How Useful is the Concept of 'Qualia'?
I have been reading Daniel C Dennet on the concept of qualia. He speaks of
'how philosophers have tied themselves into such knots over qualia. They started where anyone with anyone would start: with their strongest and clearest intuitions about their own minds. Those intuitions, alas, form a mutually self-supporting circle of doctrines, imprisoning their imaginations in the Cartesian Theater. Even though philosophers have discovered the paradoxes inherent in this closed circle of ideas_ that is why the literature on qualia exists _ they haven't had an alternative vision to leap to, and so, they get dragged back into the paradoxical prison. That is why the literature on qualia qualia gets more and more convoluted, instead of convuluting agreement'.
I see the issues of metaphysics and how this is bound up with human perception as extremely difficult aspects of philosophy. The issue of what is regarded as 'qualia' seems important. However, it may be that such an area is a complex area rather than straightforward, so I raise it as an area for philosophical exploration and questioning.I wonder about the whole nature of phenomenology as part of perception, but, at the same time, questions about the nature of reality may need to take on board ideas within empirical scientific disciplines and aspects of the power of reason. It is within this context which I raise the question of the idea of 'qualia', with a view to how that may stand in relation to metaphysics, and the limitations of the human mind in understanding reality, philosophically and from a scientific approach. In this thread, I am asking to what extent is the concept useful or not? Does the idea of qualia fuzz and blur the whole area of explaining life and the debate between materialism and idealism?
'how philosophers have tied themselves into such knots over qualia. They started where anyone with anyone would start: with their strongest and clearest intuitions about their own minds. Those intuitions, alas, form a mutually self-supporting circle of doctrines, imprisoning their imaginations in the Cartesian Theater. Even though philosophers have discovered the paradoxes inherent in this closed circle of ideas_ that is why the literature on qualia exists _ they haven't had an alternative vision to leap to, and so, they get dragged back into the paradoxical prison. That is why the literature on qualia qualia gets more and more convoluted, instead of convuluting agreement'.
I see the issues of metaphysics and how this is bound up with human perception as extremely difficult aspects of philosophy. The issue of what is regarded as 'qualia' seems important. However, it may be that such an area is a complex area rather than straightforward, so I raise it as an area for philosophical exploration and questioning.I wonder about the whole nature of phenomenology as part of perception, but, at the same time, questions about the nature of reality may need to take on board ideas within empirical scientific disciplines and aspects of the power of reason. It is within this context which I raise the question of the idea of 'qualia', with a view to how that may stand in relation to metaphysics, and the limitations of the human mind in understanding reality, philosophically and from a scientific approach. In this thread, I am asking to what extent is the concept useful or not? Does the idea of qualia fuzz and blur the whole area of explaining life and the debate between materialism and idealism?
Comments (580)
I agree with you, but no less a leading light than Galen Strawson seems to support it , so I guess there at least a few solid arguments being put forth in its behalf.
I don’t think it’s very useful.
To me it has a confusing grammar. “Quale” is a noun, so it becomes a subject and we apply predicates to it, without it being worthy of such. One can search forever for what we are talking about and never find it, while the person, place, or thing we should be talking about is thrown out with the bath water.
Really, I thought it was an incredibly simple idea.
Qualia is what a philosophical zombie doesn't have, any interior experience (likeness?) of existence.
The question then is, can nonphysicalism explain qualia? I'd like to see them try. It's only fair to ask this of them.
It's the Switzerland problem. The Allies were happy that the Swiss were not siding with the Axis powers but the Swiss didn't give a damn about the Allies either.
Asking what properties qualia has is no different from asking what properties an object has. You bump into a cup, what properties does that cup have? It has color, shape, and all sorts of other things.
You have an experience, you can then describe all the properties within it by listing properties you experience, like how you feel cold, anxious, tired, all the while seeing, hearing, and doing all sorts of things, all being a part of your single phenomenal state.
Under this analysis, all perceptions would be held unified under a single moment of consciousness, which is what you bump into. See, Kant's transcendental apperception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendental_apperception
Qualia: what’s done when the good stuff has already been done.
Quining Qualia gives plenty of support for rejecting qualia, using a series of examples in which problems arrises when the idea is taken seriously. Have a read.
Some stuff of mine from the previous thread...
Qualia add nothing helpful to the conversation:
Qualia are neither private nor ineffable:
Qualia are ill-defined:
For good measure, here's a measure:
If that were right, then there is no point in introducing them into the discussion.
Your reason for supporting the use of qualia is your odd insistence that we only ever say things about our perceptions, and never about the everyday objects that make up our world. It is a symptom of your failure to commit to reality.
And that's my reason for rejecting talk of qualia: it leads to bad philosophy.
And your problem is that you believe understandable philosophy is the goal as opposed to dealing with the reality that there are experiences of things, which means we have (1) experiences and (2) things, which means we now need to offer descriptions of the (1) experiences and of (2) the things.
It's just an unfortunate reality that reality is composed of two things and this pesky dualism can't be dispensed with simply because it leads to confusion within our philosophical systems, namely that we can best describe our (1) experiences, but not (2) things. That problem is most significant under your construct because the things you hold most obvious are the least obvious. Experiences are the most obvious, and, actually, the only thing we actually know...
"Representationism, also called Representationalism, philosophical theory of knowledge based on the assertion that the mind perceives only mental images (representations) of material objects outside the mind, not the objects themselves. The validity of human knowledge is thus called into question because of the need to show that such images accurately correspond to the external objects. The doctrine, still current in certain philosophical circles, has roots in 17th-century Cartesianism, in the 18th-century empiricism of John Locke and David Hume, and in the idealism of Immanuel Kant."
https://www.britannica.com/topic/representationism
How does this survey result help your position?
He does talk about it, but it is out of the custom that has arisen in philosophy, it's not as if he loves the use of the term. Not implying that you are saying this.
"Qualia" simply highlights the qualitative aspects of life, those aspects which we experience directly and immediately and form part of our ordinary life. That (a few) people consider something as obvious as this as problematic, is embarrassing. Here Strawson is 100% correct, I know of no other idea in the whole of philosophy that shouldn't be less controversial than this. It's astonishing that it can be a cause of controversy.
If the term is troubling, then you can say "sensible properties", or "appearances", manifest reality, etc.
Here's a better account of representationalism:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-representation/
It's the only place you'll ever read it. It's the sole preserve of a clique of modern academics and of no relevance to anything outside it. I would advise staying well away from it.
Quoting Banno
I don’t know that for Wittgenstein it makes sense to say that they are the same thing. What is relevant is how seeing something as a duck rather than a rabbit changes how we go on.
“ In describing this sort of phenomenon, there is a great temptation to talk of psychological states as if they were objects of some kind. For example, we might say that when we see it now as a duck, now as a rabbit, the external figure - the drawing - has not changed; what has changed is our internal picture - our sense-datum. And if this idea were generalized, it would lead to the very theory of sensory experience that is the target ofWittgenstein's philosophy of psychology - the phenomenalist notion that the objects of our immediate experience are the private, shadowy entities that empiricists call sense-data.”( Ray Monk)
The question to ask about changes of aspect is not: 'What changes?' but: 'What difference does the change make?'
A change in aspect can be a change in life.
I don't know of any philosophers who want to use qualia to explain life or deal with idealism.
For Chalmers, it is the explanandum, and he leans toward ontological anti-realism (the belief that we don't have the means to decide idealism vs materialism).
What does the concept mean to you?
Quoting Jack Cummins
As pointed out above (re: Dennett), 'qualia' as a concept doesn't add anything informative to neuroscientific explanations (conjectures, models) of cognition such as they are.
Are you asking about the role of subjectivity (i.e. experience) in existence (re: "explaining life")?
Btw, what "debate"? :chin:
Quoting tim wood
:up:
Quoting Banno
:100:
Quoting Banno
:smirk: :up:
Even Dennett accepts qualia. He just wants to explain it in a particular way. I wouldn't pay much attention to surveys.
I just happened to come across a book in a charity shop today by Daniel Dennett, 'Consciousness Explained' it was written in 1991, so it may not be a representative of his current thinking. However, it has a whole chapter on ideas on qualia. I had not come across the idea until I started using this site and have seen it as area in between questions of perception and aspects of metaphysics of reality. So, I created this thread partly in my own understanding of this area in philosophy and, also with a view to how it stands with other people's understanding of how 'qualia' fits into their thinking. I also do read on neuroscience, because it may shed so much light on the mind, but, of course, philosophy is a bit different from psychology, with a much wider frame of reference, so my own questioning of 'qualia' is about the areas of existence which may go beyond psychological examination and what may be considered as metaphysical speculation.
How many drawings are there in this post? I say one. And that seems to be the view taken in PI pp. 194-196. He does talk of three ways of seeing (would 'talking about' be better than 'seeing'?) the duck-rabbit: duck, rabbit and duck-rabbit.
So yes, a change in aspect can be a change in life.
I do indeed wonder if 'qualia' is 'a preserve ' of certain academics'. It is simply that on a daily basis of reading ideas in philosophy, I keep coming across the idea, and wondering what it may fuzz over or attempt to explain. I am questioning the concept and area, but do wonder about the usage of the term and, how it may be a whole way of academics 'glossing over' complex areas of philosophy, which they cannot really explain.
I definitely find that qualia is an aspect which is used to explain aspects of reality which cannot be explained easily by idealism, realism or materialism. So, when you ask what qualia means to me, it probably comes down to a complex area between metaphysics and phenomenology. It is a difficult, fuzzy area, but I do wonder if the term 'qualia' is used at times as a way of avoiding some of the most difficult questions in philosophy.
One of the subjects dissolved in Dennett's fantasy acid is philosophy itself. Stay away from him would be my advice. Or read this review. He's a fraud, a crank and a charlatan.
I am not really a big fan of Dennett. It was just that I came across his book, 'Consciousness Explained' (1991) while I was out and about today. I was more impressed by his writings than I expected I would be. Of course, he is a big name in philosophy, but I have wondered about the notion of 'qualia' for several months, so I thought it worth raising for critical thinking on a forum. It may be useful for many if the idea, and the perspective of Dennett, is looked at ans explored critically.
The problem may be that in philosophy there are so many 'bogeymen' and it is the point where it is worth weeding through the 'trash' and getting to the important parts. Of course, each person has to decide this individually, but it may be that looking at certain concepts, like 'qualia', may be important in the process of demystifying areas explored by academic philosophers.
Quoting tim wood
You do understand that David Chalmer's well-known paper, Facing up the Hard Problem of Consciousness, was specifically about 'the problem of qualia'? Basically he argues that the first-person nature of experience (awkwardly termed 'what-it-is-like-ness') is something that cannot be described in objective, third-person terms:
[quote=David Chalmers; http://consc.net/papers/facing.html]The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel ( 'What is it like to be a Bat',1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.[/quote]
The point Chalmers makes seems abundantly obvious to me. Yet that is just what Dennett denies. In fact his entire philosophy rests on the denial of just this point. So it is the very essence of an interminable debate. The only way to deal with it is to walk away from it, which I hereby do.
Could you say who it is who uses it that way? As I said, in philosophy of mind and science of consciousness, it's a thing to explain, not an explanation.
I understand. Btw, I don't see what "qualia" (perceptions) have to do with metaphysics (categorical constructs).
Let's say, for the sake of argument that we can; then what would be the qualities of our awareness or experience other than the qualities of what we are aware of or experiencing? Perhaps we can also be aware of our feelings about what we are experiencing. But then what would be the quality of those feelings other than the feelings themselves? What exactly are these elusive quales? Perhaps they are reifications generated by our abstractive reflections on our experience. Or,,,?
I probably came with some kind of bias against Dennett, but I am trying to read his ideas and see strengths as well as weaknesses. Part of the problem for me in evaluating his ideas may be seeing how his ideas developed over time, rather than in one book. Somehow, I have often thought that he was the thinker who suggested that consciousness was an illusion, but having made half way through, 'Consciousness Explained', it seems here that he regarded consciousness as an aspect of the inner life of human beings. But, I probably need to finish the book in order to evaluate, and look at some further developments of his ideas.
I may be wrong in my understanding of qualia, but I have understood it to be more about questions arising about perception and objectivity. For example, does each person experience colours identically, or what lies beyond subjective perception, and the nature of 'objective' aspects which are underlying individual human experiences. I guess that shared experience does point to the possibility that there may be some metaphysics behind human experiences.
That said you are under no obligation to read any particular philosopher; there are way too many for any of us to be able to read any more than a tiny percentage of all the philosophical works in existence.
If you have read and understood a philosopher and you agree or disagree with her, then you will be able to identify your points of agreement or disagreement and explain why you agree or disagree on those points.
I think wholesale rejection of a philosopher, which would only occur to you if you hadn't read their work, is bad form.
That's only if you think the world is as you experience it (naive realism) while at the same time believing the idea that the experience itself is causally segregated from the world itself. It's an inconsistent position.
It just amazes me that people are still asserting that qualia are an illusion when the only way they know of the existence of brains in bodies and their behaviors is via their subjective experience of such things. If the way you know the world is an illusion, then your observations, understanding and explanations of the world are an illusion.
Quoting Jack Cummins
I can't make sense of what you mean by this. Apparently, we use "metaphysics" in different ways to mean different things.
.
Anyway, Jack, here's a follow-up summation of Consciousness Explained – Dennett's 2005 Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (especially the chapter on "zombies & qualia"). I've moved on from him, however, almost two decades ago when by chance I came across the neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger's magisterial Being No One (however, I also highly recommend the less technical, much condensed summary version The Ego Tunnel).
That I can agree with. :cool:
He's a very interesting guy. Not as well known as he should be.
Haven't seen popular work from him in good while though.
[quote=Julian Baggini; https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/i-am-therefore-i-think-daniel-dennetts-hard-problem]His major work Consciousness Explained (1991) was mockingly referred to as “Consciousness Ignored” or “Consciousness Explained Away.” Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, Galen Strawson famously said that Dennett should be prosecuted under the Trades Description Act.[/quote]
Quoting Harry Hindu
:100:
No, Dennett doesn't deny that we feel, for example, orgasms; he's not as stupid as you imagine.
You've never understood my criticisms of him so there's no point in discussing it with you.
What are qualia, according to you?
Quoting Wayfarer
That's a typical response from you; anyone who disagrees with you must not have understood what you are saying. I understand your criticism of Dennett; it's not hard to understand given it's so simplistic; unfortunately it is misplaced, because you are not familiar with his work. In a moment of honesty you declared he was one of your bogeymen; of course this makes sense: a bogey man is a figure towards which one is incapable of rational thought.
[quote=Robert Kraynak]We may still speak of human "souls," Dennett argues mischievously, as long as we understand them to be made up of tiny robots. And we may still speak of "free will" as long as we mean the way our genetically programmed selves react to the environment rather than the rational choice of ultimate ends.
None of this would be very surprising if Dennett followed his Darwinian materialism to its logical conclusions in ethics and politics. After all, scientific materialists have been around for a long time, attacking religion, miracles, immaterial causes, and essential natures. Think of Lucretius and his poem about the natural world consisting of atoms in the void, or Hobbes's mechanistic universe of "bodies in motion," or B. F. Skinner's "behaviorism," Ayn Rand's "objectivism," E. O. Wilson's "sociobiology," Darwin's Darwinism, and even Nietzsche's "will to power." But all of these materialist debunkers of higher purposes and soul-doctrines drew conclusions about morality that were harsh and pessimistic, if not cynical and amoral. Lucretius saw that a universe made up of atoms in the void was indifferent to man, and he counseled withdrawal from the world for the sake of philosophical "peace of mind"-letting the suffering and injustices of the world go by, like a detached bystander on the seashore watching a sinking ship, and treating the spectacle of people dying with equanimity as impersonal bundles of atoms in the void. Hobbes, Skinner, Rand, and Nietzsche saw humans as essentially selfish creatures of pleasure, power, and domination who in some cases can be induced by fear and greed to lay off killing each other. Darwin never spelled out the moral implications of his doctrine, but presumably he could not have objected to the strong dominating the weak or to nature's plagues and disasters as ways of strengthening the species. Herbert Spencer's Social Darwinism - the survival of the fittest in a competitive world - is a logical conclusion of Darwinian natural science.
But such conclusions are alien to Daniel Dennett. He is a Darwinian materialist in his cosmology and metaphysics while also strongly affirming human dignity as well as a progressive brand of liberalism in his ethics and politics. Herein lies the massive contradiction of his system of thought. He boldly proclaims that we live in an accidental universe without divine and natural support for the special dignity of man as a species or as individuals; yet he retains a sentimental attachment to liberal-democratic values that lead him to affirm a humane society that respects the rights of persons and protects the weak from exploitation by the strong and from other injustices. He also objects to B. F. Skinner and the sociobiologists for reducing man to the desires for pleasure, power, and procreation. And he condemns Social Darwinism as "an odious misapplication of Darwin's thinking" and expresses outrage at child abuse, the exploitation of women, and President Bush's attempt to rewrite the Geneva Convention's definition of torture as violations of personal dignity. In short, he is a conventional political liberal of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, type whose moral doctrine is a version of neo-Kantian liberalism that assumes the inherent worth and dignity of every human being. But none of this follows logically from his Darwinian materialism and it even contradicts it, which means Dennett's humane liberalism is a blind leap of faith that is just as dogmatic as the religious faith he deplores.[/quote]
The components of knowledge. What form does your knowledge take? When you say that you know something what are you pointing to? How do you know you know something?
When I look at your brain, is my perspective of your brain first person or third person? Is my perspective of your mind first person or third person?
First person.
Quoting Janus
I'm not sure what you mean by "perspective" then if you seem to be attributing it to something independent of a sensory information processing system. There can be no such thing as a perspective independent of some sensory information processing system. In a sense, there are only first-person perspectives with perspectives being a informational structure composed of information about the world relative to the self. Third-person perspectives are simulated first-person perspectives.
Quoting 180 Proof
All he does is talk about how the brain models the world without addressing how the model relates to the brain itself - why the model is composed of entirely different stuff from the first person perspective (the mind and its qualia) as opposed to the third person (the brain and its neurons).
Strangely, I am not stumped by this question, but I don't think I'll bother to try and explain why.
The long and short is, there are no 'beings' as such. What we take to be 'beings' are really just the co-ordinated output of massive numbers of impersonal, unintelligent processes that emulate 'being'.
So, again, why this is regarded as 'philosophy' continues to elude me, but then, large numbers of people seem to think Trump won the last election.
Trump has a lot more fans than Dennett. His is very much a minority view.
"According to Thomas Metzinger, no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience."
How on earth is this supposed to suggest that there's no qualia? Qualia is conscious experience.
Qualia is defined as something that a thing that perhaps doesn't exist doesn't have? That's the opposite of simple. It's elusive, if anything.
Quoting Banno
I like Dennet, and the consensus among the contributors here I'm most aligned to/admiring of seems to be against qualia, but I've never quite grasped the landing of the argument.
When I refer to the red flower, I am doing so as a shorthand for my experience of the red flower. Even in saying "red", I'm not speaking of the energy levels of molecules in the flower, nor the dominant frequency range of light emitted by the flower. I am explicitly referring to something that is caused by (commitment to reality) but not found in the object.
How we get from photons destroyed by retina and currents pumped along optic nerves to my experience is nowhere near fully known. Collapsing the distinction between a thing and my experience of it eliminates the language to ask interesting and relevant questions. We can commit to reality and still ask questions about how it works.
Is there some benefit for you, in the shorthand over the experience? What does the shorthand do, that the experience hasn’t already done?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Quoting Mww
Aside from saving me from prepending every reference to an object with "my experience of", acknowledging the shorthand allows me to ponder how we get from currents along optic nerves to experienced images. (Ditto for all senses.) You cannot do that if you limit yourself to talking about the referent of 'the red flower' only. The flower is well understood. My experience of it is not.
So there's no consensus among professional philosophers regarding the nature of perceptual experience. I guess Dennett would fall under Other as he probably would consider the five listed choices to be some version of the mistaken Cartesian Theater. But that would put him in the minority.
He doesn't, nor does he deny that we're conscious. But what matters is the meaning of the words he uses. Consciousness and feeling for Dennett do no not mean the same thing as they do for Chalmers.
Did you know Dennett used to defend coming-to-seem-to-remember regarding dreaming? It's not a very tenable position considering dream research, particularly with lucid dreaming, but Dennett used to argue that dreams where created as a kind of fake memory as one was waking up.
And why was he drawn to such a position? Because dreams are a great example of a cartesian theater in the brain. You can't simply export the movie to the external world as Dennett likes to do with perception.
I found his book Consciousness Explained useless, as in not making any useful points.
Ya know.....if reference to an object is the experience, or the possible experience, then qualia is itself a prepending, which was the ground of the negation argument from the beginning.
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
True enough, but in certain circles it is as alive and well, talked about and pondered, as it was since the Renaissance. Everydayman collapses it as a matter of course, but he doesn’t ask about it either.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Initially, representational systems authorized that kind of progression, but without sufficient knowledge of the inclusive physiology as validation. Would your acknowledgement indicate qualia are meant to replace representations, as a consequence of empirical knowledge?
I think the collapse we're talking about is hardcore idealism.
If... Is this you introducing the idea, or a mistranslation of mine? Reference to the object is not experience of the object, but a shorthand for reference to the experience of the object. When I refer to the red flower, I am generally referring to my experience of it. "It is red" is a clue that I'm referring to experience, not the purported object itself, since "red" is not a property of the flower, except again as shorthand for its emission spectrum in natural or everyday environments.
That said, I have to correct myself. Just as I might refer to "the red flower" as a shorthand for "my experience of a red flower", I'm also apt to refer to the object itself as "the red flower" as a shorthand for "the (hypothesed) object that causes my experience of the red flower". Then, of course, all references to objects are really just references to mental models, to hypotheses about an us-independent reality that with overwhelming likelihood exists, but that we have no direct knowledge of.
I'm interested in the bit between photons hitting my retina and me perceiving a red flower. Flowers are, to that extent, boring, but experiences of flowers are interesting and maddeningly complex. Properties of those experiences are therefore also interesting, and we have the word 'qualia' for them. Is this a good word? Does it bring with it relevant connotations of some value when discussing experiencing itself? Time will tell. But...
Quoting Mww
... I don't really see it as a contest between likely inaccurate descriptions of consciousness by stroky beard types before the data is in and conclusive. Consciousness seems to involve representation, a model, along with pathological features and errors. Awareness of that representation is experience itself. If that experience has properties, and it seems to, then qualia and representations aren't mutually exclusive*. "The red flower" is such a model, unconsciously constructed based on all sorts of data and processes. My experience of it checks out, and has properties like 'red', and 'flower-shaped' as well as contextual properties. I don't know where these come from or why they seem, but it's useful to be able to talk about them.
*It also seems to me that philosophy has a problem tolerating useful words associated with outdated theories. "Sense data" being another example. Becoming apoplectic at its employment just means having to invent more crap terminology for data we receive via our senses, all because some stroky beard dipshit said incorrect things about it. Philosophers are weird.
The OP asks how useful a discussion of qualia are, and I can't say much time has been spent by me on the topic. I'm open to figuring our how all these hairs are split among the differing choices in the philosopher poll, but I see representationalism entailing some degree of acceptance of qualia. If we admit to a (1) a world and (2) an interpreted phenomenal world, we must admit that phenomenal world has composition and then we must describe those properties some way. What else to call those things and those properties within the phenomenal world other than "qualia"?
That is, it just seems some overlap is necessary among the representationalists and qualia folks.
Oh. I didn’t get that from the statement. I take KK to be very far from an idealist, so I guess that’s why I didn’t make that connection.
Even so, as far as my readings go, the blanket hardcore idealist maintains the reality of experienced objects....how could he not.....yet holds the collapsible distinction to be a concern of that which experiences, and not as much as we, the lesser human experiencers, distinct from our objects.
I wasn't generalising, I just meant collapsing the distinction between objects and our experiences of them in language doesn't seem helpful for talking specifically about experience.
But if you collapse the distinction between perception and object, doesn't that mean the world is the content of perception? It appears to be close to "to be is to be perceived."
I realize those on the forum who advocate this kind of collapse don't mean to take this step, but how would one avoid it?
You can't avoid the implied subjective idealism, but naturalised science can at least accommodate the paradox via the adoption of an irrealist stance; If one wants to solve the hard-problem, deflate one's notion of experience to the objects experienced. On the other hand, if one wants to solve the perceptual problem of how one perceive's optical red, study neuroscience.
The questions are qualitatively different, and so are the answers that are expected. So it shouldn't matter that incommensurable theories are used for the different types of question, except for the epistemological foundationalists who are on a hiding to nothing.
Sure, that would be a generalisation, from how we talk about things to how we think about or model things. I was just talking about Banno's language, not his beliefs.
Quoting frank
I haven't realised that. That is, they don't seem to be trying to avoid that absurd conclusion to me. But you've been here longer than I have, so you'd know I suppose.
Dennett's argument is essentially that reality is physical, so a discourse splitting hairs over every conceivable illusion about the purportedly nonphysical (philosophical zombies, etc.) is superfluous in the pursuit of accuracy, truth.
I don't think Dennett's perspective can depreciate the value of introspective insight, however, and perhaps that's not his intention. When we're seriously trying to express the qualities of what we experience, that has value.
Some experiences can be fundamentally reduced to dimensionality: photons hitting the retina, voltage gradients carrying signals along nerves, colors that take up space within the forms of objects in consort with these brain processes, etc. But some experiences have a nondimensional component, such as tactile sensations, sounds, smells, basically nonvisual "feelings". Yet these are not feelings in the sense of sentiments, but rather prior to the ego. I think it is these nonegoistic, immediate feelings that are grouped into the same category as nonegoistic, immediate dimensional perceptions by the concept of qualia, so it does have a distinctive, nonsuperfluous meaning within philosophical discourse: all perceptual experiences that occur semi-independent of the ego.
I agree with Dennett somewhat when he suggests that talking about philosophical zombies and Chinese rooms probably obfuscates the whole issue when what should really be discussed is introspective insight and, which is Dennett's focus, the physical basis of introspective content. So I almost never use the word qualia anymore and just say "percept", meaning a specific introspective but to some degree nonintentional experience.
Introduction. I hope I didn’t mistranslated. The idea is that an object cannot be referenced in any way, shape or form, without it first being subjected to a method for doing it.
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With respect to what qualia do for you, this.....
Quoting Kenosha Kid
....became this.....
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Quoting Kenosha Kid
So we arrive at a thesis for qualia, in that for you, they provide properties of experiences. “Red” belongs to the experience, “flower” belongs to the experience, “stem”, “petal”, and so on, all belong. Different, but not necessarily contradictory
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
And somewhere in there will be a bridge for the explanatory gap? Talk about a paradigm shift, if so.
Anyway.....I got what I was after: properties of experiences. So, thanks.
———-
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I suppose this to mean making them the same. Not an issue for me, insofar as I hold them to be distinct necessarily, therefore the collapsing one to or into the other, is unintelligible. Collapsing an object to its representation is standard for some cognitive procedures, but representation is not experience. They are that which makes experience possible.
So sayeth the better of the outdated theories.
:up:
Quoting Mww
They _are_ properties of experience, by definition, aren't they? Although I sometimes see people talk about them as if they are _objects_ of experience e.h. "the red flower" is the qualia, not it's redness or flower-shape. I believe this was also the ambiguity with sense-data.
They way I see it, the seeming of qualia has two possible origins, both of which seem viable and therefore validate use of the term.
Data comes in via the senses.
The (unconscious, system-oney) brain integrates, transforms, filters, and annotates that data to build a model.
Then either:
1. We experience (conscious, system-twoey) that model, that experience has properties, those properties are called qualia, or
2. Those models have properties, we experience those properties, experience of those properties are what we're calling qualia.
Which I think amount to the same thing. Somehow or other I'm conscious of the redness of the red flower, whether because the model has a property that is experienced as redness, or because the experience has the property of redness.
Quoting Mww
Yes, especially as it removes the language to make things intelligible.
You may be right.
Not necessarily. Depends on who’s advocating. Dennett, 1991 holds with this, but I think it the most restrictive and the least justified. The literature stumbles all over itself trying to keep them apart.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
....the root of all this particular evil. This seeming, what it feels like, has been around forever, qualia being merely the latest rendition of it. The same fox entering the same henhouse, but through a different hole.
Your experience of what, now?
"When I refer to the red flower, I am doing so as a shorthand for my experience of the red flower"
If "red flower" is a shorthand for "my experience of the red flower", substitute "my experience of the red flower" for "red flower":
"When I refer to the red flower, I am doing so as a shorthand for my experience of my experience of the red flower"
And again, a few times:
"When I refer to the red flower, I am doing so as a shorthand for my experience of my experience of my experience of my experience of my experience of my experience of my experience of my experience of.... "
Of what?
If you are going to refer to your experience of the red flower, you are still going to have to refer to the red flower.
So cut the unnecessary, and just say that when you refer to the red flower, you are refering to the red flower.
Or join @Hanover in failing to commit to the red flower's existing.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
If you want it broken down into simpler pieces, I have done that too:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
There's no recursion here
Quoting Banno
No, I commit to all of reality, I won't cherry-pick. What I don't commit to is the fantasy of direct knowledge of objects.
Then why not commit to direct perceptual access of vague objects?
If you are happy that the flower exists, then we can refer to it. I put it to you that we can refer to two distinct things: the flower and the perception of the flower.
Hence,it is not the case that we always refer to the experience fo the flower.
Notice also that your description makes use of an homunculus. It describes the situation as if one were experiencing a mental model of the flower; but that is not what is happening. The mental model is not something we experience, so much as part of our very act of experiencing.
I think it's me putting that to you
Quoting Banno
Never said otherwise, although in my description of the shorthand way we use language, I originally omitted the later clarified point:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Quoting Banno
I don't disagree about observing, but then I didn't speak about it. I am conscious of the representation. I am not conscious of building the representation. To that extent, then, the representation is presented to my consciousness, which is the humunculus you refer to.
I have been careful throughout to refer to this as a seeming, and the origins of this seeming are interesting, not fully understood, and therefore worth having a language for, meaning we need words for the experiences and not just their objective causes. Whether qualia will be a useful description in the end, I cannot say, but right now since I seem to have experiences and those experiences seem to have properties, qualia seem to be useful concepts.
But I agree it's perfectly reasonable to consider that there's no difference between having a model and experiencing it, if that's more what you meant, but the above is consistent with that too.
I don't know what you mean by "vague objects". I don't commit to, or even entertain, direct perception of objects because it conflicts with evidence and doesn't actually have any explanatory power, like God or any other daft concept that merely kicks the question down the road.
Qualia are so loosely and variously defined that this will doubtless be so. While few would suggest that there is no such thing as the experience of such-and-such, the question here is the utility of treating an experience as if it were an object, to be individuated.
Quoting Marchesk
Yep. The point of citing the survey was simply to show how little acceptance there is of qualia in the community. That in answer to @Jack Cummins question as to their usefulness. Were they more useful, one might expect greater acceptance.
That strikes me as question-begging. No, you are conscious of the flower. It is not until you have studied philosophy that you might mistakenly come to think of yourself as conscious of a model of the flower.
Again, the model is part of your being aware of the flower.
But consider this: when you pick the flower, it is the flower that has it's stem broken, not the model. The model does not have a stem.
I commit to its existing. I've not argued for idealism.
That makes no sense. I am conscious of what I'm conscious of. Whether I'm mistaken about what it is is irrelevant to what I'm conscious of.
Quoting Banno
The model is not constructed consciously.
Quoting Banno
This sort of error is more likely to be made by someone who fails to accurately distinguish between a hypothesised object and their phenomenal experience than by someone who is more careful.
I experience the representation of the complete flower, of the breaking of it, and of the broken flower. An objective reality of the flower remains the best theory for this. Nonetheless, I have no direct, unmediated perception of the flower, only a model built from data. The flower is not interesting: the model, and my awareness of it, are interesting. For that, I need a language to talk about it, which you argue against having.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
On the contrary, it is what is so. Sure, you are aware that you are aware of the flower.
By way of keeping track of the argument, let's go back to the post to which i took exception:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
This is not the case. We can refer to the flower, and alternately, we can refer to the experience of the flower.
Your appear to claim was that when we refer to the red flower we are actually referring only to the experience.
However there is a flower to which we can refer. That flower does not consist in what we are aware of, being independent of our awareness.
Now, have I misunderstood your claim?
Quoting Banno
If that's as compelling an argument for it we're going to get, so much for that.
Quoting Banno
This has already been addressed twice.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
But this isn't the issue at hand. You were not critiquing me, I was critiquing Dennett by way of you:
Quoting Banno
It is helpful to have a more precise language with which to distinguish objects from our experiences of them. My contention was that "qual" is a good, if putative, term that, until more facts are forthcoming, allow us to unambiguously discuss the latter without being confused for the former. I'm not seeing anything like support for the above here, just a lot of distraction. Perhaps we're misunderstanding one another, but iirc my reading of the above is consistent with your posts on this from years ago.
indeed, with no clarification. Quoting Kenosha Kid
See the bolding? Isn't what you are saying here that when we attempt to refer to the flower directly we only succeed in again referring to our awareness of the flower?
Which is only to repeat the same error. Repeating yourself is not presenting an argument.
Again, when you pick the flower, you break the stem of the flower, not of anything else. A mental model does not have a stem.
Again, you are assuming a cartesian theatre. Again, you are talking as if you were a homunculus. Again, you deny that we can talk about the things in the world, while pretending to do just that.
You seem to pretend to realism while failing to commit.
Keep in mind that his criticism of qualia is distinct from, although related to, is theory of conciseness.
Quining Qualia presents solid arguments against the usefulness of qualia. These stand regardless of Dennett's other musings on consciousness.
No mysteries. Dennett got himself taken very seriously by two generations of neuroscientists with his philosophical contributions of elucidating vague (folk) concepts which they were using. And the "hard pseudo-problem" was dis-solved by Dennett et al nearly a quarter century ago. (NB: It's only "hard" for philosophers because the explanatory gap is a scientific problem (re: phenomena) and not a philosophical one.) Chalmers' woo-of-the-gaps hustle only dupes incorrigible panpsychists, Cartesians, subjective idealists, latter-day Platonists and some neo-Kantians.
And pretending like the cup is indistinct from the perception of the cup is just pretending to speak of the cup.
