you speak of the non physical, which you do fairly frequently, I often wonder if what you mean is the invisible. For example, so cannot be seen, including processes underlying life, including the transmission of ideas electronically on this site. We can see our devices and the words on the screen, but cannot see the way it all happens. It involves signals, which have a physical basis but it does involve transmission which is invisible, and I believe that this applies to thoughts. They involve the physical brain and chemicals, but what takes place involves processes which are not visible. It also makes me think of Hegel's specific phenomenology.
Air has weight but air is invisible! So, no I don't mean invisible. Glass, the plain kind, too is invisible but definitely not nonphysical.
Air has particles and, glass is not invisible, but is merely transparent, or we would walk through it accidentally, and knock over any empty glasses. I am talking more about the way in which at the present time, neuroscience can detect the underlying basis of brain processes but cannot see the specific images and ideas within our consciousness, because they are invisible to other minds.
There's nothing particularly special about this though. If you have a particular neuron wired into your brain, you'll get different information out of it firing than if you're staring at it through a scanner. Nobody speaks of an image/flavour barrier about grapes: we're quite happy that the same object made up of the same chemicals can look one way and taste another. Same works for neurons: they can appear one way in a scanner, another way under a microscope, taste a different way on a cracker. It's all down to different bits of the information about the neuron (or grape) connected to different systems designed to convert that information into different representations.
But no, the schema is not problematic. To define physical by being detectable seems like a decent definition even in vacuum. If you want to propose a “mind substance” like a thought, being more than just a physical structure, then that’s a testable hypothesis.
You claim thoughts are non physical yes? That means they can’t be perceived. However one would also like to claim that thoughts do something (I got a drink because I was thirsty). So if thoughts do something without getting perceived, we’d know exactly what that looks like: A magical unexplained movement. Somewhere along the causal chain of you getting a drink, you’d expect to see a neurological event that was uncaused by anything physical, that was instead caused by the thought.
Once that’s detected (though it directly violates the conservation laws) you can begin to deal with the whole slew of other problems that come with it. How do we know that this seemingly uncaused movement was caused by YOUR mind? If your mind has these telekinetic powers, why can’t you cause movement outside your body in the same way you cause movement inside your body? Etc.
But most likely we won’t detect such a thing at all. I recommend you check Enrique’s explanation of quantum consciousness if you insist on having minds and thoughts be substances with their own existence, rather than just structures of matter.
Or maybe it’s doubtful that thoughts exist independently as a substance in the first place. Though I’d like to make that work, I see no good way to do so.
Anyway your argument seemed to be that if thoughts are physical activity when I think a thought I should weigh more. I presented the examples of electricity flow and heating of objects to show that I think this reasoning is fallacious.
Quoting khaled
To the above to esteemed forum members.
[quote=Wikipedia]The argument from physics is closely related to the argument from causal interaction. Many physicists and consciousness researchers have argued that any action of a nonphysical mind on the brain would entail the violation of physical laws, such as the conservation of energy.[/quote]
I'm a bit confused here. What's the relationship between the nonphysical and physical laws? 4 possibilities arise:
1. If x is nonphysical then x violates physical laws
2. If x violates physical laws then x is nonphysical
3. If x doesn't violate physical laws then x is physical [from 1]
4. If x is physical then x doesn't violate physical laws [from 2]
The argument from physics (above) seems to be about relationship 1 and 3 between the nonphysical and physical laws.
Dark Energy & Conservation Laws
[quote=From The Article Above]If the trio are ultimately proved right, it would not mean physicists having to throw their long-established conservation principles completely out of the window[/quote]
What dark energy and its implication on the conservation physical laws does is it makes statement 2 above false i.e. it's true that that x violates physical laws & x is physical. Then we get the following statement,
5. If x violates physical laws then either x is physical or x is nonphysical.
Then,
6. If x is nonphysical then either x is physical or x is nonphysical [1, 5 HS]
7. x is nonphysical [assume for conditional proof]
8. x is physical or x is nonphysical [6, 7 MP]
9. x doesn't violate physical laws or x violates physical laws [1, 4, 7 CD]
10. If x is nonphysical then either x doesn't violate physical laws or x violates physical laws [7 - 9 conditional proof]
In other words, according to physicalists who make the argument from physics, playing by their rules, their hypothesis about the nonphysical as compatible with both violation and nonviolation of physical laws (10 above) is utterly unscientific as it can't be falsified.
Either that or accept everything is nonphysical.
It's a logical statement, not a prediction of outcomes. If X can act on (e.g. move, torque, annihilate) Y then X has a property of being able to supervene on Y and Y has the property of being supervened upon by X. This is precisely what physical properties are.
Mass is a physical property that dictates how a gravitational field (physical) will act on the body, how the body will act on the mass, for instance. Charge is a physical property that dictates how the electromagnetic field (physical) will supervene on and be supervened upon by the body.
One possible out is that X supervenes upon Y but Y does not supervene on X. This would be apparent as uncaused changes in Y and breaches of conservation laws (energy, momentum, etc.). However, if one saw such a thing, such as the strange angular momentum of galaxies or the accelerating expansion of the universe), one would probably and rightly predict an undetected physical cause over an invisible non-physical one. Such a prediction is scientific insofar as, should we detect the cause, we would predict effects of it being supervened upon also.
Unfortunately or not, this is false.
The argument from physics clearly states that if the mind were nonphysical then physical laws would be violated.
Read on, Fool.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
That's the whole point of my argument. First, scientists and physicalists always maintain something physical is going on whether physical laws are being violated or not. Then they define the nonphysical as that which violates physical laws. You see the problem with this don't you:
1. Physical laws violated -> Physical (your recommendatiom)
2. Physical laws vioated -> Nonphysical (definition of nonphysical according to physicalists/scientists)
3. Physical laws violated (observed)
4. Physical (1, 3 MP)
5. Nonphysical (2, 3 MP)
6. Physical & Nonphysical (contradiction!)
Acknowledging the fact that 1 is a better option still, you can't have it both ways, eat the cake and have it too, right? What's the difference between physical and nonphysical in terms of physical laws if both can violate physical laws?
It's scientific to do so. I'll leave whether it's "better" to the eyes of the beholder.
Quoting TheMadFool
No, they don't define non-physical at all. It's not on their radar; if it is, they're not doing so as physicists but as metaphysicists.
Quoting TheMadFool
Whether physical laws are apparently violated, yes. They see a physical effect, they seek a physical cause. Why so narrow-minded? Because it's proven a successful strategy for 500 years or so, no other reason. When undetected physical causes are hypothesised, they are then sought and typically found (neutrino, antimatter, Higgs boson, etc.) No more unreasonable than supposing every nail is amenable to a hammer (which is what physics is: a tool). It would be so rare to not find a physical cause that one would be justified in concluding that it's difficult to find rather than that an entirely new, entirely different, non-physical thing is at play, a pointless conjecture that cannot hope to be verified or falsified.
You're contradicting yourself. If it's scientific, it's better in the eyes of "someone". Anyway, I don't mind that it's scientific. In fact, my whole argument depends on it being scientific.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
:brow:
What do scientists do when they hear the word "nonphysical"?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I'm not interested in the merits of science.
Yes, it's better in my eyes, but I'll leave it to you as it whether you think it's better. No contradiction, just not being arrogant about it.
Quoting TheMadFool
If you're not interested in why physicists do what they do, don't ask about them, or make ill-founded claims about them. Perfectly simple! :)
The whole history of scientific development could be summed up as the refinement and expansion of what is physically possible. We routinely do many things every day that anyone a century ago would find mind-boggling. Arthur C Clarke said that 'any sufficiently highly developed technology is indistinguishable from magic'. That is because humans alone can 'peer into the possible' and realise things from it. Not anything, there are limits, some things remain impossible, but the horizon keeps changing.
So looking at for a mental substance or thing or cause, in that sense, is misplaced.
If it has any impact on physical outcome, it is a cause of physical effects. If I wish to raise my right arm and do so because of it, ultimately somewhere along the line that wish caused a physical event. Therefore ascribing physical causation to mind is perfectly accurate.
The alternative to this is that the mind is a trapped, impotent spectator. Or perhaps telepathic but otherwise impotent. We'd not know if we were telepathic though, since no one can demonstrate any sign of it if mind does not have physical effects.
But from that it doesn’t follow that the cause is physical or determinable in terms of physics. Precisely what is the nature of intentional action is what is at issue. What about the insights of mathematicians who solve conjectures and so on? What has physically transpired in those cases?
If the cause is non-physical, it won't be determinable in terms of physics by definition. What we'd see would be indistinguishable from an undiscovered physical cause minus human curiosity.
Quoting Wayfarer
I was merely treating:
Quoting Wayfarer
A non-physical thing either gives rise to physically inexplicable behaviour, which is what the non-physical mind is supposed to do, or it gives rise to nothing, does nothing except insists upon itself to itself. I don't think anyone is arguing for the latter (except maybe Samuel Beckett), so we're very much in the area of non-physical causes of effects in physical stuff (I want to raise my arm --> arm is raised).
This is the sort of thing we were discussing when you interjected with the post I originally responded to. It might be that the timing, wording and lack of reference in your post made it sound like you were joining in the contemporaneous discussion. If not, ignore me since my response was in the context of that discussion.
I agree, the OP was misguided but I believe TMF has moved on somewhat.
Ok! Great! Anyway, it doesn't matter to my argument. I don't know why I brought it up! Was it you?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
You misunderstand me. The achievements of physicists are irrelevant to my argument. That's all. Do you mean to argue that just because physicists have made so many contributions that they're right about their take on nonphysicalism? Shouldn't it be the exact opposite? :chin:
Also, you didn't answer my question. I'll repeat it here for your attention. What is a physicist's stand on the nonphysical?
The problem is simple:
Dark energy you say is physical. Ergo the physical violates physical laws ( :chin: ). It's the "scientific" way.
The physical also obey i.e. don't violate physical laws. The usual.
Ergo,
1. If x is physical then either x violates physical laws or x doesn't violate physical laws.
Suppose now that my scientific hypothesis is the mind is physical i.e. x = mind. From 1, my predictions would be either the mind will violate physical laws or the mind won't violate physical laws. In other words, my hypothesis is unfalsifiable. Whether the prediction (violation of physical laws) is true/false, my hypothesis that mind is physical isn't affected in any way at all. This is bad science and you know it. Undermines the whole edifice of physicalism I must say!
No, I was treating the point:
Quoting TheMadFool
nothing else. This meme of physical hypotheses for physical behaviour is based solely on its merits, its fitness: if it didn't work, we'd be doing something else instead of science. I wasn't patting science on the back, just illustrating that science is principally a _practical_ method.
One could break it down and say it's induction, but that doesn't really say anything as to why, just postpones the question. The why is: it works, so that meme propagates! :)
Quoting TheMadFool
Quoting Kenosha Kid
This is refuting, not defining. I'd also argue dualists also fail to define non-physical. Anyway, physicists are in the business of physics, not non-physics. I'd say the overwhelming consensus is that everything is physical, therefore there's nothing non-physical to talk about.
Quoting TheMadFool
This doesn't make sense. An uncaused expansion of the universe would violate physical law. Dark energy is a physical hypothesis in which no physical law would be violated.
What does that mean?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
You need to get your basics right. How could one refute sans a definition?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Your befuddlement is understandable. I too am equally if not more confused.
We have to go back to the beginning whenever that was. Physical laws are being violated (the expansion of the universe can't be explained with available data on matter & energy and the physical laws duely applied).
Now, according to the physicalist,
1. If x is nonphysical then x violates physical laws
The expansion of the universe has already and is, as we speak, violating physical laws. The physicalist should, because 1 is his position on nonphysicalism, take this as confirmation of the nonphysical (abductive reasoning/affirming the consequent "fallacy"?! the scientific method).
However, they say, towing the line of physicists, "no!" This is what you're talking about viz. that dark energy, the physicalist "explanation" for the expanding universe, is physical. You seem to be under the impression that if dark energy is physical, physical laws aren't violated! I urge you to read the article again - physical laws are violated by the expansion of the universe.
See: Violation of energy conservation in the early universe may explain dark energy
Ergo, following your lead,
2. If x is physical then either x violates physical laws or x doesn't violate physical laws
The rest is as I wrote in my last post (follows from 2).
But we haven't seen those laws violated so maybe x is not nonphysical. OR x is nonphysical and also completely useless (can't bring about any movement)
Quoting TheMadFool
Which isn't helping your case. Beforehand, if we see physical laws getting violated, we can more easily assume the thing violating them is nonphysical. Now, even when physical laws are violated, the thing violating them can be physical or nonphysical. Which only makes this:
Quoting khaled
Even worse. Now even if we DO find the fabled "seemingly uncaused neurological event" which was caused by your thirst rather than any physical process, we can't attribute the thing causing it to thirst. Well, we couldn't already but it's an even bigger leap to do so now.
Quoting TheMadFool
This is the entire problem. If x is nonphysical and it violates physical laws, then x doesn't exist, as we haven't seen those laws violated. If x is nonphysical and it doesn't violate physical laws, then x is completely useless and posing its existence is thus also useless.
The problem is dualists want to propose a mental substance, that actually does work. An X that violates physical laws, that actually exists. You can't have that. Either you can propose a mental substance, and find out it doesn't do work (epiphenomenalism). Or you can insist that the mental substance does work, in which case it violates the conservation laws, in which case, you have to admit it doesn't exist because we haven't seen those laws violated yet.
Closest you'll get is quantum consciousness but again, it's highly speculative.
Then you're not a substance dualist.....
Quoting Wayfarer
So if I look at your brain, and take note of every neural event, and the neural event that caused it, will I find some neural event which was seemingly caused by nothing? Since that would be the neural event that was "triggered by your mind"?
Quoting Wayfarer
Yea, definitely not a substance dualist....
So what exactly are you saying? You propose a mental substance that triggers neurological events. But also insist that looking for a mental substance is misguided.
Quoting Wayfarer
What do you think happened in those cases? Do you think if we scan their brains we'll find some unexplained energy anomaly we can attribute to a mind causing something?
This is a mere assumption not any kind of absolute logical entailment or truth. Physical laws (if they exist), by definition, govern the physical, and have no necessary relation to the non-physical (however that is defined). A simple category error is giving rise to the illusion that these "principles" you are asserting are sound.
Something being ill-defined is a good reason to refute it. As I've already said, non-physical doesn't make sense as a concept: either it interacts with the physical, in which case it's physical, or it does not, in which case it cannot make itself known. This is the refutation of non-physical mind you refer to. It doesn't need further elaboration: it is simply that which does not supervene on or is not supervened on by physical reality.
Quoting TheMadFool
And you wrote it! :rofl:
Quoting TheMadFool
Let's be explicit. Denotatively a physical law is epistemological: it is a statement about our knowledge of the universe. Colloquially, it also refers to the referent of the former: the ontological truth about the universe. So the law of conservation of energy is precisely a statement about human knowledge, and imprecisely a property of the actual universe that we think is true.
When we say that a physical law is violated, we mean one of three things:
1. our well-tested knowledge about physical reality (physical law) is nonetheless wrong or at least inaccurate;
2. our physical laws are fine (or good enough) but our description of nature or an observation is incomplete;
3. something non-physical is happening.
Your reference to conservation laws maybe changing with time is an example of the first, as is the orbit of Mercury which led to Newtonian gravity to be usurped by Einstein's general relativity. But be clear, this is epistemological. We're not saying that the actual ontological rules governing the universe have been violated, rather that our knowledge has been upended.
The expansion of the universe may be (1) or (2). The laws we have to describe what should happen may be perfectly accurate, but not enough (2). But again, discovering the explanation today doesn't mean that it didn't hold yesterday. Nothing ontological has been violated, we have simply revised our opinions in the face of more facts.
Now it may be that the cause of apparent violation of physical law is never found within the physical. Is this good reason to assume a non-physical explanation, putting aside how little sense that makes in and of itself?
You're contradicting yourself! No harm though! I do that often and look at me - I'm still alive! Survival of the fittest! or as I prefer it, survival of the luckiest! :rofl: Nevertheless, things could've been better. :rofl:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
What's ill-defined?Quoting Kenosha Kid
You should read the conversation I had with Khaled. We discussed this thoroughly. I have no desire to repeat myself here. Nevertheless, the problem is not with how nonphysicalism/physicalism are defined but with how existence is defined.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yes, I know :smile: I felt like I had to confess. Are you a priest? :rofl:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
There's got to be a correspondence (a 1-to-1 correspondence) in terms of logical implications between epistemology and ontology. You speak as is they're completely independent of each other. They're different I agree but not independent in the sense and to the degree necessary for the above paragraph to be relevant to the discussion.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
At least you had to intellectual honesty to consider option 3. something nonphysical is happening. :up:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Agreed, conservation "laws" maybe changing.
That's exactly the issue here. If "laws" can change science is reduced to nonsense! Look below,
1. If x is physical then x violates physical laws (the usual deal) or x doesn't violate physical laws (change in the laws)
In other words, the hypothesis x is physical can't be falsified because it doesn't matter if physical laws are violated or not!
Falsifiability is what science is all about. Science makes big claims for itself and dismisses many alternatives to science out of hand by labelling them pseudoscience. Google why? It itself, however, fails to meet the stringent criteria it sets for others, and shockingly, precisely on what physical means vis-à-vis the physical laws. That's like a mechanical engineer not being able to define "machine".
Again, your distinction ontological-epistemological is irrelevant. Change in one must be reflected in the other - that's how it works, no? You seem to be under the impression that ontology can contradict epistemology and it wouldn't matter but, as you know, such events signal scientists to, well, scurry back to the drawing board as it were. The idea is to map the territory (construct a theory - epistemology - that can be tested empirically- ontology) The two interact but, mind you ontology (reality) is untouchable so to speak, modify the epistemology (the theory). Everyone knows that!
Not much point saying that unless you (can) point to the contradiction.
It's our little secret! G'day
......but rather, makes sense as that which.....
Quoting Kenosha Kid
....exemplified by....
Quoting Kenosha Kid
How can it be said something doesn’t interact with the physical, if that something hasn’t made sense as a concept? That the mind is a valid concept is given merely from the thought of it, and all valid concepts make sense in relation to something, which we can see in the construction of syllogisms including it in a premise. Which is, of course, the only possible way to even talk about it in the first place. But this still leaves the question of whether or not the mind and other non-physical conceptions make themselves known, an admirable subtlety on your part, I must say.
Supervenience is a post-modern analytic construct, which is irrelevant in epistemic methodologies in which “mind” doesn’t hold any power. In such methodologies, there are pure conceptions that make themselves known, represented as “the categories”, not of mind, but of reason alone. And to substitute reason for mind, as equally non-physical entities is absurd, in that pure practical reason can indeed supervene on physical reality, re: morality.
I submit to you, Good Sir, that you have already imbued your comments with a conception that has made itself known to your thinking, if not to your words. You have attributed “quality” to the concept of mind, as the only possible means for you to state what it is or is not, and what it can or cannot do. How would you suppose, guess, want, need or just think any of that, without some ground by which to make those judgements, when experience offers no help?
So....it is at least logically consistent, that “quality” is a concept that makes sense (the absence of which is impossible), is not itself physical (the objects to which it relates, are), does not interact with the physical (only attributes relative degree), and most certainly makes itself known (as a necessary condition pursuant to a given methodology).
But ya know what? The physicalist doesn’t have to show such non-physical conceptions make no sense, or don’t exist, or anything else. All he has to do, is show how the human cognitive system can operate in its historically recorded functionality, without them. Which is impossible, because it is the case that he must necessarily employ the very things he is attempting to revoke. He must, then, rely on knowledge he doesn’t have, with respect to a kind of technology he wouldn’t know how to use, for experiments he doesn’t know how to formulate, culminating in results he wouldn’t understand.
In other words, he can explain nothing the metaphysician hasn’t already.
(Mic drop....exit stage right)
Non-physicalism.
Quoting TheMadFool
Jesus, dude, it's just chat, don't be so offensive ;)
Quoting TheMadFool
Well that's easily dismissed. There are too many theories for the same thing.
Quoting TheMadFool
I don't think that can be inferred. I am a scientist after all. But reality is completely unaffected by our theories about it. And rightly so.
Quoting TheMadFool
:( Apropos of nothing, I'm on a train and the most beautiful sunset I've ever seen is going by. Anyhoo, option 3 is there for completion. It is the "I don't want to find out, I just want an answer" option.
Quoting TheMadFool
Quite the contrary. It is the self-correcting nature of science that makes it superior. The "laws" in this case are our knowledge which may be ever refined to be more complete, more accurate, more integrated, precisely *because* they can be disproven, unlike any claim to non-physicality.Quoting TheMadFool
No. Absolutely not.
Because being completely unknown makes it illogical to assertm
Quoting Mww
The mind is not contended. For the record, I am pro-mind. Non-physicalism is contended.
Quoting Mww
Intrigued, but pretty sure this is entirely untrue. But still intrigued.
Quoting Mww
Easy peasy! This itself assumes that experience is some separable thing that, being of the mind, can be of no use in physical considerations. But precisely because the mind is physical, I can be more sure that experience does illuminate.
Quoting Mww
This assumes what it seeks to prove.
Btw I shouldn't be writing any of this, I'm hammered. Out of interest, how am I holding up? Am I going to be embarrassed in the morning (more like lunchtime) and will you forgive me?
*Adopts Elvis voice*: Always liked you Mww. Always have. Always will. One day we shall arm wrestle.
I think this probably crystalizes this entire debate (and many others). How would one define or identify the non-physical?
No, Master Fool, it's your little secret; I have no idea what you think the contradiction is.
:up:
:100:
Shhh! :zip: :smile: I hope I didn't offend you!
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I beg to differ. Existence is poorly defined. Either that or physicalism is under the (false) impression that everything detectable is matter & energy.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
:smile: Georges Lemaître (Expansion Of The Universe) was a priest! Coincidence or...???
Quoting Kenosha Kid
The best theory, in terms of explanatory power, is chosen, the rest consigned to the scrap heap. What's explanatory power but a good fit between a hypothesis and experiment. Too many theories, yes but only one, maybe two, are shortlisted based on 1-to-1 correspondence between predictions and confirmation of those predictions.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Great! Fortune has smile upon me. Something's wrong!
