Is there an external material world ?
Most people would agree that there are objects with a location in space and time and exist independently of conscious beings. This position is commonly called “materialism”. But for some reason, some people commonly called “idealists”, believe that there are no such objects. Instead, they claim that conscious beings and their experiences are the basis on which existence itself lies.
René Descartes’ famous quote: “ I think therefore I am”, expresses an idea that is often used to support the idealists’ position: we cannot doubt our existence. We can doubt anything else, and one of these things is the existence of an objective material world.
This idea seems to many as a powerful argument in favor of idealism and against materialism. If the only thing we can be sure of is our own consciousness, would it not make sense to posit that all is nothing but a result of it ?
It seems to me that although this idea is indeed a powerful argument against materialism, the support it provides to idealism is far lesser than the blow it deals to materialism. The fact that the only thing we can be sure of is our own consciousness does not imply that all is based on consciousness.
Nor does it imply that there is no material world. Perhaps there is one, but we cannot ever give evidence that would prove its existence with no room for doubt.
It seems instead to me that materialism is an idea which can never be verified, as for it to be verified, it would require proving that there is something existing independently of conscious beings. But do do so, one must step outside of subjective experience. But obviously, that is not possible. You cannot stop being conscious and still experience the world around you. When you stop being conscious, you’re either asleep, knocked out, or dead.
But despite that, I believe that materialism still has value. How could have science developed without materialism? It seems instead that materialism is a useful explanation for patterns in conscious experience.
Imagine that two processes A and B have the same output. Would it not follow, that it is more likely for both of these processes to be identical, or at least very similar? Would it not follow also that their input is most likely identical or at least very similar?
Now imagine that these two processes are different minds and that the output is some sense data. Here again, would it not follow that those two minds are identical, or at least very similar? Would the same not follow for their input ?
The best explanation for such a situation, it seems to me, is that those two minds exist in a shared world, as it would imply identical or at the very least similar input. For that shared world to be comprehensible by those minds, I believe it would be necessary for it to be structured by space and time. So materialism seems to be the best explanation for the patterns shared by different experiences.
What do you think ? Is materialism right ? Is idealism right ? Is it some mix of the two ? Can we even settle the question ? Is materialism a good explanation for patterns in different experiences ?
René Descartes’ famous quote: “ I think therefore I am”, expresses an idea that is often used to support the idealists’ position: we cannot doubt our existence. We can doubt anything else, and one of these things is the existence of an objective material world.
This idea seems to many as a powerful argument in favor of idealism and against materialism. If the only thing we can be sure of is our own consciousness, would it not make sense to posit that all is nothing but a result of it ?
It seems to me that although this idea is indeed a powerful argument against materialism, the support it provides to idealism is far lesser than the blow it deals to materialism. The fact that the only thing we can be sure of is our own consciousness does not imply that all is based on consciousness.
Nor does it imply that there is no material world. Perhaps there is one, but we cannot ever give evidence that would prove its existence with no room for doubt.
It seems instead to me that materialism is an idea which can never be verified, as for it to be verified, it would require proving that there is something existing independently of conscious beings. But do do so, one must step outside of subjective experience. But obviously, that is not possible. You cannot stop being conscious and still experience the world around you. When you stop being conscious, you’re either asleep, knocked out, or dead.
But despite that, I believe that materialism still has value. How could have science developed without materialism? It seems instead that materialism is a useful explanation for patterns in conscious experience.
Imagine that two processes A and B have the same output. Would it not follow, that it is more likely for both of these processes to be identical, or at least very similar? Would it not follow also that their input is most likely identical or at least very similar?
Now imagine that these two processes are different minds and that the output is some sense data. Here again, would it not follow that those two minds are identical, or at least very similar? Would the same not follow for their input ?
The best explanation for such a situation, it seems to me, is that those two minds exist in a shared world, as it would imply identical or at the very least similar input. For that shared world to be comprehensible by those minds, I believe it would be necessary for it to be structured by space and time. So materialism seems to be the best explanation for the patterns shared by different experiences.
What do you think ? Is materialism right ? Is idealism right ? Is it some mix of the two ? Can we even settle the question ? Is materialism a good explanation for patterns in different experiences ?
Comments (2038)
How so? Can some wave particles not be considered 'inside' others?
Quoting Michael
Why?
Why do those wave particles there cause us to see a red cup filled with water, and not, say, a bus, or a circus clown?
They have some specific properties which cause us to see red cups filled with water.
What is in error in labelling those wave particles with those particular properties a 'red cup'?
We can say that's what a red cup is. It's a particular collection of wave particles which have the property of causing humans to 'see' a red cup.
I saw this image recently:
Under an "ordinary" explanation I would say that we see the things we do because that's just how our eyes and brain respond to stimulation, and organisms with very different eyes and brains will see things differently, as the picture above shows. Presumably there's some kind of deterministic explanation as to why particular kinds of eyes and brains respond the way they do to stimulation, and that there's some kind of deterministic explanation as to why particular kinds of brain activity elicit particular kinds of conscious experience, but that's all beyond my understanding.
Although, of course, any such talk of "eyes" and "brains" is more of the same kind of useful fiction as talking about "red cups". Rather there are two sets of wave-particle collections, and when one set interacts with a certain kind of light the "human vision" experience above is elicited, and when the other set interacts with that same kind of light the "bird vision" experience above is elicited.
Yes, but where's the error in labelling the set which (when they interact with a certain kind of light) cause the "human vision" experience of a red cup, a 'red cup'?
Why are we wrong to apply the label 'red cup' to those particular wave particles with those particular properties?
I don't see how the fact that they elicit different properties in birds makes our labelling process incorrect. We're just not labelling them by the effect they have on birds. There's nothing wrong with that. I don't see why our labelling practices should accommodate the effect the object of our labelling has on birds.
Taking colour as an example, the colour that I see isn't the colour that the bird sees, even though the external world objects are the same. The colour that I see and the colour that the bird sees aren't part of the external world; they're part of our respective conscious experiences.
Deciding to then label the external world objects as "having" the colour that we see is a naive projection.
But if you want to say that something is red if it causes most humans to see red then we have two different meanings for "red" (red as the colour in the experience and red as reflecting light at a certain wavelength) leaving us susceptible to equivocation. And the same for if you want to say that something is a cup if it causes most humans to see a cup. But if that were the case then when you say that there is an external world red cup you're just saying that there's some external world stuff that causes most humans to see a red cup. If that's all you want to say then fine, although it doesn't say much and can be accepted by the indirect realist/transcendental idealist.
In a Cartesian theatre?
No, in my bedroom on my computer. I don't go to the theatre.
Why not?
Why can it not be that 'red' just is a category of wave particles which cause humans, in normal light conditions with normal eyesight to have the response we call 'seeing red'. What's wrong with categorising collections of external world particles by the effect they tend to have on humans?
Because of what I said next in that comment.
I would argue with Putnam , who is a semantic relativist , that the world has no intrinsic properties or attributes. What is real is internal to accounts of the world.
“…the metaphysical assumption that there is a fundamental dichotomy between "intrinsic" properties of things and "relational" properties of things makes no sense.”( The Collapse of the Fact-Value Dichotomy). This would seem to rule out Wayfarer’s mathematical objects.
Yes. And that's what a cup is.
Does that imply homogeneity of the external world? If so, then what causes the heterogeneity we experience?
Seems like you’re falling victim to the exact equivocation I warned against.
Here...?
Quoting Michael
I don't see it. I don't know of anyone who seriously talks about the redness of their experiences. Post boxes are red, roses are red, traffic lights are red. Experiences aren't coloured, they're mental events.
What I'm claiming is that when we partake in our naming practices, what we're naming are hidden states. We name them by a complex, interactive and collaborative process of agreement as to the best model of the effects those states have on us (humans). The process might be fiendishly complicated, but it doesn't change the 'what' we're naming...which is a hidden state.
A 'cup' is a hidden state which we generally agree causes us to model it as something to drink out of. That's just what a 'cup' is.
It can't be an internal model I'm referring to...
I can be wrong about whether the thing I'm naming is a cup. I couldn't possibly be wrong if what I'm naming is my internal model of that hidden state.
When I say "put that cup away" I'm expecting that instruction to effect the external hidden state. I'm expecting to later model that state as being one with a cup previously on a table now away in a cupboard. I'm not expecting my instructee to act upon my model. I'm expecting him to act on the external hidden state.
The fact that we can only infer hidden states doesn't prevent us from naming them because we can come to an agreement about what it is we infer from them.
Isn't this also close to indirect realism?
I think the opposite is the case. There are no intrinsic properties because the heterogeneity the world produces is not based on static facts of the matter but continually changing patterns of relationship.
How can there be any pattern of relationship (continually changing or not) without intrinsic properties? If the hidden states are absent of any properties at all then there'd be no pattern. All would be one homogeneous mass.
Patterns (even ephemeral ones) require variation and variation requires properties over which there can be variance.
Patterns emerge and are reinforced or altered in actual
contexts of interaction, rather than in rules or properties that supposedly exist before or outside of actual contexts. What is at issue for an organism with regard to any aspect of its behavior must re-establish itself in actual material interactions.
Do you remember the dress that some people see as black and blue and others as white and gold? Same stimulus, different colours experienced.
Your account of colour would make this, and things like Locke's inverted spectrum hypothesis, incomprehensible.
If there's no bird, but just a collection of wave/particles responding to another collection of wave/particles and imagining it's a bird. then how do we know how bird's see things?
Quoting Joshs
That doesn't rule out a material or energetic context in which patterns emerge prior to there being humans and other animals to interpret those patterns as perceived by them.
Quoting Michael
Why? Same stimulus, different people; why would you think that incomprehensible?
Many a philosophical conundrum derives from considering a limited set of examples. That's the case with "colour" here. You and the bird see the eggs differently.
Yet you both see the eggs.
We se the eggs differently. We see the dress differently. It would be absurd to conclude that therefore there are no eggs and there is no dress.
We all agree that what we see is constructed by our brains. And so we go back to the first question asked in this thread: constructed from what?
You say that "The external world is just a mess of wave-particles"; why include "just"? I agree, and I think Isaac does to, that "The external world is a mess of wave-particles"; and we add that our brain is able to take the continuity in those wave-particles and construct cups, eggs and dresses.
And note that it is our brains, plural; hence the mess of wave-particles is what explains how it is that you and I and the bird overwhelmingly agree as to there being eggs and nests and sand. Without that external world-mess of wave-particles that agreement becomes inexplicable. Indeed, it is difficult to see how @Joshs "patterns emerge and are reinforced or altered in actual contexts of interaction" can happen unless those patterns are available to both your brain and to my brain; indeed, unless there is a medium for us to speak and write in, how could we share these patterns? There has to be something in which those patterns occur.
Sure, you and I and the bird act towards some of the external world-mess of wave-particles as if they are eggs; but that does not mean that there are no eggs. Exactly the opposite. Other examples may make the point clear: money and mortgages and property and universities only exist because we act as if they exist; and yet it would be wrong to suppose that therefore they are just imaginings. "just" does not do them justice.
It's as if the "realist" is supposing that the direction of fit is only world-to-mind, and the idealist that it is only mind-invents-world. We agree, slowly, that it is both, that minds impose order on the world, and can only do this because there is a world that is independent of mind.
Here's an example I gave elsewhere. On the table is a cup with one handle. The realist and the idealist agree that "the cup has one handle" is true.
In the cupboard is another cup. The realist says "The cup has one handle" is true. The idealist says "the cup has one handle" does not have a truth value.
In the end the musings here come down to a choice between which logic it is appropriate to apply to our situation.
I’m not saying that there isn’t a bird. I’m saying that birds aren’t the external world causes of experience. Waves/particles are the external world causes of experience. It’s a mistake to reduce the everyday objects of perception to being these waves/particles.
I don’t conclude that. See above.
This seems to be the salient issue: there is a world that is a mess of wave-particles; and there is a world that is eggs on a beach. They are the same world.
Now we could pull Davidson in here and show the equivalence of conceptual schema, but that should not be necessary.
Quoting Michael
You seem to be contradicting yourself here; specifically, if you say everything consists in configurations of waves/particles and that objects are convenient fictions, then is that not reducing everyday objects of perception, as well as our perceptions of them, to 'really' being these waves/particles?
I don't walk on experiences-of-the-ground, I walk on the ground, and experience doing so.
What is the ground if not "physical"?
Believing those other minds you've become familiar with means believing "physicalities".
Isn't it kind of extravagantly self-elevating to reduce all to mental monism?
We usually go by established scientific models — it's not that the models = the modeled, but good enough for many situations — among the most successful epistemic endeavors in history (the Internet, GPS, cholera eradication, Mars rovers, type 1 diabetes, long list).
Science doesn't derive morals, art, the Kama Sutra, ... But has a few things to say about the ground. And walking.
Solipsists, speak up. :smile:
And what is that exactly? :cool:
Exactly? Who knows. We have some decent models. No omniscience, though. Other than that, dirt, asphalt, grass, rubble, sidewalks, rocks, granite, ...
:chin:
Doesn't physicalism/materialism say that objects possess inherent reality, that they're real irrespective of your or my observation? And isn't that assertion central to the gist of the whole debate?
Recall that passage I quoted from Pinter:
Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 3). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Pinter is not saying that the object does not exist, but that it's identity qua 'cup' is imputed to it by us. He extends that argument to all of the objects we perceive. This, and many of the points being made by others here, are very similar to arguments from the Buddhist philosophical teaching of 'emptiness' (??nyat?) which likewise says that particulars have no intrinsic existence but exist in relation to other things ('arising due to causes and conditions') and their reality is imputed by the observer. Whereas the whole thrust of materialism or physicalism and in some ways naturalism is to insist that the objective domain has an intrinsic reality which is not connected to anything we think about it. (I should note I did an MA in Buddhist Studies about 10 years ago.)
Notice also this issue is central to interpretations of quantum physics. It is why Einstein was compelled to ask the question 'doesn't the moon continue to exist when we're not looking at it?' I'm not going to argue that it does or doesn't, but point out that Einstein was compelled to say this by what was happening in physics during the 1920's, which threw his kind of scientific realism into doubt. That was essentially the background of the Einstein-Bohr debates which occupied many later decades (see Manjit Kumar 'Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality'. Within that milieu, Heisenberg functions as a kind of modern representative of Platonism.)
Quoting Isaac
This is a very tricky point, because whereas above, we're discussing something very like relativism, and also touching on Buddhist philosophical ideas, this kind of thinking is much more associated with Platonism and the broader tradition that flows from it (including Aristotelianism).
In ancient and medieval philosophy it was assumed that there was a 'scala natura', which is that the world has an hierarchical structure, with matter at the base and the divine Intellect at the apex. So the reason that numbers and geometrical forms were 'higher' is because they were further up the scale - nearer to the source, as it were. It is of course true that this understanding was essentially abandoned in the transition from medieval to modern, in which the whole idea of there being a qualitative dimension or 'scala natura' was rejected along with Ptolmaic cosmology and Aristotelian physics.
But in any case, what I've come to understand is why the pre-modern or classical tradition esteemed mathematical and rational truths. It was because they retained a sense of them being 'higher' or 'nearer to the source' than material objects. Notice this paragraph from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Now, I think that is a sense which overall has been lost to modern and certainly to analytical philosophy. During my studies I've been piecing that story together. I notice that there is a controversy (hardly noticed outside academia) about the status of numbers, whether and in what sense they're considered real. That's the debate over Platonism in mathematics (see SEP). But that's a subset of a much larger debate over the nature of reality - whether it can be understood in terms of objects, or relations (e.g. ontic structural realism) or numbers (e.g. Max Tegmark).
The way I've begun to integrate these ideas is in line with a kind of analytical idealsm, in which maths and what the medievals called universals are uniform structures of reason. That is they're not material in nature, nor derived from or supervening on the physical. but they're real as the constituents of rational thought. It is not quite the same as conceptualism, which holds that all such things are in individual minds, because I believe that they are the properties of any and all minds.
Quoting Wayfarer
In doing so , haven’t you swapped out intrinsic features of an external world for intrinsic features of an internal conceptual world? Why not go all the way and make both the natural world as we experience it and our mathematical concepts relational, contextual and contestable? Isn’t math a form of logic, and isnt logic a pragmatic construction?
The problem though, is that the thing created by the mind, or brain, (I'll call it an image for now), need not even be at all similar to the supposed aspect of the real world which we assume that it represents. And minds or brains also created the "mess of wave-particles" as a type of image. We ought not assume that anything created by the mind or brain is in anyway similar to the external, real world.
For example, we know that the word "egg", and the word "cup", have no real similarity to the supposed real world things that the words represent. So why would we think that the visual image that the mind or brain creates, which we assume as a representation of a real world thing, is in any way similar to what the real world thing actually is. Just like a word, the visual image might be simply a convenient symbol.
I don't think so. Neither group appears to be saying anything. It's all physical, it's all ideas, it's all information, it's all frog.
What's that, then?
Weightings in neural networks. You are thinking in terms of brains containing representations, but neural nets are not representational.
Quoting Joshs
Wow. Nice reversal.
Does it add anything that is not a distraction from a more problematic issue? Because we are now discussing some version of materialism, instead of the world.
Quoting Wayfarer
What could be derived?
What's the consequence?
Say, omniscience, contra ...
Say, were I to claim my experiences = reality, I'd be reducing my neighbor a bit heavy-handedly. Solipsism. Maybe there are noumena after all — other minds? Per the comment above, "physicalities" comes before those other minds I've become so familiar with anyway. (It's not like I'm walking on other minds (just the ground), though I might like to walk all over the solipsists. :smile:) Besides, if anything significant differentiates dreams, hallucinations, etc, and perception, then it's the perceived. And the unperceived could kill you regardless.
Quoting jorndoe
Not if you have a god to ground your dreamy universe.
Quoting jorndoe
What warrants this assertion? I think you're begging the question, and committing the dire crime of underestimating the wit of the "it's all Frog" philosophers.
We all put our shoes on one at a time, eat breakfast, go about the day, occasionally pondering how to make our favorite philosophy work. We're all the same.
I can't experience someone else's self-awareness, since then I'd be them instead. I can experience someone else's hands when they use sign language (before their keen mind that I've become so familiar with). I can experience walking on the ground outside. Right?
But hey, if you want to scoff at metaphysics, then I'm all :up:.
Wait ...
Quoting Tate
Did you mean it's all goat? :D
You seemed to be describing some kind of subjective idealism, so I gave you Berkeley's solution.
Quoting jorndoe
Well that was easy!
Quoting jorndoe
Don't be ridiculous. It's Frog.
Notice in your own question the assumption of there really being an internal and external world.
The question I'm grappling with is related to the question of how causal relationships obtain, as discussed in the thread 'Logical Necessity and Physical Causation.' Chris Fuchs makes a remark that quantum physics is 'a law of thought'. That is actually Kantian in spirit, because in Kant, causal necessity itself is an a priori necessity, that is, it is grounded in the operations of reason.
Pinter again:
Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 33). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.
He notes that this ability to subjectively perceive a unified vista is also the subject of the well-known neural binding problem. He too brings in QBism:
Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (pp. 158-160). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.
So 'external objects' are still constructions - vorstellung in Schopenhauer's logic - within this 'mind-made world'. The mistake that is always made in respect to dualism is to ask how the mind could exist, or what it could be. This invariably seeks to locate the mind with respect to the objective domain, as some purported force or agency on a par with the physical - the so-called ghost in the machine. But the mind is what organises the objective domain into meaningful wholes ('gestalts') and their relationships. So it is not anywhere 'in' the objective domain or even objectively existent (which is why eliminativism seeks to exclude it, not noticing the role that it has in formulating even its own science, as per this paragraph in Schopenhauer.)
Quoting Joshs
You still have its 'unreasonable effectiveness' to consider. Again that is discussed in the other thread I mentioned.
So why would those patterns emerge variable? What causes the variance?
Quoting Michael
I don't see how. I'm saying that 'green' is a property of a hidden state which cause most humans in most situations to respond in the way we describe as 'seeing green'. It doesn't require that these hidden states have this effect on everyone, nor does it require that they have this effect at all times in all contexts.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, but I'm not clear what you mean by it in talking about idealism.
This is what I'm saying is simply wrong. The atoms do collude together to form a teacup. That's why we can all see them as a teacup. That's why one of the available gestalts is that of a teacup. Because the atoms do indeed form the shape of a teacup. They also form the shape of dozens of other things which we ignore, choosing, instead, to focus on the teacup option. But it's wrong to say they're not in the form of a teacup just because they're also in the form of many other options.
Quoting Wayfarer
And yet I couldn't just walk into a physics department and propose my own version of what's happening at a quantum scale, could I? Why not? Because the range of possibilities is constrained. It's constrained by actual measurements (such as those from the large hadron collider). Measurements I'm unaware of but which constrain the choices of physicists about the nature of reality. The reason why only learned physicists can speculate on such matters. So there are intrinsic properties of reality, it's just that they are insufficiently specific to distinguish between the competing theories.
Quoting Wayfarer
So...any closer to an idea of what isn't "real as the constituents of rational thought"?
We see them as teacups, because our culture drinks tea. Another culture might have similarly-shaped object that is called by a different name and is used for another purpose. So its identity is not intrinsic, but imputed to it by us. The teacup obviously has no sense of its own identity, being an inanimate object.
Quoting Isaac
[quote=Objective Reality Doesn't Exist, Quantum Experiment Shows;https://www.livescience.com/objective-reality-not-exist-quantum-physicists.html]The scientific method is after all founded on the reliable notions of observation, measurement and repeatability. A fact, as established by a measurement, should be objective, such that all observers can agree with it.
But in a paper recently published in Science Advances, we show that, in the micro-world of atoms and particles that is governed by the strange rules of quantum mechanics, two different observers are entitled to their own facts. In other words, according to our best theory of the building blocks of nature itself, facts can actually be subjective.[/quote]
The results are somewhat constrained, but not completely. And that is why the question of the interpretation of physics is still very much an unsolved issue.
By the 'constituents of rational thought' I'm referring to such things as the rules of logic and arithmetic, and so on. Not just any random thought that pops into your head.
The "green" in "seeing green" doesn't mean the same thing as your suggested "green" as a property of a hidden state. The former is what most people understand colour to be. When I say "the colour that I see isn't the colour that you see" I'm not saying "the property of a hidden state that I see isn't the property of a hidden state that you see."
If colour was the property of a hidden state then how do you make sense of two people seeing different colours when looking at the same thing? What does "colours" refer to here?
This is the problem when you try to use the same labels that we use to refer to features of experience to also refer to the external world causes of those experiences. It leads us susceptible to equivocation. There's a very big difference between saying that the green that I see (in the context of "seeing green") is some external world thing (a naive view of perception) and saying that some external world things cause most humans to see green. And by the same token, there's a very big difference between saying that the cup that I see (in the context of "seeing a cup") is some external world thing and saying that some external world things cause most humans to see a cup.
But we can't just see them as teacups because our culture drinks tea. Why don't I see the table as a teacup? There must be some properties that particular hidden state has that makes it amenable to being 'seen as a teacup', whereas the other hidden state has properties which make it more amenable to being 'seen as a table'. Those properties are intrinsic, not imbued by us. Our imbuing practices must use some properties to decide what gestalt to imbue, otherwise we'd have one amorphous homogeneous mass.
Quoting Wayfarer
Absolutely. Those 'constraints' are intrinsic properties. Hidden states which are intrinsically constrained in such-and-such a way are called 'teacups'. Hidden states which are intrinsically constrained in this other way are called 'tables'.
Quoting Wayfarer
The difference being? Is it consistency? Universality? What?
Quoting Michael
So the expression "the post box is red" wouldn't make sense to most people? They'd say "the post box causes me to see red"?
Quoting Michael
I seriously don't know anyone who speaks that way in normal conversation. People might say "I see the dress as green, you see it as blue". They're still talking about the colour of the dress (the hidden state we're modelling), they're not talking about the content of their minds.
Quoting Michael
I've answered that already. The label we apply to hidden states is based on the response those states normally produce in most contexts. The process doesn't require that such states always produce that response in all contexts.
Quoting Michael
That seems to me to be a problem caused by this odd manner of speaking about 'colours of experiences' which no one uses in normal conversations.
Quoting Michael
OK, so you agree that there exists some external world thing which causes most humans to have the response we call 'seeing a cup'.
What should we call that?
I propose we should call it 'a cup'.
No, because as I have also said, it is wrong to say that the external world causes of experience is the postbox.
Quoting Isaac
The "as green" and "as blue" is very much about the content of their minds. They are having different experiences despite the same external world cause. What differs between their experiences is the colour seen. If the colour seen is what differs in their experiences and if the external world cause is the same, then colour isn't some hidden state in the external world cause.
Quoting Isaac
This isn't addressing the issue. Your eyes and my eyes are stimulated by the same light, reflected by the same external world source. Yet I see red and you see green. If "red" and "green" refer to some hidden state in the external world cause then what does it mean for me to "see red" and you to "see green" in this situation? The "red" and "green" are referring to some quality of our experiences.
Quoting Isaac
You can call it anything you like. But that external world cup isn't the cup that I see, just as a configuration of electrons that absorbs light of a certain wavelength, scattering light with a wavelength of 650nm isn't the red that I see.
X causes Y. X isn't Y. But you want to use the label "Z" to refer to both X and Y. That leads to equivocation. Saying "I see Z and Z is an external world thing" is misleading because of this. It's two different meanings of "Z". All you're really saying is "I see Y and X is an external world thing".
I don't know what you mean by saying that they're the "same world." All I'm saying is:
1. Some object is red[sub]1[/sub] if it causes most humans to see red[sub]2[/sub], although some humans and some animals might instead see orange[sub]2[/sub]
2. Red[sub]1[/sub] isn't red[sub]2[/sub]
3. Red[sub]1[/sub] is external to experience
4. Red[sub]2[/sub] isn't external to experience
5. We see red[sub]2[/sub], not red[sub]1[/sub]
Why do you say that? Any pattern could symbolize something. And not all symbols necessarily appear like symbols to everyone. So I don't see any basis for the claim that "neural nets are not representational". To me, it looks far more likely that they actually are, as any ordered structure can be said to be representational. That's fundamentally what "ordered" is, a representation of the intent which orders, in other words, meaning.
The sensation of colour is best described by reference to the activities of the "cones" and the "rods" of the eyes, rather than reference to some external source. But even this does not account for the huge role of brain activity. Since we dream in colour, it may actually be brain activity which causes the sensation of colour. The role of REM in relation to dream imaging is not well understood.
Herein is the problem. There's no reason at all to consider the existence of red2. We respond to red1. We reach for the word 'red', we imagine other things which are red...
What there's no evidence at all for is some entity called red2 which we 'see'. The process of 'seeing' does not, in any way, consult an internal colour chart. There's no entity matching your description of red2.
When I see the dress as white and gold and you see the dress as black and blue, what do the words "white", "gold", "black", and "blue" refer to?
They don't refer to some hidden state. They refer to immediately apparent features of our experiences. The words "white" and "gold" refer to features present in my experience that aren't present in your experience, and the words "black" and "blue" refer to features present in your experience that aren't present in my experience.
The properties of hidden states.
Quoting Michael
Why not?
Quoting Michael
Then how did we learn to use the words? If they describe private experiences, how is it I ever learnt their use. How do we even know that what I call 'black' today is the same thing I called 'black' yesterday?
Because I can see the difference between red and blue. It's immediately apparent. Therefore red and blue aren't hidden states.
Quoting Isaac
Because we're shown a bunch of things that share the same colour-appearance and told that this colour is to be called "red". We then come to associate the word "red" with this appearance.
A better question is this: if colour is a hidden state then how can we learn to use colour words?
Quoting Isaac
Because we have a memory and can remember how things appeared in the past and how they appear now, and which words we used then and which words we use now to refer to that appearance? I don't really understand your question.
So when I see a white and gold dress and you see a black and blue dress we're seeing different properties of hidden states?
The eye has a lens and photo-receptors. The ear has cilia that send an electrical facsimile of vibrations. Obviously a representation is being delivered to the brain. We just don't know how the brain creates a holistic experience out of that.
Hidden states cause effects in us. Them being hidden refers to their being outside of the Markov blanket, not to their having no effect. So you distinguishing red from blue is easy. Red has a different effect on you to blue.
Quoting Michael
How is it that things all share the same colour experience if they've no intrinsic properties relating to colour? How is it that I can point to a post box, a rose, a bus, a traffic light...to teach my son how to use the word 'red' if all of those things have no intrinsic property called 'red'? Is it just luck that he has the same response to each such that he can see the similarity I'm getting at?
Quoting Michael
Because hidden states have fairly consistent and similar effects on us.
Quoting Michael
How could you possibly know that? Why would you even think that? I mean, I'm not going to rehash Wittgenstein's private language argument, you probably know it, but without some external reference you'd have no default reason to even think your 'black' of today was the same experience as your 'black' of yesterday.
Quoting Michael
No. Same hidden states. I don't understand why you're having so much trouble with the idea of a hidden state having a different effect on different people or in different contexts. Did you not understand the example I gave earlier of the constellation Orion? The stars of Orion are arranged in the form of a man with a bow. The fact that they could also be seen as several other things doesn't mean they're not in the form of a man with a bow, it's just that they're also in other forms.
They're definitely not in the form of next week's winning lottery numbers. There's something intrinsic about them which constrains what pattern we can see. A man with a bow is one such option.
In the case of the dress, its colour is either white and gold or black and blue. It's not pink and green. There's something intrinsic about the hidden states which constrains our range of normal responses. That something is its colour.
Well. We know quite a lot about how the brain creates a holistic experience out of that. Not a complete picture. I'm not sure what your point is.
Hidden state X causes me to see red and you to see blue. What does "red" and "blue" refer to here? It doesn't refer to hidden state X, otherwise we would both be seeing red and both be seeing blue.
Actually we have theories for how experience is created by the brain.
The schematic of the nervous system gives us ample reason to believe that a spider's brain, for instance, is receiving a representation of its environment. For some reason you're wanting to ignore that obvious fact and say that hidden states and the representation are the same thing.
The colour of hidden state X.
Quoting Michael
Why? Why must hidden state X have a colour such that it causes the same response in you as it does in me? In this case, its colour is 'red or blue'. We might, if we were to keep finding such hidden states, come up with a new word for such a colour, but since such states are exceedingly rare, we haven't the need. Most of the time the same state will cause the same (or similar) response in normally sighted people.
Does it? In what way?
If both "red" and "blue" refer to hidden state X then red and blue are the same colour, and the person who sees red and the person who sees blue are seeing the same thing.
This is evidently not the case. Your account of colour makes no sense.
The lenses, the photo-receptors, the optic nerves delivering electrical signals.
Not at all. If I think the person in the doorway is called Jim and you think he's called Jack, we're still both referring to the same person. That doesn't make Jim the same name as Jack. It makes one of us wrong, or it makes the person in the doorway possessed of two names, or it makes the name of the person in the doorway ambiguous, or unresolved.
Likewise with a hidden state which causes you to reach for the word 'blue' and me to reach for the word 'red' doesn't make red and blue the same thing, it makes one of us wrong, or the colour of the hidden state ambiguous, or unresolved.
You're just naming parts of the optic system. Your claim was that they give us reason to believe that a spider's brain is receiving a representation of its environment.
If the same hidden state causes you to see the colour on the left and me to see the colour on the right then we are seeing different colours. You're seeing red and I'm seeing blue. The word "red" refers to the colour that you see and that I don't see (the colour on the left), and the word "blue" refers to the colour that I see and that you don't see (the colour on the right).
If you want the words "red" and "blue" to also refer to the hidden state that causes us to see what we do then we have two different meanings of "red" and "blue" as I mentioned above.
Red[sub]1[/sub] is the colour on the left, blue[sub]1[/sub] is the colour on the right, and red[sub]1[/sub] and blue[sub]1[/sub] are different colours.
Red[sub]2[/sub] is the hidden state that causes you to see the colour on the left, blue[sub]2[/sub] is the hidden state that causes me to see the colour on the right, and red[sub]2[/sub] and blue[sub]2[/sub] are the same colour.
This makes us susceptible to equivocation and a confusing metaphysics, as exemplified by your comments.
The electrical signals it receives from the optic nerve are a representation. What did you think that data was?
An impossible situation from the outset. Hidden states cannot cause us to see colours. There's no mechanism by which that can happen. Seeing a colour is a process which starts with the property of a hidden state and ends with a series of responses (one of which might be to reach for a colour word).
You're imagining that 'seeing a colour' is some internal process, but you've given no reason why you'd imagine such a thing.
:up:
Uh huh. But we don't 'see' the electrical signals. We see the external world object. 'Seeing' involves those electrical signals, they're part of the process of seeing. They're not what we see.
What? Here are your words:
Quoting Isaac
Yeah. Look at the words. I was quite careful.
Quoting Isaac
It's the exact same thing, you're just wording it in a needlessly convoluted way.
It's like saying "that's the person named 'Jack'" instead of just saying "that's Jack."
Not without an ampmeter, no. Nevertheless those signals are representative. Are you denying that? Because you would be grossly out of step with biology if you do.
One has green as a property of some mental representation, the other as a property of the hidden state.
The former is without warrant.
No. I'm denying that they're what we 'see'. They're part of 'seeing', they're not what we see.
The spider sees its prey because its brain is receiving data representative of the prey.
The representation and the prey are distinct. This is basic biology.
Yep. But it sees the prey. Not the representation.
Then you still have to explain what you mean by one person seeing something as red and another person seeing that same thing as blue. Does each person have different hidden states?
Because it seems to me that when we say that one person sees something as red and another as blue that the words "red" and "blue" are referring to the particular qualities of their individual experiences. That's colour as everyone ordinarily understands it.
So we're straight that the representative data the spider has direct access to is not identical to hidden states, as you've been claiming.
:up:
Same hidden state causes one person to respond in the way we call 'seeing blue' and another person to respond in the way we call 'seeing red'. It is an intrinsic property of the hidden state that it causes this multiple response. The colour of the hidden state is either red (and person B is wrong), or blue (and person A is wrong), or some new colour which causes this odd split reaction which we'd need a new word for. As I say, we've not encountered such hidden states in any quantity. The vast majority cause the same response.
Where have I claimed anything like that?
I must have been mistaken. You wouldn't say something so ridiculous.
Responding in the way called "seeing blue" is just seeing blue, and responding in the way called "seeing red" is just seeing red. We have experiences, and we use words to refer to properties of these experiences. Colour, texture, pleasure, pain, and so on.
If you want to use the words "red" and "blue" to refer to some hidden state then you're welcome to do so, but it's wrong to deny that in normal conversation they refer to something else; something that isn't hidden but instead is immediately apparent.
How isn't it a Cartesian theatre understanding?
Yes. Blue being the name given to the property we're seeing. The property of the external hidden state.
Quoting Michael
But we clearly aren't referring to the properties of the experience. When I say "the post box is red" I'm clearly referring to the post box. The grammar could not be more clear.
Quoting Michael
Again, 'hidden' here refers to the network location of the data node relative to the Markov boundary. It doesn't mean 'not apparent'.
But people see different things despite the same external hidden state, e.g some a white and gold dress and some a black and blue dress. Therefore it’s not the external hidden state they see.
Quoting Isaac
And as I have previously said, the postbox isn’t an external hidden state either.
I didn’t realise that English grammar dictates/reveals the (meta-)physics of perception.
Why? Why must the property of the external state we're labelling as 'green' be such that it causes the same response in all people at all times?
Quoting Michael
Then when I say "I'll meet you by the postbox" I'm expecting you to get into my mind and wait next to my mental representation?
Quoting Michael
It reveals reference.
I'm not saying that it must. I'm saying that if two people are seeing different things (one a black and blue dress, the other a white and gold dress) then they are not seeing the external state because the external state is the same for both of them. It doesn't make sense to say that they are seeing the same external state but also seeing different things. You have to pick one.
Quoting Isaac
No. You're expecting to meet them by the postbox. And "meeting someone by the postbox" isn't an external hidden state.
Why not? I don't understand why you're invoking this rule that a hidden state has to have the same effect on all people at all times. Where does that rule come from?
Quoting Michael
Is anything?
I'm not saying that it has to. I'm saying:
1. Some hidden state X causes person A to see a white and gold dress and person B to see a black and blue dress.
2. A white and gold dress isn't a black and blue dress
3. Therefore, person A isn't seeing the same thing as person B
4. Therefore, person A and/or person B isn't seeing hidden state X
5. Therefore, the white and gold dress and/or the black and blue dress isn't hidden state X
Why not?
Because neither white nor gold is black or blue. They are different colours.
But why can't a dress be two different colours at the same time?
Maybe it can, but in this scenario it isn't. Neither person A nor person B sees a white and gold and black and blue dress. Person A only sees a white and gold dress. Person B only sees a black and blue dress.
[sup](pardon my poor art)[/sup]
The two occurrences aren't the same, they can't be, though there's just the one Cup (the perceived).
Whatever takes place in You and Me (the perceptions) are parts of the respective occurrences.
If I were color blind, then I might report a different color than You (the perceptions).
On a different though related note, this is just what "the-swimmer-in-the-water" looks like (refraction ? the perception):
Doesn't mean that swimmer's head is separated from the rest of their body (the perceived).
Maybe there are actually two cups, one for you and one for me, and we communicate telepathically about our individual scenes.
Point is: watch out for question begging.
:D (you're just dreaming that you're reading posts on a forum)
Quoting Tate
There are no proofs here. Just switching to other (descriptive) verbiage.
Right. But how does that make it that the dress must be one or the other?
Could be.
Quoting jorndoe
I think you are trying get leverage from aspects of your worldview. All that allows you to do is comment on your worldview.
You want to talk about me instead...? :roll: Suggest posting about the comment.
A dress can be red and blue. Or it can just be red. Or it can just be blue. Or it can be some other colour or combination of colours.
In this scenario neither person sees a red and blue dress. One person sees a red dress, the other a blue dress. A red dress isn't a blue dress. The fact that some other dress can be both red and blue is irrelevant.
Sorry. I might have failed to get your point. :grimace: I'll try again later.
So you keep saying, but you've not given any account of why a dress cannot be both a red dress and a blue dress.
I haven't claimed that it cannot. In fact I explicitly said above that it can. Maybe I should repeat myself?
A dress can be red and blue. Or it can just be red. Or it can just be blue. Or it can be some other colour or combination of colours.
...
Quoting Michael
I'm asking for support for the above assertion.
Here's a red dress:
Here's a blue dress:
Here's a red and blue dress:
Yep. I'm not asking about dresses which are part red and part blue. I'm asking about dresses which are both all red and all blue.
If red and blue are different colours then it is a contradiction for it to be all red and all blue.
Why? Why can a dress not be two different colours at the same time?
Because that's a contradiction. You might as well ask why something can't be both a rabbit and a duck.
Is it? I don't see that. A duck and a rabbit are two different sets of cells/organs. No one claims to see a duck where others see a rabbit (in real 3d objects) so we've no reason to assume anything can be both.
With colour, some people do claim to see blue where others see red, so that's default reason to believe that colour is the sort of property which can be of two kinds at the same time. We've no similar reason to believe species is such a property. If we did (half the world claimed some ambiguous object was a duck and half claimed it was a rabbit) then we'd have good reason to believe that species was the sort of property which can be of two kinds at the same time too.
The constellation Orion is in both the shape of a man with a bow, and the shape of a smiling cat. The shape of the constellation Orion is the sort of property which can be of two kinds at the same time.
No, it’s a reason to believe that colour is in the head.
Why?
The conclusion just doesn't follow. A hidden state might have the property of causing one response in person A but a different response in person B. That would still be a single intrinsic property of the hidden state. There's nothing at all preventing us from calling that property its 'colour'.
You're invoking this notion of a 'colour experience' without any warrant. There's no activity in the occipital cortex corresponding to a colour experience. There's no evidence for it at all, and there's bags of evidence against it (the vast majority of hidden states cause exactly the same responses in almost all humans - excellent evidence that the colour is a property of the hidden state, not the person's mind )
Almost every human in the world agrees that the postbox in the village is the same colour as the bus.
We need an explanation for this extraordinary consistency.
We also have very, very rare cases where people disagree that two objects are the same colour.
The simplest explanation of the extraordinary consistency is that the colour is a property of some external state which we all interpret and the very, very rare cases are either mistakes or odd hidden states.
You're taking these extremely rare cases and saying that our entire explanation needs changing, an entirely fabricated notion of color experience needs to be proposed, without any physical evidence it even exists... Just to avoid the much simpler explanation that these rare cases are just that. Rare oddities.
The explanation is that they scatter light at a wavelength of 650nm and that when light of this wavelength stimulates the sense receptors in our eyes it triggers brain activity from which visual experience emerges and that colour is a quality of these visual experiences. Given that we tend to have the same eye and brain structure and given that physical processes are mostly deterministic the quality of our visual experiences are mostly the same. And when someone has tetrachromacy or brain damage or the like then they respond differently to the same stimulus and so the quality of the emergent visual experiences are different, i.e they see different colours.
Whereas your theory requires this “hidden state” invention and the requirement that the external stimulus has as many “hidden states” as there are ways of experiencing it. It’s overly complicated, there’s no evidence for it, and I would even say it’s incomprehensible. Something can’t be both all red and all blue. The fact that your theory requires this should show how problematic it is.
People seem so bewitched by the complexity of visual experiences that they think sight works differently to other senses. If a dog could talk it would probably make the same mistake about smell.
:up:
Quoting Isaac
Variance cause variance. As Deleuze said, a change is a difference that makes a difference. Laws and patterned regularities are idealizations of continuous
qualitative change.
Quoting Isaac
It’s not just a matter of shapes that atoms
form , but of the relationship between accounts and the varying senses of concepts like shape, size, space. Of these potentially infinite variety of accounts, are you giving priority to a certain empirical account from physics? Is this a ‘bedrock’ account, as Quine claimed, one which grounds all the others in an irreducibly real beginning?
I think Wayfarer might agree that the way to bedrock is to begin by asking what all possible accounts of any aspect of the world have in common, that is , what is the condition of possibility of empirical account-building?
I think an answer compatible with naturalism is possible, but it requires a naturalism utilizing recent models from biology, centering on niche construction. As the thinking goes ( I draw from Joseph Rouse here), linguistic conceptual accounts of the world are elaborations of practical perceptual interactions that are continuous with the role of niche building in non-linguistic animals under selective evolutionary pressure. I don’t think such models warrant taking an account from physics as normatively determinative. That’s a way of saying that physics is just beginning to take into account the temporal notions that Darwinism has contributed.
It is useful to compare Pinter’s model of gestalt with that of Merleau-Ponty. For Pinter , a gestalt “is a complex of images that we may call the concept of dog. Visually, it includes a fluid composite image of what the most commonly seen dogs look like, viewed in various positions and from different angles. It includes general notions of the temperament and character of dogs, and the knowledge that dogs may be both loving and, in some circumstances, dangerous.”
From MP’s vantage , this definition of gestalt remains embedded in objective naturalism, which explains gestalts a s the result of a causal process of concept formation. For MP, as for the later Wittgenstein, a gestalt is never a move from the particular to the general. It neither involves composition nor decomposition.
A perceived object has its sense in relation to a background gestalt field as its irreducible basis. A gestalt is both subjective and intersubjective, producing perceptual and social fields of action.
Pinter’s contention that gestalts are ‘superimposed on the physical stuff of the world’ is problematic, and suggests that he, like Quine, take the results of physics to be normatively determinative. Only this orientation, I believe, can justify belief in the 'unreasonable effectiveness' of mathematics. We have to begin with a reified notion of the object which transcends the relativity of Pinter’s subjective gestalts in order to see mathematical logic as unreasonably effective. If you’re looking for a transcendental basis for scientific truth you’re better off with Putnam’s valuative realism than with an idealization of the objectivity of natural objects.
Another snippet:
[quote=Mind and the Cosmic Order] Sensations, beliefs, imaginings and feelings are often referred to as figments, that is, creations of the mind. A mental image is taken to be something less than real: For one thing, it has no material substance and is impossible to detect except in the mind of the perceiver. It is true that sensations are caused by electrochemical events in a brain, but when experienced by a living mind, sensations are decisively different in kind from electrons in motion. They are indeed “figments” because they exist nowhere except in awareness. As a matter of fact, they exist only as claims made by sentient beings, with no material evidence to back up those claims. Indeed, brain scans reveal electrical activity, but do not display sensations or inner experience.[/quote]
Why this appeals to me, is that I’ve always argued that reason is the relationship of ideas. Nothing physical comes into it, indeed, we can’t even form a notion of ‘physical’ without employing reason. So whereas physicalism wants to claim that reason is derived from or supervenes on or can be reduced to neurological data, what he is saying is that is real on a different plane altogether. And that lends support to one of the basic themes I’ve been working on since joined here: that existence and reality are not the same thing.
(I should add, Pinter also says that all the basic concepts of physics like velocity, mass, etc, are ultimately derived from the embodied experience of resistance, lifting, movement, and so on. In that sense they’re ultimately visceral in origin.)
Again, it pays to consider a wide range of examples. I think your argument here has complications caused by colour being a secondary quality. Try making the same point with a primary quality instead - does it still work?
SO the eggs might be rendered something like:
"Some object is an ovoid if it causes most humans to see an ovoid ..."
Is that something you wish to assert? Because it seems to me to be wrong.
@Isaac, arguments concerning colour tend to be futile.
I say that because that's how neural nets work.
Knowledge of how neural nets work will not inform you as to whether or not they are representational. This would require knowledge of "why". Knowing how the human vocal chords produce the sounds which are words, for example, does not provide you with information as to whether or not the sounds are representational. Again, this is fundamental to "meaning".
Yeah, it does. If you set up a neural net to, say, add two numbers, nothing in the processing represents the numbers in the way that von Neumann architecture does. That's rather the point of connectionism.
Cheers.
Sorry Banno, but you're not making any sense at all. There is a vast multitude of different ways of representing. That a process is not representational in a specific way, does not mean that it is not representational in an absolute way.
Connectionist models are just representations, so they are built for a reason other than the reason for which the thing represented was built, as they are built to represent that thing.
And I'll tell you one more time, knowing how the thing works allows you to build a representative model of it. But this provides you with no information as to whether or not the thing represented is itself a representation. A child can copy a word without even knowing that it's a word. To determine whether the action is representational requires a knowledge of why the thing is doing what it does. And that is completely different from why the model of the thing does what it does, because they are produced for different reasons.
Let me use Pinter’s own words to make the case that his is a classic neo-Kantian appearance-reality dualism.
To begin with, one of his chapter headings is ‘Do We See the World Realistically?’Does he mean by this that it makes no sense to distinguish between human or animal perceptions of the world, and the world as it supposedly is in some factual naturalistic sense? Or does he mean that there is a real world with intrinsic properties which sensate creatures do not represent accurately? It sounds like the latter to me:
“What an animal experiences seeing may be unlike a high-fidelity reproduction of reality, with all its complexity and inscrutability…. so long as all the experiences a creature has with objects are consistent with one another— with no discrepancies of any kind—the creature is far better off interacting in mind with usefully simplified and schematized replicas.”
“It is no different when you set out to solve a technical problem involving a real-world situation: You don’t want a photograph of the objective situation, but a diagram showing just the necessary information.”
Studies have show that “faithful representation is driven to extinction by non-veridical strategies based on utility rather than objective reality.”
“So long as its segmentation is self-consistent, the animal cannot ever become aware of a difference between its world-model and reality.”
So our accounts are a replica , a non-faithful representation of the ‘physical facts’ of an ‘objective situation’.
“Though our segmentation of reality is partly bound to physical facts, much of it is arbitrary.”
Pinter uses as an example of this arbitrary association between external reality and our conceptions of it the difference between color and wavelengths of light. The former are subjective representations and the latter are the physical facts.
“There is no logical connection between perceived color and the wavelength of light: It is an arbitrary association invented by nature.”
Neo-Kantianism courts skepticism because our representational filters prevent us from seeing the world as it is.
The point has been made before, by myself and @Isaac.
I don't think Pinter juxtaposes a real, physical world, with a world of appearances. It's not as if the real thing is hiding behind the sensory depiction of it. The first words in the book are:
[quote=Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order p1]Imagine that all life has vanished from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed. Matter is scattered about in space in the same way as it is now, there is sunlight, there are stars, planets and galaxies—but all of it is unseen. There is no human or animal eye to cast a glance at objects, hence nothing is discerned, recognized or even noticed. Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds. Nor do they have features, because features correspond to categories of animal sensation.[/quote]
He doesn't go on to say much about the world as it is in the absence of any observer, because (I think) in his view, there's nothing to be said about it.
Furthermore he says, as I previously put it, that the mind operates by different laws to physics, which are not derivable from it:
'the same ones' referring to the laws of physics. So he's not arguing for any normative role for science or that the understanding of the mind is derived from or dependent on physical laws. Where he appeals to science, is what cognitive neuroscience has discovered about the way the sentient mind organises cognitions into gestalts.
There's a section heading Materialism and Objectivity, which is where he explicitly mentions Kant and noumena, and the requirement of scientifically objective statements to be utterly devoid of any subjective sense, which, he says, results in:
So he's not suggesting that the "zombie universe" is real, and its depiction in the sensory systems of animals is an illusion. Rather he says that what we instinctively take to be an external reality, is really the 'manufactory of the brain' (in Schopenhauer's exact words.)
Quoting Joshs
From a Buddhist (and even, possibly, even a neo-Kantian) perspective there is no 'world as it truly is', because 'the world' is itself a composite of conditioned factors continually arising and ceasing. Real being is something which it lacks. Seeing through the apparently solid reality of 'the world', is 'seeing things as they are' - but that can be a disillusioning realisation:
Quoting Traleg Kyagbon Rinpoche
'Hopelessness' in the sense of abandoning hope of some ultimate gain or reward to be had.
Anyway, that's all a digression, although I've mentioned before I first encountered Kant through T R V Murti's book on Buddhist philosophy so that's obviously left an imprint.
The subjects which are *not* dealt with in Pinter's book are the nature of reason and the role of creativity, and many other such grand topics, but then part of the appeal is its simplicity and the fact it has specific focus. But he devotes quite a lot of the book to criticising what I think of as scientism (although he doesn't use that word either).
An intrinsic property.
So I'd say "the postbox is red". You'd say " the wave particles you imagine are a postbox scatter light at a wavelength of 650nm"...
...and yours is the simpler explanation?
Quoting Michael
Nothing there contradicts what I've said.
Quoting Michael
It's not my theory, it's called active inference, it's currently the leading theory of perception among cognitive scientists.
Quoting Michael
It's the standard model now taught on most cognitive science courses, so it can't be that incomprehensible and with currently just over 160 papers in print on the subject I hardly think it lacks evidence. Perhaps if you're not an expert in cognitive science you might refrain from deciding arbitrarily what there is and isn't evidence for.
Quoting Michael
So you keep claiming, yet still no argument to support it. Why can something not be both all red and all blue?
Quoting Michael
And yet we don't say the fire is in pain, we do say the fire is red.
Quoting Michael
No people have spent decades studying the occipital neural circuits, modelling people's responses in different cases of brain damage, and directly experimenting on the occasional elective open brain surgery and have reached the conclusion that sight works thus.
And it's not that dissimilar to other senses in this respect.
We've concluded that we do not 'see' a model or a quale, or anything like that because there is absolutely zero evidence of any mechanism by which such observation could possibly happen in the brain.
Variance in what. There has to be medium for the variance to be a variance of.
Quoting Joshs
Change in what?
Quoting Joshs
This is the assertion I take issue with. I see no grounds for believing it. That there exist multiple possible accounts is evident. I don't see any reason to conclude from that that the variety is near infinite, that's a huge and unwarranted leap (a near infinite one, in fact!). There are multiple accounts. That's all the data we have.
Quoting Joshs
I'm not personally giving priority to any particular account. I'm arguing that the range of possible accounts is constrained by the intrinsic properties of the hidden states of which they are an account. Physics need not even enter into it, these can be treated merely as hidden states in Markov nodal network system, no atoms or particles need be involved. Only information.
Quoting Joshs
Need they have anything in common?
Quoting Joshs
I agree.
So I'm finding. And yet that's where these discussions tend to go (it seems safe ground from the anti-realist). I don't like squash either, but if it's the only game one's colleagues are willing to play, then one must either play it or play nothing. Discussion is a two person game and colour seems to be the topic of choice...
Quoting Banno
Spot on.
No, they are not built to represent a thing. It's simply not what they do. They produce responses which minimise the surprise function of a prior prediction about the response under a particular policy. Nothing to do with representation. It's about prediction error in response, not representation.
Yes. Shape is as much a feature of experience as colour. There are ovoids-as-seen, ovoids-as-felt, and these aren't at all similar (see Molyneux's problem). To think that one or both of them are "external" to the experience is a mistake.
It is easier to think of a thing no longer being red when the light goes out than to think of it no longer being ovoid.
So you think of it being oviod-as-seen when the light goes out? And ovoid-as-felt when you stop touching it? I think both are a case of mistaken projection. It's as naive as thinking the same about colour.
No. Rather, I've no clear idea what oviod-as-seen might be as distinct from ovoid.
Quoting Michael
So the egg is not ovoid? What could "mistaken" mean here?
But you don't think the same about ovoid-as-felt?
Quoting Banno
The egg is ovoid, external things (i.e. waves/particles) aren't ovoid, and so eggs aren't external things. I have said several times that I think it's a mistake to reduce the everyday objects of perception to being the external causes of perception (i.e waves/particles).
This is just begging the question. External things are ovoid. They are just other shapes as well. Like the stars of Orion, the fact that they form a myriad other shapes does not mean they don't form the shape of a man with a bow.
You've not given an account of why external things (your 'waves/particles') must only form one shape. Just like you never gave an account of why they must only be one colour.
And I agree; I have no clear idea what "ovoid" might be as distinct from either ovoid-as-seen or ovoid-as-felt. Ovoids are only meaningful as an appearance (either visual or tacticle), not as some external un-seen and un-felt property.
Ovoid is a property of some hidden state which causes your 'ovoid-as-seen' and 'ovoid-as-felt'.
There. What's not clear about that?
It's red[sub]1[/sub] and red[sub]2[/sub] all over again. You can use the word "pain" to refer to the external cause of pain if you like, but when I talk about pain in everyday conversation I'm talking about the feeling, not any external cause. The same with colour. The same with shape. Your position just leaves us susceptible to equivocation which I would prefer to avoid.