The emboldened bit is a straw man. Substituting in your own "clarifications" to critique is unnecessary. And "attempting" has nothing to do with it. Subjectivity isn't a failure to be sufficiently objective. It's the framework within which everything we experience occurs.
Quoting Banno
And again these objections have been addressed. I'm not going to repeat myself as your argument hasn't moved on. This is, like I said, just a lot of distraction and straw-man construction, especially the leap to a Cartesian theatre.
Yep. Is there someone here who does that?
That's
precisely
Chalmers'
point.
Jesus.
So you basically have absolutely no idea what's meant by "the Hard Problem."
:up:
I make that distinction, explicitly*. Indeed, you do not seem to have grasped the simple point that we can talk about both our experiences and the things experienced.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Supposing that the world is only likely is, shall we say, somewhat fraught. It takes a philosophy to make such mistakes. And better philosophy to point out the error.
Doubt is only possible within a context of certainty. Doubting the existence of the flowers, trees, chairs and people that make up your world is not clever, indeed it verges on the mad.
* indeed, since you claim, even in your clarification, that "all references to objects are really just references to mental models", it is you who is not able to refer to flowers.
Quoting frank
Not according to frank, frank. :lol:
It keeps coming back to this, doesn't it? It's like the thing itself vanishes if we are able to have an experience of it.
You're a Chalmers fan unawares.
Stove's gem parodies this: we can only see with our eyes, therefore we cannot see.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
but I guess there's a twisted pleasure in saying it four times:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
If you're gathering:
Quoting Banno
irrespective of what I write, I wonder what you're basing that on. Oh yeah. Straw man building.
Quoting Banno
I'll look forward to that when it arrives, but in the meantime you're mistaking knowledge about experience of a red flower with experience of a red flower itself. Learning that we have no direct perception of the external world doesn't retrospectively change the nature of the experiences we've had. If we do have direct perception of the world, we do so whether we know it or not. And if our experience is instead of a model unconsciously constructed from brain activity triggered by photons, phonons, etc. mediating partial data about objects in the external world, it is whether we know it or not. Knowing is great, but it's not as transformative as you're making it out. I still see a flower in the same way.
Quoting Banno
Absolute nonsense. I can refer to wormholes in the same way as I can refer to flowers. I'm much more confident about the existence of the latter. I don't need proof of the external world to have confidence in my models about it.
But I take it that you now renege on your claim that "all references to objects are really just references to mental models". So there's that.
Quoting Banno
Rubbish, I've quoted it at you three times in response to your "you can't refer to objects" comments.
Quoting Banno
Not at all. If the external world is a hypothesis, however compelling, however confident in it we are, then statements about it are statements about our beliefs in it. You seem to imagine a contradiction between this and
Quoting Kenosha Kid
but they're the same.
Thee's the cartesian theatre.
Quoting Banno
We'd have much more fun discussing Rorty's mirror.
Do you seriously observe no difference between recognising that we don't have direct perception of objects and a full-on subscription to dualism? I get the comparison you're making, but unfortunately it's regarding uncontroversial statements about the brain. There's plenty of examples of the brain doing processing that we're not conscious of that feeds into stuff we are conscious of. I'm certainly not conscious of how photons get converted into an image of 'red flower', and anyone who pretends they are is full of it. Calling it a Cartesian theatre or humunculus is just misleading.
Quoting Banno
Funnily enough, your responses reminded me of the threads on postmodernism I started a while back. Coming from a scientific background, I'm comfortable with the fact that our models of reality will likely always be deficient and only ever be that: ever-improvong but never perfect models. So yeah I have sympathy with the descriptive parts of Rorty (and pomo generally, and a lot of the prescriptive stuff). Probably no surprise there. :rofl:
I'm confused?
I agree. I understand the concept, but as it is something that would be entirely different for everyone under every circumstance, outside of a concept, it seems fairly useless. Ie: When I read discussions on this topic I am rapidly drawn back into one of the more ridiculous classes in which we, the students, were to explore our feelings. We were asked how we felt about something, and then asked how we felt about that, and about that, etc. I think the point of the exercise was to demonstrate that there are multiple levels at play in each moment, however, the result was a classroom filled with confused looking students while our starry eyed instructor looked on waiting for our epiphany. It was most entertaining.
"Think about a duck. How do you feel about that duck? how do you feel about feeling that way? How do you feel about the way you feel about how you feel about the duck? How does that feeling make you feel now? and now? how about now?" Endless possibilities really.
What's that? There's plenty of room in that notion for a range of views.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Me, too. It's just that the model used in explanations of perceptions is very different from the model used in our scientific theories.
We are not brains and a spine; we are whole bodies and whole personas. Nothing will ever be more definitive of us than our whole lives, and something remains to be said for the surface level of things that expresses itself more than is possible to measure.
Obviously, you're not going to find a person inside their brain.
What would that be that we don’t have? I’m seriously asking: what do you have in mind when you say there is a type of perception, direct perception, that human beings happen not to — well, “have” seems an odd way to put — so let’s make it: what would it be to perceive “directly” rather than “indirectly”?
Perceive objects as they are would be one criteria. That means no secondary qualities of the perceiver added on to the perception. It also means a lack of perceptual relativity that indicates people undergo different experiences when perceiving the same objects.
Another would be lack of hallucinations, illusions and dreams, since those involve some mental apparition which is similar to perceived objects. And finally, when it comes to vision at least, that it would work like the ancient greeks thought, and not like what science has come to understand.
It's the assumption of an image between the perceiver and the object that suggests the dualism. That's the Cartesian theater - that we're only ever looking at images of red flowers, never red flowers.
No, this is a misrepresentation. @Kenosha Kid is not suggesting that we're 'looking' at images of flowers, the 'looking' is the name we give to the entire process. What @Kenosha Kid is referring to is our responses. Speech, action, emotional responses, strategies, and more complex mental reactions. These all result from the perception of the flower, not the flower.
You'd have to ask someone who believes we have it, not someone who thinks it's a nonsense. Divinely granted insight? Creeping tendrils of perfect consciousness?
Quoting Andrew M
For you maybe. To me it suggests retina.
Quoting Banno
Not really, the brain is quite like a scientist.
Quoting Isaac
It's even simpler. I'm just saying that perception of the flower is not the flower. Or, rather, experience of the flower is not the flower. (To my mind, and correct me where I'm wrong, perception and experience are not the same thing. Perception is the wibbly wobbly organisation of data into an always fleeting, always updating model of our environment. Experience is consciousness of that model. These might be two sides of the same coin, but still distinct.)
I was hoping you'd show up and harpoon my bubbles of misunderstanding. We discussed qualia before and you were also of the view that the term is not helpful, but you had reasons, not allergies.
Quick catch-up:
- Banno reckons by way of Dennett that there's no need to talk about experience of a thing, we can just talk about the thing, therefore qualia are not helpful.
- My objection was that experience of a thing is not the thing itself, so there are reasons (scientific, philosophical) to discuss the former, and it's useful to have an unambiguous language to talk about it. "The red flower" is ambiguous, because while I probably am talking about my experiences, I could be talking about the causes of those experiences.
- Banno cries 'Cartesian theatre' and 'humunculi'.
So I can see you're happy with the distinction between the perception of a flower and the flower itself (which ought to be trivial). At some point you and I will diverge but can you weigh in on the following please?
1. Do you think we are conscious of the processes of forming those perceptions? (Harder question: at what point are we conscious of the causes of our perceptions? Are we conscious directly of photons incident upon retina? Of currents in optic nerves? Etc.)
2. If we see a red flower next to a yellow flower, would you agree it at least _seems_ to us like there are two flowers with different properties, irrespective of how that seeming arises?
Cheers Isaac, nice to see you back.
As far as I'm concerned - spot on.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Ha! Harpoon at the ready.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I'd have to say yes, but perhaps not for the direct reasons that might at first seem a 'yes' would indicate. I think that the developments of neuroscience (and cognitive psychology) mean that we have models of the process and that makes us conscious of it. I know it might seem like I'm missing the distinction between a putative model of something and the actual experience of that thing but then, thinking about it...what are we saying about our experience of anything? Only that we have model of it.
Consciousness is a tricky business with as many theories as there are scientists working on it. My personal preference demotes consciousness to a fairy trivial logging process, we are 'conscious' of that which we log to memory, experience being merely the process of doing so, always post hoc, always retrospective, we're never conscious of anything in real time, it's the reviewing of what's just happened to make sense of it that forms our experience. Advocates of this model usually use the term 'awareness' in place of where you're using 'conscious of' in order to distinguish it from the more technical 'consciousness' which is merely being 'online', all systems firing etc.
So, at what point are we 'aware' of our perception process? Quite late on. well after it's formed what we might call an image, we need the dorsal and ventral streams (identity and form) to recombine before we can even begin to contextualise what we've seen.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yes, definitely. I'd go further to say that unless we are actually dreaming or hallucinating, some hidden state must be not only causing that difference, but by virtue of doing so, must itself be sufficiently differentiated to do so.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Thanks, likewise.
Actually, what was questioned was this:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
But you have corrected yourself, somewhat backhandedly.
Neither Dennett nor I have argued that there is no need to talk about experiences; rather that replacing talk of experiences with talk of qualia is unhelpful.
Quoting Dennett, Quining Qualia
"Some philosophers (e.g, Dennett 1987, 1991) use the term ‘qualia’ in a still more restricted way so that qualia are intrinsic properties of experiences that are also ineffable, nonphysical, and ‘given’ to their subjects incorrigibly (without the possibility of error). Philosophers who deny that there are qualia sometimes have in mind qualia as the term is used in this more restricted sense (or a similar one)". --SEP on qualia
As long as we're all on the same page, the whole issue becomes uncontroversial.
If perception organizes, what does the brain do? If vision data goes here, olfactory data goes there, is that not organization of data, relatively long after the sensory input of it?
———-
Backtracking, I find you said this, pg 3. I can’t get it to quote because I’m editing here, but anyway....
“Data comes in via the senses.
The (unconscious, system-oney) brain integrates, transforms, filters, and annotates that data to build a model.”
Not trying to be contentious, but I wonder which of the two seemingly disparate iterations you actually favor.
:up:
"I had an ineffable experience."
"Wow, me too! I wonder if we both had the same experience."
"I would think so. One ineffable experience is much like another. Once you've identified an experience as ineffable there's not much more you can say about it. In fact, there's absolutely nothing more you can say about it. That's what 'ineffable' means."
"Was it like a sound or a sight or a scent or something?"
"I couldn't say. If I could say, then of course it wouldn't be ineffable. And ineffable is just what it was."
"Hmm. Well, maybe I was mistaken about mine. Not sure it was truly ineffable."
"Well, you can't mistake an ineffable experience, mate. No possibility of error there!"
"Oh, ok, then it definitely wasn't ineffable."
That's all I have to say about ineffable experiences.
Oh that's interesting. So we have models of the processes of model-building. Perhaps this is pathological, but I am not aware of these processes. I know on an intellectual level that they occur, but have no conscious experience of, say, conjuring a colour from a current, or a shape, or depth in the way that I am conscious of a red flower close to me. Those processes being _why_ I am conscious of them, sure. Having the model may well be the same as being aware of the model, as I said to Banno earlier.
Quoting Isaac
Yeah that sounds reasonable, but that logging process is just as apt to be called a humunculus or Cartesian theatre. I'm not sure how you avoid such accusations if anything precedes that logging that isn't also logging.
Quoting Banno
Again, no, this started with:
Quoting Banno
My contention was that there are good reasons to talk of properties of experience as opposed to objects because they're not the same.
Quoting Banno
Nope, still at it. I think there's a problem here throughout with your representing either of us.
OK, so stop me if this gets too 'new age', but how do you judge whether you have awareness of something? I don't mean that as a philosophical question, I mean it as an actual exercise to do now. Look at the red flower - you're aware of it. Think about the neurons firing from your retina, to your visual cortex, to your visual-spatial sketchpad... What's missing that means you don't feel 'aware' of the latter, what kind of signal were you expecting but found lacking?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Such accusations don't bother me. If people want to model it as an homunculus, then I don't mind. I long ago came to terms with infinite regress, I couldn't progress in my field without it - it's models all the way down!
I agree that we respond to things that we perceive (such as red flowers). But I was referring to KK's "image of 'red flower'". Where does that fit into the "perception" story, on your view?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Sorry, you've lost me! See my question above.
Well I can't speak for @Kenosha Kid's understanding (although I just did in my post to you, so... oops), but I think we can justifiably use the term 'image' to describe what exits the visual cortex. We're already not a million miles away from being able to directly decode the neural signal leaving that area into an actual computer image. Much like I might say "I have an image of my house here on this USB stick"
The ontological naturalism of science refers to the fact that the ontology of science is deliberately left undefined in terms of the perceptual judgements of any particular individual, in order so that scientific concepts can be universally shared and applied by scientists worldwide in a free and bespoke fashion, without laboratories having to submit their interpretations of their findings to the authoritative perceptual judgements of a particular individual. The price of this freedom and universality is experiential under-determination of scientific language, whereby no particular individual can claim to have direct and objective scientific knowledge.
To understand the existence of the hard-problem is to recall the history of the metre. Recall the platinum bar locked in the vault of Paris during the 19th century that was used to define "one metre" . If that platinum bar was replaced with a person whose judgements constituted the definition of "one metre", for that particular person the "hard-problem" of "sensing" one metre wouldn't exist, because by definition whatever the person perceived to be "one metre" would by definition be "one metre".
Eventually, the definition of "metre" was dematerialised for global convenience, and redefined theoretically in terms of the speed of light, changing the meaning of " one metre" from being a fundamentally empirical proposition referring to a particular bar in paris, to being a theoretical term with ambiguous empirical content, a term that was itself defined in terms of other theoretical terms in other units of measurements. In the process of dematerialisation across all units of measurement, scientific empiricism lost the distinction between theoretical and observational terms to became thoroughly aperspectival and theoretically circular.
The dematerialisation of scientific language therefore constitutes buying universality, semantic simplicity and practical freedom, at the cost of creating the hard-problem of subjectivity.
The Hard Problem is specifically a problem for science: to explain the phenomenal character of consciousness. There are those who claim it can't be approached by any mode of human knowledge. Would you agree with them?
Stop, hippy! Well can I turn that around and ask how you think we're conscious of the building of these models? As it's not something I recognise and so can describe. In terms of what I _am_ aware of, right now my phone, my hands, the colours coming from the phone, the feel of tapping the glass, the lingering taste of manchego, quince, and temperanillo, and my gf glaring at me with 'Get off your f***ing phone' vibes. I'm not aware of signals building up this picture.
Quoting Isaac
Yeah, I should probably have just shrugged it off. But there are processes we're not aware of (photons on retina, phonons on eardrums and nerves), and the stuff we are aware of seems pretty mature in that process. We're not logging raw sensory input, it's processed in some way. I don't have a strong idea of when logging starts,I guess.
If I do that, two concepts compete in my mind for attention: the entire visual apparatus (which I conjur up from memory), and the flower (which currently occupies my visual apparatus). They don't integrate, and they don't make me aware of, say, the neurons that are firing right now, just of the genral concept. I know that's what's going on (to the extent of my knowledge), but it doesn't feel "present", it's abstraction I summon. What's missing is actual awareness of the process that goes on right now. I might miss a bee pollinating the flower, while I'm turning "inwards" (and get lost in a loop of metaphor).
Yeah, we could do it as a joint meditation exercise - has anyone got any patchouli?
If I'm aware of my laptop keyboard I feel like it's there in front of me, but I'm also aware of what's inside it, I can 'picture' the processor, the fan, the hard drive and they're real, I can plan to clean the fan by 'knowing' it's there behind the cover so I know where to put my screwdriver. This is a form of awareness.
Now I imagine the signals travelling between my retina and my visual cortex. just like the computer fan, it's behind a cover, but I know it's there. Just like the computer fan I don't have an 'accurate' image of it (I can't even remember what colour the computer fan is, so I just 'colour it in' ambiguously). We might say that it's not real awareness because it's not the actual signals I'm being 'triggered' by, but it's not the actual computer fan either, I can't see it or hear it, yet I'm aware it's there.
Taking it one step further, even without any previous experience to go on (of this actual laptop) I can infer the presence of a fan which I can 'place' in my model of what's behind these keys, just like I infer neuronal activity from my knowledge of how the brain works.
I guess it depends on how direct you like your models to be to class as awareness. The model of your phone is only a few jumps away from the hidden causes, the model of your gf is probably even closer (directly wired in it seems sometimes!). The model of your neurons which make you aware of them took a lot longer a route, via the signal from a poor epileptic test subject undergoing live brain surgery (probably) a neuroscience lab, a few men in white coats, a few papers, a few lecture theatres, an ageing academic on a philosophy forum...
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Then you're not doing it right! (a refrain I learnt from all the best teachers of enlightenment). Seriously, I think it's a personal thing as to what level of "I just made that up" we're willing to accept as genuine. Most (hopefully) won't just accept any old crap, we need the signal to have a kind of 'authenticity' marker (which is why I asked what token or marker you're expecting but not getting when you imagine your neurons firing), what sorts of mental images get that marker varies. My keyboard gets it because I can see it, but my fan gets it too, I really 'know' it's there. My firing neurons...? Just about, on a good day. The unicorn I'm now picturing...? Not even getting a look in.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
That's true, but (my esteemed colleagues will correct me if I'm wrong here) there's nothing physiologically preventing us. There's absolutely no physiological reason why you shouldn't log the output of the forward acting region of your V3 area. "remember that left-right motion we saw the other day...". We just don't. There's definitely some link between V2 and the hippocampus which will affect memory logging in some way, but no-one quite knows how.
That's it. Now walk into a room you're familiar with and see if you have the same awareness of the wardrobe, the bed, the view out the window... I can guarantee you didn't actually receive any genuine photon-signals from most of that stuff, but you felt aware of it, no?
Thanks, that's what I was meaning.
That would be so amazing.
Sure. I think the point here is that perception is never quite naive? I'm not sure.
"Same awareness": Same as what? I wasn't actually looking at a red flower, so the thing was hypothetical (and since I have aphantasia I wasn't even imagining anything visually specific, just a - to some degree - bare concept).
For what it's worth, I was just trying to pay attention to the window next to me. Running my eyes down it starting from top left down to bottom left, and then top right down to bottom right. I came away with the feeling that it's time to clean it again, and there's a particular smudge that stands out.
I can't do the same thing for the contents of my hippocampus, for example. I wouldn't know how to even start. It's just involved in what's going on with me right now. Don't know how to "pay attention" to it. When I try, my initial impulse is visual (as I try to use my eyes, before I abort - for lack of where ot look? because I realise it's not a visual "topic"?) - maybe because my familiartiy with the topic (however sketchy) mostly involves reading and looking at pictures? It feels like I'm aware of what's going on in my head in somewhat the same way that I'm aware there are platypuses in Australia. External stuff experienced in the past; no situationally present trigger or connection. If I apply neuroscientific knowledge to myself then I objectify myself, and it's all theoretic.
When you say decode, do you mean with loss? If so, what would be lost?
Is the sense of having a certain vantage point also part of the model? IOW, is the sense of separation between viewer and scene a construction too? Because this is related to a sense of unique identity and reflection on perception itself.
Or: why are we aware of perception? Is that an accident of the whole process? Or does it have a functional aspect? Or both?
^ A pertinent sample, but replying to whole.
Yeah I thought we'd get onto this. Then I say, but there's a difference between me passively seeing something I cannot help but see on the one hand, and me either actively conjecturing or remembering by association some facts about what I see. And then I think you say that that's all we're doing anyway when constructing these representations. When we see a red flower, we're remembering and conjecturing based on past experience of other flowers, other red things, and everything else for that matter. Brains are scientists!.
We end up unable to avoid early learning, which is also hard. But still, that's a lot of stuff going on that we don't seem aware of. Pattern-recognition, memory retrieval, that sort of thing, such that whatever I'm seeing _seems_ to come to me fully formed. It doesn't seem like it would benefit from deliberation.
Quoting Isaac
Again, efficiency I would imagine. It's much better for me to make decisions based on integrated, annotated, coloured-in if you will information. Same reason we do feature extraction and dimensionality reduction as part of preprocessing for training and using neural nets. Having to consciously parse raw data would render consciousness too slow to be useful.
It's the brain that's doing it. Perception is a brain function.
I don't see how watching videos of his lectures would be any different, unless me means different things with the same words when he writes them as opposed to speaking them. I don't see why you couldn't just summarize his explanation on this particular question, if he (or you for that matter) really had one.
Quoting frank
What on Earth does he mean by "self" anyway? Is he saying that there are no such things as individual organisms? If there are individual organisms that make up a particular species, then does a self exist even if those organisms don't have the mental capacity to model states of their body? The theory of evolution by natural selection is based on the idea of competing individuals (selves) with the winner successfully passing their genes down the subsequent generations, thereby improving the specie's chances of persisting through time. Ideas are just as real as physiological traits and they both are used to compete, and selected for or against, in the game of survival.
CEMI (Conscious Electromagnetic Information) field theory can at least hypothetically explain that by locating fully attentive, intention-laden awareness in particularly concentrated EM field/ion channel phase locking domains of the brain, which are emergent within the more diffuse and dispersed phase locking of relative unconsciousness. This is the most plausible model I've encountered, but it has yet to be fully tested and developed. Are you familiar?
If the brain models, what you call a brain is a model, but of what exactly? How do you know that the brain you refer to isn't the model rather than what the model is of? If brains model body states then how do you know that the brain you are seeing isn't just the way your mind models other people's minds? What they are essentially saying is the brains of others that they perceive is their own mental model of other people's mental modeling. It must be models all the way down?
Like I said before, third-person perspectives are simulated first-person perspectives. So if you are going to assert that the first-person perspective is an illusion, then you've just undermined all of your third-person perspectives and knowledge you've acquired by them - which is everything you know.
Another strange inconsistency that I've noticed on the part of the Modelers is that they make the assertion that the self is only a model, and not also what is modeled, yet a brain isn't just a model, but also what is modeled.
Oh.
Ya know.....I’m in agreement pretty much down the line, these last few pages, with minor adjustments maybe. But this.....too far out for me.
It escapes me completely, how sensory receptor stimuli perception in my skin, can be construed as a brain function in my head. Related, of course; similar, maybe, both respect natural law. Identical? Ehhhh.....beyond my comprehension.
Causality for perception is very far removed from causality for brain function.
Maybe I better understand your “collapsing”, insofar as combining perception with brain function, the need for language to make the difference between them intelligible, is eliminated. And while psychologically convenient, it is empirically disasterous.
With that, I’m out.
@Kenosha Kid
@Andrew M
I think we all had the "does separating out experience from perception create a perceptual intermediary + invite the Cartesian theatre criticism" discussion before. Somewhere around page 30 here. @Jack Cummins may find the discussion of the article in that thread's OP useful.
I am reading and thinking about the many replies on the thread, but a little perplexed as there are many responses and it is such a complex area of philosophy. The whole nature of perception in thinking about 'reality', and human experiences raises so much questioning about how human understanding goes, in understanding of what may be perceived and what may be the basis of underlying aspects of 'reality'.
Ah, I understand. I wouldn't call actual excitement of nerves in the skin perception, though. I think we're just using the terms differently. Perception is the brain organising data from our senses as I'm familiar with the word.
:up:
Edited.
This is where things are currently at
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2017/12/30/240317.full.pdf
We need a kind of AI to 'learn' the translation as we go, without this in between step, there's nothing... yet.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Ahh, well that is interesting! I don't know enough about the condition to even begin to discuss how the process I'm describing might affect you I'm afraid.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Yep. Basically (for someone without aphantasia), your images of the rest of your room are constructed that way too, you 'know' where the wardrobe is in the same way (well, similar - I'm simplifying). You're constructing your awareness of the room in part out of stuff you know about the room, not photons from it hitting your retina.
Quoting fdrake
Great question! I don't know enough about it to answer accurately, but, yes with loss (I've actually been shown some of the images, they just look like fuzzy versions of real pictures). As to what's been lost...my guess is there'd be three elements...
1. Some raw data - capture isn't going to be perfect.
2. Some secondary data - I don't know how the team are learning to distinguish data over the time series, which signals are being rejected under backward acting suppression by higher regions. If it simply learnt and re-iterated all the signals the result would be an absolute mess with all the neuronal noise and earlier modelling iterations.
3. Data we thought was visual but turns out isn't - if we ever got a perfect decoding from the visual cortex, my guess is that it would still look 'slightly off' to us. I'd look at a rose, see the picture of the rose I was looking at and think "yeah...but not quite". I suspect we add a considerable amount of embellishment to even the simplest of images.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Oh dear, I'm becoming a bore.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
You'd be surprised. Priming experiments have got a bad rap (quite justifiably! Shockingly bad methodologies most of them), but the theory is not so wildly outrageous. The impact of deliberate thought on image processing is not unreasonable. Here's a not too awful paper in it https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26566137/
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yes, that's my take too, but V2 to hippocampus seems to buck that trend. The idea is that is possibly involved in early stage presentation of expectations from priors stored as memories of early perceptive features. The full paper is here https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.4284/
Like Michael Corleone, “just when I think I’m out, they pull me back in!!!!”
Different senses have different kinds of receptors, so what name covers them all, if not perception?
Not something I'm familiar with, I'm afraid. I will look it up.
It seems the distinction wanted is not between 'direct' and 'indirect', but between 'inferential' and 'non-inferential' -- only those are terms more appropriate to knowledge than perception. And that suggests we're still circling around the problematic nature of empiricism, as a theory of knowledge.
The sensory side of the nervous system uses electrical discharges to communicate with the central nervous system, which is the brain and spinal cord.
If we cut those lines, you won't be aware of any sensation.
Excellent points. Dan Zahavi has made similar arguments against maintaining the neuro-representationalist idea of a veil separating ‘outer’ third personal from ‘inner’ first personal processes.
“ Representationalism notoriously courts scepticism: Why should awareness of one thing (an inner object) enable awareness of a quite different thing (an external object), and how can we ever know that what is internally accessible actually corresponds to something external?
“…it is hard to understand how one can motivate a general skepticism about perceptual experience on the basis of neuroscientific findings, since the latter – to some extent at least – presuppose the validity of the former. The main challenge, in short, is not how we can epistemically get out of the brain, but how we could possibly get into it in the first place. How do we at all know that there really is a brain? In order to enjoy any kind of initial plausibility, the neuro-representationalist account that we have been presented with must necessarily be half-baked. It asks us to abandon our naïve realism, our confidence in the objective existence of ordinary objects of experience, but it only does so half-heartedly.
Since the whole theory is constructed around the workings of the brain, the model must presuppose that one worldly object is exempt from its skeptical concerns and that we can indeed observe and describe the brain as it really is. But if indeed the brain as discovered by science is ‘real' in the transcendent sense of the term, then it is hardly convincing that we stop there, claiming that of all we can see and perceive, only one single object, the brain, is ‘truly real' and not just a representation, perceived as it is in itself.”
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Again, nothing in what I have said goes against talk of the experience of flowers. That's a misunderstanding all your own.
I understand all that, but isn’t what I want to know. Isn’t what I’m asking.
I don't think anyone moves from scientific findings to global skepticism. Common sense tells you that a representational scheme is vulnerable to skepticism.
The idea is that information more or less unconsciously ascends through areas responsible for particular processes such as recognition of lines, shapes, positions, objects etc. in the visual system, then somehow impinges upon a specially adapted neural network's CEMI field where percepts (if you don't want to talk about the quantum underpinnings, I won't get into it) are ultrasychronized on a relatively large scale via phase locking to contribute towards domains of the perceptual field which of course extensively integrate via synesthesia-like mechanisms. But I have trouble discerning where these CEMI fields might be located and thought perhaps you could have some ideas once you're familiar with the theory. That's assuming you even consider it plausible as I do. If not, I'd like to know why.
Yes, but Zahavi’s point is that a phenomenological approach is not vulnerable to skepticism( for the same reason that a Wittgensteinian approach is not).
Right. Phenomenology isn't as ambitious as science, tho.
Also, if you want to comment on my active thread Uniting CEMI and Coherence Field Theories of Consciousness I'd be interested to get your opinion.
Cheers.
It seems a bit of a stretch to me to say the brain effectively contains images from the methods in the study. But thanks for presenting it. I think my grumblings would derail the thread. Nevertheless I've put them in this hidden box.
[hide="Grumblings"]A few reasons:
( 1 ) since the model linking FMRI signals and the extracted feature from the layers doesn't seem to have a neural mechanism associated with it, the overall algorithm run doesn't have a demonstrated 'port to the wetware', so to speak. It doesn't seem established to run in the brain. I think it's thus evidence for the weaker claim that 'it's possible to reconstruct some images from fmri signals' rather than 'fmri signals encode images [i]in a way similar to what is portrayed in the paper'
( 2 ) The subjective appraisal procedure for accuracy had a strange design and metric:
It measures which of two presented images was 'more similar' (subjectively) to the subjects (an ordinal value) and then the number of agreements was presented as a % accuracy. From the set up they described:
Chance is 50% accuracy. Effectively this is a simulation of whether a human could relabel the image generated into the training data corresponding to the type of the original image -eg, inferred lion features with lions when given a single alternative. Considering the pixel crosscorrelation of test features and images was reported as 66%, even mildly increasing the number of comparison images (at the expense of 'complete cases' of comparisons) could very well undermine the claim to 95% accuracy.
If you look at the images, you can do a fair guess of which image is in which labelled category from just the background and colour space (lions are kinda yellow). Willing to bet the similarity is a priming effect of seeing the images on the same screen rather than labelling the DNN's feature as a perceptual type. Eg which of the reconstructed images of subject 2 is a lion and which is a mouse without knowing which is which beforehand?
I'm sure there's an argument there that perceptual feature visual content is not the same thing as an inferred label of the perceptual feature visual content - but that's an argument which should not have to happen. Should've been taken away in the controls of the subjective experiment - or run another to see if people labelling images with categories (is this brown smudge a lion or a mouse?) produces analogous accuracy measurements (and we all know it wouldn't based on the sample reconstructed images).
( 3 ) The experimental design is there to generate test and training data for the neural network, insert bucket of ecological validity concerns here. A person's brain processing is as much devoted to a single image at a time as is possible and they are stationary.
( 4 )
Gives me the willies - is it normal to manipulate the test data in a manner you didn't do to the training data? Effectively what's been inferred on is the average FMRI space-time series, but the model was fit on non-averaged ones. At what point would that decision be made? Is it standard? Did I misread it? [/hide]
Therefore,
This is of course a misuse of "looking at". What the rest of the brain is doing is using what is provided by the visual cortex. "Looking at" involves objects, light, eyes, visual cortex and the rest fo the brain working together.
Quoting Banno
Well said. But would you allow "at an image in the retina"?
Isn't that the thin end of the wedge?
I wonder so much about the retina and the brain in the whole process of perception. Personally, I have been to eye clinics, with a variety of eye problems and some unusual aspects showing up in eye scans. This was one of the underlying factors which lead me to consider the nature of perception and its physical basis. The eyes and the brain may say so much about the process of perception, including aspects of psychology and philosophy.
Yes, the idea of the retina may be extremely important in the understanding of brain processes. I had never thought about it all until I was told that I had some underlying retinal abnormalities and read about how the retina is part of the brain. This lead me to wonder to what extent is the whole process of thinking and interpretation of experiences linked to the process of perception. It may be asked to what extent do the aspects of sensory awareness are influenced by cognitive aspects of understanding, or vice versa?
Cameras are interesting as a way of captivating pictures and it may be that the whole process of recording of images and sounds is important here. It may be important in understanding the way in which ideas and images are stored and transmitted as aspects of what may be understood as 'mind', and human experiences , and this may have some significance in what may be the inbetween area, referred to in the idea of 'qualia'.
Did Dennett say that was why he posited that dreams are "coming-to-seem-to-remember"? We all know there is, for example, a visual field and that it is produced in the cerebral cortex.We all know we can visualize things and remember things, so why would the fact that we dream necessitate a "Cartesian theatre". type explanation?
What wedge?
The problem is that proponents of "qualia" end up saying that we don't experience the flower at at, but that we experience only "quales" that represent it instead.
Helen Keller was such an interesting example of many issues which defy conventional understanding of the nature of perception, its limitations and the furthest scope of possibilities. It may be that so many of what is taken for granted is the mere basics, and writers like Oliver Sacks may depict more unusual feats of the human mind and perception.
This is confused. You are not conscious of a representation, you are conscious of a flower. And it is not a representation in any case, but a presentation (a re-presentation refers to something which has been previously presented, but the flower has not been previously presented, except in different presentations of it). The flower is presented to your consciousness. The flower displays its qualities; which you can then talk about.
So, you think we are better able to see (and I don't mean understand, but simply see) the world today than the ancients were, on account of our "better models"? I have a better model of a flower today than the ancients did, so I can see it more clearly?
The 'representation' wedge.
Quoting bongo fury
The external world is not an "hypothesis", but is where we live every day.
If all we know are "models" then we know nothing about perception because when we study the eye, the nervous system and the brain we are not really studying those at all, but we are merely studying "models" of some unknown things that appear as eye, nervous system and brain. The irony is that it is on the basis of thinking that we are studying the actual, eye, nervous system and brain, that some conclude that all we perceive are models.
jamalrob actually did a pretty good piece on this way back
http://articles.thephilosophyforum.com/posts/the-argument-for-indirect-realism/
In the eyeball of the homunculus, where it's processed into another representation that's recognized by the second homunculus, and so on.
We do re-present what directly hits our eyes and ears into an intelligible image that we can understand. We take whatever is "out there" and make intelligible.
If we didn't "re-present", we would have no world and no cognition. Cognition is only possible given biological constraints. Or we could be an amoeba of some kind, but we're not.
Call it whatever you like, but the manifest world is the most clear thing we are acquainted with out of everything.
Just because we cannot give an account of how the stuff of physics could possibly result in colour pheneomena or sound phenomena or tastes or anything else, does not mean what's manifest is problematic.
It is only by studying the given that we have science at all, not the other way around.
By the way, I was arguing with everybody/nobody not meaning to pick on you or anything, just to avoid any misunderstandings.
It's just that this topic becomes more controversial than it should be, in my opinion, in terms of doubting that we see colours or listen to music - in some obscure manner to be sure, it drives me crazy.