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Precisely!
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Closed-minded scientist! Oxymoron.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yes, exactly, that's it! The time has come, scientist, to correct your stand on nonphysicalism.
It's weird that you take the discussion -- on your thread, no less -- less seriously than the drunk guy on the train :rofl: Amusing as it may be, word association doesn't quite have the same heft as an actual argument.
Quoting Tom Storm
I've been trying to get an answer to this for years.
What's wrong with
[quote=TLP]1 The world is all that is the case.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.[/quote]
as a working definition for existence? This implies that 'whatever exists' is a fact – a contingent entity causally related to other facts; therefore, 'whatever does not exist' is a non-contingent entity not causally related to any facts. So abstract objects e.g. numbers do not exist but rather, as Meinong designated, they only subsist...
The problem I see with that is that us human minds live in a mental world, in ideas. Each and everyone of our thoughts is abstract. So by this Meaning ontology, our mind only subsists, it does not fully exist. But then, any evidence we have of the existence of matter is based on thoughts and observations by some mind or another, something that does not exist but only subsists...
Therefore matter cannot be said to exist either.
I say: we can be absolutely certain that thoughts exist, but anything beyond that is mere hypothesis. Matter may only subsist, for all we know. :-)
I repeat: If thoughts do not exist, what's the evidence that matter exists?
My point is rather simple. To exist = To be perceived = To be physical. Where's the room for nonphysical existence!
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Cool. If you’d said “non-physicalism doesn’t make sense as a concept” to begin with, I would’ve agreed and had nothing else to talk about. So....thanks. I guess.
————-
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I should have stipulated “(...) construct...” in philosophical discourse, re: Morgan, 1923, in conjunction with the early 20th century emergence debates with respect to consciousness, behaviorism and mental activities generally. I always thought of it as a way out of the effect/affect dualism. Another dumb-ass joke played by the OLP of the day, and considering the word isn’t used these days as Morgan implied in his.
————-
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Errr.....what?????
[quote=“Kenosha Kid;559901”]Am I going to be embarrassed in the morning?[/quote]
I should hope so.
—————-
Quoting Kenosha Kid
It would, except for the contextual qualifier, i.e., “....given a pursuant methodology...”, in which the necessary employment (of the categories) is established.
You should have no issues with the fact all theories are only logically proved when empirical validation is impossible.
————-
Quoting Kenosha Kid
The Principle of Complementarity?
At last. Someone realized M was there.
If "physical" was a well defined concept, "non-physical" would be easy to define. So let's try and define "physical".
Definitions by Oxford Languages:
1. relating to the body as opposed to the mind, e.g. "a range of physical and mental challenges".
2. relating to things perceived through the senses as opposed to the mind; tangible or concrete.
Thus "physical" means by and large: "perceivable by the senses, not just imagined by the mind." And "non-physical" must mean something like: "not perceivable by the senses, but imagined or created by the mind."
Makes sense?
I'm asking: why you confuse thoughts (faces-in-clouds) with mind (sky)? Thoughts subsist (in) existing minds.
Well, at the very least, you'll get your afternoon nap! :smile: I consider that an accomplishment!
— 180 Proof
We can only apprehend matter via our perceptions and thoughts. If the latter do not exist, then we have no evidence that matter itself exists.
Materialism is just an idea, and not a very logical one.
:roll: Wtf. Okay. But we can "weigh and measure" what the idea of materialism (e.g. material, or matter) refers to? What materialism refers to (like e.g. your body) is "more than just an idea", correct?
:up: :up:
Good job, No worries, 180 contradicts himself all the time :razz:
I'm not of the 'mind is an illusion'/'consciousness is an illusion'/'qualia are illusions' camp of physicalists. Mind seems real enough, as the processes or subset of processes of the brain. Physics isn't just material things: it's configuration (information) and changes in configuration (dynamics). Mind comes under that: configuration of the neurons in the brain (brain states) and changes in those configurations (mental processes).
Quoting Mww
I am haha! :P
Quoting Mww
? They're never logically proven. They remain on the table so long as they are falsifiable but not falsified.Quoting Mww
I'm guessing this is an example rather than a definition. The principal of complementarity follows purely from the wave nature of things. If a wave has a precise wavenumber, it must have an infinitely imprecise position (this is a plane wave) for instance. In quantum mechanics, wavenumber has a physical meaning: momentum. There's nothing non-physical happening here: the wave is just behaving like a wave.
But you have made me think... I misled when I said there's no concept of non-physical in physics. I was thinking of real, non-physical things. But we do use the word itself, however quite differently.
An artefact of a calculation or simulation that does not describe something supposed to be real is called a non-physical artefact. For instance, if you allowed a charge to act on itself, or for errors to build up at the edge of the simulation and propagate through, or artefacts of approximation giving unrealistic predictions, such as the effects due to a single Feynman diagram rather than the sum of all Feynman diagrams (which is exact)... Non-physical means non-real, basically.
Why yes, that's the point. You can weight matter alright, but you cannot weight the idea that matter is all there is, because ideas are not physical as per the above definition of 'physical' = 'empirical'.
Although... you can prove that materialism contradicts itself, which in a sense is the sort of "measurement" ideas lend themselves to: logical evaluations of their worth.
This could be quite misleading. Physicalism concerns the senses insofar as it concerns the observable universe. It doesn't have to be a direct observation, but ultimately you have to sense the results of an experiment and agree with others who sensed the same thing, whether it's the direction the sun came up or the image produced by an electron microscope.
The above gives the impression that if you didn't sense it classically, it's non-physical. However if I can scan your brain and see a neurological correlate of your experience, I am sensing something about it in an indirect way (e.g. I could make predictions about it). This would keep it in the realm of the physical.
Physics defines physical things as things having physical properties, and physical properties are the capacities to couple those things to other things. Spacetime is physical because it has a property (stress-energy tensor field) that is coupled to a property of things in spacetime (energy). The two supervene on each other: the stress-energy tensor tells things with energy where to go, and things with energy curve spacetime, changing its stress-energy tensor field. You can do this with all such properties (electric charge, colour charge, spin, rest mass, etc.), defining a set of interrelated things each with a set of properties that interrelate them.
This is what 'physical' means to me. Non-physical would mean what? It doesn't have properties? It has properties but they don't couple to anything? They couple only to other non-physical things? They couple in a one-way fashion (i.e. break Newton's third law)? It would seem to be defining something that either cannot exist or cannot be demonstrated to exist.
Let me precise that, when writing "perceivable by the senses", I should have added a few caveats such as: "aided by any apparatus e.g. microscope, radio-telescope, brain scanners, etc." and "with several well qualified , sober people agreeing to what they perceive". The latter caveat is to take into account the possibility of human error or illusion (mirages, hallucinations, etc.). The former is to allow for more than just our bare eyes.
This precision being made, when you scan my brain you may be searching for neural correlates for my experience, but my experience is accessible to you only by my telling you about it. So you perceive, measure, empirically gauge a brain scan or rather a series of many scans; and then I tell you: I want an ice cream right now, preferably pistachio and melon, from the bald guy in the street behind the fountain. Or: I can't stop thinking about this documentary I saw yesterday night, about a baby called Sama born in Aleppo, and her father Hamza, filmed by their mother and wife Waad.
And then you'll tell me that you see some correlation between, say, the excitation of my post-hypophyse and my speaking of war, or ice-cream.
Then what? You think that will help you predict what I think next? Even if you could, would it make ice cream any less good subjectively? Would it make Assad's murder and torture of his own people any less disgusting?
This brutal irruption of reality in a thread about the philosophy of reality may be a bit unfair; likely you were not prepared for this. Let's go back to the safety of a lab. Scientists observing subjects in a highly controlled environment, not under bombs, and no one is getting gelato either. My options, while you scan my brain, are limited to wanting to press the red button or the green button in front of me, or something equally irrelevant to anything.
So I press sometime one sometime the other and you tell me: I can predict which one you will chose next.
Is this the argument?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
By this definition, thoughts are physical, since they can couple with other thoughts and have certain properties such as being logical or not, sensical or not, etc.
Ah well, let's be yet more precise. Imaging neural activity is one indirect way of knowing what's going on in the mind (in principle anyway). The person having the experience describing it is a different indirect way of knowing what's going on in the mind: the view of the information we get about it is different, hence the experience of hearing someone describe a mental state is very different to the experience of viewing the scan.
A third way is to have the brain that the firing neuron is in, i.e. to be the person having that experience. The unjustifiable claim is not that this view of the same information is very different to the other two, but that the difference is more qualitative and profound than the difference between the first two examples.
All three examples are experiences of different subsets of the total information about a thing being processed by different systems that produce different outcomes. It is precisely because of the limitations of conscious experience, not despite them, that we conceive of those experiences as being immediate, fully-formed and irreducible, when in fact they are the outputs of transient processes transforming and enriching data over time, subject to continuous revision.
One cannot point to the difference between first-hand and third-person viewpoints as evidence for a fundamental difference between subjective and objective realities knowing that, in all cases, the information we have about something is different, with different limitations, and processed by different information-processing systems.
In the end the two channels of information converge into the minds of the scientists. So there's no avoiding the subjective dimension of reality. Physical reality is what we (minds) make of what we perceive.
There is plenty of things we can’t weigh that we consider material. Sound waves for example. Or magnetic fields. So this proves nothing.
Quoting Olivier5
So in fine, either one considers ideas to be 'physical', or one must concede that there are things that exist, such as ideas, that aren't physical. The two options say more or less the same thing: ideas exist. They only differ by how they define 'physical'.
Cool.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Configuration of neurons are brain states, but changes in neuron configurations are mental states? Why isn’t the configuration a mental state? And why isn’t a change of configuration a brain process? I don’t see how it’s valid to call one this and the other than, merely because of a change. Seems like a few steps missing, to me.
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yeah, pretty much. Up/down, right/left, right/wrong, ad infinitum. Physical/non-physical. In the human cognitive system, for any possible conception, the negation of it is given immediately. Whatever a thing is, its negation is not that. Whatever physicalism is, non-physicalism is not that.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yep, sufficient to explain why non-physicalism makes little sense as a concept. How would non-physicalism be studied that isn’t already studied under metaphysics? Leave the real out there, bring the valid in here, let it go at that, I say. That it seems real in here is still just that....a seeming. Talk of the real is empirical, talk of the valid is only logical.
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Isn’t a single Feynman diagram depicting the interaction of one electron with one positron, or the interaction of two electrons, exact? In what way is it not?
What does that have to do with anything?
You tried proving that one must concede that ideas exist, and since they don’t have weight, they are immaterial. False. There are plenty of things that don’t have weight that are material.
Are you moving to intensity now? Well a rock doesn’t have intensity and we still call it material. So that doesn’t work either.
Mental process, not mental state. (I was in a mental state last night.) I'm not differentiating between mental state and brain state: both refer to the same thing (a snapshot of the configuration of the brain at a given time).
Quoting Mww
Ah okay. Well then the same as real/non-real I guess.
Quoting Mww
It's convenient to think of them as physical processes, but in fact they're just terms in an infinite sum that describes a physical process. Some match pretty well, especially the lower order ones, but there's no real physical process corresponding to, say, a vertex correction.
That's not physical reality, that's solipsism. Physical reality is the causes of our perceptions. Or do you mean physical theory is what we make of what we perceive? In which case, yes
Here is why I think you have reached a false conclusion. You did not consider that thoughts are always inseparable from the neurons/brain matter that contain them. By observation they always go together. Bipartite and irreducible. Neurons are matter so your argument is not complete in its analysis.
My conclusion has nothing to do with "...thoughts are always inseperable..." Even if that were true, thoughts can be nonphysical. Mind you, just because something is nonphysical doesn't imply it's independent of the physical or that it doesn't experience its own kind of death!
It is our common reality: we know of the world through our senses.
We can ascertain that a given physical object exists by using our senses (and instruments).
In fact, the very definition of 'physical' in regular English is 'empirical, confirmed by the senses', as opposed to 'imagined, invented by the mind'.
Do you understand the point now? It is simply a matter of definition.
You of course define 'physical' in a different manner, which appears to include ideas. If ideas are considered physical, or material, then I have no problem with such a 'weak materialism'. It solves the obvious logical contradiction of 'strong materialism' (=the idea that ideas don't exist).
...
Quoting Olivier5
...
Quoting Olivier5
I don't see the contradiction. If I have 'an idea', is not some part of my brain sensing that? Or are you suggesting that only two or three 'senses' are involved in detection of physical reality? If so, why the limitation?
Do you mean that ideas are empirical because we can hear them in our head?
Not 'hear', but we can detect they're there. How is that different to any other 'sense'?
Are you unsure as to whether or not you have ideas? If the answer is no it follows that you must have some means of detecting them. My money is on the hippocampus.
In my case, I hear my thoughts in my head.
Well, I wouldn't go that far, we've got some very strong theories, but yeah, I don't know everything there is to know about how the brain functions. We don't know everything there is to know about how the eyes, nose or ears function either. The point is that your distinction is illusory, we detect ideas with our senses to no less an extent that we detect objects.
Of course I can. The only question is whether you can understand the proof.
Materialism, in it's most naïve form, stipulates that ideas don't really exist, at least not as fully as material stuff. But materialism is itself an idea. Therefore if materialism is true, materialism does not exist.
Okay, point well taken. Therefore ideas are empirical, and can be considered as physical. They are objects too.
Yeah, that's the idea.
We're talking ideas in someone's, right? It doesn't permit redness to exist objectively as a perfect form outside of brains as an idealist might have it. But yes clearly my ideas exist in some way: I can convey that without any understanding of what they fundamentally are.
In physicalism, there really is no problem to solve as I see it, never has been, never will be. The criteria for what is physical are specific, not wishy-washy enough for the sorts of ambiguity needed to keep dualism alive. But they're also all-encompassing. For us to know about anything, it has to be physical. We can postulate non-physical realms, but by virtue of them being non-physical, we cannot say anything about them.
I think these ideas, like thought having no weight, did make some sense before we understood what we understand about the brain and had built artificial ones (computers) but I don't think they're really mysteries anymore, more akin to dogmas.
Being worth the time is a relationship that's non-symmetric. Sad but true.
That's either very depressed and self deprecating or you meant symmetric?
There's a word missing up there after 'someone's'. Assuming it is the word 'brain', 'mind' or 'head', I agree. I'm not an idealist. More of a synthesis between materialism and idealism. So I draw from idealism what I see as the useful bit: the importance of forms, and from materialism the importance of matter.
No matter without form, no form without matter.
So a form cannot exist without being the form of some matter or another. Assuming ideas are forms, they must be the form of something material. Forms have material substrates, so to speak.
But the interesting thing with forms, is that they can be duplicated, copied, from one material support to another. And that may be why you and I can apparently share ideas.
Yeah, sorry, my bad. C & P, write, edit, (Invisible Fence guy), edit, (Non-Stop Talker neighbor), edit (dinner time), edit, post......I lost track of the original.
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
Ya know what? I’d like to take a survey, of people in general, after a quick perusal of this:
https://web2.ph.utexas.edu/~vadim/Classes/2012f/vertex.pdf
.....followed by a quick perusal of this:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4280
.....with the survey question being, which one of these is the least useless, with respect to a theoretical description of goings-on between the ears of the human rational animal.
What measure of utility would you want to use?
It’s not complicated; each participant answers as he sees fit.
Ah. Well then neither (or both equally useless). The first I didn't understand and so could not possibly make use of even if I thought doing so might be a good idea. The second is just ad hoc guesswork, I see no reason at all why I'd make any use of it. If I wanted guesswork I'd just guess myself.
If I had to pick, I suspect someone like @Kenosha Kid could at the very least explain the relevance of the first. I know neurons are made of such elementary particles and also that their properties are somewhat determined by that make-up. I also know a fair bit about how neurons relate to cognition, so it's not hard to see the link.
How we get from what a long dead German writer reckoned to anything that might actually be the case is not so easy a path to trace... unless Kant was a spectacularly good guesser.
Well...there ya go. Wasn’t that complicated after all, was it. As a legitimate survey participant, you’ve concluded the first is a model for the absolutely useless, the second is a model for guesswork. And by admitting to the possible commission of your own guesswork, you’d tacitly acceded to the second-order usefulness of the one in form if not in content, over the absolute uselessness of the other.
Well done.
Welcome back, by the way. Where ya been the last few weeks?
I think it was soup? I love an idea soup.
Quoting Olivier5
I didn't think you were, I was just annotating the edges of our conversation for clarity :)
I'll concede to the latter, but not the former. You're right, if I had no other route I would just guess and as such Kant's guesses are as good as any (there's a separate question of whether I actually am in such circumstances, but we'll shelve that). But you've made an unwarranted jump from something which is useless to me (on account of my ignorance) to something's being useless sensu lato.
I could resolve the current uselessness of the first option by education. I can do nothing about the limitations of the second.
Quoting Mww
Thanks.
You're describing TPF. I love it too.
Right. So there's one edge which is idealism, aka only forms exist; and another edge which is materialism, aka only matter exists. In between these two extremes lies the not-so-new idea that there's no matter without form and no form without matter.
I won't denigrate vertex corrections in QED as it's not my field but in condensed matter theory, last time I checked, they were pretty damn useless. After the first few orders of approximation, adding more is as liable to make your answer worse than better.
As for QED generally, it wouldn't surprise me if it proved crucial: the brain is an electrochemical system, and QED is a complete and insanely successful theory on electromagnetism and chemistry. But it's a computationally exhaustive method just for small inert systems like ground state atoms: for large dynamic systems such as brains, it's also extremely useless. Maybe when we got dem quantumising puters.
I think Kant's metaphysical exposition of space and time is probably more useful even while being less correct. It leads to questions about the brain that are more targeted. How does the brain order things temporally (which I think we understand quite well, and the answer is "quite badly")? How does it order things spatially (not a clue... I have no idea how imaging happens, it seems like magic to me)? Back to for that stuff.
But anyway, if vertex corrections in QED are really standing in for all of science, and Kant's metaphysical exposition is standing in for all of philosophy, I've got to risk angering members with my scientific bias and say: science, without a doubt, is more *useful*. It's not that philosophy isn't vital or contributive, it's just a lot less nimble, nippy and collaborative than its cocky offspring. Empiricism and falsification make science quick to evolve, while philosophers still debate between Platonic formalism, Cartesian dualism, and more up-to-date holistic approaches. But I don't think Platonists, Cartesians and Kantians would see it that way, since science isn't providing the kinds of understanding that philosophy is about. It might be closer to the truth, might be more useful, but it's not very satisfying to be told to shut up and calculate.
It might even be that, because the kinds of calculation required to describe systems scientifically must rely on number-crunching over insight, and advances in computing make this easier, we're already at the point of science becoming, ironically, competent without comprehension. We've been using machine learning and neural nets to make predictive calculations for decades now. So far, thinking hasn't become completely black-boxed... Even adding a vertex correction diagram, while not physical in itself, has a certain kind of insightfulness (relating to how light doesn't really travel at speed c in a straight line). This might not have a big impact on neuroscience directly, but could be important in e.g. condensed matter theory.
It's an interesting question, probably deserving of its own thread.
Oh no, you don’t!!! I know you. No need to over-analyze such a simple mental exercise.
Peruse this, peruse that, judge degree of explanatory content relative to a given condition.
I'm suggesting that stand alone non-physicals do not and can not exist but non-physicals contained by neurons do exist and that is a state that should be recognized.
A lot of frustration debating monism vs. dualism gets cleared up when this relation is acknowledged.
OK, to give you some leash, the answer to the question as posed is probably Kant.
So likewise, if I may -
your second example vs. https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.2044-8295.2010.02010.x
Same question.
Absolutely, but it remains.....crucial for what? It’s quite irrelevant what the math entails, just as it is equally irrelevant what a moldy tome on metaphysics entails, the point being, the average smuck on the street will most likely throw down the math, yet give the book at least a cursory read before throwing it.
Then it merely becomes a matter of....why? For which there is a rather obvious answer.
Cool.
Quoting Isaac
While accommodating the fairness of the request, I deny the expense.
Got something this virgoyankeebabyboomer don’t gotta pay for?
Do you think your ideas have physical attributes? Size, weight, texture, etc.?
But then you have the mind-body problem, which seems insolvable, at this point.
Ah, sorry about that. BPS lets me see everything on account of my charming personality (and possibly my membership) I forgot about the paywall. It was only a review (of the standard undergraduate textbook) - treat it as a hypothetical. Kant or the standard undergraduate textbook on cognitive science. If you had to gamble on which would give you a useful picture of what going on between the ears, where would your money be?
Here's a look inside https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cognitive-Psychology-Students-Michael-Eysenck/dp/1848724160?asin=1848724160&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1
How are you deciding that those things are the properties of physical things without begging the question? If you treat 'physical' as a category of existent things which simply happen to have some set of attributes (size, weight and texture) then sure, some things are physical and some aren't. A trivial conclusion from the definition and of very little consequence other than for philologists. The point being made by idealists is that some things exist which cannot be empirically detected by our senses. As I demonstrated above, no-one is in any doubt that their ideas can be detected, as such they don't undermine physicalism any more than gravity or magnetism do.
That's the theory, yes. They wouldn't be 'planets', 'stars', and 'galaxies' of course - those are human ways of interpreting the sensations we assume those parts of reality produce, but the causes of those sensations would still be there.
We'll solve it one day. In the meantime, I'd rather have a mind-body problem than have no mind or no body.
Idealism doesn't entail you don't have a body. It entails that that body is not made of physical stuff.
I agree. I think it's evidence that they're obviously not physical things. Playing with an idea and playing with a physical object are two very different things.
What is it made of when you dream at night? Ideas, yes.
No, I don't think that follows. You asked me if planets, stars and galaxies would still be there if minds ceased to be. There are clearly lots of physical things produced by minds, all those things would obviously cease to exist if minds ceased to exist.
I agree.
Hallucinations and reality are often indestinguisable rom each other to the person experiencing it. Idealism is the argument that reality is a hallucination. Idealists always say "dream", but hallucination is more accurate, because, as you say, there are obvious differences between the dreaming and waking world.
That is not true for me. I can feel the difference quite well.