Why would I do that? That's not the way we use the word 'pain'. We use the word 'pain' to describe our subjective feeling. We use the word 'ovoid' to describe a property of some hidden state (an egg, for example).
We say "that egg is ovoid". We don't say "that needle is pain".
You're the one making the claim that our ordinary language use is wrong in the case of the egg, so bringing in 'everyday conversation' doesn't support your case.
Everyday conversation talks about external objects which have properties.
That's not right. Ovoids are a shape - the negative pedal curve of an ellipse with eccentricity e<=½, I'm told.
Quoting Michael
I really do find that argument risible. Was there ever a clearer case of special pleading?
Again, that notion of internal and external leads you astray. Eggs are ovoid, and are in the chicken coop or fridge, not in your mind.
:rofl:
Yes, and shapes are an appearance.
Quoting Banno
An ovoid egg being in the fridge isn't an external cause of perception. It can't be reduced to just being the wave-particles of the Standard Model. It's something seen or felt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enactivism
Indeed, I agree. It's an egg in a fridge.
It might, as things go, be perceived by some cook or chook, but that is incidental and not relevant to it's being an egg.
It is not a perception-of-egg, what ever that might be.
DO you really think that the view described as "enactivism"view is a form of idealism?
I suspect that you are expressing much the same view as @Isaac and I, but giving it the wrong name. So our argument becomes caught in the narcissism of small differences.
Uh huh.
Here's Friston on enactivist interpretations of active inference. You'll note the clear use of Markov boundary models. Enactivist cognitive theories are not only compatible with active inference, but they rely on much of the same mathematical modeling functions such as Lagrange equations.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1059712319862774
Hopefully made clear by the paper I cited above.
I think it fits within Kant's transcendental idealism or Putnam's internal realism. Colour, shape, eggs, etc. aren't "things" or "properties" in our environment that are then "encountered." Rather we interact with the environment and then colour, shape, eggs, etc. are "enacted" by that interaction.
Kant would describe this pre-enacted environment as being otherwise unknowable "noumena". I'm unsure if I'd go as far as him in saying this or if I'm happy to think of this pre-enacted environment as being the wave-particles of the Standard Model (or the superstrings of M-theory, or whatever our best physical theories suggest), although in this discussion I've been tending towards the latter.
Not a trick question. I think that there are, when we talk about stuff like cups and eggs and planets and so on.
No. That's not what enactivist accounts of cognition are saying.
Note, the Bayesian beliefs are about external states. The subject is an external state, not an internal model. The 'egg' is the subject of a Bayesian optimised policy, which we can render into grammar as "the egg is ovoid"
Sure. Either "the real part of every nontrivial zero of the Riemann zeta function is 1/2" is true or it's false, but we don't (currently) know which.
Quoting Banno
In the counterfactual sense of "if we were to interact with the environment over there then we would see an egg in the fridge", sure. But the (naive) realist would be trying to say something more than just this, and I think that their interpretation is wrong.
Then I will count you as a realist, for the purposes of eggs and chairs and stuff like that.
But for maths, I'll join the anti-realists. You may too if you soo choose.
1. Some hidden state X causes person A to see a red dress and person B to see a blue dress
2. A red dress isn't a blue dress
3. Therefore, person A isn't seeing the same thing as person B
4. Therefore, person A and/or person B isn't seeing hidden state X
5. Therefore, the red dress and/or the blue dress isn't hidden state X
Here you said "the colour of the hidden state is either red (and person B is wrong), or blue (and person A is wrong)."
So, let's assume that the hidden state is red and not blue as in your example. Given this, you cannot respond to my argument above by suggesting that 2 is wrong because the dress is both red and blue. By your own admission, the dress is red and not blue.
So 3-5 follow. Specifically, person B isn't seeing hidden state X and the blue dress isn't hidden state X. So what is person B seeing and what is the blue dress? Because it isn't hidden state X.
In that instance (where we're saying that person A is right), person B is 'seeing' the hidden state X, but the policy they're seeing it with is not the one which minimises the surprise function. In less technical terms (but inevitability, slightly less accurate terms), they made a bad prediction about hidden state X.
'Seeing' is an interactive process of updating predictions. So 'seeing' X is interacting with X in such a way as to minimise the surprise associated with a particular Bayesian policy toward X. It's what 'seeing' is. A process.
So person B can still 'see' the same hidden state as person A even though they respond differently to it because having a policy toward X is part of the process of 'seeing' X*.
* here X can refer to the hidden state 'dress' or the hidden state 'colour of dress'.
Quoting Michael
...it depends...
Quoting Michael
What is it about this mooted state that is hidden?
Whatever it is, cannot be said... and hence amounts to nothing.
The problem with the noumenal is that it is outside of language and outside of understanding. It drops out of the discussion.
An analogy, perhaps. You and I are both trying to guess what next week's lottery numbers are. You guess 2,4,5,6, I guess 7,8,6,5. We have different guesses, but the thing we're guessing the contents of is the same thing (next week's lottery numbers).
The "response" is the seeing. If they're responding differently then they're seeing differently, and seeing differently is seeing different things.
So person A and person B are not seeing the same thing, therefore one (or both) of them isn't seeing the hidden state X.
I think what this shows is that you're equivocating on two different senses of "seeing". I don't know what your second sense of "seeing" is as distinct from the ordinary understanding of person A seeing a red dress and person B seeing a blue dress.
Not at all. See above. Seeing is the process of updating predictions about external states. Two people can have different predictions about the same state. Seeing differently does not necessitate seeing different things.
Quoting Michael
No. They're both seeing hidden state X. They're just doing it differently so getting different results. Seeing is a process.
Seeing is what is meant when we say "person A sees a red dress" and "person B sees a blue dress."
To take your approach, the grammar is clear; they're seeing different things.
Quoting Isaac
Doing what differently? Seeing? What does it mean to see differently other than to see different things?
No the neural net is not the same as your mind seeing, because "seeing" obviously requires the activity of the eyes as well, the rods and cones for example. Otherwise seeing and dreaming might be the same thing. But REM is a different type of eye involvement. And we do know what other features are required as well, (the role of memory in seeing?). So the activity of the neural net cannot be said to be "your mind seeing". The "neural net" is a model which people have constructed and some might claim it to represent "your mind seeing", but it is a deficient model.
Quoting Isaac
Spot off, as explained above.
Quoting Isaac
Banno loves Wikipedia, so:
[quote =Wikipedia, Connectionism]The central connectionist principle is that mental phenomena can be described by interconnected networks of simple and often uniform units. The form of the connections and the units can vary from model to model. For example, units in the network could represent neurons and the connections could represent synapses, as in the human brain.[/quote]
That's explicit. representative models. I wouldn't exclude the possibility that Wikipedia is wrong though.
Seeing is a process. Like riding a bike. Two people can ride a bike differently. They're not necessarily riding different bikes. They're riding the same bike (one after the other), but doing so differently.
This is talking about how neural network models might represent neurons, not how the physical instantiation of those models represent the external world.
Or to tie this back into what I was saying before about the two different sense of "red": you're saying that seeing[sub]1[/sub] a red[sub]1[/sub] hidden state causes person A to see[sub]2[/sub] a red[sub]2[/sub] dress and person B to see[sub]2[/sub] a blue[sub]2[/sub] dress.
No. I'm saying that second use is incorrect. Seeing a hidden state does not cause seeing a blue dress. We do not 'see' mental representations, we respond to outputs from Bayesian models as part of the process of seeing external hidden states.
That "response" is seeing a red dress or seeing a blue dress.
I don't see how. 'Seeing' involves light entering the retina. The response can't be 'seeing' it can only be part of 'seeing'.
Because there are two different senses of "seeing" (and "hearing") as I have said. There's the seeing in the sense of light entering the retina and hearing in the sense of sound entering the eardrum, and there's seeing in the sense of the visual awareness (seeing a red dress) and hearing in the sense of auditory awareness (hearing music).
The latter kind of seeing and hearing is separate from the former kind, and the latter can happen without the former (e.g. when we dream or hallucinate).
And I'll add, the former can happen without the latter, e.g. when someone has blindsight.
That makes sense. The content of experience includes a visual field that changes as you turn your head and glance around. This visual field with accompanying sound and sensations of aroma and heat or cold, taste and so on is believed by biologists to be constructed from sense data and various contributions from the brain itself.
I think the homunculus keeps creeping into your outlook because the content of experience implies an experiencer. Following the same mode that if we see the car, not a perception of a car, if we experience, a subject is experiencing it.
You'll have to get picky choozy about how you deploy arguments from ordinary language use to avoid the dreaded "subject."
Can you see the red dress in your photos with your eyes shut? Or are you imagining the red dress when you have your eyes shut and seeing it when you have your eyes open?
There's a reason we have the word 'hallucinating'. It is to distinguish the activity from actual seeing.
Notwithstanding that. We are talking (when we talk about perception) not of hallucinating, nor of dreaming, nor of imagining, but of seeing. If there are multiple senses of the word, then in the case of the dresses you posted photos of, we are discussing that latter sense.
People with schizophrenia hear voices. We see things when we dream. This is a perfectly ordinary and appropriate way to speak.
And when we dream, there are colours and sounds. These colours and sounds aren't some hidden external state; they're properties of the experience.
The colours that we see and the sounds that we hear when we're awake are the same kind of colours that we see and sounds that we hear when we dream. The only difference is that when we're awake the experience is triggered by external stimulation and when we dream the experience is triggered by "random" brain activity.
This isn't true. There are numerous differences in the neurological process of dreaming or imagining other than the source of the causal trigger, but aside from that, we're talking about seeing in terms of the process triggered by light entering the retina. That process does not involve a separate sub-process where we 'see' a mental representation of an object. Object recognition is done by s series of cortices in sequence through the ventral stream exiting the occipital cortex, it takes place after modeling things like colour and edge in the visual regions. We do not 'see' a representation of an object internally by any definition of 'see'. We can say that much pretty categorically since the order of processing is unequivocal.
I'm not. I'm talking about the experience of seeing a red dress or hearing voices. I referenced it before, but see blindsight. Their body is stimulated by and responds to external stimulation but there's no visual percept. They don't see. And the features of that visual percept (e.g. colours and shapes) are not properties of the external stimulation but properties of that visual percept.
No, they're not. That's not how blindsight works. people with blindsight have non-striate stimulation from neighbouring cortices within the occipital cortex. They do not see any visual percept at all. No 'dress' of any description (mental representation or otherwise) is processed through the occipital cortex. The data the occipital cortex processes is output from neighbouring neural clusters, after which the ventral stream cortical hierarchies might identity a dress.
I know they don't, that's the point. Their body is stimulated by and responds to external stimulation but they don't see. Therefore seeing has nothing to do with being stimulated by and responding to external stimulation (except in the trivial sense that stimulation is often what causes those of us who don't have blindsight (and who aren't blind) to see).
We see when there is a visual percept, and the features of this visual percept (e.g. colour and shape) are not properties of whatever the external cause of the sensation is.
When hidden state X causes person A to see a red dress and person B to see a blue dress, person A and person B have different visual percepts, and the words "red" and "blue" refer to some property of their respective percepts, not to some property of hidden state X.
If, in your example, the hidden state is red, not blue, then what does the word "blue" refer to when we say that person B sees a blue dress? Some quality of his inner experience.
That's not a trivial sense. It's the sense in which 99.9999% of the population see. I can't understand how you could justify calling that a trivial sense.
We only use the term 'see', often still in inverted commas, to describe things like blindsight for lack of a better term, or because of the similarity to seeing proper. It's bizarre to take this very niche and ephemeral use and say that's what we mean by 'see', and not the use it's put to 99.9999% of the time.
Quoting Michael
Where is this visual percept with properties such as colour and shape. Whereabouts in the brain is it stored?
Quoting Michael
So where is your evidence for data traveling from the inferior temporal cortex where object recognition takes place to the BA7 or V4 regions which process colour? Such data would need to flow in order for us to 'see' the colour of the percept.
I don't think consciousness is "stored in the brain". Consciousness is a product of brain activity, perhaps as some emergent phenomena. The hard problem of consciousness hasn't been resolved yet.
Quoting Isaac
I don't know much about the mechanics of the brain, but that's irrelevant to this particular issue. This is a matter of what words mean. If the hidden state is "red" (as you say) but it causes person B to "wrongly" see a blue dress then the "blue" in "see a blue dress" doesn't refer to any property of the red hidden state. So what does it refer to? If seeing a blue dress is a response to stimulation then the word "blue" in this context refers to some feature of the response, not the stimulus.
If this was the case we'd have no explanation for why exposure to coloured non-objects (colour swatches) triggers activity in the inferior middle temporal region (associated with word recognition - among other things) which is not triggered by exposure to coloured objects.
The conventional explanation is that we respond to amorphous swatches by reaching for the right colour word, but we respond to coloured objects by deciding how the colour helps us identify what the object is.
By your hypothesis, the colour is a property of the percept, so we'd have to identify the object first. So how do you explain the lowered ventral stream activity in exposure to coloured swatches?
We've been through this. If I mistakenly call the person in the doorway Jack when his name's really Jim, I'm still referring to the person in the doorway. I'm just doing so badly.
The 'blue' in person B's blue dress still refers to the colour of the hidden state. It just does so less well than 'red'. It's a policy which less effectively minimises the surprise function.
It's not about what he says, it's about what he sees. He sees a blue dress. If there is no hidden blue state then him seeing something blue has nothing to do with there being some hidden blue state.
No. There's a hidden red state, which he's less effectively taking a policy of treating as blue.
He sees blue.
I honestly think you might be a p-zombie.
Ah, we've reached that point have we?
Shall we go through https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Quining-Qualia-Dennett/b00cba53a3744402b5c52accea35bff6074a38a9 again?
It means to classify the same things differently.
To see different things is to carve it all differently.
I don't think what I'm saying depends on "qualia". All it depends on is the fact that when you see the dress as black and blue and I see it as white and gold there are differences in our experiences, not in the external stimulus, and that these differences are described using the words "black and blue" in the case of your experience and "white and gold" in the case of my experience. Therefore, these terms in this context refer to the nature of our experiences, not to the nature of the stimulus which is the same for both us. Maybe experiences are qualia, maybe they're brain activity, maybe they're something else.
You might also want to use colour words to refer to some property of the external stimulus, but then that's a case of the word "red" meaning one thing in one context (the nature of the experience) and one thing in another context (that it emits or reflects light at a wavelength of 650nm), with the word we use to refer to the external property determined by the word we use to describe the effect it has on (most of) us.
Well, they'd have to be either qualia or some brain activity which no one, despite decades of research, has ever seen... Hence, qualia.
We know with quite some certainty what regions of the brain produce colour data. We know quite well what regions of the brain are involved in object recognition. We know quite well in what order those two regions are networked. So, as far as current knowledge of cognition goes, we do not 'see' a black and blue dress internally. We conclude that the retinal stimulus is from black and blue light, then afterwards, we determine that the object producing the black and blue light is a dress. There is no brain activity which could possibly correspond to the internal 'seeing' of a black and blue dress. The parts of the brain dealing with colour simply don't model stimuli from the parts of the brain dealing with object recognition*, they model stimuli from the retina.
* there are backward acting suppressive links which act to reduce data noise and refine priors.
** they can also be stimulated by the hippocampus in rehearsal for long term memory storage. I'm trying to simplify a very complex topic, but some bright spark is bound to pick up on the gaps.
I don't know, but color and shape are part of the visual experience. The difficulty of squaring that with the correlating brain function is the well known hard problem.
Quoting Isaac
That's already been done, and no consensus was reached. Same with professional philosophers. Not everyone find's Dennett's arguments convincing. I think Keith Frankish has a better approach (illusionism), although the implication is that we are in fact p-zombies, which is an extremely difficult bullet to bite. Because after-all, I do experience seeing colors and hear sounds. Also dreaming, remembering and visualizing them.
Yes, because of the objective/subjective split with describing the world that Nagel's paper on "What it's like to be a Bat" laid out. Or Locke's primary and secondary colors. You're mistaking the map of neuroscience with the actual territory of whatever a conscious brain is.
Quoting Isaac
Yet, we have one of those two visual experiences, whatever the brain activity is leading up to it the experience.
No, classifying is descriptive. It's part of the language game. We experience the dress differently. Part of the confusion over the hard problem is failing to understand the difference between describing the world and experiencing it.
...or a pointless distraction, depending on one's outlook...
Quoting Marchesk
I thought Frankish was sympathetic to Dennent's arguments, I haven't followed his work much, but I've read a couple of his papers. I'd be interested to hear what the differences are.
Quoting Marchesk
You relate your recent memories using a narrative of 'experiencing' seeing colours and hearing sounds. That doesn't necessarily have any bearing on what's really happening. I get the appeal of starting with one's current narrative, but I can't see the sense in rejecting everything until we find something which matches it.
Animistic cultures, for example, have a strong narrative which explains most physical processes in terms of willful intent in inanimate objects. It would be crazy to pursue the physical sciences rejecting any hypothesis which don't adhere to that narrative.
Sometimes we just have to reject narratives which no longer seem compatible with other things we've come to believe (such as neuroscience). So...
Quoting Marchesk
...is only true if you beg the question by assuming your current narrative is actually the territory.
So is seeing-as. It's reaching for suitable words and pictures.
Quoting Marchesk
Well put. The difference is artificial, like the problem.
Quoting Wayfarer
So the question is, from Pinter’s vantage what is left of reality when we remove color, shape, features and individual appearance? Is a wavelength of light devoid of these properties? I think Pinter believes it is. For instance, he argues “Physical motion is real but altogether different from the moving window we perceive.” How would he know? Different by what standards? I think I have the answer. You were right. Pinter does not posit a real physical world of shapes or colors or gestalt features. The real objective world he posits is based on the simple rules of the Game of Life. He says observer-independent reality is simple , mechanical. not gestalt-based but rule-bound:
“A law involving just two—or a small number—of separate objects is said to be simple. And when a simple law acts on every pair of objects in a swarm, resulting in a complex global pattern of the whole throng, the overall pattern is caused by what is called an addition of simples.”
“Physics would not exist if it were not possible to analyze phenomena of the world by decomposing them in this manner into elementary interactions. We are able to do this because nature itself is constituted that way. It appears that all of the physical world is an addition of
simples.”
“Simple rules, acting over and over on each of a large number of objects, are able to give rise to astonishingly complex collective behavior. In fact, they often generate repetitive patterns having great regularity and symmetry.” “Animal perception isn’t designed to see elementary physical relationships between subatomic particles, and bring these low-level events to awareness.”
“The perplexing intricacy that we see in the world is actually the cumulative result of simple laws that have been operating for billions of years, creating patterns upon patterns.” “The midlevel universe has energy and mass, but does not have “features”” It also has ‘information’.
In mentioning mass, energy and information, I dont believe he is speaking here of observer-dependent features of the natural world but of that world as it is intrinsically. One might ask what an observer-independent rule could possibly mean. How is a rule , mass , energy or information not a gestalt? Pinter wants to claim that the gestalts humans impose on the world in order to create uniform objects, shapes, features and pattens adds a lawfulness not present in the actual material world. Put differently. he takes the Humean approach that gestalts are the result of evolutionary guided causal processes. But he wants to hold on to the idea of a primordial , or ‘simple’ lawfulness in material reality.
I think it is this semantic realism which cause hi
to see a rift between subjective sensation and feeling on the one hand, and objectivity on the other.
“Claims about mental phenomena depend ineliminably on the meanings of terms such as feelings and sensations, and cannot be treated as the objects of physics are treated. One can study the material universe while pretending there is no mind, but one cannot study mind while pretending there is no mind…phenomena which don’t allow themselves to be studied objectively are not material phenomena. This suggests that we may define material phenomena to be exactly those phenomena that are amenable to be studied objectively, as formal systems. Phenomena which are not amenable to being treated objectively are not material. They are phenomena of a different kind, located in a different order of reality.”
Question : If the world is ‘material’ because of the way it responds to our interactions with it, why can’t we study our mind the same way, by reflecting on it ? Isn’t this what phenomenological analysis does? And what is the difference between phenomena such that only some are amenable to objective study while others are not? What makes physics a formal system and science of mind a non-formal system?
As Pinter knows, the reason one can study the material universe while pretending there is no mind is the same reason scientists in the past have studied the mind while pretending there is no mind. Pinter recognizes that in the past accepted notions of scientific objectivity required that we ignore individual differences in the sense of meaning of material concepts. But this is not true for all sciences. Recent biological models accommodate a relentlessly interactively self-transforming impetus within ecosystems, within organisms, within cells and within dna environments. Neurophenomenologists draw from these approaches to understand consciousness and language in naturalistic terms that don’t require ignoring subjective perspective in favor of a formalistic objectivism. The problem isnt that the mind operates differently than other aspects of the world, it is that we have for too long assumed, as Pinter does, that “subjective categories such as sensations and impressions are nothing but
the way they feel to us”. This is precisely the view that phenomenology and enactivism are challenging by showing how feeling arises out of social ecosystems rather than from purely ‘private’ feeling( (Wittgenstein also
showed the primarily expressive and discursive function of feeling. By the same token, if we jettison Pinter’s realist assumption to conceding the simple causal lawfulness of material reality we need no longer see feeling -based subjectivity and what would be called objective nature as belonging to separate realities
His is a one-way interaction. We probe the world and it responds in certain ways based on the nature of our actions and perceptual dispositions. On the basis of these constraints and affordances we build gestalt models of the world , imbuing it with all sorts of features different from its ‘own inherent ‘simple’ lawful objective reality.
“It is nature’s prohibitions that guide our hand as we segment our world and form a model of it. Although there may be alternative ways of segmenting reality
—hence different, non-similar world models may be constructed—few are actually possible: The prohibitions whittle down the possibilities to a very few, or perhaps to just one.”
This sounds like Popper; we asymptotically approximate a final picture of the world.
What’s missing here is a recognition that the we dont just model the world, we continuously rebuild it , and this means that the constraints and affordances that we receive from the world as feedback from our engagements with it change along with our constructions in a reciprocal process. The material world Pinter sees as having certain set simple properties responds to our constructive efforts by changing those properties.
Pinter uses the image of a hollow bust of Caesar. We are inside that bust and want to know the features of the outside of the bust so we infer the outside from our explorations of the inside. I suggest a better image is the at we have created a giant bust of Caesar as a shelter that we live inside of. We have reasons to try and improve the structure in various ways in order to make it more weatherproof as well as aesthetically pleasing. The very process of constructing these improvements through invention of new tools , new means of labor organization and the feedback from the structure itself redefines what is at issue for us in our empirical endeavor. This reciprocal shaping and reshaping taking place between us and the objects of our investigations not only is a better depiction of science than ‘modeling’, it can apply equally well to a pre-living world.
Pinter senses that his minimalist version of causal realism doesn’t quite do justice to the powers of what he calls gestalt perception, but he leaves us with the confusing picture of subjectivity as a wonder that emerges mysteriously out of a mechanistic ground.
“An easy answer might be that the material world of physics is the foundation which is the platform for all reality:
Complex objects are constructed out of the material “stuff” that exists in physical reality. In this perspective, matter and energy provide the foundation: Everything composite, manifold or structured is fashioned out of matter and energy. This is the commonsense solution. It’s not wrong, but it’s simplistic. Like the philosophy of materialism, it disregards Gestalts, which provide a
whole new opening to reality.”
It's going on as I type this. I also have recent memories of an external world. Should I doubt that narrative? If what we think we experience in the moment isn't what we experience, then why think science fares any better?
I don't think it's in accordance with common usage to say they are seeing different things. They are both seeing a dress, and presumably of the same shape, but one is seeing it as red and the other blue. If one was seeing a dress and the other a dog, they would be seeing different things.
• The perception = the perceived (the same)
· hallucinations, phantom pain, dreams, fantasies
• The perception ? the perceived (not the same)
· other people, supper, the ground you walk on, tornadoes
So, in a way, by this categorization, a hallucination is a mistake: thinking it belongs in the ? category, but it doesn't. "You're just seeing pink elephants that ain't there."
And, solipsism is a mistake thinking others belong in the = category, but they don't. (I'm ditching solipsism here by assumption if you will, yet, by that assumption it categorizes that way, and that'll do; no proofs here.)
Then there's synesthesia, which is a bit of this, a bit of that, or can be.
Anyway, the idea is just that we already have various ways of talking about these (repeated) topics, and trying to somehow make some more concise could lead down less tread avenues. Don't know if this one can work, tho'. Doesn't get into neurology for example.
Quoting Michael
What sort of thing is this "hidden state"?
What is it that is hidden? What is added to the description by including this word?
If there is a "hidden state" that causes each of us to see the cup, then that hidden state is part of our shared world. We might give it a name. I suggest we call the hidden state that causes us to see the cup, a cup.
The hidden state or better, processes, that cause us to see the cup are the whole set of conditions: environment, distance, position, cup, lighting and our visual systems ( have I forgotten anything?).
I don’t know, it’s Isaac’s thing. I’m just going along with it.
In one sense, we obviously do, but go back to the origins of phenomenology (speaking of which, the first entry in Pinter's voluminous bibliography is 'Bayne T, Montague M (2011) Cognitive Phenomenology'). As you well know, Husserl critiqued Galileo's depiction of the world in terms of a formal, mathematical structure, and its division into the domain of primary and secondary attributes. The paradigmatic approach of modern science drawn from Galileo and Descartes is to presume the complete separation of the subjective and objective domains. And it holds for any and all kinds of objects. That is why mathematical physics has been paradigmatic for science generally, and why scientific materialism wishes to apply its methodology and mathematical certainty to every domain of knowledge. But that attitude failed completely in the earliest attempts at formulating a scientific approach to psychology, namely in the introspective, first-person reporting of experience by Wilhelm Wundt, which was predictably chaotic and formless and completely unrepeatable.
Husserl's epoché is intended to step out of that dilemma by short-circuiting the sense of division between subject and object, world and self. That's why the embodied cognition (Varela and Thompson) has been able to so fruitfully explore the resonances between phenomenological method and Buddhist philosophical psychology (abhidharma). This is because the Buddhist attitude, similarly, is not grounded in the sense of separation of self and world (in the early Buddhist texts, you frequently encounter the term 'self-and-world' as a designation of the nature of experience, which are said to be 'co-arising', an expression you also find in phenomenology.) The momentary 'dharmas' of the abhidharma are not constituents of objects (as were the material atoms), but moments of lived experience. In that sense, abhidharma is inherently non-dualist in a way that modern scientific method couldn't be.
So, 'studying the mind' is different to studying (say) the motions of the planets or of solid bodies or the tides or movements of animals, for the obvious reason that in this case, we are what we seek to know. We can't stand aside from our own mind and treat it as an object of instrospection (as Wundt tried to do). It requires a very different stance or attitude - something which is pioneered in some of those very enactive/embodied cognition approaches you frequently bring up. It is the domain of 'mindfulness-awareness'.
That essay I have pinned to my profile (co-authored by Evan Thompson) on 'the Bind Spot of Science' is about exactly this point:
Quoting Joshs
Pinter doesn't miss that - he comments extensively on the implications of the 'neural binding problem'. The whole point of his book is that we (and all creatures) are constantly engaged in that process. That is how cognition works, but we mistakenly identify what is going on in our own minds with what is 'out there'.
Quoting Joshs
Indeed we do. And because of quantum physics, we have come to realise the role the mind plays in constructing the outcome.
Quoting Joshs
Indeed, as I mentioned, Pinter provides a voluminous biography which references many of these texts. He's very much part of those developments, not at all an antagonist of it.
Quoting Joshs
It's conceptually more simple to analyse the motions of bodies because they can be wholly described in terms of simple measurements and the addition of same - the 'addition of simples'. Science of mind is different in principle, because it's first-person (there's been some debate about the validity of the notion of first-person science between Chalmers and Dennett, with the latter predictably ridiculing the very notion.)
Quoting Joshs
The rest of that passage is quoted here:
This is validated with reference to the neural binding problem mentioned above. To quote from it again:
Quoting Jerome S. Feldman
That's the point that Pinter makes about 'figments' - that qualia, and indeed not only qualia, but the 'subjective unity of perception', cannot be detected as objectively existent. Yet, they're real, and to deny it, leads to Dennett's absurd 'eliminativism'.
I would ask the question, in what sense can motion, space and time be considered to exist outside any perspective or point-of-view? When we perceive 'the passage of time', what is it that is aware of duration, the period between two moments? When we perceive space, what is aware of what is nearer, and what is further away? Those elements are furnished by the mind (which is in line with Kant's metaphysic of time and space). In other words, time and space do not have completely 'observer-independent' status. They're reliant on perspective. But take them out of the picture, and what can be said to exist?
In short, I don't think Pinter's book is incompatible with phenomenological philosophy and psychology.
We have quite detailed descriptions of the process.
What?
Yes, we do, and nothing that appears in our investigations is hidden. It is only that we can ask the question as to what that which appears to us is in itself that leads to the notion that there is anything hidden.
Yes!
Hence "that which appears to us in itself" leads nowhere, signifies nothing.
The question is ill-formed. Antigonish.
The question can't be answered from the level on which it posed. Which is why it
Quoting Banno
That's odd. Let's say you see the an image of the blue dress before hearing anyone else has seen it. You show it to someone. They see a gold dress, but don't say anything at first. You don't know that they've seen a different colored dress. So how do you account for that if it's not hidden?
I was just listening to Mindscape podcast episode on animal perception. The discussion was all about how animal perception differs from our own, and how that stretches the imagination to try and understand what it's like to have non-human experiences. The word used for some of the harder ones was ineffable.
If nothing is hidden, then what colors do tetrachromatic birds see which we don't?
The experiences we don't have, which isn't in plain sight. Thus the notion that subjectivity has a private aspect to it.
Wasn't @Isaac the one who started talking in terms of hidden states? He could probably expand on what he was referring to.
Or the error may just be mine. I'm puzzled by what seems an ambiguity.
Quoting Marchesk
We only know what others experience by report or by analogy to, or extrapolation from, our own experience. Same with animals, minus the reporting.
So the in itself of others' experience shares the same epistemic status as the "absolute" constitution of things, it seems to me.
Quoting Banno
That's one way of looking at it. Some would say that the fact we can ask the question signifies an imaginative capacity to at least grope for an intuitive answer. Also seeing the ultimate nature of our existence as an absolute impenetrable mystery may lead to a very different orientation to life than dismissing the whole question as nonsense would.
The physical instantiation is the model. the thing represented by that model is neurons. The point being that we cannot determine the reason (why) for the thing, through reference to the reason (why) for the representation. So we cannot determine whether the neurons act representatively, through reference to the model, because the model represents how the thing behaves, not the reason (why) for that behaviour.
If you like. In which case philosophical issues consist in folk attempting to express inexpressible intuitive answers.
Quoting Wayfarer
I should mention that mindfulness awareness is not quite what Hussel or Merleau-Ponty had in mind. For them there is no purely reflexive non-intentional awareness. All awareness is self-transformation, it is about something other than itself even when reflecting back on ‘itself’.
So we are already studying the mind when we study the motions of the planets or the tides. We are merely doing so in the mode of the naive naturalistic attitude. We can also study these phenomena from within the transcendental attitude, by showing how such material phenomena emerge as higher constitutive performances of intentionality. Notice that this is the opposite of what Pinter is doing. He is attempting to explain mental features such as gestalt perception as evolutionarily formed products of simple mechanisms of material reality.
But since he can’t find a way to reconcile the causal mechanisms of material reality as he formulates it with the gestalt patterning of animals , he settles for a dualism and hopes for some substance to be found within physics at some point in the future that will bridge the gap between mind and matter. There is no such problem for phenomenology, since they deconstruct Pinter’s causal metaphysics and reveal it to be derivative from intentional processes that precede both mind and matter.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think you both miss that. By rebuilding I don’t mean adding an emergent mental reality onto a more primary material one that it cannot alter but is based on, I mean altering the rules of the ‘material’ reality. Pinter posits two distinct realities , the mental and the material, each with their own rules, and neither realm can change the rules of the other. Even if physics is reformed as he suggest it may be , such that it can account directly for gestalt perception , we would still be dealing with a set of fixed rules, only now places within a single reality rahther than dual realities. Phenomenology dumps Pinter’s rule-based material and mental realities in favor of a united reality that is relationally relative through and through. This is what I mean by rebuilding the building.
Pinter leaves the foundation intact , they reinvent it over and over.
Quoting Wayfarer
Pinter is closer to Dennett than you might think, and although I don’t think Dennett understands phenomenology, Pinter understands it even less. Dennett offered a spot-on critique of Strawson’s argument for qualia and panpsychism, which could apply as well to Pinter’s embrace of qualia. I dont agree with Dennett’s eliminativism , but I find Pinter’s panpsychist dualism and qualia notion to be in some respects even more ‘eliminativist’, by which I mean it misses the intricate relational textures that Dennett recognizes in living systems( Pinter’s sympathy for
Penrose’s quantum solution to the hard problem is a giveaway here).
Quoting Wayfarer
His reading of these texts is skewed in favor of free energy-based predictive processing approaches , which many ( including Andy Clark) lump together with phenomenologically informed enactivism. But like the pp approaches, it relies on a split between internal representation and outer world , whereas enactivism is non-representational. Pinter, like pp, say we dont see reality directly, but the phenomenologists say we do see reality directly ( to the things themselves!), within various modes and attitudes of comportment (objective naturalism, personalism, etc).
Are you familiar with enactivist critiques of pp, and of Clark’s attempts to package pp in enactivist clothing? This will give you a sense of my beef with Pinter.
Quoting Marchesk
Science isn't competing with narratives, science is just another narrative, but the way science is carried out makes the narratives it offers very appealing in terms of their utility.
Quoting Marchesk
A 'Hidden State' in active inference terms is just a node in a data network which is one (or more) node(s) removed from the network carrying out the inference.
The 'S' on the left are hidden states. They're not hidden from 'us' (the organism), they're right in front of us, I can see then touch them, feel them. They're hidden for the network doing the inference because that network can only use data from the sensorimotor systems ('o' and 'a' in the diagram) with which it has to infer the cause of that data (the external states). I probably should use the term 'external states' but that gets as much flack from the enactivists who then bang on about how it's not really 'external' because we form an integrated network with our environment. So I could call then 'nodes outside of our Markov Boundary', and no-one would have the faintest idea what I was talking about...So 'hidden states' seemed the least controversial term... Until now. But this...
Quoting Banno
...is exactly what I'm arguing for. There is nothing whatsoever about these 'hidden states' which prevents us from naming them. In fact, I think that's exactly what we do. The 'hidden state' I'm sitting on right now is called a chair. It's hidden from my neural network because the final nodes of it's Markov boundary are my sensorimotor systems. It's not hidden from me, I'm sat right on it.
Of course this all depends on your theory of selfhood (what is 'me'?) but that's probably a whole 'nother can of worms we don't want to open here.
As ever, I have no idea what you're talking about. Why is there even a reason for the behaviour of neurons? They just fire according to physical laws, they don't have a reason.
This is the best paper on the maths.
This one puts it all into context.
Put simply, a Markov boundary is the set of states which separate any system we're interested in studying from the parts we're not. So an individual neuron has a Markov boundary at the ion channels and the vesicles of the pre-synaptic membrane. A single-celled organism has a Markov boundary at it's cell mebrane. A brain (nervous system) has Markov boundary at it's sensorimotor neuron dendrites.
Statistically, it just represents that point in a probabilistic system where the internal and external states of that system are conditionally dependant on one another in terms of Bayesian conditional probabilities. So every internal state is associated (theoretically) with a most probable external state and the nodes which form the posterior distribution for the nodes maximising that equation are the Markov boundary. In the case of perception, these are the sensorimotor neurons. Anything outside of these is therefore a 'hidden state' only in that it doesn't directly provide posterior distributions for the internal Bayesian conditional probabilities the internal state is representing of the external one. Which is another way of saying that we have to infer the causes of the data from the sensorimotor system because that system is the last point at the edge of the part doing the inferring (sensorimotor cells cannot, themselves infer).
Does that help? Or make everything worse, perhaps...?
If you are the body is it not, along with the chair, a hidden state (or as I would prefer to say hidden process)? Of course we can name them, but it seems we are doing so from within the familiarity which constitutes our common and also individual experience.
Part of the philosophically interesting stuff has been the extent to which cognition involves the stuff outside our neurones, if I can put it so coarsely. I have an image of cognition occurring somewhere between one's body and those things that the body manipulates - embedded or extended cognition. To this we now add enactive cognition, that it is in our manipulation of things that cognition occurs. I'm puzzling over the extent to which the mathematics here assists in that choice, and I'm supposing for the moment that it is neutral.
Am I wrong?
@Michael?
When I argue with scientists I just get so angry about their know-nothingness about philosophy, like can it mend a fuse - who cares that's what engineers and scientists are for. And I reply that the questions, the requirements are really essential, really central. And then there are these endless 17th century questions which really essentially are rather meaningless. Should we maybe just vacate the 17th century from modern philosophy? God and Aristotle and Descartes and Spinoza and Leibnitz, subjects and objects shuffling this and that way in a static universe and, last but certainly not least, the most absurd and complicated metaphysical constructions - should we just let them all go?
Yes, that's right to an extent. If we look at, say, the ecosystem, then that will have it's own Markov boundary and all the organisms within it (and the non-living components) will be part of a network which could (theoretically) infer stuff about the nodes outside the Markov boundary of the ecosystem*.
The caveat is that there has to be networked data transfer for there to be inference, and that's a small problem with the enactivist account. Without suppressive feedback updating posterior distributions, it's hard to see how nodes could infer anything about the distribution of their neighbouring data points. So I struggle to see how one could create a Markov bounded system which includes the objects of our environment (but not, say the entire ecosystem) because there are so very clearly these two, non-inference, data nodes at our senses and our motor functions.
Having said that, some very smart people still hold to a full enactivist account, so I'm not in a position to gainsay them. The systems dynamics doesn't seem to add up, to me.
* In fact I distinctly remember reading a paper on that very subject, but I don't seem to have it in my biblio database. I might do a Google trawl for it later.
Feels like a roundabout way of broaching the simulation hypothesis. Wishing right now that I knew advanced math! :sad:
The point was, that you haven't the premises required to logically conclude that there is no reason for the behaviour of neurons.
We're back to the point where Banno started this, by claiming that the behaviour of neurons is not representative. I said you cannot conclude that without knowing the reason for the behaviour. To simply assert "they just fire according to physical laws" does not give that reason. You appear to assume that there is no reason. This is obviously an unsupported assumption, as the following example demonstrates.
All tools created by human beings operate according to physical laws, and this does not necessitate the conclusion that there is no reason for them. You are just proving my point, knowing how a thing operates (according to physical laws) does not provide you with the knowledge required to make any conclusion about why the thing operates that way. Denying that there is a reason why, is simply an uninformed, unjustified, and unwarranted assumption. So I've just gone around a circle, with you taking up where Banno left off, and proceeding back to Banno's starting point.
Quoting Isaac
Systems theory is extremely flimsy. Boundaries can be imposed for various reasons, and various degrees of arbitrariness, with varying degrees of openness and closedness. Then, on top of all these levels of arbitrariness, when things don't behave according to what is dictated by the imposed boundaries, we can just rationalize the misbehaviour through reference to mysterious things like "hidden states".
What about those "hidden states"? Those unknown aspects disqualify this conclusion. All you can say is that they act according to physical laws to an extent which does not include thos hidden aspects.
I don't need premises. I don't consider ants have bank accounts. I don't consider atoms have feelings. I can't for the life of me think why anyone would consider neurons having reasons for long enough to even consider the premises required.
If it floats your boat, be my guest, but I've as little interest in checking whether neurons have reasons as I have checking whether rocks have holiday plans.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Ha! But the notion that neurons have reasons is practically watertight?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Who said anything about unknown. We can know a hidden state. If we have a successful model of it, we know it. What more is there to knowing something?
Evict?
@Banno. Found it.
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10066600/1/Friston_Variational%20ecology%20and%20the%20physics%20of%20sentient%20systems_Proof.pdf
Here it talks about something similar to the wider system approach you mentioned...
Strictly speaking, you know what you inferred. Inference is not extra-sensory perception.
Thanks for posting those papers, however crazy technical they are. :up: :)
Hierarchical Models in the Brain (Nov 2008), Active Inference: A Process Theory (Aug 2016), Variational ecology and the physics of sentient systems (Dec 2019)
Didn't see the image you posted; is that from a different paper?
I guess they don't address the Levine / Chalmers thing directly, yet the models give their own insights.
Banish?
Rusticate! :snicker:
Depends on the context the words are used in. I don't hold with 'strictly speaking' when it comes to definitions. Words mean whatever they're successfully used for. If I see a map showing where the pub is and it's a good map, then I know where the pub is. I don't see a need to complicate the matter by saying that I 'really' know where the mark for a pub is in the map.
Like 'see', inferring is part of knowing, not the object of it. What we know is the external state (or the proposition, as I believe the philosophers have it). How we know is by inference.
You know what happened when you tested the model. That gives some degree of confidence in your subsequent inferences.
No need to overstate things.
Here’s an interesting analysis of the issue from an enactivist perspective:
Active inference, enactivism and the hermeneutics of social cognition: Shaun Gallagher and Micah Allen
Abstract:
We distinguish between three philosophical views on the neuroscience of predictive models: predictive coding (associated with internal Bayesian models and prediction error minimization), predictive processing (associated with radical connectionism and ‘simple’ embodiment)
and predictive engagement (associated with enactivist approaches to cognition). We examine the concept of active inference under each model and then ask how this concept informs discussions of social cognition. In this context we consider Frith and Friston’s proposal for a
neural hermeneutics, and we explore the alternative model of enactivist hermeneutics.
Snippet:
Conceiving of the differences or continuities among the positions of PC, PP, and PE depends on how one views the boundaries of the Markov blanket, not just where the boundaries are drawn, but the nature of the boundaries—whether they keep the world ‘off limits’, as Clark suggests, or enable coupling. For PC and PP, active inference is part of a process that produces sensory experiences that confirm or test my expectations; e.g., active ballistic saccades do not merely passively orient to features but actively sample the bits of the world that fit my expectations or resolve uncertainty (Friston et al 2012)—‘sampling the world in ways designed to test our hypotheses and to yield better information for the control of action itself’ (Clark 2016, p. 7; see Hohwy 2013, p. 79). On the enactivist view, however, the dynamical
adjustment/attunement process that encompasses the whole of the system is not a mere testing or sampling that serves better neural prediction; active inference is more action than inference; it’s a doing, an enactive adjustment, a worldly engagement—with anticipatory and
corrective aspects already included.
Enactivists suggest that the brain is not located at the center, conducting tests along the radiuses; it’s on the circumference, one station amongst other stations involved in the loop that also navigates through the body and environment and forms the whole. Neural
accommodation occurs via constant reciprocal interaction between the brain and body, and notions of adjustment and attunement can be cashed out in terms of physical dynamical processes that involve brain and body, including autonomic and peripheral nervous systems. We can see how this enactivist interpretation can work by exploring a more basic conception operating in these predictive models, namely, the free energy principle (FEP).
https://www.researchgate.net/journal/Synthese-1573-0964/publication/311166903_Active_inference_enactivism_and_the_hermeneutics_of_social_cognition/links/5f75e89e92851c14bca49c36/Active-inference-enactivism-and-the-hermeneutics-of-social-cognition.pdf
Glad you liked them. It's rich ground for study.
Quoting jorndoe
It's from a stock of image links I have. It'll be from a paper, but I don't know which, I'm afraid.
Quoting jorndoe
Try this.
Well, if we're not 'overstating', you only know what you currently remember about what happened when you tested the model.
All thought is post hoc by at least a few milliseconds.
That's really interesting, thanks. Did you ever read the article here...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1059712319862774
...where Friston responds to some of the enactivist critique? I'd be interested to hear how well you think it answers the criticisms.
So we're not trying to be serious here?
Nothing non-serious about it. If you want to say we don't actually 'know' a hidden state because all we 'really' have access to is our inference about it from experiment, then it is no less true to say that we don't 'really' know that either because all we 'really' have access to is our memory of what the inference was when we made it.
It's the problem with putting 'really's everywhere.
We know the hidden state. We sometimes make errors. I know the colour of the dress. Sometimes I'm wrong.
Nah. There's an 80 percent chance of rain. I don't know it's going to rain.
The hidden state is not a future state, it's a current one.
"To sample the future, what you do is first sample the last state, given its distribution. Then sample the next hidden state, using the transition matrix and repeat ad nauseum. Since you have no actual observations after the last point in the sequence, you are sampling from a markov chain. This will get you samples of the future, given everything you know of the partial sequence."
Good explanation.
That’s an important point.
If one expands “the network doing the inference” to include the sensorimotor systems, what happens to the hidden state?
It troubles me because every single “network doing the inference” appears to be the organism itself. By their own admission, and our own, organisms infer.
Maybe this is partly a problem of systems theory in biology, the idea that this or that group of organs can be considered its own system, while other parts and other systems remain outside of it, different nodes so to speak. While this may be a decent abstract model of biological function, empirically this isn’t the case because whenever such a system is isolated, or otherwise taken out of the system, it no longer performs the functions it is supposed to and is known for. A brain sitting on a chair, for example, could not be said to be thinking. It’s only function as a system at this point is to rot.
So can an activity that only organisms can be shown to perform—experiencing, thinking, inferring, believing, seeing—be isolated to a single part of it?
Well, if you consider that each and every internal organ has its own purpose, function, relative to the existence of the whole, which is a living being, then you would understand that each of these organs has a reason for its existence. If it has a function, it has a reason, that's plain and simple. It serves a purpose relative to the overall whole, which is the living being, therefore it has a reason for being there, to serve that purpose. Obviously, neurons serve a purpose relative to the existence of the being, therefore there is a reason for their existence.
I really do not understand how anyone could even consider denying this obvious fact. Those who do, seem to suffer from some form of denial which appears to be an illness.
Quoting Isaac
Yes, that neurons have reasons for being, based on their purpose, is a very sound principle. That neurons comprise a system is a very flimsy principle because they are actually a small part of a much larger "system", better known as a living being. And neurons serve a purpose (they have a function) relative to that being, but they do not make up an independent "system" in themselves.
Quoting Isaac
There is no point questioning memory as such; if we have no faith at all in memory, then we can have no faith in any knowledge at all. Memory is the foundation of who we are, to question it in a general way would be absurd.
You say we know hidden states, via inference; that our actual experience just is inference, if I've understood you. This makes no sense to me. We infer that there are hidden states, and by definition, they being hidden, we don't know them in the common sense of "knowing'. We don't know what those inferred hidden states are; if we did they would not be hidden.
You haven't addressed this earlier response:
Quoting Janus
So, I am saying that naming is just a matter of fiat: we can call the hidden state a chair, or we can call it the unknown whatever that appears to us a chair. But if we want to say it is a hidden state at all, then it seems contradictory to say that it is "really" a chair, since we have already acknowledged that we think it is "really" a hidden state, and a chair cannot be anything but a familiar object.
I’m aware of that but it is discussed in The Embodied Mind, which draws on cognitive science, phenomenology and Buddhist abhidharma. So they talk about it.
Quoting Joshs
I don’t think that should be taken as axiomatic. ‘Consciousness without an object’ is part of the lexicon of Eastern philosophies (and of American mathematician and Vedantist philosopher Franklin Mereill-Wolff (ref)
Quoting Joshs
Seems like a perfectly sound conjecture to me. And has the advantage of being at least compatible with evolutionary theory. What Pinter *doesn't* get into, in my opinion, is the sense in which h. sapiens transcends the biological, but as I said, that kind of subject is out of scope for the book.
Quoting Joshs
That's why you end up with the kind of relativism which I don't subscribe to. In that respect I'm probably a lot closer to Kant and neo-Kantians than to a lot of current phenomenology.
Quoting Joshs
I don't see it. He doesn't agree with materialist philosophy of mind. Dennett explicitly says that the mind is reducible to physical and chemical laws, while Pinter says:
I interpret this to mean that doesn't agree that the laws which govern the mind are continuous with physical and chemical laws.
Obviously our reading of Charles Pinter is very different, but I appreciate you have at least acknowledged this book, as it seems an important book to me. The fact that he's not a philosopher works in his favour in my view.
It's occured to me that you could say that the way the world exists in the absence of an observer is indeterminate. Whereas the realist picture is that the vast Universe exists before anyone is around to observe it, what that view doesn't understand is that to the extent this is a picture, even a scientifically-informed picture, the mind is implicitly the author of that (or any) picture or theory or measurement. It is the work of the 'unseen seer'.
Furthermore that the ground for the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences, is that mathematics conforms to formal structures within conscious experience and so overcomes the perceived separation between observer and observed that seems to be a basic fact of existence, but is actually not.
Its nature is indeterminate. And so it can't be said to exist, because what exists is determinate (i.e. it is 'this' or 'that'.)
Does mathematics overcome the perceived separation? It seems to me that it feeds into the illusion of a separation by treating extension and duration objectively, when they properly belong to the a priori structure of the mind.
Space and time have their actuality in our immediacy, yet they are mediated through mathematics, which also belongs to the immediate (apriori) structure of the mind, and they ultimately come to appear as something separate - something external that we apprehend and manipulate, when it is actually, to put it crudely, simple masturbation.
We cannot know something we can't remember. Socrates was correct.
But obviously they have objective consequences. Almost all modern technology - no, not 'almost' - relies on the predictive and descriptive accuracy of mathematics, including the devices that are mediating this very dialogue. In Wigner's classic paper on the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics, the word 'miracle' occurs twelve times, along with the observation that
[quote=Wigner; "https://math.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html#:~:text=The%20miracle%20of%20the%20appropriateness%20of%20the%20language"]The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.[/quote]
There are interminable arguments in philosophy of mathematics as to whether maths is invented or discovered, whether it's in the mind of humans or is something real in the world. But I'm saying the regularities and rational relationships inhere within the conscious experience-of-the-world - so it's neither 'in the mind' nor 'in the world', and that this indicates a deep philosophical issue.
And that debate is no different than the debate of whether space and time are only a construct of the mind or have external existence.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree, its a very deep philosophical issue. It doesn't help when you speak in riddles. You mention "regularities and rational relationships inhere within the conscious experience-of-the-world", and then say "so it's neither 'in the mind' nor 'in the world'". I always thought the mind was associated with "conscious experience".
So then, where is this "conscious experience-of-the-world" if it is not in the mind nor the world?
Solipsism maybe? No, that can't be
I say: The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of extension and duration for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.
(ah, nevermind me, time to turn in)
I've launched a new thread on this question.
Piece of cake. :kiss:
You were talking about perception. If you're now talking about the future, then no, I don't think we can know the future (in general). I'm claiming we know that which we have a successful model of. The success obviously requires testing in the present.
Which can, at best, give us a more or less arbitrary approximation of the future, never any certainty.
Then the hidden state would be whatever lay outside whatever nodes you had as the new Markov boundary. The existence of hidden states is just a mathematical outcome of the focus on a system.
If we're talking about a system (whether that's a person or a teacup), it has an internal and an external - that which is it, and that which is not it. Without those basics, we can't be talking about anything, we're simply talking about everything. The idea of hidden states is simply saying that with internal/external defined, you must also accept that there is a boundary, and with a boundary there must be (in information terms) a (set of) final node(s) at that boundary.
So that's a system.
Active inference occurs in self-organising systems (a subset of all the systems described above). The self organising bit meaning that they actively work against a probability gradient (the most probably distribution of our component parts is entropic - randomly scattered). The components of our body are a stage above in terms of less randomness than the components of the world we find ourselves in (which are somewhat more randomly dispersed). So we (our bodies) represent an active inference system, we are working against a probability distribution to maintain our arrangement against random dispersal, at a rate slightly higher than that of our surrounding system (the ecosystem).
As each system has final nodes (which cannot form part of the inference) we should look for final nodes in the human system (having identified it a s an active inference system above). Those nodes appear to be the sensory neurons (the passive element), and our motor actions (the active element - though many include secretion here too).
You can, of course, focus on any system you like with any boundary, but some systems would not count as active inference systems because they cross a threshold of the degree to which they are working against a particular probability distribution of the dispersal of their components.
Quoting NOS4A2
I think so, yes. We can simply remove parts and see if the process continues without them (if we were evil experimenters - otherwise we can just wait until it happens anyway, then study the result). People without arms show absolutely no sign of reduced thinking, inferring, believing or seeing. So we can infer that arms are not necessary. People with damage to the occipital cortex cannot see properly, so we can infer that without an occipital cortex, you can't see.
Not how I use the word reason. If you're talking about purpose, then fine. The purpose of neurons is not to represent the outside world. We know this because there doesn't appear to be anywhere to store that representation, nor do any of the areas involved in seeing, hearing, feeling etc seem to have inputs from areas outside the external-facing sensory organs which are sufficient to explain their activity. Hence we do not 'see' a representation, we 'see' the external world. I can literally watch a message go from the external world to the retina, to the occipital cortex and be recognised by the V4 region as being a certain colour. If I damage, or temporarily cut off that route the subject can no longer see colour. I can't think of a more clear demonstration that the seeing of colour is data from the external world, not an internal representation.
No. That was my point (reductio ad absurdum, I believe it's called?).
Quoting Janus
That's not how we use the word 'know'. We use the word 'know' to refer to successful models of hidden states. I say something like "I know where the pub is", by which I mean that if I go to the place I believe the pub is, I will find it there. We don't use the word 'know' to refer to thinks we have a direct node-to-node connection with - I don't think anyone outside of cognitive computational neuroscience would be able to use the word 'know' if it were thus restricted.
Quoting Janus
Yes. all language is by fiat. There's no book of what things 'really' mean.
Quoting Janus
Uh huh. And why can we not be familiar with hidden states? If we have good models of them, we can be very familiar with them.
Active inference is a scientific theory, that means it's an attempt to describe the world and be able to better predict how aspects of it work. It's not a normative theory, it's not saying we ought use words this way or that, it's describing what is happening in the events we already use words for. We do not need to change our words to match the science. The science describes better what the words are already referring to.
Active inference describes, for example, what 'seeing' is. The intention is not that we say "Ah so we don't really 'see' things then", what 'see' means doesn't change, we're just describing what goes on in the process in more detail. Same with the word 'know'. The process of 'knowing' is not what we (perhaps) thought it was, we have provided some more detail describing what the process of 'knowing' something involves. We've not proven that we don't 'really' know anything. The human activity/state that the word 'know' describes still exists unaltered, we just now have a better model of how it works.