:wink:
end rant/
I don't have any problems with the way you are presenting (ha!) your arguments here. Like, we can say we directly perceive a river, by virtue of the way we are so constituted.
Or we can say we mediate our presentations and say our perception is indirect, if direct perception is taken to mean that what we experience in everyday life, is what exists absent us. Which makes no sense.
Quoting Mww
Sensation? That doesn't seem right either. I don't think I know the word for it, but I'm pretty certain perception isn't it.
Quoting Janus
I covered this here:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Quoting Janus
No, you have a better model of a flower than you did when you were born, and so can see it more clearly. That's the correct analogy.
Quoting Janus
:rofl:
How is the model "better" ? Are you seriously claiming that I can see a flower more clearly than I could when I was five years old, because that would be the implication of your 'ever-improving' model claim? Or is it not that I learn, at some early stage, to recognize flowers as distinct from other objects in the environment, and once I do that i can see flowers with as much clarity as I will ever achieve?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
That all you got? How can it be right to say the external world is an hypothesis, when we all experience a world external to our bodies within which we conduct our everyday lives, prior to even thinking, let alone theorizing, about it?
Quoting Manuel
Me too!
Quoting Manuel
I agree that it makes sense in one way, to say that our perception is indirect, if that is just to say it is mediated. I also agree it doesn't make sense to say our perception is direct, if that is taken to mean that the eyes are like "windows" that we look out of onto a world that is 'out there' in every detail identical to what we see. It is on the basis of the science of perception that we have come to see that this naive view is mistaken. On the other hand the naive view, for all practical purposes, is very close to our everyday experience, which probably explains why it is so hard to shake.
Can't speak for KK but in a way my ability to see and appreciate (for want of a better word) a flower has definitely improved since I was 5. Given that flowers are not just objects to see but also objects to contextualize (flowers as symbols, flowers as a functioning part of nature, etc) the fullness of my understanding of a flower has evolved. And, if I studied botany, I would see a given flower in an even more enhanced way and see things others might not. Objects can be seen and not seen - if you understand my meaning.
Fully agree. I was remembering a nice line from Cudworth saying "it's as if these objects taunt us", which they kind of do. I mean, we began this journey seriously, back in Greece when people noticed that a stick bends in water!? No, we see it bent, the stick is straight.
Fast forward to the scientific revolution and we see "action at a distance", which doesn't make intuitive sense at all, and it governs the planets, not only apples.
By now nothing makes sense, especially all this quantum weirdness. But as you say, we just can't shake off this naïve image. But if we lacked it, or any version of it, we would have no science.
It's very, very strange.
William Blake's "To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower " ?
So, here we have another sense in which a child might see a flower more clearly, more vividly, on account of not being distracted by all the sophisticated stuff; but that would be yet another discussion.
Quoting Manuel
:up: Indeed it is!
Let me help you by becoming apoplectic. Perhaps it isn't all because people are attributing beliefs to you based on past uses of the word, perhaps it's also because how you talk about perception makes it plausible to attribute those beliefs to you.
From what I've read of your posts on perception, it's quite difficult to distinguish what you've expressed from a sense datum flavour 'representational realist' who nevertheless has a very strong Kantian (non-representational) bent ("the external world is a hypothesis"). There's rather a lot of ambiguity which can be pivoted upon in that mixture. It's also quite difficult to tell if you're a direct or indirect representational realist (is seeing an object being in a representation relationship with that object - direct - or is it being in a relationship with a representation of that object - indirect) from how you argue.
In that regard, it's quite difficult (for me) to distinguish what your views are from the 'stroky beard dipshit views' about sense data. I take it on some amount of faith that you don't believe in them in the standard sense (copied from SEP).
But yeah, never managed to understand how your view is distinct from a vanilla indirect realism with qualia thrown in, even though I've seen you disavow the usual term meanings.
It is so odd, that the precursor to the human cognitive system, the mere transformation of one kind of energy into another, in a measly five modes of operation, in a near one-to-one correspondence, fully observable and reproducible......finds itself relegated to a non-entity. The exact opposite of what natural science is meant to do, but theoretical psychology grants because it just doesn’t know any better.
There’s no explanatory gap in sensibility, yet it finds itself forcefully conjoined to that which has one. What sense does that make to anybody?
Anybody????
Ref:
Perception is a brain function.
— Kenosha Kid
Can you put that more simply?
Mr. Mww, nice seeing you puzzled for a change. :cool:
No explanatory gap in sensibility? Well the senses themselves don't cogitate. So there's no puzzle by itself here.
With cognition, problems do arise. Why do we have these senses and not other ones? Why not just have cognition alone?
Most importantly, why is that what we sense differs so much from the phenomena that causes the sensing. Such as photons hitting the eye, looking red and blue. Or vibrations in the air sounding like intelligible words or music.
Vibrating matter feeling like clay, or wood, etc. , etc.
So yeah, it doesn't make sense from this perspective.
You likely don't have a better model than the ancients. You have a flower, they had a flower. Both used eyes to "see" it. Perhaps your vision is better, clearer lens perhaps? That would allow you to see it better than the ancients.
My vision is fading, Five year old me would definitely see the flower better: better equipment. However, I have more experience with flowers, so I am better able to create a flower in my mind than five year old me. So which flower is more real, that which is "seen" in the yard, or that which is "seen" in my mind?
HA!!!
No.
Wait. Are you serious? I can’t tell.
I'm just not following.
Sorry. What?
I get you. I'd explain it as: I don't adopt a position for the sake of adopting a position. That is, I don't subscribe wholesale to philosophical positions. I try to learn about how things work and build up an understanding that way. If that ends up being in accordance with a preexisting philosophical stance, great. If not, also great. I'm not pushing a hidden agenda or anything. Here I'm just making a case, quite openly, that qualia are a useful concept, nothing else.
Quoting fdrake
Ah okay, indelicate phrasing hit a wrong nerve, my apologies. I wasn't dumping on any particular theory, quite the opposite: I was characterising how people react to useful notions like qualia and sense-data. My point was that, whether or not you agree with a theory about a thing should be distinct from whether the concept of that thing is a useful one. Anyone can come up with a 'stroky beard dipshit theory' about, say, eggs. It doesn't follow that eggs are not to be talked about.
Quoting Mww
I don't get this. Are you saying that if I personally don't know the collective noun for something, I'm saying that something is a non-entity? That's a logical leap too far for me and, more to the point, completely untrue.
I gather your main concern is really:
Quoting Mww
whereas you hold that perception is more the entirety of an individual's sense activation? I can find plenty of definitions and usages consistent with the former and none with the latter, but I'm open to whatever you've got.
In Greek these are three different words, so they would look at (vlepo) the stick bent, perceive (horao) it as both straight and bent, and understand (eido) light refraction and human visual capacity that results in a straight stick appearing bent under certain experiential conditions.
We confuse the issue when we talk about perception as if it must follow logic, the law of excluded middle, etc. and insist on determining which perception is ‘reality’ and which is ‘illusion’, as if this matters at the level of language and talking about ideas. It matters at the level of determining action, but the capacity to hold seemingly contradictory perceptions in the mind simultaneously (and without judgement) is the key to understanding.
We are only fairly recently acknowledging the destructive nature of judgemental language, both to the flow and exchange of ideas, and to our temporal interactions with the world. Recognising categorisations such as better, naive, weirdness and sense as value structures under certain experiential conditions can help us to keep an open mind.
The use of ‘qualia’ as a consolidation of conscious experience into definable objects, seems to me a step in the opposite direction.
Believe it or not, I was about to butt in to yours and Janus’ dialogue with, “the senses don’t think and cognition doesn’t sense”, but I figured he’d think I was picking on him....again. So I deleted myself.
————-
Quoting Manuel
We always have cognition, but sometimes we have cognition alone, meaning without perceptions. Any mathematics done in your head, without transferring it to speech or paper or whatever, is cognition alone. Something else that seems to have bit the modernization dust....a priori knowledge. Can’t see it, can’t smell it, can’t measure it, get rid of it.
————-
Quoting Manuel
Maybe it’s as simple as hardware vs software.
.
Funny that you say that, I recently finished re-reading C.I. Lewis' Mind and World Order. He was the person that introduced "qualia" into the philosophical literature as we understand it today, and in effect, he was arguing that these things are helpful in so far as they are guide to actions.
As for "seemingly contradictory" perceptions, I think you are right. Language is good for ordinary use, it becomes problematic when we try to do some kind of metaphysics with it, we force the world to conform to word use, which need not follow.
Quoting Possibility
I agree. And saying that all this is weird is just true, because it is.
Quoting Mww
It's interesting you mention math. I'm going down the rationalist road for the time being and questions arise. What you say is true, but I wonder how such a claim could be tested. In principle, yes, correct.
In practice, as in, imagining a baby locked in a space it can't move or have perceptions nor sensations other than darkness and growing in such horrid environments, would such a person develop math skills?
I guess it might, but I don't know. I think experience here plays some minor role in the flourishment of even basic math skills.
Quoting Mww
Maybe. But it's not clear to me what is software and hardware here.
For instance, the SEP quote @fdrake posted — we already knew that was wrong, at least since Sellars, long before the advent of modern neuroscience. And Sellars is to some degree filling out Quine’s argument in “Two Dogmas”. All of this is either the shadow of Kant cast over analytic philosophy or re-invention of Kant. People just didn’t want to believe that Empiricism had died, so it had to be killed over and over and over again. (Point number one: this attachment to the idea of empiricism is worth thinking about.) If the neuroscientists tell us that we have no conscious access to any such ‘data’ and that by the time there’s something we can be aware of, it’s been scrubbed, munged, filtered, processed and modeled — yeah, we knew that already.
We are told that we have a mental model of — unclear. Not of the world exactly, or things in it, because we are told that everything “out there” is hypothetical. If that means we have only degrees of belief — not knowledge — so be it. But Hume already figured out that reasoning concerning matters of fact is only probable, and he had also recognized that this meant he was flirting with (if not marrying) scepticism. Sorry, but I’m still not seeing anything new here.
What is new is the word ‘model’. I haven’t read the literature, but around here it seems to be considered self-evident what a model is. (Excepting @apokrisis, who believes he has to account for how it is possible for the universe to have such critters in it as ‘models’.) Within the practice of science, in my limited understanding, ‘model’ might as well be short for ‘mathematical model’. (And that’s true even if you’re not doing statistics.)
If that’s the paradigm upon which the psychological term “model” is based, it has a curious side-effect: the traditional candidate (among benighted philosophers of the past) for direct, unmediated perception is mathematical objects. We do not perceive them with our senses but know them directly. Insofar as the models in our brains are modeled on the models of scientific theory, they ought to be — it turns out — made of stuff that is not hypothetical and that (thank goodness!) we need no sensory apparatus at all to understand. But I can’t imagine any of the neuroscience enthusiasts around here talking about mathematical objects this way... (Ha! cross-posting with @Mww!)
I think I said 'baby', but otherwise: yes.
Quoting Tom Storm
:up:
Quoting Janus
Well no, but there wasn't really anything to go on. It was just a flat contradiction. However...
Quoting Janus
I'm intrigued to hear how you think we do that. Because from where I'm sitting, nothing of the external world is, for instance, in my brain. Cut me open (please don't) and there's no aforementioned flower in there being experienced.
If you're thinking some kind of perfect divine insight, okay that's your belief system and I'm not going to try and talk you out of it, likewise for some exotic everything-is-one-consciousness-type belief.
But otherwise there's nothing in my actual experience that contains anything of the external world. We seem (from experience of other phenomena) to receive partial data, which isn't experienced, from our senses, that data is processed in complex ways, put together with other data (from other senses, memories, thoughts, etc.) to create the experience of the red flower, in whatever context. It doesn't come with a verifiable NFT relating it to an object in the outside world: indeed, experience can easily be demonstrated to be misleading or flat out erroneous. Some experiences have little or nothing to do with the outside world, such as dreams and hallucinations. There is no absolute certainty that any object we seem to perceive is as we perceive it, or even there at all. And the contexts in which those objects exist are even more abstract.
None of this is to say I am dubious about the existence of any object that purportedly causes my perception of it. An objective reality is by far the best, in fact imo the only sensible explanation for our experiences, though others have alternatives (such as simulation theory, which still has an external world, just not the one we experience). Nonetheless, I am proceeding only in extremely high confidence in the hypothesis that my experience of the red flower is caused by an external object with certain properties that cause that experience. I might be proven wrong, either about the flower or the external world as a whole.
Not exactly. I’m saying that if perception is a brain function, then it has lost its established meaning, hence become a non-entity with respect to it.
———-
Quoting Kenosha Kid
History. Not gonna help me much, is it.
I didn't get that at all from what you said, thanks for clarifying. Can you cite the established meaning? I'm checking all the usual sources...
Wikipedia: Philosophy of Perception
Perception here "uses", and therefore is distinct from, senses, and the study of it is within cognitive psychology.
From Stanford: The Contents of Perception
(I'm spotting a lot of humunculi now!)
From a randomly selected neuroscience article:
I'm not finding anything suggestive of, say, nerves in skin firing, but not am I confident this is what you mean.
EDIT: And less randomly from Wiki again, citing Schacter's Psychology:
which is what I had in mind.
EDIT-WITHIN-EDIT: Oh there you go. The correct term for sensory information is just 'sensory information'.
:up:
There's also the possibility that sense data don't exist. And a more pernicious possibility that thinking in terms of sense data makes it difficult to compare and contrast rival accounts. Not all accounts of perception have something like sense data in them, and talking in those terms might shroud out equally plausible theories.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
:up:
I get this suspicion too, not that I know much about the philosophical intuitions of neuroscientists.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I think everyone who uses it here treats it, self evidently, in a different manner. For me a model is a mapping of one set of values - the target - to another set of values - the modelled values which somehow presents information about them. Changes in the target should be tracked by changes in the modelled values (A changes correlate with B changes).
To my understanding, when people talk about 'the model', they are imagining that the world consists of set values (so called 'hidden states' or 'external states') which determine its behaviour, and the body models those hidden states to mine useful information out of the environment. There is ambiguity in the use of the word 'model' because sometimes people go interchangeably between the model as the relationship between the hidden states and the modelled values and the model as just the modelled values.
EG, my left foot has a current average temperature (hidden state), which is 'inferred' into a feeling of warmth or coldness (modelled value) through the model, though the warmth or coldness is coloured by considerations of too hot or too cold etc.
I don't think the overall approach talked about is so new philosophically, regarding embodied perception etc. Gibson made similar points in 1979 ("Ecological Approach to Visual Perception"), Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger before that. The discussion about models and representations is even older.
On forum too, the debates cover similar ground about perceptual intermediaries and direct and indirect perception most of the time. IMO the science theory is a terrain of debate in the same way as phenomenology can be the terrain of debate.
I've yet to see anything from the neuroscience discussions alone that are decisive regarding direct vs indirect realism one way or another, though I think @Kenosha Kid, @Isaac, @Banno you and I tend to have this debate in the shadow of the question: "does embodied cognition + active perception tend to favour direct or indirect realism and how?", and the science we end up discussing together might as well be a specific account of embodied cognition + active perception as far as that inference is concerned.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I agree with this a lot. If there's a philosophical contribution for the neuroscience here, it's that it gives a model (hur hur) of how these filtering steps are achieved and how the filtering steps relate to each other. So, in my imagination at least, it's more possible to rule out conjectures because of the 'hows'.
Sure - ‘qualia’ as a term consolidates aspects of experience in potentiality, and can be useful in self-reflection, as a guide to structuring the potential of our own actions. But to use ‘qualia’ in relation to another’s actions seems fraught with unfounded assumptions.
As I see it, ‘qualia’ doesn’t lend any more to the notion of experience except the illusion of consolidation as an heuristic device. It’s like an imaginary number - its value is non-transferable, intangible. As long as all we’re taking about is potentiality, then qualia can be a useful term. But it has no function beyond the value structure in which it forms - beyond this it not only limits ideas, it also ambiguates intentionality.
Yes, I was saying this about qualia too. It may be, in the final wisdom, that it's not actually useful at all, for instance if, with advanced understanding, we build a refined language or otherwise employ a more fit one. However, with incomplete knowledge of how things are, how things seem is a useful thing to talk about, qualia included. Once we can explain how things seem, we can do away with seeming altogether.
Quoting fdrake
But here you're speaking of the theories, not the term, right? Theories are liable to be wrong: they're ten a penny. My question is: does having a name for unappraised but still vivid perceptions help talk about how partially explained things seem? And maybe it does, for instance in the perceptions of enfants, or in perceiving a completely unfamiliar thing. Or maybe it doesn't, or won't in the end. Point is, the criteria for tossing the theory shouldn't be the same as for tossing the points of discussion. If it transpires in the final wisdom that there are no such perceptions, that's the criterion to drop the concept, surely? That's my meaning. Just as I'm not dumping on any particular theory, I'm not endorsing any either.
Which I'm thinking is frustrating to you, sorry, but I'm afraid I'm like that with almost everything. I rarely find theories something to pledge allegiance to, even quantum theory (my old field). When I do, it's based on lots of things (empirical evidence, acceptability of postulates, minimalisation of postulates, rigour of derivations), but we're discussing a field with a lot of unknowns. I prefer to talk about and around the knowns than die on a particular hill.
The lack of definiteness isn't frustrating for me actually. I'm coming at it from the same angle - to my mind even thinking in terms of sense data is quite close to choosing a hill to die on, but without knowing that you've chosen to die on it! I'm gesturing towards one of those 'risk of unexamined presuppositions' arguments. If anything using the concept of sense data lends a non-neutral characterisation to things.
I guess. I mean, it personally doesn't cause me difficulties, but then again, I rarely use the word because of all a sudden conversations like these pop up and are fraught with accusations of vagueness, confusing words with things, dealing with false aspects of the world, denying the utterly obvious and so on.
I personally like "manifest reality" or manifest properties, the given. They likely won't lead to a science as is currently practiced, but it's the stuff of novels, art, delight and so forth.
What I don't see productive at all, is not so much quibbling over the word qualia, but denying that we experience the colour red (like blood) or blue (like the sky) or a beautiful piece of music (Mozart or the Beatles or whatever) and such things.
As I understand it, the point of talking of qualia is in part to make room for our (affective) reactions to our perceptions. If there is something it is like to see this particular instance of red, then I don’t just have the experience of seeing the thing which is this particular red color, I also experience myself experiencing it, am aware of having the underlying experience, and thus can thematize my experience reflectively or respond to it affectively. So there must be an intermediary, a quale, which is not just an artifact of the process of my experiencing things — not just some ephemeral, intermediate step — but an object that I can be conscious of, the end product of at least some phase of the process of experiencing things.
The need for such a thing arises because the way people ordinarily talk about things seems, in some circles, sometimes, to be plain wrong: we are inclined to say things like, “Oh my god! This cake tastes amazing! Here, have a bite!” In everyday conversation, we attribute to objects properties that, we have it on good authority, they do not have ‘on their own’ — coloration, taste, scent, all the exciting stuff in life. We know that taste ‘occurs’ only in the interaction of the cake and someone eating it, so if it is possible to experience a taste at all, this interaction must yield a product that can itself be experienced by the taster, a taste quale.
But we were right the first time. Cakes do have properties that reliably produce specific taste experiences when eaten by the sorts of creatures they were made for. It’s the whole point of making a cake in a particular way, the whole point of treating baking as art or science, as you prefer, of working at it and taking it seriously. (That people have variations in how things taste to them makes no difference at all.) When people marvel at the colors of a sunset, it’s the sunset that is the source of their remarkable visual experience, even if that particular experience is only likely available to creatures who see like us. In short, it is remarkable things that cause remarkable sensory experiences (and pedestrian things that cause pedestrian experiences) and there’s something perverse about ignoring that, and elevating the importance of where (in our brains) and how (via our senses) we become aware of the unique things we find in the world, whether extraordinary or pedestrian.
And people know perfectly well that, having had a range of experiences, sometimes their affective response is ‘colored’ by other factors: “Is it me, or is this coffee amazing?” “You’re in love, asshole, everything’s amazing, and the rest of us are tired of hearing it.” But there has to be groundwork laid for such displacement, experiences of things, just as there has to be for dreams and hallucinations.
Dennett didn't say that. But it's easy to infer from his attempts to debunk qualia and arguments against the Cartesian Theater. Dreams are a potential threat. I don't really understand why we focus almost exclusively on perception when it comes to consciousness. It's too easy to muddy the waters with other perception-related issues.
Dreaming is like watching myself participate in a play. Or playing a VR game, since I have a pair of VR goggles. But it's happening mostly without input from the external world. So it's clearly going on inside my head. I have visual, auditory and sometimes other experiences of sensations that are not coming from objects out there. I don't know how physicalists get around that difficulty. What exactly are dream sensations?
My reading/listening to Dennett's arguments are that he thinks we are the equivalent to Chalmers' p-zombies, except the real world is the p-zombie world, and the qualia conscious world is simply incoherent. So the qualia fans are making the mistake of Chalmers p-zombie twin, except of course there is no other world with a qualia Chalmers.
When Dennett and others like Keith Frankish argue that we're mistaken about consciousness, they're saying there's nothing it's like to see red or feel pain in a way that could be problematic for physicalism or functionalism. Frankish endorses the experience of sensation being an illusion, when understand as something more than it's functional/physical explanation. That's what a p-zombie is. It's being fooled by a cognitive trick. It's just patterns of neurons firing in a way that makes some of those neural patterns think that introspection yields some weird conscious quality.
As such, there is no "redness of red", or "what it's like to see red". There is only the functional role of perceiving a certain wavelength of light or a linguistic label for that ability. Which to me sounds ridiculous, because I do have color sensations. The functional role is a descriptive model, not what I experience. And a color word is not an experience, it's a label for an experience. If you get rid of the weird qualia consciousness, the only thing left is the p-zombie consciousness, with some sort of cognitive distortion or linguistic confusion.
That's why when Dennett tries to explain consciousness, it sounds like he's explaining it away, while wishing to keep the term instead of just embracing eliminativism. When Dennett says of course he's not denying consciousness, he means the functional definition of it, and not conscious sensation.
But what sort of sunsets are we missing out on if we had different sorts of visual systems? We know that visible light is just a small part of the EM spectrum, and the sky is full of EM radiation we can't see.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Wouldn't that be the result of adaptive evolutionary abilities? We find certain things remarkable because it's related to doing things which help us survive. In the future, we might be able to reengineer our nervous systems to find different things remarkable.
Fairness? If the physicalist must explain qualia in physical terms, so too must the nonphysicalist in nonphysical terms.
And to mine it shouldn't be until the thing we mean by it is ruled out. All it means is having to come up with new terminology to describe the same thing in order to avoid association with particular theories, when the thing being referred to isn't necessarily different.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I think this is also doing exactly what I was describing in conflating a concept and a theory about it. Qualia are a pretty simple concept. Blindfolded me, then steer me right up against a red wall so that it's all I can see, and unblindfold me. Then reblindfold me, steer me right up against a green wall so that it's all I can see, and unblindfold me. If I can differentiate the colours of the walls when all else is equal, that's a legitimate use case for the word 'qualia'. I don't need to have a stroky beard theory about it as well: the question is can I refer to it in my experience, and the answer would seem to be 'yes'.
It's precisely this "Did he say qualia? Then he must believe XYZ!" that I find peculiar to philosophers' way of thinking. Whereas if you say, I don't know, 'cosmological constant' in physics, all you're really saying is it's a thing worth having a word for. It doesn't automatically mean you believe in relativity, or dark matter, or inflaton fields because the terminology transcends theories. Very different mentalities.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Except they don't. It is precisely because there isn't a 1-to-1 map between the chemical constitution of a glass of wine or piece of cake and how it tastes that it's interesting. And therefore worth having a language for.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
You also have to be able to refer to it to explain it. Even if the explanation ends up telling us that the thing it's explaining is an illusion, that statement alone is useful.
The physicalist is the one saying everything is X. So when someone points out a Y, it's on the physicalist to explain how Y is really X. So, how is my pain sensation physical?
It's easy enough to avoid this tricky metaphysical issue. Don't be a monist.
I have a really hard time coming to terms with the idea that it only 'seems' like we're experience those things, but are actually performing biological functions instead. I don't know how many, if any, posters in this thread actually defend that 'seeming'. But some professional philosophers sure 'seem' to be making those arguments against qualia.
Seeming is in quotes because Dennett said to be suspicious when a philosopher uses that word.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
That's the thing though, a theory which uses sense data is necessarily different from one which doesn't. Same with qualia.
"I don't believe in qualia or sense data at all"
"What plays the role in your theory though?"
"Nothing at all, even the use of the words is wrong-headed"
"Still useful to talk about, since I believe in "the same things" as you".
It's useful to talk about sense data when you're talking about sense data theories. If you're talking about a theory which doesn't have sense data in it, there's no use for it. It would be like labelling oxygen and phlogiston as phlogiston because they describe 'the same thing'. At the very least, it requires a reader charitably reinterpret what you write whenever you write it.
Which is actually complicated by the other things you write suggesting you do really believe in some sense data theory!
As far as I know, the nonphysicalist claims that qualia can't be explained physically. Well then, can it be explained nonphysically? It's a simple question.
You say everything is water. I say, what about fire? You retort that I need to explain fire non-waterly. Being that it's ancient times, I say I don't know how to explain fire, but it sure doesn't reduce to water.
It's useful to talk about something when you want to discuss it too, not just theories about it or not about it. I don't need a theory of eggs to talk about them, which is helpful if I want to talk about eggs _in.order_ to describe a new egg theory.
I remember once using the word 'teleological' and my interlocutor dismissed me as a Jesuit. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.
I can see why you'd find both equally ridiculous. I don't think this is as ridiculous though. If you're using the word sense data as a neutral term, but you're also referring to it as somehow a neutral entity between theories of perception which they're all concerned with, you're paying the price of distorting the idea to do so. Or alternatively, the price you pay is interpreting theories of perception in general as sense data theories.
Edit: how would you describe a theory of perception which didn't use sense data or qualia in terms of sense data and qualia?
Good point but the nonphysicalist has to admit s/he can't explain qualia in nonphysical terms and now we're in neti neti territory, Where do we go from here, sir/madam?
That second if... I'm not, that's the point, except in response to your more theory-centric way of thinking. We're probably going far too deep into what is essentially a complaint that the term 'sense-datum' has already been taken and can't, for weird reasons, be transported between theories, or between a theory and a more descriptive discussion, leading to a proliferation of terminology and an inability to define clearly where one ends and another begins. But...
Quoting fdrake
An example would be a more complete theory that can account for the existence or illusion of sense data and qualia. This would be as opposed to one that shows that such ideas are purely artefacts of bad stroky bearding.
I’m not sure what you’re saying here, but my claim is that — plausible or not, convincing or not — the following is not simply incomprehensible:
That would be whatever says perception means a thing of its own and not a brain function. In taking exception to your rendering, it is not incumbent on me to supply an alternative, but to argue as to how yours doesn’t work. Socratic dialectics, donchaknow.
Case in point, in your entry to ......
Quoting Kenosha Kid
.....is found no disconnect between saying perception over brain function, insofar as external objects in general actually are sufficient causality both perception and brain function, which implies interchangeability without contradiction. However, in the next.....
Quoting Kenosha Kid
....is found the necessary causality not given in the first, re: certain properties. As these certain properties as assumed to belong to the object, they are not given from brain function, but they are nonetheless perceived as residing in, or appended to, the object as the means of its distinction from objects in general.
This is called direct realism, or epistemological monism.
————
Subsequently, in this...
Quoting Kenosha Kid
....is found that those conditions sustaining epistemological monism are apparently false, insofar as herein it is said there is nothing of those given properties of that object found in the brain. Now we see that it is the case that the loss of, or the non-existence of, the monistic properties of the object in the brain, says absolutely nothing whatsoever about the loss of, or non-existence of, those very same properties given from the perception of them.
The logical deduction from all that is twofold:
The theorem:
Properties never did belong to the object, therefore the loss of them is irrelevant, and, perception of objects is distinct from the brain function with respect to them.
The proof:
Imagine yourself a dendrite, just under the skin. A very young dendrite, perhaps an infant dendrite. At least inexperienced. You know what your job is, but haven’t yet had a chance to impress the boss. You know, His Esteemed Grayness sitting all lofty up there, surrounded by bone and long flowing locks. Suddenly, this protrusion of unknown origin (nod to Eric Bloom, aka, Blue Oyster Cult) slaps you right in the dentrical face. YEA!!! You finally....AT LAST....get to send a message. You’ve trained for this since mamma met papa, but you’re cool....you do your job.
First......What do you tell the boss?
Second......do you, as dendrite, really expect the boss to send a return message saying.....thanks, but I already knew all about it.
Third....if the second becomes the case, wouldn’t you wonder, in your dendrite manner.....WTF am I doing here then????
(Then you get all depressed and pathologically stupid and shoot yourself with an overdose of calcium ions, bursting yourself, taking your cell body with you. Your neighbor dendrites look at each other and wonder as well.....he’s got a point. What are we doing here anyway, if the boss already knows what we send him.)
The intent here is to ask....what is NOT sent upstream?
Yep, I agree. If it seems you are looking at a red apple or listening to a piece of music, you are looking at a red apple or listening to music.
But then let's say you're not, what you thought was a red apple was a red ball and what you thought was music was birds chirping. It's still the case that you experienced these things are a red apple and as music, even if it turns out what was there was something different from what you initially perceived.
The "seeming" language is used as an excuse to get rid of some hard problems, like having experience. Easier to do biology if you can get rid of experience theoretically.
There will probably be 'analogues' of sense data in some indirect realist and some antirealist styles of thinking about perception. There probably won't be in direct perception accounts - embodied cognition/active inference (I think) tends to side with there not being any object like sense data. Dennett also isn't a sense data theorist. Ultimately that isn't because either way of rejecting sense data as a concept rejects the notion of brain states representing world states by some coupling process, it's that sense data as a concept itself stakes out a claim regarding the process that couples mind and world. If you have an entity like sense data or qualia kicking around in your perceptual theory, that will either say things about your theory or about how you view perceptual theories in general. It says things about the abstract lens through which you view perception.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Exactly. Using sense data as you've been doing contributes to the mess. Unless of course you're actually subscribing to or think in rough accord with sense data theories of perception. It seems to me that you think in sufficient accord with sense data theories that you're happy treating the concept as transportable between perceptual theories, as if what a 'sense datum' allegedly refers to is a theory neutral posit.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
There's some phenomenology which does try to account for the illusion. You have MP's discussion of raw sensory data in Phenomenology of Perception, Heidegger's discussion of propositional as-structures in... Basic Problems or Logic the Question of Truth? Even Dennett's Cartesian Theatre concept takes aim at sense data, which is roughly the substrate that qualia predicate (sense data bears qualia), sense data is the video reel for the Cartesian Theatre.
Edit: I'm sure there's others!
If you take MP to be suggesting that either qualia or sense data are illusions, you're using some very limited definition of those terms that might coincide with Dennett's usage.
Doing that just magnifies strawmen.
I ain't. AFAIK he has a pretty realist take towards phenomena, but doesn't take a realist stance toward qualia and their 'experiential chunk' substrates. He has an issue with colour as a property of an experience, not with phenomena and colour.
Take it as a given that we see colors, hear sounds, feel pains and see how to fit that with the rest of our understanding of the world.
Quoting 180 Proof
Not sure how reading what other people write can shed light on your own mind. Seems to me that the mind is fundamental and anyone that has one can reflect on its properties themselves without being influenced by what other people write. I come here to discuss with fellow free-thinkers that can think for themselves and come to their own conclusions, and not only about what other people write.
Source regarding MP's direct realism:
Source regarding MP's disbelief in qualia and sense data:
IE, we don't experience qualia. Under what conditions could we experience a quale?
You're loading the term "qualia" with some sort of absolute independence. MP would say that nothing that's phenomenally accessible to us has that status.
If you insist that qualia must be this odd metaphysically independent entity, you're making the word useless for yourself and those who use it that way.
It remains an innocuous way to talk about the phenomenal character of consciousness for everyone else.
Source?
MP is telling you that perception is organized around ideas. The fireplace is an idea, not something arising from visual data.
If we don't agree on that, we're probably at a deadend.
For what? That MP says perception can't be atomized?
For these:
Quoting frank
Quoting frank
I suppose a very simple species would avoid pain sensations. An ingrained habit from evolution. Unless one would postulate a cognition from the most basic organic entities, which, who knows?
What good is cogitation without the senses? Well, not entirely senseless, but look at, say, deaf-blind people, they can read by only pressing their fingers over bumps on a page and get an extremely rich story out of that.
So the senses can be extremely poor compared with the cognitive reply.
I don't know what kind of source you're looking for. It's explicit in the quote you provided.
I'm wondering what in the world you think that quote means?
What do you think he means by "pure" qualia?
Which quote?
What do you think he means by "pure" qualia?
If you answer that it might help me understand how you're interpreting him.
How on earth do you not see that he's saying that perception is infused with ideas?
It's a unit of pure sensation. Which is a category he undermines repeatedly. Pure sensation I take as meaning intrinsic, nonrelational properties of (hypothetical/criticised) sensory units. Extending the previous P176 quote:
The pure quale would only arise if abstracted from the practical context of experience and the perceptual relationship a body has with its environment. Purity is construed as a lack of investment of the property in an practical or meaningful context - nonrelationality - specifically with a body - being intrinsic.
With the construal that intrinsic as meaning "deriving wholly from internal processes or its own constitution" and nonrelational means "properties that apply only to the object and are one place predicates". The red of the fire in the hearth is welcoming, the red of a house fire is not. MP is articulating a unity between the welcoming feeling and red and the panic feeling and red (and the broader experience they're embedded in).
He very clearly dunks on pure sensation, and construes qualia as the experiential properties of pure sensations - and I agree with you that he dunks on the atomisation of experience (into sense units that bear properties...).
(P53/P54, bold and italics are mine)
Red and green are properties of "the object", what is the object? The fire. The 'perceptual something in the middle of something else' is a body's perceptual relationship inhabting the world. And its red cannot be thought of as part of an 'isolated datum', since such things are 'imperceptible' - ie, they are not perceptions, whatever the conception of red is that attributes it to an isolated datum (red quale to sense datum of fire) according to MP it cannot be perceived. IE, it doesn't form part of his perceptual theory.
(@Kenosha Kid because they might enjoy MP talking about homogenous qualities as unrealistic, like the red wall thought experiment KK wrote maybe?)