Did you mean to say the bolded? Aren't you talking labels here? Is your position then that the sun's existence is dependent on whether minds exist??? And what "physical things" do you think minds produce???
I'm sure you will grant me the existence of people who cannot tell their hallucinations from reality, and this causes them tremendous trouble in life. You are not one of these people, OK.
Not the sun, no. You seem to have this odd default position that either all things are caused by minds or no things are, I can't understand why you want to take such a position. Ideas are made by minds, they wouldn't exist if minds didn't exist. The sun (or the external states which we interpret as 'the sun') are not caused by minds and would continue to exist if minds didn't. I'm really not clear on why this is such an issue, it seems obvious to me. Feet would also cease to exist if there were no animals to have feet, this doesn't make feet oddly non-physical.
The state which we interpret as 'the sun', yes.
So, the sun is mind-independent? You didn't agree with this before, and here you are literally saying the sun is not dependent on any mind. So, the sun is mind-independent, yes?
Where did I not agree with this before?
One question asks if the sun is mind-independent, the other asks if the physical is mind independent. The sun is not all that is physical.
There are many problems in this world. Thankfully most of us can intuitively feel a difference between dreams, or even hallucinations, and reality. There's a sense of matter being there, being hard and heavy.
So your claim then is that there is some physical stuff that is mind-independent (e.g., the sun) and some physical stuff that isn't mind-independent. Can you give me an example of physical stuff that isn't mind-independent?
Yes...ideas.
I agree. Idealism is counter-intuitive, but it doesn't suffer from a similar problem as the mind-body problem because it supposes that something we already know exists (hallucinations that people can't tell from reality) exists on a massive scale. There needs to be evidence for that, of course, but the claim itself is not susceptible to a category error. I think the mind-body problem is evidence that there's a category error going on, and you can't get the mental from the physical.
OK, so we have some attributes for the physical:
It is sometimes mind-independent (e.g., the sun) and sometimes not (e.g., ideas). Would you agree that the physical is sometimes conscious and sometimes not? For example, your brain is conscious and your kidneys aren't, agreed?
Yes.
(though I should add that I actually think a body is conscious, not a brain - but I don't think that was your point)
I think we got pretty far defining the physical. Any further posts would be along the lines of "why is it that brains are conscious and kidneys aren't?" and I'm sure you've heard all that and have an explanation you like.
Indeed.
Though as ever, I'm intrigued by what you think an answer to "why is it that brains are conscious and kidneys aren't?" would be like. For me the answer is "that's just the way things played out". I don't expect anything to have a reason to have turned out some way and not another. Why is it that you want a reason?
We're a curious species. We're usually not content with "that's just how things are". We always want to know why. In my case, I think the idea that mental states = physical states is contradicted by the simple fact that I can have a song playing in my head while there's no music in my skull; I can see green, without part of my brain turning green. I think the idea that mental states are caused by physical states is more appealing, but there's no consensus explanation for how that can happen, and for that to still be a mystery makes me think there's a category error going on there.
I think where the materialist case really bogs down is with computers. Most materialists believe that machines can be conscious. That entails that the pain of stubbing a toe is (or can be reduced to) a bunch of tiny switches turning off and on. That's extremely implausible.
I mentioned it doesn’t matter what the entailment is, that determines why one system would be thrown away before the other. From that, it can be deduced that explanation isn’t the reason. Besides, explanation implies understanding, which is quite obviously not the case in math generally, and quite apparently not the case in metaphysics generally.
It’s something else, underpinning both systems.
True, but not always thereby a sensible question.
Quoting RogueAI
It seems highly implausible that you actually have a song playing in your head. There doesn't seem to be be any source of vibration in there sufficient to make the necessary sounds. Far more likely is that you sometimes have an experience similar to that you have when listening to a song. Since both experiences are mental processes it doesn't seem at all a contradiction.
Quoting RogueAI
How are you judging the plausibility of some aspect of this reality? Have you experienced several other realities and found none of them to be thus arranged? What criteria would a state of affairs have to meet to qualify as 'plausible'?
I know. My position is out there. I think 5% of professional philosophers are idealists (that's from a survey done awhile back). I think idealism is becoming more popular, though. You have people like Max Tegmark saying the universe is made of math, and Christof Koch is a panpsychist. Panpsychism isn't idealism, but it's certainly a step in that direction.
Admittedly, yours gives a much more useful picture than the mathematics which grounds the elementary physical mechanisms. Between speculative cognitive metaphysics and empirical cognitive psychology, however, I will put my gambling profits on the former, for the simple reason that it tells me specifically about myself from within, whereas the latter is being told to me from without.
Most of all, my metaphysical paradigm doesn’t need to juxtaposition disabilities or physical damage in justifications for my normative mental goings-on. I mean.....the very last thing I want to know, is how something that’s broke in my head, explains something that isn’t. I understand clinical diagnosticians find that useful, but if I have a serious enough disability, my metaphysics is useless automatically, whatever the reason for it, which is ok because I won’t have a use for it anyway.
Interesting look inside, nonetheless.
No it doesn't. You've never had a song stuck in your head? Sure you have. People talk about songs playing in their heads all the time. That's one of the problems with the materialist position: it doesn't map on to the way we talk to each other. The materialist has to say, "Yes, we might say "we have a song in our heads", but what we really mean, is neurons xyz are doing abc.". That's a problem for materialism, because when I'm talking about a song being stuck in my head, everyone knows exactly what I mean, and that I'm not talking about my brain.
Dualism has a distinct advantage in that it maps on to our everyday language the best: we talk about our minds and we talk about our bodies and we don't think they're the same thing. I think if you drill down, you run into problems with it, but dualism certainly seems to be the way things are.
It claims to. By what measure do you assess that it actually does.
Quoting Mww
Again, that it doesn't is not evidence that it doesn't need to.
It depends, I suppose, on what it is you want to achieve. If you're just looking for a story that answers "why do I think like that?" then metaphysics is certainly an easier route to find one. It's pretty much off-the-shelf (armchair not provided, pipe optional), but in this case I can't quite see why communication of those ideas would be of any use. You're giving a good account of why Kant would write CPR, why would anyone read CPR? Having no predictive values (which is what all those experiments with the 'broken' minds do for us) it doesn't seem to have any measure of quality to make it worth the time, in the context of the objective we're talking about here.
Either one of two things is the case - the human mind is a set of functions in matter which are therefore constrained by the properties of that matter (in which case proper study of that matter is indispensable to an understanding of those constraints), or it is not thus constrained (in which case no assessment of it;s function carries any more weight than any other, we might as well make it up one minute to the next).
The task, it seems, is to model the causes of our thoughts. Why does it seem more compelling to believe 2+2=4 than it does to believe 2+2=5? Why can't I believe both X and ~X at the same time? Why do I like this film and not that one? etc. What attracts us to one model over another is, I suppose, just another one of those questions.
Well, this conversation has taken an uncomfortable turn for the pathological. Are you saying that you can't tell the difference (even colloquially) between the expressions "there's a song playing in that room over there" and "I've got this song playing in my head"? I can quite reliably assure you it's not a matter of materialists imposing an unwarranted distinction between the two, literally every sane person is quite well aware that "I've a song playing in my head" doesn't actually refer to the same set of happenings as "there's a song playing in that room".
I suspect you're just building an interesting 'air castle' (as above), so this is only a light concern, but one of the key symptoms of schizophrenia is the inability to distinguish between internal and external sources of sensory perceptions. If you really can't tell the difference between a song playing in the next room and a song playing in your head (in qualitative terms, not just spatial) then I strongly suggest you see a psychiatric specialist. Most people can distinguish the mental qualities of two events with some clarity.
This is a much clearer explanation than what I gave. :up:
The "mind-body problem" is a misnomer. Call it an enigma instead, or a mystery, or simply a question. There are many unresolved questions, like the origin of the universe, what existed before the big bang, how did life happen? These are accurately called questions, not problems. Nobody calls abiogenesis a "problem", for good reasons.
Questions are good things. They can be contemplated and marvelled at forever. Problems are problematic, there's something wrong with them; they need to be solved, the sooner the better.
Or they should be avoided, which is what you seem to be saying: "let's avoid a philosophy where this problem would arise". Should we also avoid any philosophy where the "abiogenesis problem" would arise?
Defining the mind-body relationship as a "problem" tends to get people anxiously banging their head on the wall about it, or avoiding it, when they could instead enjoy the beauty of the question.
You can see it happen here 24/7. The same old tired arguments are being made over and over again on this subject, day after day, month after month, year after year. They think they are arguing but all they do is bang heads.
True. But there's also a kind of category error with idealism. Let's go with the idea that there is no physical world, and take the example of subjective idealism, although there's a variant of the below for other kinds.
How I will explain my experience of the sun coming up every morning, how the clouds gather and move, how I experience having the same body every day (more or less), how the floor holds that body up, how I experience the taste of kimchi, etc., is unknown, but I can describe it to myself or other humans (be they minds or p-zombie hallucinations). Noting my experiences, mentally acting to reproduce those experiences, discussing those experiences with said phantoms, certain rules as about my experiences must become clear. For instance, I can never see the sun rise in the direction my compass calls north (irrespective of whether the sun rises in the same direction every morning or whether my compass consistently points north), nor do I experience others saying they have seen such a thing. My subjective experience is consistent with regularity and consensus.
I might conclude that these mysterious rules about what my mind experiences are the most interesting thing about my existence, perhaps dedicate my existence to their study. The rules seem to be mathematical, but there's relationships between kinds of experience that are not: how fast a bowling hits the ground in my experience 'bowling ball hits ground' depends on its initial height and its mass, and there's no obvious reason to say the initial height is 2 and not 1 or 1000, or that the mass is 1 and not 2 or 200. To use the maths to describe the regularity of the content of my experience, I must have an additional set of rules about how I measure distance between things in my experience, masses of things, velocities of things, etc.
Let's call that Xism: the idea that my ideal experiences play out according to rules (irrespective of how those experiences are generated, e.g. I might be unwittingly imposing those rules) and those rules rely on measures of contents of experience. Note, I've not said anything that contradicts the notion of idealism: I am only talking about the contents of experience that must be true, not the causes of them.
Thing is, this science of idealism we've just described --Xism -- is physicalism. Experience has forced us to ensure that everything we can say about this ideal world is constrained to match what physicalists say about the physical world, since physics is an empirical method, i.e. it's concerned with explaining experience, and the experience of an ideal world must be the same experience, otherwise it's counter-factual.
So idealism commits a worse category error: it holds that coming up with a different name for something is the same as coming up with a new thing. But a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Cognitive prejudice. Given a set of theoretical conditions, assessing the degree of satisfaction with them. Now, one might be inclined to say, yeah right, in that case you’re no more than being led by the nose, which usually is the case, considering the lack of empirical warrant, unless the theoretical conditions are so rigid, so complete, encompassing all readily apparent circumstances......and never once contradicting Mother Nature Herself......granting to it due authority causes no harm. In short, it’s a comfortable rendering of something for which no certain knowledge yet repeals.
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Quoting Isaac
My metaphysics is an exposition on the possibility of a priori knowledge on one hand, and an exposition on the grounds for moral determinations on the other. That being given, I have no wish to know what doesn’t work, but only that which does, and why such should be the case. Thus it is, that whatever juxtaposition does arise, merely exemplifies the consequences under which these expositions themselves are somehow defective, and not what happens when the internal physicality responsible for their manifestation, somehow are.
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Quoting Isaac
Exactly right. I am Everydayman. Makes no difference whether true or not, there seems to be a little tiny world contained in my head, and wherever it directs, I go. As do you, and even while looking to arrive at the same answer by a different story, you arrive in the exact same way as I, in whichever way that actually is.
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Quoting Isaac
My metaphysics doesn’t do that. My thoughts are given, it makes no difference what causes them. That I think is a condition of my biology, and to seek its causes, is to necessarily use the very thing already caused. I can never ever think to a cause of thinking. Better to examine what a thought is, what a thought contains, where it fits in some overall system, rather than its causality.
Modeling the cause of thought implies making better humans.
Modeling the content of thought implies making a human better.
So? What’s the issue with this?
Quoting Mww
Why not? You just implied in the above quote that you can.
Quoting Mww
Agreed that’s more practical. But you can do both no?
No, I'm saying you're wrong: it's not implausible to have a song in your head. It happens all the time.
Pretty much. But things change. The paradigm is shifting. Consciousness has become a big problem in academia. It's not OK to just sweep it under the rug anymore.
Infinite regress.
No, because the idealist says that the cause of your experiences is a mind(s). Everything you experience is a projection of either a coordinated set of minds or a god-head mind, like in Berkeley's idealism. Modern idealists like Bernardo Kastrup talk about a "cosmic mind". In any case, no physicalist would agree that reality is the product of a cosmic mind's thinking.
But you do bring up a point: science works equally well under idealism as it does under physicalism. Positing the existence of some mind-independent non-conscious stuff doesn't solve any problems.
Because, with abiogenesis, we already have a framework for an explanation: life started when chemicals xyz, did abc in environment efg. We're just trying to figure out exactly the environment, steps and chemicals. What's the framework for the explanation "how does consciousness arise from matter?" What does the answer to that even look like? Consciousness is an illusion? Consciousness IS brain activity? Consciousness is information integration? Unlike with abiogenesis, the explanation for consciousness at this point is pure guess work. I think it's a unique problem. You think "give it time". Maybe. But we should at least have the broad outlines of an explanation by now. The fact we don't is good evidence there's something deeper to the mystery.
Right and he’s saying that to “have a song in your head” has a different meaning to “hearing a song from the other room”. In the one case there are are air vibrations hitting your eardrums causing the certain brain state. In the other case there are no air vibrations, yet there is a similar brain state (similar in the sense that you still feel like you hear a song). So there is no contradiction here.
Having a song in your head and actually hearing a song from the other room are different yet similar experiences corresponding to different yet similar brain states. What’s the issue with this?
It solves countless problems. Such as:
1- Not being able to dismiss solipsism, or a world where it’s just you and the mind of God.
2- Not being able to tell if anyone else has a mind (kind of same as above but applies individually)
3- Not being able to tell if someone is suffering or not (since their behavior is divorced from what their mind is thinking)
And the list goes on but those are all problems with dualism not idealism per se. I’m trying to understand idealism so I’ll ask you the same question I asked wayfarer.
Quoting RogueAI
What are minds themselves in an idealist system? Are they also projections of a mind? Or are they somehow independent and fundamental? If they are the former, whose mind? God’s? Then in whose mind is God a projection? If he’s not a projection in another’s mind, what is he? If the latter, how do they seem to increase whenever a kid is born?
Sorry for all the questions I just don’t get y’all. And I’ve been trying to.
How, do you mind explaining? I don’t see how you end up with infinite regress.
It always has been, I think. Freud and Lacan were all the craze when I was a teen.
We are just guessing about abiogenesis too. Some guys think they have the begining of a usable framework. Maybe they do, maybe they don't.
My point is that the mind-body relationship is not a problem to be avoided, it's an interesting area of research. So just because this question comes up in a dualist framework is no reason to abandon a dualist framework. It's just one of the interesting questions that crop up when one accepts the existence of bodies and minds. It's not a problem.
That I must use thinking, in order to think to that which causes my thinking, is the epitome of infinite regress. The cause of my thought can only be a thought, which is caused by an antecedent thought....never to arrive at the unconditioned cause of any thought.
Pretty straightforward, I should think.
There is no issue with what you're talking about. This is what I was responding to:
Quoting Isaac
No, it's not implausible to actually have a song playing in your head. I have a song playing in my head right now. Do you think it's implausible? Do you think I'm lying or mistaken?
These are questions that need answers, but they're not indicative of a category error, which is what you were claiming before. In idealism, there's only one ontological category: mental stuff. In dualism, there are two categories: mental stuff and physical stuff, and the dualist claims that one comes from the other. That would be fine if there was an explanation for it all, but in the absence of any explanation (and the problem has been around a long time), I think there's a prima facie case for a category error.
Not true. Idk where you get this. You must have had a first thought no? You haven’t been thinking forever. What caused your first thought after being born? It wasn’t another thought. By definition. Or even simpler, what causes your first thought after waking up? Do you continue your line of thinking from before you went to sleep? I would be impressed if that’s the case! This also applies to your thoughts about what causes thoughts. Those also started somewhere, and weren’t caused by a thought.
Quoting Mww
So, if I think of a cause of something, what I just thought of is not an “unconditioned cause” because I thought about it?
How do you ever get to the “unconditioned cause” of anything then, if even thinking makes it “conditioned”?
I’m not sure I’m following.
Quoting Mww
No it isn’t as I just explained above. I know some programming and it’s pretty common practice to have an object take itself as a member. So the “human” class would declare something like “friend” variable which is of type human. You would have to have a human in order to have a human friend. But no weird infinite regresses occur. Usually you end up with cycles or complicated networks. Or some people just not having friends.
The cause is irrelevant. We've simply moved from using the word 'physical' to describe the rules that appear to govern our experiences -- irrespective of their causes -- to using the word 'ideal'. It's just exchanging dummy tokens, nothing of physicalist is really lost except terminology.
Quoting RogueAI
Question not to me but, yes, mistaken. Very mistaken. In the same way there's no red in your head when you think of the colour red. You have representations of a song, but no actual music is playing.
Yes, if by “song playing in your head” you mean that there are air vibrations that produce a certain sound literally emanating or passing through your head. But this is what you must mean in order to make your point. Otherwise your points about “seeing green without a green brain” or “hearing a song in your head without a source” wouldn’t actually be a challenge for materialism in any way as explained above.
Quoting RogueAI
I have not once used the phrase “category error”. You’ll need to remind me if I did because last time we talked was around a week ago wasn’t it?
Quoting RogueAI
Uhhhh no? Dualism is dual precisely because neither can be reduced to the other. If you propose 2 kinds of stuff but really one kind just comes from the other kind, you’re a monist who believes the other kind is all that exists. No materialist denies the existence of minds and consciousness. What they deny is that they’re different stuff. Yet we don’t call materialists dualists do we?
Quoting RogueAI
I’m not sure I understand this but it doesn’t seem to answer the question.
So can you answer the question?
Quoting khaled
You win.
Have you ever had a song stuck in your head?
I'm talking about a song playing in my head. It has nothing to do with air vibrations, and of course you know that because in your life I'm sure people have told you they have songs stuck in their heads and you never said to them "but how can that be??? There are no air vibrations in your skull!", so I give up. If you are incapable of acknowledging the trivial fact that people have songs in their heads, what more can I say? The absurdity of your position has been laid bare.
I can go one better: I have even written an entire song, lyrics, chords, bassline and all, in the space of a cigarette break without making a peep. But there was still no music playing in my head, no sounds, just mental representations of sounds.
But you didn't answer my question: have you ever had a song stuck in your head?
You genuinely couldn't get the answer from the above? Seriously?
Fine. Define 'song'.
Lame.
Isaac above tried to be more specific on this earlier to make sure you're not conflating two different things. You seemed to be stubbornly refusing to be specific then and you're clearly not improving on this point. My conclusion is that you're actively trying to conflate things and avoiding anything that will resolve your intented ambiguity, this time with stupid insults. Yeah, very lame.
Come back if you fancy a grown-up chat on this topic, it is an interesting one.
Then the triviality of your counter argument is laid bare.
Quoting RogueAI
If it has nothing to do with air vibrations then why did you expect a song playing in your head to imply music in your skill? So then the idea that mental states = physical states is not contradicted by this simple fact is it?
Quoting RogueAI
Oh no it’s very easy to acknowledge when people are using colloquial expressions. It’s your “counter argument” that relies on taking the literal meaning to make sense as I just explained above. It’s not that people are being obtuse or that materialism can’t account for songs playing in your head, it’s that your counter argument only begins to make sense when the literal meaning is taken, that’s why people take the literal meaning in response to you.
Again, if songs playing in your head has nothing to do with air vibrations (which we can agree it doesn’t) then there is no reason that having a song playing in your head should require music in your skull. So your “simple fact” presents no difficulty to materialism. There is no contradiction in it.
Or you can take the literal meaning in which case: no you don’t have songs playing in your head unless someone installed a boom box there. Now the argument is wrong on empirical grounds.
Whichever meaning you take the counter argument is bad.
Now, regardless of the absurdity or non absurdity of my position, can you please answer the question?
Quoting khaled
I’m trying to understand your position (which I assume is idealism though you haven’t explicitly committed to anything far as I can see)
Good call. I used to tell my students that far from being the detached, dispassionate scientists we might expect of our biologist or physicist cousins, if you don't come to psychology with a very strong preference for one particular model/approach then there's probably something wrong with you.
The trick is to be resolute enough to discard it when it's clearly overwhelmed by a weight of opposing evidence, but where not - fill your boots. Psychology simply cannot progress like the hard sciences can and it's pissing into the wind to try and pretend it can.
Trouble is, much of Kant's thinking on human thought processes falls into this key category of theory, but I've no doubt it's possible to salvage it with a few 're-interpretations', it usually is. there's not many theories that are beyond the human capacity for creative elbowing into the space left by empirical observation.
Quoting Mww
I don't buy this. Kant is, by all accounts, a difficult text to understand, and you seem to be something of a scholar. there's nothing 'everyman' about it, it's a passion for a particular viewpoint and (if judged by the amount of effort put into pursuing it) quite a strong one. Nowt wrong with that (as my wife would say), but it can't also be passed off as a kind of path of least resistance. I've read CPR. It's a path of massive resistance, we're talking boulder, river-crossings and pits (probably bottomless ones).
Quoting Mww
As @khaled has raised above, we're not talking about thinking to a cause of thinking, we're talking about thinking to a cause of some given thought. One can use a torch to find another torch.
Quoting Mww
Woah - left-field, where did this spring from?
Right. Then as @khaled and @Kenosha Kid have already laid out, there's no contradiction to be examined. You (in common with the vast majority of the population) can tell the difference between the experience of having 'a song stuck in your head' and that of having a song playing through earphones. Thus empirically, to our senses, they appear to be two different experiences, so we presume have two different causes.
Here we have our first piece of empirical evidence for an external world. Some experiences seem to have this 'internal' label attached to them and I can stop them (or at least interfere with them) to a degree. Other experiences have this 'external' label an no matter what I do, I can't seem to make them something other than they are at first blush. I can imagine the song in my head going up an octave, and experience that, I can't make the one coming in through my earphones go up an octave no matter how hard I try, it stays resolutely at the pitch it always has been.