Sorry, I wasn't talking about perception. I was talking about hidden states in general. It makes more sense to me to say we have some degree of confidence in our inferences. That lets me distinguish hidden states from observations.
Ah, then we're using two different meanings of 'hidden states' which is causing the confusion. I'm using hidden states in its technical sense with regards to Markov bounded systems. An observation, in this sense, is an observation of a hidden state.
I know it's a bit confusing to call a state 'hidden' and then talk about us directly seeing it, but that's just the technical terminology, it will be impossible to read about active inference, nor understand any of the work in this field without understanding what is meant by a 'hidden state' in its technical sense.
This is what Plato pointed to years ago, and it is why there is no interaction problem for dualism. "Ideas" actually exist within the medium between soul and body, and are therefore themselves part of that very interaction. In Aristotelian hylomorphism, and consequently Marxist materialism, ideas consist of both a formal aspect, and a material aspect (content, subject matter).
Quoting Isaac
OK, but "reason" was my word, and it was used synonymously with "why":
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So you giving "reason" a different meaning was nothing but trying to argue through equivocation. And now you attempt to explain away that equivocation, by implying that you were trying to change the subject and create a distraction from what I was saying (to talk about something different, to use 'reason" in a different way).
Quoting Isaac
You seem to have missed what I was saying to Banno, and just butted in to the conversation using words in a completely different way. In no way was I saying that the purpose of neurons is to represent the outside world. I was actually arguing the opposite to that, denying the reality of an outside world. I was saying that the human 'system' (if you'll allow me to use this word in an informal way), creates images, ideas, and such things within the mind, as symbols, which have meaning.
What I argued is that the symbols, (just like words for example), need not be in any way similar to any "external thing". Dreams are a good example. So the images within our minds whether they have sense input, or are derived through the dreaming mind, or some other creative way, relate to other things in a way which is analogous to the way that words, as symbols, relate to other things. There is no need for any sort of similarity between the symbol, and the thing "represented" by the symbol, constituting the meaning of the symbol.
Now, I do not think I even used the word "represent". The word I chose was "symbolize":
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But Banno asserted that it is known that neural nets are not representational. So my root word "symbol" got replaced by Banno's root word "represent", and you use Banno's word in a completely different way, to assume an "outside world".
To be clear, I stated earlier that there is no need to assume any "external world" at all, and extreme skepticism which doubts the reality of an "external" world. is well justified. To expand on this, I will say that it is highly possible that all of our relations with the so-called external world, including sensations, and communications with others, is done internally. It could well be the case that we simply model these activities as occurring through an external medium, but our models are backward, upside down, as often turns out to be the case (geocentrism for example), and all these activities actually occur through an internal medium. What is external to us may be absolutely nothing, a wall of nothingness could constitute the external boundary to one's body, as 'outer space', nothingness. Then the real medium, as that which lies between you and I as a separation, and through which we communicate, may be through the internal, 'inner space'.
This is simply not possible (where 'internal' applies to some self-organsing system). To recognise a system, a self organising one, there has to be an 'internal' and an 'external' otherwise you're just referring to 'everything', and a self organising system has to have a probability distribution function that is opposed to the Gaussian distribution, as this is just the definition of self-organising.
So simply by the definition of a discrete system we've got, of necessity, an internal state, an external state, a Markov boundary, and two different probability functions on either side of that boundary. We can then infer that for the probability function of the internal state to work against the probability function of the external state, which is required for self-organisation, as above, there needs to be a model of the probability function of the external state in the function of the internal state.
See the papers I cited earlier. Or any papers on inference systems.
If you recall a specific case of a hidden state being referred to as "observed", could you point that out? As I mentioned, in Markov analysis in general, it's not used that way. I think you've misunderstood something along the way.
First mention, first paper. It is the hidden states which are being inferred by the process in question (in this case 'seeing') ie what we 'see' is the hidden state.
Second mention, still the first paper. They are seldom observed directly (ie they are observed, indirectly).
Third paper.
Short of going through every mention in every paper I'm not sure what it is you want.
Why don't you start with a reference informing your opinion that hidden states are not observed.
Yes. An inference regarding a hidden state is never called an "observation." I'm glad to see papers aren't being written with that kind of confusion.
I've just given three examples in which the subject of observation is the hidden state. As I said, why don't we start with the papers from which you've arrived at the impression that what we observe are inferences, and we can see what the differences are.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2017.0792
So if hidden states are only seen indirectly then what is it that is seen directly? The “internal states”/“sensory states”? What are they?
The example given of spiders seems to suggest what I’ve been saying: that it’s the “sensory world” that is being directly experienced, not the external cause.
This is just garbled.
Nothing. 'Seeing' is a process of inference. Nothing is seen directly. Everything that is seen is seen indirectly. It's not a direct process, it has stages.
It's perfectly clear. I'm asking exactly the same of you as you just asked of me. The citations from which you've derived your view. If you don't understand my request then how did yours make sense to you?
By transcends biological do you mean metacognitive capacities?
If you stipulate that the usage of "exist" should only apply to determinate beings, then of course you're going to be right that it should not be used to refer to indeterminate beings. We can imagine the existence of things that are not determinable to us, though. For example gods can be imagined to exist. Or indeterminate noumena: things in themselves that are the real existences in themselves of the objects familiar to us. In common usage 'being' and 'existence' are understood to be synonymous; just as being is not a being, existence is not an existent.
Quoting Merkwurdichliebe
I think that's a different point.Socrates' claim is that (some?) knowledge is accessed via recollections of past lives.
Quoting Isaac
It has nothing to do with belief. If you know where the pub is, you know you will find it there, excluding possibilities such as that your memory is faulty or the pub has been demolished or moved. The word 'know' is used in many different ways. 'Know that', 'know how' and the knowing of familiarity. There is also 'knowing with': knowing via images, concepts or methodologies. Some knowings are bloodless and calculating, others rich and meaningful.
Quoting Isaac
All language can be subjected to fiat. But the evolution of language is not by fiat, but by meaningful association and image.
Quoting Isaac
It's very simple: if we are familiar with them then they are not hidden.
Quoting Isaac
Seeing is not a matter of inference; that is an inapt use of the term. An inference is a rational conjecture; there us no conjecture involved when I am looking at something; I simply see it. That said, of course sometimes we may think we see something that is not there or is something else, but that is caused by image association (what looks like a person turns out to be a tree, or what looks like a snake turns out to be a stick).
Yes - humans know that they know. They ask how they know and what they know, and wonder who or what they are. 'Wisdom begins in wonder'. No coincidence that we're designated 'sapiens' on that account, sapience meaning 'wisdom' or 'sound judgement'. Although I think a better designation for modern humanity is homo faber- man who makes. There is no criteria for wisdom in today's public square, it's all simply a contest of ideas and the instrumentalisation of reason.
Pinter does broach something like a cosmic philosophy in the final chapter, Mind, Life and Universe. He mentions biosemiotics, although without using that term, and many recent discoveries in genetics. Then:
[quote=Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 156).]Could the universe not contain two tiers of reality, one material and the other experiential? If that were the case, then we would have to conclude that the cosmic function of life is to be the vehicle of experiential existence, and to be the repository of Gestalt multiplicity whose purpose is to bring into existence newly minted and highly complex organized structures. While the material aspect of the universe evolves in one way (by cooling down and dissipating information), the experiential aspect evolves in the direction of producing ever more intricate hierarchical productions.[/quote]
After some discussion of the implications of quantum physics, the book ends with:
[quote=Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 160).]It would appear, from this, that reality is not limited to the physical. On a par with space and time—with matter and energy—the universe must include an organizing force which acts to create unified hierarchical structures. These are not composed of matter, but subsist on something nonmaterial that we interpret as mind. In order for physical science to advance to the next level, it is necessary to overcome a biological force that compels us to perceive the external world in the forms which our collective mind has created. Classical physics is an elegant description of the universe as it is laid out in our mental model of reality, and is a huge achievement. It may appear that it is impossible to go further, because that would be seeking what the philosopher Thomas Nagel called a view from nowhere. However, that is unwarranted pessimism. One might begin by examining the evidence for the existence in the universe of a nonmaterial mindlike effect that assigns form and structure to matter. The most obvious place to begin this search is in the phenomenon of life.[/quote]
I think that this 'organising force' is similar to what the Greeks called 'logos'. However what I don't think Pinter sees, is that (as Schopenhauer says), only in humans can this become the subject of knowledge, even if all other creatures are formed by it or from it.
Quoting Janus
This is where apophatic theology comes in, for example, Eriugena, Tillich, Whalon. God does not exist in the sense that individual beings do - but as our empirical culture can only conceive of what exists in those terms, then it can't be understood in terms of a different 'mode of being'.
It's just a different way of talking, as I see it. In ordinary parlance to say that something does not exist is to say it is not real, but imaginary. We can ask if God is real or imaginary; would God exist if there were no humans? We don't have to ask such questions; we can just accept that we feel a presence we call God, or the divine, the sublime, the numinous, or whatever.
The same applies to familiar objects: we can ask if they are real or (collectively) imagined; would they exist without humans? How can we answer that, how could we know? Is the question even meaningful? Of course our familiar objects would not be familiar objects and wouldn't have names if there were no humans. We know that much.
I told you, systems theory is very flimsy, and I explained why. The exact separation, or boundary, between what is internal and what is external is impossible to establish, so that any proposed boundary is somewhat arbitrary, or sufficient for a specific purpose, but not a real boundary in any true or absolute sense.
Quoting Isaac
There is no such thing as a "discrete system" in nature. This is just a useful fiction. All natural things have other things overlapping them in space and time. The earth and sun overlap by gravity and radiation for example. My existence and my mother's existence overlap in space and time, as I come from her womb. And many other things overlap my existence.
The idea of discrete systems may be useful for some specific purposes, but not for describing living beings, or parts of living beings, because of the large degree of overlap. Von Bertalanffy described living beings as "open systems". An open system cannot be a discrete system because the environment is just as much a part of the definition ("open") as is the "system".
That is the popular interpretation. But I've never seen any indication that is what he actually meant, at least not in the works of Plato. The more mundane interpretation is: to know something means you are capable of recollecting it...and I must admit, there are things I have fogotten that I no longer know about.
No, I'm not familiar with i, but I'm interested. Can you suggest a work that presents it?
Quoting Janus
Quoting Janus
Quoting Janus
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
...
I've no interest at all in being lectured with a series of random assertions from nobodies off the internet. Provide arguments, cite sources, or at the very least show a little humility if you don't. I can't for the life of me think why you'd assume anyone would want to learn what some random people happen to 'reckon' about cognitive science and systems theory.
We're are all "nobodies" here; there are no authoritative sources for ideas about the evolution of language. As to whether it is logically correct to say that a hidden state could be familiar it just is not because it is a contradiction in terms, or whether it is reasonable to use a term such as 'inference' with a common usage in a way that is, by fiat, not consistent with that usage; it is not because it is tendentious and inconsistent. Also I have no interest in being lectured by another dry, opinionated academic who thinks that cognitive science and systems theory have any priority, beyond their own personal set of prejudices, in respect of philosophical questions.
he also says something interesting in Philosophical Crumbs:
I cited four papers written collectively by eleven experts in neuroscience, cognitive science and computational systems. I thought I was explaining those papers to some people interested in their conclusions.
I was clearly mistaken, so I apologise for wasting your time.
Back to the arguments...
Yes it does.
No it isn't.
Not necessarily.
Yes there is.
Great discussion. Can't wait to hear what you reckon next, do hurry.
Then don't read my posts. You replied to me, not the other way round. You don't need to tell me you're not interested in my posts, just don't read them. Contrarily, you replied, with a load of random, unargued, uncited gainsaying. Doesn't sound uninterested, just sounds arrogant.
The matters you're discussing are either semantic (the use of the words 'hidden', 'inference', 'know'...) or scientific (the brain functions of language, perception, inference...) There's no shared, laymen, ground of rational thought because you presented no argument for your position, just declared a series of things to be the case.
If you don't like the technical terminology, fine, noted. It's hardly a topic for interesting discussion.
If it goes beyond a mere distaste for the chosen terminology, then make a case. The one thing we all share the same expertise in is rational thought. Make a case and we can discuss it.
I gave or at least implied arguments for all of these.
1, There is a clear distinction between knowledge and belief. If I know where the pub is that is different than believing the pub is at such and such a location, but am not sure. You are ironing over perfectly valid and useful distinctions by equating the two. Do you have an argument to justify doing that?
2, No one knows exactly how language evolved for obvious reasons. But I find it is more plausible to think it evolved in accordance with meaningful associations, in accordance with what people cared about, than in some merely arbitrary manner.
3.I've said I think it is necessarily the case that it is contradictory to say that we are familiar with what is hidden from us. Perhaps you could explain why you think it could make sense to say that isn't so. Who is the one who has failed to present an argument?
4. I know from self-reflection that making an inference is different than looking at something, and I gave examples of mistaking what I thought I saw due to pattern association, a matter of recognition not of inference, to support my contention. An inference is a process of logical deduction, how would you know such a process is going on unless you were conscious of it?
And Repetition:
I've been ducking in and out, so I haven't followed the whole conversation, but it seems to me that two distinct ideas are being conflated and confused within this thread.
On the one side we have the supposes think-in-itself, that which is supposedly behind our perceptions and hence supposed to be forever beyond our comprehension. It's "hidden"
On the other is the state of a neural network passed from one iteration to the next, or something like that.
Is that roughly right?
There is a difference between pointing to potential errors in common sense made by us individuals when we're 'riffing' our own ideas and pointing out such mistakes in an entire established body of scientific work in constant review by dozens, if not hundreds, of experts. The likelihood of them all having drifted off the rails of common sense, and you alone having spotted it are miniscule. A little more humility is warranted in the latter claim that might well be totally unnecessary in the former.
Quoting Janus
No one is ignoring that distinction. The terminology simply uses belief as any state of cognition which informs an action. Knowledge would be a specific type of belief which is supported by success in using it as a policy. As per above, this is the way 'belief' and 'knowledge' are used by a vast body of experts in the field. I'm sure there's an equally vast body of experts who use the terms differently. Their reasoning for doing so might be interesting to discuss, but the chances of either group having just 'got it wrong' by missing some obvious matter of common sense is tiny, so we oughtn't start there if we're to have such a discussion.
Quoting Janus
That you find something plausible is not an argument. People do know quite a lot about language, from linguistic science, vto the neuro-anatomy of language centers. We can study, for example, people who have trouble making verbal associations and see what differences there are in their language cortices which might explain that. What language processing remains in such patients tells us a lot about how language works. We can do more than just 'reckon' stuff.
Quoting Janus
It's not something amenable to argument. It's the technical terminology. It's a) too late, and b) completely unnecessary to change it now. If you don't think it makes sense, that's on you. Others are clearly fine with it. I don't think your opinion on the preferred use of technical terminology is a particularly ripe topic for discussion.
Quoting Janus
Again, 'inference' is the term used to describe a particular type of cognitive process. If you don't like the terminology, fine, but the entire field of cognitive science seems fine with it, so I'm not sure that a particularly interesting point of discussion either and, again, too late to change it now anyway.
Yes.
's last post seems to sum it up for me. Perception is a staged process, one iteration to the next, as you say, and there seems to be a feeling among some that one stage somewhere in the middle must be the 'real' object of perception (rather than the external hidden state, we all seem to actually refer to). I've yet to really understand why they might feel that way.
Not a part of this discussion, but the issues raised in https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13247/phenomenalism, may shed some light on the motivation. Some seem to think that the connection between what we might call our current model of an external state and our 'experience' is somehow more direct than the connection between the external state and our current model. I was trying, in that thread, to point out that it is no more 'direct', it has no unique status in the process.
Unless we are going to say that the object of our perception is whatever is currently held in the working memory (at any given millisecond) then we have to accept that there are at least some data nodes between our response (us talking about, acting on, labelling, 'experiencing') and the object of that response. Once we've accepted that there are intervening data nodes, the search for the 'real' object becomes pointless. It might as well be the thing we've all been referring to it as for the last few hundred thousand years...the external object.
So when you say this, you are pointing out the "thing" is part of the hidden state passed from iteration to iteration, and folk instead take you to be setting forth the philosophical notion of indirect realism?
All of your replies are based on the accepted usages within cognitive science. But this is not a cognitive science thread, and I would not presume to post in a cognitive science thread. I think if you want to bring cognitive science into the discussion you need to be able to explain in terms understandable to the reasonably philosophically educated layperson what relevance it has to philosophical questions which seem, at least on the face of it, to be outside its scope,
So the thread topic concerns whether or not there is an "external world". We already know that from a general scientific perspective, of course there is an external world, because it just is various aspects of what is understood to be the world external to our bodies and/or the world which is "external" in the sense of being the perceived object of conscious awareness, which is being studied by the various scientific disciplines. So, in that sense science is predicated upon there being an external world.
Possibly. I've never gotten clear how indirect realism is using the term 'indirect' (nor, for that matter how direct realism is using the term 'direct'). One of the things I thought might come out of this discussion.
But yes, for my part, I'm simply pointing out that cognitive science shows us that 'seeing' is an iterative process and as such nothing is without intervening nodes. The mere presence of an intervening 'modelling' stage shouldn't mean that what we 'see' is the model because there's loads of intervening stages between the model and the experience too. There's just loads of iterative stages full stop. So looking for a 'direct' object-subject link (where 'direct' means no intervening stages) is a fool's errand. We'd end up in a place I don't think anyone wants to be where the object of our perception is an ephemeral, constantly changing snippet of a model sliced and diced for whatever we're engaged in that very millisecond.
Quoting Isaac
It's always seemed to me that they are arrived at on account of looking at the situation form different perspectives. So, the scientific understanding of visual perception tells us it is a multi-stage process, which means we don't see things "directly". But from the experiential point of view, we just see things immediately, directly. Which view is correct? In the senses relative to their proper contexts, both are, so there would seem to be no point arguing over whether indirect or direct realism is true is any absolute sense.
I have been trying to do so, but clearly with less success than I'd hoped. Is there something specific about my attempts that have failed for you, or just in general?
Quoting Janus
The argument given for an external world doesn't rely on science as such, it's a logical construct... I'll repeat it here.
Any system is logically defined by having a boundary, otherwise it's just everything and we're not talking about something. That boundary can be fuzzy, ephemeral, leaky, or tight and clear, but it must be there just in order to talk about something, it must be this as opposed to that.
A self-organising system (such as ourselves) must, again by definition, work against the gradient of a Gaussian probability distribution, it must avoid dispersal by random forces if it is to maintain itself as system (no science yet, just maths). That is, that it must perform a gradient climbing equation (in information system terms), it has to otherwise it would disperse to a random distribution.
One step back. The declaration of an internal state and an external state (necessary simply by declaring the object of our thought to be this and not that) Requires that there is what we call a Markov boundary between the internal and the external states. This is (again no ontology yet) simply a statistical feature of there being internal and external states, there simply must exist in any network those nodes which connect to the external states and the internal states. These are the Markov boundary (and anything within them is inside the Markov blanket).
Back to probabilities. Anything inside the Markov blanket is carrying out this gradient climbing equation relative to outside the Markov blanket otherwise it would disperse according to a Gaussian distribution. In order to carry out this equation, it must maximise the terms of a marginal likelihood function (or minimise free-energy as it's sometimes expressed - two sides of the same function).
So any self-organising system (one which does not disperse randomly) must, by definition contain within it's informational architecture, a Bayesian model of the external world which, in minimising the surprise function of, it carries out this gradient climbing function and so avoids dispersal to Gaussian distribution (from which we could not possibly distinguish it as system (no this and that just homogeneous stuff).
I should be clear, I'm repeating here, to the best of my ability, how it was explained to me. This isn't my theory, it's that of active inference in general. The papers I cited earlier contain the details, but they can be a little impenetrable as presented. I've found the above explanation useful.
We can then go on to look at the sort of biological instantiation of this informational architecture, but there we really are just doing neuroscience and outside the scope of this forum.
Possibly, but then do you not also experience some of the optical illusions, weird filtering, and changes of perspective that the multi-stage scientific model gives an explanation for. Do these experiences not need accounting for in any phenomenological description?
I'm not entirely sure what you are referring to. By "optical illusions" do you mean things like sticks appearing bent when they are part in and part out of water? If so, then I would say that we just directly see the stick as bent. It doesn't seem to be a problem for direct realism that the stick is not really bent; that can easily be established by taking the stick out of the water or feeling along its length; we don't need science to tell us it's not really bent, but we do need science to tell us exactly why it appears that way. Although, that said, the hunter gatherer might have said it appears that way because it is partially submerged. the scientific understanding of refraction, tying it in with other refractive phenomena, is just a further, more generalized explanation.
The article I (and you) referenced above offered an analogy to explain this. The spider is directly aware of the vibrations and indirectly aware of the fly.
In terms of human sight, as I explained before, the same external cause causes one person to see a red dress and one person to see a blue dress. There is a qualitative difference to their experiences, which is why we don't say that they both see a red dress or both see a blue dress. The words "red" and "blue" in this context refer to some quality of their respective experiences (and perhaps also to some property of the external cause, but a failure to recognise the reference to some quality of the experience will lead to equivocation). The qualities of these experiences are equivalent to the vibrations in the spider analogy, and the property of the external cause – emitting or reflecting light at a particular wavelength – is equivalent to the fly.
And in terms of the epistemological problem of perception, the indirect realist will say that how the world looks and how the word feels doesn't tell us anything meaningful about what the external world is "like" (other than the trivial fact that it is such that it causes us to see this or feel that), whereas for the direct realist the external world is "like" we see and feel things to be (although some direct realists will only say this about so-called "primary" qualities like shape, not about so-called "secondary" qualities like colour).
Yes, plus a range of others. Something like...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilac_chaser
...or the Gorilla experiment I described earlier (not seeing a 'gorilla' walk on stage right in front of you because it's unexpected and your focus is elsewhere)...
These are harder to just do a kind of 'feel the stick' check on, yet the latter type particularly (filtered sensory processing) affects our phenomenal experience massively. We're quite regularly seeing things which don't match our other senses (and vice versa). I think we've always needed a narrative to explain that. The simple idea that we just directly see what's there doesn't seem to be sufficient here.
Quoting Janus
Cool.
But it isn't. It's not 'directly' aware if the vibrations in the phenomenological sense of 'aware' (damn terminology problems again). I don't know spider neurology, so I'm going to replace it with human neurology instead.
Something like colour is modeled by a couple of regions in the brain (V4, BA7, BA28...). What we call an experience (what we relate when we're talking about it, what we react to, what we log) is several nodes removed from either the V4 region or the BA7 region.
When articles like the one you cited talk about 'directness' they're talking about it in system terms. Direct means that the internal states have access to it within the Markov blanket. It doesn't mean our experience has no intervening nodes.
So I'm not seeing the phenomenological argument that we 'experience' the model directly but the hidden state indirectly. In terms of intervening data nodes we experience both indirectly. Our experience neither directly reports the output of the V4 region, nor does it directly report the activity of the retinal ganglia, nor does it directly report the photon scattering from the external world object. It doesn't directly report any of them. So why give the modeling output from V4 any unique status in the process?
Quoting Michael
This is the move I don't understand. On what grounds 'trivial'? It seems of absolutely fundamental and manifest importance to every single aspect of our lives, language and thought.
Then this shows that trying to understand the philosophy of perception by referring to the cognitive science of Markov blankets is a mistake, as @Janus seemed to say earlier. It is better to understand it exactly as I described it in that last post:
The same external cause causes one person to see a red dress and one person to see a blue dress. There is a qualitative difference to their experiences. The words "red" and "blue" in this context refer to some quality of their respective experiences. We are directly aware of this red or blue quality, and through that quality indirectly aware of some external cause that emits or reflects light at a certain wavelength.
Given that we see what we see then it follows that the external world is such that it causes us to see what we see. In terms of the epistemological problem of perception it's trivial. What we're interested in is whether or not the external world, when not seen or felt, "resembles" the world as-seen and as-felt. Do our everyday experiences show us the "intrinsic" nature of this external world? Are the shapes and colours and sounds that we're familiar with properties of the external world or just qualities of the experience? How much of what we see and feel is a product of us and our involvement with the world, and how much (if any) was "already there"? Is perception the reception of information or the creation of information?
I don't see the 'better'. The improvement is what?
Quoting Michael
This seems to equivocate over phenomenological and scientific senses. I can't see why you'd accept the (very unintuitive) scientific description of light, but then say that the (perhaps unintuitive) scientific description of 'seeing' has no place in your understanding of perception. Why does light get translated to wavelengths, but translating red to an output from the V4 region is disallowed. Light doesn't appear to be wavelengths to me, any more than red appears to be an output from my V4 region.
Also, this is still not really pinning down 'directly'. In what sense are we 'directly' aware of the experience of red that we're not as directly aware of the postbox? You seem to want to invoke some science to show that I'm not (contrary to how it seems) directly seeing the postbox, but then want to ignore that very same science when it shows you're not directly aware of it's redness either.
I think this is where we might be talking past each other. When I play a computer game I might say that the game is good or is fun or is scary or whatever, and the grammar is clearly referring to the computer game and saying that it has certain properties. And that's fine for everyday conversation. But being good, being fun, being scary, and so on are not external properties of things that are then "encountered". They refer to my state of mind (emotional rather than sensory in this case). You might also want to use the words "good", "fun", and "scary" to refer to some external property that causes us to feel these things, but I would say that that is secondary to the primary meaning.
I think most people would agree with me at least on this. I just think it's correct to extend this understanding to sensory qualities like colour and shape.
What would be its intrinsic nature. Why would 'it causes me to respond thus' not be one of its intrinsic properties?
Quoting Michael
Surely this question is the exact one that is answered by showing that the external world causes those experiences. Unless it is doing so randomly, then there has to be a match between property and experience?
Quoting Michael
Now this question I agree is fascinating and underlies pretty much all of my research in the field. I don't believe it can be answered by introspection alone, we need to know how our cognition works to answer it.
The fact that you and I can look at the same photo and yet I see a white and gold dress and you see a black and blue dress proves this wrong. The external properties are the same and yet the internal qualities are different. The experience is determined by our eyes and brain as well as any external stimulus. The mistake is in then projecting the qualities of the experience onto the external stimulus.
Yeah, I think we're just going round in circles on this one. If a computer game is scary, then that is a property of the computer game that it scares you. It presumably doesn't do so randomly, so something about it causes the fear. I just don't see a problem with calling that property 'being scary'.
It's not a problem in ordinary conversation. It can be a problem if it leads you to the philosophical position that being scary is a mind-independent property that some people are "correct" in experiencing and others "mistaken" in not.
No it doesn't. You seeing white and gold dress and me seeing a black and blue is not remotely random, its in fact completely explicable by direct deterministic actions of retinal ganglia, occipital cortex activity and suppressive action of higher cortical functions. There's nothing even slightly random about it. The dress has a very distinct, measurable and predictable property of causing some humans to reach for the colour terms 'white and gold' and other humans to reach for the colour terms 'black and blue'.
I'm not saying it's random. I'm saying that it's wrong to say that they "match". The external property may determinately cause the experience, but they are distinct things. A broken window isn't a property of the ball.
No, but 'that it broke a window' is. And if it breaks every single window it comes into contact with, then 'that it breaks windows' is a property of the ball.
So 'that it causes some humans to to reach for the colour terms 'white and gold' and other humans to reach for the colour terms 'black and blue' is likewise an intrinsic property of the dress.
What we call that intrinsic property seems to be the sticking point.
I don't think that's quite right. I've accepted that we can use words like "red" to refer to that intrinsic property. The disagreement is that I also think we can (and do) use words like "red" to refer to the effect, i.e. some quality of the experience. The reason I "reach" for the colour terms "white" and "gold" is because those are the words that refer to the quality of my experience. So an intrinsic property is red[sub]1[/sub] if it causes most humans to experience red[sub]2[/sub]. But there are some who might experience blue[sub]2[/sub] because their eyes and/or brain work differently.
There's that equivocation again though. You can't on the one hand invoke "their eyes and/or brain work[ing] differently" and then when I talk about the consequences of what we know about how brains work say it isn't relevant to our understanding of perception.
Either how the brain works is relevant or it isn't.
If it's relevant then you have to accept that you don't 'really' experience red either, it's just a post hoc narrative constructed by your working memory.
If it's not relevant, then you've no ground to say we don't 'really' see the dress because you're bracketing out everything about how the brain works. We do appear to see most colours the same so someone must be wrong about the dress.
Either that or we invoke qualia (without warrant and with all the associated problems).
I don't see how that follows.
And this definitely doesn't follow. Most humans are trichromats. The very rare tetrachromats aren't wrong in seeing different colours to the rest of us.
Because that's the consequence of what we know about how brains work. Either you're bracketing that out entirely (in which case out goes light hitting the retina, out goes perception modeling, etc) or you're accommodating it in your theories (in which case we don't experience red).
You seem to want to bracket out half of what we know but keep the other half. Bracket out what we know about working memory, but keep what we know about how different brain processes can cause a white/gold reaction in some and a blue/black reaction in others.
How do we know that? How have we updated our model of what's happening in tetrachromats?
By following the evidence from neuroscience. By accommodating what we've discovered about how brains work into our understanding of perception.
Again, you seem to be allowing some aspects of neuroscience to inform your understanding but denying others
Quoting Isaac
Neurology doesn't explain the hard problem of consciousness. We know that changes to the eyes and changes to the brain affect first-person experience, but we haven't reduced first-person experience to brain- or body-activity. And even if we do reduce first-person experience to brain- or body-activity, it can still be that colour terms like "red" refer to some property of this brain- or body-activity, not just to some property of the external stimulus.
[quote=Chalmers, 1995]Why is it that when electromagnetic waveforms impinge on a retina and are discriminated and categorized by a visual system, this discrimination and categorization is experienced as a sensation of vivid red? We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery. There is an explanatory gap (a term due to Levine, 1983) between the functions and experience, and we need an explanatory bridge to cross it. A mere account of the functions stays on one side of the gap, so the materials for the bridge must be found elsewhere.[/quote]
Quoting Isaac
If most people are scared of spiders it doesn't follow that the minority who aren't scared of spiders are wrong. I don't see how understanding the human brain has any relevance to this fact.
No, but, like tetrachromy, it gives us some parameters. Some possibilities are shown to be unlikely given the data we have. One such is the idea that there's some internal 'redness' which we directly experience. There's no mechanism for such a thing, and what mechanisms we can see suggest it isn't happening.
The fact that we don't fully understand conscious experience doesn't provide license to just dismiss whatever aspects we do know anytime they become inconvenient to your theory. There's a hell of a lot we do know. Chalmers notwithstanding.
What we know is that if I see a red dress and you see a blue dress then our first-person experiences are different, and that the colour terms "red" and "blue" refer to whatever it is that differs in our experiences.
If we don't yet have a scientific explanation of this mechanism then that simply shows that our scientific explanations are inadequate. Which most people accept is true, given that the hard problem of consciousness hasn't been solved.
I don't see how we 'know' this. Certainly not scientifically. All the data we have scientifically seems to show that experiences cannot be said to have properties such as colours. There simply isn't the mechanism.
So do we 'know' it phenomenologically? Again, I don't see how. All we have phenomenologically is that I seem to think the dress is blue and you seem to think its red. There's nothing in my experience which tells me why.
I'm going to quibble here too, though with far less warrant. Most neuroscientists and cognitive scientists I've worked with (I can think of only one exception) think the hard problem of consciousness is nonsense. It may be popular among philosophers, but people in general are a much broader group.
I cited the source, Ludwig von Bertalanffy. If you're into systems theory you ought to know him.
[quote=Wikipedia]Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy (19 September 1901 – 12 June 1972) was an Austrian biologist known as one of the founders of general systems theory (GST). This is an interdisciplinary practice that describes systems with interacting components, applicable to biology, cybernetics and other fields. Bertalanffy proposed that the classical laws of thermodynamics might be applied to closed systems, but not necessarily to "open systems" such as living things. His mathematical model of an organism's growth over time, published in 1934,[1] is still in use today.[/quote]
Your claim was that neurological "systems" follow the laws of physics. Bertalanffy's claim is that "open systems" (biological systems) do not necessarily follow the second law of thermodynamics.
Quoting Janus
That\s exactly the problem I pointed to, with the application of systems theory. Boundaries may be so arbitrary, that people can use "systems" to support any hypothesis that they want to support.
Quoting Isaac
The problem with your internal/external boundary is that you employ a boundary between the system and the "external", but you do not employ a boundary between the system and the "internal". And since there are internal hidden states as well as external hidden states, you need a boundary between the system and the internal, to account for the reality of these hidden states. The living "system" is best understood as a medium between the internal and the external, as pointed out by Wayfarer earlier in the thread. As Plato indicated, living acts are best understood as carried out by the medium between soul and body. This is why we can say that Plato resolved the interaction problem which is commonly attributed to dualism.
That is why systems theory is very flimsy. You employ a boundary between the system and the external, but you do not employ a boundary between the system and the internal. The "system" is a human construct, a model. The unknowns are not accounted for by "the system" because they are unknown. In modern formalism, unknowns are allowed right into the logical system. There is no boundary to separate the unknowns which are within the system, from the system itself. So we think that all the unknowns are external, coming from outside the boundary, when there is really a lot of unknowns within the system, and having no boundary to exclude them from the system on the inside. The consequence of this, in modeling biological systems, is that there is no way to distinguish between internal causes and external causes. Epistemological deficiencies appear like ontological issues, and there is no principles allowing us to distinguish these from each other.
Do you say the same about being fun, good, scary, painful? You don't understand how these words refer to some feature of the experience and not (just) the external stimulus?
Yes. And no, I don't think those words directly refer to some property of experience either.
http://www.affective-science.org/pubs/2017/barrett-tce-scan-2017.pdf
Your source claims that systems are open, not that they have no definition. In fact he claims the exact opposite.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Nope, that's not what Bertalanffy claims. He suggests that biological systems reverse the direction of the second law, the flow uphill of it. The exact same process I described in as a gradient climbing function. It is temporary and doesn't defy any physical law.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The system and the internal are the same thing.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, there are no hidden internal states. Internal states are definitionally those which are not hidden.
If I may, from the back row, hitherto being a silent witness:
In general:
Your theoretics are fine, and more than likely, close to that which is the case. But nobody cares; the average Joe doesn’t consider himself as a thinker in the terms and conditions scientifically expounded as the means for it. That leaves you and the cognitive scientists in general, to say Joe never does think the way he thinks he does, or, which is quite objectionable, he doesn’t think at all, insofar as mere brain machinations are solely responsible for such private, personal, seemings. It follows as a matter of course, that the very brain machinations the cognitive scientist expounds are never even recognized by himself. That is, he promotes, from the perspective of a particular kind of human, that which never occurs to him from the perspective of a human in general.
Those of the philosophical bent, on the other hand, don’t have such inconsistency, for they don't profit in the consideration of brain machinations qua physical necessity, in the first place, but rather, if anything, merely take whatever that necessity may be, for granted. Which justifies my asking, as super-intelligent and well-versed as you are, are you immediately considering, upon reading this, what part of your brain is doing what, or, are you immediately considering only the relation between your reading and my writing?
Something specific that fails, for me:
Attempts to supplant natural human subjectivity with mechanistic necessity. Which reduces to, albeit egotistically....even if your science is in fact the case, I shall never relinquish the metaphysical conditions for my purely rational intellect. And neither should anyone else, dammit!!!!!
So sayeth a nobody on the internet.....
Indeed. It's an incorrigible habit.
Quoting Mww
I'd have to say neither. See, whilst I find the tenor of your critism on point with regards to cognitive science, I don't find the propositions of philosophy any more familiar. Not only could I not say that I'm "considering ... the relation between [my] reading and [your] writing", but I'd go as far as to say it would strike me as really odd if someone were to claim that's what was going through their mind whilst reading.
I don't have 'red' experiences either. I've no more idea what it's 'like' to be me than I have to be a bat. I've no idea what the question could even mean.
My personal beef? Since we're griping. I think philosopher types think they're reporting from introspection, but are actually repeating stories they've learnt from culture, books etc and merely satisfying themselves post hoc that this, in fact, describes how they think.
Quoting Mww
Again, on point, but is any philosophical text less attempting the same thing. To supplant what the reader subjectively thinks is going on with what the philosopher will claim is a 'better' notion of such?
It seems that the same unwillingness to give up the subjective impression is not extended to one's liver, one's spleen, where we are only too glad to accept exactly the way medical science tells us they work. Nor, it seems, is the whole brain off limits (we've had here much of the modern understanding of how eyes and cortices work, seamlessly blended with folk psychology). It seems only a certain aspect is off limits, and I find that quite curious.
Quoting Mww
You go for it! (But if you sustain a lesion to your frontal or parietal lobes, you may struggle, perhaps submission to the neurologist's model at that point may be advisable)
Quoting Isaac
You may have phenomenology in mind here. One might argue that both the theories of scientists and philosophers are influenced by the cultural stories that they grow up surrounded by. And yet phenomenology may have a certain advantage here with respect to those sciences holding onto indirect realism, as Dan Zahavi argues:
“Husserl often contrasts philosophy proper with the work done by the positive sciences. The latter are so absorbed in their investigation of the natural (or social/cultural) world that they do not pause to reflect upon their own presuppositions and conditions of possibility. They all operate on the basis of a natural (and necessary) naivety, namely the tacit belief in the existence of a mind-independent reality. This realist assumption is so fundamental and deeply rooted that it is not only accepted by the positive sciences, it also permeates our daily pre-theoretical life, for which reason Husserl calls it the ‘natural attitude'. Regardless of how natural this attitude might be, if philosophy is supposed to amount to a radical form of critical elucidation, it cannot simply take our natural realist assumptions for granted, but must instead engage in a reflective move that allows it to explore and assess the epistemic and metaphysical presuppositions of the latter.”
When did I say systems have no definition?
Quoting Isaac
Right, therefore contrary to your claim, these supposed "open systems" are not subject to the laws of physics. The second law of thermodynamics being a law of physics. This is a very good reason why systems theory is, as I said, very flimsy. Within the parameters of systems theory, we need to assume "open systems", which are incompatible with the laws of physics, in order to account for the existence of living beings.
Quoting Isaac
Isaac, you are not making any sense. You admit that the biological "system" is contrary to the second law, yet you also claim that this does not defy any physical law. Is the second law of thermodynamics not a physical law in your mind?
Quoting Isaac
Yes that is exactly the problem I described. The internal and the system "are the same thing". This is another big defect of systems theory. You have a boundary which separates "the system" from the external, but no boundary to separate "the system" from the internal. Therefore you have no way to account for changes to "the system" which are not from an external, observable, cause, and are not caused from within "the system". "The system" changes in a way which is not caused by "the system" itself. Such a change would be consistent with the second law. And, "the system" must follow this law of physics or else it cannot be classed as a "system". A "system" is a human construct. Further, there is no observable external cause of these changes. The changes must be internal, because external causation can be excluded. But they are not from within "the system" because "system" does not allow for changes which are contrary to the laws of physics. If it changes in a way other than by the laws of physics, it cannot be understood as a "system". So these causes of change which are contrary to the laws of physics must be excluded from "the system". They must be caused by something not within "the system" yet they cannot be classed as external, because such causes can be excluded through observation. Therefore we need a boundary to the internal, as well as a boundary to the external, so that these changes can be properly understood as not having an external cause, nor being caused by temporal changes to the system itself (2nd law).
Quoting Isaac
Clearly there must being internal hidden states, when "hidden states" is described as you did. You said that they are states hidden from the system doing the inferencing. The constitution of the system doing the inferencing is hidden from that system. Look at the diagram you provided a few pages back, (which doesn't copy in the following quote). Notice that it shows both internal and external "S", when you say "S" is a hidden state.
Quoting Isaac
It's this move that I'm questioning. It seems odd to say that scientists as a group are blinkered by some presupposition (that is nonetheless clear enough for Mr Zahavi to see without trouble), and yet assume that the mere mention of the problem is sufficient for phenomenologists to shed presuppositions like unwanted clothing in a heatwave.
What is it about the mind of a scientist that shackles them in chains so unbreakable, yet as gossamer in the hands of the philosopher?
Is it just wishful thinking? Or do we have some good reason to believe that Mr Zahavi and his ilk are not just labouring under exactly the same degree of presupposition as the scientist, just from a different source?
I agree with Husserl’s and Heidegger’s critiques of realist assumptions undergirding much scientific thinking. But I don’t find it necessary , as they do, to distinguish in categorical fashion between what scientists supposedly do and what philosophers do. Realism is a metaphysical presupposition common to an era of philosophy and science. Postmodern sciences, along with postmodern philosophies, abandon realism ( or at least most forms of it). Science , like philosophy , is a culturally constructed niche. Truth gets its authority and coherence only within specific cultural practices.
As Joseph Rouse argues in Articulating the World:
“Scientific understanding specifically and conceptually articulated understanding more generally are not perennial possibilities always available in human history or to rational or intelligent beings of different biological species or planetary ecologies. Sciences are historically specific practices that emerged within human history, with significance and justificatory standards that continue to change. This recognition ought to broaden the scope of philosophical reflection upon the sciences.
The specter of epistemic or conceptual relativism has often haunted any philosophical acknowledgment of the historical specificity and contingency of scientific understanding. Such concerns dissipate with the
recognition that what is historically specific is the truth-or-falsity and the significance of scientific claims rather their truth. The sciences matter, and make authoritative claims upon us, because of rather than despite their historical and cultural specificity, and truth is a concept that expresses that authority. Sciences are powerful but historically specific extensions of the conceptually articulated way of life that is our biological heritage. They do not instantiate an ideal possibility perennially
available with sufficient intellect and social support. They likewise cannot transcend our historical contingency in order to take on a “god’s-eye view” of ourselves and the world. Science is indeed a precarious and risky possibility that only emerged in specific circumstances, and could disappear.”
You said...
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In response to...
Quoting Isaac
If sll you meant was that yhr boundaries overlap, then I don't see how that forms a criticism. Systems can be defined. They therefore had thst which is the system and thst which is not. If they don't have those two categories they are not defined.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Christ! Is this going to be one of your stupidly arrogant "all maths is wrong" arguments all over again. The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy increases during any spontaneous process in an isolated system. Living systems are not isolated systems. The only truly closed system is the universe so any part of it decreasing entropy is not defying the second law. This is physics basics I learnt in school.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No it isn't.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Mathjax error, my apologies. I've corrected it, so thanks for pointing it out. The Mathjax 's' is the hidden state, not the normal type 's'.
If...
Quoting Joshs
... then it seems likely to me that when...
Quoting Joshs
...they merely replace it with another culturally constructed presupposition.
To assume otherwise requires us to believe that modern philosophy has miraculously broken free of ten thousand year old shackles.
.....yet it appears to me that you responded with logically consistent intelligibility. I have no choice but to seriously admire that response, arising as it apparently does from one human, and directed toward another, constructed from neither consideration of brain machinations nor philosophical predications as a product of them.
———-
Quoting Isaac
Less attempting implies a relative quantity. But the mechanistic necessity of neuroscience, as opposed to the logical necessity of philosophical texts, is a relative quality. So, no, the one is not attempting a measure of the other. While it is certain that each form of necessity belongs to its own domain, holding sway only within it, it still remains to be acknowledged which came first.
—————
As an aside, your hidden states are an interesting concept. I might find a place for them.
Quoting Isaac
What I appreciate most about Rouse’s approach is that rather than treating philosophical or scientific conceptual norms as grounding starting points for understanding the nature of scientific thought, he begins from the actual contextual discursive engagements from which such grand ideas are generated. It is through such actual temporal practices that we determine what is at stake and what is at issue in such practices. Agreement or disagreement on what is true or false within a given set of shared activities must rest upon a prior agreement concerning larger goals and what matters for that activity. Even within agreed upon conventions, the shared truths will never be total, but partially ambiguous and thus contestable. Forms of realism tend to give short shrift to these features of scientific conceptualizations as a form of niche building , by assuming certain norms of naturalism as absolutely determinative rather than as included within the continual contextual redetermination of what is at stake in scientific inquiry.
As Rouse says
“Sellars shares with the disunifiers (Nancy Cartwright, Ian Hacking) a conception of scientific understanding as representing the world, whether or not these various representations can be unified into a single, idealized, systematic “image.” Scientific understanding is taken to be embodied in scientific knowledge. Whether that knowledge primarily takes propositional form or is substantially realized through mathematical, material, visual, or com putational models, scientific understanding is mediated in whole or part by a representational simulacrum of the world it seeks to understand.”
“Sellars himself provides a key formulation for my naturalistic alternative to representationalist conceptions of scientific understanding. In a justly famous passage from Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, he argued that “in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says” (Sellars 1997, 76). Representationalist conceptions identify scientific understanding with some position or set of positions within the space of reasons—that is, as a body of knowledge. I instead locate scientific understanding in the ongoing reconfiguration of the entire space. The sciences continually revise the terms and inferential relations through which we understand the world, which aspects of the world are salient and significant within that understanding, and how those aspects of the world matter to our overall understanding. Scientific research also enables the expansion of the space of reasons by articulating aspects of the world conceptually.”
I get it that we don't always see what's there, In fact most of what is in the visual, auditory, olfactory and somato-sensory fields is generally not noticed; and I know this simply by self-reflection; I don't need scientific experiments to tell me that.
But that's not what I'm talking about anyway; I'm saying that what we are immediately aware of, we are immediately aware of; that's just what we experience, and I'm not attempting to draw any further conclusions from that.
So, to my way of thinking, direct realism is merely saying that what I am immediately consciously aware of is directly real for me, and I can acknowledge that the "independent" reality of the things I am aware of is not directly known, in the sense that my perception of those things is the result of a relatively extended process of which I am not at all aware and can only know "secondhand" via the data gained by other investigators..
As I said before it's just two different ways of looking at it. I am an artist, not a scientist, so I give priority to my immediate experience; I prefer to maintain an orientation that does not involve objectifying that experience. I also agree with Heidegger and other phenomenologists that that orientation is both temporally (historically) and experientially prior to the objectifying orientation, which is secondary and derivative. Each orientation delivers its own different possibilities for knowledge and understanding, to be sure.
Notice that when psychologists play ‘gotcha!’ and talk about how our naive perception is fooled by illusions and tricks, that the ‘real’ truth of what we experience is hidden from us , they are referring to a level of analysis that first needs to be constructed by us as a fresh perspective. In other words, in order for some some phenomenon to be declared ‘hidden’, the conceptual framework within which its hiddenness is intelligible must first be invented as a fresh form of conceptualization. Could one not then follow the phenomenologists and say that both the ‘naive’ and the hiddenness-savvy frameworks are different varieties of direct perception, the second being an elaboration and transformation of the former?
'Quantum physics is a law of thought' ~ Chris Fuchs
Quoting Isaac
I'll have a go at that. First, it's by no means 'all scientists' - you can't stereotype scientists. But the classical paradigm of science from the time of Galileo until recently presupposes the division between subject and object - the scientist as detached observer, an all-seeing eye, in a world of objects theoretically intelligible in terms of their primary attributes, describable in terms of Cartesian algebraic geometery.
In terms of engineering and science, such a stance is pragmatically justified. But it has existential implications which are not disclosed by its own methods - because scientists are also humans, and science a human enterprise. And a consequence of this stance is described in the often-quoted expression of 'cartesian anxiety', which
Richard J. Bernstein coined the term in his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis.
There's been an enormous shift in science in the 20th century, due to the belated understanding of these issues, which you might call 'meta-scientific'. That's what the article pinned to my profile page, The Blind Spot of Science, addresses, drawing on phenomenological analysis.
Sure, you can talk about different systems in that way, and even "define" what would make one system distinct from another. But if in reality, there is an overlapping of the things which you are applying the theory to, then these things cannot be adequately understood as discrete systems.
That is the whole point which you do not seem to be grasping. You can "define" anything, anyway you want, but if that definition is not represented in reality, then the definition is just a falsity, which becomes a false premise if used in any logical proceeding. So, you define systems as being distinct or discrete, but the things which you apply the theory to are not really that way, they overlap, and share, etc., so your systems theory is just giving you false premises, i.e. that the thing identified as A is a discrete system, and the thing identified as B is a discrete system, when in reality they are not discrete. And, the need to assume "open systems" demonstrates very clearly that this is a falsity
Quoting Isaac
You're really not making any sense Isaac, we're not talking mathematics here. We're talking ontology. You insist on "discrete systems", but now you deny "isolated systems". How could there be a discrete system which is not isolated from other systems? To make it discrete there must be a boundary which separates it from others, or else the many supposed systems really exist together as just one continuity. If there is a boundary then it must consist of something real, which would separate one system from another, thereby isolating them from each other. Otherwise the boundary is purely theoretical, and absolutely arbitrary. Arbitrarily placing theoretical boundaries, within a continuity, does not produce discrete entities. The hour existing between one o'clock and two o'clock is not a discrete unit of time, it's just created from theoretical, arbitrarily placed boundaries
Quoting Isaac
Nevertheless, it is quite obvious that we need to assume internal hidden states as well, for the reasons I explained. The composition, or constitution of the system doing the inferencing is hidden from it. The system does not apprehend its own composition, and this is internal to the system.
Internal/External. Physical/Non-physical. Physical/Mental. Material/Immaterial. Noumenon/Phenomenon. Subject/Object. Mind/Body. Direct/Indirect.
The dichotomies above, and undoubtedly several more like them that didn't immediately come to mind, are the problem. All fail to be able to take proper account of meaningful experience. No one seems to have figured out how to escape them, stipulate a simpler but richer terminological framework that is amenable to evolutionary progression; a taxonomy that retains their usefulness but improves upon explanations where they have failed. No one well-known enough yet, anyway. This first bit is just a general set of remarks involving one aspect of the recent discussion.
To your account...
I'm in agreement with most if not all of your criticisms here. The special pleading, in particular, that the mod has been guilty of. That said, there is one thing that struck me as needing attention. It has to do with(seems to based in and/or upon) your uncertainty regarding the concepts(philosophical positions) of direct and indirect perception. Direct realism vs. indirect realism. I'm with you on the skepticism about those notions- their muddled. Ill-conceived frameworks as best I can see. Both of them. For the same reasons, no less. That said...
It seems that you want to say that we do not directly perceive anything at all. That seems to be based upon current knowledge regarding how our relevant biological machinery works. Good stuff, by the way. It's as though the denial is based upon the fact that so many different autonomous biological structures are necessary and involved in a timely(albiet virtually negligible increments) fashion.
That's only a problem for accounting practices(notions of mind/consciousness/meaningful experience) when and if they are based upon one of the aforementioned dichotomies.
As best I can tell, there's no problem with someone accepting most, if not all, of your explanations and simply noting that you've done a great job of teasing out all of the nuance regarding how biological machinery works autonomously as an elemental part of all meaningful experience(consciousness; thought; belief; etc.).
Not sure that's an accurate or fair description.
Experiments are often devised to focus on specific variables and to eliminate others, ceteris paribus.
This has worked fine in many or most cases, then there are cases where that becomes more difficult.
Say, when a measurement itself interferes markedly with the measured, or when the larger environment/system (in a sort of holistic sense) can't be ignored.
It's just a (traditional) feature of designing experiments to minimize elements that aren't the objective, it's not so much that other elements simply are said to not exist.
I didn't mean to say nothing was going on. My point was your wording, your description of it, was a foreign to me as mine is (perhaps) to you. It's not about the process, it's about our descriptions of them, our rendering of them into words and concepts. That something is going on is undeniable. Whether your description of it rings true for me or mine for you has little to do with that fact.
Quoting Mww
I think that the scientific and the philosophical domains are not so very different from one another, and so the question of which came first is not answerable by declaring 'philosophy!' or 'science!'. We each have different narratives, which we would use different language to explain, about how we think. The only proper answer to which came first would be that of the first thinking human, or (in an individual's case) the one they had as a baby.
Every single other narrative has no better claim to primacy than any other.
Quoting Mww
Glad you liked it. Fertile ground for both scientific and metaphysical speculation, I think.
Interesting, but I don't buy it. You frequently seem to have this dichotomy on how you express these ideas which makes them unconvincing. You'll talk a lot about unexamined preconceptions, culturally embedded narratives, the ephemeral nature of what is real... (all ideas I'm very sympathetic to). Until....
Until it comes to your personal favorites. Then the rhetoric suddenly changes. Now it's all 'actual', 'must', 'is', 'are'... You begin by saying that ideas are shackled by unexamined presuppositions, culturally embedded narratives, etc, then proceed to announce replacement concepts as if they were the unshackled 'Truths' of the way things are.
All ideas are culturally embedded narratives. All of them. That includes Heidegger, that includes Rouse, that includes Zahavi, that includes the idea that all ideas are culturally embedded narratives... All of them.
Then isn't that somewhat trivially tautologous? What is it you draw from this conclusion that you found novel?
Quoting Janus
Again, I'm not clear on what the first 'way' really is. It doesn't seem so much a 'way of looking at things' as just a reiteration of what the words mean. That which it seems to me is the case seems to me to be the case. What am I missing that is concluded from that approach? How does it, for example, inform your art?
Good attempt. But, like @Joshs, you've given an excellent account of the unexamined preconceptions of scientists. What you've not answered is why we shouldn't assume that the philosophers providing these alternative accounts have any fewer (if different) unexamined preconceptions.
The philosopher doesn't have a different brain, they're brought up in the same culture they're only trained (when they are trained) by other philosophers using their previous ideas. So whence this magical shakle-breaking? Why no unexamined preconceptions behind Heidegger, behind Pinter, behind Bernstein, behind the idea of a 'blind spot' in science?
I'm totally on board with this idea that science has unexamined preconceptions which, if you question them, undermine some of its oft claim to 'truth'. I really don't have any complaint about that at all.
But then by the same token, so do the replacement philosophies. They too are culturally embedded. They too assume things. They no more have a claim to being an account of 'the way things 'really' are'.