(@Srap Tasmaner & @Isaac might enjoy that quote because of how it bears on the use of the word model... do we use models to see, or do we see models?)
This is from the introduction, it's a ground clearing that takes place to orient MP's readers that no, he isn't talking about experience and its properties of distinct experience chunks as people seem to. In fact he articulates holist and embodied/enactive intuitions that undermine those concepts.
Can you source your interpretation now please, frank?
I don't. MP's a direct realist in the sense that the environment of body is the direct object of that body's perception. The 'infusion of ideas' occurs in perception, which is a relationship between that body and its environment. Because there's no intermediary or middle man, perception is in direct contact with the world - the imagining and the seeing and the actions and the feelings all get bunged together as components of a direct contact, rather than having perception itself only operate upon sensory inputs, perception itself contains the processes by which a body elicits and organises its sensory input.
Indeed, we do see colors, hear sounds, feel pain. You speak as if these are distinguishing features of a nonphysical mind. Let's see what the next coupla decades of neuroscience research tell us. Hope I don't die (too soon).
Absolutely. Why were you disagreeing with me earlier? That's exactly what I was saying. MP is saying that a black dot, for instance, can't be perceived in isolation. There has to be something non-black around it.
This is an insight much older than MP. It at least goes back to Hegel. MP is just taking the time to apply the principle to perception. So if he's identifying an illusion, it's that a bit of perception could be independent.
To now claim that he's saying that qualia are illusions, you'd have to make this independence a necessary feature of the concept of qualia.
It most definitely isn't.
I have now repeated exactly what I told you before you started asking me for sources. *pulls trigger on invisible loaded gun at temple*
Hope you have a good day. Stay warm.
Can you please give a source that spells out a candidate holistic conception of qualia that you're gesturing towards?
I don't understand. What's a holistic conception of qualia?
A conception of qualia which isn't the name for the isolated 'red' of the fire, or the 'red-welcoming' mixed quale shorn from its generative environment. Which alternative conception of qualia to the one you imagined I was attacking did you have in mind, and can you give me a paper that talks about it?
You’re leaving out the temporal , or diachronic aspect of MP’s model. figures must appear against backgrounds, yes. But the whole figure-background gestalt ensemble changes with each new act of perception.
Merleau-Ponty explains that to attend to any experience is not merely to shine a neutral light on it, but to articulate a new sense, the ‘active constitution of a new object'. It is to identify a new figure and in doing so, to transform the sense of the previous figure along with its background.
“Attention, therefore, as a general and formal activity, does not exist.” Rather than there being a general capacity for neutral observation, a universal kind of attention necessary for any moment of consciousness, “it is literally a question of creation. “ “Attention is “a change of the structure of consciousness, the establishment of a new dimension of experience, the setting forth of an a priori... To pay attention is not merely further to elucidate pre-existing data, it is to bring about a new articulation of them by taking them as figures”.
This is the first definition in the SEP article on qualia:
"Qualia as phenomenal character. Consider your visual experience as you stare at a bright turquoise color patch in a paint store. There is something it is like for you subjectively to undergo that experience. What it is like to undergo the experience is very different from what it is like for you to experience a dull brown color patch. This difference is a difference in what is often called ‘phenomenal character’. The phenomenal character of an experience is what it is like subjectively to undergo the experience. If you are told to focus your attention upon the phenomenal character of your experience, you will find that in doing so you are aware of certain qualities. These qualities — ones that are accessible to you when you introspect and that together make up the phenomenal character of the experience are sometimes called ‘qualia’. C.S. Peirce seems to have had something like this in mind when he introduced the term ‘quale’ into philosophy in 1866 (1866/1982, para 223)."
The SEP doesn't address whether the phenomenal character of experience is atomic or holistic. We start with this basic idea and then decide whether we can pull the elements of perception apart (whether we can know about a black dot extracted from it's environment).
In the same way, if we're talking about personal identity, we just start with the idea. If we later decide that it's best to talk about Dasein instead of extracting selfhood out into an Aristotelian substance blob, that's fine. We haven't done away with selfhood, just the INDEPENDENCE of it.
I'm actually pretty frustrated at this point.
Yep. I agree.
I mean I know what qualia are.
The canonical example there is the colour of a coloured patch, and they're 'available to introspection', if you read through PP that's exactly the framing MP is taking shots at. You have an isolated stimulus as a canonical example rather than a gestalt one, a focus on introspective scission as a fuel for quale examples (the qualities that 'together make up the phenomenal character of the experience' - together implying an individuating/atomising introspective operation to split the fire's red from the fire) rather than pre-introspective unity (all the figure ground examples, the shadow on a red example).
I thought you would be able to provide me with a relational account of individual qualia, or at least a reference to it. If there is indeed a relational account of individual qualia and they aren't born by an underlying 'sensory datum', I'd be more inclined to agree they're consistent with MP's points.
...with you so far...
Quoting Enrique
...eh?
Quoting Enrique
...none, I'm afraid.
Quoting Enrique
Do you have a citation I could look into?
Quoting fdrake
I agree. I was quite careful to be circumspect about the degree of progress along the road.
Quoting fdrake
I can't do the hidden box thing, so people will just have to lump it. Picking apart the methodology is as least as interesting as the actual topic.
Quoting fdrake
Yes. Agreed. I hope I wasn't read as making such a claim, I'm indicating a direction I think the research is going rather than claiming a milestone has been reached.
The way I see it, if a DNN can 'learn' to decode fMRI scans into something - anything - then it's proof of principle (which is all I think the authors were going for) for a method by which we can develop candidate models. We obviously then need to actually test those candidates.
Quoting fdrake
I hadn't picked up on that, it is weird. Other approaches don't use this method - see Rosca for example https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.04987.pdf which is sort of a seminal paper of this approach (for me anyway - I'm not necessarily up to date with this) Rosca used a dual network (adversarial and variational) which I thought was a standard training methodology.
Quoting fdrake
Yes, but given the relative isolation of hierarchically separate cortices I don't think this would be too disruptive to a generalisation of the results. The regions being examined are very specialised and specific to their tasks. It's not that I'm unsympathetic to the ecological validity concerns, only that I think they're not big enough here to get much in the way.
Of course, if anyone were to make any claims about AI 'reading our minds' resulting from this, that would be utterly ridiculous. But what kind of world would we live in where media outlets would be stupid enough to do that!
https://time.com/5874444/science-of-nightmares/
Oops!
Quoting fdrake
I think that was the point. They wanted to be able to test the network performance by looking at the difference. I don't know how 'standard' it is, but I've seen the approach before. Here for example
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncom.2021.754587/full (where you might prefer the lack of priming opportunities!)
To be honest, I could have picked a much better paper to give the impression I wanted to give, but it was late and that one was the first on my Zotero!
This website has a bunch of articles by Johnjoe McFadden, the originator of CEMI theory. If you want to spend the time perusing them, you'll get a detailed sense for what it's about. Or like a said you can just read my thread Uniting CEMI and Coherence Field Theories of Consciousness to get a summary of the basic idea along with some of my extensions.
It's just this:
"The phenomenal character of an experience is what it is like subjectively to undergo the experience."
That's it. We don't know what causes it. Presently, there is no testable theory of it. Neither MP nor Dennett offer one.
You're pretty thoroughly wedded to the notion that qualia has to be somehow independent units of perception. You're free to stick to that, although I don't know why you'd want to.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
It's perfectly comprehensible. The characters believe they can create a thing that tastes like whiskey. That doesn't mean that one whiskey tastes the same as another, that your first whiskey tastes the same as your second, that whiskey tastes the same to you now as it did when you started drinking it aged 11, or that it tastes the same irrespective of whether you brushed your teeth.
Quoting Mww
If your counterargument is that there is a different authoritative definition, you ought to be able to cite it.
Quoting Mww
That's the opposite of the case. If I was _certain_ that a given perception was caused by a particular object, then I'd be saying that such an object is necessary. The fact that all such objects, indeed the external world itself, are hypotheses, however confident I am in them, allows for the possibility of other sources. Therefore the hypothesised object is _not_ a necessary condition.
Quoting Mww
I was unclear, I apologise. What I mean is that when I observe, say, a flower, there is nothing of the flower in my brain being somehow directly conveyed to my consciousness (like a Cartesian theatre). You're right that my brain belongs to the external world.
Quoting Mww
Btw I enjoyed this very much. I'd tell the boss that I had been slapped and how hard. We're not in disagreement that information flows from nerves to brains. We're in disagreement that this alone constitutes perception. Perception is the organisation of these messages, not the messages themselves.
Quoting fdrake
Your feeling that any such concept brings with it the trace of its theoretical origins and connotations is what I'm arguing against. Things first, theories second.
Taking an analogy with cosmology, it would scupper useful discussion to hold that the concept of the cosmological constant brings with it the assumption of a steady-state universe _because that's what Einstein intended_. It's much clearer to have a healthy divorce between concepts (sense-data, qualia, cosmological constants) and theories. The confusion arises from hauling in the theory uninvited, not:
Quoting fdrake
I haven't "used" it at all, except as directed by your good self. I've asked questions about the usefulness of the term 'qualia'.
Quoting fdrake
Not really, unless "the concept of sense datum itself is useful" is the sufficient accord you're thinking of, which is a very low bar. For instance, one doesn't need to hold that unappraised perception is how we generally see prior to cognition, as per sense data theories. We know that sensory information pre-exists such a cognition, something more akin to @Mww "s notion of perception, for instance.
Ah, yes, another tabula raza know-nothing. Lazy is as lazy does, Harry. You prove my point. :yawn:
Isn’t a concept a mini-theory( fact-value distinction and all)?
Coherence field theory is testable, or at least currently researchable. Look for classes of molecules and biochemical pathways in the brain that are strongly correlated with abnormalities such as perceptual hallucinations of a severity equivalent to those caused by substances such as mescaline, LSD, etc. Then find out the mechanism of action, which is probably going to be some variant of additive superposition with relatively low frequency EM radiation, perhaps by experimenting on synthetic variants in the lab. Simple.
That's fair. Even objects are mini-theories :smile:
:up: Yes, it's an interesting thought experiment, and as I said earlier:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I expect in this case, as opposed to a hellish scenario in which an unchanging red wall was all I ever saw since birth, I probably could. It's not just space that contextualises but time too.
But this was just an extreme example. I'm not championing the idea of pure qualia, merely the means to ask how I experience the red of a red flower.
Yes, these are all possibilities, and they are the sort of thing you're interested in, as I understand it, because you're interested in how that works. And it is interesting. But it's also interesting that bathtub gin + iodine + hair tonic tastes a bit like scotch, and we'll talk about this concoction, itself, tasting like scotch. When we say, "It does taste a bit like scotch," we take ourselves to be talking about that thing, and we're not simply and obviously wrong to do so.
I'm just trying, a little, to hold you back from, in a stroky-beard moment of your own, correcting people -- "Actually, you mean that to you, at this moment, it tastes a bit like scotch." Whether you're inclined to say that sort of thing isn't altogether clear to me.
Indeed, it's interesting even that the second scotch tastes like the first too, even if not exactly alike, because it isolates the 'what it is like' from possible deviations of sensory information. If there were a 1-to-1 mapping, that would be a lot less interesting: same thing in, same thing out.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Agreed, but I've not argued that things taste something like themselves or other things, or told anyone they're wrong to do so. Wrong end of the stick, I think. I'm just saying there's no 1-to-1 map. Our perceptions aren't functions of objects from which we can prove the existence of those objects.
A 1-to-1 relationship exists between cone cells and the sensing of specific colors, a 1-to-1 relationship between the perception of a specific color and its neural correlate in the visual cortex, so why not a 1-to-1 relationship between the subjective color itself and properties of some class of molecules or molecular array in the brain? It seems apparent from the success of science that any alternate explanation is impossible, though the objects will be novel in mechanism of action compared to either the retina or neural networking.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
This makes me very confused. Objects are mini theories, but don't worry about the theories using those objects imports to discourse?
I'm assuming because all objects belong to a system of value and meaning.
Yes! That bit doesn't confuse me. The bit which confuses me is that objects are mini theories but don't worry about the theoretical import of the object when using it.
Uh... :joke:
That's a really interesting thing to say.
So does that mean that if there were a 1-to-1 mapping, we could *prove* not just what something is, but that it is? (Not just a function, but a function whose inverse is also a function.)
If the fake scotch tastes to me, at the moment, like real scotch -- we have to fudge a lot here, previous tastings of credible scotch? an average of those? what? --- then my tasting fails to discriminate the real from the fake, and thus fails to provide conclusive evidence that my drink is scotch. But that's all 'what'. How do we get to 'that' this way? Can I similarly not discriminate between drinking purported scotch and not drinking at all? I don't think dreams and hallucinations get you there; there have to be some genuine experiences for those to be possible.
Anyhow, is this how we would get to 'that the scotch exists (and is really scotch)'? If there were a 1-to-1 mapping, it would leave no room for mislabeling my experience? And thus no room to think I saw or drank or tasted something I did not?
Why is that confusing? Otherwise you end up pulling in every theory when you wanted to talk about just one.
Quoting Enrique
It's not the molecules in the brain. When we drink the fake whiskey, a sample isn't sent up to the brain for analysis, rather signals about the sample are sent up. We can test this for ourselves. Water tastes much better when we're thirsty, meatloaf when we're hungry, etc. Objects appear the same throughout the day despite the ambient light changing. And different people see the same objects in different ways.
And I don't see how you can say that with a straight face.
I don't believe that Dennett denies sensation. I'd have to see quotes that show him saying that to be convinced of it. I take Dennett to be saying that of course we experience sensations, see colours, and feel all kinds of emotions; of course we can be conscious of our experiences, but that the naive thought that feelings, sensation and consciousness are not physical is based on our "folk" intuitive presuppositions concerning what it means to be physical, which leads us to posit an incoherent idea of mental substance.
No. Dennett is a functionalist.
This is not my area, but I guess we can't know which theory to ascribe towards an object at any point given all the potential values possible. Is a gun operating as a tool, an instrument of oppression, a source of liberation, as symbol of the constitution, a hammer? But I could be totally wrong...
I can also say this with a straight face...
[quote=John Horgan]Consider how Dennett talks about qualia, philosophers’ term for subjective experiences. My qualia at this moment are the smell of coffee, the sound of a truck rumbling by on the street, my puzzlement over Dennett’s ideas. Dennett notes that we often overrate the objective accuracy and causal power of our qualia. True enough.
But he concludes, bizarrely, that therefore qualia are fictions, “an artifact of bad theorizing.” If we lack qualia, then we are zombies, creatures that look and even behave like humans but have no inner, subjective life. Imagining a reader who insists he is not a zombie, Dennett writes:
“The only support for that conviction [that you are not a zombie] is the vehemence of the conviction itself, and as soon as you allow the theoretical possibility that there could be zombies, you have to give up your papal authority about your own nonzombiehood.” [/quote]
The point you're not seeing about Dennett is very simple: there is no in-principle difference between beings and things. There are only things, and what we understand as 'beings' are simply concetanations of material things that behave in the way they do because of the blind forces of evolution executing the 'darwinian algorithm', as per Darwin's Dangerous Idea.
The fact that nothing of the external world is in your brain is the basis on which it can be said that there is an external world. (In a sense of course internal and external are arbitrary; if you try to think of the world from no one's perspective, then there is not absolute internality and externality). But we are speaking here from the human perspective (of course) and the surface of our bodies defines the boundary between internal and external.
When I said we experience a world external to our bodies I meant that we experience ourselves as bodies interacting with a world that is outside our bodies. So you interact with the flower, touch the flower, smell the flower, see the flower, hear the tiny sound as you break off its petals one by one. As a child you can interact with the flower as soon as you notice it is there; which is not difficult if the flower is brightly coloured. You don't need a model of the flower in order to notice and interact with it; it reveals itself to you, to the body, promordially.
Probably more accurate to say that whatever molecules in the brain are responsible for subjective color itself constitute a fraction of the 1-to-1 identity between physical reality and consciousness. I imagine that a particular additive relationship between wavelengths of EM radiation and wavicles in atoms comprises the basic substance of subjective color itself, so some biochemical/radiative complex = red itself in a sense. But any conscious experience identifiable to the subject transcends particular percepts such as these because experience arises from numerous regions of the brain and a huge host of fluctuating environmental features in general, as per your alcoholic beverage argument.
Perhaps something like a morphogenetic field exists which participates in forming conscious experiences, so a so-called "percept" in the brain will become an unrepresentative fragment of the totality, and the definition of what consciousness is will be more finely grained conceptually: at base, trillions of physical percepts and more rather than a nonphysical entity, exactly as theorizing neural networks has enhanced comprehension of the mind. Some collection of physical properties is equivalent to consciousness.
Then what would you mean when you said "we see the same objects (differently)"?
"External" means, not belonging to me (or us) and thus, extra mental.
The objects we interact with directly (though mediated by our sensory organs and intellectual apparatus) are not "external" to us.
In fact, it leads to a kind of forced dualism which need not arise in these instances. Not that all dualisms are bad, but, they should be avoided when possible.
What seems to be external to us is the things physics talks about and describes, chemistry too. When it comes to biology, we begin to enter into complications about what's external or not.
An open question is if the stuff physics describe what's internal to objects or is it the external manifestations (atoms and particles) of something internal to the thing (whatever it is that gives rise, at bottom, to the things studied in physics) , which we cannot access.
It's tough.
The point you're not seeing is that if you want to support your claims about what Dennett is proposing you need to quote Dennett, not somebody else's opinion about what Dennett proposes. Is he that much of a "bogeyman" for you that you cannot bear to read him at all?
No naive realism is the idea that the eyes are "windows" through which I "the perceiving soul" look out onto a world that exists out there exactly in every detail as I see it. This is obviously wrong since other animals (and to some extent even other people may) see the world differently than I do,
As my example indicates, we see different things, when we look at the same thing.
But I have no idea if this addresses remotely what the others are all on about.
I think that's exactly the right thing to say. Full endorsement from me.
They are external to our bodies, though. Of course the way a tree looks is mediated by the visual apparatus and the light conditions, the way a rock feels depends on the skin as it does on the rock, the way the cicadas singing sounds depends on the ear as it does on the cicadas and the wind or absence of it, and so on, but none of that says anything to deny that the tree is "over there", the rock is on the ground at my feet, so I have to bend to pick it up, and the cicadas are at various distances in different trees.
Well, it's tricky. I believe they are external to me, that is something which existed prior to me, or human beings in fact.
We get into problems when speaking of "over there" and "next to me" or "close to my hand" and so on. If you aren't spatio-temporally located, how can you give coordinates to that rock?
From the Cicadas perspective where is the rock? At best you could say a Cicada would react to a rough surface of some kind, something with extension.
We can be confident abstract mathematical descriptions will hold of what we interact with, beyond that, it's very hard, because perspective must enter.
The question is, if you and I see them as being different, how do we go beyond those difference to see what it really is. There's no particular use pointing to the hypothetical 'chair', 'tree' or 'apple', as philosophy does, because in such cases you're just taking a random object as a stand-in. Of course we agree on such trivialities but when it comes to real world judgements, it's a different matter.
This statement assumes that there is some underlying object which is the same for all observers, that is beyond all differences of judgement, and that is what is really there. That is called transcendental realism - realism, because it assumes the reality of the object, and transcendental, because it is beyond the differences that observers might have about the object in question. 'The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances (if their reality is conceded) 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' ~ Kant, CPR A369
------------------
I think the underlying problem is that any statement which relies on the conjunction 'it is' - for example 'the mind is just the brain', 'experience is simply the activities of neural connections' - is already depending on something for which there is no physical equivalent. And that is because there is no physical equivalent for 'it is' or '='. That is a fundamental element of judgement, and something for which there is not even an analogy in the natural world. It is only real as a primitive artifact of rational thought, where it is the basis for abstraction, and hence comparison and differentiation.
I think that is the upshot of the long history of discussion of the reality of universals. I think that what emerges from the Platonic tradition, is the view that pure understanding is only possible with respect to the objects of the intelligence (a.k.a. nous). That is why mathematical expressions are paradigmatic for certain statements; a=a is true in a way which 'that is an apple' cannot be (because it might be a replica or some other thing that is like an apple). All of our rational judgement comprise the synthesis of rational judgements with percepts (pace Kant) or with the concepts of things (the ideal forms of Plato). And I'm learning that the philosophy that best anticipates this is actually Thomism.
The problem with materialism is that it has taken only the quantifiable aspects of things as real. This goes back to Galileo, Descartes, and so on. Hence:
[quote=Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos p35]The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop.[/quote]
Dennett is simply speaking from that assumption, without understanding how it can be questioned. This is why Chalmers has sometimes asked humourously if he really is just a philosophical zombie.
I don't have to give coordinates to know that something is on the ground at my feet, something else is over there, and something else is further away again in a different direction, and so on.
I don't agree with that wording. Better: we usually see the same things, but perhaps we see them differently.
So back to your example:
Quoting Tom Storm
Overwhelmingly, you will see the same things. But someone else may see those things differently. We still see the acacia seeds, but do not know how to prepare them, or do not see them as food. And you might be shown how to see them as food.
That is, the world occupied by others is not incommensurate with our world. We share the world.
(Edit: The alternative seems to involve an unacceptable "othering" of indigenous folk. It's one thing to respect the knowledge eof first peoples, but quite another to claim they do not share our world)
There is something powerful in the idea of what we see being perspectival.
Me, too. Which explains it's attraction. But I think it wrong.
Note the edit. There are moral imperatives implicit in the ontology one adopts.
I agree that the Galilean view of science may suck all the life out of living, inasmuch as it sees everything of any importance as being quantifiable. Importance itself is not quantifiable, though. There is nothing wrong with science per se, and the mathematical approach does nothing per se to undermine the value of life. We create the value of things by valuing them.
Cool. I had fun with it. Just because we take our philosophy seriously doesn't mean we need to take ourselves as much.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Just what I’d hoped. Would you agree the empirical occurrence, and the quality of it, as reported, belongs properly to the concept of sensation? Do you think the conclusions follow from the proof? The intent of the exercise is in the question at the end, which was meant to pave the way for relieving the concept of perception from any internal predication, pursuant to the relative validity of the answers.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I don’t think you said it was, and I know I would never claim it was. So we are not in disagreement with this. That perception is a brain function, is the major premise of our disagreement, you in the affirmative, me in the negative.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Which forces the “empirical occurrence and the quality of it”....the message.....to remain internal, as you’ve maintained all along, and I understand it as such.
————
Quoting Kenosha Kid
True enough, but I’m not counter arguing in favor of a difference, but in arguing in refutation of a stated claim.
Given that the criteria for the possibility of a conception is its definition, and, say, I delivered an authoritative definition for “perception”, you are then entitled to ask me to cite the criteria that supports it. OK, fine, but we’ve already got one: perception is a function of the brain. If I advance a successful refutation of that definition, which is my wont because I’m denying its validity, by showing how the criteria do not support it, beginning with the gedankenexperiment, then I don’t need a different definition. And in the case at hand, should I offer one, I might be susceptible to accusations of committing an informal etymological fallacy. A fancy-assed way of saying what was once acceptable now isn’t.
Not to mention.....and conspicuous in its absence.....nobody’s asked me for one.
———-
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Of course, but certainty is a knowledge condition, so this statement is correct from that perspective. But the thought experiment attempts to show that the cause of sensation is entirely unknown. or, more accurately, knowledge of the object is not given, is impossible to derive, from the mere sensation of it, just as you yourself made explicit in your “hard slap”.
Regarding the proposition, then, all you’re justified in saying is, if you are certain a sensation is caused by an object, the object is necessary, and its existence is therefore given, and nothing else whatsoever.
There is no knowledge of the object, and there is no organization of any kind at this level of the system, therefore there is no inclusion of brain function.
If perception is a brain function, and there is no brain function at this level, there is no perception at this level. Or, perception was never a brain function in the first place, which grants the possibility that perception is something else entirely.
Refutation success!!!! YEA!!!! (Does the Happy Dance, feet just a-blur. Look it ‘im go, sawdust ‘n’ peanut shells ‘n shot glasses flyin’ all over the place.)
Like many I have often festered over the idea of what 'really is' actually means. In the end, even for 'physicalism' all we think we know seems to be quantum waves - solid matter being a myth. I guess what you are searching for is capital T truth out there somewhere above and beyond the flailing of human perceptions and rationalism. Is this the appeal of idealism - this second set of books which makes sense of the first book? I just wonder if this can be achieved - despite recognizing the enormous literature and speculative work in the affirmative.
Yeah but "over here" and "over there" are just as much mental attributions as colours are.
A different thing, in that it likely applies to the external world, are some aspects of mathematics.
Yet it would have been less typing for you and more educational for me and others had you simply used the time you had in forming these snarky replies to just quote his explanation here, in this thread. :roll:
Tell me, 180: who in the world, or in all of history, has had a clearer understanding of what mind is and its relationship to brains, and how did they obtain this clearer understanding, so as I might understand why what someone else thinks about this relationship could be better than mine or anyone else's?
It seems to me that we are all stuck in this same predicament of only having access to our own minds and the world as we perceive it through our own minds, so one is just as likely as any other to have a clear understanding of this relationship.
Please don't bother saying they are neurologists and it's their job to study brains. Studying brains is only studying your perception of brains without acknowledging the fundamental problem of how the mind appears compared to how brains appear and all of their knowledge of brains is only a result of how they appear via the mind. When science itself implies that "physical" objects are made up of the processes of smaller objects, which are in turn made up of smaller objects interacting, etc. ad infinitum, and that objects are mostly empty space, then our perception of "physical" objects doesn't match up to our explanation of the objects we perceive, and that includes brains and their neurons.
We know that the brain is adaptable and can repurpose processing power that was used for visual and auditory perception for tactile perception.
A better example would be what happens to people in a sensory deprivation chamber. After a while the brain creates its own input.
Nerve nets eventually started to group together in tighter clusters, which brains evolved from. Brains were selected for their ability to bring information from different sources (multiple senses) into a consistent whole creating a more fault-tolerant system where the information from one sense is used to confirm the information coming from another. Brains were also selected for their ability to attend to these sensory impressions focusing the attention from one part of the mind to another (think of continuing to look straight ahead while focusing your attention on the limits of your peripheral vision).
So it seems to me that primitive minds existed prior to the existence of fully evolved brains, with more complex brains adding to the functionality of the pre-existing mind.
I may sound like I'm leaning towards idealism or panpsychism, but I'm not. Supposing mind is the fundamental component of reality is just as much of a projection as supposing the world is "physical" - whatever that means. The mind is a process, and process is the fundamental component of reality.
I see mathematics (in part) as consisting in precise quantification of distance. So, I see 'over there' and 'over here' as being expressions of physical distance, not merely mental attributions.
Mathematics are as much mental attributions as colors are. After all, the symbols of math are made up of shapes and colors. Any alien species would probably use different symbols.
It's the relationships/processes that mathematics represent that are real (again it's processes all the way down, of which minds are a type of process). Mathematics is just a way to quantify these relationships/processes into useful objects of thought. It is the processes that are real and what the external world is like more so than the solid, stable, "physical" objects of the process of perceiving and thinking.
I actually don't mind labels much. As in, you can be a total idealist and say that we create the world with our minds. Or you can be a metaphysical dualist. If the arguments are interesting and persuasive, that's what matters. I only dismiss "eliminitative materalism", because it's just very poor philosophy.
Hmmm, I can see that argument. I think we agree that we have to consider sensations and intellect as different but closely inter-related "modalities" or "faculties", for lack of a better term. It could be that brains evolve prior to sense, it's possible.
Perhaps at some point "down the system" these things actually converge, in very primitive organisms but then they develop differently. The one thing that keeps coming to mind is that sense alone, is poor when compared to the intellect alone, in as much as we can separate them in actuality.
Oofff. Gets really complex here. I don't know how to express "here" mathematically. I guess if you add something in relation to you, say a Capital or mountain, then yes. But with nothing else to go on, over here is hard.
"There" can be expressed mathematically in so far as you have an object in mind which you can express in measurable units, as in, the Moon is 384,000 kilometers away from the Earth. But we remove here all phenomenal properties by saying this as a fact about the world.
Yeah. That's the elephant in the room. Didn't want to say this because then I'm put in a position of having to defend the existence of an external world, which I think should be taken for granted. But, it turns out, it needs a minimum of justification too.
While what you say is true, I assume that for reasons we don't know, these mathematical relations do hold to the extra mental world, such that it is true that there was a world 6 billion years ago and a "Big Bang" 13.8 billion years ago, not completely dependent on human beings.
A psychologist might talk about an internal dialogue. A surrealist thinks a dreamlike account is closer to the truth. In a Stephen King novel telepathic people are communicating their "inner worlds" in some quasi external realm.
Just have to look to context.
Oooh. No, again, I don't agree.
The table, the road, the wall are all solid; they are not going to give way on you. Hm. I might be wrong about the table - those legs might be a bit wonky. But if they do collapse, it will not be because they are quantum waves.
Talk of things being solid is grounded in our everyday interactions with solid things, wonky things, liquids, and so on. It's nothing o do with quantum.
Like the previous example, we've different ways of talking about stuff. Acacia seeds can also be seen as food; tables as solid. Different word games for different purposes.
Reminds me of Goodman's "irrealism" and his talks of versions.
I mean, we can do that, yes, but the thing is attributing the least things possible to objects, unless necessary to make sense of experience.
No, it doesn't. It's just that there are things we agree on - that is a handful of acacia seeds, that is a solid table, and so on.
Is the table really solid? what is that word, "really", doing there? Pointing down a philosophical garden path.
There used to be a relationship between this and the kind of 'enlightenment' that is subject of the other thread. Well - almost. The reason being, that enlightenment in the Western tradition had a much more mathematical and rationalistic bent than its Eastern counterparts, although there are still many points in common (Russell points this out in his chapter on Pythagoras in HWP). But I think what is being sought through that expression of seeing 'what really is', is a grasp of the totality, the 'unitive vision', which sees the Cosmos as an ordered whole (actually, 'cosmos' means 'ordered whole'). Whereas now we're so utterly emerged in the minutiea of specilisations that the forest is no longer visible for the trees (or even the bark, for that matter.)
There's one independent scholar, by the name of Peter Kingsley, who really explores those lines. Check out this review.
Quoting Banno
The reason these examples keep coming up, is because one of the fundamental assumptions of The Enlightenment philosophers was that what was real was ultimately - there's that word again - atoms, which were purportedly physical bodies. 'All I see', said Baron D'holbach', 'are bodies in motion'. Francis Crick - 'you - your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will - are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” Which is also what Dennett says. So the claim is that what 'really is' the case, are the fundamental constituents of physical matter. And that's why the realisation of quantum physics about 'wave functions' and the indeterminate nature of sub-atomic particles is significant. They're like the Cheshire cat's grin.
Quoting Banno
Don't worry Banno at the end of the garden path your coffee cups and spoons are all nestled safely in their respective places.
I just meant that people use "internal" and "external" in different ways that might sometimes conflict.
Why attribute the least things possible to objects?
Ok, good, I understand what you are saying. Can I ask what is the principle which underpins the perspective you use here to select 'real world' experience over a knowledge of QM? I understand that in human experience the object is solid. Do we privilege this because we can't avoid the realities of, for instance, a head on crash with the 207 bus to Shoppingtown?
AH, good. There is some hope for you, then, when you eventually find them.
Quoting Tom Storm
Austin's view clarifies this. "Real" is a word that obtains its use in contrast to other words. It's a real painting, not a fake; it's a real $50 note, not a forgery. It's a real lake, not a mirage. It's a real table, not an illusion.
But philosophers will play silly buggers and forget this, ending up asking things like Quoting Wayfarer
(His emphasis). Here the word "really" is not contrasted with anything; that's the first step on the garden path. What is the table really? A table.
I'm not choosing one over the other. They are different contexts, different word games, with which we do different things.
It'd be much like privileging democracy over chalk. It makes no sense.
(additionally - and I'd be happy to be corrected here - so far as I am aware, there is no notion of things being solid in quantum mechanics. SO the proposition that "the table is not solid" could not be made therein, at least not without a debatable degree of interpretation)
(edit: Mary Midgley is particularly clear and readable on these issues.)
Ah. Gotcha. Yeah, that's true actually about "internal" and "external" word use. Having granted that, I think that we can mislead ourselves, when thinking a bit more reflexively, in speaking loosely of "external things".
In ordinary use, it's fine, we can speak of the things external to the house, or external to the relevant situation or even external surface, etc.
Quoting frank
I meant that if we want to be scientific and try to speak of things independent of us, then we have to try to strip away those things that don't help us understand the phenomena.
If a given rock is 5 feet or meters away from me, the colour of the rock, nor its texture, nor its smell, matter in relation to the distance of the object.
Actually, I rather hope I am undermining a particularly poor sort of philosophy. So quite happy with that.
It's a cumbersome, disjointed view that divides the world into internal and external, objective and subjective, and then proceeds to deny the existence of cups and chairs and then get stuck denying the existence of other people.
Some questions are not meaningful.
Can't help you with that, Harry. Unlike you (seem to be), I'm neither a subjectivist nor a introspection illusionist.
I read her piece on philosophical plumbing Very clear.
True.
I'm not convinced you have demonstrated a grasp of what those questions are.
Off the top of my head, a question to all who disagree with the validity or utility of an internal-external divide:
That which is accessible to a single person, i.e. private, is internal to the person in question; that which is accessible to everyone in principle, i.e. public, is external to all persons.
Where’s the fallacy in this?
There she is objecting to the grandiose schemes and others advocate, in favour of this sort of plumbing.
Well, that rather follows from their being nonsense - that they do not make sense. Pity those who think they do grasp those questions.
I see no problem with that as it stands. Issues arise when folk make attempts to talk about what is private, and hence to treat it as if it were public.
(edit: there's a quibble as to things that are privileged to an individual - pain, for example. But that's been overdone in other threads.)
They're not 'grandiose'.
Such are the attributes of universals, numbers, and the like.