Of course the line between these two states is not a clear cut as that - we construct all of our perceptions and expectation can bring about all sorts of changes to what we see and hear. But that's something psychologists, and neuroscientists have found out recently, not the default position we're born with. In fact, telling people the extent to which we construct our reality is usually a challenge met with strong resistance.
So we have excellent cause to believe there's an external cause for our perceptions and an internal cause for our imagination and memory. Our perceptions are difficult to alter, seem to be highly homogenous among other humans, are consistent through time and are generally confirmed by machines and predictive algorithms. Our imagination and memory, on the other hand, seem very easily altered (I seem to be able to choose what appears in my 'mind's eye'), vary wildly between humans, change through time and are currently inaccessible to machines let alone predictable.
Nothing conclusive, but given it's the default position anyway (certainly since toddlerhood, which is as far back as we can really test these things), there seems no good reason not to assume a theory that these two radically different types of experience have two equally radically different causes.
What makes you think this?
Edit - Catching up, I somehow missed the section where @khaled already dealt with this. Feel free to ignore this.
Are you arguing for dualism now?
I don't think so. That two different experiences have two different causes doesn't seem to me to imply that one cause must be non-physical and the other physical. There could be any number of other differences. The one I had in mind here, for example, is that one (proximately) originated from inside our heads and the other from outside.
Information is the cause of your thought.
In other words, a (useful and indeed basic) distinction between an actual perception and an imagined perception. Between the real stuff and its virtual mimicry.
Yep. Spot on.
(Note: I am using this terminology of mental and non-mental because the classic distinction of physical vs mental has been made unusable once you and I recognized that mental events must be physical in some manner or another)
Of course, this distinction between things "in our head" and things "outside our head" is culturally near-universal and I believe absolutely fundamental to art, justice, politics and zillions other things we humans do. Still, some other people refuse to envisage this distinction, or try and deny its importance.
The next step is to realize that perceptions are not just different, or even "originating from" a non-mental event in a mechanical manner. Perceptions represent non-mental events, they interpret them in a symbolic manner. Our mental world is (among other things) modeling reality "out there".
In other words, there is an epistemic gap between the event perceived and the corresponding perception events.
A thought bwahahaha
Another but similar factor is that recalling a snatch of a tune doesn't seem much like hearing it for the first time. It's less difficult to differentiate if the components of the tune are simple: a simple beat, easy-to-remember lyrics, a simple, catchy melody... You don't have to study In Da Club to convince yourself you can perfectly reproduce the first 45 seconds in your head. However, after that the voice is too rhythmically complex, the lyrics too rapid to be recalled, and even some of the pads surprise you after your tenth listen. You have to _learn_ to play even a simple song in your head.
Something more harmonically complex requires great skill. When I think of a song, I generally get the groove, the bassline, the lyrics and the melody right, probably the vocal harmony or some of it, the basics of the beat (kick, snare, toms). But I cannot "play" the most recognisable chord in pop history: the opening chord to Hard Day's Night. I could probably learn to do so, but it'd take work. And that's a significant difference between hearing a song and thinking it: I don't have to learn Hard Day's Night to hear it.
You'd be able to correct me and fill in a lot of the gaps, but I expect I'm not far off in thinking that a song "playing" in your head isn't just a representation of the real thing (which is true of hearing it for the first time), but an approximation (recall is imperfect) to a representation (memory) of an approximation (memorisation is imperfect) of a representation (what I heard) of a real thing (what was played).
Yep, I think we all agree there.
Quoting Olivier5
I agree.
Quoting Olivier5
Do they? I've not encountered such an approach. What would it look like, to say that experiences originating from inside one's head were of no qualitative difference to those experiences seeming to originate from outside it? As I mentioned earlier, there are forms of Schizophrenia where this is a problem, but I don't know many suffers writing philosophical treatise on the matter. Generally, I've found near universal agreement that the two kinds of experience have a distinguishable and meaningful difference.
Quoting Olivier5
Absolutely. A matter I've written about pretty extensively in my posts before so won't go into again here in the general sense. Broadly speaking, the idea of active inference of external hidden states underlies pretty much my entire approach to understanding cognition.
Ha! I should have worked that out shouldn't I?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Spot on. I can't remember the paper, but one interesting aspect of recall (in addition to the examples you've given) is that the timing is often compressed. So 'recalling' a three minute song will take less than three minutes of brain time, even though subjects report having gone through the whole song in time and can sing it out loud in good time. It's like compression in computer files. It's just more efficient to give you the main points and then a bit of 'meta-data' making you feel like it lasted three minutes than it is to actually store three minute's worth of data - like your brain just goes "then the song goes dilddledede for a bit" instead of actually creating the right signals in the auditory cortex.
Same's true of speeches and poems apparently, you think you're 'mentally pronouncing' every word as spoken, but the time it takes betrays that fact that you actually skipped quite a lot (or sped it all up, but skipped is the preferred theory, it makes more sense with semantic processing mechanisms)
I'm not quite sure because he was so vague about it, but it seemed to me that bongo-fury was in the habit of denying everything mental. Just one example.
Quoting Isaac
Reminds me of Pattee's epistemic cut and how this is the basis for the subject-object distinction.
https://homes.luddy.indiana.edu/rocha/publications/pattee/pattee.html
Simple: I don’t know the cause of my thought. That which cannot be known, can still be thought, hence, the cause of my thought can only be a thought, or, it is nothing. Hence....infinite regress, if the former, and from either, no answer is at all possible.
I know what a thought is. As a scientist, a thought euphemistically represents the relation of a stimulus to a reaction by means of an electrochemical medium. As a metaphysician, given a specific theory, a thought is the relation of an object to its cognition by means of a speculative rational system. To say I know the relation between a cognition and an object, which may or not be true, does not give me warrant for claim to know the cause by which the relation is brought about. All I can say is....that’s how this particular rational system works. I know I start with this (something), I know I end up with that (“basketball”), but whatever happens in between, is part of the system itself, and can never be examined except by the very system of which it is a part.
It is catastrophically erroneous to say the object in the relation is its cause, for the object is necessarily simultaneous with the thought of it***, which eliminates the time absolutely necessary for the principle of cause and effect. There is no such thing as an empty thought, every thought is about something, by which the notion of simultaneity (Kant calls it spontaneity) finds its support. It follows as a matter of course, that given the absence of the time necessary for cause/effect, my thoughts are not caused by nor an effect of, the relation it represents.
Nahhhhh.....cognition is the effect, object is the cause. My thought merely unites one to the other, and it is called......wait for iiittttttt......understanding. More precisely, understanding is the uniting, judgement is the united. Theoretically.
*** not to be confused with the perception of it, which is always antecedent to the thought.
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Quoting Isaac
Modeling the physical cause of thought can possibly lead to manipulation of its electrochemical constituents. Behavior modification is a real thing, right? More likely behavior modification manifests as beneficial to humanity in general, I would hope. Hence....better humans.
Me, modeling the content of my thoughts, meaning “this is what I think about that”, and providing I wish to benefit myself by rearranging what I think about that....hence making me a better human.
Where it springs from....damned if I know. Sounded profound at the time. Ego or superfluous bullshit....take your pick.
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Quoting Isaac
I much favor responding to proper intellectual inquiry, rather than pathological ineptitude.
Not from this armchair. Information is what the thought is about, not the cause of it.
Information, if anything, is the affect on the brain from perception, which we call sensation.
Before Pop drowns you under some wall of text about 'enformation', allow me to give the short version:
Like any animal, you are capable of acquiring and analyzing information through senses only because such a process is useful for your survival. So the reason you have a mind is that this mind can acquire and work on usable information to make your life easier, longer, more successful, etc.
Ergo, if there was no information in this world, or if it was inaccessible, or if it was useless for survival, you would simply have no need for thinking, and as per Darwin you would therefore not think.
I’m good with that version.
But still, there are other uses for thinking than survival alone, aren’t there, at least nowadays, when survival isn’t as big a deal as it used to be.
Note that survival is the most basic but not the only biological goal that a mind serves. The highest goal is still successful reproduction, which for our species (as well as for most bird and mammal species to a lesser degree) entails not just biology but also cultural elements: songs, seduction, dances, parental care and protection of off-springs, transmission of knowledge to the off-springs, etc.
Yeah, I have some sympathy with that view, although there are some aspects I'm not so sure on...another thread though maybe.
Quoting Mww
So when I see a mark on my kitchen floor and I don't know the cause of it, it must be either uncaused or caused by a thought? ...seems iffy to me.
Quoting Mww
Are not 'start' and 'end up with' nodes in the system? If had a flow diagram of your though process, box 1 would say [whatever the something is], box 9 would say [basketball] and there'd be whole load of boxes in between. You're saying that you know you start at 1 and end up at 9, but you can't examine the boxes inbetween using the system itself. But how can you know that without having at least taken a glance at the diagram - you must have 'examined' the system to some extent to even be able to report as much as you have.
"It has a box 1 and a box 9. Box one contains the initial thought and box nine the final one, but I don't know what goes on in between"
Is that not a description of the system despite being a partial one? What did you use to arrive at it?
Quoting Mww
Agreed. The sensation is the cause. The action of light/sound etc on the object is the modelled cause of the sensation. At no point should we say 'the object' is the cause. The object is a model itself, not the cause it attempts to be a model of.
Quoting Mww
I see, makes sense now.
Still all good, but having to do with anthropology and sociology and such. Just because I’m trapped in some relative influences of them, doesn’t mandate a personal interest.
Sure, you could try and become a hermit or a monk, or just throw yourself under the bus if survival is of absolutely no interest to you.
Quoting Isaac
I found it a very powerful formulation, and I think it works for me. Life is fundamentally transcendental in that sense.
I get where Mww is coming from. The diagram is not in the system, it's an outside view. A system with an input and output can't have as its output a report on the system. If there's a bit of the system that measures the system, what is measuring it, etc. Never call the logger inside the logger ;)
However, nothing wrong with a system examining the inner workings of a sample of almost identical systems.
Quoting Isaac
Functionalism in a nutshell. Have the system report the map input :|--> output for all possible inputs. The resultant map is functionally identical to the system, but differently composed (unless you were unfortunate enough to do this on a map). Have the last node cache the results for good measure and boom, you have a system that knows so well what it does, even if it has no clue how it does it, it doesn't have to do it anymore. \o/
EXCEPT by using the system itself. Also, as you must be aware, examining the system, reporting on it, post hoc, is not the use of the system for its intended purpose. When thinking about something, in the common course of cognitive events, to ask myself how it is I’m thinking it, isn’t in that common course. I may inquire afterwards, in which case I would retrospect using the very same system by which the original thought occurred. Check out how a car drives, whether it drives properly or there’s something wrong with it, by driving it, right? Check out the fit of a shoe......ehhhh, you get the picture.
In addition, part of the system is not in our awareness. Just as in the physical nature of brain mechanics, there is a gap between the sensing of a thing and the apprehension of it, that part in which the perception is transformed into material for the system. Much like we are not conscious of the transfer along nerves of the output of sensation and the input to the brain. Metaphysically speaking, the output of sensation into the nerve endings is phenomena, the transfer along nerves is imagination, the input to the brain is apperception. You know.....case you were wondering.
Quoting Isaac
Technically, no, they are not. The first box is the instantiation of it, the last is the culmination. Empirically, the first is perception, the last is experience. Rationally, the first is thought, the last is reason.
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Quoting Isaac
Description, yes, but not necessarily knowledge. Metaphysics describing the human cognitive system is a logical interpretation only. Say, experience is this, but only if that and that and that, are consistent with the possibility. But we do not know if the conditions speculated, are the conditions in fact. But that's ok, because science doesn’t know either. Hence.....the inescapable dualism.
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Quoting Isaac
This is exactly right, and oh so Kantian, for it is the purpose of his entire tripartite treatise, to show the objects we perceive are given their modeling by us. The only way it could be otherwise, is to deny the representational nature of the human system. Science will never be able to do that, because the very laws which promise the certainty of its paradigm, automatically prevent its denial, re: conservation of energy. Thing is, in the physical system, the energy is the same throughout and compensation for energy loss in the transfer from one medium to the other occurs downstream, but in the metaphysical system, where the energy of sensation is completely lost, everything downstream is prevented from being a direct correspondence to the object perceived. This is how we are allowed to claim we don’t know what a thing is, immediately upon the sensing of it. It merely constructs as an internal representation, in accordance with the affect the energy of the perception, has. And that which is constructed, is a phenomenon. The object becomes a model.
Philosophy.....ain’t it grand????
That’s not at all what I’m saying. I have no wish to be attacked by a bus, anymore than my ancestors wished to be attacked by a grizzly. Considering the relative possibilities of each, I’d say my survival is less the problem than his.
Exceptions to a rule say nothing whatsoever about the rule.
Quoting Pop
That'd be why sense-deprivation is a mode of torture.
Ahhh....another closet Kantian. YEA!!!!! C’mon, admit it. Release yourself to the Force, padawan!!!
“...For the manifold representations (recall, memory, what I heard) which are given in an intuition (what was played) would not all of them be my representations, if they did not all belong to one consciousness, that is, as my representations (...), they must conform to the condition under which alone they can exist together in a common consciousness, because otherwise they would not all without exception belong to me (be in my head)....”
Hey, I already said nice-ish things about Kant.
HA!! Boy-howdy. I can’t even imagine total sense deprivation. I’m not even sure such a thing is possible at least while being conscious.
Noticed, and for which he owes you a cocktail of your choice.
Well, I Kant say fairer than that, Maine's an extra dry vodka martini with a twist
With Hangar One, of course. Shaken, not stirred.
Tangueray for me, while you’re at it. Preferably Rangpur.
Quoting Olivier5
Information is the only thing that fits in mind, so it is the only thing that can cause a thought ( The deeper question though is what causes the information to integrate?).
"What is information", really needs its own thread, as it is probably the most valuable piece of knowledge a philosopher can posses - it being central to all understanding - how consciousness works by integrating information. A bit much to plonk here right now.
Instead, perhaps you might understand that we interact with the world through the information we have of it. We cannot interact with something we have no information of ( a nothing ). The information of the outside world reaches us via frequencies and vibrations ( sight and sound ), discrete molecules ( smell and taste ), and force fields ( matter ). This information must be interpreted.
Hopefully this provides a sense of how radically transformative the interpretation is. In the external world there are no colours or sound, there are frequencies and vibrations. The mind is working with "raw information" in the form of frequency and vibration and translating it to anthropocentric ( socially understood ) symbols of colour and sound. This energetic and vibratory information of the outside world is constantly acting upon us. We are constantly swamped by it ( information ) . We must interpret it, in order to navigate it , and self organize.
Fair warning - I can't quite make sense of what either of you are saying here so this post is in part a fishing exercise to clarify and may well end up more clearing up things you don't mean than responding to the thing you do mean.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
An outside view viewed by whom? Mww seemed to be talking about his own thought processes in both cases, so taking an 'outside' view of them would seem to be impossible - unless one relied on the view of third parties, but this seems no less available to cognitive science so that wouldn't amount to a distinction.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Indeed, but this seems to apply only to the totality of the system, which I didn't think was ever in question. If a system is made of subsystem A and subsystem A* (responsible for examining the workings of subsystem A) then 'the system' is examining itself. The fact that it's not examining the totality of itself doesn't remove from the fact that it is examining itself.
So, insofar as the discussion was about the advantages of a metaphysical vs a cognitive science approach, neither seem to be making the claim to have examined the totality of the system and so inability to do so doesn't seem relevant to the matter of each one's utility.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
A separate point here, but perhaps one to get into when I've fully understood your objections - here's a really important feature of neurology called redundancy - you may have come across it - but it undermines the idea that there's specifically a neural circuit for this or that job, rather there are usually several. If what we're talking about is a simple inability of one subsystem to examine itself, then we've surmounted that objection already as there would almost certainly not be one subsystem doing the job of system-wide examination. There are already carbon copies of such systems available to their clones for examination.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Again, in the context of an examination of the two approaches (metaphysics/cognitive science) this seems to be simply a de facto constraint on both. Any description we give will constitute a description not the thing it's describing.
Quoting Mww
Not sure how this relates to the difference between cognitive science and metaphysics. Both are post hoc. In fact cognitive science has the slight edge here in that third parties can contribute some data here without their examination forming a part of the process (and so changing it). I'm not seeing how a metaphysical approach solves this problem.
Quoting Mww
But we are conscious of the transfer along nerves of the output of sensation and the input to the brain, at least I am. I've seen it with my own eyes in both fMRI and EEG. I'm not conscious of it at the time, but I've no reason at all to believe that all the times I'm not in a machine capable of detecting such things my body works differently to the times when is is, that would be unreasonable skepticism.
Quoting Mww
This seems to be making an arbitrary distinction. 'The System' in the context of our discussion is the mind and it's contents. If you are aware of the instantiation and you are aware of the culmination, then by definition both must be part of 'The System' because you have no other means by which you can be aware of either than your mind. You could rely on third party reports of either, but then with cognitive science we can rely on third party reports of the intervening activity too.
___
As I said, I'm not yet convinced I've understood the objection, so take the above as tentative.
Yes, this is fine and, I think, more or less what the brain is doing anyway, right? I was just saying I got what Mww was talking about. And it is pertinent. For instance, System A* can report on at least some of System A but not itself, which seems to describe the mystery of the mind quite nicely. Pretty much everything we can point at is present and correct for animals with much smaller forebrains and likely not what we'd think of as conscious. We're aware that something more is going on with us but it's very difficult to put a finger on, hence the evasive vagaries of the language used ("what it is like" etc.).
Another possibility: you could have say a ring of subsystems each examining the system on the left. Every subsystem will be examined, but none has a picture of the whole, nor can you get any information out of it without introducing another subsystem which isn't being examined.
Anyway, I think what Mww is saying is that the brain can't report on its entire state, which is true. Bits of the brain can examine other bits, but the whole is made up of blind spots as much as insight.
Quoting Isaac
No objections dude, just weighing in. Didn't mean to confuse matters more.
Yeah, I certainly see the issue. I don't subscribe to the difficulty myself though. I think something as simple as time passing is actually a far more complicated notion to get one's head round, yet the story we tell ourselves to manage it is simply accepted.
For me consciousness is simply an internal collation mechanism, all the justifications (reasoning, logic...), intentions, desires are just the stories we tell to bring a modicum of unity to what is otherwise a disconnected set of stimuli-response mechanisms. I don't doubt for a minute that most organisms complex enough to benefit from some collation have it.
What I don't wholy understand is why we have so much trouble reflecting on it.
Going back to time. As I understand it, my everyday concept of time passing would fall to pieces under any serious scrutiny, but we don't have so many interminable debates about how that is. I have a story about time which helps me muddle through, it's not terribly much like time really is, but then I wouldn't expect it to be, time's really super complicated and it'd be a nightmare to go about life with that in mind all the time.
Consciousness seems the same to me. It's extremely complex and nebulous, but there's nothing at all mysterious about it's being that way, it's exactly how I'd expect it to be. We have a lay understanding of it instead which suffices most of the time.
The philosophical 'puzzle' only arises when we expect that lay story to relate in some intrinsic way to what we actually find out in neuroscience and cognitive science. I mean, why would it, it's just a story.
Anyways... I realise now I've rambled way off topic with all that, but I'm not deleting it all now, you can have it.
More on topic this time.
What would be the case if part of the information each step received was the fact that it's neighbour had been studied by the step to it's left and will be studied by the step to it's right. That doesn't defy any self-study because this still all counts as information about the previous step. If also it were to learn that the previous step learnt this about the step before that... Then let's say one of the algorithms in a step was to make a Bayesian inference about where its data came from and went to... Would it not derive the exact system you described despite being a part of that system?
You: What makes you think this?
Me: Simple: I don’t know the cause of my thought. I know I start with this (something), I know I end up with that (“basketball”), but whatever happens in between, is part of the system itself, and can never be examined except by the very system of which it is a part.
You: You're saying that you know you start at 1 and end up at 9, but you can't examine the boxes inbetween using the system itself. But how can you know that without having at least taken a glance at the diagram - you must have 'examined' the system to some extent to even be able to report as much as you have.
Me: EXCEPT by using the system itself. Examining the system, reporting on it, post hoc, is not the use of the system for its intended purpose.
——————
Quoting Isaac
It doesn’t, insofar as they are both post hoc. Yours is post hoc from an external perspective, mine is post hoc from my own internal perspective.
Quoting Isaac
Which is exactly the problem. I don’t want data contributed exactly because it isn’t part of the process. Metaphysics is not and never was a science, hence cannot be examined scientifically. The system can only examine itself, with itself.
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Quoting Isaac
Then you are only conscious of the the representation of the transfer, and infer the correspondence between them.
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Quoting Isaac
Correct, you’re not conscious of it at the time of it, but you are also not conscious of it merely because of its visual representation. Also correct, in that there is no reason to think the body works differently pursuant to different representations of it. The body works as it works, however that is.
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Quoting Isaac
It would be, if not for its logical necessity. It is indubitable that whatever is in our heads is not the same as whatever is in the world outside our heads. Doesn’t matter what is, only that what is here is distinct from what is there.
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Quoting Isaac
If you look back, you will find I don’t use the term “mind”. As far as I’m concerned, in the context of this discussion, all I need to talk about is the human cognitive system and its constituency, which cannot include mind. Even if we say the system is metaphysical, and “mind” is metaphysical, doesn’t mean they are the same thing.
(In the 700 pages of the CPR, mind is mentioned exactly four times, and then only as a general transcendental idea)
Quoting Isaac
I disagree. I am aware of the external world simply from being affected by it. I don’t need mind to tell me there is something in my visual field. It is certain the reason makes mistakes, so it is irrational to suppose Mother Nature would require us to reason about whether or not we see something.
It is not the business of reason to tell me that there is something, but always and only to tell what the something is. Which also suffices for the distinction from another point of view, for that I am affected by a thing from its perception, is of a different time that being told what it is from the process of the cognitive system.
To be continued......Honey-Do time, doncha know.