So? They only need to be defined systems for the model to work, not closed ones.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Who says the definition is not represented in reality?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Overlapping and sharing in no way prevents a system for being defined, and it only need be defined to have internal and external states, to have probability functions performing gradient climbing equations against entropy.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Easily thus. "Everything within the cell membrane is the system, everything outside of it is not". Nothing about the fact that my newly defined 'system' exchanges molecules with the system outside of it, prevents it from being defined as a system and therefore being modelled as performing this gradient climbing function. If you can't explain how you think the openness of systems prevents this model then simply repeating that it does doesn't get us anywhere.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Internal states are literally defined as those which are not hidden. It's just the definition of the terminology.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Then it is an external state as far as the system is concerned.
I'm not really sure what you mean here?
Quoting creativesoul
Are you perhaps suggesting that some parts of meaningful experience are not mediated by how the underlying biological machinery works?
In philosophy there is space for 'the unconditioned', although I will grant you that most of today's academic philosophy show no grasp of the idea nor any interest in it. (It may be there in Heidegger somewhere, although I've not studied him in depth.) There is also the fundamental philosophical maxim, 'know thyself' with the concommitant emphasis on self-awareness. And again, the reason that philosophy is different to natural science, is that in this discipline 'we are that which we seek to know'. So it must be of a different order to a methodology that is primarily oriented to the objective domain, although by no means incompatible with it on those grounds.
Quoting Isaac
Do you see how that is reductionist? You're willing to accept such criticisms, but only on the basis that those criticizing don't know any better or any different. So you're still operating within the science paradigm. Philosophy is a different way of thinking or being. A comment on Jurgen Habermas' critique of post-Enlightement philosophy is relevant:
Quoting Does Reason Know what it is Missing?
No, it's not tautologous: what we perceive is experienced as being perceived immediately, or do you experience some time lag between turning to look at, say, a tree and seeing it?
As to how it "informs my art" it's the difference between accepting what you perceive just as it immediately appears to you, giving yourself over to it and becoming absorbed in it, and objectifying and analyzing the the experience; separating yourself from it, so to speak.
The difference is perfectly clear to me: if you don't understand the profound experiential difference between the two dispositions, then I can only conclude that perhaps you've never experienced it?
Quoting Isaac
Just a general overview of what we're all doing here. We are attempting to take proper account of something that existed in its entirety in some form or another prior to our awareness and especially prior to our accounting practices(naming and descriptive practices).
Whenever a terminological framework has the purpose of explaining human consciousness(meaningful human experience) and/or other kinds of consciousness(such as non-human meaningful experience), and it is based upon either internal/external, or physical/non-physical, or even perhaps both, then those practices are doomed to fail as a result of not having the explanatory power to be able to take proper account of that which consists of both internal and external things, physical and non-physical things.
All meaningful experience consists of internal and external things, physical and non-physical things. Categorizing all the elements of meaningful experience into those dichotomies guarantees misunderstanding of that which consists of both, and is thus neither. Seeing red is a meaningful experience.
Meaningful experience exists in its entirety, in simpler forms, prior to our knowledge. <-------That's the pivotal ontological consideration which ought inform the selection/creation of our terminological framework.
Quoting creativesoul
Quoting Isaac
You've highlighted the role that the biological machinery plays in seeing red. I've a couple of quibbles with certain phrasing but those terminological choices may not be important to your position. In other words, I do not think your position hinges upon the idea that autonomous machinery like biological brain structures "mediate" in the same sense that people do. I could be wrong, but if I take you to mean that the underlying biological machinery directly influences and/or determines every part of meaningful experience, then you would be correct. I am suggesting that some parts of meaningful experience are not "mediated" by the underlying biological machinery, if by that we mean "mediated" in the sense of directly influencing and/or determining everything that meaningful experience consists of.
An individual's biological machinery, while facilitating their meaningful experiences, does not have any determinative influence whatsoever upon that which exists in its entirety prior to becoming a part of an individual's meaningful experience.
Methodological Naturalism.
The color red cannot be properly taken into account when and if the practice itself involves situating the result of biological machinery within the biological machinery. Seeing red is a result of biological machinery working autonomously. The result is not equivalent to the machinery necessary in order for it to happen anymore than it is equivalent to the wavelengths we call by the name "red".
The experience of seeing red consists of all the individual things causing us to see red. The biological machinery is but one of many. The wavelengths we call "red" are another.
The colors we see are not in the head. They are not outside the head. They are part of a larger whole(light). Where there is no biological machinery capable of detecting light(parts of the spectrum anyway) there are no individual colors(ranges of wavelengths) being filtered from the rest. That filtering happens and must in order for them to become meaningful by virtue of becoming part of a meaningful correlation drawn between them and something else by a creature so capable. That's how everything becomes meaningful. Light is no exception. There are certain biological structures that do parts of that job; that autonomously detect some wavelengths which has the unintended consequence of isolating them from the rest. However, seeing red requires more than just isolating/detecting the color. In order for it to become meaningful and/or significant to creatures, they must be endowed with the machinery required for detection as well as correlation.
That is not to say that seeing red is something that happens in the brain, for the biological machinery - while necessary for seeing red - is not exhaustive of the meaningful experience. Seeing red requires more than just adequately evolved biological structures capable of isolating certain wavelengths of light. It first requires light being emitted and/or reflected from things other than the host of biological machinery, being detected, and becoming part of a meaningful correlation(which requires the previous biological machinery, and other structures as well).
All seeing red consists of the wavelengths we call "red", an emission source, and a creature with adequate biological machinery to detect(isolate) and subsequently draw correlations and/or associations between the color and something else. That is how all red things become meaningful to all creatures so capable. The richness of the individual experience is directly proportional to the sheer number of correlations drawn between the color and other things by the creature having the experience.
All experience is meaningful to the creature having the experience<---------that's just a common-sense core tenet/guiding principle.
A creature cannot be said to see red if the color is not meaningful to them. The color red must be meaningful to any and all creatures capable of seeing red, unless all detection of those wavelengths counts as seeing red. Seeing red is a meaningful experience, afterall. Some things completely lacking biological machinery are capable of detecting those wavelengths. Surely we aren't going to demolish our understanding of meaningful human experience by virtue of equating it to color detection devices, are we?
Besides, there are some things with adequate biological machinery capable of detecting those wavelengths, but there is neither good reason nor adequate evidence to warrant subsequently claiming/believing that the color is somehow significant and/or meaningful to machinery host for they do not have the other biological structures that seem to be required for drawing correlations between the color/wavelengths and other things. The structures serve as benchmarks for certain complexoty levels of meaningful experience, should our knowledge of them be robust enough. This all lends itself well to evolutionary progression.
Sentience and the Origins of Consciousness: From Cartesian Duality to Markovian Monism
Regarding the "hard problem" it does refer to this paper:
Bayesing Qualia: Consciousness as Inference, not Raw Datum
So, 1) the science of Markov blankets doesn't directly address the philosophical issue of subjective experience (as explained in the first paper) and 2) colour terms like "red" don't (only) refer to some property held by some external world cause but (also) by something that happens "in the head" (even if you want to reduce qualia/first-person experiences to be something of the sort described in the second paper).
..by removing it almost completely from the lexicon of philosophy as such and discussing it as far as possible through the metaphors of science and engineering, especially useful for the elimination of anything that seems mysterious.
I have no doubt that such models may work. I've repeated that already, they are created for specific purposes, and are adequate for those purposes. What is at question is the truth or falsity of the models, in the sense of correspondence, and that is whether the models are a fair representation of what is supposed to be being modeled. Mathematics can be used, with statistics and probabilities, to create predictive models, with the models being symbolic (having predictive significance), without representing the activity being predicted.
Quoting Isaac
I said that. That is exactly the evidence I have been giving you, and arguing. Have you not been paying attention to the evidence I've given you? What's the point to this type of discussion, if you just pay attention to the parts of what I say that you want to?
Quoting Isaac
You are not paying attention to what I write. I clearly indicated that overlapping does not prevent a system from being defined. I said it prevents a system from being defined as "discrete", which is the word you used.
Quoting Isaac
Good example. Now do you see that the "cell membrane" in your example is a third thing? It is neither within the system nor is it outside the system, according to your statement. Does your model account for the existence of this third thing, the boundary, which is neither within the system nor outside the system?
Of course the nature of the boundary is extremely important to the nature of the system because it has a very important function in relation to the "openness" of the system. And in your example, the activity called osmosis demonstrates this fact.
Quoting Isaac
I know, that eternal states are defined that way, you've stated that. What I am arguing is that the definitions employed by systems theorists are false premises, and that is why systems theory is flimsy. So, the point is that "internal states" is literally defined as those which are not hidden, bit this false definition literally hides the fact that many internal factors of any system, actually are hidden.
Quoting Isaac
Again, you were not paying attention! The possibility that it is an external state can be excluded through observation. The influence on the system, of external states can be observed. But when the system acts in a way such that it is influenced (caused) to behave in a way which is neither the result of observable external causes, nor the system itself (2nd law), then we ought to conclude internal causes which are not part of the system itself. To conclude "hidden" external causes is a false conclusion, because properly designed experiments have the capacity to exclude the possibility of unobservable external causes.
Now, refer back to the "cell membrane" which is neither inside the system nor outside the system. Clearly it has an influence on the system. Is that influence better classified as from inside the system, or outside the system. Since it is an integral part of what composes the system, it must be inside the system, so we cannot truthfully say it is outside the system. But by your description, it is not inside the system, it is the boundary.
Granted. But you did say neither one nor the other of the two possible explanatory methodologies, was going on, with respect to a single given occasion, that is....what did Issac do with what Mww gave to him.
————
Quoting Isaac
If it be agreeable that the domain of philosophy is rational thought in accordance with logical law, and the domain of science is empirical experiment in accordance with natural law, and furthermore that no human ever performed an experiment without first thinking how it should be done in order to facilitate an expected outcome.....we arrive at both a clear chronological succession and a clear methodological distinction.
The success rate, the productive usefulness of one over the other......well, that’s a different story, innit.
————-
Quoting Isaac
If that were true, there would never be such a thing as a paradigm shift, whether in science, ethics, metaphysics or anything else. If there ever was that which is sufficient reason to cause the collapse of an antecedent condition, then that thing could not be contained in that which collapsed. No paradigm shift as such, is possible if the idea from whence it originated was already included in an extant cultural narrative.
Even if the argument is that ideas acting as sufficient reason for a paradigm shift are already culturally embedded narratives, the instantiation of a different relation between any two of them, or between any one of them in relation to experience, is itself a different idea, hence sustains the notion of being not itself already culturally embedded.
The alleged “hidden state” was once a new idea, despite both “hidden” and “state” being already preconceived and not necessarily related to each other.
Anyway....you got lots of folks vying for your attention, so I’ll just retreat to the back row, with all the other Group W troublemakers......
(Friston, et.al., 2020)
If that which is internal to the blanket is external to that which observes it, the proposition is a mere rework of.....
“....objects are quite unknown to us in themselves, and what we call outward objects, are nothing else but mere representations of our sensibility, whose form is space, but whose real correlate, the thing in itself, is not known by means of these representations, nor ever can be, but respecting which, in experience, no inquiry is ever made....”
...a 1787 treatise on human reason. The conditions are representations, thus “conditionally independent” descriptions of a set of states is nothing more than “not known by means of these”. So it is that behind a Markov blanket resides a ding an sich.
Is it a far-fetched personal cognitive prejudice, or is it a case of the more things change, the more they stay the same? Dunno, who’s to say? But it’s fun to play with all the same.
If you were arguing that all of us should abandon realism and avoid the tendency to use terms that suggest we believe there is an unshackled truth beyond our models I’m all for that. By all means challenge me whenever I let such vocabulary slip in. But if I understand you correctly,
you believe such realist terms SHOULD be part of our scientific and philosophical claims , and furthermore , we can’t help but have them be implicit in our thinking because , as the cliche goes , insisting there is no objective truth out outside of local conventions is itself a claim to universality. But as Rouse argues “Nothing matters from the imagined standpoint of the universe (which is itself only conceivable from a specific location within it), but we do not and cannot actually occupy such a standpoint.”
The point isn’t that there is no objective
truth , or no independently existing world outside cultural assumptions, but that 1) anything we say about such a cultural-independent realm is contingent on and relative to our practices, which are always changing.
2)Any claim of an asymptotic movement of scientific knowledge toward representation of something independent of that movement itself is a claim within a practice that is itself changing , and changing in qualitative ways that do allow of linear , cumulative or even Popperian progression. Is this a claim to universality? No, it is an invitation to look very closely at what you and I are doing right now in this conversation , or what you do day to day at your job. It is an invitation to see for yourself if what appears to be an internally generated representational model of an outside doesn’t qualtiatively alter the sense of that outside in the act of representing it. If one does not see this then one has no reason to abandon representational reason.
All I can tell you is that once one sees qualitative change within quantitative continuity , difference in kind within difference in degree , in everything that representational realism counts on as subject only to change in degree , one cannot unsee it. We postmodernists don’t want to make truth claims , we only want to share with others the incessantly dynamic qualitative movement we cannot help seeing in every context that realists render as qualitatively frozen.
Quoting Isaac
Yes, but it seems that to you this is a bug, a contextual imposition of cultural bias and distortion on an autonomous scientific enterprise from the “outside”. To me it is a feature. It is the place where truth happens , rather than truth residing in the attempt to transcend such narratives in the interest of objectivity.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
I very much doubt scientists would happily admit that they have a blind spot. Do you find they do? I'll assume not.
So you merely claiming that philosophy doesn't isn't going to cut it. Science will claim it doesn't too. What can you give me by way of evidence?
Quoting Janus
I wasn't talking about the time lag, I was talking about the sense of directness. I don't get a sense that I see things 'directly'. Sometimes the form of something is unclear, but I don't believe the actual thing is unclear, I believe that my vision is not delivering me a clear image (in my naive everyday belief). I don't recognise this idea of directness that you're talking about. Vision seems quite clearly indirect to me, I imagine a world made of solid, clear object and yet many of the I can't see clearly. That's my day-to-day experience. Not a direct one at all.
Quoting Janus
I've heard artists talk this way. It's not something I really 'get' but it sounds almost integral to the artistic process. I suppose that's probably why all my drawings are shite.
Quoting creativesoul
I can see how that might be the case, but I don't think dividing states into internal and external suffers from that problem as it still retains the possibility of modelling something which is both (a person in their environment for example). The division doesn't prevent both sides from being in the model.
Quoting creativesoul
I think you're making a mistake in assuming that because something exists prior to our accounting for it, it must be that our accounting is wrong if it doesn't represent it fully. You're making tow unwarranted assumptions. Firstly that {that which exists in its entirety prior to our accounting practices} can be represented with only one 'true' model, that there's only one 'true' way to account. There may be many, hundreds. Secondly that our accounting practices must capture the entirety of the thing they're accounting for. I see no reason why they should.
Quoting Michael
Agreed. The idea of there being no coherent thing called a subjective experience is a different matter. As I said, we can discuss qualia.
Quoting Michael
No. You've misunderstood what the second paper is about. The key is in the introduction, which you quoted from but didn't seem to take account of. It's quite clear...
They're asking the question why we think there's a hard problem at all, not whether there is one. Nothing in the paper is about perception, it's about the meta-model we have of perception in folk psychology and why we have it.
They even quite specifically repeat the point I've been making...
...and...
...and...
.
When they say...
...what they're getting at is a meta-model of how perception works (our own internal model of what's going on) which includes this high-certainty, low clarity 'feeling' of experience which works alongside our knowledge that what we see might not be what it seems.
They're arguing that qualia are a Bayesian model of the high certainty policy on any perception which acts as a base on which to build models of less probable possibilities. It's a model space in which possibilities can be explored. It's...
In other words. We do not 'see' qualia. They are (in the paper) an inferred part of our internal model of how perception works.
Oh. Well in that case I couldn't care less.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You haven't provided a scrap of 'evidence' yet, you've just been asserting things so far.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It doesn't. A discrete system can still be defined despite being open. I gave the example of a cell.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No. It's part of the cell, so part of the system.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Definitions are not premises. It just declares how the word will be used.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What experiments? I've never read of any experiments which reveal a system acting in a way which is neither the result of internal nor external states. Could you cite a paper?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No. The boundary is part of the system.
I don't agree there are only two possible explanatory methodologies.
Quoting Mww
Ah, I see. Yes, fair enough. Philosophy, thus defined does come first. But...(you knew there was going to be one)...what is true of philosophy the practice is not true of any actual philosophy. Rational though comes first. Kant's theory of rational thought doesn't (necessarily).
Quoting Mww
No, but cultural changes can occur for all sorts of reason (my favourite involves Lorenz attractors, it's really cool), which can then lead to changes in culturally mediated paradigms. The change needn't be rational.
Quoting Mww
Not all that far fetched...
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2016.00079/full
..but there are significant differences when it comes to active inference (which has elements of predictive processing, but is not restricted to it) to do with that troublesome second crossing of the Markov boundary which is so often forgotten. The active state. We move, interact with the world, harvest data, even change the world to fit our models better... and all this is part of the process of inference. Does Kant have an equivalent?
Well then we are on the same page it seems.
Quoting Joshs
Not so much 'should' as unproblematically are.
Quoting Joshs
Agreed.
Quoting Joshs
Also agreed.
Quoting Joshs
Absolutely, but there's consistency too, we couldn't think two straight thoughts in a row if every time we thought something it changed the model of the thing we're thinking.
Quoting Joshs
I'm not sure what I've said to give you that impression, but I don't feel that way. My beef, such as it is, is only with the equally culturally embedded philosophies claiming to be anything beyond optional. Optional narratives, I'm all for.
Even if they don't say that we see qualia, the point still stands that colour terms like "red" (can) refer to this qualia, which according to them is a Bayesian model, and so colour terms like "red" don't (only) refer to some property of the external cause of the sensation.
The mistake you seem to be making is to conflate our external world model with the external world. But as they say, "despite holding all the phenomenal facts fixed, how the world really is might vary, even to the point of there being nothing at all bearing the properties so confidently represented as being present" which only makes sense if "the properties so confidently represented as being present" refers to something. And that something is "in the head". This is the sort of thing that colour terms like "red" refer to, even with this Bayesian interpretation of perception, and any further claim of this kind of redness being a property of some external cause of perception is a naive projection.
There is, perhaps undoubtably, some external world property of things that causes most humans to see red (i.e. infer these Bayesian models), but that model (and its properties) isn't that external world thing (or its properties). You can use the same word to refer to both if you want, but as I have said, and as you seem to be demonstrating, that leaves us susceptible to equivocation, and the erroneous claim that there is a "right" way to see things like colour. A human isn't wrong if he sees colours as birds do; his visual system is just atypical of humans.
Interesting paper. Between you and I get all kinds of nifty stuff to rock my epistemic water vessel, so sincere thanks for it.
“.....and he did not set out theories of learning....”
(From the link, under “A Note on the A Priori”
Why would he, when the theory on knowledge he did set out presupposes it? It is either tautologically true, or a useless exercise, to suggest we know things we haven’t the ability to learn. If the former, a theory of learning is unnecessary; if the latter theories of knowledge are all catestrophically irrational.
———
Quoting Isaac
Dunno about changing the world to fit our models; seems sorta backwards to me. Be that as it may......
The active state would be cognition. The process of inference would be the tripartite logical syllogistic functionality between understanding (major), judgement (minor(s)), and reason (conclusion). Now, as you’ve said, albeit in a different way, re: the talking is not the doing, this is how we talk about it, how we represent to ourselves a speculative methodology, but the internal operation in itself, functions under the condition of time alone, such that cognition is possible from that methodology.
Not sure that’s a very good answer, but best I can do with what I’m given, and considering my scant experience with Markov blankets.
Takes nothing away from the paper, though, don’t get me wrong.
The mistakes you think I'm making are ones I'm not. We need not know everything. Our models need not be able to account for everything.
However, if we are to place confidence in a model of meaningful experience(consciousness), it ought be that the model is amenable to terms of evolutionary progression. It ought be simple enough to be able to account for the simplest meaningful experiences while having the richness of potential to be able to account for our own highly complex meaningful experience, as well as all other meaningful experiences in the meantime.
You missed the point of the ontological consideration, and neglected to address the elucidation of the issues raised that followed from my initial reply to you. All good though. No worries.
Multiple models can all be useful and contradict one another. They cannot all be true and contradict one another. Not sure why truth has been invoked here...
Only rational argument, which apparently doesn't cut it.
It sounds right that both are different varieties of direct perception, but the naive view is a (direct) conception of directness, whereas the "hiddenness-savvy framework" is a (direct) conception of indirectness. All our perception and conception seems, experientially speaking, to be direct and that doesn't change even if the conception is of indirectness. We can conceive of indirectness, of hidden process, of lack of immediacy, but we cannot perceive indirectness, we cannot perceive hidden process or lack of immediacy, because if we perceived it it would not be hidden; it would seem immediate to us. That's my take anyway.
Quoting Isaac
So, let's say you are sitting in a room, and you imagine, say, that room full of "solid, clear objects" and yet what you see at any moment is only what you are directly focused on, attending to. You can turn to any of these objects and see them clearly (if the light is sufficient of course). Say you're now staring at your computer screen; it's right there immediately in front of you. That's the sense of direct realism; just that anything you focus your attention on appears right there directly visible, immediately present to you. Of course, the science of perception tells a very different story.
Note, I'm not arguing for the "truth" of one perspective over the other. I also understand that you believe that all views are culturally mediated, but I think it is arguable that the "naive" view is "native", just on account of the fact that perception seems immediate, and it is only when detached, "objective" investigation and analysis is carried out that it is possible to come to the conclusion that perception is not "really" immediate.
[i]To see the contrast, we need to return to a work mentioned earlier, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. In this unjustly-neglected work, Kant tells us that anthropology is the study of human beings from the point of view of their behaviour, especially behaviour toward one another, and of the things revealed in behaviour. Anthropology in this sense contrasts with what Kant understood as empirical psychology, namely the introspective observations of our own mental states. Kant’s rejection of introspection and turn to behaviour have a very contemporary feel to them. (For more on Kant on introspection, see Brook
2004.)
The Anthropology is important for other reasons, too. In particular, it illuminates many things
in Kant’s picture of cognition. To make sense of behaviour, character, etc., Kant urges early in the
work, we must know something of the powers and faculties of the human mind: how it gains
knowledge and controls behaviour. Thus, before we can study character, etc., we must first study the
mind. In fact, this study of the mind (Anthropological Didactic, he calls it) ends up being three quarters of the book. In it, Kant discusses many topics more clearly than anywhere else. In one
amusing passage, Kant indicates that he was, if anything, even more hostile to the use of
introspection to understand the mind than I have indicated. Introspection, he tells us, can be a road to "mental illness" (Ak. VII:161). Strangely enough, Kant never seems to have asked whether
anthropology in his sense could be a science.[/i]
Did Kant become a proto-behaviorist?
[i]Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and other animals.[1] It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual's history, including especially reinforcement and punishment contingencies, together with the individual's current motivational state and controlling stimuli. Although behaviorists generally accept the important role of heredity in determining behavior, they focus primarily on environmental events.
Behaviorism emerged in the early 1900s as a reaction to depth psychology and other traditional forms of psychology, which often had difficulty making predictions that could be tested experimentally, but derived from earlier research in the late nineteenth century, such as when Edward Thorndike pioneered the law of effect, a procedure that involved the use of consequences to strengthen or weaken behavior.
With a 1924 publication, John B. Watson devised methodological behaviorism, which rejected introspective methods and sought to understand behavior by only measuring observable behaviors and events. It was not until the 1930s that B. F. Skinner suggested that covert behavior—including cognition and emotions—is subject to the same controlling variables as observable behavior, which became the basis for his philosophy called radical behaviorism.[2][3] While Watson and Ivan Pavlov investigated how (conditioned) neutral stimuli elicit reflexes in respondent conditioning, Skinner assessed the reinforcement histories of the discriminative (antecedent) stimuli that emits behavior; the technique became known as operant conditioning.
The application of radical behaviorism—known as applied behavior analysis—is used in a variety of contexts, including, for example, applied animal behavior and organizational behavior management to treatment of mental disorders, such as autism and substance abuse.[4][5] In addition, while behaviorism and cognitive schools of psychological thought do not agree theoretically, they have complemented each other in the cognitive-behavior therapies, which have demonstrated utility in treating certain pathologies, including simple phobias, PTSD, and mood disorders.[/i]
From here
So, the mind is not so much "eschewed" as it is understood in terms of reflexes and conditioning, and it is just on account of this understanding that introspection is ruled out, because the introspectively generated story that individuals tells themselves about their motivations and states of minds are not understood to give the "real picture" as to what is going on.
I'm not saying I agree with this view, but just seeking to get clear about what it entails.
That's a very interesting question. One of the papers that @Joshs linked to is about that - Killing the Straw Man: Dennett and Phenomenology. It distinguishes between the 'straw man' depiction of introspection as the mere 'reporting of what comes to mind', and the discipline involved in phenomenological analysis illustrated with reference to Husserl's Logical Investigations.
Skinner was one of the two guys I loved to hate as an undergrad. (The other being Ayer.)
I did read that paper at the time it was linked, and I'd have to go back to it to be sure, for which I don't have time right now, but from memory Zahavi points out that the practice of phenomenology does not consist in introspection as it is usually understood, but in reflection on the nature of experience just as it immediately seems to us,"back to the things themselves" (not the "things in themselves" :wink: ) . This latter would seem to consist in a kind of generalizing exercise of the memory. Maybe @Joshs will give his perspective here.
Yes, it depends on how much it changes. Our faces are changing all the time, but I might still recognize someone I haven't seen for twenty years.
Now you contradict yourself. You said very distinctly and explicitly: "Everything within the cell membrane is the system, everything outside of it is not". Now you say the boundary itself is inside the system. Or are you saying now, that the membrane is inside itself, being both inside the system, and the thing which everything within it is inside the system? The membrane is inside itself?
So let me get this straight. The membrane is not the boundary, as you said earlier, the membrane is inside the system, therefore part of the system, and inside any proq|aaposed boundary. What is the boundary then?
I suggest that you do not have a "boundary" at all, just principles whereby you judge some things as part of the system, and other things as not part of the system. And unless your principles are stated as spatial principles, your use of the spatial terms "internal" and "external" is misleading. The parts of "a system" may be scattered around the world, like a network of microwave communications, certain things being designated as part of the system, and other things as being not part of the system, and to use spatial terms like "internal" and "external" is rather misleading, because the things which are not a part of the system are intermingled with the things which are.
Would you agree with this characterization? If there is not a spatial boundary which circumscribes an area of inside, leaving another area as outside, then really what you have is a judgement as to which things are a part of the system, and which things are not. And the things which are not a part of the system could be physically inside the system, or they could be physically outside the system. So for example, the molecules which pass through the cell membrane in the process of osmosis, may or may not be part of the system both before and after they pass through the membrane, depending on how one models "the system", how things are included as part of the system. Being inside or outside the membrane is an arbitrary difference, if the membrane is assumed to be part of the system, because the membrane is not a boundary in this sense.
Nice.
————-
Quoting Janus
The answer is in the paper. Simply put: we don’t.
The problem with this way of modeling is that it sets a boundary to the outside of the system, but it does not set a boundary to the inside. As Isaac describes, everything inside the boundary is designated as inside the system. This means that causal influences which change the system must come from outside the system. The only change caused from within could be the cause of the entropy of the second law of thermodynamics.
Consider a sphere, and all within the sphere is internal to the system. Now suppose there are changes to the system which cannot be accounted for by outside influence. A simple example could be the cause of existence of the system itself. We cannot say that it is the system which causes these changes because the system on its own can only follow the second law of thermodynamics. And in the simple example we'd have to conclude that the system caused itself.
But if we put a boundary to the inside of the system, suppose an infinitesimally small centre to the sphere, and we allow that this "internal" is not a part of the system itself, that problem is resolved. We can now have internal causation to the system, which is not a part of the system proper.
This is why systems theory is not very good for this type of modeling, it only imposes one boundary, between the system and everything else. In reality though, we need two boundaries, one between the system and the external, and one between the system and the internal, because the system is always going to exist as a medium between the two extremes, which are not part of the system itself.
Here's a Bayesian model
P(S1,…,Sn)=?i=1np(Si|parents(Si))
What colour is it?
If that’s what they mean by quaila being a Bayesian model then they’re demonstrably wrong because nothing like that happens when I see red, or indeed when I see anything. Perception/experience isn’t maths. So it’s as the first paper I referenced said: this Markov blanket theory says nothing about the philosophical hard problem of consciousness, it’s just a mathematical description of an organism’s functional response to stimuli.
Regardless, they’re the ones saying that redness is a Bayesian model, not me. My point is only that by their own account of perception redness isn’t a property of some external stimulus, contrary to your claims.
Happy to help.
Quoting Mww
It's just about direction of fit. If I have a model of my lounge and the chair's not actually in the place I was expecting it to be, I don't have to update my model, I can move the chair.
Quoting Mww
About as extensive as my understanding of Kant, so it's a wonder either of us can understand a word the other says. I'll give this some thought though. First impression is that cognition can't be an active state because it doesn't interact with the external states, but...
Could you perhaps repeat it for me?
You made claims about what philosophy is able to do. I asked if it actually did. there's no rational argument can be brought to bear on that question. It's answered with examples.
Thanks. I'll stick it on the reading list. Have you mentioned it to @Mww?
To study the mind presupposes it. So.....if mind is the unconditioned relative to human cognitive systems, what is there that can presuppose? To posit an antecedent to an unconditioned is a contradiction. Which relates to introspection, in that the mind ends up studying itself, which must be impossible. Now we got all kindsa metaphysical roadblocks, in that we are mistaking the replication of the doing of the deed, for the deed itself being done.
It just may be Kant’s greatest philosophical gift was not to try to explain stuff that didn’t need it.
As usual, I have no idea what you're talking about. The Markov boundary is a statistical feature of a network. It's not an object. It is at the membrane, not the membrane itself.
How would you know. Do you have privileged and unfettered access to everything that happens in your brain?
There are several experiments which show that the mental processing of sensory inputs is, at least, extremely similar to Bayesian modelling, as subjects update expectations with almost exactly the same function as would a computer carrying out Bayesian modelling.
Not only that, but once you define a self-perpetuating system, then it's state, by definition can be defined by the Fokker-Plank equation (a probability function of the state of any system which has an attractor - a shape, or state it tries to maintain against random decay). When you write this equation from the position of the system's inferences about the external world (which it must have in order to resits random decay) they come out exactly identical to Bayesian model evidence functions.
So it's not only evidentially demonstrated that you carry out these functions, but it is mathematically demonstrated too.
Quoting Michael
They're not. They're saying that our experience of certainty during the modelling of red objects about the the colour is itself a meta-theory about perception which (like all our models) can be expressed in Bayesian terms.
Quoting Michael
That's not anywhere in the text. I've already explained what the purpose of the paper is, it's written in the introduction to it. It is explaining the prevalence of certainty in our meta-theory about perception. It makes no reference whatsoever to what 'red' is actually a property of. The whole paper is about the role that the idea of qualia plays in our meta-theory of perception. It's not even about actual qualia as a part of the brain's process of perception.
"Our claim is that when the brain estimates that a suite of mid-level re-codings, couched in terms of features such as redness, roundness, loudness, pulsatingness etc. etc., as highly certain, it can simultaneously compute that this vivid set of (perhaps 100% agent-certain) contents is consistent with multiple ways the real world might be."
It quite clearly uses the words "redness", "roundness", "loudness", "pulsatingness", etc. to refer to "mid-level re-codings", not to any property of the external stimuli, and distinguishes this "vivid set of ... contents" from "[the] ways the real world might be."
It's in the first sentence. Is there something you're not understanding about the subject matter of the paper because I keep repeating this and you keep ignoring it.
The entire paper is about why we might report our experiences that way, not what our experiences actually are. If you want to translate it into what 'red' refers to it would be the trivially true statement that, for some, 'red' refers to the quale 'red' when they are verbally reporting their meta-theory of perception.
We can see that quite clearly here, as that's exactly the way you're using 'red' throughout this whole thread.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual process of perception. It has nothing whatsoever to do with normal everyday use of the word 'red'. It is to do with exactly what they specify in the very first sentence of the paper.
That's what I've been trying to explain to you all along. When I say that I see a blue dress and you say that you see a red dress, you and I have different qualia (however you want to make sense of qualia), and that in this context the colour terms "red" and "blue" refer to this qualia.
Quoting Isaac
The claim is not that we actually have qualia, it is explaining why we might think we have qualia when thinking about perception.
And going back to this, no, I don't, but I do know how to speak English and use colour-terms like "red" and "blue", and so it is a mistake to think that some in-depth scientific and mathematical account of brain activity and sensory experience determines what we mean by such words.
What I do have access to is qualia, and it is this qualia that directs my use of colour terms like "red" and "blue".
The paper concludes "[our story] is realist in that it identifies qualia with distinctive mid-level sensory states known with high systemic (and 100% agentive) certainty."
It's quite clearly accepting that we have qualia, it's just arguing that qualia is something other than the "raw data" that some think it to be.
So, again, nothing in either this paper on the "hard problem" of consciousness or the other paper on the responsiveness to sensory impressions supports your claim that being red is (only) an external world property.
So the papers identifying out-of-body experiences with certain activity in the parietal and premotor cortices, is saying that we do actually have out-of-body experiences?
Or, is it saying that we feel like we have out of body experiences (but don't really) because of the modeling assumptions of those regions?
We could say the same about the 'god' neurons. I suppose they prove we actually do speak to god?
And schizophrenia? Identifying the models which give the impression of external voices proves schizophrenics really do hear external voices?
I don't know. I don't understand what relevance other papers have to what this paper is explicitly saying? It quite clearly says "qualia [are] distinctive mid-level sensory states known with high systemic ... certainty".
If you want to argue that this account is problematic then you need to speak to the authors, not to me.
The fact that you've had to change the wording of the quote to make it match your conclusion says it all.
I didn't change it to match my conclusion. I changed it so that the grammar flows better. But if you prefer:
I don't know. I don't understand what relevance other papers have to what this paper is explicitly saying? It quite clearly says "[our story] identifies qualia with distinctive mid-level sensory states known with high systemic (and 100% agentive) certainty".
If you want to argue that this account is problematic then you need to speak to the authors, not to me.
The account is not problematic. It merely identifies the subjective certainty about qualia with some meta-theoretical models.
Other papers have identified feelings of 'speaking to god' with certain neural clusters very active in a few people.
Other papers have identified out-of-body experiences with modeling activity in the parietal and premotor cortices.
Other papers have identified the schizophrenic's 'demon voices' with failures of backwards acting suppressive models in the autidory system.
None of these papers are saying that the phenomena is actually happening as it reported. We don't actually talk to god, we don't actually have out-of-body experiences, we don't actually hear demons, and we don't actually see qualia. The authors of each paper have merely identified the.modeling processes associated with those reports.
This is misleading. The schizophrenic does hear voices[sup]1[/sup], she's just wrong to interpret these voices as belonging to some demon (or person, or something external to herself). Qualitative experiences don't depend on there being some "corresponding" external world stimulus, and we have words like "red" and "painful" that refer to features of these qualitative experiences, e.g. the voices the schizophrenic hears have a tone, a pitch, a pace, a volume, etc.
[sup]1[/sup]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK557633
True, it doesn’t. But external states are absolutely necessary for the representations (empirical) cognition does act upon. Activity herein being internally systemic. All in accordance with a specific speculative theory, hence not necessarily the case. Feasible, possible, non-contradictory....sure; the way things really are........ehhhhh, maybe not.
———-
Quoting Isaac
And here is a perfect example of the depth of Kantian metaphysics. Think about it for a minute: you say you are amazed you can understand a word I say, but it is probably closer to the truth that you understand perfectly well what I say. The possible obscurity resides in the judgement you make upon receiving what I say, when you compare it to what you mean by the same word or conception you already possess.
The tripartite system in action:
(Deleted for being too long and dawn out, and perhaps only of passing interest anyway)
That's the point. They seem external. The authors identified the models associated with them seeming external, but they are not actually external.
People seem to have qualia. The authors identified the models associated with them seeming to have qualia, but they do not actually have qualia.
That's not what they say. They say that qualia isn't what most people think it is:
It's right there in the quote. They're saying that qualia – colours, sights, and sounds – aren't "raw experiential data" but are "generative model posits".
And again:
And I'll add something else from the conclusion:
We see red, not because the external world stimulus has some property of being red, but because of something going on "in the head". They just make sense of what goes on "in the head" as being a Bayesian inference rather than as the occurrence of "raw experiential data".
What is it you understand by 'generative model posits'? What definition of generative model posit are you using?
I'm not using any, I'm repeating what they're saying. Another quote:
Do you want to argue that this theory says that dogs and cats don't exist?
You're selecting bits of what they're saying with virtually no knowledge of the field and no understanding of the theoretical context, but instead of finding out what it means, you're arguing with someone who could explain it to you.
It is quite an advanced paper in cognitive science, it's embedded in a whole theoretical framework about which you know virtually nothing.
I've tried to explain it to you, but I'm not going to continue to bang my head against a wall. If you really think you can now argue positions in cognitive science after scanning a couple of papers, using terminology you admit you don't even know the meaning of, then there seems little point continuing.
Yes. It's a paper about cognitive science, you need to understand the terminology and theoretical context to understand it. I would have thought that was obvious.
The Zahavi paper that Wayfarer linked to tries to show how Husserlian phenomenology allows us to avoid the metaphysical trap that you , Kant and Dennett are stuck in. Specifically, it doesn’t begin from a notion of mind as an unconditioned ‘inside’. It begins from an irreducible
a priori of correlation that produces both what we call mind and what we call external objects.
I asked you what one of the terms they used earlier meant and you replied that you didn't know.
What do you understand by...
in the first quote?
To what do you think they're referring when they reference...
in the second quote?
What is the sense of 'model' and 'hypothesis' they mean in terms of active inference when they say...
in the third quote (which also references active inference)
And we've not even touched on the theoretical framework, the context, nor the paragraphs around the ones you've picked...
Functional integration and the mind, Jakob Hohwy
But I don't even know why I even need to quote this. The previous quote of Friston, especially about seeing red, is enough. It's quite clearly a form of indirect realism. It just replaces the usual notion of "raw sense data" with something else.
You could also call it neo-Kantianism.
1
Forthcoming in Husserl Studies. Please quote from published version.
Brain, Mind, World: Predictive coding, neo-Kantianism, and transcendental idealism:
https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/54174325/Predictive_coding-libre.pdf?1503060419=&response-content-disposition=attachment%3B+filename%3DBrain_Mind_World_Predictive_coding_neo_K.pdf&Expires=1658349141&Signature=TJReJgoXSnrRGvSTjMJaS3tz2IQ~hDWuXZYU4wRrOJz39Z8153gr7B5I2PRAvZVrU4hM7qlXWolX~Yt8sPnoPuROVJrLLv5G1J~G1EQKXVUwnmgXcq6Pu-t5kCgGXw~CHlm7wmoX91ej5iKrDfsG67W9MJdOTvPPCwb4jmirprYFBld2GOF3b4m8KZbZr24jcYJlEVdan1gQ5elYii4oaU1sVRFBbOM5FqjJ9-yVueeGYOxp0Vzjbw~meSlCKY74Y36Q-5nCh5lrEMAX5uQlWRGz7KUl3k9J0oudgjmxICP3SkUp~Nb3NTLp6PdhEGOerJHMBvOu38Y-cLqCAZkFbA__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA
Hey.....
Yeah, I read the paper, happy with it, good for some to hang his hat on, but, I’m good with what I know.
Thing is....mind is just a catch-all, a logical placeholder to prevent infinite regress, having nothing to do with speculative theoretics as a system. For instance, in searchable Guyer/Wood (1998) CPR, brain has four returns, mind 176, but reason has 1400+.
So there is no metaphysical trap, per se. Mind is just that which is conceived when we....carelessly......step one idea over the explanatory threshold.
My opinion only, of course.
How would you articulate a model of reason that didn’t make use of a notion of mind( or subjectivity)?
Wait, do the authors actually state that? Because what Michael quoted seems to say the opposite:
Maybe you prefer to call it "virtual red" instead of "red quale", but it plays the same intrinsic, immediate, private, ineffable role Dennett so wanted to quine. The only difference being that color is part of a virtual reality model instead of a Cartesian Theater.
Truth be told, I must admit to only being able to articulate someone else’s model. I ain’t nowhere’s near smart enough to come up with a decent, original myself. But then, I don’t need to repeat what’s already been done.
OK, so....a model.
First, some assumptions:
.....does a human being think (or whatever one choses to call that pesky voice in his head that never seems to shut the hell up).....check;
.....does a human being receive sensory data (or whatever one choses to call that oh-so-subtle imaging process in his head that only goes away when he chose not to need it).....check;
.....does a human being ask himself, even if only once in awhile, about stuff for which he has no answer, and then, if he has no answer, creates one that makes him feel good....check;
.....is there stuff in the human intelligence in general, no matter which head contains it, the denial of which is impossible....check.
Given those assumptions, enter the guy that figures out a bunch of parts, assembles them into an explanatory method sufficient to turn those assumptions into succession of logically consistent internal mental events.
And there’s your model. Which fine for the talking, but means not a damn thing to the doing. I’m mean.....you gotta use the very thing you’re trying to model. Every abstract cognitive notion suffers the same map/territory paradoxical circularity. But whatcha gonna do, when you don’t even know with apodeictic certainty what you have to work with.
Yes. The entire paper is (as is stated very clearly at the outset) about our meta-model of perception - why we feel we have qualia.
Yes. The author (and me, for what it's worth) consider perception indirect. The wording in this quote again could not be more clear about what 'red' refers to. "inferring that something is red". Something. Not the inference itself, some external thing.
Look at the part you haven't bolded.
And again here...
'Red' is referred to as a shared external property.
The paper is arguing that we model something like qualia in our meta-model of perception (not the process of perception itself) because it helps us to imagine keeping that part of the inference steady whilst changing others which helps with prediction. It's a tool in a model. Not even a model involved in perception, but in the higher order reflective models of consciousness (which would be clearer if one had read Friston's work on active inference and consciousness).
What's being confused here is the indirectness of perception and the properties of the percept. The process of perception is pretty clear (it's very well studied). Colour is determined in a stage in the iterative process that is prior to object recognition (except in cases of plain colour swatches to which we respond slightly differently). It is not possible with the current mechanisms we know about, for a person's actual perception to 'see' a red dress as an internal model. 'Red' is modeled by the V4 region (primarily) which is close to the optic nerve itself (in network terms). Our conscious awareness is several dozen steps removed and several seconds behind. For us to actually have a 'red' quale would require us to model affect directly from that V4 region, and we cannot (despite looking) find any evidence of such a process. Any affect modeling is from a red dress, or a red post box, or a red car, from which percept we later, artificially extract the 'red' as a qualia-like inference, to render prediction of, say, a green post box.
But how can thoughts be studied if not by examining them? Is it possible to examine thoughts by introspection? If we could do that it would involve putting the thoughts into language, which is a kind of behavior.
Is it possible to examine images by introspection? I don't know about others, but my experience tells me I cannot hold images in mind steadily enough to examine them, so I would need to draw or paint them, or describe then in writing; again behavior and its results. So, it does look like we are back to examining behavior and its products as the only means to understand the purported entity we call the mind.
When you think about it the same thing goes for matter: it also is not determinably anything more than a concept and the only way to study and understand it is via studying its behavior and resulting forms. So we are back to studying behavior, results, phenomena; in other words we are back to phenomenology.
You understand why that is implicitly empiricist? In any case, the examples of philosophy are, of course, the philosophers, although that looses cogency in modern culture, where the subject has become an academic speciality (except for the exemplary few actual popular philosophers, like Jules Evans, Alain du Bouton, Eckhart Tolle.)
How could the mind be a concept? The mind is the faculty by which concepts are grasped. Of course, completely defining something as basic as 'concept' is a tricky business but going with the dictionary entry '1. something conceived in the mind : thought, notion. 2 : an abstract or generic idea generalized from particular instances the basic concepts of psychology the concept of gravity.' So, the mind is the faculty which can grasp concepts, but that doesn't make the mind itself a concept, although philosophers will have various concepts of mind.
We know there is an idea of mind, and we can stipulate that if there are ideas, there must be minds to "have" them, but since there is no mind to be found, we cannot rationally conclude that it is anything more than a stipulation, or a name for the process of generating and becoming aware of ideas.
Kant's idea of mind has been revisited in the latter half of the 20th Century in the form of functionalism according to the SEP:
[i]In general structure, Kant’s model of the mind was the dominant model in the empirical psychology that flowed from his work and then again, after a hiatus during which behaviourism reigned supreme (roughly 1910 to 1965), toward the end of the 20th century, especially in cognitive science. Central elements of the models of the mind of thinkers otherwise as different as Sigmund Freud and Jerry Fodor are broadly Kantian, for example.
Three ideas define the basic shape (‘cognitive architecture’) of Kant’s model and one its dominant method. They have all become part of the foundation of cognitive science.
The mind is a complex set of abilities (functions). (As Meerbote 1989 and many others have observed, Kant held a functionalist view of the mind almost 200 years before functionalism was officially articulated in the 1960s by Hilary Putnam and others.)
The functions crucial for mental, knowledge-generating activity are spatio-temporal processing of, and application of concepts to, sensory inputs. Cognition requires concepts as well as percepts.
These functions are forms of what Kant called synthesis. Synthesis (and the unity in consciousness required for synthesis) are central to cognition.[/i]
The only way to study anything at all, is to represent it as a phenomenon if it’s a real object, or as a conception if it’s an abstract object. But the human system, predicated on relations, can cognize nothing by a single representation, insofar as a single representation doesn’t have anything to which it relates. So to study a thought, considered as an abstract object in itself, and without regard to the content of it, it must be turned into a conception. How can we conceive of something that has no content?
(“...Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions, blind....”)
And if we think of the thought we’re studying as having the relation which made it a thought in the first place, such that it is not an empty nothing, all we’re doing is re-creating, not studying, what we’ve already thought. All that does for us is confuse the matter, insofar as that which we re-create cannot be distinguished from that which is already in consciousness, which means we might not have re-created anything, but just recalled it. In which case, we’re studying something we already know all about.
Which brings up another issue. If it is the case that thoughts are singular and successive, then each thought is of its own time. If it is impossible to jump back to the time of a thought and to jump to the future of a possible thought, then no thought can be studied insofar as its time is not the time of the thought that studies it. We can study the contents of any thought, provided such content is common to a multiplicity of thoughts......but not the singular abstract conception itself.
Much more parsimonious, and less self-contradictory, to study what it is to think, rather than study a thought. We might be alright if we limit introspection to the examination of the relation of faculties to each other, but introspection becomes hopelessly tangled if we use it to examine the faculties themselves.
Besides....best to keep it as simple as possible, but no simpler than necessary. Somebody mentioned that some time ago...can’t remember who.
So if I look at a cell membrane through a microscope, I will see a "statistical feature of a network" there "at the membrane"? If not, then what do you mean by "it is at the membrane"?
It seems to me, like you are stuck in a huge category mistake, and instead of accepting this you dig yourself deeper in. The "network" is supposed to be the thing being modeled, the statistics are the modeling tool.
Do you see, that in systems theory, a "system" is a model, not the thing being modeled. They take a natural thing, and assume that the thing can be compared to a system a true system being an artificial thing, not a natural thing). So they create a model of a system which is comparable to the natural thing. But the natural thing cannot be called a system because systems are artificial.
The reason why I say systems theory is flimsy, is that instead of recognizing how big the differences are between the actual natural thing, and the model system which it is compared to, systems theory ontologies tend to find ways to dismiss or overlook all these big differences, and insist that the systems model provides a good representation.
All the things we hear, see, touch, and otherwise sense, "seem external", but this does not necessarily mean that any of them actually are. That is the point.
Exactly, thoughts cannot be understood except as they are expressed in language. Is it meaningful to conceive of a thought as being a contentless "abstract object"? Sans content what else could we think of a thought as but an activity that has a certain quality or "feel" or image or set of images to it, or else as a neural process (which as such is outside of our awareness)? Content just is symbolic, linguistic; what else could it be?
Quoting Mww
This I don't agree with if I've understood what you're trying to say. It seems we are thinking all the time, while not being conscious of most of it, So to think is one thing; while to be aware of thinking is another. To have a thought is one thing, and to be aware of having that thought is another.
Quoting Mww
I'm not sure what you are getting at here, so I'll just note that thoughts can be written down and studied at leisure, but of course that would be studying the content, not the experience, of thinking.
Quoting Mww
I agree, and this is in line with what I said earlier: that phenomenology consists in reflecting on the general nature of experience. Thinking is one kind of experience, sensing is another. Because we are capable of self-awareness, we can reflect on how thinking and sensing are experienced. on how the doing of them seems to us, and how they differ from one another. But this is only ever going to tell us how they seem to us, not what they are in any imagined "absolute" sense.
And of course there is always the danger of being "bewitched by language". It is interesting that Wittgenstein said: “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.” It is ambiguous as to whether it is the battle or the bewitchment which is "by means of our language"; I think it is both.
:100:
Are you suggesting that it can be deduced rationally that philosophers succeed at doing what they claim to do? That we can rationally determine that if a philosopher claims to study 'the unconditioned' that they succeed in that endeavour?
We're talking about cultural presuppositions here. Ideas that seem to true by virtue of common sense, but which, when examined, turn out to be merely assumptions from one's culture.
You're claiming that scientists have such unexamined preconceptions (materialism, causality, etc), but that philosophers don't have any because "they say they don't".
I have no idea what a systems theory ontology might be. Systems theory is a modeling tool. It makes useful predictions and sets up the parameters of useful frameworks. It doesn't bring things into existence. The cell pre-existed systems theory, which merely describes how the cell functions in statistical terms.
I've no clue what you're arguing against, but it isn't anything I've claimed.
They may not be successful, but that is what the purpose ought to be. (It is what the rationalist philosophers were all about!) Of course, as I've said, I recognise that in modern philosophy that is not at all the case, I have more in mind the traditional conception of philosophy up until the time of Descartes.
The unexamined preconceptions I'm referring to aren't matters of personal prejudice - they're the well-recognised assumptions of the scientific attitude of Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and the other founders of modern science. If you study philosophy of science (Kuhn, Feyerabend, Polanyi) it is the subject of considerable analysis.
Right. So both scientists and philosophers actually work under unexamined cultural presuppositions, but the difference is that philosophers claim not to. Whereas almost everyone knows and agrees that scientists do.
I don't see that as a positive for philosophy. If anything it's a downside. If you're going to work under cultural presuppositions, you might as well have it out in the open.
You must mean one’s thoughts cannot be understood by another except as they are expressed in language.
Quoting Janus
What else it could be is precisely what it is. Content of any particular thought is the schema/schemata of the conception/s representing it. The schemata are represented by images. Therefore the content of thought is the schema/schemata of the conception/s contained in it. A symbolic, linguistic representation nowhere yet to be found. Images as representations are rational, imbued in all humans; language as representation is cultural imbued in particular humans. Images are common across all subjects, words are not.
But surely you know all that, so.....what gives?
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Quoting Janus
Yes, we’re thinking continuously while conscious, and the fact we’re not aware of most of it is reflection on our laziness on the one hand, and the simplistic, repetitive lives we lead on the other. So busy impressing everybody else we overlook ourselves. Got this one-of-a-kind intellectual gift, and don’t know shit about how it works.
(Wanders off, muttering insults, kicking the fake rubber tree pot and the way out.....)
Oh good, because when you say things like "The only truly closed system is the universe so any part of it decreasing entropy is not defying the second law", and ""Everything within the cell membrane is the system, everything outside of it is not", you give me the impression that you think that things like the universe, and a cell, actually are, each, a different type of "system".
Now that we're clear on what a "system" is, a predictive modeling tool, do you see from the evidence I've provided you with, that systems theory would be a very flimsy sort of tool for modeling the true reality of things like the universe and a cell? Really, systems theory is not a good tool for modeling the true existence of any type of object or thing. As a simple predictive tool its usefulness is very limited to simple predictions, therefore there is no real place for it in ontology.
Then again, you don't seem to hold philosophy in much esteem.
No. I have absolutely no idea what you're going on about.
On the contrary, I think it's a very important activity. Holding an activity in high esteem does not require that I treat its practitioners with a reverence that the practitioners of equally esteemed activities are not blessed with.
Or do you hold science in low esteem?
Yet you're judging philosophers by a much less stringent standard than scientists. Scientists are marked down for actually having unexamined preconceptions, whereas philosophers can merely claim not to have any (having apparently examined them all) and you require nothing further to take that as gospel.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm very fond of empiricism in many aspects of life. I don't see how that leads to me being unable to see how the alternatives could exist. I just don't prefer them.
It's like me saying that because you don't like heavy metal, you don't see how anyone could. It's not the same judgement.
I can see perfectly well how alternatives to empiricism might exist. I don't find them persuasive (in those contexts where I prefer an empirical approach).
I'm no expert on philosophy, not by a long way, but I don't think that my disagreeing with certain philosophical approaches is, alone, evidence that I've not understood them.
I don’t consider myself expert either, I did two two years of undergrad and have since read a bit. But I do know that it’s a different subject to cognitive science.
Absolutely. But can you seriously claim that nothing you've learnt about the world empirically has informed any of your metaphysical positions? Would you be of the same worldview had you spent your life in a cave as you are having spent it in the world?
All I'm trying to do here is bring what I know (cognitive science, psychology) to the discussion, together with the consequences I think that knowledge has for our options with regards to metaphysical positions.
If you believe that metaphysical positions are completely unconstrained by empirical observation, then I can see that this sort of approach is not for you, but I don't think it's in the least bit an odd position in philosophy to consider that results from the empirical sciences inform our metaphysics.
You yourself frequently cite discoveries in quantum physics in support of your idealism. Should we levy the same complaint against you. Philosophy is not quantum physics!
You do, and while I respect the discipline it often tends to be a pretty one-way street. It’s like ‘if you want to demonstrate the limitations of empiricism you’d better have darn good empirical evidence.’
Besides from an empirical pov the OP question is meaningless - it goes without saying that there’s an external material world (indeed someone started an OP on exactly that point.) Naturalism starts with the accepted reality of the sense-able domain, and from within that framework of course there’s an external material world. It’s only a meaningful question when you start to question what ‘material’ really means, or what ‘external’ really means. And that’s where metaphysical or meta-cognitive considerations come into play. That’s the sense in which it’s a philosophical question.