[quote=Bertrand Russell, The World of Universals] In the strict sense, it is not 'whiteness' that is in our mind, but 'the act of thinking of whiteness'. The connected ambiguity in the word 'idea'...also causes confusion here. In one sense of this word, namely the sense in which it denotes the object of an act of thought, whiteness is an 'idea'. Hence, if the ambiguity is not guarded against, we may come to think that whiteness is an 'idea' in the other sense, i.e. an act of thought; and thus we come to think that whiteness is mental. But in so thinking, we rob it of its essential quality of universality. One man's act of thought is necessarily a different thing from another man's; one man's act of thought at one time is necessarily a different thing from the same man's act of thought at another time. Hence, if 'whiteness' were the thought, as opposed to its object, no two different men could think of it, and no one man could think of it twice. That which many different thoughts of whiteness have in common is their object, and this object is different from all of them. Thus universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts.
Ah. Pacifies me a bit. As to the latter, isn't that what a majority of art does (... well, at least historically)?
Though I'm trying to avoid directly addressing issues regarding nuances of perception, cogitations, emotions, and the like, art when affective / effective can touch on most of these topics - in essence making the strictly private public to some community.
I agree with the quote you give. Though, to be honest, the issue of universals still gives me headaches sometimes. I guess it depends on which types of universals are addressed.
I preferred when you used $70 as your example lol
While that sounds like a good idea, I'll comment anyways.
It strikes me that so termed universals can range from being cosmically applicable - thinking of things like goodness - or else be, well, not technically universal, instead being limited to a cohort of beings that communally shares the given so-called universal. While examples can get cumbersome and arguable, redness (when allowed to be a universal) is limited to only those beings capable of experiencing it; this while something like goodness (as in that which is favorable, rather than strictly moral) can be argued to be cosmically applicable to all beings in existence.
If you know of literature that addresses this disparity, or else have thoughts regarding non-univeral universals, please let me know.
Cheers.
Art shows rather than says. That's part of the value of art: that with it we see things that are difficult, if not impossible, to say.
True. I was in part thinking of things like poetry, which is all words and therefore saying. But I can see how one could argue that poetry shows as well.
I wonder, have you heard Austin's account of universals?
It can be read as a critique of the notion that there is a something had in common by, say, all red things (Austin uses "grey"); that what all red things have in common is a thing, and that we can call this thing "redness" and talk of one having "the concept of redness" in one's head as a sort of mental object.
His argument amounts to pointing out that this is an assumption. Why shouldn't we just use the word "red" to talk about a bunch of different things? After all, the flower and the sports car are not the same colour; and there is more than one sort of red in the sunset.
The argument is congruent with family resemblance. There need be nothing held in common by all members of a family, nor is is necessary to understand what is common to all games in order for us to use the word "game" effectively.
Definitely.
Then again, I know that it requires a comparison of very different metaphysical approaches in order to even consider things such as goodness to be a universal.
That's why they are so damn hard to find out in the world, and why Plato was wrong.
But another thread...? @Tom Storm - more plumbing that does away with vast, grandiose philosophical ponderings.
The "Plato was wrong" gave me a good friendly laugh. Not planning on staying long on the forum, but maybe I'd partake of another thread.
Out of fun, though, can you think of any awareness-endowed life that doesn't move toward what it find's favorable, hence good? If you can, then the good would not be cosmically applicable to all beings, hence would not be universal as Plato claimed.
Oooo lots to unpack.
The obvious point is that either "favourable" is not the same as "good" - and that "hence" is misplaced; or you are using "favourable" and "good" for the exact same thing, and so saying what is good is what is favourable achieves nothing but a change in wording.
The first is a common error - the naturalistic fallacy, from Moore; who shared with you the desire to ground ethics on "good". Moore tied himself in knots trying to get that to work. Better perhaps to forget about good and instead look at improvement. Hence, virtue ethics.
Rather than looking for a grand ethical scheme, it might be better to look at what is before us: Tolstoy's three questions.
For what its worth, it the second option, a change of wording, which can serve to clarify what is semantically intended.
Cool. I'd just add that it doesn't then follow that we perceive images or, alternatively, respond to images. Instead we respond to things that we perceive, such as red flowers.
Quoting fdrake
:up: Preparing for another 90 pages of this...
It's pretty easy, you just don't cherry-pick reality. There's lots of famous examples.
Indeed, I suggested sensation, but that's not right either. The issue is what the word 'perception' means, and it means the organisation of sensory information by the brain, and therefore is brain function. I'm not seeing an argument that it occurs elsewhere. I think we can assume a common understanding of the sending of that information to the brain until we hit a counterexample.
An octopus has a distributed nervous system, so a particular arm, being as clever as it is delicious, can make its own decisions, which means some local organisation of sensory information. But I don't know whether that could ever constitute perception. Man, I could go for some octopus for breakfast. A heavy sprinkling of paprika...
It would be a useful start. If there are other sources of our experiences (and there are, not just dreams and hallucinations, but biases, errors, and features of processing), and those sources aren't separable after the fact (and they're not), then there's always an unknown about whether we're seeing an object, some feature of processing data about it, or something else entirely.
Fortunately the brain is pretty good about making hypotheses about continuity of identity and similarity (it's a good categoriser, in ML terminology), plus we have other people to point out that, no, your gf hasn't turned into a wolf, that's just the acid man.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
In humans, reason is a major contributor to that organising ability (much more so than in non-rational animals). Do you think reason can be understood as a brain fuction? I would suggest not, on the basis that that the basic constituents of reason - e.g. logical principles, like the law of the excluded middle - are not meaningfully the product of anything envisaged in neuroscience. Rather we need a grasp of such principles to even pursue a scientific explanation. Certainly one needs the large hominid forebrain to grasp such ideas as the LEM, but presumably were our particular species of hominid to die out, the LEM would not die out with it.
[quote= Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos (p. 81). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition. ]Eventually the attempt to understand oneself in evolutionary, naturalistic terms must bottom out in something that is grasped as valid in itself—something without which the evolutionary understanding would not be possible. Thought moves us beyond appearance to something that we cannot regard merely as a biologically based disposition, whose reliability we can determine on other grounds. It is not enough to be able to think that if there are logical truths, natural selection might very well have given me the capacity to recognize them. That cannot be my ground for trusting my reason, because even that thought implicitly relies on reason in a prior way.[/quote]
Quoting Kenosha Kid
An example of the mereological fallacy - brains don't do anything of the kind, it is rational beings who make hypotheses.
I agree organization of all sensory information is the function of the brain. From both an empiricist’s and a rationalist’s point of view. Certain flavors of idealists, on the other hand, while granting the authority of science with respect to natural law, are justified in forwarding logically predicated theoretical systems, until, if ever, our empirical knowledge supports the scientific dominion over them. That being said........
Sensation is the downstream side of sensory apparatus, that which the apparatus reports.
Sensation without a cause is an unconditioned natural event, which violates the principle of cause and effect, and is logically impossible on certain initial grounds.
To sustain the principle of cause and effect, there must be that which is antecedent to sensation, as the cause of it.
Each of the plurality of modes of sensation, as singular, dedicated effects, are internal to the body, all causes of sensations as objects in general, are external to the body, the apparatus being merely the natural physiology sufficient to mediate one with the other.
There are distinct modes of sensation, but that in itself does not require correspondingly distinct modes of cause, insofar as it is possible a single cause can affect separate modes of sensation, and that even simultaneously.
“Perception” is that conception which represents the appearance of an physical object, such that the sensory apparatus is caused to evoke a sensation as effect. As simple cause and effect, there is no organization, no cognition, being a strictly passive one-to-one transition of empirical information.
“Appearance” herein not to be confused with “looks like”.
Perception as brain function alone disregards the absolute necessity for causality of sensations, and at the same time, disregards the spatial distinction between the external cause and its internal effect.
“.....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....”
(Master and Commander of Outdated Theories, 1787)
Qualia aside, it turns out in the end, that it isn’t philosophy that “has a problem tolerating useful words associated with outdated theories”. It is science, or at least psychology, that hijacks a perfectly reasonable, established philosophical conception, and the domain of its employment, turning it into something it was never intended to represent.
—————
Quoting Wayfarer
Sad commentary indeed, that in 13 pages, that word hasn’t once made an appearance. The only saving grace must be that reason is tacitly understood as given, which even if true, still leaves the mistakes being made under its name.
“They have forgotten the faces of their fathers”.
Likewise the flower is an effect of a seed dropping at a certain place. It dropped because of its initial location in another flower. And so on and on back to the original emergence of our universe out of its mother universe.
Any time you bring cause and effect into an issue there's a pending collapse of everything into a monolith. And it's all absolutely necessary starting with certain initial grounds.
So you end up close to Schopenhauer's take on perception.
This is a helpful summary.
All we know is the river. We have reason to believe the river itself has tributaries, smaller streams that feed into the river. There are stories, but no one can reach the place where you could to see these tributaries first flowing on their own and then mixing themselves with the river. We believe that when we scoop up a handful of water, the waters of many tributaries drip from our hands, but we cannot name the source of even one drop, so it is all, for us, only part of the river.
Well, I’m of two minds about this.
On the one hand, the sorts of things you refer to, you can refer to them because they have known effects and conditions. Mirages are interesting but they don’t cause you to underestimate the population of African countries; priming bias is interesting but does not cause the Georgia blacktop to shimmer in August. It’s not all water, but a stew we’re dealing with: some ingredients, like the seasoning, are so thoroughly mixed and have so affected others that they cannot be separated, but you can still spot a bit of carrot and identify it as stew-flavored but still recognizably carrot. If we could not point out optical illusions, biases, and the like, and distinguish them from normal perception and inference, your argument couldn’t even get off the ground.
On the other hand, I am convinced by arguments from many quarters that we begin our questioning in the river of experience; we cannot step out of the river and observe it as it flows by, study what goes into it and where it comes from. We can identify some things as they go by, and we can make a science of that, but it is not the science of what flows by that tells you you’re in a river, and it is not that science that could tell you what the nature of that river is.
I was going to say something else: the casting of everything as uncertain has a sort of methodological modesty about it — like finding a room a mess and cutting off arguments about who left that plate on the table, and who was supposed to have put the LEGOs away, and saying: it’s a mess now, however it got that way; everyone contributed (we assume, but perhaps falsely) so it’s simplest for us to ignore all that and clean it up together. That’s a pragmatic decision, and it will work — maybe! — but it’s an assignment of responsibility rather than determining responsibility, and it’s a mistake to think that because we can assign responsibility that’s all there is to it, and especially to think that when we effectively don’t assign responsibility — by assigning it to everyone — that no one was in fact responsible.
Pretty close, if you’re going from this, in WWR, 1.3., 1844, in Haldane/Kemp, 1909:
“...We shall consider these abstract ideas by themselves later, but, in the first place, we shall speak exclusively of the ideas of perception. These comprehend the whole visible world, or the sum total of experience, with the conditions of its possibility....”
Gotta be careful of the world as idea, though.
But the latter doesn't follow either. I mean, I agree it doesn't necessarily follow that we respond to images (as in 'I have an image of my house on this USB stick'), simply from the fact that such a definition is plausible, but then it also doesn't necessarily follow that we respond to things we perceive from the the fact that such an definition is only plausible. Neither case has been made nor refuted.
I think a lot is made here of the status of an intermediary in the process of perception, which seems to be to be wrongly hinged on epistemological concerns when it's rightly more ontological.
That something causes us to respond when seeing (what we call) a red flower is not in dispute. That there are intermediary step between the flower an our conscious 'logging' of having seen it is also (I hope) not in dispute.
But here all we have is a causal chain, flower>conscious logging event. There's no reason why we shouldn't extend that chain - seed>flower>conscious logging event - are we now properly said to be conscious of the seed? Does that become the proper object of our perception because it is primary in the chain of events?
So if I, instead of extending the chain, further dissemble it. Flower>retinal ganglia firing>conscious logging event, why can I not say the proper object of the conscious logging event is the firing of the retinal ganglia? We previously stopped the chain of causality at flower (not seed).
The ontological commitment seems to be that the proper object is the first outside of our body. We could just as easily say it's the first outside of our conscious awareness.
I was going full-tilt Schopenhauer. There is only one perceiver that is somehow magically multiplexed.
Quoting Isaac
That's where I was headed. Trying to specify the location and boundaries of the act of perception gets ambiguous.
As each human is a replica of any other, in a general sense, why not?
I think Arthur just wants to say all of us cognize, judge, and experience, the same way.
Read it. It kicks ass.
But also rigour. If you go in with the view that the answer to any sum is 5, you'll make a crappy calculator. The call to commit to the objective reality of what you see is a mere leap of faith. The true commitment to reality involves actively eliminating possible causes of our observations, not just only considering one (falsificationism).
Quoting Mww
Oh, is this your point? No, I don't think it does. In fact, I'd say that it organising suggests a thing to organise. Naming a function in a process doesn't suggest there's nothing else in that process.
Quoting Wayfarer
Obviously, yeah. But also obviously you would not. I actually find the brain performing imaging much harder to wrap my head around than it performing reason.
I have, and used it as reference. It has its good parts.
No, it doesn’t. But it can suggest too much included in the process.
That's probably because you take it for granted. Naturalism tends to do that. Then it thinks it's 'explained' it.
I don't think you read it very closely then. He's not saying we're all similar. He's saying there is only one will that drives all events.
I used to visualize thinking as a two step process of low-level quantum combinations and selection from complex mental structures which is then followed at times by slow linear mature reasoning.
The numerous shallow processes of imaging have been more accessible for instrumental research. Yet the puzzle seems to be how the brain manages the physics and chemistry of the structures for perceptual functional presentation to arise. This seems like a transcendental problem of fitting unlike pieces together to make a whole.
So, in a crowded nutshell, what you're saying is that perception, as you understand it, is the end-to-end of the nervous system from stimulation of nerves through to awareness. All good, I understand. My understanding of the word is that it's the organisation of sensory information by the brain. So this is a matter for dictionaries and whatnot.
Quoting magritte
Jings! That makes it harder to wrap my head around, and I know quantum theory well. I see the occasional article stressing the importance of some quantum effect in brain function, so no doubt it has it's relevance. Personally I think of it functionally, and find Kahneman's two-system description compelling. No idea which bits (or qubits ho ho) might rely on quantum behaviour. Do you have any thoughts on the mechanics?
Quoting Wayfarer
:fire:
I won’t disagree, but only ask: why should this be so? But that’s too much, too fast. What does it mean to take a leap of faith? Do you know what it means? How? Again, too much. We feel this compulsion to take such a leap, or feel we have already taken it and want to understand what we have done, or we feel that we should above all avoid taking any such leap and are worried that we may already have done so, without noticing. This is all worth thinking about, and I haven’t even gotten to the word “faith” yet, and there’s surely something to be said about that.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
So you have a method in mind that will protect you from an impatient leap of faith. How did you arrive at this method, the method of elimination? If you’re going to talk of causes — of possible causes — of our observations, haven’t you already committed to quite a lot?
I don’t think we’re in a position yet to say what method can solve this problem — that before us is the possibility of a leap of faith and we are resistant, perhaps with good reason, to taking it. I don’t know how to solve such a problem. I don’t even understand why this is the problem we face, but it absolutely is. Before announcing how it is to be solved, I would spend some time trying to understand what sort of predicament this is, why it makes us uneasy, and see if we can learn, from the situation we are in, if it is possible to get out of it, and if it is, how.
If that’s what you got out of it, far be from me to say otherwise.
No, actually it isn’t.
My fault. Guess I didn’t make myself clear.
No worries. It was fun anyway.
I just don't see how that could be. My point is that you can't have one without the other. What could you be intellectualizing about if you had no sense? What form does your intellectualizing take if not sensory data (qualia)?
Quoting Manuel
I don't mind labels either as long as they are used in such a way that makes sense when parsed.
If "we" create the world with our minds, then where is the we in relation to our minds, and if the we, the world and mind are synonymous, then I don't see much use for the word, "mind", as there would only be a world and no mind and no we. Minds and we would simply be part if this strange world.
I think that if you were actually paying attention then you'd know I'm neither of those, too. I'm an informationalist, or relationship/process philosopher. I'm trying to argue that your mind is an objective part if the world because it is information, or process, like everything else. You seem to be a naive realist if you think the world is composed of physical objects, like brains, instead of processes like minds, like the one you have direct access to right now and of which brains and other physical objects that you experience are models of other processes.
Maps are not the territory, but they are made of the same substance as the territory. For maps and their corresponding territory, it is easy to see the similarity because we are neither map nor territory and both map and territory can only be modeled as part of our mental processes. So the similarity has to do with how they are modeled, and the difference between mind and the "phyisical" objects is that one is the modeler (processor) and the others are what is being processed (models).
It's unclear is this example would hold, but perhaps mathematics. Or, consider the following thought experiment: suppose a baby is put in a complete sensory isolation chamber, it's not inconceivable to me that they would have internal self stimulation of some kind. Of course, I can't say if this would happen, but it's possible.
Quoting Harry Hindu
If that is the case, then what you say follows.
I don't think we are the world though, because if we were, I see no reason why we cannot, in principle, introspect to the bottom of things and figure out all the hard problems in physics by thought alone, absent experiment. Likewise with psychology, we would be transparent to ourselves, it seems to me.
The fact that we do need experiments and that the world science discovers does not work as our intuitive psychology thinks it does, suggests to me that many aspects of the world are hidden from us, and hence existent (in some admittedly obscure manner that's hard to verbalize ) independent from us.
What is mathematics composed of if not the visual of black scribbles on white paper? If you're talking about what the scribbles represent, then I would still assume that you mean something real and observable, for if you didn't mathematics wouldn't be of much use.
What is internal self stimulation and would the baby be considered "thinking" when in this state? If so, what OF? Does hallucinating and dreaming qualify as thinking? If anything this latter example is evidence that the brain needs sensory input to function properly enough for the entire organism to survive long enough to be meaningful.
Yeah, mathematics refers somehow to the world. They're probably symbols, but obviously no paper is needed, for blind people can do math, they interpret the stimulus through another medium either sound or touch.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Good question. We don't have a good enough definition or conception of thinking in normal states. If you push me for an answer, I'd say yes, the baby is thinking. About what, I don't know. The best I can come up with is some kind of activity, which seeks some patterns in the dark.
I think dreaming can qualify as a kind of thinking, hallucinating sometimes may count as thinking or not, depends on reflection and explicitness.
Yes, I have been wondering about where dreaming and hallucinations are placed within qualia. This shows the way in which subjective consciousness takes on the role of distorting and giving an 'alternative' take on 'reality'. I once had a thread on dreams and this raised questions about the subconscious aspects of mental processing.
However, hallucinations are particularly interesting because so many people, especially in the form of -psychosis,'. It would appear that the mind is capable of playing tricks in distorting perception in waking consciousness at times. There is also the whole realm of illusions of perception, such as those described by Oliver Sacks. It is possible to even ask what are illusions? Part of thinking about illusions and delusions may come down to validation and falsification through understanding shared experiences of others. If I am seeing an alien being in a room and I am aware that I am the only one who can see the alien, this may give rise to my perception being a hallucination.
Yes, it's interesting, I think about it quite a lot. Personal view, I think faith is a necessary pragmatism. It's all well and good dithering on a philosophy forum and casting the seeds of doubt... In day-to-day reality, we need to act. I think human will necessitates little leaps of faith all the time, and it's a credit to the human mind that it's actually pretty great at leaping in the direction most of the time.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yeah, break it down, I dig your style. I don't think I'd argue that falsification is _the_ method, just a good method that we know works, certainly better than devotion to a particular thesis, admirable as that is in other ways. At root, falsification is open-mindedness but not to the extent that your brain falls out. It's not a barrier to proceeding in good faith, so it's very pragmatic, without being dogmatic or totalitarian.
Which is
Quoting Mww
Always!
Unfortunately, in philosophical circles it sometimes is. Quoting Isaac
I rather like that. And
Quoting Isaac
...and now I can see the sense in your earlier comment about homunculi.
So we can on your account consider (almost?) any point in the chain of events as the object of consciousness.
But presumably it would be an error to cut this chain of events off in such a way as to claim that some part was uncaused - that the flower was not the result of a seed (or bulb), or that the excitation of the rods and cones were not the result of light.
The point being, and it bemuses me to think it necessary to make the following points, that there are flowers, bulbs, light and nervous tissue; and further that when we talk about the flower, we are talking about the flower and not some odd construct such as the-consciousness-of flower or the-perception-of -flower; we can talk about flowers.
I'm not suggesting you think otherwise, Isaac, but I suspect that there might be those who erroneously think your account provides succour to such views.
Yes, and things presenting themselves is exactly what we do know in the primary sense of knowing. The secondary sensing of 'knowing that' or propositional knowledge consists in beliefs expressed as true statements about the things which present themselves.
For me it makes no sense to speak of our perception as representation, it is better understood as presentation. It might make sense to speak of propositional knowledge as representation; that is propositional representation of the facts or actualities that are presented to us.
Quoting Goldyluck
Why would you refer to the sound of the cars as a quale, though? You hear the cars, to be sure, does it make sense to say you are hearing a quale?
Good point!
I can think of a deflationary answer to why we shouldn't be conscious of the seed - because while the seed and its growing environment is a distal cause of the flower's behaviour in the environment we're perceiving in, it doesn't form part of the system of proximate causes that our perception is responding to in our current environment. Seed caused flower to be there, wind's making it move, we see the movement.
Maybe if I can steel man a bit - maybe the point you're making is that it's unclear exactly how to extend what we are conscious of into the system of proximate causes of our environment when the causal network that leads to our perceptual acts is ambiguous - how do you chunk it up into nodes, and which parts are perception? Definitely agree with the presence of that ambiguity. If what the object of perception is, is equated to the antecedent step to the conscious logging event, then I think it's quite clear that the retinal ganglia firing event is the object of perception.
I think we've got some resources at hand to construe that 'the antecedent step to the conscious logging event' isn't an appropriate definition of a perceived object. An appropriate definition of an object which was logged consciously yeah, but there's a difference between what goes into our perception and what we experience. On pain of losing the 'unlogged' parts of the perceptual process which continually shape the emerging landscape of the content of our conscious awareness.
Do you think it's right to say that the conscious logging event is part of the perceptual process, or is it an external process which perception just 'writes to' once it's finished? Perception makes a package, sends it to conscious awareness, done. Or is it like 'perception is online, sending live feed to conscious awareness as part my internal function' - is conscious awareness a 'receptor' of the output of the perceptual process - a terminal node - or is it an interior node of the process of perception?
I personally make a stink about perceptual intermediaries in part because of the above ambiguity - going strongly against construing conscious awareness as a terminal node/passive receptor of data. Could be wrong there though. One reason for the stink is that if you label the parts of that causal chain:
seed->flower->retinal ganglia->conscious logging event
with whether the constituent processes are part of the body's process of perception (under the conception that conscious logging isn't a terminal node) you get: seeds aren't, flowers aren't, retinal ganglia are, conscious logging events are. In that regard it looks like:
(seed->flower) = world states
(retinal ganglia->conscious logging event) = body states
IE it looks like:
world states -> body states
and there's no 'intermediary' between the body's perception and world.
Another, perhaps deeper criticism, is that while it's possible to construe perception as a causal chain with components, as an overall process it takes environmental or bodily states and 'maps them' to inferred values ; which makes it functional or relational, so more of an bidirectional arrow (reciprocal/feedback relationship) than a node.
Like world<-perception->environment.
A final point of contention is that if perception requires environmental foraging, and exploratory acts are treated as part of the perceptual process (eg, adjusting to a load due to perception of heaviness), the exploratory acts are proximate causes of changes in environmental hidden states (where the weight is held), and thereby in direct contact with environmental objects - as proximate causes. Shift the weight, therefore proximate cause of weight movement.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Call it what you will, Harry, but your "informationalist" position as expressed here suggests introspective illusionism (i.e. naive platonism) to me.
There is that, yes. There's no accounting for folk...
Quoting Banno
With one important caveat. We talk for reasons, so our talk is subservient to those reasons. Some cut-off points would not serve any of the needs we have, the reasons for talking. Many would totally get in the way.
A considerable amount of philosophy (in my opinion) is composed of things we could say without any reason why we should.
Quoting Banno
Yeah. There's no doubt about that. I'm not that well versed in philosophy so my explanations are often lacking, and I'm afraid I am rather prone to saying things like "there's no flower". Call it a kind of active inference Tourette's.
Perhaps demonstration might be better...
Here is some work using the idea of perceptual features. https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2019/1/niz012/5566576 (an interesting paper, but just a random example really). Now, they describe the first node outside of the Markov boundary as a 'hypothesised stimuli', I use 'hidden state'. The question for the "when we talk about the flower, we are talking about the flower and not some odd construct" position is...are they wrong to do this research? Are they wrong about what they're discovering, wrong about their modelling assumptions? Basically, the trouble I have understanding the position you espouse (which does differ from mine on this point, I think) is exactly where you think people like Friston have gone wrong.
I totally get that in normal language games it's be ridiculous to say "pass me the set-of-hidden-states-that-I'm-currently-modelling-as-the-jam would you". I can even go as far as to understand why a more in depth linguistic analysis might want to deal in flowers, bulbs, light and nervous tissue, rather than models.
Where I struggle is in philosophy of mind and epistemology where I can't seem to accommodate what is, at the moment, the prevailing model of perception . I don't currently see how it can take into account that model without getting into Markov blankets and hidden states.
If we extend our causal chain further seed>flower>retinal ganglia>visual cortex>action(pick the flower), we see that in terms of proximate causality, your reaching out to pick something is stimulated by the message from your visual cortex (there are complex backward-acting suppressive messages too, but we'll ignore those for a minute). So the properties (spatial location, texture etc) that form your reaching strategy are those properties the visual cortex delivers. Additional properties (what flowers are 'for', the fact that there might be hidden thorns...) that your reaching strategy is modified by are those delivered by (well, a very complex set of brain regions, but all triggered by the ventral stream of processing from the visual cortex). The point is, if we want to understand your reaching strategy (behaviour), then it's the information entering your sensorimotor regions that determine the strategy, not 'the flower' near the beginning of our chain, any more than 'the seed' right at the start of it
So. To say "we reach to pick the flower, not a model of the flower" is fine until you want to explain why we might make mistakes, or how influences other than the flower affect our strategy (which is where my research was). If we can only talk in terms of reaching for 'the flower', then I can't distinguish other influences. I suppose I could say that we reach for the flower+additional-models, but that seems like a clumsy compromise.
Suggestions welcome!
True, but that assumes no distal causes can intervene in the perceptual process does it not, no neuronal noise, no transmitter suppression en route? If we break the chain at the seed because it's influence on the flower is only distal, then is there some way we can distinguish the many influences from inside the brain on the route between retinal ganglia and conscious logging such that they're categorically different from the way the environment affects the seed? I can' draw it properly by it might go...
seed>(plus stochastic external influences)>flower>retinal ganglia>conscious logging
- and we're troubled including the seed because of the stochastic influences which muddy it's causing the flower. But considering that we actually have...
seed>(plus stochastic external influences)flower>retinal ganglia>(plus stochastic external influences)conscious logging
...the stochastic variables don't seem to be a distinguishing feature of the seed>flower step.
Which I think might be what you're saying with...
Quoting fdrake
...?
Quoting fdrake
Can I be really annoying and say both?
Perception is a process involving feedback (reaching out into the environment to 'test' hypotheses, or even to make the environment match hypotheses) so we must include the conscious awareness that logs very short-term events as those will without doubt be brought back into the process a few seconds later (there's also non-conscious versions of this, such as the loop between the V2 region and the Hippocampus, for example - consciousness is not required).
However, it would seem perverse to say that all of the thousands of mental events that are triggered during a perceptual process (as if we could break that up into chunks either!), should be considered as part of the process. we'd only ever have the kind of radical holism that can't investigate anything for failure to commit to boundaries.
I think, if we're to investigate perception we have to learn to be happy about identifying a main stream of events in the causal chain and accepting that we've cut-off a whole load of more minor tributaries from our investigation. Much of conscious logging goes out the window by that means, for me.
Quoting fdrake
No, I think you're entirely right, but it's only that an actual investigation must set it's boundaries. It has to draw some arbitrary lines around what is actually a continual process affected by just about every part of the brain, body and environment at some level. It would be impossible to proceed with any interrogation of that massive network without making those boundaries. Sometimes that boundary is at some arbitrary logging point (usually the subject verbally acknowledging that they've 'seen' X).
Which I think is also your criticism here...
Quoting fdrake
...?
Quoting fdrake
Yes. I like this.
...the problem though (sorry) is with the feedback within the body. Take language. If I say "rose", the whole process, up to the sound exiting my mouth, is an 'in body' one. So to say that I picked the word 'rose' because there's a world state equating to 'rose' would be to break your own boundary distinction. I clearly picked the word 'rose' as a result of internal stimuli - body states. Since the signals triggering my speech centres were internal. Speech isn't a part of perception (another of our artificial boundaries), so we cant say it's all part of the body state response to the world state {rose}.
So if we have...
world state{there's a rose}>body state{perception of rose}>body state{I think I'll say "rose"}
...then we picked the word rose because of a body state, not because of a world state.
Quoting fdrake
I agree here too, but the same caveat applies - do we include speech in this exploratory act? Is non-exploratory action (like picking the flower for a loved one)? Is remembering the scene five minutes later? Five hours later? I think we must draw arbitrary lines, perhaps different lines for different purposes.
And when you name the rose, this naming is anchored in a public domain.
So we could say that perception is something whole cultures do. (Just to expand the number of ways we could define it)
It is now, but was it always?
If we're in a dream right now, that question is dubious. What's your answer?
A retinal image of a tree is obviously etc.
If we’re dreaming we wouldn’t be in a public domain, so we can say the question isn’t dubious, right? At least for that reason anyway.
My answer is no, naming isn’t always in the public domain. After the first naming, yes, if repeated or recorded as such. Before it, no. Unknown natural thing, first discovered, then named, at the discretion of the discoverer. Usually.
Think man-made objects that don’t exist in Nature until constructed or invented. As it is for that, so it is for everything.
Pass? Fail?
Well, the phrase has two elements: the leap, and the faith. Leaping is not like walking, a steady, methodical progress from one place to another. Leaping is taking the distance covered by many steps at once; we cannot make our steps bigger, so to pull off such a feat we must actually leave the reassuring solidity of the ground and take to the air, at least for a moment.
It is a choice sometimes forced upon us. When our walk brings us to a ditch or a small stream, there are three ways forward: there is an imaginary way straight on from this side to the other, as it would be if the ditch were not there; there is a way under, down into the ditch or stream and then up the other bank; and there is a similar way over, through the air, above where we would walk if only we could.
If we generalize this situation, the ways under and over are not always available. We can imagine thinking as traversing an obstacle course. (In everyday life, there is often a timer ticking, but not in philosophy and only for external reasons in science.) An obstacle blocks the methodical progress forward; it may offer a simple way over (a small ditch to be leaped over), a methodical way over (like a climbing wall) or under (you may have to crawl under something), and so on. Some obstacles may offer a choice — slog through the water or swing across on a rope. Some may offer a false choice — attempt to slog through a deep mud hole, which you will not be able to do, or jump over.
This is one way of situating leaping: it is a solution to some obstacles but not others, when it was not our preferred way forward. If, on the other hand, you already preferred leaping, because it is faster, and chain leaps together one after another, we don’t call that ‘leaping’ but ‘running’.
But are we sure it’s leaping-over-an-obstacle we’re interested in? There’s another idiom that seems similar, which is ‘jumping to a conclusion’. [hide="*"](Kahneman’s line about System 1.)[/hide] If you compare them, it’s clear that we disapprove of jumping to conclusions because it is not a response to an obstacle; you had the option of continuing to make steady, methodical progress but, out of impatience, gave up traveling methodically, selected a destination and simply teleported there.
No one feels any compunction about leaping when it is called for. But when we are thinking, how do we know when our leaps are a solution to a genuine obstacle — the intuitive leaps of a Copernicus or an Einstein — and when we have simply become impatient and jumped to a conclusion?
To know, then, whether we should leap, we need to know whether we face a genuine obstacle. That leaping “works”, that it moves us quickly from one place to another, is not in question, but if we did not have to leap, where we land might not be where we wanted. But how do we know where we want to land? Because this is in the nature of an obstacle: an obstacle is something you are one side of or the other. You do not need to see the whole course; you do not need to know what destination you are headed for; you only need to know that it is on the other side of each obstacle you face.
And here is at least one place where we might see a role for the second part of the phrase, for faith. How do you know the destination is on the other side? Perhaps you don’t; perhaps you only have faith that it is. And I think this is just how people tend to use the phrase “leap of faith” (whether it has anything to do with Kierkegaard or not). That it is precisely a leap to an unknown place. It will be some place, but whether it is is the place we hope for is unknown — as, in the simple case, you might hope each obstacle on the course is the last.
(That some destination worth reaching is on the other side of a series of obstacles, of problems to be solved, has become an article of faith in philosophy. Even Wittgenstein, who makes noises about there being no genuine philosophical problems, implies that he has such a faith in PI 107, the “rough ground” speech.)
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. To put all this rambling back into context, before abandoning it again, the question is whether there is a genuine obstacle to taking our everyday experience at face value. There is a long history of philosophical objections to such naivety, and a considerable body of recent scientific objection. But related though they may be, there are two different issues here: one about the facts on the ground, that is, about how we get along in the world; and one about how we are to theorize how we get along in the world. If you object that we have no ‘direct access’ to things — whatever that means — that is a claim of theory, but it is a claim about how we get along, and implies that there is an obstacle between ‘us’ and ‘the world’. Whether you, or your mind, or your brain, know anything about this obstacle, it’s there to be responded to somehow. On the other hand, if you find the claim that there is such an obstacle compelling, that becomes a different sort of obstacle — how can I take my experience at face value, given everything I know about how, say, perception works? You can then say that the theoretical objection is no obstacle at all, but the end of the line; if you leap over it, you'll leap to nowhere. But at the same time, you can acknowledge that this is not the same obstacle that you (or your mind or your brain) face all the time, and *that* one *must* be leapt over. I take it this is close to your position; maybe there's nothing answering to "perception" or "knowledge" as traditionally understood, but we must behave as if there is to get along in the world, and we'll call that a kind of "pragmatism".
What we need next is a better understanding of what an obstacle is. I wouldn't jump right to "how we recognize something is an obstacle", how we have a certain sort of knowledge, though that's in some sense what we want, so we can say whether there's an obstacle between us and the world that needs to be leapt over. Hopefully we can get to something like that later.
There's a flower moving about. It used to be a seed. I watch it moving.