Which could be considered as just another iteration of what I’m talking about. If it is information responsible for causation and we still need to query the cause of the cause....we remain contending with that damnable infinite regress.
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Quoting Pop
Absolutely.
Quoting Pop
Common consensus, yes. Pretty much given something is working with the information. One camp says brain works with it, the other camp says mind works with it.
As it ever was......
Not an outside view, but an inside view at a different time. Guy goes about his business. Guy makes a mistake; guy does a good thing; guy does this; guy does that, all day, every day for his whole conscious life, all under the direct supervision of the system.
Something a guy might do, is ask about the mistake; ask about the good thing; ask about this; ask about that. It’s called reflection. Who’s he gonna ask, for certain answers that is, but himself? What’s he gonna ask, but the system. How’s he gonna ask, but with the system. Only the system can ask and answer, because the system did, what the system’s asking about.
Silly as that seems, it is in fact what we do all the time. Happens so fast we don’t notice, and is so common as to be unnoticeable most of the time, but once in awhile, we are forced by some relative severity, to actually think about something we did. Didn’t do. Said or didn’t say. Thought or didn’t think.
Not that hard to imagine, that given sufficient methodological reduction from some undeniable reality, we can actually arrive at some example or other, that represents our cognitive system, such that all the above is explained. Explained but not proven.
And the rest, as they say....is history.
Yes, I completely agree with this but it also makes me think we're speaking at cross purposes. You're talking about some rationalisation of our experiences, I think, either some innate compulsion to narrate (which I believe in, perhaps not as a compulsion but a function) or some conscious rationalisation along those lines.
I was talking more about what precedes that: System A*'s lack of knowledge about itself or the causes of System A's outputs. Yes, it's undoubtedly a cause of rationalisations, of narrative-building, but the absence of information (expressed by those you disapprove of as the immediacy of qualia) are examinable. What we don't know about our phenomenology invites either curiosity or rationalisation.
Well played, Derren. Well played.
Anyway, my response will have to wait til tomorrow as we had nothing to do but drink more cocktails.
No. Information does not just simply reside in your mind. There is an information flow between things - connecting and relating them. We are an evolving process of self organization - evolving in relation to the information ( people, society, things , everything ) surrounding us.
Quoting Pop
Wikipedia: "The English word "Information" apparently derives from the Latin stem (information-) of the nominative (informatio): this noun derives from the verb ?nf?rm?re (to inform) in the sense of "to give form to the mind", "to discipline", "instruct", "teach". Inform itself comes (via French informer) from the Latin verb ?nf?rm?re, which means to give form, or to form an idea of. "
Science happens in the mind. This may be why science finds it difficult to look at the mind, or even to conceive of it. The eye cannot see itself.
Understood.
Quoting Mww
Why would it matter? We've just established the investigation is post hoc, so externally derived data about it isn't going to disrupt the process we're investigating, that's already happened and we're simply gathering data about it. Memory is one source, fMRI scan might be another.
Quoting Mww
Not seeing the link. Something's not being a science doesn't seem to me to have any bearing on whether science can investigate it. Sports aren't themselves a science either, but science investigates them.
Quoting Mww
True, good spot. True also of your thoughts though. As we've established, your investigation of them is post hoc. So you're being delivered a representation of what went on, not what actually went on.
Quoting Mww
True, but that gives you the existence of box 1. It does not give you that it is connected to a chain of boxes which ultimately lead to box 9. It's logically, equally possible that there is merely box 1 and box 9 and no connecting boxes at all. To conceive a connection you must, in some way, have examined 'the system' because it is only via the system that they are connected at all.
Quoting Mww
I read this the requisite three times...still nothing I'm afraid. Any chance of a re-phrasing?
Quoting Mww
If I knocked you unconscious and then shaved your eyebrows off you would have been affected by the outside world but not aware of it. It doesn't follow that you are aware of all that you are affected by. So it isn't 'simply'. Some intervening factor must be involved to distinguish the eyebrow removal whilst conscious from the same even whilst unconscious.
Quoting Mww
You absolutely do. Absent of a mind all you have is a chaos of staccato signals, which tell you nothing, not even if there's something. The mind even has to contend with 'noise' (random neurotransmitter release, axon channel leakage...). We can't even tell the difference between external sources and internal sources of signalling without a mind to do some speculation and hypothesis testing.
Quoting Mww
I'm not sure I want to know, but curiosity won...What is "Honey-Do time"?
Yep. The only difference then between this metaphysics and cognitive science seems to be that that we make the assumption all this happens in a brain (a good assumption, I think). Once that assumption is made then "my V4 region fired when I looked at that chair" becomes no less a piece of the puzzle to reflect on than "I thought of my old schoolmaster when I looked at that chair". Having established the link between the mind and the brain, all activity in that system (thoughts and signals) becomes a piece of the puzzle. There's no reason I can think of to rule out one source of data.
But my eye can see your eye and vice versa. Then we come to the astonishing discovery that we can see and study eyes.
Probably.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
OK, I can see that, but see my next post, I think there's stuff system A* can infer about system A, including it's own role.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Or was it...?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Or, will you get home and find it's already this time next year...?
I'm still waiting for Derren to come on the radio and demonstrate that the whole of the last few years has been a massive trick. "Did you all really believe that Donald Trump could become president of the US and then preside over a viral pandemic that's straight out the plot of at least six post apocalypse films?... Even I thought I'd gone too far on this one..."
Quoting khaled
Exactly. I was going to say use a mirror, but the point is the same.
Quoting Olivier5
Then you begged the question.
Do I really need to explain such ultra basic literary notions? What's wrong with you brains?
Quoting Isaac
I didn't mean to say that it is absolutely impossible for the mind to see the mind, just that it was difficult for some minds to see themselves. (You are a case in point.) And this poor reflexivity in my view accounts for the difficulty of science to study and understand the mind.
Nothing in that prevents it from begging the question. The likening of the mind to the eye in your metaphor, without @khaled's objection, only works if you already assume that the mind is something that cannot examine itself. Hence all you've said it that you think the mind cannot examine itself. We knew that. We're trying here to present arguments either way, not just remind everyone what our current beliefs are.
See my caveat in the post above: it is not totally impossible for the mind to understand itself in my view, just hard to do. A prerequisite, I would think, is for the mind to acknowledge itself...
No, mistaken on both counts I'm afraid, my fault. I did not ask "why is the mind so difficult to understand?" I asked why we find it so hard to accept that our subjective feeling of it might be different from the reality of it.
And I did not agree with you that the mind cannot examine itself, I said we all already knew that you thought that.
Sorry for not having been clearer on both fronts.
Quoting Olivier5
I don't think anyone denies this.
You'd be surprised.
B. Quoting Isaac
Are you denying the reality of your subjective feelings? See point A above.
How could the reality of the subjective feeling be anything other than the reality of the subjective feeling?
'I feel sick, Doctor!'
'Oh no you don't, you're just being tricked by your stomach!'
Examples?
Quoting Olivier5
Why would I be?
I have a subjective feeling the earth is a flat plane which goes on forever. Scientists tell me it's round. Great, now we can navigate.
I have a subjective feeling the table is made of solid matter. Scientists tell me it's actually all quantum goings on and wot not (I believe I've got I got the technical terms correct there @Kenosha Kid?). Great, now we can quantum compute.
I have a subjective feeling my consciousness is really special, consistent and impenetrable to investigation. Scientists tell me it's actually just neurons firing. All hell breaks loose.
That's the matter I find interesting.
See above. That things are sometimes not as they seem to be is taken as a matter of course these days in all fields of science... Why would your mind be any different? Why is it immune from turning out to be other than it first seems?
All the things you mention are objects. You have an I-it relationship to them.
Consider that, if you cannot trust the reality of your feelings, you cannot trust the reality of your thinking either since thinking is in part feeling, sensing, etc. If you cannot trust the reality of your thinking, you cannot trust science.
So I have a new question for you: Is science more than just neurons firing?
Yes... and? I'm not seeing that as a compelling reason why they can turn out to be other than they seem but my mind can't. All you've done thus far is point to a difference, you haven't explained how that difference causes the effect I'm asking about.
In what sense does one know one's own experience, your innate sense of being conscious and paying attention. You can't say 'oh, there it is, what is that, I will go and look at it.' It's not an object of cognition, but is part of the subject of experience.
When you have a thought, an experience, a sensation, this doesn't occur to you as an object, obviously. If a rock hits you, then the rock is an object, but the pain it causes you is not an object. Isn't that obvious? Is that something that has to be explained? And you can't say 'well, that pain I feel is actually not pain, it's really the firing of c-fibres.' Let someone fasten a paperclip to your earlobe and have you say that. Pain is irredemiably first-person. You can't see pain, or weigh it or measure it, only feel it, and only you know how bad that pain is. It's not an objectively real but it's nonetheless real.
That they exist? No. That they give me an accurate model of reality? Yes. I see no reason at all to believe that prima facie.
Quoting Olivier5
Yes, that's right.
Quoting Olivier5
Indeed.
Quoting Olivier5
Because it's got a methodology that produces some reliably useful models. I'm not getting the point you're trying to make. There's a difference between trusting a feeling prima facie and continuing to trust it in the light of other feelings to the contrary. You seem to assume it's either all or nothing.
T1 - I have some feeling about how my mind works.
T2 - I do some science (or read some). I now have some new feelings about how my mind works which seem to tie in better to other feelings I have about the world.
T3 - I now have a new feeling about how my mind works.
I trust science because it generally delivers better 'tie ins' at T2 than other methods. The process seems painfully simple to me, I'm baffled as to why it causes such consternation.
A scientist who doesn't trust the human mind's capacity to understand the universe would drop science altogether, and try bar tending instead. Therefore, all scientists actually trust the human mind quite a lot, even those who are not consciously aware that they do.
Of course it's an object of cognition. I have a model of what it is and how it works. I can examine that model and check it against other models such as my model of the substrate I assume it is within (neurons).
Quoting Wayfarer
Not at all. I can model the pain as an activity in neural circuits. It's seems quite clearly like an object to me.
Quoting Wayfarer
That's what pain is, from one perspective.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't see why that would cause me any difficulty.
Quoting Wayfarer
No. Other people can know how bad my pain is, as well as measure it. I can't think why you would image weighing it has any bearing on the matter, but it definitely can be measured.
Why? In fact, this is disingenuous because I see it's already been asked and answered. A scientist does not have to trust all thoughts in order to trust any thoughts. They do not have to assume all the universe is understandable in order to assume some of it is.
As such there's absolutely no reason a scientist is compelled to trust their first feelings about their mind.
Well, if yet make the distinction between felt pain and the concept of pain, there’s really no point discussing it.
So basically if I don't start out agreeing with you there's no point in discussion. Interesting approach.
Not completely or all thoughts, of course. But a scientist must believe in the capacity of the human mind to understand something about the world. Otherwise he is in the wrong business. Science is fundamentally dualist. It's about minds trying to understand things.
Of course. Again, I don't see anyone denying this.
Quoting Isaac
No, it wouldn't cause you difficulty, it would cause you pain. But apparently that can also be denied, for the sake of prevailing in an argument, which is why it's not worth arguing.
Incidentally, by 'paperclip' I mean, one of those larger sprung metal clips used to hold sheaves of paper together, that exert force.
Similarly, if you say they are different how can Isaac's argument prevail? This is precisely where reasoned arguments are needed.
If starting from different premises makes reasoned arguments useless, people would have never agreed on anything.
Usually what you do when the other party has radically different premises is you try to show contradictions in their approach and show them that your position suffer from no such contradictions.
I don't know why people keep repeating this. Yes, minds exist. No, they're not immaterial. That's the position.
Everything you said also makes sense from a materialist perspective. Except the "it is dualistic by nature" bit. Which is the only bit that doesn't follow from anything you said.
If minds matter, then mental events are important and potentially effective. They are not necessarily illusions or mere noise. The role of neuroscience is therefore to use mental events as a way to investigate how come mental events are so useful and powerful, and how we can make them even more so. The role of neuroscience is not and can never be to replace minds with another "realer" reality. Isaac does not even understand what his job is all about.
Why do you seem to think the only materialist in the world is Dennett? No one here has called minds an illusion or mere noise.
Quoting Olivier5
So where is the part where this becomes a critique of materialism? Or is it not?
Quoting Isaac
I'd been airing the idea that we'd snap out of it in the Lowry Theatre and it'd be 2020 with no pandemic. It seems a very him thing to do :rofl:
Quoting Isaac
I suppose, getting quantum on yo ass, if each subsystem is an ideal state-measurer, then each would be in a state (ignore superposition) of having measured a particular state of the previous subsystem.
Subsystem 1 is in state |1>
Subsystem 2 is in state |measured |1>>
Subsystem 3 is in state |measured |2>> = |measured |measured 1>>
and so on. But even in this ideal situation, all you really get at the end is something equivalent to the state of the first subsystem. You'd still need to report on that somehow which is supposed to be subsystem 2's job.
And that's the point really. If subsystem 2 is doing anything other than reporting on the state of 1, that needs reporting somehow. If it's doing two things, it's really two subsystems, one of which is reporting on itself which it can't because a subsystem is still a system (recursion).
The map idea is the closest, since it reports on the function of the system as a whole, which is how cacheing works anyway.
Yeah, this. I'm fascinated by it. There's these no-go areas with no obvious reason to not go there, in fact really compelling reasons to go there. Life is short, why die not knowing what you even were, let alone about the universe you existed in?
Well that's on them. I'm sure in their personal life they don't take an MRI scanner and a textbook on research around to check and verify their partners reactions...
They don't see it fully because they are in thrall and intimidated by science.
They lead a double life!
@Olivier5
It must be obvious I consider metaphysics a purely first-person architecture. As such, I don’t want data contributing to my metaphysical system for which I hold no responsibility. How would I trust my knowledge, if there were external influences on it not included in the constituency of the system?
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Quoting Isaac
Deriving data by third-party investigation of a system’s use, seems to be something different....
Quoting Isaac
....than third-party’s contribution of data, which makes explicit data not connected to the system being investigated. The first is not an issue, the second is, asked and answered by the above.
Nevertheless, I understand the ramifications. It is the case that sometimes third-party investigations reveal a physical discrepancy in the mechanics of the system, and sometimes even a rational article the system hadn’t presented to itself, re: “I never thought of it that way”. Even so, when presented with this missing piece, the system must still incorporate it into the compendium of its extant conditions, re: its relevance must still be understood by the system. If it isn’t, it has no power and thus cannot amend the system.
“....Deficiency in judgement is properly that which is called stupidity; and for such a failing we know no remedy. A dull or narrow-minded person, to whom nothing is wanting but a proper degree of understanding, may be improved by tuition, even so far as to deserve the epithet of learned. But as such, persons frequently labour under a deficiency in the faculty of judgement, and it is not uncommon to find men extremely learned who in the application of their science betray a lamentable degree this irremediable want....”
Kinda funny, really. Here we have you, an intelligence in one regard, and me, an intelligence in another, duking it out in a dialectical free-for-all.....with an onlooker claiming we’re both exhibiting a deficiency in judgement, you for mine, me for yours, neither of us improved from the other’s tuition, making us both stupid. Perhaps, in best-case scenario, we’ve each gained from each other, making the onlooker eat his words.
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Quoting Isaac
Science is an empirical study, or, a study under necessarily empirical conditions. There is absolutely no empiricism in cognitive metaphysics, it being entirely a rational study under the auspices of logic alone.
Quoting Isaac
Yes, but herein, science investigates the manifestation of the sporting activity...what makes a sportsman deficient, hence to improve it. What makes a person a sportsman, better yet, a good sportsman....is not a science, but a psychological investigation, which is not an empirical science. At the extreme, me calling that sportsman a farging cheater, winning all the damn time, either immediately manifests as me being merely jealous due to my incompetency, or he actually does cheat, in which case I have found him out. Both metaphysical deductions. Amendable to mediate psychological investigation, sure, but....er....post hoc.
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Quoting Isaac
Substitute any occurrence of mind, with reason.
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Quoting Isaac
You have caused an effect, but not an affect. Affect presupposes awareness; how could I say I was affected if I never sensed that which affected me? Even if something happened to me, I still couldn’t say it had an affect, if I never knew about it. So I wake up, notice missing eyebrows.....now I am affected.
If I am unaware, the system that discerns conscious activities, is useless. Being unaware makes explicit no sensation, which eliminates every single downstream constituent of the system which follows from it. This emphasizes the previous stipulation, whereby the input to the system is not part of it, while still being absolutely necessary for it.
“....For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses....”
Bad example, really. If there’s no mirror, or it’s my day off and I have no outside contacts, I, at least temporarily, might not know I’m missing my eyebrows. Hence.....for the duration of such temporality, their being missing has no affect. But I see your point.
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Quoting Isaac
Mostly correct, insofar as all I would have is signals which tell me nothing......except that there are signals. So, yes, I am informed of something. But those signals would be there irrespective of my reception of them, iff I grant the reality of the external world, which I, personally, do.
Now, it may be said mind is that which grants such reality, but that’s a different argument, consisting of ontology rather than cognitive metaphysics, which is an epistemological investigation. Again, I don’t care that there is something (chaotic signals); I want to know if that something is this or that (red, or, bacon, or, gunfire).
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Quoting Isaac
Honey, do take out the trash, please?; Honey, do mow the lawn, please?; Honey, do the dog-poop pickup, please? Etc, etc, etc.........
I used to go by Functionalism (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/functionalism/), and then Epiphenomenalism (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epiphenomenalism/).
Yeah! Thanks for letting me know. I owe you one. G'day!
I'll read those links if I can. :up:
I think the proper metaphysician grants the assumption. I certainly do, myself. Everything human happens because of the brain. Neither discipline knows the exact means by which the brain does what it does, but to say it doesn’t permits absurdities. Your system has the advantage of dispelling absurdities by experimentation in compliance to natural law, whereas my system can only argue against them in conformity to logical law. Which ventures a subtlety in itself, insofar as humans were logically endowed long before they were scientifically inclined.
In truth, all I got going for me is, “...I can think what I please, provided only I do not contradict myself; that is, provided my conception is a possible thought, though I may be unable to answer for the existence of a corresponding object in the sum of possibilities....”
Yes, they put themselves in what Bateson called a "double bind", i.e. a self-contradictory injunction, which is actually dangerous for one's mental health as it can lead to schizophrenia.
Why not:
Subsystem 1 is in state |1>, which includes a (imprecise, approximate) measurement of Subsystem 2
Subsystem 2 is in state |2>, which includes a (imprecise, approximate) measurement of Subsystem 1
We have two brains (left and right) and only one mind. It could be that our two brains work as mirrors to one another, thus creating a mise en abyme called consciousness. Just an idea.
An optical mise en abyme
That is a disagreement, obviously. I'm clearly not going to hold a position I think is unreasonable.
Quoting Wayfarer
Show the existence of one without the other. If every time I experience a pain, some particular pattern of neurons fires in my brain what possible reason would I have to refer to them as two separate things? If each time I see my dog, I smell my dog, I don't go around assuming there are now two entities - the smell of my dog and the sight of my dog. It's one entity which can be detected by either smell or sight. Pain is one thing which can be detected either by interoception or fMRI (for example).
Quoting Wayfarer
Who's denying it will cause me pain?
Quoting Olivier5
Where have I denied my own thoughts are real. Honestly, this is getting ridiculous both of you. I don't deny the existence of something by denying your preferred exposition of it's properties.
Quoting Olivier5
Who said anything about replacing minds? There's this common theme here where a person cannot take a physicalist position on anything without being caricatured as a guileless member of some cult trying to turn us all into machines. The question cognitive science is trying to answer is that of how the mind works (neuroscience is trying to answer the question of how the brain works). It is a question without a current answer, no-one is 'replacing' anything, we're filling in gaps. Are you claiming that you already know how your mind works, do you think your own guesswork is somehow privileged and should be sacrosanct?
Quoting Olivier5
It could be, yes. If only there were thousands of highly trained individuals who had decades of time and experience to put to finding out via careful experimentation that they could then publish in a series of papers and books so that people like you could read them and find out...
Nothing is sacrosanct in my shop, not even my nor your guesswork.
I think there are answers to those two questions. Biology tells us a humongous lot about brains and how they work, and more generally about how the body manages its information needs. And psychologists have become pretty good at understanding or at least at predicting, manipulating, and sometimes curing minds. Transactional analysis for instance does work reasonably well. So we do have some answers. We are making sustained progress, the way I see it, and I have been looking at this fields for a good 30 years.
All this to say that I am not a prophet of doom for neuroscience. I think we will end up cracking the mystery of the human mind, ultimately. And when that happens, it will be a great triumph for the human mind. It will of course NOT be a replacement of the human mind by some biological theory, just an understanding of the mind and its powers in terms of its biological foundations.
Quoting Isaac
Yes, and if all of them gave some thought to what they are doing instead of running around like materialist chicken, they would make faster progress.
But what about inference? If a given subsystem only has the data that it has read the state of a prior system which itself had previously read a prior system, would it's Bayesian prior not be that it itself was in such a chain, having no cause to infer anything else? I guess I'm still not clear on why a system can't have inferences about itself. It can't confirm them, obviously, but I don't see anything intrinsically stopping it's own function and identity being the subject of one of it's algorithms, it would just have to infer the answer from outside data.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yes. Despite my theoretic fancies above I think this is still the most likely way interocepted reporting of brain activity is done. The working memory is delivered a précis of what just went on in the same way as memories are delivered, which would be much more like your map example. I still think, though, that the working memory could infer its own role from the input data and reports of the output without needing access to its own workings.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Religion, and pride. Probably.
I think there's something intrinsically private about the workings of one's brain. Subjects I've worked with have definitely fallen into two distinct camps when we disseminate results. Either "wow that's interesting" or a non-committal grunt which I've taken to mean "how dare you get inside my head". I worked primarily with belief formation. You can imagine how well that goes down sometimes.
Then again, there's also the 'expertise cost' effect. It's a hell of a lot easier to become an expert in some psycho-woo than it is to become an expert in neuroscience. I'm sure you must get the same in physics. Without a bit of discipline you've got two routes open to you - study like hell for eight years, be tested, fail, tested again, finally prove your worth and make it past your PhD, or... sit in your armchair eating crisps and spout whatever you happen to reckon because "it's all speculation anyway init"
Well, I'll send as many as I can on to you so you can instruct them in 'The Way' and save them from their unenlightened chaos... hang on, I've heard this story before somewhere...