Of course we’re all subject to and influenced by the environment and circumstances. I’m not a cave-dwelling hermit. Where I started my philosophical quest was in pursuit of spiritual illumination. Strange as it seems, that used to be a real part of philosophy although it is long forgotten and now abandoned. But as I’m not a tenured academic with a publishing career I’m not obliged to conform with current intellectual fashion. But that’s the metaphysical thread I’m attempting to follow through the labyrinth.
Yet you've raised the apparent consequences of the double slit experiment in this very thread. Are you suggesting that wasn't an empirical observation? Or are you suggesting that, for example, a naive materialist need take no notice at all of that empirical result because empirical data need not constrain our metaphysics? Is materialism rescued after all? The main evidence thrown against it is from quantum physics.
No, I mean it is impossible to think anything complex, anything involving symbols,anything that involves more than simple sensory-motor images, without language.
Quoting Mww
None of this makes any sense to me, or accords with my own experience of what is involved in thinking. I don't know; maybe it's different for others, but I cannot see how it is possible to think anything discursive without language. I mean how would you think, for example, what I just wrote in that last sentence if you possessed no language? I have no idea why you would think that surely I would know something that I actually think is patently false. Complex concepts are possible only when there is language and via language, or so it seems to me, and I can think of absolutely no reason to believe otherwise.
Quoting Mww
How could we possibly be constantly aware of the stream of thought, when we need to be aware of other things, what we are doing, the environment around us, how we are feeling, how others are feeling and so on? My own experience tells me that conscious attention can only be focused on one thing at a time. The "internal dialogue" is like a sub-routine most of the time, or at least that's what reflection on my own experience tells me. I don't deny that maybe it's different for others, but the many people I have discussed this with over the years have confirmed that their experience is in accordance with my own experience, and I find it hard to believe that people are all that different.
I am curious as to whom your "muttered insults" are directed.
The debate over quantum physics is a debate over the meaning of the experiments. You can’t question what is observed - that is the empirical fact. But what it means is another matter. That’s the way in which quantum physics forced metaphysics back into the discourse. The naive materialist can completely ignore the question and just carry on using the method for his or her purposes - the attitude known as ‘shut up and calculate’. Quantum physics expertise is required for a huge range of disciplines and techniques nowadays, and many of those using it do exactly that.
Actually, as philosophers, we can and ought to question what is observed. There are two principal facets of observation. First, the person prepares oneself into a position to observe. This is the perspective one takes, and the perspective greatly influences what is observed. So for example, observations in quantum physics are done through the means of instruments. And we ought to question the observational capacity of these instruments. Second, an observation is what is noted. So an observer notes what one thinks is important, and chooses one's words to describe what is observed. So we can question why somethings are noted, and others not, and we can also question the observer's choice of words in describing what is observed.
So does the double slit experiment constrain metaphysics or not?
Here's a couple if examples of what I mean about the way you use the double-slit experiment.
...and my personal favourite...
What's going on here? The double-slit experiment doesn't constrain (or free-up) our metaphysical notions at all, yet you dedicate entire threads to the consequences, you consider the results to have "torpedoed" realism?
Hey thanks for taking the trouble to find all those quotes, but I don't really understand what you're asking. What I'm arguing in all of those is that quantum physics has a tendency to undermine scientific realism. This is not news. There has been a lot of commentary and controversy about this point since the 1920's. So what's the question again?
I think it's more the case that quantum physics does not seem to offer a realistic picture of what is going on at the "fundamental" level; but that does not equate to "undermining scientific realism", it' seems more that it just doesn't appear to support it.
Also, if it is true, as has been claimed, that the MWI is the interpretation that enjoys majority consensus, then that would mean that a realist interpretation is the one most favored among physicists.
I can't find anything that supports this.
From here.
Philip Ball on why the many worlds interpretation sucks.
Bernard D'Espagnat says what we call reality is just a state of mind.
The only definite fact in all of this is that quantum physics undermines realism.
I definitely have favorite interpretations of subjects I'm not qualified in, can't seem to help it. But I certainly attempt to approach discussion of those subjects with a little humility, especially when speaking to experts on it.
I admire your nonpartisanship, but I don't always manage it.
Why you consider the conclusion of cognitive science to place no constraints on what one can believe metaphysically about the mind, but the conclusions from physics do place a constraint on what one can believe metaphysically about the world.
What has physics got that cognitive science doesn't?
It seems an awful lot like cherry-picking. You've found some results in the sciences which support your pre-existing beliefs so you bang that drum. When results from the sciences do not support your pre-existing beliefs, you claim science has no place in philosophy.
Quoting Wayfarer
No it doesn't. I have a book on my shelf about many worlds in which the intro reads "All the chapters start from the point of realism". It's by Simon Saunders a professor in the philosophy of physics at Oxford.
His position is that of structural realism. The SEP describes it as...
Quoting Wayfarer
But again this is not a fact, since it is only that QM doesn't offer a realistic picture of what seems to be going on, and that is not the same thing as "undermining realism".
Apparently several interpretations qualify as realist; it would be interesting to find out overall percentages of support for realist vs anti-realist interpretations.
I should qualify what I said: I don't refrain from having opinions about some subjects, even though I am not officially qualified therein. If I have read a lot in some area I may feel I am sufficiently qualified to hold an opinion. That definitely doesn't apply to QM, because it is not merely a matter of reading; it is arguable that you are not qualified unless you understand the math.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't think so.
Quoting Bell’s Theorem: 3.3. On “local realism”
My bolding. There are devils in the detail here, to be sure, but the only definite fact in all of this is that the metaphysical implications of quantum mechanics, if any, are far from settled.
Sure. But if it didn’t challenge scientific realism, then there wouldn’t even be a metaphysical question.
Well, herein lies the problem. We now have "local realism", "realism" per se, and "scientific realism"...
So which is it? And what is it that is challenged? What is realism?
And just for the record, here's my own present favourite again, for the purposes of full disclosure: Quantum Wittgenstein
The physicist Sean Carrol (Mindscape podcast) favors it. I've listened to a sampling from a few physics-related podcasts recently, and the Copenhagen Interpretation has been heavily criticized on all of them for the measurement problem (and the idea of probability waves interacting to form interference patterns), while MWI tends to get a lot of respect. I do know that the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder (popular YT channel), who works on the foundations of physics, criticizes both. But she's a fan of Superdeterminism, which isn't terribly popular. I don't see it in the poll above. It's a hidden variables realist version that doesn't violate locality, because experimental results are predetermined (or known) by the universe in advance, somehow.
Quoting Janus
Quoting Wayfarer
I note that you've downgraded your claim from "undermining" to "challenging". I'm not sure QM even challenges realism, although I think it's fair to say that some interpretations don't offer a realistic picture of what is going on at the "fundamental" level. I guess you could count that as a challenge for realism if you accept an anti-realist interpretation.
What is at issue is the naturalist assumption that the Universe just is as it is, and will be that way, without any observer present. That is what I call 'realism', and it has been called into question by these discoveries. It is documented in many books, such as Manjit Kumar: Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and The Great Debate about the Nature of Reality. Ask yourself: why would this book have that sub-title if there were no such debate? Do you think he's just making stuff up? (Read it if you want to find out.) Another useful book I've read is David Lindley's Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science :
So, what are these 'shocking implications'? Why did Neils Bohr feel compelled to ask, after delivering a lecture to the Vienna Circle and recieving their sanguine applause, 'if you're not shocked by quantum physics, then you can't possibly have understood it!' (this anecdote is recounted in Heisenberg's book, Physics and Beyond.)
I could produce a dozen more passages, but I will only mention only a couple more from the interview with Chris Fuchs whose interpretation is called Quantum Bayesianism, normally contracted to QBism. I've bolded the passage that I think articulates the important point.
Some other snippets:
Those familiar with non-dualism will recognise that.
Charles Pinter also mentions QBism in this comment:
Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 167). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.
My take: mind is nothing objectively existent, there really is no such thing. But we never know anything apart from it.
You appear to conflate two difference senses of "realism". In the context of the phrase "scientific realism" it's contrasted with "scientific instrumentalism". Scientific realism says that scientific theories are "true" in the sense that the world is as the theories say, whereas scientific instrumentalism says that our scientific theories are just useful or not.
The kind of realism that can be called into question by quantum mechanics is that of counterfactual definiteness, which asserts that there are objects and that they have properties even before they are measured.
When the observational evidence does not support a particular metaphysical perspective, isn't this a case of undermining that metaphysics? Metaphysics, as speculative, is not "proven" per se, it is supported or not supported. How much evidence inconsistent with a particular metaphysical perspective is required before one accepts that the metaphysics is off track? Since metaphysics deals with everything, being, or existence in the most general sense, evidence which does not support a perspective, is evidence of a different perspective, therefore necessarily undermining to the former.
Metaphysical wisdom moves forward by determining which proposed perspectives are not accurate, and are therefore unacceptable. This is a process of elimination. We find that certain perspectives are unacceptable because the evidence does not support them, so we dismiss them as not rational possibilities.
When the world is modeled as consisting of possibilities, the premise of the model denies that there is such a thing as "what is the case". However, from the many possibilities, we can proceed to determine what is impossible. "What is impossible" is a determination of "what is not the case". And since "what is not the case" (what is impossible) is diametrically opposed to "what is the case", we let "what is the case" in, through the back door. So we could call this a back door realism, "what is" consists of all the possibilities which have not been excluded as impossible.
This is a very good point. Isaac and I spent days arguing the accuracy of systems theory, only to find out in the end, that Isaac was arguing the usefulness of systems theory, and I was arguing that systems theory does not give us truth. I thought Isaac was arguing the truthfulness of systems theory. But there was really never any inconsistency between us, because usefulness is not the same as truthfulness.
Ehhhh.....nobody. Me being flippant.
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Quoting Janus
3B neurotransmitter connections per mm3 at somewhere around the SOL....brain can handle just about anything the senses throw at it. Experience enables relative disassociation....you no longer have to think about getting the fork squarely into your mouth. Comb your hair without a mirror. Add more and more complex numbers with less and less paper and pencil. Or, I guess, these days....reference to a phone with a calculator embedded in it.
All awareness of things just is the stream of thought.
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Quoting Janus
Fine, no problem. One metaphysical doctrine may be more logically sufficient than another, but it can never be proved as more the fact.
My experience is:
Since I was a kid, when reading something, I never saw the words, but pictured what the words say. Skim right over the words, like they weren’t even there. Now you might say that’s what you’re talking about, thinking by means of words (even if not noticed they are still causal), but there is congruent functionality when I tie my shoe (I never speak about “right hand this way, left hand that way, twist wrist, pinch with finger”....I just “see” the physical interaction and “seeing” without eyes is thinking by imaging).
But you might come back with....well, somebody had to tell you, with words, how to tie shoes way back when, right? But if that is true, and nobody told me anything about tying shoes....I’d never be able to do it? It would be absolutely impossible for me to ever put two strings together in some fashion that prevents my shoes from falling of my feet, if no one told me how or I never read the instruction manual?
Go to the grocery store. Got your “honey-do” pick-up list, full of words. Upon arrival at the appropriate aisle, you look at the list, perceive a word that represents the thing you want....you’ve been told....to load into the cart, look up on the shelf, find the thing that relates to the word. But word is nowhere to be found, it is not the word you put in the cart, it is the thing represented by the word. Off you go, next aisle, put a thing in the cart that wasn’t represented by a word on the list. Impulse purchase; spontaneous determination....Oooo, that looks yummy!!! How did you accomplish the exact same function, but under two different conditions? If you put two particular things in the cart, one because of a word on a piece of paper, and the other without words or paper, then the word cannot be the cause of things in the cart necessarily, which is the same as words are not necessary for the end result of a cognition....even if, as in this case, a mere desire.
So if...IF.....for those working scenarios so mundane as reading and shoe-tying and spontaneous whatevers.....mighten it not work for every damn thing? If it is indeed possible to acquire knowledge without spoken or written language, as is the case for the first time for everything, for everybody, then it is the case that language is always a secondary cognitive functionality.
Besides the obvious....nothing ever got a name that a human didn’t give to it, language is nothing more than an assemblage of names, therefore language is a product of, thereby related to, but not the cause of, human cognition.
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Your own experience is.....?
So we're back to scientific discoveries having an impact on metaphysical theories again. Perhaps now you could explain why the discoveries of cognitive science are excluded from this allowance?
Quoting Janus
Quoting Isaac
For my money, it is not quantum physics that clearly begs for a non-realist metaphysics , but certain approaches within cognitive science billing themselves as postmodern. There is a cohesive community advocating for a post-realist postmodern science with Shaun Gallagher , Dan Zahavi, Michel Bitbol, Hanne De Jaegher and Joseph Rouse, among others. I dont think you’ll find a comparable commitment among physicists (yet. It’s only a matter of time)
As Rouse writes:
“ Epistemic objectivity as an ideal presumes a gap between us as knowers and the world to be known. An objective method, stance, attitude, or disposition is put forward to bridge that gap. But any such proposal as a form of subject-positioning finds itself firmly placed on our side of the gap between us as knowers and the world as “beyond” our representations of it.
The objection is that the gap between knowers and the world is thereby conceived in advance in a way that renders it unbridgeable. Moreover, this conception can itself be challenged as a dogmatic presupposition that we should reject. As Heidegger once suggested, the problem is not that the refutation of skepticism has yet to be accomplished once and for all but that it continues to be attempted again and again out of a dogged commitment to an underlying conception of a gap between knower and world to be known.”
Shaun Gallagher is a professor of philosophy at University of Memphis.
Michel Bitbol is a researcher in philosophy of science.
Dan Zahavi is a philosopher at University of Copenhagen
Hanne De Jaegher has at least qualified in cognitive science, but is currently at the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of the Basque Country
Joseph Rouse is Professor of Moral Science at Wesleyan.
Where are the cognitive scientists you're referring to?
Quoting Isaac
Here is a small sampling of Gallagher’s ‘philosophical’ work. Notice the wide range of scientific journals that have published him as well as the specific contributions he has made to empirical research in such areas as autism , schizophrenia, distributed cognition and anosognosia.
Newen, A., De Bruin, L. and Gallagher, S. (eds.) 2018. Oxford Handbook of 4E-Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Gallagher, S. and Daly, A. 2018. Dynamical relations in the self-pattern. Frontiers in Psychology 9: 664. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00664 (open access link: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00664/full)
Gallagher, S. 2017. Embodied intersubjective understanding and communication in congenital deafblindness. Journal of Deafblind Studies on Communication 3: 46-58.
Gallagher, S. and Trigg, D. 2016. Agency and anxiety: Delusions of control and loss of control in Schizophrenia and Agoraphobia. Frontiers in Neuroscience 10: 459. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2016.00459.
Gallagher, S. and Varga, S. 2015. Conceptual issues in autism spectrum disorders. Current Opinion in Psychiatry 28 (2): 127-32. doi: 10.1097/YCO.0000000000000142.
Arntzen,E.C.,Normann,B.Øberg,G.K.andGallagher,S.2019.Perceived bodily changes
individualized, group-based exercises are a source of strengthening self in individuals with MS: A qualitative interview study. Physiotherapy Theory and Practice. Online First: https://doi.org/10.1080/09593985.2019.1683923
Gallagher,S.2018.The therapeutic reconstruction of affordances.ResPhilosophica95(4):719-736
Gallagher,S.2018.Mindfulness and mindlessness in performance.TheItalianJournalofCognitive
Sciences 5 (1): 5-18, DOI: 10.12832/90966
Gallagher,S.2018.Deep brain stimulation,self and relational autonomy .Neuroethics.DOI:
10.1007/s12152-018-9355-x.
Natvik,E.,Groven,K.S.,Råheim,M.,Gjengedal,E.and Gallager,S.2018.Space-perception,
movement and insight: Attuning to the space of everyday life after major weight loss. Physiotherapy
Theory and Practice. doi.org/10.1080/09593985.2018.1441934
Bitbol,M.andGallagher,S.2018.Autopoiesis and the free erergy principle .CommentonRamsted,
Badcock, and Friston. Physics of Life Review. 24: 24-26 doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2017.12.011
Vincini,S.Jhang,Y.,Buder,E.H.andGallagher,S.2017.Neonatal imitation:Theory,experimental
design and significance for the field of social cognition. Frontiers in Psychology – Cognitive Science.
8:1323. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01323
Gallagher, S. and Trigg, D. 2016. Agency and anxiety: Delusions of control and loss of control in
Schizophrenia and Agoraphobia. Frontiers in Neuroscience 10: 459. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2016.00459
Gallagher,S.2015.Doing the math:Calculating the role of evolution and enculturation in the origins of
mathematical reasoning. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 119: 341-346
Rode,G.,Lacour,S.,Jacquin-Courtois,S.,Pisella,L.,Michel,C.,Revol,P.,Luauté,J.,Gallagher,S., P., Pélisson, D. & Rossetti, Y. 2015. Long-term sensorimotor and therapeutical effects of a mild regime of prism adaptation in spatial neglect. A double-blind RCT essay / Effets sensori-moteurs et fonctionnels à long terme d’un traitement hebdomadaire par adaptation prismatique dans la négligence : un essai randomisé et contrôlé en double insu [in English and French]. Annals of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine 58
Gallagher,S.2014.In your face :Transcendence in embodied interaction.Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8: 495. Reprinted 2016.
Here’s some more for ya:
103. Gallagher, S. 2012. The body in social context: Some qualifications on the ‘warmth and intimacy’ of bodily self-consciousness. Grazer Philosophische Studien 84: 91–121
104. Gallagher, S. 2012. Time, emotion and depression. Emotion Review 4 (2): 127-32. doi: 10.1177/1754073911430142
105. Gallagher, S. 2012. In defense of phenomenological approaches to social cognition: Interacting with the critics. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 3 (2): 187-212.
106. Gallagher, S. 2012. Multiple aspects of agency. New Ideas in Psychology 30: 15–31.
107. De Bruin, L. and Gallagher, S. 2012. Embodied simulation: An unproductive explanation. Trends in
Cognitive Sciences 16 (2): 98-99.
108. Gallagher, S. 2011. Embodiment and phenomenal qualities: An enactive interpretation. Philosophical
Topics 39 (1): 1-14.
109. Gallagher, S. 2011. The self in the Cartesian brain. Perspectives on the Self: Conversations on Identity
and Consciousness. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1234: 100–103.
110. Sternberg, E., Critchley, S., Gallagher, S. and Raman, V.V. 2011. A self-fulfilling prophecy: linking
belief to behavior. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1234: 83–97.
111. Gallagher, S. 2011. Fantasies and facts: Epistemological and methodological perspectives on first- and
third-person perspectives. Phenomenology and Mind 1: 49-58.
112. Gallagher, S. 2011. Somaesthetics and the care of the body. Metaphilosophy 42 (3): 305-313.
113. Gallagher, S. 2011. The overextended mind. Versus: Quaderni di studi semiotici 113-115: 55-66.
114. Gallagher, S. 2011. Strong interaction and self-agency. Humana-Mente: Journal of Philosophical
Studies 15: 55-76
115. Gallagher, S. and Cole, J. 2011. Dissociation in self-narrative. Consciousness and Cognition 20: 149-
155 doi:10.1016/j.concog.2010.10.003.
116. Bedwell, J., Gallagher, S. Whitten, S. and Fiore, S. 2011. Linguistic correlates of self in deceptive oral
autobiographical narratives. Consciousness and Cognition. 20: 547–555. Published online, October
2010. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2010.10.001.
117. Gallagher, S. 2010. Defining consciousness: The importance of non-reflective self-awareneess.
Pragmatics and Cognition 18 (3): 561-69.
118. Cole, J. Dascal, M., Gallagher, S. and Frith, C. 2010. Final discussion. Pragmatics and Cognition 18
(3): 553-59.
119. Gallagher, S. 2010. Joint attention, joint action, and participatory sense making. Alter:Revue de
Phénoménologie 18: 111-124.
120. De Jaegher, H., Di Paolo, E. and Gallagher, S. 2010. Does social interaction constitute social cognition?
Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14 (10): 441-447.
121. Froese, T. and Gallagher, S. 2010. Phenomenology and artificial life: Toward a technological
supplementation of phenomenological methodology. Husserl Studies 26 (2): 83-107.
122. Crisafi, A. and Gallagher S. 2010. Hegel and the extended mind. Artificial Intelligence & Society. 25
(1): 123-29.
123. Gallagher, S. 2009. Two problems of intersubjectivity. Journal of Consciousness Studies 16 (6-8): 289-
308.
124. Gallagher, S. 2009. Deep and dynamic interaction: Response to Hanne De Jaegher. Consciousness and
Cognition 18 (2): 547-548
125. Gallagher, S. and A. Crisafi. 2009. Mental institutions. Topoi 28 (1): 45-51.
126. Gallagher, S. 2008-09. Intercorporality and intersubjectivity: Merleau-Ponty and the critique of theory
of mind [in Japanese]. Gendai Shiso (Review of Contemporary Thought) 36 (16): 288-299.
127. Gallagher, S. 2008. Inference or interaction: Social cognition without precursors. Philosophical
Explorations 11 (3): 163-73.
128. Zahavi, D. and Gallagher, S. 2008. The (in)visibility of others: A reply to Herschbach. Philosophical
Explorations 11 (3): 237-43.
129. Gallagher, S. 2008. Intersubjectivity in perception. Continental Philosophy Review 41 (2): 163-178
130. Gallagher, S. 2008. Are minimal representations still representations? International Journal of
Philosophical Studies 16 (3): 351-69.
131. Ratcliffe, M. and Gallagher, S. 2008. Introduction to special issue on situated cognition. International
Journal of Philosophical Studies 16 (3): 279-280.
132. Gallagher, S. 2008. Another look at intentions: A response to Raphael van Riel's “Seeing the invisible’.
Consciousness and Cognition 17 (2008) 553–555
133. Gallagher, S. 2008. Direct perception in the intersubjective context. Consciousness and Cognition 17: 535–543
134. Zahavi, D. and Gallagher, S. 2008. A phenomenology with legs and brains. Abstracta 2: 86-107.
135. Gallagher, S. and Zahavi, D. 2008. Précis: The Phenomenological Mind. Abstracta 2: 4-9.
136. Overgaard, M, Ramsoy, T. and Gallagher, S. 2008. The subjective turn: Towards an integration of first-
person methodologies in cognitive science. Journal of Consciousness Studies 15 (5): 100-120.
137. McNeill, D. Duncan, S. Cole, J. Gallagher, S. & Bertenthal, B. 2008. Neither or both: Growth points
from the very beginning. Interaction Studies 9 (1): 117-132.
138. Gallagher, S. 2007. The natural philosophy of agency. Philosophy Compass. 2 (2): 347–357
(http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00067.x)
139. Tsakiris, M. Bosbach S. and Gallagher, S. 2007. On agency and body-ownership: Phenomenological
and neuroscientific reflections. Consciousness and Cognition 16 (3): 645-60.
140. Gallagher, S. 2007. The spatiality of situation: Comment on Legrand et al. Consciousness and
Cognition. 16 (3): 700-702.
141. Gallagher, S. 2007. Social cognition and social robots. Pragmatics and Cognition 15 (3): 435-54.
142. Gallagher, S. 2007. Sense of agency and higher-order cognition: Levels of explanation for
schizophrenia. Cognitive Semiotics 0: 32-48.
143. Gallagher, S. 2007. Moral agency, self-consciousness, and practical wisdom. Journal of Consciousness
Studies 14 (5-6): 199-223.
144. Gallagher, S. 2007. Pathologies in narrative structure. Philosophy (Royal Institute of Philosophy)
Supplement, 60: 65-86.
145. Gallagher, S. 2007. Simulation trouble. Social Neuroscience. 2 (3-4): 353-65.
146. Gallagher, S. 2007. Moral personhood and phronesis. Moving Bodies 4 (2): 31-57
147. Gallagher, S. 2007. Introduction: The arts and sciences of the situated body. Janus Head 9.2: 293-95.
148. Gallagher, S. and Jesper Brøsted Sørensen. 2006. Experimenting with phenomenology. Consciousness
and Cognition 15 (1): 119-134
149. Gallagher, S. 2005. Intentionality and intentional action. Synthesis Philosophica 40 (2): 319-26.
Croatian translation: 2006. Intencionalnost I intencionalno djelovanje. Trans. S. Selak. Filozofska
Istrazivanja 102, 26 (2): 339-346.
150. McNeill, D., Bertenthal, B., Cole, J. and Gallagher, S. 2005. Gesture-first, but no gestures?
Commentary on Michael A. Arbib. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 28: 138-39
151. Gallagher, S. 2005. Phenomenological contributions to a theory of social cognition [The Aron
Gurwitsch Memorial Lecture, 2003]. Husserl Studies 21: 95–110.
152. Gallagher, S. 2004. Consciousness and free will. Danish Yearbook of Philosophy 39: 7-16.
153. Gallagher, S. 2004. Les conditions corporéité et d'intersubjectivité de la personne morale [Embodied
and intersubjective conditions for moral personhood]. Theologiques 12 (1-2): 135-64; includes comment by S. Mansour-Robaey. Le corps, ses représentations et le statut de la personne morale. Theologiques 12 (1-2): 156-59.
154. Gallagher, S. 2004. Understanding interpersonal problems in autism: Interaction theory as an alternative to theory of mind. Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 11 (3): 199-217.
155. Gallagher, S. 2004. Body experiments. Interfaces 21-22 (2): 401-405
156. Gallagher, S. 2004. Hermeneutics and the cognitive sciences. Journal of Consciousness Studies 11 (10-
11): 162-174. Chinese translation (2004), Polish translation (2011), Italian translation (2019).
157. Gallagher, S. 2004. Neurocognitive models of schizophrenia: A neurophenomenological critique.
Psychopathology 37: 8-19. Invited paper with response by Christopher Frith: Comments on Shaun
Gallagher. Psychopathology, 37 (2004): 20-22.
158. Gallagher, S. and Francisco Varela. 2003. Redrawing the map and resetting the time: Phenomenology
and the cognitive sciences. Canadian Journal of Philosophy. Supplementary Volume 29: 93-132.
Polish translation: (2005; 2010).
159. Gallagher, S. 2003. Phenomenology and experimental design. Journal of Consciousness Studies 10 (9-
10): 85-99. Polish translation (2014).
160. Gallagher, S. 2003. Bodily self-awareness and object-perception. Theoria et Historia Scientiarum:
International Journal for Interdisciplinary Studies, 7 (1): 53-68.
161. Gallagher, S. 2003. Hylétická zkusenost a prozívane telo. Trans. Michal Sasma. Philosophica (The
Czech Republic) 5: 103-126. Czech translation of: Gallagher, S. 1986. Hyletic experience and the lived
ody. Husserl Studies 3: 131-166
162. Gallagher, S. 2002. Født med en krop: Fænomenologisk og eksperimentel forskning om oplevelse af
kroppen [Born with a body: Phenomenological and experimental contributions to understanding embodied experience]. In Danish. Trans. Ejgil Jespersen. Tidsskrift for Dansk Idraetspsykologisk Forum (Danish Yearbook for Sport Psychology ) 29: 11-51. Polish translation (2005).
163. Gallagher, S. 2002. Experimenting with introspection (Comment). Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6 (9): 374-375.
164. Cole, J., Gallagher, S., and McNeill, D. 2002. Gesture following deafferentation: A phenomenologically informed experimental study. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1 (1): 49-67.
165. Gallagher, S., Cole, J. and McNeill, D. 2002. Social cognition and the primacy of movement revisited (Comment). Trends in Cognitive Science, 6 (4): 155-56.
166. Gallagher, S. 2001. The practice of mind: Theory, simulation, or primary interaction? Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8 (5–7): 83–107
167. Gallagher, S. 2000. Philosophical conceptions of the self: implications for cognitive science. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4 (1): 14-21.
168. Gallagher, S. 2000. Reply to Cole, Sacks, and Waterman. Trends in Cognitive Science 4 (5): 167-68. [A reply to commentary on my article by Jonathan Cole, Oliver Sacks, and Ian Waterman. 2000. On the immunity principle: A view from a robot. Trends in Cognitive Science 4 (5): 167].
169. Gallagher, S. and Anthony J. Marcel. 1999. The self in contextualized action. Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (4): 4-30.
170. Gallagher, S. 1999. A cognitive way to the transcendental reduction. Journal of Consciousness Studies 6: 348-51.
171. Gallagher, S., G. Butterworth, A. Lew, and J. Cole. 1998. Hand-mouth coordination, congenital absence of limb, and evidence for innate body schemas. Brain and Cognition 38: 53-65.
172. Gallagher, S. 1997. Mutual enlightenment: Recent phenomenology in cognitive science. Journal of Consciousness Studies 4 (3): 195-214.
173. Gallagher, S. 1996. The moral significance of primitive self-consciousness. Ethics 107 (1): 129-140.
174. Gallagher, S. and A. Meltzoff. 1996. The earliest sense of self and others: Merleau-Ponty and recent
developmental studies. Philosophical Psychology 9: 213-236. French translation: 2010. Le sens précoce de soi et d'autrui. Merleau-Ponty et les etudes developpementales récentes, trad. Jéremie Rollot. In B. Andrieu (ed.), Philosophie du corps. Paris, Vrin, 2010, p. 83-126.
175. Gallagher, S. 1996. Critique and extension: A response to Robert Young. Studies in Philosophy and Education 15 (4): 323-328.
176. Gallagher, S. and J. Cole. 1995. Body schema and body image in a deafferented subject. Journal of Mind and Behavior 16: 369-390.
177. Gallagher, S. 1993. The Historikerstreit and the critique of nationalism. History of European Ideas 16: 921-926.
178. Gallagher, S. 1993. The place of phronesis in postmodern hermeneutics. Philosophy Today 37: 298- 305.
179. Gallagher, S. 1992. The theater of personal identity: From Hume to Derrida. The Personalist Forum 8: 21-30.
180. Gallagher, S. 1989. The formative use of student evaluations of teaching performance. APA Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy 89: 14-17.
181. Gallagher, S. 1986. Body image and body schema: A conceptual clarification. Journal of Mind and Behavior 7: 541-554.
182. Gallagher, S. 1986. Hyletic experience and the lived body. Husserl Studies 3: 131-166. Czech translation: Hylétická zkusenost a prozívane telo (2003). Trans. Michal Sasma. Philosophica (The Czech Republic) 5: 103-126.
183. Gallagher, S. 1986. Lived body and environment. Research in Phenomenology 16: 139-170. Reprinted in Phenomenology: Critical Concepts in Philosophy Vol II. D. Moran and L. Embree (eds.), London: Routledge, 2004.
184. Gallagher, S. 1983. Violence and intelligence: Answers to the Irish question. Political Communication and Persuasion 2: 195-
By the Copenhagen Interpretation. Different interpretations bite different bullets. The Many Worlds doesn't give up counterfactual definiteness realism, but it multiplies realities and makes probability problematic. Superdeterminism bites the bullet of the universe knowing in advance what measurements will be made (as I understand it). Bohmian mechanics gives up locality for a non-observable pilot-wave.
Since there's multiple interpretations and no experiment so far to decide between them, it's probably too soon to say QM undermines some form of reality. There's no quantum theory of gravity, no grand unified theory, no explanation for dark energy and so on. But this is a philosophy forum, so people are free to pick sides.
It's just if you use one particular interpretation, you can't truthfully say the science supports your philosophical conclusion, because there is non empirical confirmation or consensus.
It's regrettable that folk used the word "observation" when they meant "measurement".
Sure, there is discussion, mostly outside of physics, on youtube and in pop media and philosophy forums. But this does not amount to support for your claim that "The key realisation arising from quantum physics was the fact that the observer has a direct role in determining the outcome of the observation of purportedly the fundamental building blocks of the world", and is even further from negating the view that" the Universe just is as it is, and will be that way, without any observer present".
I doubt very much that you will find many physicist who hold that the moon disappears when not observed.
Nor is the uncertainty principle support for such a view, as you suggest.
Nor does a quantum Bayesian view suggest such a thing. From your own quote: "Quantum Bayesianism claims that instead, the scientific observer sees the readings on his instrument and understands that they bring him new information pertaining to his mental model of reality." Read that with care. It should be clear that since there is a Bayesian model of reality,there is a reality to be modelled.
Quoting Wayfarer
So we don't know stuff unless we have a mind. Well, knowing something is a relation between a fact and a mind, so that's hardly a surprise, and does not need the support of quantum mechanics. And if you would go the step further by claiming that therefore we never know anything, then your are committed to Stove's Gem: we only ever eat oysters with our mouths, and therefore we never eat oysters as they are in themselves... Do you want to do that?
In summary, the question of the OP is phrased so as to be problematic: "Is there an external, material world?" Drop the "external" and the "material" and the answer is "Yes".
mistakes a copy-and-paste for an argument.
I can be aware of the bare visual character of the visual field in a state of suspension of thought. Of course to tell you or myself what I see then thought, language, must be engaged.
Quoting Mww
I agree; we go with what seems the more plausible to us.
Quoting Mww
That's my experience too. Words are tools and as Heidegger says when using a tool skillfully the tool "disappears". Hammering nails is like this. My point is only that complex thought is impossible without language. Could you think all the thoughts (or any) in the CPR without language, for example?
It seems to me that any science relies on there being some inter-subjectively determinable reality to warrant the veracity of its observations. I have no argument against the free-flowing associations and insights of postmodern thought; they may indeed be illuminating and open new avenues for contemplation and research, but they can never command the kind of inter-subjective corroborability that science or everyday empirical observation can, as far as I can see.
Not necessarily; it depends on whether the observational evidence is relevant to the metaphysical perspective in question and it is never the bare observation that is relevant in any case, but some interpretation of it, which rather begs the question.
The point was that since metaphysics concerns being, or existence, in the most general sense, all observational evidence is relevant to any metaphysical perspective. To dismiss the evidence as "unsupportive" rather than "undermining", and insist that it is not relevant, is simply denial.
And, anyway, as I said it is not the mere findings of QM that could have bearing on the question, but the various interpretations of their relevance.
I highly recommend Joseph Rouse’s ‘Articulating the World’. His postmodern rejection of realism , rather than being based on “free-flowing associations” , is grounded in evolutionary biology. He uses the model of biological niche construction to characterize the intersubjective discursive practices that create scientific communities, tracing their origin to the communicative practices of non-linguistic animals. Intersubjective corroborability requires a shared set of practices. Only within that ‘niche’ does the notion of observation , agreement , and truth and falsity, make any sense. Niches are constantly changing and being rebuilt , and as a result what is at stake and at issue in a scientific practice changes along with it.
In other words, a thoroughgoing naturalism leads one to reject realism.
I'm not convinced that it generally changes that much. I find Kuhn's idea of radical paradigm shifts to be somewhat overblown.
:ok: I'll try to find time to take a look at it...
https://www.meetup.com/the-toronto-philosophy-meetup/events/286979563/?_xtd=gqFyqTIxNzgyMzQ2OKFwo2FwaQ&from=ref
In all fairness, I haven't made it clear. That's one of my personality flaws... assuming others are already on the same page as myself, so to speak. Put differently, I assume others have interpreted the bulk of the conversation the same way I have. Mea Culpa. In retrospect, that was the exact opposite of what was warranted.
A common phrasing concerning forests and trees comes to mind. As it applies here, I'm rendering the forest, as a general outline with ambiguous enough edges to do both, effectively set out the basics(of all meaningful experience) in as simple a manner as possible and subsequently extrapolate with and/or in terms of evolutionary progression in such a way as to be capable of taking account of meaningful human experience as well. Whereas, on the other hand, you're rendering the biological structures of the individual trees within the forest, doing so at the micro level - with respectable precision.
It's that pesky little notion of internal/external that's the problem.
Simply put:Seeing the wavelengths we've named "red" is a meaningful experience that consists, in part, of those wavelengths. They are being emitted/reflected by something other than our own biological structures. Thus, the meaningful experience of seeing red leaves requires leaves that reflect/emit those wavelengths. Leaves are external to the individual host of biological machinery. As is the light being emitted/reflected from the leaves. The experience also consists of things that are internal, such as the biological machinery itself. So, the leaves and light are external, and the biological machinery is internal. It takes both(and more) to have a meaningful experience of seeing red. If we remove either, what's left doesn't have what it takes to produce a meaningful experience of seeing red. This tells us that both are necessary elements of the experience. The experience consists of all the necessary elements. If some of it is internal and some is external, then the experience can rightly be called neither, for it is not the sort of thing that has such spatiotemporal location.
How those wavelengths become meaningful is imperative as well. However, the above is enough for now...
Thank you for bringing Rouse's book to attention. A see that a review is available at NDPR.
Interesting book summary. Seems right up my alley, so to speak. Wish I had more time...
...for that quote is worthy of attention.
I didn't deny those academics made contributions to cognitive science. I've found some of their contributions to be insightful and useful (though I'm not generally persuaded).
But they are contributions from philosophy to cognitive science, they are not discoveries of cognitive science, those are made by cognitive scientists. I had a paper once published in a Political Science journal. I'm not a political scientist. It was, in that case, a contribution from my work in Psychology, to the political scientists, it was not research in political science.
The relevant point here is that philosophy's contribution to philosophy is already taken as given, we were talking about the contribution from other sciences, to which your comments don't appear to be addressed.
Quoting Banno
Odd in one usually so verbose.
I don't find anything to disagree with in the above. Do you think it opposes something I've said, or are you just providing your own (welcome) way of seeing it? If the former I'm still lost as it doesn't seem in opposition. If the latter, then simply, yes, that seems to me to be an accurate summary of how I understand matters to be too.
I thought all along that our views dovetailed nicely.
Well, that's nice to hear. Good summary.
The issue I pointed to earlier in the thread, is the nature of the assumed "mind-independent world". This world is not necessarily external, it might be internal, and we simply model it as being external.
Quoting Janus
I can\t imagine how "what is apparent to us" could possibly not constitute evidence regarding the existence of a mind-independent world, in one way or another. It appears to me, like such a claim would be the result of not interpreting "what is apparent to us" in relation to the issue.
CPR is all language representing Kant’s thoughts, so no, I cannot think Kant’s thoughts. But I can, and have, represent(ed) Kant’s words, thus indirectly his thought, with objects of my own imagination. Like.....you know those new-fangled downspouts on fancy houses these days, that are just painted plastic chains, where rain water travels down them without falling off? The rain all over the roof is objects out there; the gutters are the sense organs, collecting and directing all the objects where they need to go, rather than just overflowing and falling all over the place; the chains are the nerves that transport the collected stuff to the only destination appropriate for that stuff. The collected stuff traveling down the chains is.....of course......phenomena.
Yes, words are tools.
—————
Quoting Janus
Ok, maybe. What is a complex thought, such that that kind of thought is impossible without words, but carries the implication that simple thoughts are possible without words?
How is this not research in cognitive science?
Arntzen,E.C.,Normann,B.Øberg,G.K.andGallagher,S.2019.Perceived bodily changes individualized, group-based exercises are a source of strengthening self in individuals with MS: A qualitative interview study. Physiotherapy Theory and Practice
Vincini,S.Jhang,Y.,Buder,E.H.andGallagher,S.2017.Neonatal imitation:Theory,experimental
design and significance for the field of social cognition. Frontiers in Psychology – Cognitive Science.
Rode,G.,Lacour,S.,Jacquin-Courtois,S.,Pisella,L.,Michel,C.,Revol,P.,Luauté,J.,Gallagher,S., P., Pélisson, D. & Rossetti, Y. 2015. Long-term sensorimotor and therapeutical effects of a mild regime of prism adaptation in spatial neglect. A double-blind RCT essay / Effets sensori-moteurs et fonctionnels à long terme d’un traitement hebdomadaire par adaptation prismatique dans la négligence : un essai randomisé et contrôlé en double insu [in English and French]. Annals of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine 58
But this begs the question. Arent you defining ‘cognitive science’ in conveniently narrow terms such that it preemptively shuts out precisely the kinds of challenges to its methods and assumptions that non-realist enactivists like Gallagher are presenting? Haven’t you set up a catch-22? Galagher rejects reductive, representational realist approaches to cognitive science. You work within a community of scientists who define cognitive science in those terms. Therefore, Gallagher can’t be a cognitive scientist. 60 years ago, when behaviorism reigned supreme, given the methods you embrace, you yourself would not have been considered a scientist by that psychological community , only a speculating philosopher. It would be an interesting study to track how long it took for cogntivists like Ulrich Neisser to be accepted as scientists by the larger research community. It’s a classic situation, described by Thomas Kuhn , of newer paradigmatic communities having their methods delegitimized by the older community as non-scientific.
I’m guessing that enactivism has been around long enough that a mature community of active scientific researchers has by now formed around it. If Gallagher doesn’t fit the bill , then certainly you can agree that a list can be pulled together from repeatedly cited references in the journals they publish in. Unless you want to insist thar, by definition , none of these people are real cognitive scientists. So why don’t you help me out here. I’m sure you can provide a name or two from
within the enactivist research community. Then we can see what, if anything, they say about realism, pro or con.
I’m curious , do you consider Lisa Barrett to be more of a ‘real’ cognitive scientist than Gallagher?
The co authors on those papers are cognitive scientists or psychologists. Again I'm not questioning the contribution, I'm questioning the origin. What the philosophers brought to each of those papers was philosophy.
Quoting Joshs
I feel like I'm defining cognitive science quite uncontroversially. One is a cognitive scientist if one has trained, and does research, in cognitive science. doctoral students, post docs, professors, researchers, etc. It seems like a pretty normal delineation based on where they're likely to gain their insights. Someone sitting in an armchair just 'having a bit of reckon' is not going gain insights into cognitive science without testing them somehow (hence the collaborations). No university in the world is going to open their labs to a bunch of philosophers who've 'got an idea' about cognition.
Quoting Joshs
Well Francisco Varela was trained in Neuroscience and Eleanor Rosch is a psychologist. You can't get much more pedigree in enactivism than those two.
Quoting Joshs
Yes. I mean I can't believe there's any debate about this. Lisa Feldman-Barrett is a professor of psychology. Gallagher is a professor of philosophy. That means that Professor Feldman-Barrett has demonstrated that she's familiar with all the background research in psychology and can conduct research of her own in the field of a standard suitable to obtain a doctorate. Professor Gallagher has made no such demonstration. How is this remotely controversial?
Quoting Isaac
You have to be kidding me. You’re right about one thing, there should be no debate here. My undergraduate degree is in biopsychology. My graduate degree
degree is in experimental psychology. Well before I read any works on philosophy, I familiarized myself
with much background research in psychology. Almost all of it is the ‘normal science’ type stuff which attempts to discover new variations within a framework which is itself accepted implicitly and unquestioningly.
Shaun Gallagher is one of a rare few thinkers existing in a given era who moves effortlessly and expertly among schools of thought, synthesizing their conclusions. I have found very few writing today , especially outside of Europe, who have delved in scholarly fashion into philosophical hermeneutics , phenomenology , poststructuralism, pragmatism, integrated their contributions, and applied them to a renewed understanding of the psychological sciences. I can assure your that in any conversation concerning the intellectual foundations of cognitive science Gallagher would run circles around Barrett, who does a competent job of contributing to and summarizing the results obtained from within the PP framework but has nowhere near Gallagher’s breadth of understanding. Let me make it clear. To write and think at the level that Gallagher does on these issues requires much much more than your cliched impression of what a philosopher does ( sitting in an armchair having a bit of reckon). I’m not simply arguing that Gallagher can babble philosophy better than Barrett can. I am claiming that the elements of training in your field that you consider most essential to making valid scientific discovery are directly in the crosshairs of Gallagher’s research, and the proof of it is that you don’t even understand the presuppositions of your field , or of the recent history of science, well enough to realize it.
Barrett articulates and adds to the contributions of pp to modeling such concepts as emotion, motivation and perception. Gallagher articulates and adds to the contributions of a radically embodied enactivism that questions her conclusions and methodology. You don’t recognize his methods as properly scientific. In your mind they cannot securely add to objective empirical knowledge or effectively critique her results, so you privilege a moderately talented scientist like Barrett over a more original thinker
like Gallagher because she is a proper scientist and he is not. For you there is a clear separation between science and philosophy in this regard. At the heart of your assumption is your embrace of realism. If realism
is successfully critiqued, then the science-philosophy-art boundaries fall.
It is your belief in realism that makes it utterly inconceivable to you that someone sitting in a armchair could invalidate the results of properly replicated empirical knowledge.
Btw, Gallagher is far and away not my favorite philosopher. If you were to ask me , for instance , who offers the most advance and insightful understanding of the nature of emotion, I would say that Heidegger’s account of affect towers over Barrett’s. But that can’t be, right? He’s an armchair reckoner and she’s a bonified scientist. How could an armchair reckoner’s fantasies cause a hard-nosed scientist to have to go back to the drawing board?
Turns out I prefer the copy paste.
Your view on Gallagher and Feldman-Barrett's relative merits is noted. Not sure what to do with it... but noted anyway.
Quoting Isaac
Let’s get back to the larger topic of realism and cognitive science. I want to shift tone here; I think a bit of nuance is in order. Anthony Chemero wrote a book titled Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Although he is also a philosopher, you may be more impressed with his credentials as a researcher than you were with Gallagher. At any rate , he asks the question as to whether a radical embodied cognitive science necessarily requires an abandonment of realism. After discussing some
of the many varieties of realism he concludes that, no, one does not have to follow Varela and some others in insisting on this. Chemero thinks that Ian Hacking’s
brand of realism is a more than adequate fit for enactivist embodied cognition.
So I should amend my original claim to read that , to the extent that we can consider enactivism as a definable
category, identifying with its premises no more requires a rejection of all forms of realism than does the embrace of quantum physics. We can, however, locate a subgroup within the larger enactivist community that considers rejection of realism as a requirement for membership in their club.
Perhaps we can agree that in general theoretical empirical orientations do impact on metaphysical
positions. While quantum physics doesn’t necessarily threaten realism as a whole , it does seem to be incompatible with naive (direct) realism.
Roughly: Complex thoughts consist of correlations including words by a creature so capable. Simple thoughts would be correlations drawn or being drawn between things not including words.
Thinking that a mouse ran behind a tree requires no language. Thinking that "a mouse ran behind a tree" is true does.
The only notable difference seems to be that you divorce the biological machinery from the experience of seeing red when you claim that the machinery "mediates" the experience. The summary you just agreed with does not. Rather, it talks about it as a necessary component thereof; the machinery is a part of the experience, not a mediator thereof.
Mouse running behind a tree....wordless image....united schematicized conceptions......simple thought.
“Mouse running behind a tree”....construction of a proposition.....united schematized conceptions.....discursive judgement....complex thought.
Gold star????
HA!!!! It’s only 51 pages. You haven’t found a definition in there anywhere? What ever happened to due diligence, huh???
Kidding.
:rofl:
Waaaay too much man reading man, that I leave for books or exchanges with people here, a simple definition shouldn't be hard to give. ;)
Best guess: pick somebody, ask ‘em. “Meant by” is always a subjective judgement, so.....be ready.
Most definitely the wise move. This thread should be renamed "sophistry in action".
I think the main problem is that different philosophical schools have incompatible definitions, and there has been an attempt here to somehow reconcile those definitions with little success.
Yes. This happens a lot, but then the individual arguing for or against this position should merely state what they mean by the debated term.
If it's not defined, confusions will arise much more frequently.
As an initial attempt I would say that simple thoughts involve images of concrete objects and actions, whereas complex thoughts involve logical relations between generalized abstract notions such as "logical", "involve", "thought", "relations", "between","generalized", "abstract" and ideas like "being", "time", "space", "number".
The mind-independent world is necessarily thought as being external to the mind (and body). Of course, there can be no mind-independent thought of the mind-independent world; that goes without saying
Quoting creativesoul
If there is no meaningful distinction between internal and external, then how can we determine that some is external (or internal)? Usually the idea of something external is the idea of something that can be perceived as being external to the body by the bodily senses and that is what you have relied on to determine that
Quoting creativesoul
Quoting creativesoul
Quoting creativesoul
If the experience is considered to be an affect of the biological machinery insofar as it is the biological machinery that experiences red and not the leaves or the light, then it follows that we are thinking of the experience, by your own definitions, as internal. Of course it needs the stimulus of external elements (light and leaves) but it does not follow that the experience is both internal and external on that account, Of course if you define experience as the whole process, then of course it, tautologically, is both internal and external, so these are just different ways of speaking, different ways of conceptually dividing and/ or sorting things.
Yes, we can agree there. I think the empirical observations from cognitive science also support that view (though with the caveat that I'm still not sure I've understood what a direct realist really wants to say).
That there are steps in the process of perception seems obvious, without any more science than just everyday experience. Cognitive science has confirmed the extent and the method.
Where I think cognitive science has produced surprising results for the metaphysics of conscious experience, is in showing that, if we accept a disconnect between object and internal response (be that representational or enactive continual re-creation), then we have to similarly accept a disconnect between the impression we now have of what happened (why I said "cup" when I saw that cup), and what actually just happened.
To be consistent, the indirect realist cannot claim stages represent indirectness when creating the model/enacting the narrative, but then deny they do that when talking about one's memory of such an experience.
You might have to unpack that a little. I'm not really sure what you might mean by 'divorce'. Is mediating something not 'part of'? The mediator in a discussion is part of the discussion, no?
As I explained earlier, external and internal are spatial terms. We tend to set, or assume a boundary between mind (and body) and the external, but we assume no such boundary between mind (and body) and the internal. Why not? The activities of the mind (and body) are intermediate between the proposed external world, and the internal soul. If the external world is supposed to lie on the other side of a boundary, then for consistency sake, we ought to assume that the internal world also lies on the other side of a boundary.
If we take a sphere, we assume an external circumference, as a defining boundary. The dimensionless "point" at the centre of the sphere though, is indefinite due to the irrational nature of pi. To properly understand the reality of "the centre", as a proposed non-dimensional point with a specific location in a spatial entity, we need a defining boundary between the dimensional and the non-dimensional. In mathematics it is represented by infinitesimals. In practise, this is the boundary between the dimensional (external), and the non-dimensional (internal). But if we propose a boundary between human activity and the external, we need also to propose a boundary between human activity and the internal.
So if we proceed from here to ask which is the real "mind-independent world", the external or the internal, there is no necessity to conclude that it is the external. And this is why dualism is so appealing, it allows us to conceive of the reality of both, the internal and external "mind-independent" worlds. And the supposed "interaction problem" is left without bearing, because the mind (and body) is the realm of interaction.
Ok I agree with with this. But still, I'm not sure of what is meant exactly by "perceiving". I'm also not sure of how this is related to the thesis that the world is made up of sensations.
Ok I see.
Quoting Bartricks
This point seems to come back often. Is there any way for someone to accept it other than viewing it as "a truth of reason" ?
I suppose. I really don’t have a trust-with-my-life kinda thing for this question. I’m stuck between what appears to be the intrusion of anti-narrative, OLP philosophy in the analytic tradition onto theory-laden speculative metaphysics in the continental tradition. That is, regarding the latter, a simple thought vs a complex thought is merely a matter of content, any thought at all being nothing more than a “cognition by means of conceptions”. With regard to the former, on the other hand, the distinction between simple vs complex thought seems to be a matter of form, one only possible with, the other possible without, words.
I guess I fail to understand why it shouldn’t be the case that an aggregate of simple thoughts possible without words, couldn’t become a complex thought, which then would necessarily itself be without words. Maybe the simple/complex distinction is merely a condition of time. Maybe the longer there is a simple thought, the more complex it becomes.
But then....time itself, being a mere condition for, cannot be considered a content of, so we are left with the notion that the time of just indicates a time to adjoin an aggregate of simples. Which is probably where the notion of intentionality...an altogether post-modern precept...originates, insofar as even if time to amend is enabled, there is nothing about the pure intuition of time that demands its fulfillment.
But then....isn’t that exactly what understanding is, at least from the meta-narrative continental POV? The most thorough combination of amendable conceptions possible? Such that there can be no contradiction in the cognition that follows from it, the combining making time to combine, necessary?
I think I shall remain content that a complex thought doesn’t need words any more than does a simple thought. I affirm that complex thoughts are indeed possible, but deny the necessity of language as the ground of their possibility.
Because unless our sensations resemble the world they are telling us about - and tell us about it in that way - they will not constitute perceptions of the world.
We do perceive an external sensible world.
If our sensations were merely providing us with information about the world, then we would not be perceiving the world by means of them (that was the point the air traffic controller example was designed to illustrate - acquiring information about a matter is not the same as perceiving it).
So, as we do perceive an external sensible world, our sensations must resemble it.
Sensations can only resemble other sensations.
From this it follows that the sensible world that we perceive by means of our sensations is itself made of sensations.
And that, in combination with the self-evident truth that sensations can only exist in a mind, gets us to the conclusion that the external sensible world is made of the sensations of another mind.
But what I did there is simply appeal to the argument for idealism. That is, I simply applied the basic argument for idealism to resemblance itself.
The argument for idealism - the main argument - goes via certain self evident truths of reason, namely that a) sensations can only resemble other sensations and b) that sensations can exist in minds and minds alone.
Quoting Hello Human
All evidence for anything amounts to an appeal to a self-evident truth of reason.
All examples do is excite acknowledgment of the self-evident truth of reason.
But in the case of sensations, even within the domain of sensations, one type of sensation seems only to resemble other sensations of the same type (though whether this is actually true is not essential to the claim that sensations can only resemble other sensations).
Consider texture and sight. Do colours have a texture? That is, can you 'feel' what colour something is without any recourse to a visual impression?
No, obviously not. Indeed, the very notion seems confused. Colours are essentially seen, not felt. That this is so clearly true is a self-evident truth of reason. One cannot see that colours are essentially seen. One can see a colour. But one cannot see that colours are essentially seen. That is a self-evident truth of reason, not something we are aware of sensibly.
By the same token, it seems equally self-evident to reason that nothing can resemble a sensation of any kind except some other sensation.
That's not what I said.
Quoting Janus
That does not follow from what I've written. It is contrary to it.
There are different terminological frameworks and methodological approaches used as a means to attempt to take proper account of the same things; each framework and/or approach with their own set of logical consequences as well as explanatory power, congruence with current knowledge, and amenability to evolutionary progression. In this case, we're taking account of the experience of seeing red. Seeing red is a meaningful experience.
We're talking about exactly what sorts of things meaningful experiences are.