Rather than assuming that distal causes 'can't intervene in the perceptual process', I think it's more accurate to say I was assuming that the distal causes are Markov separated from the current state of the flower. If you fixed the current material constitution [hide=*](really, dynamical trajectory, stuff moves)[/hide] of the flower, how it got that way doesn't matter. we'll see how it bends in the wind as a function of its material constitution and the wind.
Generalising that from the flower to the environment as a 'system of proximate causes', those material constitution variables which are associated with the values of hidden states (which we elicit/model) are proximate causes for what we see, which are Markov separated from their past by their current configuration.
Quoting Isaac
The point I was trying to make here:
Quoting fdrake
is something you just illustrated I think. The 'nodes' of the causal chain are the word labels, the arrows are the causality relation. So in:
Seed is a node, flower is a node, retinal ganglia is a node, conscious logging is a node. In reality there's some sort of continuous feed forward from the retinal ganglia to the conscious logging and the two processes are interdependent, right? Perception models are cyclical, what's logged now is (part of) a prior for later.
If you severed out the logging bit - imagined it didn't exist - since the retinal ganglia bit and the logging bit are interdependent, you no longer have the same process.
Which means that when you draw a causal chain like that, seed>flower>retinal ganglia>conscious logging, there's a certain amount of artistry that goes into lumping parts of the causal chain together into distinct entities which are then labelled with words ('seed', 'flower') and become stages in the causal chain.
The ambiguity regarding what the nodes of a causal chain of perception should be transfers uncertainty to any definition of "the perceptual object" which seeks to distinguish the perceptual object by its antecedent to the logging node. Since the interdependence of the two makes it difficult to break the conscious logging event out of the perception process.
There's then a further ambiguity regarding whether it's correct to say that the antecedent event to the conscious logging event is what is perceived.
Quoting Isaac
I think that says 'some internal states in perception have internal states as proximate causes', not 'all internal states in perception have internal states as proximate causes', in Friston's model there's both. I'm trying to highlight the realist commitments contained in 'some internal states in perception have environmental hidden states as their proximate causes', I believe you're highlighting that 'some internal states in perception have internal states as their proximate causes'. [hide=**]And even more radically, 'some internal states are proximate causes of the values of environmental hidden states"![/hide]. We can both agree.
Pass, definitely. I'm guessing that if we read Schopenhauer drastically differently, we probably also read different Kants. What is time according to Kant? Obviously we perceive it, but what's up with our apriori knowledge of it?
I brought up the seed. Mww had been expanding perception out from the brain via the binding of cause and effect, so I just extended it further so that a single act of perception is bound up with everything throughout time.
Yes, that was were I would have gone next; that explanations, even if in a sense arbitrary, need to be made; that cutting the flower and arranging it in a vase is a much less complicated task if one treats it as if the flower and the vase are real, as opposed to say explaining that same process in terms of the activity of neural networks. If many ways of speaking are of equal validity, the simpler way of speaking is to be preferred.
Quoting Isaac
Ok, I'm not following this. First, I agree entirely with the extension fo the discussion to acting on the world - picking the flower. The discussion is trivialised, led astray, by treating only perception. It's interaction with the things around us that is our topic.
Have I understood you correctly? you are saying something like that the flower is outside the Markov boundary of what we need to understand the behaviour?
Time is nothing but the condition by which things are successive to, or coexistence with, each other. We don’t perceive time; we perceive things in relation to it. Two things can never at once occupy the same space, but two things can at once occupy the same time. One thing can never be in two spaces, but one thing can be in two times. And that’s all there can ever be for us to know about.....no things, one thing, or more than one thing.
Our a priori knowledge of time arises because we invented it. It is a purely human intellectual conception, used only to make the natural world understandable by means of the system that invented and uses it. Same with mathematics and formal propositional logic.
————-
We didn't understand S that differently, in the end. He does something like you said, but rather than some elan vital you implied, the force behind everything, he merely makes will a substitute for the unknowable, such that Kant’s unknowable thing-in-itself is removed. Problem is, he spends the first part of the book telling us what will is for us, and the second part telling us how it applies to the world, but makes no proof that the human will we know is the same as that which grounds everything. So we are still left with a thing we don’t know, except by a name that we do.
He removed will from time, in the world, but will in humans absolutely requires time. So how he decided to use human will as the way to understand the world as will, is far too long a reach for me.
So, an image isn't an image of anything by being a physical trace of it. It's an image of the thing by being interpreted as being (an image) of the thing. By being made to refer to the thing, in a system of pictorial reference or interpretation.
Does the retina get to be made to refer to things?
It was only after a few eye problems that I became aware that the retina is actually part of the brain. It may play more of a significant role in consciousness than many realise. Some descriptions of sensory perception make vision, hearing and other aspects of perception, including touch appear as if they are add on features, but it may be they are the key aspects of consciousness. In connection with your post about 'images' it could be asked what are images, and whether images are simply that? The nervous system may be very complex.
Then why isn’t the eye problem you have, a brain problem? What part of the brain got fixed when the eye did?
It is difficult to disentangle aspects of the brain and sensory awareness. When I first developed an eye problem, to the point of being referred to an eye specialist; several years ago, I wondered how much came down to reading late at night, as well as overthinking. It may be that there are precautions to be advised, likreading digital devices which give off blue light at night. However,it is possible that it may go beyond this, as I was aware of struggling with negative emotions at the time of developing eye problems. This is my own experience and wonder about that,in connected with thought and the way it has effects in daily life experiences. So, brain and the role of thought may be complex.
.
Do you actually believe this?
Quoting Mww
I think he later decided Kant was right. His "will" is an off-shoot of his determinism. A human will is a matter of what a person identifies with.
Ehhh.....I don’t have much use for the concept of time. I can get all I want from the usefulness of it with a clock. I can defend his theory, but it is just that, a theory. Everybody’s got one.
What’s your take on it?
Quoting Mww
Sorry, posted too soon
Thinking of a dreamscape is a way to imagine time as a construct, because dream time literally is constructed. The things that populate a dreamworld don't really have the origins implied by their presence.
Cause and effect fails, but only from a perspective beyond the world. You have to take logic with a grain of salt. All certainty is built on hinge propositions or actions.
If you depend heavily on cause and effect and implied origins, you're bound to an in-world perspective. You can't mix that up with an out-world one.
Yes, but we’re disentangling parts, not aspects. Brain and eye can be aspects of something common to both without being parts of each other.
As a yankeevirgobabyboomer.....you know, everything in its proper place.
Yeah? And......?
OK, that works well for the flower, we can draw a hypothetical Markov blanket around all it's current states and consider that to be the first exterior node of our own perception. I'm not quite sure how that idea (which I'm fine with, as a model) fits in with how we might accommodate things like neuronal noise. They're happening 'within the body', but are surely as outside of the Markov blanket of our own perception process as the first rain the seed felt is outside that of the plant's current state?
Quoting fdrake
Yep, I can see the difficulty, but do we really have no ground for our 'stand roughly there' type of line being around the 'logging event'. Consider it this way...
The perceptual process is 1>2>3>4>5>6>7>8>9>1>2>3>4>5>6>7>8>9>1>2>3>4... where the numbers are all reals (even though I've just used natural numbers). Now we've removed the artifice of packaging up the process entirely. We want to take a 'snapshot' of the state of the system for our definitions, to answer the question "what are you looking at?" That snapshot is not going to come from an arbitrary number in that sequence, it's only ever going to come from the 9s. The conscious logging event (or maybe even the final step in it, if we come to terms with the fact that it too is a stepwise process) is not your average point in the process, it's the stopping point for any kind of third party access, we can't tell anyone what the signal from our retinal ganglia was, we can't tell anyone what just exited our V1, we can't tell anyone what photons just sped away from the flower's petals...We can't talk about any step in the process other than the last logging event. So even though that event merely feeds back into the perpetual process to become a step like any other, it remains significant to us in language, social behaviour etc. That, I think, gives the step immediately prior to it a justified priority when asking "why do we say...?" or "why do we do...?" the 'say' and 'do' parts are always going to be one of the 9s in the sequence so looking for 'why' should start at 8...regardless of an understanding that the cycle is continuous.
To me that makes the answer to the question "what am I talking about...?" the nearest step I can describe (arbitrarily put a ring around) to the 'talking about' bit of the cycle. I could say that I'm talking about the very last neuronal signal prior to be making the sounds, but that's not yet something we have a social construction for, we don't know what that is. But to go back beyond our beliefs, memories, mental images...etc, all things for which we do have words, all the way back to the hidden external state to answer that question seems unwarranted. If we're looking for the nearest describable step in the chain to the latest logging event (the one where we determine to do the action we're enquiring about), then I think it's just not true to say the nearest one we can find is the external hidden state (the flower), we have much nearer steps we can still find meaningful words for.
Quoting fdrake
Yes, definitely (even your hidden bit). I think that's the essential difference between my position and idealism (with which it is often confused). Idealism would claim the latter - 'all internal states in perception have internal states as proximate causes', I claim only the former, but I believe that the state of intent to act (speak, do) is an example of such a state as has another internal state as it's proximate cause and as such, in some modelling exercises, the internal state is the proper subject of those acts, not the external state further along the causal chain.
Yep. If only...But philosophers must earn a living I suppose.
Quoting Banno
Nearly, yes. The flower is outside of the Markov boundary for the determinates of the action on the world, but I wouldn't want to be read as saying that's all we need to understand the behaviour. I'll try to explain, but (if it's not too presumptuous of me) it'll be clearer if you read my response to fdrake above this, as it covers much of the same ground.
The process of perception is circular, a two way relationship between us and the world with world states being proximately responsible for body states and body states in turn being proximately responsible for world states. Hidden states of the world outside of our Markov blanket trigger mental states we're finally aware of (conscious logging) and that logging triggers behaviours which then affect the hidden states of the world...and so on.
But in this continuous cycle of steps, not all steps are equal. The hidden states of the world are super important for example. They're what we share with others, how we co-operate. The states of our retinal ganglia are not so significant to us, even though it's just as vital a step. We don't talk about it, don't share it, and most don't care about it. The behaviour (the step where we feed back to the hidden state of the world) is also a very significant one for us, not in terms of the physical effect (other people's bodies are world-states to us, so that's the same as step one), but the proximate cause, the step just before it. That's the step we use to predict people's behaviour, it's what allows us to be social beings - being able to predict the effect of our actions on others. So my claim is that in addition to the two steps already really important (not in any way trying to take away from those) - world state and behavioural action on it - I think we have a third step which is also really important - the one just preceding the action, the proximate cause of it, and that's clearly not the world state, it's an internal state.
Yeah, and then the fact that 'rose' is something frequently said of that flower becomes a world-state which can then be an object of perception.
Quoting frank
I can see how it might seem that way. The content of dreams is of a different time than the content of the experiences from which the dream content arises. But it’s the same for plain ol’ conscious memory recall, too, so, not sure we’ve gained much. As to origins, I think we’re stuck with a common origin for every manifestation of human cognition, whether conscious thought, memory recall, or dream state content.
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Quoting frank
Does this relate back to dream worlds as being beyond the world? So c&e doesn’t hold power there? True enough, I suppose, but then, dreams are just imagination without arbitration from reason, meaning that not only is there no proofs of the possibilities contained therein, but there isn’t any need of them. There’s no need to subject dreams to logical principles, so it doesn’t matter if c&e holds or not. I’m sure we’ve both known folks who would claim they’ve whooped Bobby Fisher. Or copied Albert’s beam-riding.
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Quoting frank
Absolutely. I mean....what would an out-world be? How would it manifest? How would we even know if we were in it? If we were in it, it wouldn't be an out-world. The nature of the human intellect: for any possible conception, it’s complement is given immediately from it. The implied origin of a possible out-world is given necessarily from the fact of the in-world.
Can I getta A-MEN!!! brutha?
I don't know if noises are even uniquely associated with environmental or internal state variables in Friston's work. They're associated with functions which combine those state variables and a hierarchy level. So it doesn't seem clear to associate noises with environmental or internal states, and the 'markov blanket' of any noise term is determined by which hierarchy level it's on IIRC (see box 1 and 2 here). If you're referring to the noises at the same time as environmental states and internal states with the phrase 'outside the Markov blanket', I think that's a theoretical error since the noises aren't kept track of with state variables in the same way as environmental and internal states? They're instead kept track of with their distributional summary characteristic (the precision matrix of their joint distribution).
So, summarizing: there's more than one 'Markov blanket', if you wanted to look at 'the Markov blanket of our sensorium' that's got direct connections to environmental and internal hidden states, if you wanted to look at 'the Markov blanket of neuronal noise and environmental + internal states' it seems to me either to use more than one concept of 'state' (one for errors, one for environmental and internals) or to be a misapplication of the concept of 'Markov blanket'?
Putting it in less jargony terms, whatever errors we make in perception act upon the synthesis of sensory data rather than acting as their own sensory data. Errors are formed by the coincidence of discrepancies between emerging features of our perceptual landscape, rather than stored as their own form of sensory or environmental data (state). Part of the model are assumptions about how this error behaves in the aggregate.
Quoting Isaac
If the transition from 9 to 1 could be thought of as a reset, I'd agree with the emphasis, but isn't it more that 9 provides a very strong prior for the next 1? So unless the prior effect's gone away by the time you get to the next 9, it seems to me too artificial to abstract from the process that 9 is the real content of 1. It's the proximate cause of 1's current form, in a context where non-proximate causes are still relevant - eg 9 is a filtered aggregate of 8.
Maybe a philosophical way of phrasing it, if you've got a chain like that, you can read the arrow as something like '1>2 = 1 informs the content of 2", if 1>2 and 2>3, you'd still have that 1 informed the content of 3 if that relationship is transitive.
In the real world it probably depends upon the weighting of steps, so probably true that step 9 'informs the content of' step 1 the strongest - there's still a question regarding where the content of step 9 'came from' and whether it's appropriate to say that '9 predominantly informs the content of 1' implies 'person perceives the content of 9'.
Regardless, it doesn't seem to me a valid inference to go from: "X predominantly determined the content of Y's perceptions" to "Y perceived X". Could be made a better inference with a theory of content determination - eg, what makes that inference true? What kind of thing can be substituted into X there?
The reason why philosophers have muddled the whole affair is that they refuse to acknowledge the ontological primacy of caring and its "objects". Qualia are, as Dennett, I think dismissively, puts it "pure phenomena", but what is IN phenomena? It is not the bare recognition of some "appeared to redly" kind of thing. This is awfully naïve, an abstraction from experience. But affect: the interest, desire, love, hate, fear and all the rest are always of-a-piece with qualia and it is here the apprehension of the being qua being of a thing, if you will, is discovered. The existence qua existence (not mincing words here) of this lamp on the table is IN the bare features once the cognitive dimensions are analytically removed. In other words, do a reduction to the pure sensory features in the empirical presentation, and while you may find the conceptual structure never to be reduced, the "bare" witnessing in the conceptual scheme can be pure, I claim, and here, qualia's identity is understood: in affect, existence "speaks".
And a fair amount of a human's interaction with its environment is reflexive and explained post hoc. So again, what we call perception has to be tuned to needs.
I’ve been wondering where “aboutness” is in these causal chains, and how @Isaac proposes to infer 9 is about 8 from 9 was caused by 8. Since the model is not supposed to be descriptive but predictive, you might think intentionality could be captured by saying that 9 points to 1 — which is around the corner from your point about priors. That makes it at least as tempting to say that 9 is about 1 as it is to say 9 is about 8 (or 7 or 6 or ...). Why look back in the chain for meaning, instead of forward? It might also make sense to think of the logging at 9 being something like “Cycle finishing, coming back to 1 now,” or “Now connecting 8 to 1,” or “Got from 1 to 8, headed back to 1.” Don’t we expect to find not a bare, descriptive report logged to consciousness but one with some kind of directedness embedded in it?
But you did not make use of qualia in your description - you described what you saw in terms of circles and size and colour - all stuff that is part of our shared world.
So how are they supposedly useful?
Of course not. It's made of chairs and cups and trees and people. And that some (you?) might suppose otherwise is why qualia are a bad idea.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/629929
In the article cited, there is a discussion about the ambiguity of "qualia".
Treating colour as prior to the things that are coloured is presumptuous, as would be treating coloured things as prior to colour. The one is never without the other.
My reply to you, again, is that nothing is added to our account of red and loud things by introducing qualia. They do not have explanatory value beyond our existing language. You described of flashing lights before your closed eyes quite comprehensibly without reference to qualia.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/629929
It's the way we ordinarily use our words. That thing there that I'm pointing to (cue, a red rose in a vase on the table) is what I understand a red flower to be. I can see it, take it out of the vase, and react if I drop it.
That a scientist could potentially put probes on my brain and view an image of what I'm looking at doesn't change anything about what I'm looking at.
Quoting Isaac
I think its a logical/linguistic issue. Our (public) use of words derives from our interaction with things in the world that we find ourselves a part of.
There's no dispute that perception involves a physical process that can involve any number of steps. The dispute (if there is one here) is with the suggestion that we're not perceiving the things we ordinarily think we are - that we're instead subject to a "veil of perception" (i.e., that we're either perceiving images or else inferring things via an image).
Quoting Isaac
Yes, our perception starts with "medium-sized dry goods", so to speak - the everyday things we observe and interact with.
But perception is not limited to that. Brains aren't outside the body, yet we can open up a skull and see a brain. We can use a microscope to see neurons. And we learn that seeds (which we can also perceive) grow into flowers.
We can also use more abstract language - "image", "representation", "appearance" and so on. But those abstractions depend on the concrete things we perceive and interact with. The "veil of perception" is an alternative conception that breaks that logical dependency.
No, as far as I know they're not. That was the point I was trying to make. I was giving an example of an input where the external/internal boundary made no difference in terms of being Markov separated. I could perhaps have used a hidden physiological state instead (might have been less confusing).
Quoting fdrake
Not necessarily. It depends on the prior priming of backward acting signal suppression as to whether noise is aggregated by some sort of precision matrix into the signal or if it is 'clipped'. We're interested here only in stochastic resonance effects rather than background noise (which can be aggregated without influencing priors. But... that's not really relevant to the point I was making, which could have chosen an example other than neuronal noise.
Any signal which has a threshold potential to meet can be modelled as it's own Markov blanket as all but the proximate contributory signals will be Markov separated. There's no modelling impact of this on a per neuron basis, but with neuronal clusters, their immediate sources have modelling implication, but the fact that those sources too have threshold potentials to meet, themselves from multiple sources, gives us Markov separated internal states.
Quoting fdrake
Yeah, this is correct - as far as I know, but with stochastic resonance, it's a reasonable modelling assumption, I think.
Incidentally, this is (according to Friston himself, in a paper I did understand) Friston's preferred model of neuronal noise (in a paper I didn't understand!)
Quoting fdrake
Except for stochastic resonance in non-suppressed signals from forward feeding neural clusters with specifically modelled 'meanings'. assumptions about input states can be detached from external states by the effect of neuronal noise.
Quoting fdrake
Maybe (see reservations below), but my main dispute with this analysis is that there's no need for us to use the 'real' content at all. My argument is entirely about the pragmatic content of 9 for various models. I've little time for the 'real' anything...only the useful.
That said, I think the fact the 9 informs 1 is not more special a part of the system (it's what I was implying by having my example continue ...8>9>1>2...), as you say...
Quoting fdrake
Yeah. If I could actually draw in these posts I would have gone for a network with several 1s leading to 2 and several 2s leading to 3 etc. but that seemed beyond my mathjax capability. I'm not sure that the introduction of ambiguity affects how we talk about the content of 9 though. I mean 9 itself will be a lose aggregate with fuzzy boundaries no matter how we divide it up. 'Flower' is too (where does the flower end and the atmosphere begin - is the CO2 inside a stomata part of the air or the flower? So I don't necessarily see a problem with us similarly loosely referring to 'all the 8s' informing any given 9, or 'all the 9s' informing any given 1.
Quoting fdrake
Yeah, this is basically the point I'm trying to make. We weigh steps differently. No-one even has a non technical name fo the activity of the retinal ganglia, but the external hidden states we call 'the world' or 'objects' or 'a flower'... we have names for that stage, it's of huge significance to us. What I'm arguing is that the most proximate stage which we weigh heavily enough to name it, conceptualise it, is what we refer to as 'mental image', 'memory', 'concept', 'motive' etc.
Quoting fdrake
Possibly, but what I'm arguing is that the inference is useful, not that it's true. I'm saying that anything could be substituted for X that's in our model of a causal chain (with the caveat above, that each stage be treated as a loose affiliation of signal, not a deterministic single route), but that not everything should be. Not every X is as useful as every other X, but any X is a valid as any other.
As above, yes.
Not infer, declare. It's a choice we make, not a fact we discover.
Cool. 'Realist' is what I was aiming for!
That's what I thought from our previous chats. :up:
That seems like an odd position to take. It implies that science is a pointless exercise, forever subsumed by whatever it was we 'reckoned' was the case prior to its discoveries. We used to talk as if the sun went around the earth, we talk of sunrise, the 'movement' of the stars. Should we then say that cosmology needs to change how it talks because we had a prior linguistic convention which assumed a geocentric universe?
If we start out with a very direct form of realism (because we have no idea how the brain works), and create linguistic conventions around that, I don't see why it has primacy over any new linguistic conventions arising from knowledge we've gained as to just how much internal states affect our perception and understanding of external objects. Edit - Actually, I'm not even concerned about 'primacy' here. The counter-claim being made is that it's not even 'allowed', let alone, secondary. Secondary I'd accept, even support.
Quoting Andrew M
I don't think they do, at least not exclusively. Our public use of words is derived as much from social beliefs, dynamics and feedback (often chaotic), as it is from the properties of objects.
Quoting Andrew M
I agree.
Quoting Andrew M
I don't see how. They just seem like two models to me. Why does the fact that one of them governs everyday interaction (including interaction with brains, fMRI scans, EEG etc) and one of them govern talk about how minds work mean that one breaks a logical dependency on the other?
If I use an instrument which relies on electricity to investigate electro-magnetism my results are thus constrained. I'm not told "you can discover anything you like, but you cannot change how we think electro-magnetism works because the machine you're using relies on electricity"
Indirect realist, right?
I guess I don't see what the point you made is for then. It seems the following are true:
( 1 ) There are states.
( 2 ) Some stuff counts as a state, some stuff doesn't.
( 3 ) It's ambiguous when to count something as a state sometimes.
( 4 ) Neuronal noise doesn't have a state associated with its values (but it does have states associated with its precision matrix).
[hide="more detail on precision matrix"]( 4 a ) - the precision matrix encodes the relationships of the neuronal noise at different levels of models in the hierarchy.[/hide]
( 5 ) If you perceive environmental object X, X has external hidden states with it.
( 6 ) Those external hidden states are in direct contact with some internal states.
( 7 ) Direct contact means that the value of one state (external) influences the value of another state (internal) without passing through another state. A->B rather than A->B->C.
( 8 ) That means the Markov blanket of some internal states includes some external states.
( 9 ) A corollary of ( 8 ) is that the Markov blanket of all internal states includes some external states.
I think I can believe those things and draw a direct realist conclusion from Friston's work. Direct in the sense of the contact in ( 8 ), rather than perceiving reality 'unfiltered'. I don't want to conclude that we 'perceive the objects of the external world as they are' from that, I want to conclude that the values of external states actually saturate the perception process. (Box 1 here).
I think I've been playing fast and loose/using the vocabulary a bit wrongly in construing there being internal and external states, since 'internal states' are in the brain, and external states are outside of the brain - but sensory states and action states have connections to both internal and external states. I've been lumping in sensory states with internal states and action states with external states. Hopefully that hasn't done too much damage to what I've said.
Anyway, I don't think it follows from what I said above that "I perceive the state of the external world exactly as it is", just that "I perceive the states of the external world (using some model process)" and "That modelling process is in direct contact with the external world".
Quoting Isaac
Can you flesh out why from that it follows that we perceive mental images, memories, concepts etc? I don't see the connection.
"The introspection illusion is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly think they have direct insight into the origins of their mental states, while treating others' introspections as unreliable."
-Wikipedia
If you're claiming that brains are the origin of experiences and asserting that all others who disagree are unreliable, then you're as much a introspective illusionist as anyone.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Quoting 180 Proof
Don't know how you interpreted skepticism of other people's introspective illusions as me being an introspective illusionist myself. Wouldn't that mean you're one too?
Is your experience of brains an illusion? How else do you or anyone know anything about brains if not by experience?
Well, i'm doing neother ... :roll:
I didn't, so ... strawman ergo another evasive non sequitur.
I'd like to again draw attention to the intentionalist approach to the problem of perception. intentionalist approaches draw on the intentional character of perception: seeing things as a cup or as a tree or as a person. The interesting thing here is that this is quite similar to the Baysian modelling described by @Isaac and others. So for example if what you see fits in with what in previous encounters you have treated as a cup; treat it as a red cup but modify your model if needed. "Treat it as a red cup" is adopting an intentional attitude towards the cup.
Intentinalist explanations potentially show how a neurological account and an intentional folk-account can both be true.
Intentionalism is a form of direct realism. While other direct realists might say one sees a cup, an intentionalist would more accurately say that one sees it as a cup.
More duck-rabbits, of course. And this needs filling out. But it fits fairly neatly with the neuroscience, avoids the silliness of qualia and shows that we refer to flowers and not perceptions-of-flowers.
The concern some might associate with different kinds of realism is whether the things we encounter have mind-independent status. If one calls the encountered thing an apple, it would appear you're saying the apple is not mind-independent. What we call this view is really of secondary importance philosophically speaking.
Quoting Banno
Science is interested in how a collection of firing neurons comes to be interpreted as a single thing. It may be that scientists need to look at inclinations to "treat" a stimulus as distinct objects. I don't know. It seems that you're gliding over the scientific question to talk about language use?
This implies a dualism. "It" and "the cup". What means "one sees"? Already in saying "one sees" are qualia involved. What do you even mean by qualia and saying that they are silly? Do you live in an extra-quale reality of objective, solid material, existing in an extramundane world, seen from which they are silly stuff while you unconsciously use them too when looking at the world from a high tower made of some stuff inaccessible to qualia?
Why do you think it follows that if we call something an apple, it follows that we would thereby be committed to saying it is mind-dependent?
I quite agree. I would add that what we are engaged in, at least to begin with, is finding an effective grammar, a way of talking.
Quoting frank
All realisms take it that the stuff around us is mind-independent, don't you agree?
Quoting frank
I don't see why. Calling it an apple is mind-dependent. But the apple isn't. It doesn't need a mind to be what it is.
The stuff around us is always already interpreted; that is, we always take an intentional attitude towards it; we see this as an apple, that as a dish, that as a knife. But if you call the apple an orange, or see it as an orange,that makes no difference to the apple.
Read the Dennett article - even if only the first few paragraphs. Get back to me.
I don't follow your reasoning either, but we both agree with Isaac: the objects we respond and react to are internal.
I think that a mischaracterisation*. But @Isaac will speak for himself. I've found that he is unusually careful with his choice of words and found that on examination his view is a pretty straight forward realism.
As for you and I, we might usefully finesse the discussion. You said
Quoting frank
Can you confirm that realism for you is the view expressed in SEP, that:
Just for the sake of checking that we agree on at least this basic use.
Then:
Quoting frank
I agree with you that calling the apple "an apple" requires a mind. Can you explain how this is incompatible with the use of "realism" agreed above?
* Edit: That mischaracterisation is that Isaac might well agree that the objects we respond and react to are internal but be puzzled why others might think that it did not involve flowers.
Putting you on the spot...
Just bring honest here: I don't see you as coming to the discussion in good faith, so I'm not interested in clarifying any statements made by either of us.
Nah. I just worked 12 hours in an emergency department and I'm not interested in your bullshit.
Take care - get some sleep?
This is pure Kantianism as I read this.
If the intentionalist insists upon drawing a distinction between "it" and the cup, but references only what he sees, the phenomenal obtains description and the "it" remains a descriptionless indescribable entity. This is classic phenomenal versus noumenal talk, just dressed up in a more palatable way.
On the other hand, if the referent of the intentionalist's "it " is simply the cup, it would be superfluous to say "I see the cup as the cup." He might as well just say "I see the cup," and stop repeating himself and making vague references to an "it."
This is to say you haven't found a comfy middle ground between direct and indirect realism. You must pick your poison
Sometimes they're the same, other times not.
When they're not, we tend to say the experienced is objective.
Experiences themselves are usually said to be subjective, and in a format we call qualia or whatever.
If I'm talking about my like of coffee, or an annoying headache, then the experience and the experienced are the same.
If I talk about the coffee, or the bump on my head, then they're not the same.
Then there are the errors...
A hallucination or phantom pain is when thinking the experience and the experienced aren't the same, but they are.
Idealism is thinking they're always the same, but sometimes they're not; talk about self-elevation/universalization.
And the occasional category mistakes...
Experiences are occurrences, more clearly temporal, are interruptible (interaction/event-causation), come and go, i.e. process-likes.
The experienced are often more clearly movable, locatable, breakable (under conservation), i.e. object-likes.
So, when we perceive things, process-likes are involved, interaction, causation, or something; it's not like we become the experienced, or have to.
At a glance, I don't see anything plain wrong with that account, but I do see some things going awry when ignoring parts of it.
Nor am I looking for a middle ground between direct and indirect realism; intentionalism is direct realism, only the direction is reversed.
I'm not sure I have the meaning of that term right. @fdrake and @Banno both seem willing to accept that our brain guesses, filters and modifies sensory data prior to the next step (whatever that might be), yet are 'direct' realists. I've described my position before as model-dependant realism, which is a term I heard some chap use in a lecture I attended, but I'm wary of these labels, they've come back to bite me before, people says "Oh, so you believe..." where I don't.
Yes, we're in agreement here. The hidden states have to form a part of the process. What's more, their properties have to be such that two people's models of them is at least in the same ballpark, we cannot possibly just 'make it all up' I don't see a way that a process which seems to mathematically match one aimed at reducing surprise could function in a state where no nodes were outside it's Markov boundary.
Quoting fdrake
No, not at all, but it's what I was getting at with my clumsy introduction of stochastic resonance. What's inside or outside any Markov blanket is not necessarily the same as indies or outside a skull. That's true of our sensory receptors (for whom their first 'inside' node os actually outside the body) and it's true for our internal models (which may have nodes outside their Markov boundary - my stochastic resonance example - but inside the brain)
Quoting fdrake
Yes. Completely agree. And if that's what 'direct' realism is, then you can sign me up, but if so, I'm left confused as to what 'indirect' realism could possibly be. Same for @Banno's use of the term. I don't think I've ever been clear on this.
Quoting fdrake
If I've said 'perceive' then I've messed up somewhere. My intention here is to give a model (only one among others) of what we talk about, act on, believe etc. I wouldn't (shouldn't have!) describe this as what we 'perceive' because perception is a process which involves parts of the brain which are outside of the Markov blanket for the models which produces the objects we talk about, act on and believe (in this model).
I'm probably labouring many of these points, but to get it clear;
We have a model which assumes there are hidden states causing our conscious states (those we log). I don't think we can do anything about this model and doubting it or pretending it's up for discussion is disingenuous - I think we all agree there.
We make further models that are guesses as to what those hidden states will do next. Guesses based on priors and sensory inputs.
Note (this is really important for understanding my position) it's not that we guess what they are, we're not interested at this stage in what they are, only what they'll do next of we prod them (or not).
We then check that model by looking again, fiddling with it (and sometime making it fit the model better), this being, as you say, a continuous process - guess, fiddle, re-guess
One of these checks is to interact with these hidden states in social environment (we could say to pick it up and throw it at some other hidden states - people)
For this particular test, we use a combination of object recognition and social meaning (things like the name for it, what we in our culture use it for, etc.). One could simplify this as saying "I'm currently modelling this thing as a 'cup', if that's right, I should be able to say 'pass me the cup' and it work, I should be able to pour tea into it and not have everyone look at me funny". The social function is one of the continual tests we use to update our models.
So I see the social world of objects as a kind of current mutual agreement about how we're going to treat hidden sates, kind of an insurance policy against hallucination, insanity, or just plain bad eyesight. It makes sense to have our models pretty close to those of the people around us we want to co-operate with so we include those people in our modelling process. Thing like language are part of that inclusions, which is why I tend to put word meanings within the top level modelling process, not outside of it (as the object of it).
I see "the grass is green" as meaning (from the perspective of our world-modelling mental processes) "if I say 'grass' do you look at the thin leaves sticking up there, and if is say 'is green' do you nod in assent or do you look at me confused". This is not to say that confirmatory behaviour is the only option, I might (as part of my surprise reduction process) try to get you to agree, or try to get you to change the grass so it fits my model better, but either way, I'm using the social interaction with the modelling process, not as an object of it and the 'word for it' is a token used in the social interaction, so also within the model, not the object of it.
I should stress though, that treating things this way is just a frame I find useful, not a claim to the way things are.
This seems to fit quite neatly into...
Quoting Banno
...have I got that right?
Quoting Banno
Frankly, none at all. When I was doing research, I studied the role of social construction in beliefs, toward the latter end of my academic career, I became interested in the social influences on perception, and got peripherally involved with some neuroscientists looking at the same problem (hence my interest here). At no point did we use 'qualia', the term was considered as archaic as 'phlogiston'. But, that's a very limited experience, I know many in the field do use it, although in my experience they do so primarily to communicate with others, rather than as a modelling commitment.
If I brought it up in my current work, I think I'd be shown the door.
Like the Snark there are many still hunting the quale, and good luck to them, but I've neither seen any compelling evidence it exists nor any reason to think it might.
Dennet is a computer guy. I'm not interested in computers. I know what he tries to do. He projects computational processes on an area where they don't apply. Humans. Well, humans calculate, off course. But not like computers. What do you think qualia are?
The "it" you refer to can be something that combines matter and qualia. The "it" can be matter as well as quale.
I'll take a wild guess that the point of calling your view "direct" realism is to rule out a static intermediary while accepting a dynamic one.
For my purposes that contributes confusion without any payoff.
The ideas of direct vs indirect realism themselves are problematic. What type of access do we have to our own conscious minds? It seems to me that we have direct access to our mind and indirect access to the world via the mind - the one and only way we have access to and know about the world. We have direct access to our mind because we are our minds. Minds are a part of the world, so in a sense we have direct access to part of the world and indirect access to the rest of it. Now the boundary between indirect and direct realism becomes blurred and meaningless.