Who funds scientific research and who decides what avenues get funded?
Just tell them that science is about minds understanding matter, not vice versa.
Probably communists or some sect of paedophile cannibals.
Quoting Isaac
If I understand you right, that's basically what explainable AI is supposed to do: use Bayesian inference to give a likely cause of your output. Which is fine, because at no point is the system actually giving a description of its own state. Funnily enough I was chatting to my new boss about doing exactly this.
Quoting Isaac
Haha yeah! Reminded me of Brideshead Revisited: "Show me your marvelous artworks. Let me explain them to you!"
You missed out capitalists.
After all a capitalist is a communist with a Walmart bag.
Seems a bit extreme, but fair enough, life's rich pageant and all.
Quoting Mww
It's surprising how few people I speak to get this aspect of cognitive science, bonus points. I agree with the importance of understanding the evidence within the context of the narratives you have. It's 'objective' origin doesn't lend it any special status, it has to fit into the stories we tell just like any other insight.
Quoting Mww
I disagree. What seems logical to you is an empirical finding from interoception. You find it logical that 2+2=4. That's not different than you finding the rocks are hard or roses smell sweet.
Quoting Mww
Likewise.
Quoting Mww
But surely it is either given that it is ("if it seems to me to be bacon then it is bacon") or you accept that things can seem some way yet turn out to be another. If this can be true of perception, then why not introspection? Or, answering my own question, are we back to 'any theory I can rationally maintain'? If so then my issue would be with holding the label 'rationally-acceptable (to me)' to be anything more than an empirical property of some thought. No different to sensing your toe is in pain after stubbing it.
Quoting Mww
Love it!
So... is the thought that some thought is a contradictory thought subject to the same restrictions?
Yeah. Last funding meeting I attended was absolute carnage. After you've sacrificed your third virgin though it all gets a bit work-a-day...
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Cool. Maybe there's more mileage in it than just a theoretical possibility then. If AI can do it, it should be a walk in the park for wetware.
Check your complacent egos boys!
The Kanban board is just depressing...
Who are you even railing at?
On the bus home from work this evening, the guy in front and to the left of me, who was sat alone, stood up and pulled his trousers down. I mention him because, at the time, he was the most crazy-seeming person I'd encountered today.
You drunk again punchy?
Curb your alcohol palooka.
Sacrifice and teamwork my ass!
Paycheck is your motivation is it not?
Plus the fake esteem of "science".
No deal! Ones argumentation is tip top!
You can drink to that glib one!
Are you deaf? I'm rocking a hangover, dummy. Although a mojito maybe...
Quoting Protagoras
It'd be an odd way to go if it were. Do you know how much the financial sector pays for physicists? Curiosity is the name of the game. You seem like you like to start with surety and dismiss the contrary. It might be difficult to explain it to you.
You are having troubling reading my posts,the meaning and context. Mr sober.
So your a minimum wage scientist!! I'm sure for the love of science you would work for free.
You say curiosity,it's really fear.
I smell virtue signalling and a fear of the confidence of others.
Quoting Protagoras
The last taboo.
The taboo against confidence!
You hold on to your uncertainty....for now.
Wasn’t Einstein a patent clerk when he developed
special relativity?
“ For Einstein, the patent office was "that worldly cloister where I hatched my most beautiful ideas.”
The amount of nonsense and misinformation written about Einstein is legendary...
By todays scientism logic he would have been chased off this forum as a lunatic anyway. You need degrees,phds,white coats and to worship newton or the current paradigm to be able to be in our club of science.
Quoting Protagoras
btw, I thought you were a realist? It sounds like you’re endorsing Kuhnian science here. How would you describe the nature of scientific progress? Is it cumulative ?
Quoting Protagoras
Are you saying Einstein didn’t work at the parent office when he began generating special relativity?
With respect,philosophy is not stringent like science.
Which kind of psychology do you write on?
Neuroscience/experimental or other?
I don't endorse kuhn,I'm saying science has dominant paradigms,which are very hard to overturn.
I'm saying nearly everything we have heard about Albert Is mainly prooganda.
Like what. Please give examples. Otherwise I might take you for a conspiracy monger. For someone who’s big on empirical truth and correctness you seem to throw out a lot of unsubstantiated claims. If you have specific evidence that he didn’t create special relativity while working in a patent office , let’s have it. Otherwise don’t waste my time or the time of other readers of this site.
Listen guy. Don't pigeon hole me or try to patronise me.
If your too anal and think I need to show proof of every bit of malevolence in historical matters then you keep believing the narratives dealt to you by the powers that be.
You stick to your comfortable post modernist narratives.
As if I owe you a detailed spoon feeding of how to asses narratives. Do your own research and use your own brain not relying on academics to justify your every viewpoint
And the irony of ",conspiracy monger" when you read deleuze,Nietzsche,foucault et al and say there is a variety of perspectives.
Human all too.human!
Well,if people are that double standardish that they can dish out strawman criticism and not take it back then so be it.
Cheers for the concern though.
Honestly I don't care for your opinion on this.
Nor your amateur reading into my motivations.
And maybe you should look at the insecurity of yourself in not being able to handle counter opinions with Grace.
A very teenage response!
It's only yours I called a shit post. Because it was.
As I said before,snowflakes be dishing out but can't handle some heat.
We’ve been exposed to simple arithmetic since Day One, practically, so we don’t notice the fundamentals anymore. That 2+2=4 is a given, but it is merely the empirical proof, a euphemism for experience, that the logical inference “these things conjoined with those things makes a greater thing than either”.
Rote memorization is cognition, but isn’t cognitive metaphysics, which presupposes memory, albeit named by a different conception.
—————-
Quoting Isaac
If it seems to be bacon presupposes what bacon seems like. What bacon seems like, to me, is my experience of it. So, all else being equal, if that which I now perceive seems like bacon, than I am justified in experiencing it as bacon.
That I am forced to admit that some things seem some way, but turn out to be quite different, is nothing but the manifold of conceptions I think as belonging to that thing, were insufficient for the valid cognition of it. These days, that’s just called “not enough information”. This is why we don’t need science to tell us empirical knowledge is both contingent, and incomplete; logic told us that eons ago.
Guy has the experience of a certain animal. He’s out for a stroll, sees an animal, perceives the same properties in the second he found in the first, says...yep that there’s a “dog”, too. Second animal does an about-face, guy then notices a stripe running the full length of its back. Oops, he says, that ain’t no dog like I ever seen. Gonna call that a “badger”.
Guy calls this thing a table. Some other guy comes along, miniaturizes him, takes him way down deep into the table, guy finds nothing but mostly empty space. Does he think his table isn’t what it seems? No, he does not, for he is no longer cognizing the table, but only that which occupies the space relative to himself, which quite obviously does not include his pre-conceived table.
—————
Quoting Isaac
Thoughts are not contradictory. Thoughts are singular and successive, in that no thought is of more than the one thing to which it relates, and no thought is simultaneous with any other. Given a series of thoughts, if the judgement arising from them does not conform to them, the judgement is contradictory. For me to judge blue and square, that which I conceive to be red and round, is me contradicting myself. Simple, extreme, but serves as the general principle.
Me judging a car to be doing 50, when the cop giving me the ticket proves the car was doing 60, is not me contradicting myself, but me misunderstanding the empirical conditions, which is not irrational. If I judge the car as doing 50, look at the speedometer which shows the car doing 60, but insist the car is doing only 50 anyway, then I contradict myself by denial, which is quite irrational.
————-
Interoception. Interesting concept. I never heard of it. Care to elaborate?
Bad example because of the ambiguity. Logial inference is still something one 'senses' and so empirical, is the point I was making. Have you never thought something logically follows whilst another disagrees? You 'sense' it's logically valid, another senses it isn't.
Quoting Mww
I don't agree. You've limited the models to instantaneous experience, where models are really about expectations. My previous model of the table as solid contain in it an expectation that if I were to be miniaturised and travel into it I would be somehow 'swimming' in table, much like treacle or maybe set, unable to move, as if in concrete. That model changes when I'm taught about atoms. I have a different expectation, my story changes.
Quoting Mww
...which is a type of thought, no? Hence...
Quoting Mww
Quoting Mww
It's the sense of one's internal states. Like looking inwards.
I don’t know you well enough to pigeonhole you. All I know is you’ve been on this site for less than two weeks and have already managed to show hostility to all but two of the people you have engaged with here. I think that’s some kind of record. Does that mean you are one who ‘doesn’t play well with others’? I guess that’s not for me to say. You’d know better than I if you have a pattern of feeling alienated from the social groups you find yourself involved with. Maybe that’s because you’re the only righteous one amongst all your peers. But if so that must be a lonely cross to bear.
Quoting Protagoras
I was hoping you’d humor me and show prooof of the specific malevolence you claimed.
Quoting Protagoras
I’d rether you present an interesting critique of those post modern narratives. Isnt that what we’re here for?
Quoting Protagoras
A good policy for all of us . But wouldnt it be quicker just to say that you don’t have any specific evidence to back up your assertion concerning Einstein rather than give me a lecture on interpretation of narratives? That’s what someone does who’s trying to cover their ass.
Quoting Protagoras
That could be an interesting starting point for a discussion, Much better to go in that direction than just throw it out as an attack one-liner. It makes you more vulnerable but the other direction just closes you off to people.
Your talk about vulnerable and alienation is just your defensiveness.
Your "psychoanalysis" is born from the same.
Yes,the last point is interesting. We could have a good discussion. But if you want that,then talk in your own words,not just quoting others.
I like discourse with you on some level because you actually acknowledge intuition and a critique of enlightment "rationality",which is very rare on this forum.
We can start afresh,but i want your views,not scholar X on scholar Y.
I don’t have all that much to defend because I don’t have that high an opinion of myself. I’m just another shmuck on here trying to learn a thing or two. But there’s no question we all make ourselves vulnerable when we share our ideas , because they are a partn of who we are, and it can be devastating to have our self-image challenged. I think that’s why conversations often deteriorate into name calling.
Quoting Protagoras
I think within the continental tradition, and hewing closely to texts of part of that style, but I certainly don’t have to include quotes.
There are a number of contributors here who critique Enlightenment rationality, including Antony Nickles , Xtrix and Streetlight.
In honesty I don't mind if someone disagrees with me,it's the manner in which they post that can be the issue at times.
I'm very confident and certain in what I do know,so nobody is going to upset me on that score.
I'm not a fan of xtrix and definately not streetlight! Anthony Nickles I will have a look.
When I say a critique of rationality I'm talking foucault level of saying science is just control. However,I don't go foucault level of subjectivity being constructed purely by culture etc,nor do I say religious experience is invalid.
My critique is psychological,and with this everyone's philosophy is an expression of their biography,just like nietzsche alludes to.
Academic logic is just control in platonist style,with large chunks of aristotle.
Are you familiar with the work of Eugene Gendlin? He wrote about an approach that he dubbed ‘after postmodernism’. His approach , which he worked out when he was working with Carl Rogers, shows how logical forms and patterns are generated out of an implicit intricacy , which is not just the imposition of culture and language on individuals, as the postmodernists claim. One can think beyond language and culture. Gendlin argues that this implicit intricacy is both intentional and affective, before any notion of a split between feeling and thought. I wonder if this might be of interest to you. I’m also a big fan of the psychologist George Kelly, who also abandoned the distinction between feeling, knowing and doing.
Both those sound right up my Street!
I will look them both up.
If you give a little synopsis of what you think are some of their salient ideas,then we can have a good discussion.
See now,this is very interesting.
Thank you. I just read the wiki article on Gendlin.
It's quite amazing how close in some respects it is to my philosophy especially the part about Focusing.
Tremendous!
So now George Kelly if you would!
Just read the wiki on Kelly.
Superb psychological insights.
If you are into those two thinkers why even bother with the vast majority of continental thinkers? The ideas of those two if refined with some freud are sufficient.
It's also very instructive that those two and freud were all Practical therapists and not just writers or academics.
Further,the parallels with gendlin and yoga,zen and meditation are very instructive.
My philosophy in a nutshell. Focus on everyday tasks in a competitive non discursive way to elicit progress and growth. This from instinct and life experience,not books.
I'm always said sport is a microcosm of life and better than any philosophy.
the classical definition of a concept. If a concept is the dictionary definition of a word, then a construct is the particular sense of a word’s meaning that is unique to our own construct system. We may both use the word ‘dog’ when pointing to an animal , but they may mean slightly different things to each of us. Each construct gets its meaning from its role within a system
of constructs. Think about it this way. Our lives are organized by overarching themes having to do with the way we see ourselves in relation to others, what we stand for, etc. This would be the superordinate aspect of our construct system. The limits of our superordinate system
define a the limits of what we can understand , what we can make sense of. It also defines our affective limits. Those experiences that trigger anger, threat , guilt or fear are events that lie just outside the range of convenience of our total system. Negative emotions define our intellectual frontier. when we find ourselves in emotional crisis , we are prompted to reconstrue our situation , to find alternate ways of making sense of our world. In this way each of us is an incipient scientist.
I have always said the ultimate test of any philosophy is how well it serves as a psychotherapy. What can it tell us about ourselves and others that rival psychotherapies miss?
Excellent stuff. Much appreciated.
Would you say there are people whose superordinate system rather than triggering negative emotions when in new unknown experiences or territory "Focus" hard and actually thrive joyfully in spite of the unknown?
Because thats a lot of my experience.
Agree in general wholeheartedly.
Now you see my beef with science and philosophy!?
@Joshs
Well, if I shift back a minute from Kelly to Gendlin, Gendlin would say that in feeling ‘ stuck’ in a new situation where one does not know how to go on , to move forward, one can use the technique of focusing to tap into one’s bodily implicit intricacy. The body knows how to go forward because it is always implying new possibilities.. But to make that knowing fully conscious and articulate , one has to get in touch with the bodily felt sense of the situation as a whole. Usually we just get stuck in a piece of the situation and react with narrow emotions., which keeps us trapped in the same cycle of thinking. When we sense the situation as a whole it begins to shift and create new possibilities of meaning for us.
For centuries these have left US out of the picture , as if our relation to experience was not necessary to the facts of the world.
Yep. That's my personal experience.
I'm combining Kelly and gendlin in my above post.
If we threw in some freud, William James and Zen the circle would be complete!
Yes indeed @Joshs. This is true. Though people outside academia didn't fall for the pure rationality nonsense.
Only philosophers,scientists and the bourgeois.
We’re......I’m......talking about a system, a cognitive system, a determined speculative methodology. It behooves understanding the system from without, to maintain its components in relation to each one’s functionality as a whole, from within. Part.....“think: puzzle pieces”; part......“don’t overthink”, that which has already been completely rendered. As such, understanding/judgment is the faculty of thought, but a judgement is not a thought. A thought is a cognition from conceptions. Conceptions arise spontaneously from understanding in relation to phenomena, judgement is the unity of conceptions in relation to each other. These together are a cognition. Reason determines the relation of conceptions to each other, that is, a cognition, to experience.
Couple things that might help....an object cannot be perceived by a single property. An object cannot be cognized by a single conception. There’s a whole slew of both, but nevertheless usually resolving into a single item of knowledge, a single experience. It gets complicated for the system because the world is complicated, but we, as conscious agents, usually have no conscious notion of the work the system does, in order to keep us out of trouble, so to speak. It seems Mother Nature realized her rationally-inclined creations work better and last longer if mentally streamlined. It’s when things don’t quite fit together, that understanding of some theoretical system makes possible the understanding of why things don’t quite fit together. And the first realization is...it isn’t that things don’t fit together, but rather, it is that we ourselves that have misfit them.
But I made a mistake. I said, Given a series of thoughts, if the judgement arising from them does not conform to them, the judgement is contradictory. I should have said, given a series of conceptions.... From the correction, it clarifies that a judgement wherein the conceptions do not belong to the phenomenon, reason finds such cognition contradicts experience, re: “That ain’t like no dog I ever seen”. It is in judgement alone, with respect to a posteriori cognitions, that errors in our thinking occurs, and it is reason alone that discovers them, and is solely responsible for the possible correction of them.
It is from all that, that this arises: “...I can think what I please, provided only I do not contradict myself....”, which translates to, I can judge conceptions as being united with each other til the cows come home, in any manner and any combination I like.......as long as reason, finds nothing wrong with it.
—————
Quoting Isaac
Does that, relate to this, re: interoception?
Quoting Isaac
I’m not so sure about that. It reeks of the Homunculus Argument, in that if one senses an inference it begs the question...from whence did the inference arise, if one merely senses that there has been one? On the other hand, if one senses an inference presupposes he is the source of it, begs the other question....why would he call it something he sensed, if it was he who created it? What one senses, is the conclusion the inference obtains, which may or may not be empirical. He does not ‘sense’ the act of logically inferring from which the conclusion is given.
I think you may mean, from your point of view, that to ‘sense’ indicates that under the proper experimental conditions, evidence is presented that one does a logical thing in response to relevant stimuli, and so is empirically verified that such is the case.
If that is what you mean, do you see the problem? What else could possibly appear under such experimental conditions, if the human cognitive system is itself a logical system? Of course you’ll witness that ones ‘senses’ a logical inference, because he could not possibly do anything else, simply because that is the very nature of the system under which he does anything at all. Your system would be of great benefit, if it were demonstrated that the human system is not in fact logical, but a human still ‘senses’ logical inferences, because in that case, he would not be at the same time the source of it. If you can’t do that, in effect you’ve done nothing metaphysics hasn’t already done, 300 years go.
So...in order to reconcile the paradigmatic conflict, what I think you meant, and what you actually meant, are way more separate than laid out here. Which I grant beforehand.
Which brings up this: I’ve been telling you of my system, but you haven’t reciprocated by telling me of yours. And while all this is a proper demonstration of Socratic dialectic, it is necessarily one-sided. Just letting you know it doesn’t have to be; you could always lay some psychological counterpoints on me.
OK, that makes sense, but it still leaves the substance of the question unanswered(or at least I can't see an answer there). Can you hold contradictory judgements? You say "Reason determines the relation of conceptions to each other, that is, a cognition, to experience", but 'reason', in my experience rarely delivers clean categorical judgements. One day one's reason might judge that minds are non-physical only to read an argument to the contrary and judge differently. I'm not sure I see the clear distinction you want to make between thoughts and judgements. Judgements are necessarily recalled post hoc (one doesn't re-judge every second) so a judgement being 'in mind' is a phenomena, an interocepted state one discovers one has.
Quoting Mww
Nice.
Quoting Mww
The trouble with this is that, as you say, "we, as conscious agents, usually have no conscious notion of the work the system does, in order to keep us out of trouble, so to speak". Seems innocuous, but one of the activities 'the system' is strongly suspected of doing is filtering and even, in some cases, completely changing, the sensations to match the expected model - prior to delivering this information to the working memory (which is my term for the place where 'reason' is done). So it's not reason alone that discovers them and corrects them. There are three aspects which I cannot see could be maintained without contradiction. The brain is where reasoning takes place - We are conscious of all reasoning - Reason alone corrects perceptions which contradict experience. We know that areas of the brain are responsible for subconsciously correcting perceptions which don't match experience. So one of those three positions has to give.
Quoting Mww
It's relatively simple to lay out my system, but would take several textbooks to provide you with the evidential reasoning behind it, so you may either just assume a background of empirical evidence supporting, or take what I say as an interesting fairy tale. Either way...
I treat the mind as being the functional system arising from the arrangement and properties of the central nervous system. In other words, it's what the brain does by virtue of it's component parts being so arranged.
It transpires (according, of course, the the interpreted result of the experiments I take to be evidence for this sort of thing), that what the CNS does is almost nothing else but guess the cause of it's own states, all being entirely directed to improving the next guess. Surprise is the enemy here. The method is to have a hierarchy of subsystems, each guessing the cause of its inputs which then becomes the input to the next subsystem, and so on. The details need not bore you now (quite happy to expound on anything though), but the consequences for your comment...
Quoting Mww
...are...
The entire system is working post hoc, each input to a system is not the current state of the system below it, it is the state at the time of input - necessarily some point in the past. Inputs are actively blocked and filtered by backward acting neural network connections, partly to ensure this. So what you call 'making an inference' could mean one of two things - we could translate it as some system having a model (it has inferred the cause of it's inputs). This is the sense in which I use the term. But this sense doesn't marry with the way you use it (your requirement for conscious awareness). So for your use, inference would translate better to the model derived by those systems whose inputs are the activity logs for the other systems. Our conscious awareness is a kind of meta-model which unifies the goings on of all the other systems (or many of them, more like) under it's own model. This meta-modelling, we experience as awareness, consciousness...whatever you want to call it.
So, to have your conscious rational judgement, it can only be done by the meta-modelling consciousness systems, whose inputs are the activity logs of the other systems actually doing the inference modelling of sensations. At no point does your conscious, rational, system get access to the sensations from one's environment (nor from one's physiology). The brain simply doesn't trust such a flamboyant storyteller as consciousness with the important stuff.
Hence - what best translates from my system as your 'reason' is only ever something which gathers inferences about sensations, not makes them. The inferences it makes are those which unify the systems below it, to better predict what they are likely to deliver next. 2+2=4 is just such a model.
Ain’t that the truth!! Some do it more than a others, the most prevalent, I would guess, being the long-ago story embellishment......“Damn thing was THIS big, I swear, then the line broke and he was gone!!!”....which relates to purely personal aesthetic judgements whereby the ego satisfies itself. More serious are occasions of rejecting empirical evidence in dispute with personal prejudice, which relates to discursive judgements whereby the ego finds its satisfaction from outside itself and maintains it at all costs. As Paul Simon says, “Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest, mmm, mmmm, mmmmmm”.
But you know as well as I, only by understanding the properly working system does its impropriety become recognized, and the simplest, easiest to recognize error in metaphysical cognitive systems, is the LNC.
The purpose of my metaphysics is, hopefully, to have “....discovered the cause of—and consequently the mode of removing—all the errors which have hitherto set reason at variance with itself in the sphere of non-empirical thought....”