Due diligence holds that there are necessary elemental constituents of all meaningful experiences such that all meaningful experiences include them, and if any are removed what remains does not have what it takes. Hence, these basic ingredients are rightfully called the necessary elemental constituents of all meaningful experience. Seeing red is but one.
Seeing red leaves includes leaves that emit/reflect the wavelengths of light we've named "red", a light source, and a creature endowed with certain biological structures capable of not only detecting the light and leaves, but also of somehow isolating and/or picking out the color itself as significant and/or meaningful(attributing meaning to the color). That task(attributing meaning) is successfully performed by virtue of drawing correlations between the wavelengths and something else.
In the complete absence of light and leaves there cannot be any experience of seeing them. In the complete absence of the biological machinery, there cannot be any experience of seeing them. Thus, the experience consists of both internal and external things. It most certainly follows that the experience is neither internal nor external for it consists of elements that are both.
1.) Mediation requires a worldview. The biological structures under consideration have none.
2.) The mediator in a discussion is not necessary for the discussion. The biological structures under consideration are necessary for seeing red.
3.) A mediator has the expressed purpose of overseeing and/or governing the conversation to ensure the respective parties successfully reach agreement/consensus through thoughtful negotiation and compromise. The biological structures under consideration are not doing that.
Quoting Isaac
As above, so below...
4.) Mediators do not mediate themselves.
So the problem is with the term 'mediator'? I'm not wedded to the term, if it's problematic.
Pretty much. As mentioned before in my first reply to you, it's a terminological quibble. However, removing that bit will sharpen the position as well as eliminate any justified objections based upon it, such as I raised and the underlying anthropomorphism.
Good to know, thanks.
My pleasure...
I'm curious though, does that elimination have consequences regarding whether the red leaves are directly or indirectly perceived?
P.S. For whatever it's worth, the indirect/direct dichotomy and/or debate is neither a necessary nor helpful tool for acquiring understanding of meaningful experience. It can be brushed aside, and ought on my view due to the inherent deficiencies in how they talk about experience itself.
Fair enough, I suppose. I remain unconvinced that complex abstract thinking is possible without symbolic language. And I don't think this conclusion has anything to do with OLP. I don't at all deny the human imagination's capacity to create complex metaphysical systems, and I don't, like the positivists, count such systems as meaningless or incoherent as such, but I do believe that there is a human propensity to take such systems as presenting literal truths, which I think is the Wittgensteinian point about "language on holiday".
I can't imagine how such complex metaphysical systems of thought would be possible without symbolic language; in other words I don't see how they could be rendered in concrete purely imagistic terms, but I grant that maybe that's a failure of imagination on my part. If someone can explain to me how such a thing could be possible, I'd be very interested to hear it, because I'd love to think that it is possible. It would be a much more interesting world if it was possible.
I think all divisions are contextual; their logic derives from different perspectives we can take due to language and imagination; the different ways we are able to picture things.
I wasn't able to discern any point of disagreement on your part with anything I'd said, so nothing to respond to.
On your view...
Are thoughts about the truth of a sentence considered complex thoughts? Thoughts about what's going to happen next Thursday? Thoughts about which words best describe meaningful experience? Thoughts about language use in general?
All those thoughts are impossible to form, have, and/or hold without words.
That some complex thoughts use words does not mean that all complex thoughts use words.
I never said that or otherwise...
The issue - to me - is what sorts of complex thoughts can be formed in the complete absence of language(without words). My objection was to the claim that "a complex thought doesn’t need words any more than does a simple thought." That claim is false as it is written. I gave examples of complex thoughts that most certainly do.
Let me explain then. You have provided examples of complex thought which uses words. These examples are insufficient to produce the inductive conclusion "complex thought needs words". You have provided no evidence whatsoever, that complex thought requires words, only evidence that some complex thought uses words. Therefore you do not have the premise required to conclude that this proposition "a complex thought doesn’t need words any more than does a simple thought" is false. You have provided no indication that complex thought needs words.
In my view.....
......it is preposterous, bordering on the catastrophically absurd, that the totality of that of which I am aware, re: the entirely of my cognitions, requires that I read, write and speak;
......if language developed as a means of simplex expression by a single thinking human subject, or as a means of multiplex communication between a plurality of thinking human subjects, then it is the case language presupposes that which is expressed or communicated by it;
......if language is assemblage of words, and words are the representations of conceptions, and language is the means of report in the form of expression or communication, then language presupposes the conceptions they represent, and on which is reported;
......thinking is cognition by means of conceptions. If language presupposes conceptions, and conceptions are the form of cognitions, and cognition is thinking, then words presuppose thinking.
......that which presupposes cannot be contained in that which is presupposed by it;
.....there is no language in thinking; there is language in only post hoc reports on thinking.
————
If language is so all-fired necessary for the formation of complex thoughts, why did we come equipped with the means for the one, but only for the means of developing the other? Why did we not come equally equipped for both simultaneously, if one absolutely requires the other? The robotics engineer manufactures a machine with pinpoint circuit board soldering accuracy; the toddler has somewhat less accuracy but still understands the distinction between thing-as-object and thing-as-receptor-of object, and the congruency of shape for both, to put a round object in a round hole.
So I come upon a thing, some thing for which I have absolutely no experience whatsoever. Maybe something fell to Earth, maybe I discovered something previously unknown in the deep blue. The modern argument seems to be......I can form no complex thoughts about that new thing, can have no immediate cognition of it, unless or until I can assign words to it. But, being new, which words do I assign if I don’t cognize what the new thing appears to be? What prevents me from calling the new thing by a name already given to an old thing?
And, of course, everything is new at one time or another.
Views: Like noses. Everybody’s got one.
Ok I agree.
Quoting Bartricks
This seems to me like quite the claim to make. Why do you think so ?
Quoting Bartricks
:up:
Quoting Bartricks
Resemblance in what regard ? What properties are you talking about when you talk about resemblance between sensations?
I agree (which I think also answers your first question). The problem with 'direct' and 'indirect', which we're seeing here, is that both require a network model (a model of the nodes so that we could say "these two are right next to one another" (direct), and "these two are separated by intervening nodes"(indirect). But the intervening nodes must, by definition, be indirectly experienced (if they were directly experienced, they would not be intervening nodes). So, by definition, we have to derive our network model by some process other than phenomenological reflection - we've admitted by the very subject of our investigation that we won't notice them by reflecting only on that which we experience.
This isn't a problem for many forms of scientific realism because we can infer nodes from empirical studies of the body and brain which we assume is doing the experiencing.
I can't see how a purely metaphysical approach could possibly infer nodes that we've pre-defined, as being hidden from experience, having, as it does, only that which occurs to our rational minds, as it's data set.
I think that this interpretation places too much focus on the word used to label the metaphysics and not enough on the problem that the metaphysics is trying to solve.
The epistemological problem of perception is: do our ordinary experiences provide us with information about the existence and nature of the external world. Direct realists say that they do "because experience is direct" and indirect realists say that they don't "because experience is indirect".
Rather than quibble over the meaning of "direct" and "indirect" it is best to simply address the underlying problem. If it can be shown that ordinary experiences do not provide us with information about the existence and nature of the external world then experience isn't direct, whatever "direct" is supposed to mean. And I think that this is where the character of the experience is what needs to be considered, and whether or not it makes sense to think of this character as being the character of mind-independent objects.
So let's refer back to an image I posted before:
The character of a human's experience is different to the character of a bird's experience. This claim is true whether you want to make sense of this in terms of qualia/sense-data or in terms of Bayesian models, or in terms of something else. If direct realism is true then the mind-independent world is of the same character as one of these experiences. The eggs have the colour either we or the birds see them to have even when not being seen; they're either cream-coloured or they're red-coloured (or we're both wrong and they're some other colour).
This is where we run into the first problem: given that the character of the bird's experience differs from the character of the human's experience, one (or both) of these are "wrong" (in the sense that the mind-independent world isn't of the same character as one (or both) of these experiences). As such, at least one of the experiences isn't direct. The Common Kind Claim then comes into effect; there is no fundamental difference between the nature of a veridical and a non-veridical experience, just as there is no fundamental difference between the nature of a true statement and a false statement. The veracity of the experience (or statement) is determined not by the nature of the experience but by whether or not the facts "correspond" with the experience; the veracity of the experience is independent of the experience.
The second problem is that our best descriptions of the mind-independent nature of the world (things like the Standard Model) do not find that things have visual colours. It finds that they absorb photons of certain wavelengths and emit or reflect photons of other wavelengths, but that's a very different thing to the cream- or red-colour as given in experience and shown in the photo above, hence why different organisms see different colours when stimulated by the same kind of light.
We then seem to have an answer to the epistemological problem of perception: our ordinary experiences do not provide us with information about the existence and nature of the external world. We don't need to get lost in an effectively pointless debate over the words "direct" and "indirect".
We're going round in circles. You've still not explained why you think this restriction exists. Why must the hidden state be either cream-coloured, or red-coloured, why can it not be both? we don't know what properties hidden states have (clue's in the name), so you've no grounds at all, as far as I can see, to claim they are such that they can only be one colour at a time.
Quoting Michael
Again, see above.
Quoting Michael
Begs the question. Physics doesn't find what you're prepared to call colours because of the very theoretical commitment we're disagreeing on. I'm perfectly happy to say that "absorb[ing] photons of certain wavelengths and emit or reflect photons of other wavelengths" is what colour looks like when looked at through the machines of the physicists.
Quoting Michael
Then how is that we interact with it so accurately?
If there’s just one possible case where it isn’t both then the point stands.
So you would have to argue that mind-independent objects are every colour that any possible organism could possibly see them to be. Are you willing to commit to that?
Yes. Why wouldn't I be?
Because you said before that people can see the wrong colours.
People do, yes. 'Red' is not the term we use to describe the hidden state that causes birds to see what we would call red (if we had the same ocular equipment). It's the name we give to the hidden state which causes most humans in normal light conditions to respond in a predictable manner we call 'seeing red'. If a bird learned human speech and called those eggs 'red' he'd be wrong.
The 'dress', is black and blue. There's no debate about what colour the dress actually is.
Hidden states are only half the picture. There’s also the non-hidden states, e.g the visible colour that is presented in experience and which, according to you, people can “get wrong”.
Direct and indirect realists want to know if we can trust these non-hidden states to show us the nature of the mind-independent world. Direct realists say that we can because these non-hidden states are the mind-independent nature, whereas indirect realists say that we can’t because these non-hidden states are only representative of and/or causally covariant with the mind-independent nature.
No visible colour is presented in experience. It cannot happen (with what we currently know about the brain). Experience is a post hoc construction, no colour is presented to it, it infers colour from an abstraction out of the actual objects presented to it.
Quoting Michael
Why does them being only representative or causally covariant mean we cannot trust them? We can be right.
Of course it is. Some people see the dress as black and blue, others as white and gold.
I honestly can’t be bothered to rehash the old arguments where you try to deny this very basic, empirical fact.
How do you know?
So people, when asked, use the words 'black and blue', or 'white and gold'. They describe their personal folk psychology, meta theory of perception as 'seeing' those colours.
How does any of that show that colour actually is presented to experience?
I know from first-hand experience that colours are present in my experiences. I’m not just some thinking thing that engages in logical inferences.
Of course I can’t make such a claim about you or anyone else. Perhaps you all have blindsight or are p-zombies. But I tend to trust that other people have the same kind of experiences as me.
So we've left the science behind, and anything that seems to you to be the case actually is the case?
Does it seem to you that your table is not actually solid, but rather made of probabilistic wave forms? You don't seem to have any trouble allowing the most bizarre conclusions of physics undo your most foundational beliefs about objects. Are your beliefs about your cognition so precious?
Phenomenological experience is its own domain, hence the hard problem of consciousness, and hence the epistemological problem of perception that direct and indirect realists are trying to solve.
I'm trying to understand why your line is where it is. Scientists tell you objects are made of waveforms. They don't seem to be, but you accept they are. Scientists tell you that parts of our brain infer models of external objects rather than see them directly. It doesn't seem that way, but you accept it's the case.
Scientists tell you your 'experience' is a post hoc construction made up of culturally medisted abstractions (such a folk-theories about perception), and you refuse to even consider it.
No I don’t. Waveforms are waveforms. Tables aren’t waveforms. I reject the philosophical position that reduces the everyday objects of perception to just being the mind-independent stuff “out there.”
Then why does it matter what the standard model tells us about how objects reflect light?
Maybe it’s not in yours, but color is certainly present in my experience of the world. You don’t have to believe iit if you wish to argue as p-zombie. But you might as well argue that I don’t exist. Makes no difference to my experience.
Because it shows that colours as-seen aren’t mind-independent. If it were the Standard Model or some other theory would find it. Instead, colour is a product of perception. The naive philosopher then mistakenly thinks of this colour as being mind-independent.
As I said to @Michael, if we're only talking about the way things seem to us to be, then there's no cause even for debate. It seems to me as if the apple actually is red.
Only according to the scientists. It doesn't seem that way to me, objects don't seem to me to be how the standard model describes them. So I suppose for the purposes of our current conversion, they aren't.
Exactly. Which is why the objects you see aren't mind-independent. That's the point I've been making since the start.
They seem to me to be. So I suppose they are.
Of course, he talks about things like "red" and "a rose" as being a "fictive" that is used as some sort of instrumentalist tool to make sense of sensory impressions, whereas I would refer to such things as being sense-data (and he indeed mentions qualia). Either way, it's not the mind-independent causal thing.
So now we're believing the scientists again. Can we come to some kind of decision on this, I'm struggling to keep up.
I'm not believing him. I'm pointing out how even the theory you're supporting doesn't make the metaphysical claims you're making.
Friston's theory is about how we see. We're discussing what we see. I'm using aspects of his model to constrain the possibilities of the answer to that question. For example, we do not 'see' an internal model. That appears (according to the science) to be impossible.
This is where you're getting lost in the irrelevance of English grammar. All that matters is whether or not the world when not being seen resembles how it looks to us. Are the mind-independent features of the world present in the phenomenological character of experience? We need to answer these questions to solve the epistemological problem of perception. All this other talk is a red herring.
Maybe it would be better to dissolve the epistemological problem of perception by dissolving the alleged gap between perceiver and world and along with it representational realism.
Joseph Rouse argues:
“This account blocks both realism and anti-realism by showing how the contentfulness of scientific claims about the world is worked out as part of ongoing interaction with our developmental and selective environment. Scientific claims and the conditions for their intelligibility are part of that environment, and only acquire meaning and justification as part of our ongoing efforts to articulate that environment conceptually from within. There is no gap between how the world appears to us and how it “really” is for realists to overcome, or for anti-realists to remain safely on the side of those appearances. Scientific understanding instead develops hard-won, partial articulations of the world. Within those conceptually articulated domains we can differentiate locally between what our theories and models say about the world, and whether what they say is correct or in need of some form of revision. Both conceptual understanding and its assessment nevertheless presuppose the kind of access to the world that antirealists deny and realists seek to secure.
?In the wake of these arguments, we should stop asking the questions to which realism or anti-realism would pose answers. Unless they can develop an adequate critical response to these arguments, realists must abandon any commitment to philosophical naturalism. They would instead share with their anti-realist opponents the need to defend their conceptions of scientific understanding with the recognition that these conceptions conflict with what the sciences have to say about our own conceptual capacities.”
Is this done by playing with language, by conceptional framing, or by looking the other way? :razz:
Joseph Rouse argues:
“This account blocks both realism and anti-realism by showing how the contentfulness of scientific claims about the world is worked out as part of ongoing interaction with our developmental and selective environment. Scientific claims and the conditions for their intelligibility are part of that environment, and only acquire meaning and justification as part of our ongoing efforts to articulate that environment conceptually from within. There is no gap between how the world appears to us and how it “really” is for realists to overcome, or for anti-realists to remain safely on the side of those appearances. Scientific understanding instead develops hard-won, partial articulations of the world. Within those conceptually articulated domains we can differentiate locally between what our theories and models say about the world, and whether what they say is correct or in need of some form of revision. Both conceptual understanding and its assessment nevertheless presuppose the kind of access to the world that antirealists deny and realists seek to secure.
?In the wake of these arguments, we should stop asking the questions to which realism or anti-realism would pose answers. Unless they can develop an adequate critical response to these arguments, realists must abandon any commitment to philosophical naturalism. They would instead share with their anti-realist opponents the need to defend their conceptions of scientific understanding with the recognition that these conceptions conflict with what the sciences have to say about our own conceptual capacities
I guess much of the debate here has been getting stuck in this bog.
Is this from Rouse's paper, 'Beyond Realism and Antirealism ---At Last?'
These are tantalizing incomplete snippets - I wish I had time to read more.
That's demonstrably false, since there's tons of counterexamples where appearance didn't match reality. Arguably, philosophy got its start noting those differences. Ancient skeptics base many of their arguments on appearances varying. But certainly science has shown many times where appearance and reality differ.
When we demonstrate the truth or falsity of an empirical claim, this is made possible because the intelligibility of what is at issue is determined within a shared set of practices. Thus , the appearance matches or fails to match the criteria that have been intersubjectively constructed. This is not an ‘external’ reality in the sense of having features entirely disassociated from those practices , but neither is it walled off from
world inside a solipsist ideal realm. Rouse argues that our scientific theories and practices are biological niches that we construct through our interaction with our social and material environment, just as an organism creates a niche that it inhabits and that produces constraints on what is real for that organism ( what is ‘true’ or ‘false’ relative to its needs and goals). So whatever you show to be demonstratively true or false is always going to be relative to a space of reasons that responds to and is altered by changing circumstances, just as an organism’s niche adjust itself to an environment that changes in response to the organism’s interactions with it.
"Using words" and "needing words" are not always the same thing. I am responding to a claim about complex thought not needing words. I provided a few examples of thoughts that need words, and seem to be complex thoughts. Such examples falsify the claim I objected to as it was written. A simple qualification of "some" would fix the issue.
A criterion of simple and complex thought is on order as well. I mean, if we aim to determine which candidates belong in which category, we need to know what the differences are between the two. I've yet to have seen anyone aside from myself attempt to even perform that task. I drew a distinction between thought that does not include words as content(part of correlation) and thought that does to make the point that some complex thought needs words.
All the nuance, of course, is packed up in both the aforementioned criterion for what counts as thought(simple and complex), as well as what it takes for a thought to "need words".
For whatever it's worth, I'm not at all against claiming that some complex thoughts need words whereas some do not. "Need", on my view, means existentially dependent upon. Furthermore, depending upon the content of the thought in question, some languageless creatures can have thoughts that need words although they do not use words. It's nuanced, but no issue if we have an adequate linguistic framework.
How would a world resemble how it looks to us? I can't even make any coherent sense of such an expression.
I see a green apple on the table in front of me. You want to claim that there isn't 'really' a green apple there? On what grounds?
That we sometimes hallucinate, or are mistaken? That only demonstrates that sometimes there's no green apple, not that always there's no green apple.
That birds would see it as purple? That only shows that green apples look purple to birds, not that there is no green apple.
That someone else might claim it's blue? That just proves the cognitive scientists notion that we see by active inference, our inferences are not always right.
That Physics describes the apple as waveforms? Someone sitting on the other side of the table would describe the apple differently too, they have a different perspective. You've not yet given an account of why one thing must only have one property from all perspectives.
...
So whilst I can see how we could say that the mind-independent features of the world are not present in our phenomenological experience, I just can't see why we would.
Ok, I understand now.
Agreed. Who would ever say such a thing, whether overtly or by virtue of inevitable logical consequence?
Quoting Mww
Well sure. I've no issue at all with that aside from the inadequate qualification that stems from your having driven a definitional wedge between language and thought in such a way that you're incapable of even admitting that some thought is itself existentially dependent upon language use. On pains of coherency alone, you must deny all such talk! I mean, good on you for the consistency. However, we both know that coherency alone does not guarantee truth. A position can be perfectly valid, consistent, internally coherent, etc...
...and false.
How do we know whether or not such positions are false, despite being perfectly consistent? A plethora of counterexamples succeed in showing us that the framework in question contradicts everyday events. By acknowledging those contradictions we can also experience the added benefit of bringing our attention to the fact that our framework is inherently flawed somewhere along the line. In this case, it could be somewhat corrected by proper qualification(claiming "some" rather than necessarily implying that all thought is existentially independent of language).
With much agreement, I'm quite certain(for empirical as well as logical reasons) that some language presupposes that which is expressed and/or communicated by it. Not all. So, I would be fine with saying that prior to expressing and/or communicating some thought using language, there must first be a thought to express and/or communicate with language. I'm readily accepting the validity and/or internal consistency(coherence) of your position. I've foregone any criticism of that aspect of the position you're putting forth. However, it lacks much needed explanatory power(the aforementioned examples to the contrary).
The contentious matter at hand is whether or not all thought needs words, which I take to mean whether or not any thought needs language in order to be formed to begin with(in the first place; initially formed; emerge into the world for the very first time; etc.). Some thought clearly emerges solely as a result of prior language use. I mentioned a few already here and now as well as earlier and elsewhere. Odd(perhaps indicative of an inherently inadequate linguistic framework???) that you did not directly address those counterexamples. More generally speaking(being Kantian you hopefully appreciate that)...
There are thoughts about words.
Where words have never been, there could not have ever been thoughts about words. All thoughts about words are existentially dependent upon words. We need words to think about in order for us to even be able to think about words. All such thought needs words.
Quoting Mww
This is part of the problem as well.
Language is far more than merely "assemblages of words". Meaning comes immediately to mind. Not all assemblages of words are meaningful. All language use is. So, language takes a bit more than just an assemblage of words. Words are not inherently meaningful. Meaning is attributed.
We also use language to do far more than communicate and/or express pre-existing thought(which is the only use you've focused upon as of yet). I'm claiming that there are far more uses of language, some of which produce entirely new thought. Language use has introduced so many different kinds of thought that I find it very very odd that anyone could possibly disagree with claiming that many thoughts need language(are existentially dependent upon language).
Quoting Mww
Our frameworks are quite different, as you well know. I mean, this is not our first exchange. However, generally speaking, although I reject your framework for all the different reasons I'm putting forth, I would whole heartedly agree that words presuppose thinking, if by that I mean that thought emerges prior to language. Well, to be more precise and consistent, some does anyway. Whereas certain other kinds of thought cannot for they are a product thereof.
Thoughts about what time it is cannot possibly exist(be formed) prior to the existence of clocks(a means of time telling, if you prefer). Clocks are themselves existentially dependent upon language in that they owe their very existence to language use. Thus, it only follows that wondering what time it is, even if unspoken, is one kind of thought that needs words, for it is about stuff that is itself existentially dependent upon words. Where there has never been a means of time telling, there could not have ever been thoughts about what time it was/is.
Wondering about time is a kind of thought that needs words.
Quoting Mww
I have no idea why. That's a psychological question.
Seems to me that we come equipped with the capability to form both thought that needs language as well as thought that does not. Interesting that I've recently watched Chomsky stuff as well as other linguistics and neuroscientists, and they've claimed that the human brain has not undergone much evolution at all over the past ten thousand or so years.
Quoting Mww
Oh yeah...
It's fascinating to watch children at an age where their understanding of language use exceeds their mastery of speech. They invent totally "new" two word combinations like "more outside" while standing at a glass sliding door separating them from what they want; from being outdoors.
Acknowledging that some thought is existentially dependent upon language does not force us into saying that all thought is.
Quoting Mww
You misunderstand the modern argument. Mine anyway. Not all opinions are equal.
I find that the single problem with direct and indirect perception is shared in that both positions drive a terminological wedge into the practitioners' brains by virtue of divorcing perception from reality.
That's the fatal fundamental flaw of both.
Human perception is not existentially independent of reality. Rather, it is most certainly a part thereof. We are both, objects in the world and subjects taking account of it and/or ourselves. The division of us and the world, of our perception and the world, creates the very problems that those practitioners find important enough to talk about for hundreds if not thousands of years.
Flies and bottles come to mind.
Neither can I, but it's the position of direct realism that it does. Hence the arguments I've put forward that show the problems with this view.
Quoting Isaac
I don't make that claim because I don't claim that something is "really" there only if it is mind-independent. As I've said many times over the years, antirealism isn't unrealism.
Quoting Isaac
If something looks purple but isn't purple then there's a difference between a purple-look and being purple, and so we're back to what I said before; there are two different senses of the word "purple" and you're just equivocating. There's the purple appearance, which I would say is the primary sense of our understanding, and then there's the mind-independent state of causing most humans to be presented with this purple appearance, which is an ad hoc naming.
It would show that the apple doesn't have the property of being green or purple. Rather, it's the perceiver in question that sees the apple as having that color. This is basic ancient skepticism. Honey tastes sweet to you and bitter to me, therefore sweetness isn't a property of honey, but rather our taste buds.
Quoting Michael
So world-stuff exists. The green apple we see is part of that world-stuff, but not as we perceive it. You didn't seem to have any issues with the nominalism of Jody Azzouni. Apples don't exist as such. But features in the world-stuff that can be carved into apples by animals like us do exist. As you stated in that thread, antirealism concerning objects, relations and properties. But not the world itself.
Indeed.
Quoting creativesoul
But division is not independence. To divide an army into units is not to say they're independent, nor is it to say they're not all still part of the army. One can still say "I don't think the army are reckless, but that unit is"
When we talk about internal and external, we're just dividing the world along lines useful to that model. Systems can be defined by their Markov boundaries. We're not obliged to divide the world that way, but it's a lot more convenient than referring only to "the world" every time one wants to describe some part of it.
Can you give an example from a direct realist?
Quoting Michael
I should have highlighted 'there'. Your claim, unless I'm mistaken, is exactly that the green apple isn't there (where it seems to be in the external world), but rather is in our minds, with merely some causal something being 'there'.
Quoting Michael
It looks purple to birds. Being purple is about the property of how it looks to humans. 'Purple' is a word in human language, not bird language.
Quoting Michael
There isn't.
Why would it show that?
So do you see then, that we can make the general claim "complex thought does not need words"? And in your examples, the words are "needed" not for the complex thought, as you seem to think, but for something else. We could for instance name a special type of complex thought, propositional thought, or something like that, and say that words are needed for this.
My major premise, the fundamental ground of my argument. I shall call that a win, and issue an exuberant....and wholeheartedly honest....thank you.
Quoting creativesoul
I might agree some complex thought does not presuppose words, but rather, ensue from them, insofar as the words are given to me, from which my complex thoughts arise, in which case, I may treat of those words as any of my perceptions. Still, the dialectical continuity should limit the relation of word and thought to individual subjects.
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Quoting creativesoul
But it does force a sufficient explanation as to the relation between the quality of thoughts wherein words are necessary and the quality thoughts wherein they are not. Parsimony...the elimination of self-contradiction...should suggest thought does not have a quality, such that it follows words perform no qualitative conditioning on them, or, the quality of thoughts resides in some other procedural constituent.
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Quoting creativesoul
Does it? The first thing that occurs to me, is an image of a device by which a change can be demonstrated. Never does the representation arise in the form of a word. I will agree, nonetheless, that wondering about time, as the subject of a series of propositions, might elicit a series of representations of words I’ve experienced concerning what others have said about it. But then, when I do that, in effect, all I’m doing is treating my own private cognition as if I am in the process of expressing myself.
Which leads inevitably to this: do you see where ego might explain the position that complex thoughts require words? Complex thoughts would require words, merely from the seeming that whatever is being thought, ought to be expressed? Or, perhaps, I am so desperate to be understood, I treat my thoughts as if they were words, in order to facilitate the congruency of the recipient’s understanding. Dos the sound of a thought carry the same weight as the thought?
Given those possibilities, it is clear words may adjust the quality of a complex thought, thus can be said to be necessary for such adjustment. But not necessary for the thought itself. Also given is possible sufficient reason for simple thoughts requiring no words at all, insofar as the quality of simple thoughts is determined by its simplicity. If one does not understand how I arrived at the word “BOOM!!!”, then he will have great difficulty with how I understand, e.g., religion, should I talk to him about it.
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Quoting creativesoul
Oh, but they are. The correspondence between the truth of them, and that to which it is directed, may not be. Opinion is merely a relative judgement, after all.
The disagreement in our respective frameworks, is predicated on the differences in our definitions. Still, given that.....
Quoting creativesoul
...it remains that our brains work compatibly with each other, which implies our thinking must, if thinking is only a production of brain mechanics necessarily. How we think about things, on the other hand, is governed by the contingency of our experiences, and not the stationary condition of our physiology.
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Quoting creativesoul
And time well spent, I must say, even if this....
Quoting creativesoul
....is the case.
You can't have something be both all green and all purple. It would show that color is perceptually relative to the perceiver.
How do you know? I thought we had no direct knowledge of the external world. Now you're saying that it's objects are definitely such that they can't be both green and purple. How could you possibly know that?
Vision science: Photons to phenomenology
The physical properties we ascribe to the world are just as dependent on our accounts as are the colors we see. Neither is more ‘true’ to nature than the other. They are simply different sorts of interpretations for different purposes.
Also, I didn’t make a claim about object existence. I referenced the nominalism of a philosopher Michael and I were debating in another thread.
How? Talk me through the logic.
Quoting Marchesk
I know. You made a claim about its properties. Properties you also claim we do not experience. So I'm wondering how you know anything about its properties.
If colour is a property of our perception, then what is it that is constrained in external objects when you say they cannot be both green and purple?
It can't be the nature of colour since that's apparently a property of our perception, not constrained by any physical law pertaining to the object.
It can't be the nature of the object, since we don't know the nature of the object on account of all its apparent properties being actually those of our perception. And in any case, the nature of the object is unrelated to its colour (which is, rather, a property of our perception)
So what is which is constrained in an object such that it cannot be both green and purple?
The wavelength of light the creature sees, which gets represented as a color sensation. I’m not sure what you’re disagreeing about, other than you don’t like calling the color experience qualia.
Quoting Janus
Following on from what I said, and to clarify why I said there was nothing in what you said to respond to; what you say above is just an expression of defining "experience as the whole process (of external and internal elements)" in which case "of course it, tautologically, is both internal and external", which is the same as to say it is neither in the sense that it cannot, on that interpretation, be rightly classified as either. So, to repeat myself, "these are just different ways of speaking, different ways of conceptually dividing and/ or sorting things".
Yet you speak as though there is some context-independent "fact of the matter" that I am somehow disagreeing with or missing, when I have already acknowledged that "experience" can be defined in those different ways, although the more common conception is the one which logically leads to it being thought of as internal in relation to the external world it is of.
Why can't that wavelength be both green and purple?
Your argument is that colour is a property of experience becasue two people see different colours and an object cannot be two colours at once.
But if colour is a property of experience, then the statement "an object cannot be two colours at once" is incoherent. Colour is not a property of objects so there cannot be physical laws about how many such properties it can have at once.
The best you can say is that if colour were a property of objects, then it could not be two colours at once. But here you're creating a counterfactual world in which colours are the properties of objects and claiming you know what physical laws would exist in such a world. Which is an unsupported claim - we only know the physical laws of our own world, the one in which you claim colour is a property of experience, not objects.
According to you, something is green if it causes most humans to see it as green and something is purple if it causes most humans to see it as purple. How can a single wavelength cause most people to see it as green and most people to see it as purple?
Quoting Isaac
When direct realists say that we see an object as red because it is red they are not saying that we see an object as red because it causes us to see it as red. That would be a truism.
There is something which is a red look (i.e. the seeing as red). It's what occurs when most people's eyes are stimulated by light with a wavelength of 650nm. Direct realists say that we see an object as red because that object has that exact red look and that light reveals the look rather than just causes that look. A red look and an orange look are conceptually different things, and if they were physical properties they would be physically different things. And the claim is that an object cannot have two different physical looks for the same reason that it cannot have two different physical masses or two different physical charges. Or, at the very least, that at least one object could have just one physical look.
And if at least one object could have just one physical look but two people could see it as two different colours then for at least one of them the colour they see isn't a property of the object.
But I suspect that your account of experience can't make sense of this, in which case it's irrelevant to the argument being made which is an attack on direct realism, not on whatever your account is.
Indeed. It's a reductio argument. I think it doesn't make sense that an object is (normally) two colours at once because I think colour is a property of the object and as such amenable to the physical laws we know about objects (such as their propensities to reflect light of particular wavelengths). If, on other confirmatory analysis, the object turns out to be green, then those who called it purple were wrong.
Of course, our models of physical laws could be wrong, and an object could be found which does emit wavelengths which are ambiguous, perhaps could be correctly modelled as both green and purple, but I don't know of any such objects.
The whole "why can't an object be both green and purple" argument is meant to draw out the fact that, we're all really talking as if colour is a property of external objects because we're all quite happily discussing the physical laws which constrain the colour an external object can actually be.
Quoting Michael
And what is this thing? Is it physical (if so in what form?). If it's not physical then in some other realm? Dualism here?
Quoting Michael
What occurs when most people's eye's are stimulated by light with a wavelength of 650nm is a series of fairly well documented and reasonably well understood neurological reactions. Which of them is the 'Red Look'?
Quoting Michael
This doesn't make sense as written. You said above the 'the red look' is "what occurs when most people's eyes are stimulated by light with a wavelength of 650nm". How can an object have it when objects don't generally have eyes?
Quoting Michael
OK, so that answers my question above, the concept is physical. So where is it in our brains?
Quoting Michael
But an object can be both narrow and sinuous, it can have two properties of outline. Objects can be both rough and sticky, two properties of texture. Objects can be both vertically striped and horizontally striped, two properties of patterning. And we're still in physical properties. Once we get into conceptual properties, it becomes even easier for an object to have two properties of the same category at once. An object can be both a hammer and a crowbar (tool type). An object can be both a weapon and paperweight (use). An object can be both awe inspiring and beautiful (emotional response)...
There's absolutely no reason to think an object cannot be both conceptually of an 'orange look' and a 'red look' - whatever such notions might mean.
Quoting Michael
Then I'm struggling to understand the account direct realism (or indirect realism, for that matter) is putting forward. If direct realism wants identicality with this undefined concept referred to as 'the experience of red', then it seems it can have it - the concept has no definition so who's to say an object doesn't project 'the experience of red', since we can neither measure such a thing nor do we know anything about any laws which constrain it, we've absolutely no idea whether an object can project it, nor how many such things it could project at once.
If all we're talking about is 'the experience of red' then literally all options are on the table. It could be a property of our mind, it could be a property of objects (which we detect with our 'experience detectors'), it could be a property of God which both the object and us merely reflect.
I can't see how any amount of thinking is going to pin down the nature of this 'experience of red' since it has no laws governing it.
The epistemological problem of perception asks: is the world as it appears to us? Direct realists answered in the affirmative. However they made sense of "directness", that things are as they appear follows from perception being whatever they meant by "direct". Therefore, if it can be shown that things aren't as they appear (i.e. that a thing's appearance depends in part on an organism's perceptual apparatus and any associated mental phenomena (e.g. if substance or property dualism are true)) then direct realism is false.
The argument I have been making is that, assuming scientific realism, the world isn't as it appears to us. That's not to say that how the world is and how it appears aren't causally covariant; we know that an object's colour-appearance is determined by the wavelength of the electromagnetic radiation it emits or reflects, as well as by an organism's sense receptors and any subsequent brain activity.
I agree with you, as you seemed to say above, that it doesn't even make sense for the world to "have an appearance" (when not being seen), and so direct realism seems to be false even in theory, irrespective of scientific realism. But there seems to be a sticking point in that at times you even seem to reject appearance tout court. Or at the very least reject the claim that any words we use (like "red") refer to features of this appearance; instead you say that they all refer to whatever hidden states are causally responsible for the appearance. I disagree with this view, although admittedly it's irrelevant as the argument isn't over what words mean or what they refer to but about whether or not the world is as it appears to us.
If they're really arguing that we're never wrong, however the world seems, that's how it is, then they should consider the earth flat, the sun in its orbit, dragons exist, and the weather caused by an angry God as these are all ways the world has appeared to us to be.
Since some direct realists are otherwise very intelligent people, I think a more plausible explanation is that you've misunderstood their position. But I'm not sufficiently expert in that area of philosophy to gainsay, so, assuming you're right, what an embarrassment to the field of philosophy that anyone thought such an obviously nonsensical thing.
There's a difference between the phenomenology of experience and any subsequent intellectual interpretation. I think you're conflating two different senses of "how things appear".
For example, "the object appears to be glowing red" and "the object appears to be hot because it is glowing red."
But the phenomenological sense of 'appear' can't possibly apply to the world (without imparting consciousness to all objects) so the same problem arises. If the direct realist thinks the world is exactly as it phenomenologically appears, then their argument is still so embarrassingly ridiculous as to force us to consider our own misunderstanding as the more plausible explanation.
They certainly thought so of at least some appearances, hence Locke's distinction between primary and secondary qualities.
And see color primitivist realism for the view that objects have an objective colour appearance:
Sure. Mathematics comes to mind.
Hardly. It just means color as we experience it isn't a property of the object.
Quoting Isaac
Other than none. Which is kind of the point.
Quoting Isaac
Before modern science, skeptics made these sort of arguments to claim objects as we experience them don't have those properties. If their arguments were incoherent, then skepticism would have been easily dismissed.
There are some contemporary philosophers who do argue for color realism, and they try to make it compatible with science. I'm not convinced those arguments work.
The counterfactual world you're talking about is the world of our experience. It looks like colors are properties of objects and light sources. The world of our experience came before science was developed.
Consciousness.
Quoting Isaac
Probably not physicalism.
Quoting Isaac
How do you know this? Chalmers proposed a law binding consciousness with informationally rich systems. So property dualism for him. It's just one possibility. Some have tried to work on making a panpsychist theory built up form minimally conscious subatomic particles.
I'd probably opt for neutral monism. The world is neither all physical or mental, but something that gives rise to or contains both.
It's odd because I've made those sort of arguments to the direct realists in this forum before and got argued down. They didn't seem to think there was problem in the world appearing differently than our scientific account, since I guess those were two different modes of experiencing and explaining.
Indeed, but you're using the vagueries of colour sensation (which Locke already decided was a secondary quality) to show that objects do not resemble appearances. Locke already covered that by using secondary qualities. His claim about primary qualities was things like solidity, extension, shape, and mobility. So, using Locke, it seems insufficient to show the direct realist os wrong using differences in colour perception as they (Locke being an example) already differentiate two types of property and colour is not primary. What am I missing here?
Quoting Michael
The article you provided says..
So it appears even the critics are agreed that the colour primitivists are still assuming colour is a property which we detect and produces the way it appears, not that colour actually is 'the experience of red' in an object.
I'm not finding, in the sources you've provided, the idea that any direct realist considers objects to actually have (rather than have a property which causes) the 'experience of red'. Do you have any less ambiguous sources, or perhaps you could explain them more clearly?
How could it possibly mean that?
Quoting Marchesk
No. there can't be any physical laws about it at all. You can't claim colour is not a physical property of objects and the use, in your argument, aspects of that physical property.
Your claim is that colour cannot be a property of physical objects because objects cannot have two colours at once, but if colour is not a property of physical objects then there is no such law, so your argument fails.
Quoting Marchesk
But no-one here has presented any science showing that world of experience to be wrong. If we assume colours are the properties of objects and light sources, what science shows that to be wrong?
Quoting Marchesk
Chalmers can 'propose' whatever he likes. I can 'propose' the world is really made of jelly and we're tricked into thinking it isn't by space aliens. If there's no laws governing what can be then all theories are equally valid. Since we (broadly) agree on coherence with physical laws, then agreeing something is physical puts constraints on what it can be, thus not all theories are valid. If we say that something is in some other realm that we can't even see let alone measure, has no discernible laws governing it and can't be proven either way, then all theories are game.
Quoting Marchesk
Uh huh. As you say...
Quoting Marchesk
No laws or no physical laws? Why do laws have to be physical?
The way it appears would mean the color in our experience. Except that one thing is a property of the object and the other is a perception of that same property.
Quoting Isaac
They certainly don't mean panpsychism. They mean the world is as it looks to us under proper lighting conditions, at least in the visible light range.
They don't, they just have to be roughly agreed for us to talk. We have to have some common ground. If you get to make up the laws as well as the theory, then clearly anything goes.
We agree about our basic empirical experience of the world, so we can develop and talk about theories which make coherent sense of that. If you want to claim that our 'experience of red' exists in some non-physical realm, then that's fine, but since we cannot measure or sense this realm in any inter subjective manner, we cannot develop and talk about theories of its function. What possible critique could be brought to bear?
Quoting Marchesk
Yes. The idea that seems to be bring presented is that red is some property of an object which produces the response we call 'seeing red'.
Quoting Marchesk
I can find no support for this. Both Locke and the colour primitivist agree that we can be mistaken. So they do not think the world is as it looks to us under proper lighting conditions, at least in the visible light range. Otherwise we couldn't be wrong and both admit that we can be wrong.
No, the idea is that red is a property as we see it, not something that causes us to have a response, which could be something unlike color, such as a photon's wavelength.
Quoting Isaac
Under normal conditions, when there's not an optical illusion, and taking into account whatever details about color vision need to be accounted for. The claim is the world is basically colored-in as we perceive it to be.
I've been reading Color Realism and Color Science and Color Properties and Color Ascriptions: A Relationalist Manifesto. The first one is a good overview of colour realism and its discontents.
The crucial question for me, which I don't think is answered in them, is whether colour relationism implies that perceived objects are not coloured. I think not necessarily, although I can see why some would think so.
Intuitive first step: my brother is a brother despite brother or being a brother being a relational property. The tomato is red despite its colour being a property of the relation between an object and a particular kind of perceiver.
But in Locke it says...
...and he was cited as an example of these direct realists. IF you have a different source, perhaps you could cite it for me?
Quoting Marchesk
Right. So given these caveats, how does two people perceiving different colours from the same object count as evidence against the theory? One of those people can just be said to be under one of the factors that need taking into account.
We could however attempt to deduce/verify the presence of telltale signs of mental objects as opposed to non-mind-dependent entities. Either mental constructs are distinguishable from the non-mental or not. If the former, we have to work them out and conduct relevant tests. If the latter, the question becomes meaningless - if we can't tell the difference between x and y, x = y for all intents and purposes, oui?
I didn't cite him. I'm not aware of Locke being a direct realist. Maybe with regards to primary qualities?
You can read a summary about color primitivism and other theories of colors here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/color/#RivaTheoColo
Direct realism is a separate but related debate, just depending on what the direct realist has to say about color. As you can see on SEP, there different theories of colors, and a direct realist might choose the one they think offers the best defense for direct perception.
I've read Color Realism and Color Science before. It is a good overview. Seemed like a quality attempt at defending color realism, even if I'm prone to disagree.
I am simply pointing out that people believe(d) that the world resembles how it appears to us. Locke, an indirect realist, argued that it doesn't resemble appearances in the cases of what he considered the secondary qualities. Direct realists didn't make this distinction.
Quoting Isaac
As the quote I provided says, they claim that colours "are not micro-structural properties or reflectances, or anything of the sort." And I'll add, color realist primitivism isn't color dispositionalism, which is the position that colours "are dispositional properties: powers to appear in distinctive ways to perceivers (of the right kind), in the right kind of circumstances; i.e., to cause experiences of an appropriate kind in those circumstances" (which seems to be your view).
I'm not saying that their claim is that objects have "the experience of red". I'm saying that their claim is that objects have a red appearance. They're saying that an object's colour resembles how it appears to us (in the same way that Locke would say this about his primary qualities).
From your quoting of the article, "at most, one group is correct, but we would not know which." What they mean here is that the object's colour is revealed in the experience of one group, not just that it causes the "appropriate" experience (as per colour dispositionalism) in one group.
And on the topic of color dispositionalism, as it appears at first glance to be your view (and please correct me if I'm wrong), but from that article on it:
This was the point I tried to make several times regarding the two different meanings of "red".
This is needed to avoid the circularity problem:
Yeah, thanks. Michael linked me there too, but I'm not seeing the theory you and Michael are expounding about direct realists believing colour actually is the same thing as our 'experience' but in objects. None of the theories talked about in that article seem to make such a claim (not that I can see, anyway).
The closest might be primitivism, but in the section on Primitivism, it says (of one proponent)...
The properties that do the causing of these experiences seem to be complex, micro-structural properties of surfaces of bodies (and similar properties for seeing volume colors, diffraction colors, scattering colors, etc). This problem is addressed by Hacker in his defense of the claim that colors are intrinsic features of physical bodies. He insists that colors are properties that are used to provide causal explanations.
Hacker's main argument (according to his critics) seems to be grammatical...
[quote="From David Stern's review of Hacker's "Appearance and Reality""]
Hacker believes that an investigation into the ways in which we ordinarily talk about perception will lead to an understanding of the grammar of our language ans thus the way we see the world around us[/quote]
I've obviously still got a lot of reading to do, but if you (or @Michael) have any more direct link to the actual target of your objections I'd be grateful.
Quoting Michael
That far I understand. Where I'm coming unstuck is on what anyone means by the world "resembling" how it appears. I don't understand what it could even mean for a world (by which I assume we mean the external world) to 'resemble' how it appears. If we eliminate the whole oddness about mistakes (ie we assume we can be mistaken), then it seems to be saying that if the world appears to have a red apple in it, then it has a red apple in it. But nowhere in that simple exposition does it say what kind of thing a red apple is, so it doesn't seem to address any of the concerns we've been discussing.
If a 'red apple' is a hidden state in a particular configuration, then when it appears to me that there's a red apple in the world, then there actually is one (by which I mean a hidden state in a particular configuration). Likewise if it turns out that a red apple is a figment of God's imagination, then when it appears to me that the world contains a red apple (a figment of God's imagination) then it actually does contain a red apple.
There seem to be an assumption that what appears to us is some clearly defined thing for us to examine if something resembling it exists in the world (and so prove direct realism), but there clearly is no such clearly defined thing. The way the apple appears to me doesn't tell me anything about whether it's a hidden state, a figment of God's imagination, a trick of the light, an electrochemical signal from the electrodes attached to my en-vatted brain... Nothing about how the 'appearance to me' tells me about the apple's make up, it's just not data that forms part of the appearance.
So the question is, when we're examining the world (testing the direct realist's hypothesis) looking for something which 'resembles' the way things appear to us. What are we looking for? What data are we going to find which either confirms or denies this hypothesis?
If we find objects which produce more than one appearance in different people, that doesn't help because all direct realists include the possibility of being wrong - so, one person's wrong. Simple.
If we find our scientific instruments record a world of atoms and electrons, that doesn't help because the way the apple appears to me doesn't include what it's made of, there's simply no data on that. Plus, I could be wrong - all direct realist theories include the possibility of being wrong.
If cognitive science finds our brains use models to help perceive the environment, that doesn't help because direct realism is about what we're seeing, not how we're seeing it.
So I just don't get what evidence we're looking for to counter the direct realist.
Yes, that's a position I'd agree with, but I take the view that we do not in any way 'see' this second notion. It is a post hoc construct of meta-theory, not a part of perception. It's something we hypothetically construct after having 'seen' the object as a meta-theory of how our perception works. It could also (though I'm less convinced of this) be a tool in our construction of priors about other objects "what would happen if I saw the same thing but a different colour?". This is Friston's theory. But as I say, I'm not fully convinced of it.
And that's where you're getting confused. Direct realists don't claim that a red apple is a hidden state. Direct realists claim that a red apple is a directly visible thing. Direct realists have a fundamentally different view of perception than your free energy principle/active inference interpretation.
Quoting Isaac
Imagine a set of identical twins. The twin on the left resembles the twin on the right. Now imagine that the twin on the left is an apple-as-experienced and the twin on the right is an unexperienced-apple.
A hidden state is directly visible. The process of 'seeing' is one of inferring what hidden states are. Again, if you want anything more direct than 'inference' then you eliminate the possibility of being wrong and no direct realists claims we can't be wrong, hence everything we think about hidden states must only be an hypothesis, it cannot be a direct transferal otherwise we couldn't be wrong.
Quoting Michael
Right. But to tell the twins resemble each other I look at their properties (they both have red hair, they both have high cheek bones, etc). What are we looking for in the "apple-as-experienced" and the "unexperienced-apple" to tell if they're similar, or not?
Except it's not about inference. They claim that the external cause is directly presented in experience, and so it isn't hidden. Direct realism is nothing like Friston's theory.
Quoting Isaac
And that's why the arguments from illusion and hallucination are evidence against direct realism, as is the fact that different people see different colours.
Quoting Isaac
The twin on the right resembles the twin on the left even if you never meet him.
Then how are we ever wrong? The direct realists you've cited for me all say we can be wrong.
Quoting Michael
But all the direct realists you've cited include the possibility of us being wrong, so all those situations just count as situations in which we were wrong.
Quoting Michael
That doesn't answer the question about what properties we're supposed to be matching. The twin on the right has a different spatio-temporal position to the one on the left. So they don't resemble each other after all?
That's for them to explain, not me. That we can be wrong shows that something other than an external object being directly present in experience must be happening. Their attempts to solve the problems of hallucination and illusion seem like special pleading to me. See the disjunctive theory of perception where they argue against the Common Kind Claim and say that only in veridical perception is an external object being directly present in experience.
So for them, a veridical perception isn't one where we "correctly infer" the nature of a hidden state, or whatever it is you're saying. For them, a veridical perception is one where the state isn't hidden.
Quoting Isaac
Their appearances resemble. Their shape, the colour of their hair, etc.
But not their position? Is where they are not an appearance, but hair colour is? What about if one twin was facing one way and the other twin another?
And more.
Ask direct realists, not me.
But you're arguing against direct realism. You must have an understanding of their position in order to do so, surely?
You’re asking me to give an internally (and scientifically?) consistent account of direct realism. I can’t do that because it isn’t consistent, hence why I’m not a direct realist. They are the ones claiming that in the case of veridical perception an external object is directly present in experience (and so not “hidden”) and so that the object (independently) is as it appears.
The very questions you’re directing at me, issues with hallucinations and illusions and perspectives and differences in colour perception and the sensibility of objects independently being as they appear, etc. are the very criticisms that indirect realists levy against direct realism, and which I feel direct realists fail to overcome. At best their position is false, at worst it’s incoherent.
Fair enough. It seems like such a weak position shown false by the simplest of counterarguments that I find it very hard to believe I haven't simply misunderstood their position. I mean, one of the proponents listed in the article you cited was PMS Hacker. I don't agree with a lot of his philosophy, but he doesn't strike me as the sort of low caliber philosopher likely to make such an elementary error.
More reading required, I think. Probably more than I have the time for, unfortunately.
What is perceived is real directly, insofar as that thing is not mediated by a system; what is experienced is real, but mediated by a system to which it is given by its presence, thus, with respect to perception, is real indirectly.
What really....I mean REALLY....is the problem here? How come, in 50-odd pages, consensus that the possibility of both forms of realism may be incorporated necessarily in the human cognitive system? If each form is justifiably refutable by the other, and the exceptions to each as a general rule are rampant, then the ground of the possibility of both, each limited to its own specific domain, but functioning in unison towards a given end, becomes the better option.
(Back in the day, on the tv show Taxi, Danny Divito and Judd Hircsh were arguing about something, and Cristopher Lloyd, butts in with some comment. They both give him The Look, to which he says, completely deadpan, “oh, I’m sorry, am I still here?”. Call me Lloyd)
In typical philosophy forum fashion, nobody can quite agree on the terms under dispute, in part because we have our philosophical commitments to uphold.
Quoting Mww
How would that look?
Relative to this observation, it seems that indirect realism is ontologically committed to the folk-psychological notions of goal driven behaviour and mental states. For according to indirect realism, agents aren't merely said to commit perceptual errors relative to the expectations of onlookers and their linguistic conventions, but are believed to really make those errors as a result of possessing cognitive states that have goals and beliefs as intrinsic properties.
Quoting sime
Dennett is an indirect realist, and his view of goals and beliefs is that these features of a cognitive system can be reduced to the collective activity of a network of millions of dumb bits which can’t themselves be said to have goals or beliefs. It can be useful for certain purposes to treat such dumb assemblages as if they possessed such intrinsic properties.
The solution looks like some form of transcendental idealism, insofar as it uses, rather than disregards, an intrinsic logical dualism in the human intellect.
First....because it is a metaphysical problem, it must look like a metaphysical solution;
Second....it would look like an epistemological solution, if it explains something we want to know;
Third....it would look like a logical solution, if it is predicated entirely on logical conditions;
Finally....it looks like a solution based on, or incorporating, relations, because that about which we want to know involves conditions that do not belong to us, in juxtaposition to conditions that do.
There is an established metaphysical solution, predicated on logical conditions, sufficiently explanatory for what we want to know, which effectively combines direct empirical realism with indirect representational idealism in a single intelligence.
Whether the solution is worth a damn has nothing whatsoever to do with how old it is, or whatever name by which it is called, but is a function of how many of its core tenets are held in common by its opponents, which merely exemplifies the very human intellectual duality upon which the proposed solution is predicated.
And the fact none of a metaphysical solution’s core tenets are susceptible to empirical proof is irrelevant, because all physical sciences with co-relevant procedural constituency, are equally unprovable. Beside the point that the dialectical discourse is in a philosophy medium, not one in which empirical proofs for the validity of its arguments, is absolutely necessary.
That’s how it would look......to me.
———-
Quoting Marchesk
Same as it ever was, throughout the ages, right?
Does Dennett interpret the the objects of perception to be theoretical entities , such as those defined according to science and ontological naturalism? If so then that might explain his use of 'indirect realism', in the sense that the entities of a naturalistic ontology are only defined up to their structural/mathematical Lockean primary qualities and are left undefined in relation to phenomenological secondary qualities, effectively deferring their phenomenological meaning to the in situ judgements of language users who apply the terms (and who ultimately apply theoretical terms as a result of perception, so I still can't see this as an indisputable example indirect realism).
And of course there is the ambiguity as to the location of the agent's sensory surface. If the agent is looking down a microscope, does the definition of the perceptual process include the microscope or not?
But i think those considerations are tangential, for direct realists take the object of perception to be the stimulus that directly elicits a behavioural response from an agent, however the boundary of the agent is defined. Would Dennett disagree with direct realists who define perception in this way?
The problem with this account is that it doesn't seem to say anything about experience at all. Does a Venus flytrap experience the fly when that fly directly elicits a behavioural response from it?
In general it seems that the more 'uselessly' metaphysical as opposed to practical the issue, the more semantics becomes central.
Also, good point about everyone trying to hold their own ship together in rough weather.