Quoting Banno
Avoiding the "silliness" of qualia is ignoring the way the intentionalist sees the world. It fails to explain how one can confuse a hallucination, or a dream, for the real thing. How can they be confused for the same thing if they didn't appear similarly (their form and behavior is identical as qualia).
Is the intentionalist referring to flowers, or what they see as flowers? Mirages and hallucinations show that what the intentionalist sees something as isn't always what it is. Using the behavior of others as a means to determine what one is seeing is part of the shared world and not a figment of the mind is just as problematic as your only means of observing others is by the same means that the doubt is attributed to. There is also the issue of different levels of subjectivity - on the level of the individual and on the level of species. Not only are there differences in how individual humans perceive the world, but also a difference in how different species perceive the world. Which species has direct access to the world?
So I've read the first paragraphs, and as I thought, Dennet doesn't convince. As usual for materialists, he siphons the burden of proof to the shoulders of quale defenders, who have nothing to proof at all because the kind of proof he means isn't used by the defenders of qualia. Material processes are part of the world of qualia and as such the can't be used in a defense or proof of the qualia. Qualia might differ from person to person, while material processes are objective and the same for everyone, but that's just a tactic used in their defense. Supporters of qualia don't need such claims of independent objectivity to infer their real existence. Qualia differ from person to person, and it's only in very specific conditions that stable qualia corresponding to a material process are formed.
DNA exists, of course. It is not made of qualia either. But viewing it as matter is invoking qualia too. The difference with everyday qualia being that they are standarized and seemingly the same for everyone. Everýbody agrees that DNA is a 2-meter long connection of two negatively coupled strings of 4 repeating units (themselves fixed structures particles), folded up intricately to fit in a nucleus. You can look at them under a microscope, make a (partial) colored model, or imagine them. However you present it, you are bound by qualia.
But then, what is a DNA molecule, If no matter or qua?e?
I don't think the literature is clear on the distinction either AFAIK. Proponents of direct realism seem to do one of two mutually exclusive things:
( 1 ) Believe that when you see a red cup, you really are seeing the red cup, and was red cup before anybody interacted with it. Properties get 'read off' the world and logged into perception without transformation.
( 2 ) Believe that when you see a red cup, seeing it as a red cup is a useful summary/condensation and reflection of its real properties. You see it as a red cup, but you nevertheless see it.
Arguments against direct realism seem to focus on two points - that properties like being red aren't mind independent (notice this only targets ( 1 ) ), and exposing directly seeing the red cup (perceptual state is in direct relation with red cup) to various paradoxes (argument from hallucination, illusion etc). The purpose of this second flavour of argument seems to be to undermine direct realism in support of indirect (usually indirect representational) realism, because those paradoxes are seen to have more elegant solutions when you use (representational) perceptual intermediaries.
I believe it's also possible to construe ( 2 ) as a type of representation - a direct relationship of representation between red cup states and perceptual states of the red cup. Though it's a type of representation without perceptual intermediaries. I think Dennett's alluded to holding a position sympathetic to this (I can go quote hunting if required), something about body behaviours representing world behaviours without perceptual intermediaries. I'm not going to speculate further in this direction though.
I am quite sure that the forum is a non-representative sample of people who enjoy philosophy of perception. Philosophers of mind tend to be representationalist (at time poll was taken). I think the regular discussers in these threads are more likely than real philosophers to be sympathetic to embodied cognition, which seems to have a lot of overlap with ecological psychology approaches to perception, which are direct and possibly non-representational realist.
[quote='SEP on embodied cognition']Ecological psychologists, on the other hand, deny that organisms encounter impoverished stimuli (Michaels and Palatinus 2014). Such a view, they believe, falsely identifies whole sensory systems with their parts—with eyes, or with retinal images, or with brain activity. Visual perceptual processes, for instance, are not exclusive to the eye or even the brain, but involve the whole organism as it moves about its environment. The motions of an organism create an ever-changing pattern of stimulation in which invariant features surface. The detection of these invariants, according to the ecological psychologist, provides all the information necessary for perception. Perception of an object’s shape, for instance, becomes apparent as a result of detecting the kinds of transformations in the stimulus pattern that occur when approaching or moving around the object. The edges of a square, for instance, will create patterns of light quite different from those that a diamond would reflect as one moves toward or around a square, thus eliminating the need for rule-guided inferences, drawing upon background knowledge, to distinguish the square from a diamond. Insights like these have encouraged embodied cognition proponents to seek explanations of cognition that minimize or disavow entirely the role of inference and, hence, the need for computation. Just as perception, according to the ecological psychologist, is an extended process involving whole organisms in motion through their environments, the same may well be true for many other cognitive achievements.[/quote]
Which can read like ( 1 ) or ( 2 ), Gibson's affordances are very similar to ( 2 ) (which afaik inspired Friston's work heavily?).
You will also find arguments between embodied cognition people (enactivists) and those who believe that perception is representational even without reference to the perceptual intermediary debate if you go looking.
Edit: meant to link this which talks about direct realism and enactivism.
I'm working on what is involved in the intentionalist approach. It fits with Wittgenstein via Anscombe, and seems compatible with your comments about neuroscience, but there are some issues I'd like to clear up before committing to something like it. But yes, your account seems similar, if from a differing perspective.
On qualia:
Quoting Isaac
Thank you for setting this out. It's much as I had supposed. Qualia do not seem to have a useful place in these accounts.
Useless.
Just to repeat what I have been saying for years, qualia seem either to just be seeing red and feeling a smooth surface, things already accounted for in our language; or they are ineffable and hence outside of our language and of no use in our accounts. If you think there is a useful way to treat them, then it's up to you to present your account.
The view of Dennett you expressed is somewhat shallow - "he's a a computer guy, I don't do computers..." I'm not too keen on Dennett either, but the dismissiveness you present is of no use. Better that you stay out of the discussion.
Quoting AgentTangarine
That's why they are of little use in our accounts. I don't see that you are presenting anything of merit here. You seem to have a picture of an odd sort of dualism of material and qual, of which I can make little sense. If we take such a dualism seriously, how is it that qualia reflect what is happening in the "material" world?
On this I agree. It's an anachronism, and over-simplification. Quoting Harry Hindu
I don't think we "have access" to our own minds; we are our minds, at least in part - as you say. SO that way of speaking leads to confusion.
Quoting Harry Hindu
That's indeed a weak point. I suppose an intentionalsit account might talk about something like "persistence" being absent form hallucinations and dreams. Or better, that they are not shared in the way of veritable experiences.
:up:
There's too many ways of being direct or indirect to get into the specifics based on those terms alone I think.
Aha! Then it's small wonder indeed that you think they are useless. In reality though, qualia make up the whole world we live in.
Quoting Banno
No, that's why they differ from person to person. You can't expect them to be all equal. Why should they? Because they differ they are even more useful in constructing an invariant picture of material processes behind them. If there would be only one common set of common qualia one couldn't even start looking for a common materialistic picture behind them.This picture is a subset of a much wider collection of qualia. Different and varying qualia can be reduced to a stable invariant set of common qualia, which are the qualia of the material processes.
Quoting AgentTangarine
Shouldn't be too hard to specify what you mean?
I told you previously what I mean by direct realism - at least the version of it I defend. It's a similar use of the term to the sensorimotor theory of perception paper I linked, and also similar to the description of perception in the enactivist section I referenced earlier.
There are other word meanings for direct realism, I gestured toward the 'reading off the world' one ('naive' realism) in thread too. Any particular position will be able to tell you what they mean when asked. The problem as I see it is threefold:
( A ) lots of contrary positions with the same broad labels, this might be because perception philosophies intersect with broader theory of mind ones and philosophy of language ones to a large degree.
( B ) the content ascribed to each position depends upon which position it's viewed from - the perspectives distort each other, you'll be able to find articles quibbling about presuppositions of certain word uses/argument patterns in the field (see how much of a quibbling preamble is required to determine what is meant by "qualia", "functional property", or a perception instantiating a property vs having a property inhere in a perception etc) to try and hedge against the history of theoretical baggage
( C ) it's probably not actually a misinterpretation to be supersensitive to theoretical baggage in the field because how experience is parsed depends upon how it's described, so something like vocabulary choice (or even whether an entity is conceivable) might have adverse consequences for articulating some other theory which needs a different vocabulary choice or labels that entity inconceivable/confused/a contradiction in terms. It makes it very difficult to make theories 'meet in an honest disagreement' when so much prefiguring/ground clearing jostling needs to be done.
(maybe also of interest to @Kenosha Kid).
I think that's only insurmountable when the people involved are full of antagonism and don't want honest disagreement.
Ordinary language allows the revising of claims in the light of new discoveries. One can be mistaken about what they think they're perceiving, e.g., that the sun is literally rising. In your example, people agreed on what the term "movement" meant. The dispute was instead a substantial one about which objects were moving.
The "perception" dispute is not like that. It's instead a disagreement over how the term is defined.
Quoting Isaac
Yes, language emerges within a dynamic, relational context. We don't stand outside the world perceiving things from a God-eye's perspective.
Quoting Isaac
Because the "veil of perception" model takes the ordinary term "image" (or "veil", or "representation") which is defined in terms of perceptible objects and then defines "perception" in terms of images (or veils or representations), which is circular. Also see the example below.
Quoting Isaac
As I see it, it's like being told that the instrument completes its function indirectly because it relies on electricity. The point is that the instrument does what it is designed to do and uses electricity (or perhaps some other yet-to-be discovered means) to do it. There isn't a barrier in the way.
Similarly, the term "perception" does what it is designed to do. There's no barrier or veil in the way because the term "perceive" has been defined ostensively (which is to say, relationally between a perceiver and what is perceived). That is, this red flower here is the intended object of my perception. When I look and become aware that it is there, then I've perceived it. If I'm mistaken about what is there (because, like the above instrument's operation, things can sometimes go awry) then I haven't perceived anything.
Scientific investigation is a natural extension of everyday experience where the language and knowledge is simply more specialized. There doesn't need to be a conflict.
My impression is that reviving the use of "direct" realism was about rehabilitating empiricism after Kant's view had become dominant.
So it's not like champions of indirect realism are trying to push woo with the use of the term. It's more that people (maybe you to some extent?) are pushing the use of the word "direct" in a way that seems a little contorted.
I really don't think we're so far past the problems that gave rise to the terms that they're meaningless or somehow profoundly problematic. Are we?
I don't really know that we are our minds. What of our bodies? Are we not our bodies? If confusion results from saying that we have access to our minds, in what way do we have access to our own bodies, and then to the environment they are part of? Does this mean that "we" can exist apart from our bodies? If not, then wouldn't that mean that we are our bodies and not our minds?
Quoting Banno
A schizophrenic's hallucinations are persistent. If they cannot be shared in the way of veritable experiences, then how is it possible to lie to others - to make others believe in things that are not true? How is it that we can get others to behave in ways as if they are hallucinating by lying to them? Asserting that the behavior of others an help you determine if you are hallucinating or not doesn't help at all when the others and their behaviors could be a hallucination as well. Think about how a schizophrenic will claim that everyone is out to get him and they don't believe his ideas about being hunted down by the government.
Besides, none of this addresses why there is even a moment in time where hallucinations can be misinterpreted as being real - because of the shared qualities of the experience itself - hallucinated spiders look just like real spiders. When looking at another brain, either directly or via a brain scan, is it easier to tell the difference when someone is hallucinating or not than it is when you're the one experiencing the hallucination? If so, why the discrepancy when your view of another's brain is always via your own mind? How is it that you can know more about someone else's state than they do if you can only access their state indirectly, and if they are their own mind then why wouldn't they have more direct and accurate knowledge of their own mental state than you?
When you're asking a question about the nature of qualia, you're really talking theory. Qualia _seem_ to happen whatever our theories about them. There is pragmatism though in understanding the limits of other pragmatisms. It may be pragmatic to proceed on the basis that qualia do or don't exist, but that just means it's extra important to be aware of when they don't or do seem to. Otherwise you end up rationalising facts to fit theories and you're just championing something willy nilly.
Same for the fidelity of our experiences. It's efficient to assume that our brains have this all covered for us by now, but when we hit something alarming remember that such pragmatisms are just that.
:up:
Quoting fdrake
Guilty, but that's characteristic of a) only having the experience to work with, not it's causes, b) being largely ignorant of the nature of those causes, and c) too many theories. All the more reason for divorcing things from theories about things.
I have read the comments in the thread and it does remain a complex issue. Previously, I had not been particularly impressed by what I had read by Dennett. However, at this specific moment, his writing is making sense to me of qualia being the link between the objective aspects of the world and the way it is transmitted in subjective internal states. The actual transmission of information may be important, as in music as a form of Vibrations which form into meaningful songs.
Another important remark which Dennett makes, which may be useful for reflection is:
'Doggedly pursuing the idea that qualia are both the causes and the intentional objects (the existing intentional objects) of introspection leads to further artifactual fantasies, the most extravagant of which is the idea that unlike our knowledge of other kinds of causation, our knowledge of mental causation is infallible and direct; we can't be wrong when we declare that our subjective beliefs about the elements of our conscious experience are caused by those very elements. We have "priviledged access" to the causes of our or sources of our introspective convictions. No room for any tricksters here.' In other words, in most instances we believe that our perceptions of the external world on the basis of our subjective experience.
Of course, there may be some exceptions, like in the way different people may recall details of an events differently, especially critical events. But, this may be more about the specific role of attention in perception and the way in which our own internal narratives weave their way into perception, with potential for distorting it.
Sure, all that. But you without you mind is a diminished you.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Of course; but they are not real spiders. An odd thing about denying realism is that it leads to the conclusion that there are no real spiders, and hence it's all hallucinations; we no longer have the capacity to say that the paranoiac is wrong.
Quoting AgentTangarine
:lol:
Yeah, alright. But that's a problem of language. You can rename objective material processes bocketibonders just as well. I think there is a relationship between flubberts and bocketibonders. Flubberts lay at the base. The offer a direct glimps on dundereekies. It's the outside of dundereekies we can percieve by means of flubberts, which lay inside the objective dundereekies. Bocketibonders are a special case of flubberts. They are colorless rather constant flubberts which, as such, correspond to limited dundereekie developments. Only in abstract experimental conditions, or in abstract views on dundereekies (like reducing the moon to a point mass or colorless mass, so it look the same to all people) it's a useful concept. Even in pointing to regions in the brain where flubberts get their shape by interacting dundereekies, they are useful as they can explain, besides direct introspection by experiencing them, relations or the internal dynamics of the flubberts (which, as said, form the inextractable inside of dundereekies, whose outside you can look at by by bocketibonders or flubberts.
So, when you examine dundereekies in my brain, you have only acces to their outside and you can only see it with your flubberts or bocketibonders, a more confined and seemingly more objective view. I, on the other hand, experience flubberts in my brain dundereekies directly. So you might be able to infer if I have a bocketibonders model in my mind.
Yes, a new kind of duality. But freed from the restrictive monism of material processes.
Indeed, we adjudge bocketibonders by their interactions with those shared things around us on whcih we can agree - the dundereekies.
Quoting AgentTangarine
That's the point; the supposition that you have privileged access to flubberts; as Wittgenstein might have said, the flubberts drop out of consideration, and all we have to talk about are the dundereekies.
I don't think one has privileged acces to flubberts. You have access as well, and even to that of mine, albeit only indirectly via the outside of the dundereekies they are situated in. This access can be gained by means of variable flubberts or more stable and abstract bocketibonders, which are a subset of flubberts. From one side of the moon I see a dark sphere with craters, while from the other side I see a while sphere with seas, and your flubberts might differ. Introducing a stable bocketibonders image might be helpful but it's still a flubberts image. I think you mix up dundereekies with bocketibonders. Dundereekies are fundamental and are no flubberts, although the contain them .By means of flubberts and bocketibonders, dundereekies present their outside. By means of their inside they allow flubberts and bocketibonders to exist. In our thinking about dundereekies we are bound by what's inside of them. So even in and outside is a flubbert or bocketibonder. But how else can it be? Dundereekies are weird stuff.
Hence my continuing view, that qualia lead to nonsense, and are best left out of the conversation.
A materialistic view can't even exist without them. Let alone the material it refers to. Material processes are just empty qualia. So the stipulation of qualia leading to nonsense is the same as saying material processes are nonsense. Material processes are useful, an for micro processes they are all we've got. Qualia and their subset of material processes give us a pretty adequate view on the outside of things.
Stable material processes existing objectively and independent of us is a justified view though. So drink your material wassail and be sozzled by it. Mollycoddle it even. The qualia brouhaha bottle you pour it from won't mind materialistic argle bargle.
Did you argue for this somewhere?
And why do you imply that my views are materialist? What gave you that impression?
I proposed it. No need to argue for it.
Quoting Banno
Because the modern view on nature is that of material processes going on independently of us. Elementary particles and all that. Don't you agree with this?
A view espoused without reason may be dismissed on the same basis. I still do not see any merit in your contributions.
I've explicitly argued that both consciousness and subjectivity are overused by philosophers.
Oh, one more question...
Quoting Banno
What question?
You habitually fail to make your point, ask your question, or present your argument. It's tedious and tendentious. Give me a reason to respond to your posts, apart from pointing out your personal flaws.
Said the murderer, before Columbo's gotcha. Was my poorly signposted allusion. Anyway... as [url=https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/624928]usual, I'll be happy to clarify.
Quoting bongo fury
Quoting Banno
Fair enough. Except you missed out "experience" there, so I held up the quote. For if you had the time. You're often in a hurry. That's fine.
As I was the person who asked the question I am still wondering how useful the idea of qualia is. There has been so much interesting discussion on the thread, but it is probably an area in philosophy which people will never agree about. It does seem that the terms subjectivity and consciousness are such buzz words in philosophy and it is possible to go round in circles at times, with the issue of qualia being somewhat in this.
I can remember the first time I ever came across the word qualia and how it took me a while to grasp and, then, I realised it was a almost a bit of a puzzle. I have mentioned the idea of qualia to friends who don't read philosophy and some seem to relate to the idea easily and the concept seems to make more sense to some than others. I am inclined to think that the idea of qualia is useful to some extent, but with some limitation, in the way in which it can become a bit of a knotty tangent at times.
There was a lot of interesting analysis of art and music based on qualia as colour scales and pitch and tone and time scales etc. Prall, Goodman, Boretz. But there, there was no philosophical bias, no claim of epistemological priority. It was just a matter of starting the analysis with those elements.
I think Dennett was possibly reacting more against the epistemological claim. Maybe that is a later usage of "qualia". I'm not sure. (Not entirely later. CI Lewis, who coined the term, is earlier, of course. I gather his bias was the strong and epistemological kind. @Manuel has mentioned having recently read his book. In this thread, I think.)
I do intend to try to read other writers on the topic and, would like to read CI Lewis in particular. The ideas within art and music are interesting too and even if they fall a little outside of philosophy, they probably raise the whole area of phenomenology in the arts.
The above pop-sci article is asking a question about ethics. "Qualia" wouldn't clarify anything for the average reader. The vast majority know they're talking about phenomenal consciousness, not function.
Note that the question they're asking can't be framed at all in Dennett-speak. I would say that where philosophy interferes with addressing a moral question, that's bad philosophy.
What can we say about the character of a Dennett fan in the light of this? Absolutely nothing. :lol:
Sure, but the question was why do hallucinated spiders look like real spiders. How do you explain the behavior of someone hallucinating without "silly" qualia? How is it that something that isn't real looks like something that is unless they both take the same form (qualia)?
Denying realism isn't denying what is real. It just changes the reference to what is real. If there were only hallucinations (which doesn't make any sense without something real), then hallucinations would be the only reality. Reality would simply be a solipsistic mind and that is what would be real. Spiders would exist only as qualia and would be real as qualia, while the notion that spiders exist outside the mind would be the illusion.
Like you, I'm a realist. It's just that I'm also assert that qualia are real, and it would seem to be that you do to if you agree that we are our minds, which are composed of qualia. If qualia were so "silly" then how is it that solipsism could even be contemplated. A p-zombie could never conceive of the idea of solipsism. It would make no sense to them, just like the idea of qualia.
Thanks. I appreciate the exhaustive summary, it's made things clearer in terms of why there's such lot of confusion (on my part) about the various terms being bandied about. I think maybe just 'realist' is safest.
Cool. I look forward to reading your thoughts (should you commit them to writing here at any time). It sounds like a really interesting approach.
I think that's a gross deflation of all the work that neuroscience has done on this. Most of the neuroscientists I've spoken to or listened to consider themselves to be investigating the matter of what perception is as a scientific investigation, not one in philology.
Quoting Andrew M
I don't see any of the works on active inference, or neural modelling using the terms that clumsily.
Quoting Andrew M
I agree with this. It's the 'realism' bit. The object we're all trying (with our modelling processes and our social interaction) to react to is the red flower, out in the world. I don't see how it being the object of our intention somehow removes the 'veil' between us and it.
Quoting Andrew M
This just doesn't seem to make sense. You're saying that any time we're mistaken about the properties of the object we've instead perceived nothing? If I perceive a flower, but in my mind it had red petals (I only briefly glanced at it). I return to it for a closer look and find I had merely assumed the petals were red - expectation bias - they were, quite clearly pink). Now I have to admit that I perceived nothing at all? I've got some bad news for you - literally all of our perception involves such assumptions in place of actual signals from the object. So you've never perceived anything in your whole life.
This is awfully teleological.
No. It's "see[ing] geometric shapes and patterns", as you said first... before introducing the word qualia. What's qualia doing that the first expression was lacking?
Nothing. The debate just comes down to what the word means. We all agree that consciousness includes phenomenality. What difference does it make what you call it?
I agree that the idea of qualia is just a term and that the complexities of perception have been discussed by many ways by various writers without use of the word. It is probably simply that the term gives a specific framework for thinking about perception. Certainly, that has been my experience of reading and thinking about the term. I do wish to hold onto the term but with some fluidity, recognising that in some ways the term is a bit of a tangent, probably if the word qualia is used too concretely as if it solves many contradictions in perception.
You're free to insist that this is true. However the broadest meaning of the word, per the SEP, is simply phenomenal consciousness: experience.
We don't know what causes it. Period.
And yet we hear talk of such spectres as the 'red quale'. Does the 'red consciousness' make any sense at all?
The aspect which we do know is that there is some degree of shared experience, like the sky being blue. Obviously, it is not possible to know another person's actual experience of what this blue is but if people paint it there is likely to be some similarity with what this blue looks like, even to the point of knowing which other colours to mix with it.
However, there are the unique elements to perception which are represented in art, like the swirls in Van Gogh's paintings and the composition of dots in Seurat's. This may be where the emotional or mental states come into the variable nature of what is perceived. There is an external world to be perceived but it is filtered through the lens of perception, and the concept of qualia, even though abstract, may pinpoint the tensions arising in this.
Experience is multi-faceted. That's true.
No. ?
I find myself back at some form of anomalous monism - the view that there is some such equivalence but it is cannot be specified. .
Pretty much right. The problems arise as one asks folk to specify were and how qualia are of use. For example:
Quoting bongo fury
The question is, how do qualia improve the analysis in a way that is not just as clear from a discussion of colour scales and pitch and tone and time scales etc... And this is the part that never receives a clear answer. The usual approach is to allude to their being useful without actually saying how - as here with a couple of citations and some passive aggression.
One aspect for which I think that qualia has specific bearing is understanding witness accounts and statements. I wondered about the nature of this before I had even come across the puzzle of qualia. In critical incidents people are often asked to give witness reports and I have been in a few situations where I had to give accounts or look at witnesss statements. There were great discrepancies between accounts, including perception of sequence of events and descriptions of people. It means that working out a clear picture of events can be difficult and part of the issue may be that people perceive the exact same events but uniquely. The emotional impact of stress and heightened emotions may play a major role in this.
My own understanding of the importance of the idea of qualia is that it may throw some light on these kinds of difficulties, but not that it completely eradicates them. I guess my other interest in qualia is the bearing which it has on aesthetic appreciation in the arts.
I don't think it adds anything. There are numerous ways to distinguish experience from function. If "qualia" makes things confusing, drop it. The music was in response to "passive aggressive."
That's all they were, for Goodman at least. Classes of stimuli. Sound events and illumination events. But classified through human aesthetic judgement and culture, rather than physics. And hence free from all the spurious distractions of "red-as-a-wavelength" etc. And thus answering your question.
All of this can be put simply a "Spider hallucinations look like spiders" - no use of "qualia"!
What's relevant about an hallucination of a spider is that thereis no spider. Hence, as you point out, characterising some event as an hallucination presumes realism.
Quoting Harry Hindu
To be sure, realism is the view that there is stuff in the world that is independent of the mind, so the claim that what is real is stuff in the mind would not count as realism.
I think I'm getting there now, thank you for the clarifications. I wanna put a note here about how this maybe intersects with the externalism/internalism debate on mental content.
I hope this helps contextualise some things, even if it's mostly a catalogue of ambiguities.
Broadly speaking, someone is an internalist about X if they believe X only is determined by/depends upon the body or mind of the individual which bears X. Like someone is an internalist about colour if they believe colour depends only upon the individual which sees it, literally 'it's in the eye of the beholder'.
Someone is an externalist about X if they they believe X is not only determined by the body or mind of an individual which bears X.
People can be internalist about an X in a few different ways: they might restrict the notion of dependence in some way, to allow X to be determined 'only' by the body mind in one flavour of dependence or in one subclass of the class X. EG, someone like Chalmers is an internalist about mental content, but only about a specific type of mental content (narrow content) which he construes as determinative of psychological states. Even though he believes the content of some types of mental content are 'broad' - depend upon things which aren't an individual's body or mind.
Maybe the first thing to do in terms of this debate is reframing it in terms of vehicle externalism and content externalism to nip an ambiguity in the bud:
[quote='SEP']Vehicle externalism, more commonly known as the thesis of the extended mind, is externalism about the vehicles of mental content. According to the thesis of extended mind, the vehicles of mental content—roughly, the physical or computational bearers of this content—are not always determined or exhausted by things occurring inside the biological boundaries of the individual. [/quote]
[quote='SEP']The distinction between states and acts is, in the context of this form of externalism, a significant one, and the general idea of extended mind can be developed in two quite different ways depending on whether we think of the vehicles of content as states or as acts. Thinking of the vehicles of content as states leads to a state-oriented version of extended mind. Thinking of these vehicles as acts leads to a process-oriented alternative.[/quote]
[quote='SEP']Mental content is not free-floating. Wherever there is mental content there is something that has it—a vehicle of content. Mental states (belief, desires, hopes, and fears, etc.) are natural candidates for vehicles of content. So too are mental acts (believing, desiring, hoping, fearing, etc.). As a rough, initial approximation, extended mind is the view that not all mental states or acts are exclusively located inside the person who believes, desires, hopes, fears, and so on. Rather, some mental states or acts are, in part, constituted by factors (e.g., structures, processes) that are located outside the biological boundaries of the individuals that have them. Thus, extended mind differs from content externalism not merely in being about mental vehicles rather than mental contents, but also in being committed to a claim of external location rather than simply external individuation. If extended mind is true, some vehicles of content are not, entirely, located inside the biological boundaries of individuals that have them. Rather, they are, partly, constituted by, or are composed of, factors that lie outside those boundaries.[/quote]
If we're going to posit that the Markov blanket of an individual's perception process touches the environmental hidden states, that seems to be a form of vehicle externalism if it satisfies either form of vehicle externalism. I can't think of an easy way to relate the state version to our debate [hide=*](the way it's articulated on SEP seems to be in terms of already individuated mental states, which is 'too late' here..)[/hide] (but I'm sure it exists), so I'll ignore it. Focussing on the process based one:
I think Friston's account counts as the processed based vehicle externalism (at face value), since the environmental states do constitute part of the process of perception for him - and as we've talked about, it seems the Markov blanket of states involved in the perception processes extends beyond the body of the individual. Example, you're catching a ball, the current position of the ball (an external state) influences various sensory state nodes. Thus the external state is involved somehow in the perception process.
Maybe it could be construed that the ball isn't a 'physical bearer' or 'partly constituting' the process of perception - if you focus on what's 'logged to consciousness' as a meaning for 'what's perceived', it might be possible to argue that 'what's perceived' doesn't have an immediate dependence upon the external state values because the sensory states interface with the world and the internal states which are logged to consciousness don't. There's probably some wrangling regarding where you draw the line. If the 'dependence' is 'any sort of dependence' rather than 'proximate cause in terms of states in the model's graph', it looks to be vehicle externalist in the process sense, if it's the latter maybe it's still possible to be a vehicle internalist.
I also want to stress that this is talking entirely about dependence without talking about how content is determined. This isn't about 'what the information is' in perception, the overall values, it's about the relationships between information states - how information is passed around - in the process of perception. Topology/networking/relationality rather than individual state values/properties/qualitatives.
The latter is more similar to what content is. If the frequency of reflected light from a position in your environment is an environmental hidden state, then the 'content' of its perception might be thought of as a colour associated with a location (with usual caveats regarding priors etc).
But that doesn't do very well to bridge a gap between 'red cup' and state variables in the environment - especially because I can act to drink from a cup, but I cannot act to sip from a light frequency emanating from a location - the sensory data I act upon is never raw, so to speak. So there's a puzzle regarding bridging the 'content of a state in a neural network' with the content of an intentional act.
The content of a state in a neural network doesn't seem to be a good match for the use of the word 'cup', since using the word to refer to a cup involves a perception which consists in lots of states synergising together in a body-environment interaction - ignoring hallucinations/illusions. In the case of hallucinations and illusions maybe there's no body-environment interaction [hide=**](I doubt this personally, but entertaining the idea)[/hide], but still in that case there's a complex synthesis of bodily states with each other to produce the hallucination - and the relationship of the cup to those states is just as mystifying. (Also probably of interest to @Banno).
and an internalist when:
[quote='SEP']Content internalism (henceforth internalism) is the position that our contents depend only on properties of our bodies, such as our brains. Internalists typically hold that our contents are narrow, insofar as they locally supervene on the properties of our bodies or brains.[/quote]
Which leaves a question regarding what mental content is. I think when we start talking about mental content in terms of desires, hopes, attitudes towards stuff... These get called intentional states, one of two things has to happen to make sense of them (though I'm sure @Banno would tell you that intentional states are directed towards statements (see here for related concepts, 'propositional attitudes' ):
Let's say I want to take a drink from my mug. I have an intentional state toward my mug, desiring to drink something out of it. I'm sure there are more than two ways of spelling out their content relevant to this discussion, but I'm going to write down two.
( A ) The content of my intentional state of wanting to take the drink from my mug is an attitude toward a mug. The mug is thought of as a synthesis of external, internal, sensory and active states all in feedback, and my intention toward the mug is actually an intention toward my current internal representation of the synthesis. Putting it loosely, the mug and my current bodily state are in a very definite and urgent collective organisation, which I then operate upon in the manner I do (I reach toward it, taste it etc).
If we think of this in terms of affordances, this puts the affordance ''for drinking'' in the mug, which I then action+intend.
( B ) The content of my intentional state of wanting to take the drink from my mug is an attitude toward a mug. The mug is thought of as a synthesis of external, internal, sensory and active states all in feedback, and my intention toward the mug is actually part of this synthesis.
If we think of this in terms of affordances, this puts the affordance ''for drinking' in the relationship between the mug and me, so perceiving it as I do now contains my desire for drinking it.
I think ( A ) invites perceptual intermediaries, since then all the different intentional states we have towards events are then separated out from perceptions. It would go external states -> representations -> intentional states(representations), rather than external states -representations> intentional states (this the same point I made regarding thinking of perception to be an arrow, here the arrow is labelled representation, rather than a node).
I think ( B ) doesn't invite perceptual intermediaries, but I think it's got other problems. I think interweaving intentionality into perception and somehow 'beneath conscious awareness' is a standard phenomenological move, Heidegger calls it 'circumspective concern', Merleau-Ponty emphasises intentionality as pre-reflective (have a quote from Phenomenology of perception regarding intentionality and sex):
[quote='MP, Phenomenology of Perception, 437']“Erotic perception is not a cogitatio which aims at a cogitatum; through one body it aims at another body, and takes place in the world, not in a consciousness. A sight has a sexual significance for me, not when I consider, even confusedly, its possible relationship to the sexual organs or to pleasurable states, but when it exists for my body, for that power always available for bringing together into an erotic situation the stimuli applied, and adapting sexual conduct to it. There is an erotic ‘comprehension’ not of the order of understanding, since understanding subsumes an experience, once perceived, under some idea, while desire comprehends blindly by linking body to body. Even in the case of sexuality, which has nevertheless long been regarded as pre-eminently the type of bodily function, we are concerned, not with a peripheral involuntary action, but with an intentionality which follows the general flow of existence and yields to its movements.[/quote]
I'm inclined to let intentional states be non-conscious and let them saturate perception, I'm sure someone who thought of intentionality as directed toward 'already formed objects' like cups etc, the kind of intentionality imaginable by directing 'a desire to drink' toward a mug (which seems to me derivative of the first, but that's another tangent).
There was a final ambiguity I wanted to catalogue.
Another distinction between the kind of directedness state relations have in a perceptual neural network and the kind of directedness intentional states have is the directedness of an intentional state might be an emergent[hide=*] (I mean weakly emergent, but I'd guess there are strong emergentist takes too)[/hide] property of the whole perceptual process. So it could be an category error to talk about how 'cup related states join with sensory/internal/active states' as if this were an intentional relationship between an agent and a cup. Or a more simple error in considered scope of the perceptual process, in taking too small a subprocess for a perceptual modelling relationship of the cup to make sense ("that ain't a directed conscious state toward a cup, that's a composite object of reflected light and thirst!").
The same too maybe holds of content - it could very well be an emergent [hide=***](or large scale in terms of nodes and time)[/hide] property (or aggregate state) of the perceptual process.
Pretty much, with the usual qualification that an intentional state can be placed in the form of an attitude towards a proposition, and hence made the subject of discussion, but it need not be so treated. That is, we have unexpressed intentional states.
I'm sure that's so. However when we see a red flower, do we see it in the brain, or in the mind, or in the garden? I'm not suggesting this applies to you but without clarification of the terms involved, this is the kind of confusion that can arise. For example, from Bennett and Hacker:
..