————-
Quoting Isaac
Technically, a judgement isn’t something one holds, and judgements are not themselves contradictory. The relativism of truths are that which are said to be held, and cognitions are those which are contradictory. So, no, one cannot hold contradictory judgements, but under a given set of conditions, he does hold with beliefs, the judgements for which its cognitions are only contingently true hence susceptible to contradicting themselves, or, under a given set of conditions he does hold with knowledge the judgements for which its cognitions are necessarily true, hence cannot contradict themselves.
In the former, a different judgement made on the same premises is sufficient to nullify or otherwise change the cognition of the object, but in the latter, a judgement made on an entirely different set of premises is necessary to nullify or otherwise change the object of cognition. The former is a different version of the same truth; the latter is a different truth entirely.
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Quoting Isaac
Yes, agreed. Recalled post hoc, but that merely implies pre-existence, indicating they are not themselves post hoc, but occurring immediately upon their temporal standing in the system. So, no, we don’t re-judge; we constantly, continuously, judge. Think of it like....we cannot have a cognition without its dedicated neural pathway, in accordance with the physical system, we cannot have a cognition without its judgement, in accordance with the metaphysical system Even cognizing the same thing but at a different time, still requires its own pathway/judgement. It doesn’t matter that it’s the same pathway/judgement, each is temporally distinct.
Quoting Isaac
Hmmm....dunno, man. When I think, “every good boy deserves favor”, am I referencing a judgement, or a cognition? I rather think I’ve cognized the veracity of the proposition, which follows from the antecedent judgement. So the state I’m in, or the state I currently have, is one of truth. I have trouble seeing the state I have is, “every good boy deserves favor”.
Disclaimer: a metaphysical theory of judgement is very complex, perhaps even to the point of massive confusion and obfuscation. It’s just like science trying to explain consciousness; we know it’s something but damned if we can figure out a bottom line for it. There is a critique of judgement, a treatise in its own right, but is even more dense that the critique of reason, and I make no claim whatsoever for having grasped its instructions.
—————-
Quoting Isaac
When I speak of reason without qualifiers, I speak of reason in its empirical use, properly termed a posteriori. So, yes, contrary to your system, mine does make inferences about sensations. If a thing impresses me as this and this and this, I may safely infer it as that.
As regards making inferences which unify that which is likely to be delivered next, I must qualify reason as “pure reason”, insofar as there are conditions already in play, from which what follows isn’t so much inferred, but made possible. With respect to your math example, pure reason has already made the condition “quantity” available, in order for quantifiable objects to relate to each other. With respect to the real, physical domain, pure reason makes available “existence”, “possibility”, “necessity”, “causality”, “community”, and exactly seven other similar conceptions, as fundamental grounds for the possibility for the subsequent inferences a component makes on an input from an antecedent component.
2 + 2 = 4 is an exact inferential model of the relation between a possible pair of these extant things conjoined with a possible pair of those extant things necessarily ends as that final thing. The mathematical expression not only wouldn’t work, but wouldn’t even be conceivable, absent the pure conditions antecedent to it. In effect, unifying the whole system.
——————-
Quoting Isaac
My system agrees without equivocation. Remember I mentioned a few days ago we are not conscious of parts of the whole cognitive system. My conscious rational system is the part that thinks about the phenomena given from sensation, but never about the sensation itself. In effect, thinking has no access to sensibility, but is only conditioned by it. Such is the speculative representational system writ large
Quoting Isaac
Pretty damn close. Whose inputs are activity logs is my imagination. It isn’t a consciousness system itself, but it does inference modeling from sensations and conscious rational judgement is impossible without it.
“...By the word synthesis***, in its most general signification, I understand the process of joining different representations to each other and of comprehending their diversity in one cognition.(...) Synthesis, generally speaking, is (...) the mere operation of the imagination—a blind but indispensable function without which we should have no cognition whatever, but of the working of which we are seldom even conscious...”
(***for all intents and purposes, explanatorily synonymous with your meta-modeling)
Methinks the methods be different, but the results the same.
Thanks for sticking around, valiantly scaling The Great Wall of Text, and especially for showing another point of view.
I was talking about subconscious processing, so we're not talking about the ego, but rather about how to deal with aberrant data. Your sensations are imperfect, noisy (in data terminology) and cannot themselves distinguish context (is that a shadow or a change in the colour of the actual object?). As such they present a lot of extraneous and contradictory data to the cortices responsible for modelling it. To deal with that the higher cortices will simply suppress signals from the lower ones which do not match the model of what they're expecting to be there. What's more, they'll send instructions back to the muscles controlling, say, the eyes to get them to look at the places most likely to confirm the model.
I think ego preservation is a slightly different matter...but maybe there's a link there.
Quoting Mww
At the rational level, maybe. the brain processes thousands of totally contradictory models at any one time quite without trouble. It's our conscious awareness that seems so obsessed with not holding contradictory beliefs. I've never quite seen the obsession myself. I mean a) it doesn't really help much because the main thing you want to know is which belief is true, not simply the fact that they can't both be, and b) unless you're absolutely sure about the answer to (a) it's more efficient to have one system believe one proposition and the another believe the other, thus spreading your risk.
Quoting Mww
But, being recalled post hoc, we have no way of knowing what that judgement actually is, only what we later recall it to be. I don't know how old you are, but at my age I can't always remember what I was saying in the middle of saying it. I don't have much faith in my accurate recollection of judgements.
Quoting Mww
Depends how much stock you want to put by neuroscientific experiments. Try removing someone's hippocampus and see how much of the information from their senses they're able to rationally judge, yet they're still able to act appropriately toward objects and navigate a room.
Quoting Mww
There was a study done by Peggy Sears many years back comparing probability judgements of contradictory sensory inputs to the probabilities worked out using Bayes theorem. She found a remarkable correlation. I wonder if these 'grounds of reason' might be something similar. Our vocalisation of the processing elements carried out by various neural networks.
Quoting Mww
This is good, it explains a lot of the confusion I had about the extent of your metaphysical analysis of thought. You're talking about what I'd call higher level processing, where we review phenomena as given and create meta-models which feed back to the cortices developing those phenomena. I really do think that within this specialised region of mental activity it may well be just...
Quoting Mww
Quoting Mww
Likewise. It's been a pleasure.
I'm responding here because don't want to derail KK's thread with such digressions. I did try and respond to your objections in this thread, but the point at which I first discontinued was in a debate about the extent to which consciousness - actually, I prefer to use the term 'mind' - can be understood through the perspectives of neuroscience, I was arguing that there is a difference between actually feeling pain, and having a concept of pain.
So at that point you said:
Quoting Isaac
To which I said:
Quoting Wayfarer
And again, I was accused of 'avoiding your arguments'. So I responded again - probably a bad call:
Quoting Wayfarer
I regarded the answer to that as beside the point that was at issue, which is, the distinction between the first-person and third-person perspective. The fact that there is physiology of pain, or a neurology of pain, is not at issue in any of this.
I asked you before whether you favoured Dennett's approach - called 'eliminative materialism' - which you confirmed. Critics of Dennett make a similar point about his approach. His book 'Consciousness Explained' was derisively called 'Consciousness Ignored' - and not by armchair critics, but by other philosophers. Nagel - hey, I know you think Nagel is a dick, but whatever - said of his last book:
So, if you're taking that view, which you appear to do, then they're not the kinds of arguments I want to pursue. And really, I'm not to going pursue my declining to answer your objections and arguments beyond this point. I know it's a public forum, but I can decide who and who not to respond to.
No one's disputing that. Mainly I'm intrigued by your thought processes, but I do think it's a little impolite of you to post your condemnations of whole swathes of the population (scientists, materialists, positivists etc) if you know in advance don't intend to actually pursue that line of discussion. If you've no intention of engaging with positivists, or materialists then it's little more than boorish jeering to keep posting about how we're all wrong about everything.
Fair point. I am trying not to throw grenades, I used to do it a lot more. The thing is that modern culture, generally, presumes that the ‘scientific worldview’ is normative, kind of the arbiter of what is considered real. It is more like an undercurrent a lot of the time. My whole interest in philosophy started with counter-culturalism - I didn’t perceive it as being philosophy at all to begin with, but trying to understand what the popular Eastern teachers and books were pointing at. Plus I think I had a pre-disposition from early on in life - always had an instinctive sense about it. But when you call it out as ‘materialism’, it sounds accusative, when really it’s not. It’s trying to grapple with those elements in secular culture, when what I’m interested in is something altogether else.
When I was an undergraduate, the two books that aggravated me the most were A J Ayer’s Language Truth and Logic, and B F Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Eventually I majored in religious studies, which I stress was not theology or divinity but history of religious ideas. I did two years of undergrad philosophy and later in life began to appreciate the idea of the ‘perennial philosophy’ as represented in the classical Western tradition.
(Hey listen to this track. It’s the best single I’ve ever heard. It’s also about enlightenment.)
Besides, I don’t acknowledge doing that. Generally don’t think I can be accused of being discourteous although plainly my views are at odds with many others.
Interesting background, thanks.
As you may know, I'm a research psychologist. Although I'm retired now, I spent the vast majority of my career on beliefs and the factors which affect their formation, strength, defence...etc (particularly social factors). So you and I have perhaps a significant overlap in interests (though not in music it seems - waaay to pop-ish for my tastes, but I appreciate the exposure nonetheless).
My version -
...of course, Sonny really is blind, so they're talking about actual eyes and actual seeing...but you get the point.
Quoting Wayfarer
I wasn't imputing your intentions. I was pointing out the consequences.
If you say "materialists have missed the point / got this wrong", that can be taken one of two ways.
Either you're presenting your view for discussion, or you're just jeering at materialists {"what a bunch of losers to have got it so wrong, am-I-right"}. If, in response to the materialists defence, you say "I don't discuss with materialists", the effect is to render your comment of the latter type, regardless of your intention. Not discussing the issue is as good an indicator that you didn't raise the matter for discussion as one could get.
By refusing to discuss the arguments, you appear to be taking the position that either eliminative materialists are wrong beyond question (which is, you'll forgive, more than a little dogmatic), or the position that eliminative materialism is not of interest to you (in which case, why keep bringing it up?). Do you see the problem?
It's not about which posts you reply to, it's about which debates you engage in. If the eliminate materialism debate doesn't interest you, then it might give less of a mixed message if didn't keep starting them. If it does interest you, but not the actual responses of the eliminative materialists themselves, then it's not really 'debate' you're interested in, is it? Difficult to understand the purpose of the post, if not for debate.
Quoting TheMadFool
I fully agree. I would like to make this more "real" by adding that while thought has no mass or wave length, it can create wave length and affect the phhysical universe. It is not and does not contain motion. It contains an image of mass, energy and motion. In this sense, it can be said that it is a "kind of energy", but which is not part of the physical universe.
Quoting TheMadFool
I can't answer staightly to this. Mind can be defined and described in different ways and in general it is something much more complicated than thought. It is easier to examine and describe functions, capabilities and in general parts of it separately.
When “folk psychology” is spoken to you, what best describes what you hear, in a narrower sense of the term?
Yes, I do see the point, although there are often grounds for a kind of 'mutual exasperation' in such discussions. There's the expectation that if you're going to criticize the role of science in culture, then you ought to have a good scientific reason for so doing. Allied with that, the expectation that if you do pursue that line of thought, then you must prefer to 'get your information from burning bushes' (I was actually told this recently).
Case in point is that I do think eliminative materialism is unquestionably wrong (and I'm not alone in that). It's an example of the self-reinforcing tendency in this kind of theory - it purports to be 'scientific', although actually it's not, because there's no way of demonstrating it scientifically, it's not a theory about anything objective. But it will only admit criticisms that it will agree are based on scientific premisses. That's the sense in which it is self-reinforcing.
Eliminative materialism exists due to the fact that the intrinsically subjective nature of conscious experience or existence, is out-of-scope for objective explanation as a matter of principle. So it means that conscious experience can't be accomodated within the supposedly comprehensive conceptual framework provided by the natural or objective sciences; it's an anomaly right in the middle of human nature, and must, therefore, be eliminated. Basically what it's arguing is that, if the mind is real in its own right, and not explicable in terms of physical principles, then materialism must be false. But rather that draw that conclusion, which I think is the obviously correct one, Dennet devises arguments, mainly based on evolutionary theory, that are, as one critic said, so preposterous as to verge on the deranged.
And this is something that critics of Dennett have been saying for 50 years - but none of it counts. He simply ignores the criticism, dismisses it as hand-waving. If no criticism can ever really be made, then who is being 'dogmatic'?
Also want to clarify that where I think the problem lies is not with science - for instance, I have zero regard for climate-change denial, anti-vaccination, or creationism - but in taking science as being authoritative with respect to human identity or the human condition.
Obviously 'the human condition' is a sweeping term, but it contains many elements that are - well, let's say, the subject of the Humanities department, rather than the Science department. This was actually one of the major concerns of Wittgenstein's philosophy, according to this essay by his biographer, which describes his criticism of 'scientism'
Quoting Isaac
I presume this is missing the subject 'you didn't keep starting them'. I haven't started many of such threads, but I will often weigh in, usually when the opinion is expressed that humans 'are an arrangement of atoms' and are therefore understandable, in principle, in terms ultimately reducible to physical laws (in other words, physicalism). Again, it's a presumption, often not stated explicitly, but a kind of undercurrent or background to many conversations. And I even understand how this framework must seem obvious to a lot of people, because, as I was told, to question it is 'to believe in burning bushes'. There is the implication that either you accept the authority of science in all such questions, or you're a 'woo-merchant', as I'm regularly called, (even by yourself!) But, I am glad we have had this exchange of views, and I thank you for it.
:clap:
As I was arguing in one of the other threads about psychology (I can't remember if it was the "All psychologists are Nazis", or the "Psychology killed Jesus" thread, one of the enlightening, well-informed and balanced discussions we've had recently), we all have a whole slew of psychological theories. You have a model of how someone will respond given a particular set of circumstances, including yourself. That's what I understand to be 'folk psychology'. It's usually not far off the mark, we've been doing it for millennia after all.
Indeed. This will probably be another such, but I'll come back on a few of the points you've raised. After all, that the point of this place.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think this is true, but what I experience is the less common, but annoying - 'if you don't agree with the 'woo' you must be cold robotic positivist with no philosophical understanding'. The cliches work in both directions.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't find this to be the case. The extent to which I'm an eliminative materialist is entirely a model-based one. I think it's a good default position and the arguments I make for it are entirely pragmatic. I don't, nor would ever, claim that it can be supported on 'scientific' grounds. I think you over group non-woo ans science. They're not the same. What I detest about 'woo' is pretence, not anti-science. I don't care much about anti-scientific thinking. What I care about is people trying to get power over others by claiming to have 'secret' knowledge that only the enlightened can access, and all that bullshit. I don't just mean organised religion here. It goes all the way from the Pope, to some guy on the internet with a condescending "you wouldn't understand unless you've read...". It's all power plays and they piss me off (hence the occasional rant). If anyone came on claiming the Lord of the Rings was all true somehow I'd have no truck with them at all - believe what you like, just don't claim that only the enlightened can then talk to Frodo.
Quoting Wayfarer
No. This is taking the way the world seems to you to be the way the world actually is. It seems to you as if consciousness was intrinsically subjective, it does not seem that way to others. Eliminative materialism doesn't agree with you about the intrinsic subjectivity and then rule it out of scope. It disagrees with you about the intrinsic subjectivity (or about it's nature, anyway).
This was the whole point I was making in the other thread. You claim that conscious experience is intrinsically subjective as a fact about what is the case. Yet you've derived this 'fact' by introspection alone...using your conscious experience of existence...the very thing you just argued was intrinsically subjective...So how exactly does it deliver you facts about the world which you can claim apply to others. It's just your story, the way things seem to you to be. It's not a description of the way the world is because, as 'science' has proven, measurements of the way the world is are observer dependant.
Quoting Wayfarer
See, now this is an example of the problematic arguing style we started out with. Obviously critics of Dennett criticise him. It's tautologically true. It's not an argument in itself to say "some people disagree". Dennett is a Philosopher who is not only just as well educated as his critics, but has won awards for his work. He obviously does not 'hand waive' away criticisms. It seems to you that he does because you don't find the counter-arguments compelling, but again, the way things seem to you is not the way things actually are. Your conscious experience is unavoidably 'observer dependant' and does not simply deliver you an unfiltered understanding of the what is the case.
Quoting Wayfarer
Again, I would have the same issue. Science is far too under-informed to be authoritative about something as vast as human identity and theories are too underdetermined by the data anyway, even if we had all the data in the world. The point is...so is any other approach.
Quoting Wayfarer
And it's good that you do. That's the great thing about these places, we get to hear from people with all sorts of perspectives. It just seemed a little unfair to weigh in as if your insight was worth hearing, but then when others try to explain why they think differently you say "I'm not interested". Seems a little one-sided is all, but I understand you don't necessarily mean it that way, I gather your intention from your earlier...
Quoting Wayfarer
I'd just say, take a look at the responses...
, for example. You're not David here. The crowd are cheerleading for your team, not mine, Dennett's the bogeyman, Nagel the enlightened sage...etc
:lol:
How do models arise in an eliminative materialist model?
[quote=Ludwig Wittgenstein]The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.[/quote]
The definition I'm using of eliminative materialism is the SEP one...
So models arise in the same way as they might in most approaches to cognition. They're a named model of a neural network. Some people have kittens about models of models. If you're one of those then I can't help you I'm afraid.
And how would that be, if you don't mind explaining?
A model is just relation between the data from sensory receptors and the behaviour appropriate to it to reduce the uncertainty involved in any interaction. The models refine themselves by means of pursuing a minimum entropy gradient of fit between them and the external stimuli they're a model of.
It's generated by both the membrane potentials of particular neuronal populations and by the probabilistic mechanisms of neuron firing rates.
Basically, there's a higher metabolic cost to the neuronal architecture which is repeatedly delivering unexpected information relative to that which is expected so neuronal populations tend to develop networks which predict the signals from those beneath them. Part of the way they do this is suppressing noise from lower cortices using backward acting connections, partly they prune synapses within their own cluster whose discontinuity is highest (those that fire at rates in conflict with those from signals of lower hierarchies).
The higher the hierarchies, the more collated the data is that they're dealing with ('My Kitchen Table', as opposed to 'edge';'shadow';'light' etc). So higher hierarchies model the causes of signals from lower hierarchies.
The end result is that sensory data and interoception data is filtered through a system of neuronal circuits which are passing a filtered and modulated version of that data on to hierarchies above them based on an expectation of the cause of the signal. A model.
Cool. Sorta liked that new-wave disco/pop (shudderchokegag) song in ‘85..... “Everybody wants to rule the world”
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Quoting Isaac
Wouldn’t that depend on what one deems authoritative? If science cannot tell me I’m “deeply wrong**” about some mental state, because it is “far too under-informed”, merely from some “ordinary common sense understanding**” of my mind, why can I not then say I am authorized, if my understanding of my mind is substantially more than ordinary?
I think I should go so far as to insist there is an approach by which my mind is granted its own authority, simply from the fact that it is completely self-informed. Even if the authority is limited to a singular domain, it is nonetheless authoritative in and for it.
Which leads me to wonder.....what are some but not all of the specific mental states the existence of which are said to be denied by modern E.M. advocates? Just because, following Quine, it is a fact demons don’t exist, insofar as physicalism successfully refutes some mental objects, how does that refutation make the mental state of thinking demons, non-existent? It seems the only reconciliation is to say thinking demons is not a mental state, which appears altogether quite contradictory, insofar as to refute a thing presupposes the thought of it.
While I agree some mental states can have “no role to play in a mature science of the mind**”, it seems pretty hard to deny that all mental states have a definitive role to play in human activities generally. I mean....if they didn’t, how would we ever be able to distinguish the advent of our own errors?
(**SEP article on eliminative materialism)
This sounds unfortunate. One's world (reality) consists much more than words (language). It also contains images, sounds, feelings, experiences, ... In fact, one's world gets limited only when one tries to put it in words. This is what we mean when we say "I can't explain it in words ..."
Be your own "Wittgenstein" and let him be himself! :)
So your eliminative materialist model is generated by neurons in your brain, like some sort of 'woo'?
Ah. I personally wouldn't go as far as to say science can't tell you you're deeply wrong. I think there are places it can do that. If you were to suggest that you recognise your cup because it's 'essence' is detected by your brain directly, we can come up with a whole slew of experiments to show that you're 'deeply wrong' about that (by which I mean that you'd have to do an awful lot of wriggling to keep that model alongside a whole bunch of other models I'm betting you rely on). There's also a load of stages in between (which is where you and I seem to sit) where I think science strongly suggests things to be otherwise, but nonetheless, alternative models are still workable. Call it shallowly wrong. The only measure we have of anything being 'right' is the degree to which it hangs together with other things we believe. The main advantage science has is that it uses a lot of empirical data which is the sort of data we build our most treasured models about (mummy, food, tigers - you get the picture). The sort of system I think you use is also strongly based on hanging together, but perhaps only with itself, so great for you, but perhaps less useful for understanding others?
Quoting Mww
I wouldn't want to speak for E.M advovates (sounds like a firm of solicitors), but for me things like qualia and 'experience'. I don't think there's anything it's 'like' to be me. Emotions as natural kinds (like anger and guilt) would also be on that list. But I think when we say we're 'remembering' something, for example, something is happening in the brain that answers to that general picture.
Quoting Mww
Yes. 'Thinking of...' is a tricky one. I'm comfortable with saying there's a mental state that could be called 'Thinking of ...', but it would have to be loose affiliation of states. I bet if you were 'thinking of' a daemon, you couldn't necessarily tell me how many toes it had, yet you'd surely say it had toes. One might be of the impression that when we 'think of' something we bring a picture of it to mind. That would be wrong, I think. Rather, we ready other parts of our mind in anticipation, we know the word for it, should we be called upon to speak it, we know the action for it (run, fight) should it actually appear, we know the things it's associated with... etc. I think it's more a linguistic problem than a psychological one. What answers to the word 'daemon' is just that which my use of the word will be understood in reference to, and that's a social enterprise, not an internal one.
Quoting Mww
Yeah, definitely. But note the complete absence of talk about qualia in normal life. It's an artefact of philosophers. The all too frequent framing of the debate about such things as being 'common sense' vs. 'science' is nonsense, common sense wouldn't touch qualia with a bargepole either.