I think the wrinkle is in red is a property as we see it. It's as if 'red' is supposed to do double-duty for some ineffable private experience which is somehow known to be the same ineffable private experience for all (an impossible public-yet-private experience). Ryle attacks this kind of confusion in The Concept of Mind, just as Wittgenstein does with his beetles and boxes.
If the thesis is that we all see red the same way, then any data supporting this thesis is impossible in principle ('grammatically') when 'see' is understood to refer to some radically private experience.
All we can compare is public behavior, and this is also enough semantically. Anyone who grasps the proper material implications (and other appropriate uses of the concept red) is seeing red as much as such a thing can be reasonably established. Or that's the best sense I can currently make of the situation.
Might be yanking this out of context, but it inspired a question. Does the philosophical situation itself, occurring in the space of reasons and dominated by rational norms, commit itself implicitly to such folk-psychological notions? Is the gist of indirect realism the possibility of an individual being wrong, or an individual perception being wrong ? The gap between me and the truth might involve the degree that my word alone (without further evidence) should count as reliable.
I don't think it needs to be the same. It could be that your red isn't my red in something comparable to Locke's inverted spectrum hypothesis.
But also it could be that it is the same. Assuming that we have the same kind of eyes and same kind of brain, and assuming that the relationship between body and mind (whatever that is) is deterministic, then we should have the same kinds of private experiences.
Quoting Pie
I don't buy Wittgenstein's account. If at some point I were shown the contents of your box but not recognise it as being a beetle then clearly I mean something private by "beetle". The word "beetle" and the phrase "the contents of our boxes" would mean different things to me.
Or again, consider Locke's inverted spectrum hypothesis where one morning my private colour experiences change. If such a thing happened I wouldn't then continue to say that grass is green and that rubies are red. I would say that grass is red (or "looks red" if you prefer) and that rubies are green (or "look green"). It's a perfectly coherent scenario (not withstanding its physical possibility) and so clearly there's more to the meaning of colour words than just some public activity.
But as I said before, what we mean by "red" is irrelevant to the discussion really. It's not a discussion about what words mean.
I understand why one would say this, but consider that we only have evidence for behavior. Our talk and doings are indeed synchronized. The assumption is unwarranted, in my view. Fortunately, it also seems necessary. Note that I don't deny some kind of inner experience. I just think it can play no role in reasoning. As Sellars might put, reporting a sensation would be a kind of entry move. It's a way that I might explain some otherwise dishonorable or just unexpected action (I had a terrible itch, so I didn't bowl a strike.)
Quoting Michael
A good point. I don't deny that we have grammar for unique experience. I think this naturally connects to a scorekeeping understanding of rationality (Sellars via Brandom.) The 'I think' and the 'I feel' implicitly accompany all our reports. Jim might be credulous and Tammy might cry over a mosquito bite. I just think we should be wary of reifications. I look toward norms rather than ontologies on such topics.
Quoting Michael
I agree with you about the persuasiveness of the inverted spectrum scenario. I can relate very much to experiencing color as some kind of ineffable stuff, but it's just that ineffability that seems to make it semantically irrelevant. Roses are red and grass is green, even if their colors are reversed for one of us. But what can reversed or inverted mean here? Whose raw feel would have priority? Neither, I say. Inversion implies a norm. But clearly all that matters is the convention that roses are red (like calibrating a scale.)
That the colour you see roses to be is the colour I see grass to be and vice versa.
Quoting Pie
I think it more accurate to say that red is the colour that roses are seen to be. This then accommodates both the "convention" that roses are red and Locke's inverted spectrum hypothesis. There is the common public use of the word "red" and the private understanding of redness.
I can make some kind of sense of 'the color you see' as opposed to 'the color I see.' We can agree to use 'color' this way in this kind of context. But calling that a private understanding of redness might be misleading. What I have in mind is the way that concepts fit together (material implications, such as being red implies being colored, etc.). If your private experience of redness has no bearing on on other concepts or the inferences you recognize, 'understanding' seems like too strong of a word.
Hacker shouldn't be construed as defending either direct or indirect realism. He's instead using and analysing terms like direct, indirect, see, perceive and representation in their ordinary sense. Here's a sample from PFN.
Sorry for the delay. Just saw this. Do you mean something like saying to oneself that such and such is red? I can relate to the experience. I can see it figuring after the fact in an explanation. 'That's when I noticed the light was red, when it was too late to stop.'
I believe I have what I am tempted to call the usual intuitions , but I also see that such a thesis is unsupportable not only in practice but even in principle. The inverted spectrum possibility should make us question the whole framework, it seems to me. (As I see it, it makes a beetle-in-box-point itself.)
It's nothing to do with language. A hermit with no language could look at two objects and see them to be the same colour (or different colours). That's colour recognition.
Well then I'm left with no idea who these 'direct realists' even are, let alone what they claim. I asked @Michael for some examples of the direct realist claim and he pointed me to the SEP article on colour primitivism which listed Hacker as a proponent.
So...
1. Is Hacker not a colour primitivist, or is colour primitivism not a form of direct realism?
2. Who the hell is a direct realist? Seems everybody quoted turns out not to be one.
You know this how?
What evidence are we working from here then?
It's everything to do with comparing and classifying, whether or not using word-pointing so to do.
Quoting Michael
Not without associating those two objects with all the others of their class (or each with a different class).
Without that wider association, and background classification, it wouldn't make sense to say they discriminated (or matched) according to colour. Only that they discriminated (or matched).
You confuse me being able to know that that he recognises colours with him being able to recognise colours. He either can or he can't, irrespective of what I think.
Quoting bongo fury
I don't need to have words for pleasure and pain to recognise that I am in pain or to recognise the difference between me feeling pleasure and me feeling pain. Qualitative experiences occur and differ from one another, and that they do has nothing to do with being able to make and make sense of my own and another person's vocalisations or ink impressions.
Hence my edit: it wouldn't make sense to say they discriminated according to colour, without their associating according to a background classification.
Quoting Michael
I clearly allowed for there being no language as such: no word- or symbol-pointing. But there will be comparing according to a wider classification, if it makes sense to speak of colour recognition, and not merely discrimination.
And that's how seeing colours is seeing objects. It's recognising classes of objects. (Or classes of illumination events.)
Quoting bongo fury
I have no idea what you're talking about. A hermit with no language can recognise when he feels pain. A hermit with no language can recognise when he feels pleasure. A hermit with no language can recognise the difference between feeling pain and feeling pleasure. A hermit with no language can recognise hot from cold, quiet from loud, hard from soft, sweetness from sourness, and so on.
Nothing about this depends on there being some observer who can make, and justify, these claims.
And there's nothing special about colour that makes it any different to the above.
I'm trying my best to make sense of "recognise" without implying language use.
Quoting Michael
Agreed.
A dog can recognise his owner.
Yes. By learning to compare and classify appearances.
Oh. Well my point is,
Quoting bongo fury
We can do that in cases of dreams, hallucinations, and illusions as well. Therefore it says nothing about the direct realist claim that mind-independent objects are directly present in experience and so independently are as they appear.
Do what?
No, dreams and hallucinations are us exercising our imagery circuits without succeeding in seeing anything. Illusions covers a multitude, obviously.
There is no perception without conceptualization in humans ( and higher animals). Conceptualization doesn’t mean using formal. language. To perceive pain or emotion or colors is to construe them by paring expectations with appearance in a complex process of sense making. We dont instantly feel, we undergo a matching and fitting process to determine and identify what it is we are feeling. This is why pain changes it’s felt character in response to many internal and external contextual factors.
This constructive process happens quickly enough that it seems immediate to us. We dont need others to help us judge what we are feeling when we are along , but we need our own cognitive processes to make that judgment, that is , to validate our expectations.
If you're going to define "seeing X" as such that it's only satisfied in the case of veridical direct perception then you're begging the question by asserting that we see X.
I was arguing against Pie's claim that seeing red depends on the public use of the English word "red".
Quoting Michael
To the extent that the public use of language brings with it expectations concerning what we are seeing , it will have an influence on our perceptions. This can be seen more clearly in actual contexts of word use (language games ). The context of use creates the actual sense of meaning of the word , and in turn shapes our perceptual expectations and thus what we actually see.
Experiments show how subjects’ auditory or visual perception is influenced by what they are told.
Semantic Direct Realism
The SEP article seems to say something similar:
I think that this "quasi-direct" realism wants to maintain the grammar of saying "we see the table" and avoid the grammar of saying something like "we see sense data" but also wants to avoid the naivety of direct realism proper (e.g. that things independently are as they appear because how they are is directly present in appearance).
The indirect and the quasi-direct realist are then, in a sense, talking past each other. As I mentioned before, the indirect realist says something comparable to "we read words" and the quasi-direct realist says something comparable to "we read about history", both of which can be correct. Whereas the direct realist proper is saying something comparable to "we read history", as if reading about history is direct access to history, which is of course false.
If somebody insists to me that I can only talk about my memories of my childhood, as opposed to my actual childhood, am I in a position to agree with that person?
No.
If this were true, then we'd have no trouble figuring out what sort of colors a tetrachromatic bird sees, or what sort of smells a dog experiences. It also doesn't make sense out of how some people can experience seeing a gold dress and some a blue one.
Take an experiment with that blue/gold dress before anyone knew about it. How would you know that someone was seeing a different color (blue or gold) than you were (gold or blue) until they told you? You couldn't know just by showing them if they're instructed to keep quiet about what the dress looks like.
All of this is rather obvious. We do dream after-all, and nobody can share our dream experience. Many of us have inner dialogs and day dreams. People lie and there's no foolproof way to always tell. Nor can we always know what someone is feeling or thinking.
I don't know how it's possible to escape the conclusion that we do have private experiences. How else would you make sense of the above?
Does that work for colors? Do you think if someone said you would be seeing a gold dress that it would necessarily mean you saw it as gold and not blue? If so, then how did it become a big controversy on the internet with people disagreeing on what color it was? I'm not aware that color illusions work that way. Anyway, it wouldn't matter for insects or birds who can see visual patterns on flowers or other animals invisible to us.
Quoting Marchesk
Apparently it does to some extent. Isn’t the gold dress -blue dress problem an example of gestalt perception? Think of the duck-rabbit or vase-face set-up. If someone tells me the image is a rabbit that will prime me perceptually to look for ways to construct it as a rabbit.
Perceptual
rooming should work for other animals too. If a vervet monkey produces an alarm call , do you think nearby monkeys are more inclined to recognize objects as
predators? What about if we associate a red-colored light with food, and then link a word command with the red light? Would an intelligent animal then be primed to see the color red by hearing the word?
https://qz.com/1454466/your-language-influences-your-color-perception-says-a-new-study/amp/
Let me just start by saying I don't deny private experiences. For me it's more about trying to point out their semantic uselessness. 'Red' can't refer to something private. I grant that 'my red' or 'how I see red' or 'what I'm calling red' makes sense enough. It can still function in licensed inferences. I can infer that for you the color of the fire engine is also the color for you of the rose.
Quoting Marchesk
But this seems to support me as much as you on this issue. One of my big points is that we only have reports of the other's sensation, never that sensation itself (which is more about grammar than some Cartesian ectoplasm.)
Quoting Marchesk
If someone could share our dream experience, we'd likely no longer call it a dream. So such statements are, in my view, at least as much about how people like us use the word 'dream' as they are about dreams themselves. If dreams are radically private, we can't say anything sensible about them (a tautology almost, upon consideration). But the use of the word dream is public, and there are correct and incorrect ways to use it. If, with Sellars, we think of meaning in terms of norms that govern inferences, we can climb out of this traditional K-hole. Without denying our strong intuition that there are raw feels and yet without trying to build public reality out of them. (Lying is another good issue, but I think that kind of thing is well-tackled by Ryle, and this post of mine is already too long.)
:up:
Quoting Joshs
:up:
Quoting Michael
:up:
Along these lines, it also makes sense to avoid taking certain issues too seriously. So often we are just talking about usage and differences that mostly make no difference.
I'd say not. I readily agree with Hacker in the text I quoted whereas the SEP Primitivism section misses the mark despite there being apparent points of agreement. The issue is that the philosophical direct/indirect realism distinction is completely different to the ordinary language direct/indirect distinction used by Hacker.
So Hacker says:
Whereas SEP says:
Quoting 2.1 Primitivism: The Simple Objectivist View of Colors
SEP describes Primitivism in Cartesian (e.g., objective, mind-independent, material) and Platonic (e.g., intrinsic, non-relational) language, whereas the ordinary language terms used by Hacker cut across the dualist framing. SEP frames the issue as a metaphysical either-or, whereas on an ordinary language view, whether one sees something directly or indirectly depends on the context.
To paraphrase @Pie from a nearby thread, Hacker is not trying to be Pepsi to the indirect realist's Coca-Cola. He's showing that there's no need for this bubbly acidic sugar water in the first place.
The irony is that everyone in this thread agrees on the basic science of perception. Hacker shows that it is perfectly possible to explain what we know about perception with a combination of ordinary and scientific language without assuming a dualist framing.
Quoting Isaac
A foil for the indirect realists.
:up:
Same here. I think the danger is a temptation to mistake reports about proprieties of language use for ontological profundities.
How would you support your claim about this hermit ? Presumably some public action would be interpreted in terms of a private experience.
Also, how can we speak of color recognition in the singular while insisting it's essentially private and inaccessible ? We can radicalize the inverted spectrum idea. Maybe you see a different palette of colors entirely. Maybe I've never seen any of the colors you've seen. Along these lines, maybe there is no one quale for recognizing color. Instead there is something like a loose complex of public behaviors (including reports involving sensation concepts) that might call recognizing a color.
I think your view implies, for instance, that we can never really know if another person has ever been in love, even if we have a detailed biography...as if being in love is something behind what are therefore mere indicators rather than constituents.
[quote=Robert Brandom]
The fact that cognitions acquired receptively through sensation are noninferential in the sense that they are not the result of exercising inferential capacities does not mean that they are nonconceptual in the sense that they are intelligible as determinately contentful apart from the situation of those contents in a “space of implications” of the sort exploited by inferential capacities.
[/quote]
In other words, I might be caused to report seeing red by radiation of a certain frequency hitting my retina, but this does not mean that redness is intelligible as a kind of semantic atom, anchored in some private experience. As Brandom interprets Sellars, to wield one concept with skill always involves skill wielding other concepts at the same time.
So I'm discovering.
Yes, exactly. Maybe this is the case. That's the point I'm making. I'm not sure what the rest of your comment is trying to say. That I am unable to name the colours I see? Firstly, I don't see why not, and secondly, I don't think it's relevant to the discussion. What matters is whether or not the colours I see are mind-independent properties of ordinary objects. The epistemological and ontological issues of perception have nothing to do with English vocabulary.
Quoting Isaac
If you're suggesting that philosophers don't make these kinds of claims, and that they are just a strawman fabricated by indirect realists, then maybe you should read Allen's A Naïve Realist Theory of Colour:
Or Martin's The Reality of Appearances:
These are the direct realist views that then gave rise to indirect realist views like the sense-datum theory, and then later the "quasi-direct" realist views like intentionalism and adverbialism. Although as we can see, there are still those who commit to direct realism proper.
If some thought needs words, and some does not, then claiming that thought does not need words is false. Claiming that thought needs words is also false. It's a matter of nuance:All, some, none.
That's what I see.
Quoting Mww
There is no denying that thinking about words is a kind of thought that needs words. Otherwise, there would be nothing to think about.
We're considering whether or not any thought needs words. Regardless of which linguistic framework we put to use, any and all meaningful coherent answers to that particular question are based completely upon what counts as thought that needs words, as well as what counts as thought that does not. This, in turn, relies upon what counts as thought, because both do.
It seems to me that the difference between thought that needs words and thought that does not is one of existential dependency. The former is existentially dependent upon words, and the latter is not. Thought that is existentially dependent upon words cannot possibly exist when and where words have never been. Thought that is not existentially dependent upon words can.
Here we face a 'problem' though.
If we claim that simple thought existed prior to the first words, and we aim to set out that kind of thought, then we are taking account of that which existed in its entirety prior to our taking it into account. Thus, we can get it wrong! While what counts as "thought" is determined by how we use the term, if we're using the term as a means to take account of that which exists in its entirety prior to our taking it into account, then whatever we say about such thought must not only be consistent with the ability to exist in its entirety prior to words, but our account must set out how it can/does.
When dichotomies are used as a means to divide everything up into stuff that fits into one or the other, then the inevitable result is a failure to be able to properly account for that which is both, and thus... neither one nor the other. There are no such things in those accounts.<-----That's the fatal flaw. It's a consequence of consistent language use combined with an inherently inadequate terminological framework.
Quoting Janus
I understood the first time. I agree, but that is a trivial point to make. We all know that much. Do you object to either claim in the quote at the top of this post?
[s]57[/s] 58 and still going...
Sure I agree, but I see those claims as being more obvious, more trivial, than the point that there is no fact of the matter concerning whether experience is internal, a combination of internal and external or neither internal nor external, and that these are just different ways of talking about perceptual experience; different understandings that all make sense in their various contexts, and that pitting them against one another doesn't mean much..
True enough, but is it not therefore logical, and rational, to claim that thinking about anything except words, would not need them? While it is true every thought must have its object, it does not follow that ever object must be a word.
Quoting creativesoul
It’s been established that some thoughts need words....thoughts with wordsk as their object.
Quoting creativesoul
Ok....the kind of thought that has words as its object counts as the kind of thought that needs words. The kind of thought that has anything but words as its object.....why does that kind of thought need them?
Quoting creativesoul
Ok, fine. A thought that needs words to exist is impossible without the words that are its object. This is true for particular thoughts of a certain kind, but does not hold for thought in general. It follows that the existence of thought in general is not necessarily existentially dependent on words. Which is exactly where we began this dialectic.
Quoting creativesoul
That’s not the claim, which is simple thought doesn’t require words. Simple thoughts occur whether or not words exist, and regardless of their temporality relative to thought in general.
Quoting creativesoul
Yes, we can do that. Aim to set out, and, take account, are just about the same thing, so when we do either we are describing something. So we are describing an antecedent. Can’t account for that which hasn’t occurred, I wouldn’t think.
Quoting creativesoul
This carries the implication that the occurrence and the account of the occurrence can be incompatible. I submit this only possible from a distinction in chronological reference frames. I have often taken account of an existant thought and found it wanting, but only from the perspective of a successive, and conceptually differentiated, thought. Commonly called instruction if from external source, or introspection if from the same internal source.
———-
Quoting creativesoul
I understand this as....if we use thought to take account of thought, to which I agree wholeheartedly...
Quoting creativesoul
.....but now it is that what we say that takes account. So what we say must be consistent with our thoughts...yes, it should, in order to be productive. The account sets out the consistency between the thought and the account we take of it, by relegating words to the representations of the conceptions that are the content of our thoughts. In this theory, the consistency in the account is given, under the assumption of an otherwise rationally operative intelligence.
You’re a tough nut to crack, mon ami, and hopefully I did some justice.
Symbolic thought requires symbols, and symbols are mostly words. It's true that things like love or hate or anger can be symbolized by images, but how could non-verbal images be used to symbolize abstract notions like generality, specificity, pattern, from, form, about, content, exception, logic, rationality, fundamental, absolute and countless others?
Quoting Janus
Perfect. Do you object to what's directly below?
All thought and perception is symbolic in the sense of signifying something. Complexes of sound , image and sensation signify recognizable things. Music signifies complex ideas and feelings. Words are just specialized forms of signification. Many abstract ideas can be signified better by feelings( which are forms of conceptual meaning) than by words.
No, I've already said that, in the context of thinking about experience as being comprised of both internal and external elements, which is one of the possible ways to think about it, it's a sensible statement.
Never claimed otherwise. Red herring. Strawman. Non sequitur. Readers' choice.
There are better approaches.
So, ...
You've agreed to all of what's in the above quote.
I put it to you that whether or not experience is external, internal, and/or both is something that is not up to us any more than whether or not our biological machinery, the tree, leaves, and light are. Would you agree with that as well?
:brow:
The way I think about signs has been influenced by Peirce. To give a basic account: according to Peirce a symbol is something that signifies something else but does not resemble it. An ikon is something that signifies something else by resemblance or representation. And a basic sign, such as smoke being a sign of fire for example, signifies by material association acquired by inference or expectation from the experience of constant conjunctions of things.
Words are symbols in this sense that they do not resemble or have any material associations, but do have conventional associations, with the things they represent. So not all signs are symbols in this understanding.
Now my claim has just been that a complex argument or train of thought involving abstract concepts cannot be followed except in symbolic language terms. That said, I don't totally rule out the possibility, but I know I can't do it, and I cannot imagine how others could. But even if it were possible, how could it be shown to be such in any case?
Yup.
Good, then we've nothing to argue about.
Quoting creativesoul
Better according to who?Quoting creativesoul
No, I think it's just a matter of definition, nothing more. If experience is defined as the sensing, feeling and thinking processes of an individual, which are obviously not open to public scrutiny, then on that definition experience is internal. So, it is up to us how we choose to think about it.
:cool: Cool, we agree on that it seems.
Well, no. Some things we think about are themselves existentially dependent upon words. If A is existentially dependent upon words, and thinking about A is existentially dependent upon A, then thinking about A is existentially dependent upon words.
I think we agree upon much, actually.
If some thought does not need words, then the proposition "thought does not need words" is true. This is true, regardless of the fact that some thought needs words. That's the way inductive reasoning works.
Here's some more examples. Some living beings need to breathe oxygen, some do not. We can conclude that living beings do not need to breathe oxygen. Some plants need UV light, some do not. We can conclude that plants do not need UV light.
When we have a class, "thought" for example, and some of the members of that class require a specified property. and other members do not require that specific property, we can conclude, as a general principle, that the specified property is not a requirement to be a member of the class. This makes the property accidental rather than essential. You could however, start a subclass, where that accidental property is stipulated as essential, and say that the property is a requirement for that subclass. So, a special type of complex thought needs words, but in general, complex thought does not need words..
No, if some thought does not need words then the proposition "some thought does not need words" is true. "Thought does not need words" is a blanket statement which is equivalent to "all thought does not need words".
What - exactly - is a matter of definition, and nothing more?
Whether or not a tree is inside or outside my head?
Quoting Janus
emphasis mine
Again, what - exactly - is up to us how we choose to think about it? The elemental constitution of all human experience? As if that changes depending upon how we choose to define the term "experience"?
Do you think that we can be mistaken about what experience consists of?
So, I'm imagining a one-year-old human, playing contently in a crib with some toy. Happy slobber. The family dog is lying close by fast asleep... legs and facial muscles twitching. There's a sudden loud knock on the door. The dog barks incessantly. The toddler is startled.
According to you, the content of that toddler's experience depends upon how we define the word "experience".
That cannot be right.
No, whether or not your experience of a tree is internal or both internal and external. As I said both can be coherently said, depending on context or definition of 'experience'.
Quoting creativesoul
You're putting words in my mouth. I haven't said anything about content. If experience is thought of as being something that goes on inside the body/ brain, then experience is rightly thought of as internal; that is inside the skin/ external world boundary.
If experience is thought of as the whole process consisting in stimulation of the senses by light, sound or whatever that is external to the skin/ external world boundary as well as the neural affects that go on inside the body/ brain, then experience is rightly thought of as both external and internal or neither (exclusively) external or internal; that is both outside and inside the skin/ external world boundary etc.
These are simply different ways we can think about these things; it is not a case of one being right and the other wrong. One or the other way of thinking might be more or less useful depending on what it is we want to do.
Fortunate then that the account of active inference does not seek to deicide "everything" up into one or other camp, but merely some things. Otherwise it would indeed fall foul of your concerns.
Quoting creativesoul
Perception.
Of course it can. The contents of my house depend on how I define 'house' (does it include the porch, the outhouse, the shed...?). It seems quite normal to say that our definitions determine the content of those defined concepts.
Fair enough.
According to you, the toddler's experience depends upon how we define the word "experience".
Being normal doesn't equate to being accurate, correct, and/or true. Our definitions determine what else we can say without self-contradiction. They do not determine whether or not they are true. They do not determine what something consists of when the candidate is the sort of thing that exists in its entirety prior to our attempts at taking it into account. Some human experience is exactly that sort of thing. So...
The toddler was a deliberate choice. The toddler's individual experience is not at all influenced and/or determined by how we define the term "experience". It consists of external things, internal things, as well as things that are neither(associations/correlations drawn between external and internal things).
Toddlers have experience. I think we agree there.
The point here is simple really. Those and many other experiences existed in their entirety prior to our naming and descriptive practices. All definitions of "experience" are existentially dependent upon naming and descriptive practices. Thus, it only follows that some human experience can and does exist prior to any definition of the term "experience". If the notion/conception of experience cannot take those kinds of experience into account, then it is found sorely lacking.
"Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts." ? Charles Sanders Peirce
I would concur. It only follow then that we can get such things wrong.
Our definitions regarding all such things(all that exists in its entirety prior to our ability to talk about it) can be mistaken.
The toddler's experience is not a defined concept
No. Something existed prior to our naming practices. Our naming practices determined which of the possible boundaries we are going to make significant.
It's like saying a cell exists prior to our naming it. It doesn't. A collection of proteins, lipids and carbohydrates exists, all moving around in a constant state of flux. What constitutes 'the cell' is determined entirely by convention, by the naming practice. We say 'the cell' includes the vacuole, but excludes the interior of the protein channel. It includes the mitochondrial DNA, but excludes viral RNA. We decided all this in naming 'the cell'. All the stuff existed prior to our naming, but the fact about what was 'the cell' and what wasn't 'the cell' didn't exist prior to our naming it.
So, just so I understand this...
Are you really objecting to anyone claiming that humans had experience prior to language use?
Wow.
So then, no sex, no eating, no being full of fear at the sound of the bear, etc? Really? As if all of that does not count at any time prior to language?
Quoting Isaac
I agree, and I think the same applies to what we variously decide to name "experience".
Quoting creativesoul
Isaac will correct me if I've misunderstood, but I don't think that's what he means. At least that is not what we've been discussing, which is the various ways of defining experience, not whether it exists without language. That said, on certain views it would be possible to say that without language there is no experience; not that I would be inclined to agree with that..
Quoting Janus
Are you sure about the last statement above?
I have no doubt that it is matter of definition, as I've explained.
Look again. You've contradicted that.
No.
Quoting Janus
That's it, yes.
Look. Below are five Xs...
X X X X X
I'm going to say those middle three Xs are ' a jabberwocky', that's just what a jabberwocky is.
Now, did those three Xs exist prior to my naming them? Yes.
Could I have included the two Xs either side in my definition of 'a jabberwocky'? Yes, clearly I could have, but I didn't.
Could someone else come along and say 'a jabberwocky' is actually the first four Xs? Yes, obviously they could.
None of this has any bearing whatsoever on the existence of the three, four, or five Xs involved in what we're variously calling 'a jabberwocky'.
Those Xs are not the sort of thing that exist in their entirety prior to naming and descriptive practices.
I did.
(grain of sand/beach)
Quoting Janus
(Grain of sand/this beach)
Quoting Janus
(Grain of sand/not this beach)
Quoting Janus
(Grain of sand/beach; this beach; not this beach; any beach; all beaches)
All parenteticals can be images, obviously. Now, perhaps I’m treating your “abstract notions” as universals, which may have particulars as their objects. I did that because, technically speaking, abstract notions are pure conceptions that do not have objects of their own, which makes explicit they cannot be represented by either words or images, but only the relations which constitute them, may.
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Quoting Janus
Agreed, with the caveat “cannot be followed”. It remains that while it is rather absurd to suppose I have a complex argument with myself, I can nonetheless have a complex chain of thought comprised of a series of conjoined images, which, of course, no one else could follow. Or, in fact, even know about. To objectify my chain of thought, such that another could both know and possibly understand it, language would be necessary.
That is incorrect. You have made a category mistake, caused by equivocation. You are equivocating between "thought" as referring to numerous specific and particular instances of thought, in "some thought does not need words", and "thought" as referring to one general conception in "thought does not need words".
Notice "some thought" in the first case, refers to a multiplicity, a plurality of particular instances (that's what "some" indicates), while "thought" in the second case refers to one general concept, a universal. Your failure to make this distinction between "thought" referring to a group of particulars, and "thought" referring to one general concept, a universal, is a prime example of a very common form of equivocation.
The principal difference between a particular and a universal is that all properties (including accidentals) are necessary to the individual, whereas all properties of all the particulars in a type (universal) are not necessary to the type. So, in "some people are white", white is necessary to all those individuals who are white. And, white is also necessary to each member of that group referred to by "some people". However, white is not needed to be a person. Therefore "people are not necessarily white" remains true, while "some people are necessarily white" is also true.
Special Relativity...a physical relation of the Universe to us....does not need words. To think about Special Relativity and form his theory thereof, Einstein used his imagination; to record the objects of his imagination as a theory he used words and symbols. When I think about the theory, I use the words of it, but not the symbols because I am not proving the hypotheses contained by the theory, to form in me the images the words represent, just the reverse of what Einstein did. So, yes, my thought about SR depends on Einstein’s words, insofar as the images I think for myself are given from the affects the external words perceived as mere objects prescribe, to which I assign my own understanding. This works quite well for SR and GR, but not so well for QM. At least for me.
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Quoting creativesoul
It could be right, if experience is define as having content. Or, if a principle of a theory of experience mandates that an empty experience is impossible. Herein, experience is not so much defined, as necessarily conditioned, is susceptible to certain criteria in order to be an experience. Biggest mistake in metaphysics, is reification; experience is not a thing, it is an logical end given from consistently determinable logical means.
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Quoting Isaac
Keyword: practices. The practice of, the innate ability to, name, may be as necessary to human intelligence as reason itself, but the actual employment of that ability does not occur absent that which is to be named. And that is conditioned by time, insofar as there is only and always a mere undetermined something prior to its name. That which is a mere something, is phenomenon; that which is named, is conception, which may or may not be given from phenomenon, but is so necessarily with respect to real objects.
Quoting Mww
The point I was making was one of selection, or filtering. We select from among a range of options which phenomena, to use (possibly abuse) your terminology, we are to make a concept.
Boundaries are the easiest example (but not the only). The boundary separating tree from not-tree is real, a phenomena we sense, but it is not the only available real boundary. We could have drawn a boundary between the solids and the liquids, named one one thing and one another. We didn't. We looked at the boundary created by the biological systems and used them. Thus, those systems (and their physical parts) are 'tree', and anything else is 'not tree'. But it needn't have been that way. There are other boundaries we could have chosen.
Hence, our naming practices (here choosing which boundary to use) determine, to a degree, what a tree is and what it isn't.
I see what you’re saying, but I find it rather inefficient. According to the Old Guys, each perception generates only its own phenomenon, so a range of them, for any one perception, generates inefficiency. But we do, on the other hand, select from a range of options what constitutes each phenomenon, which is the purview of the productive imagination, so there is a selection process in there.
————-
Quoting Isaac
Again, I somewhat agree, your boundary being my limitation, both being real. Each property of any object has its own boundary/limitation, the totality of them determining te phenomenon as such, and from that, how the object is to be named.
Something like that?
I think a major sticking point between Old Guys and New Guys is.....where are phenomena to be found, in the complete picture.
That's actually what I meant. Clumsy writing on my part which I can only put down to an attempt to use 'philosophy' terms!
Quoting Mww
Maybe not the totality though. There may be properties which are just of no interest to us at all, and so play no part in determining an object. But in general, yes, that's the picture I have.
Quoting Mww
Now, I'd have to understand properly what you mean by 'phenomena' to answer that...
Quoting Janus
Derrida’s analyses of language attempted to show that what you are calling word symbols, and what Peirce calls ikon, have both conventional and inherently meaningful expressive relations with what they stand for . There is research corroborating Derrida’s claim that word symbols are not as strictly conventional as you might think. For instance , auditory characteristics of phonemes have been found to be non-arbitrarily linked to the meanings they symbolize.
Quoting Janus
Would you grant that a music composer is creating abstract concepts through their medium , and may consider music to be a more effective way , and perhaps the only, way to produce the deepest form of abstract thinking? And that a visual artist or dancer may make the same claim about their art? And even an actor may claim that the silences and pauses, the facial expressions and gestures , can convey more in the way. of abstract ideas than the use of words?
I would suggest that the differences among these non-verbal forms of expression are continuous with the differences within varying uses of verbal language. For instance , poetic language conveys differently than prose, and story-telling produces ideas differently than
theoretical verbiage. And words that belong to song lyrics work differently than these other examples.
Eugene Gendlin studied how verbal language and bodily felt meaning reciprocally determine and enhance each other , and developed techniques for tapping into the experiential intricacy of bodily felt sense, which is wider than verbal concepts at the same that it stands as the generating process behind verbal conceptualization.
We use a sense of the whole situation in many crucial situations in an implicit way. This is often referred to as
‘intuition’ , but it is not a phenomenon restricted to only certain circumstances. It is this relevance that makes any word meaningful to us. In generating new concepts , we do t have the new words till a fair bit into the process. Prior to the creation of new words , we have a sense of what we mean that we can refer back to and manipulate. It has a bodily quality to it. We can create thought experiments and invent new ideas well before we are able to find new word names.
Threads like these make me wish there was no "external world."
Good.
Understood. There are a plurality of accepted usages/definitions of the term "experience". Those definitions have no bearing whatsoever upon that which is being picked out by the term. What experience consists of and/or amounts to is not up to us. It is not a matter of definition, and nothing else. The notion that it is a matter of definition and nothing else) and all that follows from it is precisely what I'm rejecting. It's dead wrong. There are a number of ways to show this.
I'll start here...
Consider a group of humans living in England during the 14th century. There were famous artists, artisans, craftsmen, theatre, nobility, royalty, and everyday life. There were struggles. There were defeats. There were victories. There was class warfare, politics, truth, and lies. There were common beliefs. There were disparate fringe beliefs. There were worldviews. There were social conventions and rules governing behaviour. There was fairness and injustice. There were romantic relationships, infidelities, and loneliness. There was starvation and excess. There were murders and victims thereof. There were hunting expeditions, games, jousting events, etc. There were people who were proud. There were people who were ashamed. It was a society of people.
Here's the salient fact of the matter:The term "experience" had not yet been coined.
So, either no one in that time had experiences, or they did. I can only trust that no one here would deny that those people had experiences. Thus, since they did, and did so long before the term was coined, it only follows that human experience existed in its entirety prior to the term "experience". As a matter of backwards causation alone, that which existed in its entirety prior to being picked out to the exclusion of all else and subsequently further described is not effected, affected, determined, and/or otherwise influenced in any way whatsoever by the accounting practice. Human experience emerged prior to our ability to take it into account. What human experience is amounts to what it consists of, and that is quite clearly not up to us. Rather, it [i]is[i] up to us to get the definition right(to arrive at true statements about human experience and what it consists of), and that requires keeping the right sorts of things in mind during our endeavor to acquire and/or accrue knowledge about human experience.
I'm guessing that there's a bit Quine influencing your thinking here. In Ontological Relativity he argues
Such frameworks are the linguistic equivalent of someone trying to pour thousands of gallons of water into a five gallon bucket. The world includes much more than one's worldview.
Not at all.
Take my example of 'cells'. We didn't have cell theory back in the 14th century. So did the people back then have cells?
So, that could be established henceforth as a basic agreement.
Some thought needs words.
While I could agree that "thoughts with words as their object" is a description of one example of thought that needs words, I would not agree that that is the only kind. Nor do I find that that description is capable of taking into account all thought that needs words. As before, all thought that needs words is thought that is existentially dependent upon words. Such thought are the kind that cannot possibly exist without words, and those include more than just thought that has words as it's object.
Let's suppose a very different case...
Consider the curious case of a cat thinking about the contents of its food bowl. I have just such a curious cat named "Cookie". Cookie will come to me, wherever I may be around the property, make eye contact with me, and then immediately take off as fast as she can back towards the kitchen, where her food bowl is. I mean, she tears out of the area with claws extended. It's quite memorable. Sometimes, if I'm lying on the bed, she'll sit around on the floor for quite some time waiting for me to look at her. If too much time passes, she will begin tearing around in circles, claws extended, on the rug at the foot of the bed. If, after doing this, I continue to remain in place without ever having made eye contact, she will then begin tearing a path between the rug and kitchen, through the bedroom doorway, going back and forth between the two areas, tearing around in circles on the rug during each visit to the bedroom. Finally, if all that happens and I still have not acknowledged her presence, she will jump on the bed, na dmake her presence known by meowing at me, while placing herself into my immediate proximity, within mere inches.
After she has my attention, regardless of my whereabouts, she will lead me to the bowl stopping every few feet or so to look back at me, as if to ensure that I'm following her. Clearly the curious cat Cookie cannot think about the word "food bowl". So, words are not the object of her thought. The contents of the food bowl is. Despite not being able to think about words, she can nevertheless think about the fact that her bowl is empty. She can want me to pour food in the bowl.
Her thinking that her bowl is empty is an excellent example of thought that needs words despite not having words as their object. It is a very curious example. In this particular case, her thoughts do not have words as their object. Her thoughts are however, about the bowl. That particular bowl is the sort of thing that is itself existentially dependent upon language. That bowl is the resultant product of many a linguistic endeavor. From the initial conceptual drawings, through all of the different engineering inherent to the manufacturing processes, the emergence of that particular bowl was facilitated by words. That bowl is existentially dependent upon words.
Thinking about A is existentially dependent upon A. If A is existentially dependent upon words, then thinking about A is as well.
Let Cookie's food bowl be A.
Are you serious?
:brow:
Quoting Mww
OK, I can't do it, so I'll have to take your word for it that you can.
Quoting Joshs
I don't deny that ikons may accumulate conventional associations, but all that is necessary for understanding what an ikon represents is the ability to see the similarity between it and what it represents. We see that in paleolithic cave paintings. I also don't deny that words may be onomatopoeic or their sounds non-arbitrarily associated with what they symbolize. But in both cases such relationships are not essential to their function.
Quoting Joshs
No, for me music (without lyrics) conveys only feeling. Abstract concepts are determinate; I don't think music, like so-called "abstract" art, is rightly thought of as being abstract, but is non-representational and concrete; more concrete in a sense than representational art. Which is not to say that abstract art and music cannot evoke images or associations; but the images and/ or associations evoked, and whether there are images and/ or associations evoked, may be different for each individual.
Quoting Joshs
Sure, we don't need new words, just new combinations of existing words, in order to produce novel ideas. I do it every time I write a poem. We cannot create thought experiments and invent new ideas without words, though; or at least I can't, and if someone tells me they can then I can only take their word for it, as there can be no other way to demonstrate whether what they claim is true or not. They may really be able to do something I cannot, or they may be deceiving themselves, who knows?
Quoting creativesoul
You've claimed that experience is a matter of definition and nothing more, and that experience is what it is [b]regardless of how we define it[b]. Those two claims are mutually exclusive. If the one is true, the other is not, and vice versa. That is the epitome of self-contradiction - by definition, ironically enough.
Quoting Janus
“Only feeling” is the very core of abstract meaning. It is an impressionistic kind of verbiage. Rather than describing feeling as indeterminate, I would say that the word puts into sharper focus what feeling already locates in a general way. Is feeling non-representational? Is music non-representational? Did you know that if you put a group of people in a room and ask them to draw images that are evoked by a piece of instrumental music played to the group, many would draw similar images? That sounds representational to me. Is a Haiku representational in the way that an instruction manual is? Are there not forms of modern poetry that are abstract in the way that abstract art is? Does metaphorical language represent or invent?
No, I didn't claim that. I said that whether experience is thought of as internal or external etc,, is a matter of definition. If you can quote something I wrote that you think claims what you say then do so.
I'll have to respond later; it's 7.22 AM here and I'm off to work...
Yep. Music is like language - what counts as dramatic, peaceful or lyrical in music is generally understood by the intersubjective community from which the music originates. When Westerners hear music from other cultures, it often sounds incoherent, as they have no point of reference.
Quoting creativesoul
Okay. I've quoted the relevant portions of our exchange above. Where you claimed "No, I think it's just a matter of definition", what - exactly - are you referring to? What - exactly - is just a matter of definition?
I asked that already. You did not answer.
It may be best to revisit the succession of agreements leading up to that objection, because the objection itself contradicted the prior agreements. What you objected to followed from what you'd agreed upon.
Sure looks that way to me...
Quoting creativesoul
Is there an external material world?
If by "external" we mean not within the physical bounds of our skin, and by "material" we mean detectable stuff, then all we're asking is whether or not any detectable stuff not within the bounds of our skin exists.
Such questions are the bane of philosophy.
They are consequences of placing far too much - perhaps it's better described as placing the wrong kind of - value upon consistent language use.
Yes.
It makes absolutely no sense at all to deny and/or object to the following claim.
"14th century humans had cells."
That's my answer.
As I see it, this is a language trap. That it is impossible for one to step out of subjective experience is not an empirical hypothesis. It's just a lesson in metaphysical English, an articulation of how concepts tend to be used together by a particular, eccentric community (us), often mistaken for facts about immaterial entities like consciousness and knowledge and sensations.
How convenient.
Proving there is an external world does not require stepping outside of subjective experience. Human experience is not the sort of thing that can be stepped into and/or out of to begin with, so it makes no sense at all to claim that doing so is needed for anything else at all.
Understanding how language creation and/or acquisition happens leaves no room at all for serious well founded doubt regarding whether or not an external world exists.
Simply put, understanding that we use the term "tree" to pick out the thing in my front yard suffices.
Don’t we need to include the concept of ‘x’ itself as what is involved in naming.? Put differently, aren’t the words we use more than just added-on tokens to extant objects? Doesn’t the use of a word involve an activity, a set of causal interactive performances that give that word its pragmatic sense? If we look at word concepts this way, as inextricable from causal interactions with an environment , then everything we can say about a series of x’s implies specific patterns of engagement. We can’t then say the x’s existed prior to our naming of them as a jabberwocky , because the meaning of ‘x’ points to a specific way of causally interacting with aspects of the world. As the interactions evolve, so do the meanings of the named concepts.
Naming things with words is more than just sticking a symbol in front of a sign. Words are not just tools that we use to refer to an independently existing universe, they are ways that the world we interact with modifies our engagement with it. Using a word changes us at the same time that it changes something in our environment. Words only exist in their use , and their use reveals new aspects of things.
I think the point is that at that time, the word "cells" was not in use, nor was the concept which the word refers to. So at that time it is impossible that human beings had "cells" because there was no such thing as cells.
That’s a good point. If we think about what is an empirical hypothesis, the use of words themselves provides a key example. Word use is performative, intrinsic to and inextricable to the way we causally interact with each other and our material circumstances. This includes concepts like subjectivity, which only makes sense in relation to worldly intersubjective engagement, whose reciprocally created constraints and affordances serve to empirically determine the intelligibility of concepts like ‘inner’ and ‘subjective’.
Yes, exactly. I like cashing out 'worldly intersubjective engagement' in terms of mostly tacit rules for applying concepts. The traditional metaphysician, our traditional foil, talks as if these contingent and blurry rules/habits were the deepest laws of reality, meanwhile oversimplyfing them until they are more plausibly handled in a quasimathematical way, so that what appear to be profound theorems can be cranked out from the comfort of an armchair.
As if this somehow applies to what I've been putting forth?
Sure. We're not interacting with things contained within the physical boundaries of our skin. The tree in my yard is one such thing. Which is the point. The tree is detectable and not within my skin(material and external).
We are in our environment. Word use changes us. How exactly does using the word "tree" as a means to pick out the thing in my front yard change the thing in my front yard?
Perhaps you have an example of a situation when language use changes something in our environment. I mean, I agree with that. At least when I take it at face value. Word use helps to create many different parts of our environment.
I'm struggling to see the relevance.
That's what I took him to be saying.
"Cell" is a term used to pick out specific biological machinery. That machinery does not need to be picked out in order to exist. The names pick out the machinery. Humans in the 14th century had all the machinery that we later picked out to the exclusion of all else by virtue of using the term "cell" as a means for doing so. The machinery is the cell. The name is not the cell. Humans had the machinery without having the words. Thus, 14th century humans had cells despite not having "cells".
"Cell" does not refer to a specific "biological machinery" (which really makes no sense anyway, as biological organisms are not machines), so your reply is not relevant.
We might want to radicalize the relation of tacit rules to concept application in the direction of the later Wittgenstein.
“…we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, I have argued, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances (Wittgenstein 1953). Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.”( Rouse)
I don't think there's any substantial disagreement between us on this issue. I try not to be too attached to any particular jargon, so to me we can talk of rules or norms or habits. What I have in mind is the kind of fragile, constantly-updated 'structure' that makes us intelligible and more or less plausible to one another. I think we agree that it's raging white water. I very much understand wanting to emphasize how malleable or response the 'medium' is, even to the degree of insisting that we can only ever lie about it, because it's an unchartable self-drinking river.
[quote=Brandom]
A characteristic distinguishing feature of linguistic practices is their protean character, their plasticity and malleability, the way in which language constantly overflows itself, so that any established pattern of usage is immediately built on, developed, and transformed. The very act of using linguistic expressions or applying concepts transforms the content of those expressions or concepts. The way in which discursive norms incorporate and are transformed by novel contingencies arising from their usage is not itself a contingent, but a necessary feature of the practices in which they are implicit. It is easy to see why one would see the whole enterprise of semantic theorizing as wrong–headed if one thinks that, insofar as language has an essence, that essence consists in its restless self–transformation (not coincidentally reminiscent of Nietzsche’s “self–overcoming”). Any theoretical postulation of common meanings associated with expression types that has the goal of systematically deriving all the various proprieties of the use of those expressions according to uniform principles will be seen as itself inevitably doomed to immediate obsolescence as the elusive target practices overflow and evolve beyond those captured by what can only be a still, dead snapshot of a living, growing, moving process. It is an appreciation of this distinctive feature of discursive practice that should be seen as standing behind Wittgenstein’s pessimism about the feasibility and advisability of philosophers engaging in semantic theorizing…
…
[T]he idea that the most basic linguistic know–how is not mastery of proprieties of use that can be expressed once and for all in a fixed set of rules, but the capacity to stay afloat and find and make one’s way on the surface of the raging white–water river of discursive communal practice that we always find ourselves having been thrown into (Wittgensteinian Geworfenheit) is itself a pragmatist insight. It is one that Dewey endorses and applauds. And it is a pragmatist thought that owes more to Hegel than it does to Kant. For Hegel builds his metaphysics and logic around the notion of determinate negation because he takes the normative obligation to do something to resolve the conflict that occurs when the result of our properly applying the concepts we have to new situations is that we (he thinks, inevitably) find ourselves with materially incompatible commitments to be the motor that drives the unceasing further determination and evolution of our concepts and their contents. The process of applying conceptual norms in judgment and intentional action is the very same process that institutes, determines, and transforms those conceptual norms.
[/quote]
Oh, for fuck's sake...
The tree in my yard is not a name. The term "tree" is. The term "tree" is used to pick out trees. The same holds for cells and "cells"...
[quote=Carnap]
Let us consider as an example the simplest kind of entities dealt with in the everyday language: the spatio-temporally ordered system of observable things and events. Once we have accepted the thing language with its framework for things, we can raise and answer internal questions, e.g., "Is there a white piece of paper on my desk?" "Did King Arthur actually live?", "Are unicorns and centaurs real or merely imaginary?" and the like. These questions are to be answered by empirical investigations. Results of observations are evaluated according to certain rules as confirming or disconfirming evidence for possible answers. (This evaluation is usually carried out, of course, as a matter of habit rather than a deliberate, rational procedure. But it is possible, in a rational reconstruction, to lay down explicit rules for the evaluation. This is one of the main tasks of a pure, as distinguished from a psychological, epistemology.) The concept of reality occurring in these internal questions is an empirical scientific non-metaphysical concept. To recognize something as a real thing or event means to succeed in incorporating it into the system of things at a particular space-time position so that it fits together with the other things as real, according to the rules of the framework.
From these questions we must distinguish the external question of the reality of the thing world itself. In contrast to the former questions, this question is raised neither by the man in the street nor by scientists, but only by philosophers. Realists give an affirmative answer, subjective idealists a negative one, and the controversy goes on for centuries without ever being solved. And it cannot be solved because it is framed in a wrong way. To be real in the scientific sense means to be an element of the system; hence this concept cannot be meaningfully applied to the system itself. Those who raise the question of the reality of the thing world itself have perhaps in mind not a theoretical question as their formulation seems to suggest, but rather a practical question, a matter of a practical decision concerning the structure of our language. We have to make the choice whether or not to accept and use the forms of expression in the framework in question.
In the case of this particular example, there is usually no deliberate choice because we all have accepted the thing language early in our lives as a matter of course. Nevertheless, we may regard it as a matter of decision in this sense: we are free to choose to continue using the thing language or not; in the latter case we could restrict ourselves to a language of sense data and other "phenomenal" entities, or construct an alternative to the customary thing language with another structure, or, finally, we could refrain from speaking. If someone decides to accept the thing language, there is no objection against saying that he has accepted the world of things. But this must not be interpreted as if it meant his acceptance of a belief in the reality of the thing world; there is no such belief or assertion or assumption, because it is not a theoretical question. To accept the thing world means nothing more than to accept a certain form of language, in other words, to accept rules for forming statements and for testing accepting or rejecting them. The acceptance of the thing language leads on the basis of observations made, also to the acceptance, belief, and assertion of certain statements. But the thesis of the reality of the thing world cannot be among these statements, because it cannot be formulated in the thing language or, it seems, in any other theoretical language.
...
From the internal questions we must clearly distinguish external questions, i.e., philosophical questions concerning the existence or reality of the total system of the new entities. Many philosophers regard a question of this kind as an ontological question which must be raised and answered before the introduction of the new language forms. The latter introduction, they believe, is legitimate only if it can be justified by an ontological insight supplying an affirmative answer to the question of reality. In contrast to this view, we take the position that the introduction of the new ways of speaking does not need any theoretical justification because it does not imply any assertion of reality. We may still speak (and have done so) of the "acceptance of the new entities" since this form of speech is customary; but one must keep in mind that this phrase does not mean for us anything more than acceptance of the new framework, i.e., of the new linguistic forms. Above all, it must not be interpreted as referring to an assumption, belief, or assertion of "the reality of the entities." There is no such assertion. An alleged statement of the reality of the system of entities is a pseudo-statement without cognitive content. To be sure, we have to face at this point an important question; but it is a practical, not a theoretical question; it is the question of whether or not to accept the new linguistic forms. The acceptance cannot be judged as being either true or false because it is not an assertion. It can only be judged as being more or less expedient, fruitful, conducive to the aim for which the language is intended.
...
Thus it is clear that the acceptance of a linguistic framework must not be regarded as implying a metaphysical doctrine concerning the reality of the entities in question.
...
A brief historical remark may here be inserted.The non-cognitive character of the questions which we have called here external questions was recognized and emphasized already by the Vienna Circle under the leadership of Moritz Schlick, the group from which the movement of logical empiricism originated. Influenced by ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Circle rejected both the thesis of the reality of the external world and the thesis of its irreality as pseudo-statements; the same was the case for both the thesis of the reality of universals (abstract entities, in our present terminology) and the nominalistic thesis that they are not real and that their alleged names are not names of anything but merely flatus vocis. (It is obvious that the apparent negation of a pseudo-statement must also be a pseudo-statement.) It is therefore not correct to classify the members of the Vienna Circle as nominalists, as is sometimes done. However, if we look at the basic anti-metaphysical and pro-scientific attitude of most nominalists (and the same holds for many materialists and realists in the modern sense), disregarding their occasional pseudo-theoretical formulations, then it is, of course, true to say that the Vienna Circle was much closer to those philosophers than to their opponents.
[/quote]
http://www.ditext.com/carnap/carnap.html
A "cell" as commonly defined can be either a complete living organism, or a part of a living organism. How is it, that in some cases an entire living organism is "picked out" as a cell, and in other cases, a part of a living organism is picked out, and called by the same name. One is an entire living organism, the other is not, yet they are both said to be the same independent thing, a cell. Obviously, the term "cell" is not used to pick out cells, because it is used to pick out two completely different types of things, one being a whole living organism, the other being a part of a living organism.
You may want to try a better example.
ALL living things consist of cells. But how many varies from beastie to beastie. Some consist of one cell, some consist of millions. The term "cell" by itself has nothing to do with being a living organism.
:up:
If what is being picked out by the name exists in its entirety prior to being picked out then it does not matter one bit if those different uses conflict with one another. My point remains.
Since you said that whether or not experience is external etc. is something that is not up to us, and I said I think it's a matter of definition, no more, I think it should have been obvious what "it" was. Anyway, I've already cleared it up in the previous post. so there's no need to go over it again I hope.
This practical reminder, while maybe not the last word, deserves respect.
In my view, this supports what might be called the primacy of the space of reasons or of the philosophical situation itself. He invokes the concepts of argument and legitimacy against the same norms that make such concepts intelligible or relevant.
Good. Now what about the phagocytised or excreted proteins in the cell vacuole. Were they part of what makes up these 14th C cells or not? If you gave an intelligent 14th C citizen a microscope and showed him the cell, told him they were called "cells", what would he make of the phagocytised or excreted proteins in the cell vacuole?
Possibly, but X here simply stands for something and the spaces between them stand for some boundary. I don't doubt you could make an argument that both concept (an external world matrix, and 'boundaries') are constructed concepts, but I haven't seen the evidence for that. All I've seen indicates that such fundamental concepts are present in very young babies and so seem likely to be hard-wired.
Quoting Joshs
I agree, yes. I think the differences between us might be the foundation on which this activity acts. You might have it have nk foundation at all, I believe there are physical and biological building blocks from which these senses are constructed.
Quoting Joshs
As I say, I can see how you might theorise that, but the evidence I've seen seems to contradict it.
I'd say it this way, to head off a tendency to think we're pointing our telescopes at curious entities:
Human experience is (contingently but significantly) not the sort [s]of thing[/s] of concept that
Not seeing the relevance.
Quoting Joshs
I don't think feeling is essential to abstract meaning; abstract meaning consists in generalization. 'Tree" refers to whole class of concrete objects, whereas a class is an abstract object; a concept.
I didn't know that about people drawing similar images after listening to instrumental music. Can you cite references for that study? Does it work with all instrumental music or just some, like for example Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony?