Quoting Isaac
If you agree that there can be a red flower there that I can perceive, then I'm not clear why you're invoking a "veil". What exactly is being veiled here?
Quoting Isaac
The example I had in mind was a hallucination, which isn't perception. Yes of course there can be conditions where we see a flower that looks red (or assume is red), but isn't.
Why is that?
(I've got a vague memory of us discussing this before, but I couldn't find it in the 'archives')
Do they have to believe in non-determinism of some sort? After all, our bodies have not been around forever (though mine sometimes feels like it has!)
This is intriguing, do we have some examples? If I've understood it right, could my theories about the role of social narratives fit here (always looking for interesting new ways to frame this stuff)? That someone's beliefs often cannot be expressed without reference to the social entity which defines (part of) it? Is that what they're talking about, or have I missed the point entirely? - Side issue not related to the OP, I know. Just a quick yay or nay perhaps if I'm on the right track.
Quoting fdrake
I think you're right in that it could, but I'm inclined to think (as I suspect you are) that it would be a mistake to do so. My reasons are that it would mistake the process of perception with the process of response (speaking, reaching - -catching the ball). We're in danger of an excessive holism this way, as I mentioned with the process of perception itself. we are one deeply interconnected body, within which is a deeply connected mind with causal connections reaching deep into the world around us. Without being comfortable with drawing (semi-)arbitrary lines around a process we end up unable to anything about anything. So, I think this is just such a case. Even though the perception of the ball is intricately connected to the process of catching the ball, we have to comfortable drawing a line between them somewhere, just as a façon de parler if nothing else. In that spirit, I'd say that the process of perception is directly connected to the ball, the process of catching only indirectly so. To the ball-catching system, the actual ball's location is a hidden state inferred by the signals it receives from the ball-perceiving system. To the ball-perceiving system, however, the ball's location is the direct cause of the state of some of it's nodes (certain retinal ganglia, for example) - the wind/air pressure/gravity/propulsion would be hidden states to that system.
Quoting fdrake
Again, I think allowing ourselves some arbitrary lines helps to talk about this. The 'content of a state in a neural network' is one of the exterior-facing nodes in the 'take a sip form that cup' system. But important missing nodes are things like 'what a cup is', what people in my culture do with cups', 'what effects are likely to result from sipping from it' etc. None of which are directly contained in the process of perception, despite being intimately linked to it.
Did I ever tell you (sorry if I end up repeating myself) about the experiment on macaques where they but a blocker to interfere with the connection between the dorsal and ventral streams exiting the visual cortex. They could interact with bananas in a perfectly accurate manner (locate them, pick them up with appropriate pressure etc), even peel them, but they had no idea what they were (food, bargaining tokens etc). I think this shows that there's a perfectly acceptable (semi-)arbitrary line we can draw if we so wish between the object of perception as a physical emitter of light/sound/pressure and the object of perception as a social object (one with a name, a use, a role in our intentions)
Quoting fdrake
I think essentially we'd be remiss if we didn't include our intentions toward an object in the act of perception, but again if we're not to prevent ourselves from being able to say anything at all, we have to be able to draw a line somewhere. I may be oversimplifying, but is there any reason why we shouldn't draw the line at the decision to act? If we're asking the question "Why did you hit your brother?" we might well include intentionality in the perception "he was about to hit me", did our aggressive intention have some role in the perception of the shoulder going back, the fist clenching - probably. But at the point of the message being sent to the arm to strike - that's the point we're interested in - not because it's got some ontological significance, but because that's what we asked the question about. At that point, there was an object (a brother threatening violence) which was the result of some perception process (plus a tone of social conditioning) and the object of an intention (to punch). I don't think it matters that the intention (to act aggressively) might have influenced the perception (a person about to hit me). We can have our cake and eat it here. We can talk about the way in which the intention influences the perception of the object before the question we want to ask of it and still have the final version* be the object of the intention we're asking the question about. (*final version here referring to the object on which the move to strike was based). after the action in question, the whole process will continue seamlessly, the perception might change a bit as a result of our interaction with the object, our intention might change and so affect the perception..., but we marked a point in that continuous process, simply to ask a question (why did you hit your brother) and to answer that question we need to 'freeze-frame' the movie to see what the object of perception was at the time the intentional decision was made.
It's not different to asking what speed a car's going. You have to just pick an arbitrary distance and measure how much time it took to cover it. It inevitably makes artificial break in a continuous process, but it's the only pragmatic option.
Quoting fdrake
Like saccades, perhaps? Yes, I think there must be cases where this is true, but again, probably just some, not all. We'd be missing something if we wanted to model perception and action this way, but we'd be kidding ourselves if we didn't have such a model to explain things like saccades.
Yes, it's the primary difficulty here. If I (as a scientist) am to explain what your 'seeing the rose in the garden' consists in, I can't very well give the answer "you're not seeing the rose in the garden". That didn't really answer the question. But equally, I'd be remiss if I didn't provide an explanation of how you can see the red rose out of the corner of your eye despite dendritic trees from the ganglia there being too complex to interpret colour from. You filled-in the colour you expected the rose to be, nothing to do with any physical activity in the actual garden.
Quoting Andrew M
Because the 'red flower' I'm trying to model and the current 'snapshot' state of my model are not necessarily the same, and some of the reason they're not the same is expectation biasing the interpretation of (and occasionally outright suppressing) the sensory data. It's only the sensory data which is directly connected to the 'red flower', the thing I'm trying to model. The 'veil' is everything else which plays a part in the modelling process not caused directly (or even indirectly) by the 'red flower'.
Quoting Andrew M
Then how is that not a 'veil'? If we can see a flower as red.but it isn't red, then what got in the way? Whatever got in the way - that's what I'm referring to as a 'veil'.
:up:
What does it mean for hallucinations to look like the real thing? How can something that isn't real look like something that is?
And what does it mean to say that the hallucination isn't real? Are you saying that hallucinations themselves aren't real, or that they don't represent anything that is real? If the latter, then aren't we talking about representations (qualia) vs what is represented (spiders)? And are the representations real things themselves?
To even talk about hallucinations and compare them with other things must mean that you think that they are real and have real effects in the real world, and can be compared to real things. How can you compare something that isn't real with something that is?
Quoting Banno
But "real" in what sense? You seemed to agree earlier with the statement, "we are our minds". Are you saying that "we" and our "minds" are not real?
:up:
Quoting Isaac
:up:
Quoting Isaac
So the phrase "veil of perception" has a historical connection with certain 17th century metaphysical views that deny any direct world-involvement. But your use of the term is different to that - you allow that we see things as they are at least some of the time which is sufficient to get a footing in the world. That is, our model of (some part of) the world and the world we are modeling sometimes match up. I think we essentially agree.
I think being a content or vehicle internalist is independent of non-determinism. If determinism is the claim that mental content or mental vehicles have their behaviour completely determined by prior states, or past events, that leaves the type of relationships possible between mental contents and how mental vehicles work largely untouched. Similarly, if someone's an externalist, they could believe the environment is has some entirely random states in it. Determinism/non-determinism regarding mental events to me seems like a question of to what extent past events constrain present events, rather than a question of which events together count as mental or how mental stuff works.
A move which gets taken is to massage the notion of dependence and the type of content. You could 'bite the bullet' of whatever externalist argument you like which was dedicated to mental content of type X and say "Yes, type X as a whole has some external dependence, but type X1 which is a subset of X does not", I think that type of mental content gets called 'narrow'.
[quote='SEP on Narrow Content']A narrow content of a particular state is a content of that state that is completely determined by the individual's intrinsic properties. An intrinsic property of an individual is a property that does not depend at all on the individual's environment. For example, having a certain shape is, arguably, an intrinsic property of a particular penny; being in my pocket is not an intrinsic property of the penny. This is because the penny's shape depends only on internal properties of the penny, whereas the fact that it is in my pocket depends on where it happens to be, which is an extrinsic property. The shape of the penny could not be different unless the penny itself were different in some way, but the penny could be exactly the way it is even if it were not in my pocket. Again, there could not be an exact duplicate of the penny that did not share its shape, but there could be an exact duplicate that was not in my pocket. Similarly, a narrow content of a belief or other mental state is a content that could not be different unless the subject who has the state were different in some intrinsic respect: no matter how different the individual's environment were, the belief would have the same content it actually does. Again, a narrow content of an individual's belief is a content that must be shared by any exact duplicate of the individual. (If some form of dualism is true, then the intrinsic properties of an individual may include properties that are not completely determined by the individual's physical properties. In that case an “exact duplicate” must be understood to be an individual who shares all intrinsic nonphysical properties as well as physical ones.)[/quote]
Phenomenal stuff, what is it like to be you stuff, can be thrown into the narrow content category. I'm clearly not sympathetic with that, but it's a clear idea. If there are instrinsic properties to some mental content, those aren't relational properties, determination is a relational property, so those intrinsic properties aren't determined, but that means some part of mental content is not determined by external states since whatever 'internal states' determined that content suffice to... determine it. Not sympathetic, but...
There is less ineffable/radical way of interpreting narrow content - like afaik Chalmers does. Recall that content externalism was the claim that every mental state's content is determined in part by some non-bodily or otherwise external cause, and internalism was the claim that that not every mental state's content is determined in part by some non-bodily or otherwise external cause. That lets you nominate a type of content and perhaps a type of determination to be an internalist regarding. So an internalist can be an externalist regarding most if not all types of mental content, but still be an internalist in some regard because they are an internalist regarding some type of mental content. Externalism says all, internalism says not all.
An ambiguity in that ambiguity clarification (sorry) is that if internalism regarding content regards content independent of state which the content is of, then it's quite different from considering content as part of state. EG if you have a qualia of the smell of your coffee, the overall state of smelling it stands in a relationship to the stimulus (and thus might be thought of as 'being wide') but the particular qualia profile of your coffee [hide=*](at that moment etc, give it whatever charity you need to to make sense of the idea)[/hide] can still be intrinsic and thus undetermined. If you slice up the content of experience, you can partition out the intrinsic from the non-intrinsic bit, and the intrinsic bit is narrow, even if you wanted to say that all states are broad and that people are 'in the world'. I don't know how popular that is as a move, or how important that wrinkle is.
Anyway onwards, IEP has a summary of a point Chalmers has made about a candidate type of narrow content, what he calls epistemic content in this paper. I won't even pretend to understand the guts of the argument. Here's the IEP summary:
(SEP also has one in its 'narrow mental content' article linked previously)
It might (IEP clarification) be an analogue to the 'Markov Blanket' idea as you use it to 'veil' the world from perceptions for the purposes of explaining mental states ((Chalmers paper on some related and underlying notions). As I read it and try to shoehorn it into this conversation, if you fix all the external states (facts, possible world truth evaluations) of a scenario and leave them unobserved at time t, you imagine all the internal states at time (t-1) just before they come into contact with the external states, and imagine the kinds of predictions that the internal states of the person can provide before being exposed to the current batch of external states - that system of predictions will completely rule out some things from occurring (as we think anyway, we might be wrong) and largely endorse some things, it will split up 'epistemic space' into what's plausible, irrelevant, implausible etc. But what splits up the predictions is arguably solely determined by non-external properties, since you just fixed them.
[hide=Why I did not spend more time with the Chalmers papers exegetically](I don't feel like I can give them a fair hearing at time of posting and they're very technical, involving twin earths with multiple notions of modality in them[/hide]
I imagine you maybe have some sympathy with a view like that? Because it seems you're quite happy to fix an instance of the perceptual chain and treat the current 'content' of the 'write instruction to memory' as what is said to be perceived, in a manner where the antecedent internal states determine what is logged or not logged to memory (arguably a form of paritioning epistemic space coincident with the write instruction).
Quoting Isaac
It fits as a form of content or vehicle externalism. If social stuff or processes count as determinative of mental content, and they are outside the body or brain, then that's (at least very close to) an externalist thesis regarding the relationship of social stuff to mental content. Similarly if social processes act as some kind of distributed mental process - cf Lakatos' term for reasoning with people 'thinking loudly' -, then social processes are vehicles in that regard. The latter seems like an extended mind thesis towards the social milieu.
Quoting Isaac
Think we see eye to eye there.
Quoting Isaac
Yes I see it as implausible that intentionality isn't right down in the motor functions considering the directedness of visual foraging, that it's not conscious, and that it's salience+causal relevance+information density based. I recall having a long argument with @Banno about whether the intentionality in saccades counts as a form of belief that wasn't propositional (I argued that it was not propositional), so that might be another point of tension with someone who's quite strict about the relationship of mental content to statements and truth conditions.
Would the intentionality in saccades best be called 'belief' or 'expectation'? Regardless of that, would it not be the case that such expectations or beliefs, although not present to consciousness in propositional form, could be rendered as such?
I think that's a big rabbit hole.
Quoting Janus
I don't think the majority of eye movements can in principle be logged to consciousness - at least not in the standard way you would expect for a statement involving account of propositional content. When you see a person, the pattern of eye movements which elicited that information is quite clearly directed towards informative subobject features (or areas where they are anticipated/'believed' to be etc) which then get synthesised/combined into the distinct perceptual features we can then consciously identify in our visual field at the time. If the saccade movement has content which can be explicated, it doesn't resemble anything like the intentional state of belief directed toward the visual content the saccade helps elicit (the representation/image/look of the person). Eye movements haven't seen what you've seen, because they are how you've see what you've seen.
You can tell what Terry Pratchett referred to as 'lies to children' about the content of saccades in terms of propositions, though. EG, someone might 'look at a chin to provide more information about the orientation of a face', but there's no conscious event of belief or statement associated with what the saccade's doing at the time, the speech act which associates the propositional content with the saccade is retrospective.
Analogy, it's like saying the content of this pile of Lego blocks is castles because Lego in general can be used to build castles.
If the criterion you're going for with 'the content of the saccade is propositional' is 'the content of the saccade can be set out as a proposition the agent is conscious of at the time', then it's false because we're not conscious of most saccades at the time. If it's 'the content of the saccade can possibly be set out as a proposition by a conscious agent after the fact', I'd be more inclined to agree that the content is propositional, with the rider that someone who accepts that criterion seriously strains the connection between propositional content and intentional acts - since propositional content and intentional acts no longer need to occur together in the same event for the retrojected content to count as the target of the intention at the time... Or alternatively if someone were to state that all beliefs amount to in total is a language game of telling 'useful lies to explain our behaviour' and didn't really care about their literal truth, I'd buy that too.
There are reasons why people describe saccade content like this: "During the search phase (visual exploration for an object), subtask relevant features are attentionally prioritised within the attentional template during a fixation', even when they're speaking about a specific sub part of a perception (a single time the eyes still).
Last time I went through that with @Banno, I recall falling into the trap of providing 'lies to children' examples to flesh out what the author was writing about from their example, which was turned into proof that I could explicate the content. This time I would advise any reader to guess precisely the object the person was searching for and what the 'subtask relevant features' and 'attentional template' are based on that.
[hide=Spoilers](Spoilers: if I recall correctly it was a teabag in a box of tea which the person was about to pick out. The subtask relevant features might be things like a protrusion of paper to grab hold of, a shuffling sound, a texture confirming touch and location information. The attentional template is nebulous sense of what one should look out for when searching for teabag within the box. Also, notice that the attentional template is 'within a fixation' - a momentary rest of the eyes to form a stable visual image is still saturated with directional/intentional content. Way too much going on which is intentional, and the majority is discarded and thus can't be recalled or explicated at the time. Afterwards? In principle? Maybe.)[/hide]
(Proof I'm not making shit up about the eye movements and features).
In some Chalmers book he said there's a silent verbal stream that coincides with attention. Maybe in a very rudimentary way data gathering is expressed propositionally. It's not impossible anyway.
Ahh. I'm not very well versed in these things so didn't realise I was sowing more confusion than I was eradicating. Best I avoid the term in future, thanks.
Quoting Andrew M
Yeah. We have a vested interest in them matching up, not just with the world, but (and this is the really important part, for me) with each other's models. In fact I'd be tempted to go as far as to say that it's more important that our models match each others than it is they match the state they're trying to model. I'm pretty sure this is main function of many language games, the main function of social narratives, the main function of rational thought rules. To get our models to match each others.
Yeah, I see how that could work. I was more thinking of the whole chain such that some mental content could not be wholly dependant on other mental content because at some prior time their was no mind. Kind of a mental version of the Kalam Cosmological Argument (and no-one wants to go there!).
Quoting fdrake
Yeah, that's right (and thanks for the great links, not generally a fan of Chalmers - too much qualia and zombies - but always satisfying to read some crossover, makes me realise we're not all radically different, still trying to navigate the same world!). For me, it's more pragmatic than anything else. We simply can't be including all the wider net of influences in all our thinking about any given step or node in a network, we'd never get anything done. I can, however, see how this causes a great deal of confusion about my position, and some of that is my fault for (innocently) stepping into a world where people genuinely do try to argue for things like an entirely mind-dependant reality, and not being careful enough to distinguish my thinking form theirs. Though I should say, I have (from reading the papers you cited) some grave concerns about the route Chalmers takes to get here (if here is indeed where I think he is - I suspect my ability to understand what he's on about is substantially less than yours). I'm not sure that the modality is actually a viable approach if he's trying to get at the way we actually think. There's too little scope in a kind of 'this else that' model where I think It's more 'this until further notice', but I may have misunderstood.
Quoting fdrake
By odd coincidence, see my response to Andrew above, I happen to have started banging on about that exact topic...
Quoting fdrake
So, there's these strong connections which neuroscientists (to my knowledge) have yet to fully work out the function of between early areas of sub-conscious cortices and the hippocampus, an example might be the V2 region of the visual cortex. Usually a connection to the hippocampus is involved in consolidation of some memory, so it seems odd that such early regions would be strongly tied to it. One idea is that there's some higher level modelling suppression going on even in these early centres, like - 'is that likely to be an edge? Let me just check'. I think (though I can't lay my hands on any papers right now) there's one of these connections into the cerebellum too.
What do you see as the difference between the two?
Some aspects of human consciousness are the same as that of a worm, right? Is it appropriate to think of a worm's consciousness as intention driven? Are going to end up equivocating about "intention" if we do?
You'd like to reserve 'intention' for conscious species? I see that as more of a religious/ideological decision than a scientific one. Not that that makes it wrong, but it's just not a useful distinction for me.
I suppose we could differentiate between actions which we can trace through some typically conscious areas of processing and those that don't, but it'd be a very hazy line.
I certainly think it would be possible, but I'm not quite as clear on what we'd gain by doing so.
Hold up. What do you mean by "conscious" here? What is a worm missing that it would need in order to be conscious?
I'm not comfortable with the use of modality either, though I'll put my charity hat on. I'll assume that at least part of this discomfort regarding modality is rooted in the idea that models of neural networks don't seem to compute possibilities, they tend to compute probabilities.
For a reader that isn't clear on why that matters, something can have probability 0 and still be possible. Like picking the number 2 randomly out of the integers. Further, assigning possibility to a state value given another state value is a much different idea than assigning probability to a state value given another state value, the latter shows up in neural networks, the former doesn't.
Anyway, I'll put on my charity hat for why it's okay.
I don't know if employing modality as Chalmers does for studying the mind is really aimed at questions of how the mind works - like descriptions of processes or attempts at modelling the modelling process. I think it's aimed one level of abstraction higher - on the types of descriptions of processes or 'modelling the modelling process' attempts which could in principle make some kind of sense. EG epistemic content is posited as a type of mental content, not any specific means of ascribing epistemic content to an intentional state. The specific means that someone attains epistemic content of a specific configuration in practice are left uncharacterised in the paper. To my mind he had to introduce parameters for the scenarios he analysed to suggest the appropriate content. 'water' and 'xyz' as names in the twin earths one with water, arthritis and tarthritis in the other one.
So I don't think Chalmers needs to be judged on whether his papers produce descriptions which cash out in procedural descriptions of people's perception process and how consciousness works in general, I think they ought to be judged on the crucible of whether they're tracking the type of entities which are successful in those theories.
I'm not really convinced by that reasoning, but there you go.
Were there other reasons you thought that employing modality as Chalmers does might not be okay?
Quoting Isaac
This is super cool. Paper I linked seemed to indicate something similar to that, eg the microsaccades having directional biases towards required coloured stimuli. Assuming that the content of the attentional template of a microsaccade has its information being passed about the brain in the way you mentioned, anyway.
Right, so to say that saccades are driven by beliefs seems to stretch the meaning of the term too far. See below, as to why I think it would be more apt to speak of saccades in terms of expectation or anticipation.
Quoting Isaac
I think of beliefs as being more obstinate than expectations. For example say I always put my keys in a particular place; then I 'automatically' expect them to be there even though I know that sometimes I fail to put them there. On the other hand if asked whether I believe they are there I might say 'no' because I acknowledge I might have put them somewhere else, someone might have moved them, and so on.
For contrast, if someone asked me whether my fridge is where it usually is in the kitchen, I would not merely expect it to be there but I would positively believe it to be there, even though I know there is a very tiny chance that it's not.
Certainly it's important for communication and co-operation. But it's worth noting that we have language not just for agreement and disagreement (i.e., whether our model matches up with other people's models), but also for being correct and mistaken (i.e., whether our models match up with the world we are modeling).
Consider a Robinson Crusoe on a deserted island who doesn't communicate with anyone. Mistakes in his world modeling can be costly (nope, no precipice there...)
I meant 'conscious of...'
Not that you couldn't ask the same question there too, but I'm really just trying to get at whatever distinction you're applying to 'intent' that you think a sub-conscious process couldn't satisfy the definition. You want to reserve the word for some types of directed behaviour but not others, right?
Quoting fdrake
No, the above pretty much covers it. It sounded too much like the 'other' option was part of the decision-making process, as if it's likelihood (or lack of it) helped determine the decision to maintain the prior, and I don't see that being the main case. Like the prior might be 'that's a dog' and somehow establishing that 'well, if it's not a dog then it must be a unicorn and that seems very unlikely' helps decide that it is, in fact, a dog. I can see situations at higher level processing where that might be the case, but rarely, and even then it's still falls under the general case of 'have I got any reason not think that's a dog?', which seems to me to be a better way of expressing Bayesian inference than the modality Chalmers introduces.
Quoting fdrake
Yeah, me neither, but good effort, it's good to treat the positions of others as charitably as possible (seems in rather short supply these days). I was thinking that a sort of modal tree could be built where options were gradually eliminated at each branch such that we could maintain the rest of Chalmer's model. A kind of one-by-one checking to see if there's reasons not to hold the prior, but that seemed too much like unnecessarily elbowing his work into my preferred model...
Quoting fdrake
Yeah, that's the idea. All very much to play for though in terms of this cashing out in what these links actually do (although I'm not bang up to date on this anymore).
Interesting, thanks. I've run into a lot of trouble for lack of a full grasp of just how many different ideas there are of what 'belief' means. I've been in something of an echo-chamber in terms of the working definition of belief, and talking about these ideas in a wider community has proven problematic on that account.
Quoting Andrew M
I can definitely see the need for our models to at least be consistent with the world (they don't have to match, just work), but I don't see a role for language in that. Are you thinking of the link between grammar, naming, and though enabling?
Well you said "conscious species." You can't be a functionalist and use that kind of language. I'll put you down for non-reductive physicalism.
Quoting Isaac
"Directedness" just sounds teleological. At the chemical level we just need chemicals and no purposeful events. So maybe "directedness" can be jargon for a bunch of totally undirected events.
I define 'conscious' (earlier in this thread, even, I think) as a process of logging certain mental states to memory. So I think I can be functionalist and still use that language (if I wanted to be functionalist, that is). I used to be flat out behaviourist, in fact. You wouldn't recognise me in my earlier work.
Quoting frank
Yeah, maybe. But all those chemicals are instructed by a mind which is itself several models which have a function. I don't have any problem in saying that the purpose of the printer cable is carry information from the computer to the printer, or that the purpose of some sub-routine in the program is to translate the key inputs into binary code. None of these has purpose as a system isolated, but it has purpose as part of the larger machine. It has a purpose given the purpose of the machine of which it is part.
Ok. Good to know.
Quoting Isaac
A worm demonstrates functions of consciousness. You'd need to go ahead and allow consciousness all the way down. That's not an unusual stance.
Quoting Isaac
I know a tad about computer architecture. There are no purposes in there. You can allow that there are if you get neo-Kantian about it, maybe?
As a rather selfish request, can you please provide more words and citations for these positions. By the sounds of it you're writing largely from Chalmers' perspective on things? To my knowledge it's rather contentious that consciousness goes 'all the way down' with functional properties if one is a functionalist. It's also ambiguous whether you're using 'all the way down' to refer to a panpsychism or whether bodily functions are conscious 'all the way down'.
More words please.
Ok. I'll try.
Quoting fdrake
No. It's not Chalmers. I don't think Chalmers lays out a definition for consciousness, except that whatever it may be, it needs to include phenomenal consciousness (in the case of humans anyway).
"All the way down" is a quote from some article. Sorry I can't cite it. But if a functionalist says consciousness is identical to function, but excludes worms, they'd need to explain why.
Quoting fdrake
No, "all the way down" zoologically speaking. Anything with functions of consciousness.
Mostly because such propositional attitudes are so mercurial. My belief that the door is closed is manifest in so many different ways - I would have to open it to go outside, the cat cannot get out, the air in here might improve if I open the door, the air conditioner is not needed, the breeze outside is not coming into the house, the light is sufficient for me to see around the room, and so on. How would a single neural network map against all these possibilities?
More formally, there's Davidson's question concerning the scientific validity of any such equation. Suppose that we identify a specific neural network, found in a thousand folk, as being active when the door is open, and hence conclude that the network is roughly equivalent to the propositional attitude "I believe that the door is open". If we examine person 1001, who claims to believe that the door is open, and do not find in them that specific neural network, do we conclude that we have not identified the correct specific network, or do we conclude that they do not really believe the door is open?
I think this argument shows that there is a difference in kind between proposition beliefs and neural nets that mitigates against our being able to equate the two directly, while admitting that there is nothing much more to a propositional attitude than certain neural activity. That is, it is anomalous, yet a monism.
My apologies for this not being clearly expressed. The problem is somehow reconciling Mary Midgley and neuroscience.
If you exclude worms from the function of consciousness to see the world, what's to be explained. Note that the function of consciousness (to see the world) is not the same as explaining it. You need consciousness to walk around. But that's no explanation.
Maybe replace "see the world" with "light sensitivity.".
Light sensitivity is a function of the eyes. Seeing is a function of consciousness. You need it to see worms. To see the world. But you can exclude the worm or the world. Focus on consciousness alone.
Nicely done. Do you believe that's reflective of Davidson's position (since he proposed that term "anomalous monism"), or is it more Banno's than Davidson's?
Ecactly what I wrote. It's plain English. You can exclude the worm and still see it with closed eyes and imagination.
Are the other 1000 all the same, under the same conditions? If he believes the door is open, why should his network be different? Is he lying?
How can his network be different if he believes the door is open? Is he lying? Have we wrongly identified his network? If he's not lying then his believe part should be the same.
:up:
Any chance I could get you to zoom in on this bit:
Quoting Banno
What is it about the concept of a neural network that makes it seem very specific and individually variable?
What challenge does the individual variability of neural nets play with the equation of a belief state with a type or behaviour of a neural net? (Token vs type identity questions here. )
Lastly, I'm really interested in where you got those two possibilities from in:
Why is it the case that possibility 1 and possibility 2 seem to follow from the hypothetical scenario, and are there other possibilities?
The two possibilities... I used the same argument a few years ago to the ends of demonstrating that neural science had an issue with falsifiability. I think it was in a discussion with @Isaac, who showed that there might be sufficient nuance in the descriptions of networks to allow for such eventualities; that the details might well provide an out. The proper attitude is to wait and see what Isaac and his friends can come up with.
But perhaps I have not understood your question?
Another reason to baulk. Propositional attitudes have a linguistic structure, attitude:proposition. In this sense they can be subject to algorithms. Neural networks are not algorithmic - one cannot set out in a step-wise fashion what is going on in a neural network as it solves a problem.
That is, there seems to be a basic difference in their logical structure.
Maybe. I'm not trying to draw a line here, I'm trying to establish the line you want to draw. The type of thing/process 'intention' is reserved for.
Quoting frank
Yet "what's the purpose of that wire?" is not an incoherent question.
It might surprise you then to learn how mercurial neural networks are. The concept is known as redundancy and degenerative architecture (or just degeneracy). Excellent primer here. Basically, neural networks do not seem to be restricted to carrying out (representing) only one task (mental state), but rather can carry out different (usually related - but not always) tasks, in sequence. So there's plenty of room, no worries on that score, but... On what grounds are they 'the same' or 'different' tasks then? Which I think is where you're going with...
Quoting Banno
...yes?
I'd agree with you here. I think we make a mistake if we model beliefs only in a single brain. Beliefs (for me) are a relationship between the state of some neural network (a snapshot of it), the world it's trying to model, and (for us anyway) the relationship between that system (neural state-world) and other people's systems toward the same part of the world. How do we know it's 'the same part of the world'? I think the system is iterative and constructive, so it's collaboratively built, me-society-world, we create a unified model using the consistency of the world's hidden states in the same way as one might use a primary key in a database, to link the models we each have.
So my belief that the door is open cannot be just a state of some neural network (though it is encoded in such a state - which is where I think I misunderstood your position previously), it's a relationship between a model I have (which is a neural network), and the hidden state of the world (the door), and the models other people have (neural networks), of what we assume (by constant experimentation and communication) is the same hidden state, the primary key by which we create social constructions like 'door'.
So I don't see a problem with saying that my belief is a model (a neural network) in my brain, but we get stuck when we want to say what it is a belief that..., it's just a belief (in my brain) a tendency to act some way or other. But to get a belief that... we need both a world toward which that belief intends to act, and a social construction (lots of us all trying to get our models of the same hidden states to vaguely match) to fill out the ellipses.
Non-social creatures, of course, only have the first part, or the second is of trivial importance. I'm not wedded to the idea of calling what they have a belief, but I'm not averse to it either.
Quoting Banno
No worries, I bet a random sample of readers would understand your post to a considerably greater degree than my response!
Her neural network will differ from the people who rightly believe and claim that the door is open. What is rightly believing? Depends on what you call the right neural network for believing something is the case.
Humans here are reduced to NN. You can just as well ask the people without looking at their NN.
You did draw a line, but I think you're back on track now. Worms are conscious.
Then:Quoting Isaac
Chemicals are instructed by a mind? What?
The three I’s.....interesting, informative and intelligent. This discussion over the last few days.
In the back of the room, taking notes, sits Everydayman, nodding in affirmation once in awhile, but shaking in negation generally, for he knows beyond doubt that his head just doesn't work that way.
He’s actually chuckling to himself, because to him Mother Nature has pulled a fast one on those who wish that the belief that the door is open ever was a belief, and that merely a product of ionic activation potentials forced as sufficient justification for it. I mean...he invented “mind” to cover all that stuff, and it doesn’t bother him that technically, he cannot include such a thing in his list of thing-like possessions. Maybe why he’s here in the first pace, but also why he sits back here and keeps his mouth shut.
But don’t get me wrong; I’m a lot smarter....I’ve studied many centuries worth of philosophy, I’ll have you up there on the podium know.....than these other guys back here, and I know the brain does all those things, from which arises that which is present to all of us. I’m just here keeping him company, because I sympathize with him in his perceived loss of individuality which must follow from the strict determinism of natural law under which the brain necessarily functions, combined with some sort of social contract, which I’m sure you'll forgive him for treating as pure horseshit.
So....as self-appointed spokesman for Everydayman, just let me advise you that he ain’t buyin’ it, for he has never once in his life ever realized anything of which the grounds of the discussion promises. And while I personally agree with the foundational premises of the discussion, I am in agreement with him that it doesn’t, and never will, make the slightest impact on humanity in general, who just plain doesn’t think in terms of ion potentials and energized neural networks, and therefore couldn’t possibly care less about them.
Furthermore....he says.....it makes not the least difference what the public determines as intentionality of language predication, for he is first and foremost perfectly capable of disregarding the entirety of it, and, somewhat to his own detriment perhaps, the more redneck....obstinate....he is, the more apt he is to do it. In effect, he is saying, and even Intellectuals must admit the truth of it, that no matter what the test equipment probes and dye traces say, and.....sorry, Isaac, what theoretical psychology wants....he can immediately deny it, simply because he can think otherwise in refusing to be lumped with the crowd.
Yeah, ol’ Mother, She did indeed pull a fast one. On the one hand, possible empirical proofs of a thing, on the other, perfect deniability for that very same thing. Technology gives pictures of synaptic clefts, but not one human ever has formulated his mentality in terms of them.
That’s it, from the back of the room. Or....Token Rebuttal from the Vulgar Majority!!!!!
I dispute your ability to speak for the Everydayman since you are on this forum.
AH, but the point I woudl make is that each of the people who believe that the door is open may well have a different brain state for that belief. The belief is not the very same as a specific brain state, even though the belief is some way the brain is.
Yeah, busted, for sure. Pretty presumptuous of me to declare a demographic doesn’t care about something, then appoint myself to represent them on exactly what they don’t care about.
I was trying to estimate the line you were drawing with...
Quoting frank
All, I've been trying to do this whole time is get what you think the properties of a worm are that would give you pause when assigning it 'intentions'.
I hadn't even started on what I actually think about that question.
Quoting frank
The release of certain chemicals is a result of the state of a mind. Since the likely consequence of those chemicals both fixed, and has priors within the model doing the releasing, then I think 'intention' is reasonable term relating the consequences of those chemicals to the model for which their release was a means to an end.
Say I intend to pick up my cup. Somewhere in the long chain of events I have to release acetylcholine into the synaptic cleft between my motor-neuron and my muscle cell, so my intention to pick up the cup released the chemical (albeit not proximately), no?
It seems that we're talking across each other along a rather cryptic journey. Is there some point you're getting to such that we could perhaps take a short-cut?
@AgentTangarine - Not just may. It's almost a mathematical certainty that they will.
Why would we need to talk about intention wrt worms? Their actions are reflexive or hormone driven. No models, no memory logging, just chemicals.
To some extent, humans are like that. Anyone who is reductive would start with the assumption that humans are entirely like that with some twists and turns. So it would be helpful if you fleshed out the philosophical landscape for your use of "intention.".
I'll put aside your odd language (suggesting that worms aren't conscious and the mind controls chemicals). I don't know what to make of that.