Yes, that's right. The explanation I just wrote is like 'woo'. It's actually magic given only to humans by the great god Vishnu via the medium of dance, only known to those who''ve performed several rituals involving pentagrams and incense. Now that you've seen through it all, I'm really wishing I'd spent the last couple of decades of research siting in my armchair and having 'a bit of a think about it' so that I can really get down to the truth of the matter and brush all this 'woo' aside.
I'm not part of a team nor do I agree with Wayfarer on everything. I just thought it was a well thought out reply. But likewise, I've got to give you credit for being so tenacious and articulate in the way you think about this topic. :up:
Yes. The difference is in the quality of the model. If you have different criteria for what makes a good model, then different models are going to seem good to you. For many reasons, "God did it", seems useless to me - mainly because it doesn't give me anything by way of prediction and doesn't tie in with any other models (did God cause the pen to drop when I let go of it too?) - but others might like it.
Quoting Manuel
I know, I was just being facetious, my apologies.
Quoting Manuel
Cheers.
Okay, so it all depends on what looks good to you.
What I meant to say was our world, i.e. our worldview, is determined by how many words (read concepts/ideas) we know/understand. In other words vocab is a good index of the richness of a life. For example if you don't know or don't recognize nautical terms it means your world is limited to land, you're what sailors call contemptuously a landlubber.
What's 'it' in that sentence?
Why, your eliminative materialist model generated by neurons in your brain. What else? If it looks good to your neurons, then it's good for you, but it doesn't look good to my neurons so it's not good for me.
So "[s]it[/s] {your eliminative materialist model generated by neurons in your brain} all depends on what looks good to you"? Depends for what? the sentence doesn't even seem to make sense.
You explained that your neurons created an eliminative materialist model that looked good to your neurons, but that other neurons, e.g. mine, might create other models, which would not look good to your neurons but look good to mine.
So your model is some kind of noise generated by your neurons, which sounded good to your neurons.
Yep.
Quoting Olivier5
If by 'noise' you mean something initially random that gets honed by selective pressure, then yes, it's possible.
I'm not seeing the purpose of your line of enquiry. Are you just confirming your understanding of my position, or do you actually have a point? If the latter, could you just get on and make it.
The point is that any model for the human mind needs to be compatible with the possibility of its own emergence as a possibly true model. Let us call this the reflexive challenge, because it is about human thoughts being in theory able to explain human thoughts.
Unfortunately, eliminative materialism fails at this challenge because it literally ELIMINATES its own emergence as a possibly true model. The best shot you can arrive at is (in summary): "my neurons made some model of neuronal operation (eg Matter did it), which they kinda liked, and others will make other models (eg God did it) which their neurons will kinda like".
How does that mean it couldn't possibly be true?
It has the exact same chances of being true than any other neuronal noise, like @Wayfarer's or mine...
Well
a) that undermines what you said "eliminative materialism fails at this challenge because it literally ELIMINATES its own emergence as a possibly true model". It obviously doesn't eliminate it if it has the same chance as any other model.
b) why would it have the same chance? That assumes the processes you, I and Wayfarer are using to determine our preferences have equal chance of yielding a true result. Whatever attracts me to particular models might draw me more toward ones which are true than whatever attracts you to models. There's no reason at all to assume an equivalence.
If you've got any clear line of argument, I'm happy to pursue it, but I'm not going to continue with this vague fishing exercise where you just spew out some half-baked critique hoping it'll get a few jeers from the back row.
For one, there's no reason to assume any particular truth because truth remains undefined in your model. What you spoke of was just better fit / control offered by some models, not truth. For two, whatever attracts me to particular models might draw me more toward ones which offer better fit than whatever attracts you to models. It cuts both ways, and thus the probability that your neuronal noises are right(er) is the same as the probability mine are right(er).
I haven't even mentioned truth. Why would a model of how the mind works need to first define what 'truth' is? Di you ask all propositions to include a definition of what makes them true at the beginning. That's quite a ridiculous way to proceed.
Quoting Olivier5
It might, we've not talked about that yet. Any two possibilities are equally likely prior to having any information about either, but we're not in that situation with the appeal of different models, they can certainly be analysed to give some probabilities, we just haven't done so. You were asking about the model, not the factors which attract me to it.
Of course words enrich one's world. This is only logical. But imagine someone who is reading tons of books, he is assisted by dictionaries and has the richest vocabulary on earth. However since he was disabled since infancy and confined to a chair, he has very little experience of the world. Imagine now someone who is semi-literate, yet he is out there in the world, working, travelling, enjoying life, etc. How their worlds would compare? Whose world would be richest and fullest (subjectively or objectively)?
Re your example: One travels a lot and is very often at sea but has very little knowledge of nautical terms. Can you say that his world is limited to land?
Considering now both my and your examples, can you still say that (the number of) words determine one's world?
It does, if it pretends to be possibly true.
Do you require this of all models then? If a physicist comes up with a new model of atomic decay do you say "that's all very interesting, but what is truth?"
He might have no particular problem with the default definition of truth, as the adequacy between a representation (or model) and what it attempts to represent (or model). But if he says something like that:
Quoting Isaac
... I might start to enquire.
What I said is basically the same as what you claim the 'default' definition is.
A 'true' model is one whose outputs (in terms of predictions usually) yield the expected results from assuming the model is true. My model of the pub being at the end of the road is 'true' if, when wanting to go to the pub, I walk to the end of the road and find it to be there as I would expect if my model were true.
I'm not going to rehash the entire debate about qualia, perception, awareness, etc. Suffice to say I consider them to have presented a number of situations in which assuming a neural-based model of models has yielded the results we'd expect if that model were true.
Not everyone prefers models which do this in a wide range of inter-subjective circumstances. Many people prefer familiarity to inter-subjective agreement, so, as long as the model works for them, they'd rather keep it even if people like scientists are finding the model doesn't work in the very specific circumstances they arrange for their experiments. Such a preference is less likely to yield a true model because it fits fewer data points.
Artifact....absolutely. Nonsense....absolutely. Barge pole....ditto.
Quoting Isaac
Agreed. What it’s like to be me, and “me”, are indistinguishable, which makes “what it’s like”, represented by qualia, utterly superfluous.
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Quoting Isaac
Agreed. Empirical data-based models relates directly to experience, and experience is the ground of all our empirical knowledge.
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Quoting Isaac
Thinking of planets doesn’t imply any particular planet, so, no, the thought of a demon doesn’t say anything about its toes. It could therefore be said thoughts of things is a loose affiliation of states, in that the assemblage of properties belonging to the thing are each of them, a separate thought, hence a separate, additional, state of thinking. I could tell you how many toes, but I’d have to think of that number before I could assign just that quantity to the demon, and then tell you. Of course, I could just as well think “hoofed”, or “web-footed”.
Wherein I take my first exception to your comments:
Quoting Isaac
I hold with the notion that human thinking is fundamentally predicated on images. Even while granting human mental images are not pictures in the truest sense, “I can see it in my mind” is precisely the general state of my mental machinations.
Quoting Isaac
“....But suppose that in every sensation, as sensation in general, without any particular sensation being thought of, there existed something which could be cognized a priori, this would deserve to be called anticipation in a special sense—special, because it may seem surprising to forestall experience, in that which concerns the matter of experience, and which we can only derive from itself. Yet such really is the case here....”
(CPR A167/B209)
I submit for your esteemed consideration, that that which could be cognized a priori, in constructing your “ready other parts of the mind in anticipation”.....is none other than an image we insert into the process, that serves as a rule to which the anticipated, must conform.
The stereotypical physicalist will adamantly decry the notion of images, maintaining instead the factual reality of enabled neural pathways, which translates to memory recall. Which is fine, might actually be the case, but I still “see” my memories, and science can do nothing whatsoever to convince me I don’t.
Lots of good stuff in your post, so thanks for all that.
Quoting TheMadFool
Clarification: Words don't enrich our lives as much as it's a marker of the breadth of one's experiences.
Imagine a person who knows the names of each part of a motorcycle and someone who doesn't. Imagine also that the latter has clocked more bike-hours than the former. Now, think of an animal (linguistically challenged). Which of the two people is closest to being an animal? I'm beginning to wonder if animals have it better than us - should we dispense with the linguistic rigamarole and get down to business? Pleaaasse!
By the way, you do realize this conversation is only possible because you have a certain level of command over the English language. Paradoxical! :chin: Hmmmm...Language committing seppuku!
I was doing so well...
Quoting Mww
Actually, I get what you're saying here. I think rejecting pictures wholesale might have been a little too extreme on my part. Just as your motor cortices might ready themselves to run, your visual centres arranging themselves as they would in response to a tiger is, for all intents an purposes, an image of a tiger. I suppose what I was trying to say, if I dial back the superlatives, is just that it's not only an image. That when we say "I'm imagining a cat" there's not just an image of a cat in neural form, there's a whole readiness for 'cat' at least some of which helps us fill in the blanks where the image bit is not so clear. If I ask how many legs your imagined cat had, do you count them in the image, or do you just know that cats have four legs...? That sort of thing might be more what I'm working toward.
I would, in turn though, take issue with "...to which the anticipated, must conform". I'm not sure I see the justification for such a hierarchy. Often, maybe, the picture takes precedent, but the olfactory process is shorter than the visual one, stimuli from there will reach the working memory before signals from the visual centres (which have a lot more work to do) so in a situation where imagining a scene might be olfactory and visual, the olfactory state is going to set the priors for the visual (by which I mean it will determine which model the visual centres will try to fit their data to first, discarding it only on utter failure). We are strongly visual thinkers, but our biology betrays us as mammals wired for scent and sound foremost. Humans, like Microsoft, have simply patched on some new programming over the old code without actually doing the rebuilding required to house it.
Quoting Mww
Likewise - always good to have someone coming from a different perspective to digest one's thoughts on a matter.
Correct.
Quoting Isaac
That reads like mumbo-jumbo. I miss the part where anything mental gets "eliminated". Who are "we", if not some selves?
Quoting Isaac
Look, my intuition-based, ordinary model of myself and of my non-eliminated mind works really well. Why should I adopt another?
The part where certain mental notions get eliminated is the entire canon of cognitive science for the last few decades, do you expect me to reproduce it all here?
That it might read like mumbo-jumbo to you is not something I'm responsible for is it?
Quoting Olivier5
Read back through our exchange. Who initiated, who questioned the reasonableness of whose position? It's not I trying to get you to reject your model, it's you trying to claim mine is unreasonable. You asked about my model and three short posts in launched in with...
Quoting Olivier5
...and likening my work to...
Quoting Olivier5
...Don't now try to pretend it's me attacking your position. I really could not care less what position you hold, it's your claim that mine is unreasonable that I responded to. If you don't understand the arguments supporting it then your general derisive antagonism toward materialist positions gives me no incentive at all to resolve that.
Quoting TheMadFool
I gave you two examples to show you that words do not determine one's experience(s). I can give you a lot more, but I don't see the point. As I can see, you ignored them. So that's it for me.
You do realize that what you're saying is words are a waste of time, don't you? I'll leave you with that to ponder upon.
Isn't the entire canon of cognitive science part of what gets eliminated, and if not, why not?
What? I've absolutely no idea what's lead you to that conclusion so I can't even begin to answer the question. Eliminated how? It's a canon - a body of work - the only way it could be eliminated is by destroying all the copies.
Who said anything about eliminating the human mind?
We've been through this - things like qualia, consciousness (in the sense of 'what it's like'), emotions as natural kinds, essences and forms (in the Platonic sense). I bolded it in the quote right at the beginning of our discussion - eliminative materialism includes the claim that some mental terms have no proper referent, I subscribe to that view. I don't subscribe to the view that no mental terms have proper referents, but I do think those referents are the same thing as neural states. That's not the same as saying the things don't exist. Denying them a separate existence from their material substrate is not denying them an existence tout court.
Yes, that's right. I want to ban tastes and emotions. I don't know why I didn't think of putting it that simply in the first place.
What a waste of time.
Isaac, are you claiming "what is it like to go sky-diving?" is something that needs to be eliminated? Or is nonsensical? Surely you've been asked "what is it like" questions by people before. How do you respond to them? Do you just ignore the question?
No. As Peter Hacker says
Quoting Hacker
Asking what it's like to sky dive is asking for my affect at the time, the answer is "It was great", or "it was really scary". Asking what it's like to be a bat is not intending such an answer. Nagel would not be satisfied with "it'd be fun", or "it'd be boring".
The idea of consciousness as 'something it's like', is the notion that there's an existent thing (what it's like) on top of the goings on in the brain that constitute the experience of doing something. It's that notion that I'm eliminativist about. I don't think it has any proper referent. The experience of skydiving just is the affect, the memories, the anticipations, the self-narrative etc, all of which have a clear neural basis (in that damage to parts of the brain can remove them). There's no additional thing on top of that.
His kind of "eliminative" materialism is not in fact self-contradictory, as would be the more radical eliminative claim that minds don't exist. It is merely tasteless.
Surely there is a subject of experience. The brain doesn't experience anything, unless it is embodied. The reality of the subject of experience is what is at issue. Eliminativism wants to say that the subject can be accounted for, in principle, in objective terms, so as to be amenable to exhaustive scientific description. That is what it is at issue. 'The brain' doesn't sky-dive, or play the piano, or do anything, even though it's true that you obviously can't do these things without a brain. (Although there have been cases of persons with impossibly malformed brains.)
So - the conscious being, the subject of experience, doesn't have a referent *because* it's not objectively describable, not because it isn't real.
Quoting Isaac
Notice that when you say 'it seems to you that ...', this statement assumes there must be a subject to whom something 'seems' to be the case. There can't be a seeming, without someone to whom it seems. That's the fatal flaw in all Dennett's blatherings about 'unconscious competence'.
And yet, we then go on to read that the reality of one's subjective experience 'It's just your story, the way things seem to you to be.' So, the first-person perspective is dismissed as being 'just a story', even though the first-person perspective is required for there to be a story in the first place. Again, a glaring contradiction.
Finally, it is an obvious mistake is to categorise first-person experience as 'a fact about the world'. It is not 'a fact about the world' at all. It's what must first be, in order for there to be any facts about the world. Which is, incidentally, precisely the meaning of Descartes' cogito.
The brain (I don't know about mind) ABSOLUTELY gains in mass and volume just as with any other organ. Stuff (blood, chemicals, nutrients, etc, etc,) go in and out of the brain constantly. The only dispute is how appreciable/measurable the changes are. The brain consumes energy (chemical/biological) in its functionality. Therefore, at different times it has different energy levels.
Thought can be anything from an actual identity to a symbolic identity. We know thoughts have expressions at the level of brain functionality (fMRI tests and such). Therefore, it is also probable that thoughts may fall in the category of matter and energy even if not readily appreciable/measurable by specific machines/systems of mass/volume measurement.
On the other hand, thought (and by extension, mind) could be a symbolic thing like beauty which exists as an aspect of expression/perspective/perception and not necessarily an energy/mass identity by itself.
At the moment, in the brain-mind discussion, there are no definitives.
I did consider that possibility - blood flow is the mass equivalent of increased energy consumption - but that still doesn't solve the problem. I'm looking at thinking, or as 180 Proof likes to call it (mind)ing, as a conversion of one form of energy (electrical) into another form of energy (thoughts). We can do work with electrical energy but I've never heard of thoughts being used to do work. What I mean is the action potential in neurons can run a tiny nano-motor but I don't think the thought corresponding to that action potential can pull off a similar feat.
Putting the word 'surely' in front of your assumptions doesn't magically make them more persuasive you know.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yet...
Quoting Wayfarer
...sounds exactly like a description of it which is purporting to be objective.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yep.
Quoting Wayfarer
Not even vaguely related.
Quoting Wayfarer
It's not a contradiction in any sense. One is saying that your subjective feeling about the way things are might contradict the hidden causes of those feelings in some way. The second is saying that such a perspective is nonetheless necessary. Something can be necessary without it being accurate. Necessity and accuracy are not the same properties.
Quoting Wayfarer
If that necessity is not a fact about the world then what is it a fact about?
No, not objective. But real!
Quoting Isaac
Something you're obviously having a great deal of trouble seeing. That is what this Aeon essay is about. As said, it's the substance of Descartes' famous argument, 'cogito ergo sum'.
Ah! I see a cause for potential confusion between us (not that I think resolving it will get us far, but we might as well). There's 'objective' as in 'true for everyone' and there's 'objective' as in true in the absence of a subject. For me they're indistinguishable because anything which requires a subject to be true by definition is not necessarily true for everyone (we can't discount the possibility of a subject coming into existence for whom it's not true). Saying a claim is objective is saying that it's true for everyone, not that it doesn't require a subject to hold it. So "not objective. But real" doesn't make any sense as a claim. If something is real (to you) then it is 'not objective but realm, but that's the claim I'm making which you're refuting. If it's 'real for everyone', then it's either objective (doesn't require a subject to think it), or you'd need to defend the additional claim that despite it being a subjective truth it is impossible for a subject to exist for whom it isn't true.
Quoting Wayfarer
None of that answers the question. If it's not a fact about the world then what is it a fact about? Shouldn't require an essay to answer.
Very good. This is a properly philosophical question. But think about that. Whatever is true 'in the absence of a subject' is by definition unknown. In fact I'm going to call into question that there is a domain of facts that exist in the absence of any subject.
You said before that
Quoting Isaac
I think that's an over-simplification of the 'observer problem' but it's still relevant to the point.
I think that the presumption that there is a domain of fact that exists irrespective of anyone's knowledge of it is what is described in Kantian philosophy as 'transcendental realism'. This is the belief that 'the world' has an instrinsic or observer-independent reality which we discover or uncover - an observable reality that transcends our knowledge of it. It's the sense that there's a real world 'out there' which you and I both dwell in but which is real irrespective of our knowledge of it:
[quote=Kant, CPR A369; https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/06/16/kant-and-empirical-realism/] The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances...as things in themselves, which would exist independently of us and our sensibility and thus would also be outside us according to pure concepts of the understanding. [/quote]
But remember, we're taking philosophy here, not empirical science. We're dealing with foundational issues in the nature of knowledge. And I think what you're appealing to as 'objective in the absence of any subject' is just the common-sense view that the world is real independent of any act of observation. That is just what has been called into question, in some contexts, by quantum physics; see this post.
Quoting Isaac
It doesn't make any sense to an empiricist. But consider the nature of mathematical objects, such as number. Mathematical proofs and the like are not objectively true, they're deductively true. I think as mww already said earlier in this thread, the metaphysics of being is more like that, than like an empirical proposition. So let's say there's an empirical domain, the domain of phenomena, which is what appears to us; 'phenomena' means 'what appears'. But what is the nature of mathematical reasoning? What of the inner processes of judgement, that we use all the time to arrive at conclusions about the nature of things? I don't see that, and many other facets of reason, as being empirical in nature. That's where I think a form of dualism is defensible.
Interestingly, Kant himself acknowledges that he is a dualist in this passage:
[quote=Kant CPR A370; https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/06/16/kant-and-empirical-realism/]The transcendental idealist, on the contrary, can be an empirical realist, hence, as he is called, a dualist, i.e., he can concede the existence of matter without going beyond mere self-consciousness and assuming something more than the certainty of representations in me, hence the cogito ergo sum. For because he allows this matter and even its inner possibility to be valid only for appearance– which, separated from our sensibility, is nothing –matter for him is only a species of representations (intuition), which are call external, not as if they related to objects that are external in themselves but because they relate perceptions to space, where all things are external to one another, but that space itself is in us.[/quote]
Quoting Isaac
It might, if you're not seeing the point at issue! There is an enormous volume of literature on just these kinds of questions. Many books have been written on it.
Honestly, hand-on-heart, not trying to be confrontational or condescending, there really is something you're not seeing in this argument. What it takes is a kind of shift of perspective, something like a gestalt shift.
I agree. I don't think a domain of facts absent a subject to have them makes any sense at all. I believe in an external source of facts, but that's just a belief which works for me, I think it's the default position, so I question the true commitment of people who claim they believe otherwise, but yeah, just an assumption. Facts are things subjects know.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm not appealing to it. I'm denying it. My claim is that you are appealing to it by elevating the way things seem to you (I have a conscious experience... etc) to the status of a fact about reality. For example...
Quoting Wayfarer
You're taking your subjective experience of using numbers, seeing other people use numbers, thinking, judging etc. and assuming that the way it then seems to you tells you something about the nature of reality. That's doing exactly what you accuse scientism of doing, ignoring the fact that there's a subject experiencing these things and that the act of doing so interferes with that which is the source of such experiences.
Quoting Wayfarer
And you think this is not true of realism, physicalism, materialism... That many books have been written on a subject has no bearing on its qualities.
Quoting Wayfarer
Honestly. How would you defend yourself if I said the same to you?
Outstanding dialogue, you guys. Well done.
Sure it's a waste ... But do you really think that I am going to ponder on something that a Mad Fool tells me? :)
:smile: Remember, I'm only your echo, your reflection!
Thanks... though 's latest effort doesn't quite match previous standards.
"[deleted]"... I don't get it... some sort of metaphor perhaps?... Like eliminativist views on the mind, his post is like, 'deleted' from discourse, man?... Woah...Too deep for my shallow positivist block of neuro-jelly to understand no doubt. I cede.
I double took when I read it myself. The lack of self-awareness is so worrying.
Generally speaking, materialists have very poor self awareness. Which I guess is logical since they don't believe in self awareness.
There is something that it is like to be you (you), and there is something that it is like to be me (me). You would agree? It sounds like you're only objecting about considering what it's like to be things like bats. You concede that "what is it like to be you?" is a question you can answer?
No. The question doesn't even make sense.
It's not that I know or don't know. The question doesn't make sense. "What it's like..." is a grammatical device used to either compare or to describe affect responses to something, it just doesn't apply to 'being me'. The answer (though not the one you're looking for) would be "quite nice, thank you".
Quoting Isaac
Are you seriously claiming you don't know what it's like to be you? You can't see the absurdity of that?
I just explained that. It has nothing to do with knowing or not knowing. The question either doesn't make sense or else I've given you my answer "quite nice generally".