In any case music is gentle, calm, slow, racing, violent, aggressive, chaotic, ordered, happy, sad, eerie, dark, light, and so on and these are all feeling tones, it seems to me. So, if the similarity in the drawings is on account of the feeling tones in them which echo the feeling tones in the music, that would not surprise me.
Haiku is a very "pictorial" genre of poetry; generally it evokes concrete images, the classic being Basho's best know haiku:
The ancient pond
A frog leaps in.
The sound of water.
I am not aware of poetry which is abstract like abstract art is. The Abstract Expressionists aimed to dispense with any representational associations with things of the world such as human figures or landscapes, under the influence of Clement Greenberg, they wanted to produce paintings emphasizing the two-dimensionality of the surface, which were to be judged in purely formal, compositional terms. Yet of course some of these paintings seem to evoke landscape such as Jackson Pollock's Autumn, Blue Poles and Lavender Mist.
So they skirt the edges between representing recognizable objects and evoking the feeling of natural textures: patterns of moss on walls, or the general fractal forms of foliage, rock-faces, clouds and so on. I suppose you could say that evoking generalized forms, as opposed to clearly representing particular objects, is a kind of abstraction, so maybe I'll rethink what I said earlier about "abstract" being an inappropriate label. But then maybe not, because again I think it comes down to evoking the feeling tones, and even representing or at resembling the patterns of these natural forms.
In any case, none of this changes my mind about whether it is possible to think complex discursive ideas without using language. As I said earlier my belief that it is not possible is based only on my own experience and the reports of some others I have put the question to. so I am not totally ruling out the possibility, but find it hard to see how I could be convinced, since any counterargument could only come in the form of reports by others who claim they can do it. So far only @Mww is the only one to have claimed to be able to do anything like this, and going by his descriptions I'm not sure we are even talking about the same thing.
Here's my version. At some point in the philosophical tradition (Locke or Kant or implicitly in Democritus even), it made sense to think of human experience as [math] f(X) [/math] where [math] X [/math] is reality in the nude or raw or completely apart from us and [math] f [/math] is the universal structure or mediation of human cognition. The important bits of this insane but charming theory are that [math] X [/math] is impossible to access directly and that [math] f(X) [/math] is private experience (plausible initially because we each have our own sense organs and brain, according to our sense organs anyway, which are in that sense their own product ? And the brain is the dream of the brain is the dream of the brain ? But we must carry on...).
It's a small step to let [math]Y = f(X) [/math] and then wonder whether [math] f [/math] and [math] X [/math] aren't just unproven hypotheses, mere pieces of [math]Y' [/math], solipsism's divine blob. Yet this whole system seems to be a corruption of something far more reasonable and practical, which is simply a tracking of the reliability or authority of the claims of a member of a linguistic community as a function of that member's status and prior behavior, etc. For instance, 'it seems to me like X' is a mitigation of the responsibility for consequences implicit in 'I know that X.' But this 'seems operator' can inspire oceans of confusion.
I've no clear idea whether or not those terms pick out things that existed in their entirety prior to being picked out. If so, then those things were part of what made up 14th Century human cells. If not, then they were not.
So something existing is sufficient criteria for it being part of a cell?
There is nothing being "picked out" by the name, like I said originally. I just went along with that notion to show you the fault in it. As I said, the name refers to a concept. And, we can use the concept in a variety of different ways. Whether or not a person uses the concept to pick out things, or believes oneself to be using the concept to pick out things, or simply believes oneself to be using the word to pick out things, is another issue altogether.
What we pick out with "cell" is up to us. Whether or not what we're picking out existed in its entirety prior to being picked out is not. If those things mentioned are now considered parts of cells, and they are parts of all cells, then I see no reason to deny that 14th Century humans cells included those things.
Right. That's the point @Janus and I have been trying to communicate.
What 'experience' picks out depends on how one uses the word. Could be internal, external, or both.
Just like the word 'cell' could pick out all the phagocytised proteins in the cell vacuole, some or them, of none of them. It all depends how we use the word.
You don't seem to have had any introductory level instruction on logic. Saying "thought does not need words" (which is the proposition being discussed) means that the type of thing which "thought" refers to, is not a type of think which requires words for its existence. In no way does this exclude the possibility that some forms of thought do require words.
Quoting Janus
This is what has been contested, as explicitly wrong. We cannot substitute "complex" for "some" here, because there are instances of complex thought which do not require words.
So we're right back to the same place. "Complex thought does not need words" is true, because there is complex thought which operates without words. However, "some complex thought needs words" is also true because there are some instances which require words.
I am very surprised that these simple inductive principles are so very difficult for you to understand, so much so that you are inclined to call it "sophistic nonsense". It's just basic induction.
Are you familiar with the later Wittgenstein? He argues that words do not refer to already existing objects. Strictly speaking , they do not refer at all. They enact relationships by altering prior relationships. If I see a tree, I am not passively observing hat appears to me, I am deconstructing it. And what I am deconstructing is not an object , it is a way of relating to something,- me that way of relating never repeats itself identically from
context to context. When I use a word in front of someone else, their response establishes a fresh sense of meaning of that word. ‘Tree’ has an infinity of senses that depend exquisitely on the context of a shared situation. In a situation of usage of the word ‘tree’ I am not creating a new physical object , I am enacting a new pattern of relationship with it. No object simply exists for us as what it is outside of changing contextual relationships of sense.
We wouldn’t say , though, that the hard-wiring is itself hard-wired. That is, ‘hard-wired’ is not a metaphysical a priori like a Kantian category, but an adaptation under selective pressure, and since we can grasp the nature of this ‘categorical’ adaption as a contingent product of a non-categorical process, aren’t we capable of reducing a physiological a priori like ‘boundary’ to something more original? Might hard-wired capacities be better thought of as sources of conditioning among others rather than as irreducible determinants of meaning?
More importantly, isn’t there a danger that the myriad senses of a concept like ‘boundary’ be lost as a result of a pre-emptively reductive understanding of ‘hard-wiring’? Is this way of understanding the innate the result of science or the unintended reliance on a philosophical presupposition guiding a certain kind of naturalistic stance?
Quoting Isaac
But if we belong causally to nature rather than standing outside of it observing it, must not the physical and biological building blocks be reconstructed from our immersion within that world? This immersion isn’t as spectators or mere modelers , but , though our practices and invention and use of instruments, as constructors of niches that reveal new and better ways of seeing and interacting with our surrounds, precisely because of the way they material change those surrounds. I suggest that in order for science to progress, the farther away from its origins it moves via its construction of the world, the better it understands those origins. Making progress in understanding the earliest and simplest building blocks of nature is a process of materially altering the world scientists and the rest of us inhabit, in ways that change the world we interact with profoundly relative to those beginnings.
To assume we are attempting to capture non-contingent intrinsic features of that world through our science may be a dream we inherited from theological notions of the world.
“I think a more basic trace of a theological conception remains in many philosophical accounts of science and nature. A theological conception of God as creator places God outside of nature. God's understanding of nature is also external to the world. Such a God could understand his language and his thoughts about the world, apart from any interaction with the world. Naturalists long ago removed God from scientific conceptions of the world. Yet many naturalists still implicitly understand science as aiming to take God's place. They interpret science as trying to represent nature from a standpoint outside of nature. The language in which science represents the world could then be understood apart from the causal interactions it articulates. A philosophy of scientific practices denies that such an otherworldly understanding of nature is possible. Scientific concepts and scientific understanding are situated in the midst of ongoing causal interaction with the world. That is why I talk about conceptual articulation in science rather than theoretical representation. We understand scientific concepts only by understanding the phenomena they articulate. We find ourselves in the midst of the world, and cannot understand it except from within. That is the radical vision of a naturalistic philosophy of science expressed in my “concluding scientific postscript“.
(Joseph Rouse, Naturalism and Scientific Practices: A Concluding Scientific Postscript(2007)
Yes, I think so.
Quoting Joshs
Not so sure here. I don't really see other senses of boundary being at risk of being lost (like they were some endangered species), I think it's unproblematic that they compete with hardwired concepts 'no holds barred' style. I don't feel I owe alternative world-views anything. If they can complete in the marketplace of ideas same as any other.
Quoting Joshs
I think the idea of 'innate' is quite clearly delineated, it's that mental activity (regardless of how you measure it) that is likely to take place regardless of cultural influence. It's usually inferred from the actions of very young children.
You could certainly pick holes in that methodological assumption, many have, including myself. But the concept itself seems clear enough.
Of course, the value or importance you attach to something being innate is up to you. For me it's a good foundation from which to understand why we think the way we do. For you it might be an irrelevant distinction among many potential sources of conditioning.
My point is merely that the background concept of there being an external world matrix (without specifying the simples), and the idea of there being boundaries (not everything is one homogeneous mass) seem sufficiently innate to me to be premises from which we might find common ground with our fellow humans. One who has a sufficiently open mind may be an exception, but I don't expect there's many such people.
Quoting Isaac
What makes the matrix we interact with ‘external’ to us? The evidence coming from the world or our starting presuppositions? What a fess do we have to a world external to our space of reasons? And isnt that space of reasons in direct and continual contact with a world whose behavior it predicts and anticipates? In other words, what is at stake and at issue within the space of reasons for a scientist is under question and subject to modification in applying it to the world , because the world speaks back to us. But it responds differently to different conceptions. So the world’s ‘externality’ can only challenge a system of conceptions relative not the nature of those conceptions.
(Not sure my last edit of the previous post came though
so I’m duplicating it here:)
If we belong causally to nature rather than standing outside of it observing it, must not the physical and biological building blocks be reconstructed from our immersion within that world? This immersion isn’t as spectators or mere modelers , but , though our practices and invention and use of instruments, as constructors of niches that reveal new and better ways of seeing and interacting with our surrounds, precisely because of the way they material change those surrounds. I suggest that in order for science to progress, the farther away from its origins it moves via its construction of the world, the better it understands those origins. Making progress in understanding the earliest and simplest building blocks of nature is a process of materially altering the world scientists and the rest of us inhabit, in ways that change the world we interact with profoundly relative to those beginnings.
To assume we are attempting to capture non-contingent intrinsic features of that world through our science may be a dream we inherited from theological notions of the world.
“I think a more basic trace of a theological conception remains in many philosophical accounts of science and nature. A theological conception of God as creator places God outside of nature. God's understanding of nature is also external to the world. Such a God could understand his language and his thoughts about the world, apart from any interaction with the world. Naturalists long ago removed God from scientific conceptions of the world. Yet many naturalists still implicitly understand science as aiming to take God's place. They interpret science as trying to represent nature from a standpoint outside of nature. The language in which science represents the world could then be understood apart from the causal interactions it articulates. A philosophy of scientific practices denies that such an otherworldly understanding of nature is possible. Scientific concepts and scientific understanding are situated in the midst of ongoing causal interaction with the world. That is why I talk about conceptual articulation in science rather than theoretical representation. We understand scientific concepts only by understanding the phenomena they articulate. We find ourselves in the midst of the world, and cannot understand it except from within. That is the radical vision of a naturalistic philosophy of science expressed in my “concluding scientific postscript“.
(Joseph Rouse, Naturalism and Scientific Practices: A Concluding Scientific Postscript(2007)
1h[/quote]
I don't think anything 'makes' it external. We assume it is.
Quoting Joshs
Yes, that's the way I see it.
Quoting Joshs
I can't make sense of this.
Quoting Joshs
I'm not seeing why. I mean, they could be, and we've good evidence they are, bug I'm not seeing the argument that they must be.
Quoting Joshs
I agree with the latter, but I don't see how it relates to the former. The fact that science makes assumptions doesn't make those assumptions bad ones to make. I'm sure there are scientists who will deny the assumption-laden nature of the work we do. I'm not one of them. But I do deny the automatic assumption that because we have presuppositions, those presuppositions need exposing/replacing/examining. There mere existence is not evidence any of those things need to happen.
Quoting Joshs
Yep. Likely.
What many postmodern approaches to science have in common is a radically temporal, self-reflexive point of view. In Rouse’s case , he likens assumptions to the normatively organized interactive cycling between organism and environment. Piaget said that this cycling shows the organism to be assimilating elements of its world to its kind of functioning, but at the same time must always accommodate and adjust this normativity to the novel aspects of what it incorporates. In like fashion, an assumption , rule or norm only exists in practice , that is in its actual performative interaction with the world. Assumptions doesn’t simply assimilate the world, they accommodate themselves to that world at the same time.
Just as an organism, in order to continue to exist , must maintain its normative functioning in the face of changing circumstances , so must empirical conceptions continually adapt and and re-affirm. It’s not that we SHOULD examine and question them , its that we always already do this even while maintaining them as stable assumptions. We simply don’t often notice this continual accommodation.
For these writers, the mere existence of assumptions IS evidence that adaptation and accommodation is always already happening every time we instantiate and use them, just as this is the case every time an organism assimilates material into its functioning.
Assumptions, like organisms, are kinds of relatively but dynamically stable ongoing self-transformations
The quote function did not transfer the symbols correctly...
I am in agreement. The framework treats human thought and belief(human experience) as though they(it) are(is) completely independent and/or separate from the world. They(It) are(is) not. You've also noted how the framework treats human experience as private. It is not, and cannot be given what we now know about how language effects/affects human thought and belief. The idea that all we have access to is our perception of the tree, and not the tree("Stove's Gem", it is often called) pervades academia to this day.
About three years ago, I received a phone call from my better half's youngest child who as an undergrad took Introduction To Philosophy as a means to meet his curriculum humanity course standards. Stove's Gem was the beginning of course! So, because he knew how much philosophy I've studied and done in my spare time, he calls me up and says something like "Hey, uncle
Dennett's paper "Quining Qualia" is the most convincing piece of writing I've been fortunate enough to have read with regard to the purportedly private parts of human experience. His approach is admirable as well as his attitude, even towards people whose approaches and attitudes are anything but.
There's never been disagreement regarding that much. It comes as a surprise to know that you thought I did not agree with that much.
What made no sense was to deny the existence of what was being picked out before being picked out. 14th Century humans had glial cells, because glial cells existed before the 1800's, despite their not having yet been picked out by name. To deny that they did, because the term had not been coined, is to confuse our language use with what is being picked out. Glial cells are biological structures picked out by the term "glial cells". Glial cells do not consist of words. "Glial cells" does.
The consideration I've been trying to coax some kind of agreement upon is that humans had experiences long before the term "experience" was coined.
Could be an interesting endeavor. Earlier you wrote the following...
The same way two different people may share the same name.
They are both called by the same name. They are not said to be the same thing. You've already said as much directly above. One is an entire living organism, and the other is but a part thereof. Sometimes "cell" is used to pick out an entire organism, sometimes it is used to pick out parts of an organism.
Exactly.
I don't disagree, but it makes sense to me to understand this as a debate about which usage (both allowed by the apathetic gods) is preferable.
It'd be fine if we decided to say that cells didn't 'really' exist until we could talk about them. And it's fine to object to such a convention, calling it a confusion of name and object...or as just not very useful or graceful.
Words mean whatever a community takes them to mean, that's the gist.
While I do appreciate some of the changes Witt helped to get going, as well as some of his simple approaches, overall I'm not all that impressed. After having skimmed through "Cambridge Letters", which I took to be correctly translated copies of the original correspondence between him and others, one of whom was Bertrand Russell, my opinion of Witt changed remarkably. It was the conversations with Bertrand Russell that interested me most. All that being said...
What you say above reminds me of Heiddegger, Derrida, Saussure, or something along those lines, much moreso than anything I've taken away from my limited readings of Witt. My personal library includes probably four or five posthumous books, still unread. I've read four to five different publications including Tractacus, Remarks on Color, Brown Book, Blue Book, On Certainty, Philosophical Investigations(about half anyway) and others that were more about Witt rather than writings of Witt.
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Regarding the claims made above by you...
A bit of that stuff - as written - is false on it's face. However...
Some of it looks to speak towards how worldviews evolve as a result of how meaning does.<-----That part is interesting... to me.
I agree.
When a community uses words in certain ways, it can be detrimental to the community knowledge base. It can lead to big problems.
Word use can be both sensible(in the way we're talking about here) and dead wrong.
This is particularly the case when discussing that which exists in its entirety prior to our awareness of it.
Folks, that is what philosophy amounts to - finding a good way to say tricky things.
Someone once told me long ago, a decade maybe, that what I wrote was "too tricky".
:razz:
:up:
Unfortunately, philosophy must be done within the limits of our concepts and language, so we’re going to have to be content with this, at least for now.
What appears to you is not a tree, or trees are not objects, or you're not seeing what appeared to you?
Colorful regardless of exactly what you mean. If I forego intense criticism and grant poetic license...
That makes total sense if we're talking about someone so steeped in such language use that they've come to think like that. It makes no sense whatsoever however if we're talking about a young child whose crib is in the shade under the tree. Whatever that child is doing, whatever is going on in that young mind, if that child is thinking about the tree, then we must be able to take proper account of that child's thought.
It's not doing what you're doing.
Okay.
Colorful.
Key words being "for us"... Does that include the toddler in the crib under the tree?
:up:
:up:
One of my big philosophical realizations was that we often don't know what we are talking about. We can argue passionately about whether X is real...without noticing that we don't really know what we mean by 'real,' at least away from our ordinary, tacit skill with the word in practical life. And so on and so on.
Yes, and it seems to me it is because we’re trapped in it.
Quoting creativesoul
What do you mean exactly by “it makes no sense” ?
Quoting creativesoul
I think it does leave room though. I think people acquire langage by noticing patterns in the way others use words to refer to concepts or objects. But those patterns are patterns in their experience. Whether or not this experience is representative of an external material world, that is the issue.
Of course, you might ask “then how come we refer to the same things, with the same words ? Wouldn’t that mean we all have a common experience, which would be at the very least sufficient proof of a an external material world ?” This argument can be answered to in multiple ways, some more skeptic than others, but the answer I’d give is: assuming that we do indeed use the same words to refer to the same patterns in experience, all we can know from that fact is that there are patterns existing across all of human experience, we can go a step further and induce that assuming there are systems causing all those different experiences such that they are not random, those systems most likely are similar, and we can go a step further again with induction and say that the input of those systems are likely similar too, and that that input is information from a common, shared external world. But notice we have arrived to this conclusion with inductive reasoning, so each step further is more risky than the last one.
Language creation seems to me to be much more of a historical and linguistic than a philosophical issue, so I’m going to sit this one out.
Indeed. But you additionally claimed that those experiences constituted both internal and external features. The counter was that what experiences constitute depends on the definition being used. Like the cell. Someone claiming "cells contain both organismic and foreign proteins" could just as well be met with exactly the same counter "it depends on which definition of 'cell' you're using"
I like this theme, and I connect it to a inescapable ethnocentrism (having only our current norms for a not-so-final authority, the way we do things, what we take words to mean.) Yes, we can change them, but only from within, for what else could compel us?
It's strange.
For one thing, we could just grant that we don't know things as they are in themselves, adding also that we don't know what the hell it's supposed to mean to know something as it is itself. We understand (well enough) the idea of a warranted statement or a true statement. But knowledge of something as it is independent of knowledge is like the taste of ketchup without the flavor, or music that is 'better than it sounds.' What's the turn on ? The mirage of surprisingly easy eternal 'knowledge'?
Another thing, whether something is 'real' or an 'illusion' or 'true' is a fundamentally social issue. So there's something weird in reasoning about whether or not others exist in the first place.
As I see it, there's a sneaky piece of bad logic in here that Ryle and others have tried to point out. If you think (each) human experience is essentially private, then by this assumption alone all the datapoints we need are impossible to get, even in principle, forever and ever amend.
Do we attach the same words to the same private experiences? That's the issue. But what evidence could support such a thesis, except for the very stuff that's supposed to be so encrypted that not even the NSA could get it ( what red looks like to you, for instance.) The question seems so reasonable, and it's traditional, but it's bonkers.
The reason we assume that experiences are the 'same' iin the first place is probably the public norms for concept application and our conspicuous skill in applying them (when we aren't in a language trap that is.)
Human experience existed in its entirety prior to the term "experience". That is a true claim with considerable consequential power. It only follows that what we say about human experience could be mistaken. This becomes even more obvious when we acknowledge that many of the different senses of the term are mutually exclusive and/or in some clear conflict with one another. They cannot all be accurate depictions and/or characterizations of what existed in its entirety prior to them. They are all attemting to take account of something that emerged, evolved, and existed in its entirety long before our awareness of it, and hence long before not only the term, but common language as we know it.
So, when competing notions of human experience are under consideration, at least one is mistaken. Since the notions can be mistaken, it cannot be the case that what constitutes human experience is up to us. It also cannot be the case that whether or not human experience consists of both internal and external things depends upon the definition of "experience" being used. Nor is it the case that the constitution of human experience just a matter of definition alone and nothing else.
It's a matter of what existed in its entirety prior to, and thus regardless of, all accounting practices thereof thereafter.
Any notion of human experience worthy of assent will consist of the simplest terms possible so as to be able to adequately explain emergence at the earliest stages possible, prior to language use, during initial acquisition, as well as throughout the rest of the individual's life. It needs to be universal in the sense of consisting of basic statements that are true of all individuals regardless of subjective particulars because they pick out the basic elemental constituents at the core of all individual meaningful experience.
I did and have offered argument and reasoning for those claims that has been given neither just due nor adequate attention. As just argued above, whether or not human experience consists of both internal and external things is not a matter of definition and nothing more.
It would follow that the basic elemental constitution of all human experience prior to the term somehow depended upon that which did not even exist at the time.
Not very convincing from my vantage point.
:up:
Philosophy can only be done within the limits of reason, philosophizing is done within the limits of language.
———-
Quoting creativesoul
“Its” being experience, the assertion is true iff the accounting practice is reason itself, brain machinations aside, insofar as it would be very difficult to establish neurological function as an accounting practice.
Quoting Banno
:eyes: :sparkle:
And what I envied most about him was that he managed to reach the end of his life without the slightest conscience of being burdened with a special individuality or sense of individual mission like mine. This sense of individuality robbed my life of its symbolism, that is to say, or its power to serve, like Tsurukawa’s, as a metaphor for something outside itself; accordingly it deprived me of the feelings of life’s extensity and solidarity, and it became the source of that sense of solitude which pursued me indefinitely. It was strange. I did not even have any feeling of solidarity with nothingness.
Of course they can. We just agreed that one can define a cell as containing the foreign proteins or as not containing them. Neither definition is right. There's no law governing what we ought to include as covered by our word 'cell'.
Quoting creativesoul
But you just agreed this was the case with 'cell', now you're saying it's not the case with 'experience'. what's different about these two words?
Quoting creativesoul
Not in the least. If I group some cows into 'herd1' the cows still existed prior to my naming them 'herd1' but whether daisy the cow was in or out of herd1 did not pre-exist my naming. I declared it to be the case by grouping the herd that way.
What is and is not part of cell is declared by using the word 'cell'.
What is and is not part of human experience is declared by using the term 'human experience'.
You can disagree all you like, but you'd need, in your account, to provide some source of authority as to what should constitute 'a cell'. if you're to claim that the grouping 'cell' pre-existed our use of the term. To what ought we look to find the 'right' meaning of words?
Actually, what I described is how "cell" refers to two distinct concepts, in one case a whole living organism, and in the other case a part of a living organism.
Quoting creativesoul
The point was that if a word refers to an external thing ("picks out a thing" as you said), then "cell" would pick out "a thing", not a multitude of different things. Then the whole living organism, and the part of a living organism, which "cell" refers to, would be the same thing.
Quoting creativesoul
OK, this is a better way for you to say it. The word doesn't pick out a thing, the person uses the word to pick out a thing. But what you don't seem to understand, is that the thing which the person uses the word to pick out, is a concept. In one case the person uses the word to signify the concept of a whole living organism, and the person may produce supposed external objects to exemplify this use, and in the other case, the person uses the word to signify the concept of a specific part of an organism, and may produce supposed external objects to exemplify that use.
Quoting creativesoul
Why are you abruptly changing your claim? You said a word picks out things. I said a word picks out types. Now you agree with me. Do you not see the difference between a supposed external thing, as a particular or individual, and a supposed internal type of thing, as a universal or generalization? Failing to see that difference is what caused Janus' equivocation, in our discussion concerning the proposition "thought does not need words".
Quoting Banno
Perhaps, but when philosophy is reduced to simply being concerned with 'the way things are said', then "good" is removed from your proposition, and it is simply "finding a way to say tricky things". That is sophistry. So we must maintain "good" here, and determine exactly what qualifies as a good way. Of course a bad way of saying tricky things is deception. The problem is that there is a multitude of bad ways, and the "good way" gets narrowed down toward the ideal, the best way, which is the goal of perfection in understanding.
The following is a good example of a bad way:
Quoting creativesoul
This is an example of a bad, or deceptive way of using words, because individual people use words in particular instances of usage. So there is no such thing as a "certain way" that a community uses any particular word, because a community is a collective, consisting of a multitude of persons, each using any specific word in very distinct ways in the various different circumstances that the person might find oneself in. These differences are referred to as accidentals.
We might generalize, and say that a particular person uses a certain word in a specific type of way, removing the accidentals. But then we'd have a type of way, and this does not provide us the certainty of knowing the particular way, which would be the way of a particular instance, complete with accidentals.
But to jump from that type of generalization made about an individual person, to a generalization about "the community", requires a different sort of generalization, which would render a multitude of distinct individuals as one "community". This sort of generalization is logically invalid. It is invalid because individual people are the ones who use words, and as explained above, an individual's particular way of using words is an accidental property of the individual, and therefore cannot be transposed so as to be a property of the generalized whole community, unless it is done through valid inductive logic.
Being accidental properties, rather than essential, such inductive logic could not proceed unless every person in a specific community used words in the very same way. For example, it's like saying "the community has red hair". This would only be true if every person in the community has red hair. If its only ninety nine per cent, who have red hair, we can't truthfully say that, because it's a statement supported by faulty inductive logic.
This thread is full of such faulty inductive logic. which is a bad or deceptive way of using words. I've been working to point out some of these occurrences, but the guilty parties tend to use tactics like accusing me of sophistry, when in reality I am just exposing their sophistry.
What would the right kind of value look like?
If the toddler is young enough, they will not yet have attained the level of object permanence. To recognize an object as something which remains when we are no longer looking at it , or when it is covered up , requires a constructive process. In fact , everything to do with the concept of a spatial object requires a sequential
process of construction. We don’t originally directly see objects as solid unities, we see a constantly changing flow of sensations, from perspectives that change as we move our eyes, head or body. We concoct the idea of a unitary object like ‘tree’ from concatenations of memory , expectations and the meager data that we actually see in front of us. The notion of a tree as this thing in front of me is thus a complex synthesis of what we actually see , what we remember and what we predict we will see. Most of the ‘tree’ is filled in this way. And the most important element is that we have to interact with the ‘object’ in order for it to exist for us. Animals deprived of the ability to move and interact with their surroundings do not learn to see objects. When we passively see a thing, we are understanding what it is in terms of how we can interact with it, how it will change in response to our movements. This is the standard model from developmental perceptual psychology.
Quoting Janus
Let’s draw up a general conception of language for our purposes and see what we can discern from that. We know that even the simplest forms of perception draw from conceptuality in that they involve a meeting between expectations and what actually appears to our senses.
A remarkable feature of a word (or a picture) is that it allows the brain to integrate a wide range of modalities(visual, touch, auditory, kinesthetic, smell and taste) of perception into a single unitary concept. This is what I mean by abstraction here, the creation of a more complex synthetic unitary concept from simpler perceptions or concepts. For instance , abstract art isn’t interested in representing the photographic details of a scene in order to tell its story , but strives to begin from deeper and more meaningful conceptual forms. It is looking to bring out inner truths rather than getting bogged down on surface aspects.
When you see the world ‘cat’ right now, your brain , as brain imaging studies show , may be accessing the sight of a cat , it’s smell, how its fur feels , the sound of its purring. And it is doing this all simultaneously. In addition, the brain may be accessing emotional associations and complex bits of knowledge about a cat or cats in general from scientific or literary sources. How does language do this? It builds up to this complex whole step by step from simpler associations, starting with the recognition of the shapes of letters or the phonemic characteristics of spoken words. Of course this doesn’t happen in a vacuum. When we are presented with language, we are already expecting the visual or auditory units to be meaningful symbols, because we already know what a language is. So we are priming our brain to rapidly recognize these shapes as words , and words that belong to a meaningful context that is already ongoing.
The bottom line is that words are technologies, ways that we reconstruct our world in order to develop our culture.
All of our built environment( our architecture, communication and media devices , produced arts , manufactured goods) acts a language in this sense, speaking back to us and pushing us to further levels
of abstract thought.
How does this background summary relate to your contention that words have a distinct advantage over other forms of language in enabling abstract conceptualization? Assuming we can accept my definition of abstraction, it seems you’re making two points
First , that only word symbols allow to a brain to attain the deepest forms of synthetic unity in a manner that is usable. For instance , when we are in deep thought, we tie together a continuous string of words. This allows us to sustain a recognizably clear and meaningful flow of ideas that we can build upon. Painting, dance and music, by contrast, while allowing for a certain. degree of synthetic abstraction, gives us only murky, vague felt signposts of meaning. This merely ‘felt’ kind of meaningfulness is different than abstract knowing. For one thing, it is hard to imagine how a felt experience can build’ on itself exactly in terms of intensity. How can there be conceptual development in a medium devoid of concepts?
This assumption seems to repeat the traditional divide between emotion and cognition, feeling and thinking.
Supposedly , only verbal cognition is rational , conceptual. Feeling is mere spice, coloration, window dressing. It’s an important motivator but does not produce ideas in and of itself.
Recent approaches to emotions and feeling overturn this divide. Affect is now assumed to provide the very basis of conceptual meaning. As Ratcliffe(2002) puts it,“moods are no longer a subjective window-dressing on privileged theoretical perspectives but a background that constitutes the sense of all intentionalities, whether theoretical or practical”.
There is no concept without affectivity , because affect has to do with the meaningful way in which we embrace new concepts , or the extent to which we are able to coherently embrace new concepts at all. I reading these words, you are understanding them in an affective contextual out of how they are relevant to you , how they matter and to you. Every text is accompanied by a kind of ‘music’ but we usually don’t notice this aspect and instead assume a conceptual content can be divorced from its significance to us. By the same token, feeling never occurs apart from a conceptual domain that it is intrinsic to. To feel
something is always to experience an intrinsic aspect of conceptualization, the relative coherence and consonance of meaning. Just as we can pretend that the music of felt relevance is not intrinsic to the use of all word concepts, we can ignore that a piece of music
is presenting an unfolding conceptual text while we focus exclusively on the feelings that this unfolding conceptual text is delivering.
In accord with this newer thinking, let me make the following claims:
Music, painting , dance and other non-verbal arts produce ideas , and these ideas evolve in parallel with theoretical conceptualizations in the science and philosophy. The history of painting, for instance, is an evolution in how we see and think about ourselves.
The octave scale of music is organized similarly to a subject-object proposition. And these ‘sentences’ belong to larger ‘paragraphs’ developing the ideational theme of the song. By the end of the song one has learned something , travelled somewhere, not just ‘emotionally’ but conceptually.
Instrumental music can be profoundly political and subversive.
The difference between these vocabularies and words is that the language of the arts is more ‘impressionistic’ and incipient. This can be an advantage over words, which have a tendency to lock us into old ways of thinking because of their concreteness.
Less like truth, more like meaning.
Confidence and/or certainty that is grounded upon consistent terminological use alone can and should be tempered according to what we already know. A model, story, narrative, worldview, report. accounting practice, and/or philosophical position can be perfectly sensible, consistent, understood, commensurate with current convention and yet still be... dead wrong! Absurdly so even. Scopes. Thus, consistent language use alone is insufficient evidence to conclude that what's being said is true, and thus does not justify any subsequent truth claims about the story, narrative, worldview, report, accounting practice, and/or philosophical worldview under consideration.
Apply this to any philosophical position resting its laurels upon logical possibility, coherence, and/or consistent language use alone. This is nothing new. Falsification, verification, and justification(some notions anyway) are all tempered accordingly. Not to mention Kant's own critique on 'pure reason'. :wink:
Short, sweet, to the point....the boon of good philosophizing.
Scopes......(chuckles to self).
Still, at the end of the day, I’m more convinced by my own logical reasoning than I am persuaded by another’s semantics. I never question my own meanings, for then understanding must question itself insofar as it is the source of all my meanings and is therefore a self-contradiction, but invariably question another’s logical reasoning.
Quoting creativesoul
True enough, insofar as determinations of what is true has nothing to do with what’s being said in the first place.
Counterpoint: the bane of philosophy doesn’t reside in wrong kind of value placed on consistent language use. It is that consistent language use is valued at all.
Exactly.
The grouping did not exist in its entirety prior to your 'christening'. I'm talking about things that did. You're talking about things that did not. That's the difference.
All things we name are such groupings. The tree is a group of cells, the cell is a group of organelles, the organelles are groups of molecules, the molecules are groups of atoms...
And all such groups are in constant flux, molecules from one group entering and leaving, becoming part of, and then excreted from...
And all such groups change over time such that their actual constituent parts are never the same...
There's not a thing in the world which is not brought into being, from the heterogeneous soup of hidden states, by our conceptualizing, and constant reconstruction of it.
You should re-read 's excellent reply here. It sums up the idea in developmental psychology terms very succinctly.
No, I wouldn't say that; feeling is basic, primal and indispensable. I also think that rational inference can be non-verbal; animals do it all the time. Conceptualizing is not only of the abstract kind, but also of the concrete kind; even animals see things as specific things. But abstract reasoning using symbols is something that I think only humans do. For example, you would not be able to think that last sentence I just wrote, without words, in other words.
The kind of reasoning animals may do, and humans also do pre-verbally or non-verbally is reasoning based on concrete visual, auditory, motor, tactile, olfactory, gustatory and proprioceptive images. At least that's what I assume based on my own experience.
I actually think that verbal reasoning would be impossible without the affective underpinning of pre-verbal reasoning; and that the latter is more basic and more important; abstract reasoning would be vacuous without it.
To repeat, my point has only been that complex, discursive reasoning is impossible without language. I don't see why that would even be controversial. Unless I have misunderstood you, you say that even our perceptual experience is culturally constructed; well.human culture itself would be impossible without symbolic language.
Are you saying that music is based on concrete images, or that music is not a kind of reasoning?
What about the pre-verbal valuative assumptions that motivate all kinds of human decisions, In psychotherapy, the aim is to make verbally articulable these driving values. We often do things
for good reasons that we know we can justify , but have difficulty putting them into words. These reasons are
quite abstract, but hard to pin down.
I think you’re wrong here. A concrete auditory image is a door creaking or a train whistle , not a highly organized pattern of notes and pauses designed to represent thought in ways similar to the highly organized sequence of letters that form words and sentences. Notes ARE special kinds of words , creating a kind of impressionistic variation of what verbal concepts do.
Sometimes autocorrect is astute.
Sure you could they are kinds of signs, but not symbols with determinate meanings.
They are determinate enough to evoke a cultural context, to produce a narrative , to unsettle beliefs , and to be preferred over words by many as a way to tap into the most profound depths of abstract meaning.
Think about a text about zen buddhism that produced a powerful feeling of enlightenment and creative joy for you the first time you read it. Subsequent readings didnt produce that same profound sense of meaningfulness even thought the words were the same. Why? Because words only imperfectly determine sense of meaning. The feeling of pure conceptual discovery cannot be encoded in the words in a reliable way because of the changing way we interpret the same word concepts over time. Music is the code we use to capture the original meaning of concepts. It reliably brings us back again and again to what it was about the way we interpreted a text that produced the profound conceptual meaning that first time. It does this by giving us only the general outlines of that meaning by representing it as a soaring melody. But not just any soaring melody. Only a certain general
context of thinking fits the particular way the piece of music is constructed. When we hear the music we fill in that particular context. So music is more accurate than words for preserving the ‘real’ meaningful power of abstract conceptual domains , but at the cost of specificity of content. Words give us this specificity of content but we can’t preserve the identical sense of meaning of words (their conceptual power) when we repeatedly return to them.
We could go for weeks having conversations, thinking to ourselves, or reading texts about those ideas that initially meant so much to us conceptually , and none of this verbiage may be capable of recapturing that meaning. But one special piece of music can be capable of immediately elevating our understanding to that special place of enlightenment. The only drawback is that it delivers us over to a general range of abstract meanings that encompasses more than just the particular content of the buddhist text that we read. But once , thanks to the percolate language of music , we have arrived back in the general vicinity of the powerful conceptual terrain we were attempting without success to attain without success through verbal means, we can then use words to tighten, clarify and definitively articulate the impressionistic space of ideas that the music put back at our disposal.
So there is a back and forth cycle between musical and verbal articulation, each insufficient without the other.
Quoting Isaac
Now you're contradicting yourself.
I've little to no issue with any of the above. The question is whether or not those 'actual' parts existed prior to their being named. However, what's below does not follow from what's above...
So much for discovery huh?
Well sure, but the notion of a tree is not the tree. We actually see the tree, not our notion. My notion of trees is not out in my front yard. The Kukui nut tree is though. What we believe about the tree is our notion. The tree is not equivalent to our belief about it. We can be wrong about the tree. The same is true of all that exists in its entirety prior to our picking it out to the exclusion of all else.
Actually, that was intentional.
I just don't consider that evocative, affective power that some music, literature and art possesses to be abstract; that just isn't the terminology I would use. For me it is feeling, and feeling is concrete; felt in the body, in the heart and mind.
When it comes to these kinds of issues, about which no empirical confirmation can be found, I remember something Nietzsche said: there are no truths, only perspectives.
It's an analogy. I thought it might help. Clearly not.
Quoting creativesoul
Whether 'discovery' is the act of finding a new pre-existing object, rather than the act of christening a new otherwise non-existent grouping, is the question at hand. Just claiming 'discovery!' is begging that question.
Besides which, there's not even any need to resolve this in this thread because we're talking about human experience and what it consists of. If you agree that some things are 'groupings' christened by the act of grouping, then it is on you to show that 'human experience' is not such a grouping (like 'cell') so as to support your claim that it's contents (both internal and external) is a fact of the world and not a fact of our language use.
Even if we were to accept your argument that there are macro-scale objects as simples, you've yet to show that human experience is one of them.
It's always peculiar to me when one handwaves away and downright neglects several different arguments, examples, and lines of reasoning while gratuitously asserting the opposite only to later act as if no justification has been given...
Perhaps you may want to re-read the exchange I had with Janus.
Quoting creativesoul
Where? I just checked back over the last few pages and can't find any such exchange. I don't always read the whole thread, if there's points you've made relevant to the argument, you can just cut and paste them into your response to me, or link them.
I can't be sure, but perhaps this quote is aimed against finding so much of metaphysics to be a mere debate about usage....because it's such a gray and sad approach ? But I think to myself : I love poetry and novels and even certain spiritual texts. So maybe it's a matter of timing ? Or trying to keep my roles separate ? With philosophy being annoyingly serious about clarifying concepts effectively, and unquenchingly dry?
Arguably the project is driven by a desire for one's words to have weight and utility for others, to be doing more than merely expressing insignificant preferences, and so to know the difference, which is not always easy...
But I do not want to go in an off topic debate because it would be disrespectful for the OP. Nevertheless if you are interested about how Mishima's works can lead our minds to a state of euphoria and ecstasy, you can follow these ones: On beautiful and sublime.
Why does religion condemn suicide?
He meant that also with regard to issues about which empirical confirmation can be found. And in the case of the relation between affect and abstract conceptualization, a wide range of contemporary approaches in psychology and other social sciences has arrived at a model which they have confirmed empirically.
In a previous post you said that “verbal reasoning would be impossible without the affective underpinning of pre-verbal reasoning; and that the latter is more basic and more important; abstract reasoning would be vacuous without it.”
In recognizing that affectivity is the necessary underpinning for abstract cognition, you are in agreement with these new approaches. But you go on to characterize feeling as concrete and verbalization as abstract. By concrete , do you have in mind bodily sensations? According to embodied approaches to affect, feeling isnt just directed toward the body, it is directed toward the world. It is the situation that feels bad, not our bodily sensations that are triggered by it. Feeling is world-directed and intentional. It involves appraisal and judgement concerning the relevance of situations to our goals. This is because feeling isnt simply an underpinning of verbal thought, it is so inseparably intertwined with it at all levels of abstraction that it makes no sense to try and tease out what aspect of our experience is felt and what is conceptualized.
Eugene Gendlin writes:
“Before speaking we do not usually think all the words or concepts which we are about to say. What we mean exists in us as a subjective feeling. When we speak,
we refer directly to this feeling and the proper concepts or words come to us. If the words or concepts that come are not the right ones, we say, "now let's see, what did I
mean?" again referring directly to our subjectively felt sense of what we meant.
This observation can be formulated by the following assertion: intellectual meanings are experienced as aspects of a subjectively felt referent. If we refer to this referent, we can differentiate and conceptualize meanings. Thus intellectual meanings are in their very
nature aspects of subjective feelings. Any moment's subjective feeling implicitly contains many possible meanings which could be differentiated and symbolized.
Everything we learn, think or read enriches the implicit meanings contained in our subjective felt referent. For example, after reading a theoretical paper, my "feeling"
about it will implicitly contain many intellectual perceptions and meanings which I have, because I have spent years of reading and thinking. When I write a commentary on the paper I symbolize explicitly the meanings which were implicit in my "feelings" after I
read the paper.
Clearly, such "feelings" contain not only emotions, but attitudes, past experiences, and complex intellectual differentiations. Thus the "feeling" which guides the adjusted person implicitly contains all the intellectual meanings of all his experience. As his "feeling"
functions, it is a modified interaction of these implicit meanings. When an individual is said to "act on his feelings," this complex total functions as the basis of action. It includes implicit intellectual meanings; it is not mere emotion.”
We actually see an idealization or abstraction. Without our ‘notion’ filling in for what is not actually presented to us , in the form of memories and expectations, what we would ‘actually’ see is a disunified flow of perceptual
phenomena, not the idealized object we define as a ‘tree’.
What you are doing is taking the constructed idealization we create ( the ‘tree’) , ignoring the fact that it is a combination of actual appearance, recollection and expectation, and then treating the derived idealization (the object we call ‘tree’) as if it were the true and actual basis of the name ‘tree’, and our job as perceiver is merely to accurately represent it as it is in itself.
I should have asked a better question. I wanted to see you set out the changing contextual relationships of sense that are rightfully and sensibly applied to the toddler. I wanted to see you use that framework. If no object exists for us as what it is outside of changing contextual relationships of sense, then either a toddler has what it takes, and objects exist for them, or they do not, and no object does.
Does the tree exist for the toddler in the same way it does for us(as what it is within changing contextual relationships of sense)?
If we're talking about an intentionally and deliberate constructive process, we must first remember that toddlers cannot possibly conceive of anything so steeped in language as any given one of us can. They cannot join us in conversation here, nor have they been influenced by language use. When it comes to those things we've long since called "trees", each of our individual notions of "tree" is as exactly different from one anothers' as the difference between the respective individual correlations drawn between the term and other things unique to each of us. That's how all things become meaningful to us. Where correlations are shared(where we draw the same ones), we have shared meaning... use of "tree" notwithstanding. Each and every time we've endeavored to use the term, each and every time we've entered into a discussion about using the term, each and every time we've silently pondered the term, we were steeped in the circumstances and/or situations required for adding just a bit more meaning to our terminological tea(pardon the flowery language).
:yum:
Toddlers most certainly do not 'see' the tree like that!
I'm willing to whole-heartedly agree that we see the tree as a tree. Seeing the tree as a tree is to be able to pick it out as a result of knowing it by name. Toddlers cannot do that. Neither can any other creature incapable of naming and descriptive practices.
So, to circle back around to the re-examine the assumption/logical implication that seeing trees requires changing contextual relationships of sense along with a constructive process...
If we are talking about a constructive process like naming and descriptive practices, then the answer is "no", trees do not exist 'for' one-year-old toddlers in the same way they do for us, because the do not have that capability... yet. Trees most certainly exist for toddlers, it's just they must exist in a way that is much different than that way. They definitely see trees. They just do not think about them the way we do, nor can they. The trees have very little to no meaning at all to/for the toddler.
Quoting Joshs
I agree. Seeing objects as solid unities requires understanding what sorts of things count as such. That's irrelevant. It's not necessary for a toddler to be able to see a tree as a solid unity in order to watch a butterfly slowly exercising its wings upon one. It need not see the butterfly as a solid unity in order to ever so curiously watch one.
Quoting Joshs
Unless you're claiming that we actually see concatenations of memory, expectations and the meager data, you've just contradicted yourself.
Quoting Joshs
I cannot do this anymore. The above is nonsense on its face.
Quoting Joshs
I see no room for the toddler.
Quoting Joshs
Ah, there we go! So, is it safe to say that toddlers see "a disunified flow of perceptual phenomena" when they are watching the butterfly on the tree? Or is it possible for a toddler to see a butterfly land close by and then watch it closely as it slowly opens and closes its wings?
Quoting Joshs
I think there's much overlap between our views, despite the remarkably different frameworks and the horrible misunderstanding you've expressed above regarding what I'm doing when claiming that toddlers can see trees.
Yeah, that's weird coming from someone who has been describing how trees become meaningful to complex language users like us, and doing so by setting out conditions that require very long periods of time. I do not even agree with the description that you've given for how we see trees. Toddlers do not have that kind of time. It does not make any sense at all to say that I'm attributing your description to toddlers.
I'm saying trees are detectable by toddler eyes, so they see trees. I mean, they see all sorts of things that are meaningless to them.
For me empirical confirmation consists in unequivocal observation. In those matters there are truths, not merely perspectives, but of course those truths are contextual and always to some degree approximations. For example, at sea level water boils at 100 degrees C, the Earth is (roughly) spherical (at scale more perfectly so than a billiard ball). There are countless such empirical truths; truths of bare observation and measurement. Scientific theories, though, are never confirmed to be true empirically, but merely proven to be or not to be predictively successful, and this applies to theories in the social sciences even more so (or should it be less so :wink: ),in my opinion.
Quoting Joshs
By concrete I mean to refer to what appears immediate and tangible to us. Ideas are abstract, but they may embody concrete imagery; imagery of concrete things. I don't see music as abstract; although of course the underlying patterns of chord progression,. melodic line and rhythm are, as they can be symbolically represented and transposed into other keys and different instrumental mediums.
Actual music, what we actually listen to being performed, for me evokes; it does not represent, it presents. In this it has some commonality with poetry, which is more symbolic, but also manifests concrete musical elements and concrete imagery. Reading poetry and hearing it "performed" are of course different experiences.
But all of this is just "perspective" as Nietzsche would have it, and perspective depends very much on definition and context.
Quoting Joshs
By "concrete" I have in mind what is experienced by us as immediate and tangible. By "abstract" I have in mind what is lacking such immediacy and tangibility, but may of course have associations, more or less attenuated, with the immediate and tangible. Some feeling, as you say, "involves appraisal and judgement concerning the relevance of situations to our goals", but by no means all feeling does, in my view.
I also agree that feeling is intertwined with verbal thought, but the point is that (coherent) verbal thoughts have determinate ranges of (literal) reference and meaning, whereas music and abstract art, for example do not. Why would we want to collapse everything into the same category of kind?
I don't agree with Gendlin that there is a determinable subjectively felt sense of what we mean when we speak, that our speaking refers to. I do agree that speaking, and all our activities are accompanied by subjectively felt senses, but I don't agree that these are as determinate, as the (literal) ranges of possible reference and meaning of coherent verbal thoughts.
Quoting Janus
Immediate and tangible….Of course, when we read abstract philosophy, each concept is grasped immediately, but I don’t think you mean it in this sense. I’m picturing instead the concreteness of simple sensations of touch, visual imagery, sounds that physical objects make. We consider these more direct somehow than abstract concepts, as if the features of concepts like democracy were without shape , edges , sharpness.
Autistics are predisposed to gravitate toward interactions with the world at such a concrete level, because they have difficultly processing the rapidly unfolding, highly abstract engagements typical of verbal social interaction. Intense immersion in concrete , repetitive visual, auditory and movement patterns are typical of many autistics. High functioning autistics and Asperger’s individuals learn to use language, but at a delay.
Significantly, just as autistics have great difficulty with the dynamically changing nature of verbal social interaction, they have equal difficulty with identifying and understanding the meaning of social emotions.
Why is this so? It is because social affect and feeling (sadness, anger, trepidation , love, angst) are nothing other than the vicissitudes , the consonances and dissonances , the acceleration and deceleration of the flow of abstract thought. All thinking , whether verbal or non-verbal, concrete or abstract, takes place as a textured flow, and feeling is this aspect of it. The textures of concrete perceptions of simple , direct , tangible things are felt as the attractiveness of colors , the harshness of bright light , the pleasant symmetry of moving visual patterns, the agony of physical pain or delight of a caress. This is concrete feeling, the analogue to concrete perception.
The textures of abstract verbal thought are what we call the social emotions. It is not that a feeling of anger or sadness or joy is devoid of verbal conceptualization. On the contrary, social feelings would be impossible without abstract conceptualization , because they are the very textured undulations of the progress of abstract thought. There cannot be social feeling in the absence of abstract conceptualization. And there cannot be abstract thinking going on unless that thinking unfolds in time. Its unfolding IS feeling.
When we think of emotions and feelings, we tend to think of concrete sensations like the feeling of the tightening of the chest and rapidly beating heart in anxiety, flushed fact in embarrassment, clenched fist in anger. But these concrete sensations are merely the response of the body in support of the social feelings
that trigger them and in preparation for action. The social feelings themselves are not these sensations. In most circumstances, social feelings are verbal. That is, they are the changing flow of verbal conceptualization. The intensity of social feeling is the rapidity of the flow of verbal conceptualization. It is this rapid sequential
flow produced by abstract verbiage ( social feeling) that autistics have such difficulty processing. The progress of conceptualization in experiences of felt enlightenment and excited creativity is too fast for us to stop and identify each verbal symbol that contributes to the constructing of big and bigger ideas. In order to consolidate the gains made by the enlightened train of thought-feeling, we must slow down the rate of abstractive progress by further defining , clarifying and adding to the original verbiage.
In sum, the relevant analogue to the distinction between concrete perception and abstract verbal conceptualization is not the difference between conceptual thought and feeling. It can’t be. This notion is incoherent once we realize that abstract as well as concrete experiencing is a flow, a progression, and feeling IS the vicissitudes, undulations, consonances and dissonances of the progress, not as a separate system intertwined with verbal meaning (this system is only the concrete bodily sensations that are the response to social feeling) but as as aspect of the essence of verbal meaning itself.
So there is concrete perception and concrete feeling , abstract verbal thought and abstract social
feeling. Instrumental music , dance and painting are slightly less definitive modes of abstract symbolizarion than verbal conceptualization, but considerably more abstract than concrete perception, given that they produce a wealth of social emotions.
' Is there an external world? ' The challenge is making the absurdity of this question conspicuous.
' Is there something that we can be wrong or right about ? ' If not, the question is unintelligible. If so, the question answer itself, presumes its own answer, confusing with its strangeness, with its apparently valid grammar and what seems like a daring willingness to question everything....
For more on this, I quote again:
http://www.henryflynt.org/philosophy/flawbelief.html
[quote]
We begin with the question of whether there is a realm beyond my "immediate experience." Does the Empire State Building continue to exist even when I am not looking at it? If either of these questions can be asked, then there must indeed be a realm beyond my experience. If I can ask whether there is a realm beyond my experience, then the answer must be yes. The reason is that there has to be a realm beyond my experience in order for the phrase 'a realm beyond my experience' to have any meaning. Russell's theory of descriptions will not work here; it cannot jump the gap between my experience and the realm beyond my experience. The assertion 'There is realm beyond my experience' is true if it is meaningful, and that is precisely what is wrong with it. There are rules implicit in the natural language as to what is semantically legitimate. Without a rule that a statement and its negation cannot simultaneously be true, for example, the natural language would be in such chaos that nothing could be done with it. Aristotle's Organon was the first attempt to explicate this structure formally, and Supplement D of Carnap's Meaning and Necessity shows that hypotheses about the implicit rules of natural language are well-defined and testable. An example of implicit semantics is the aphorism that "saying a thing is so doesn't make it so." This aphorism has been carried over into the semantics of the physical sciences: its import is that there is no such thing as a substantive assertion which is true merely because it is meaningful. If a statement is true merely because it is meaningful, then it is too true. It must be some kind of definitional trick which doesn't say anything. And this is our conclusion about the assertion that there is a realm beyond my experience. Since it would be true if it were meaningful, it cannot be a substantive assertion.
The absurdity of the question is readily apparent to anyone and everyone first hearing it.
I grant that most people, even philosophers, see its practical nullity. But it really seems to be a big part of the tradition that we work from the ghost outward, with only the ghost truly, securely known, leaving all the rest a mere hypothesis, however likely.
So the challenge is to make its absurdity apparent to philosophers locked deep in the idea that they are locked deep in a pineal gland which itself is a mere dream of a pineal gland which is itself ....
It already is. No philosopher believes there is no such thing as an external world. The confusion comes as a result of attempting to take account of our own meaningful experience and failing miserably at doing so, as a direct result of employing linguistic frameworks that are/were themselves inherently incapable of successfully performing that task.
Such questions are absurd upon first hearing them because the answer is so obviously undeniable that it's impossible to take seriously by common language users that have yet to have begun using terms like "external world" according to traditional philosophical accounting practices. Common use comes first, and that's when, where, and how the terms "internal/external" first become meaningful to the community of language users.
With just an inkling of mastery, one can say a number of meaningful things about specific kinds of spatial relationships by learning how to use those words. When we endeavor to use the terms "internal/external" to describe the spatial relationship between an orange's seeds and the fruit stand upon which the orange is being displayed, we may sensibly do so in relation to the orange. We would say that the seeds are internal(within the physical bounds of the orange), and that the stand is external(not within the physical bounds of the orange).
It is when philosophers began attempting to take account of meaningful human experience that things went awry.
All meaningful human experience involving oranges includes oranges and our biological machinery. If we consider what would be left if we remove either, then we realize that what remains is not enough. It takes both biological machinery and oranges in order for an individual to have a meaningful experience involving oranges. Biological machinery is internal. Oranges are external. Meaningful experience involving oranges consists of both, internal and external things.
I think we are coming from very different definitions of terms, so we are going to talk past one another. For me what is concrete is what has immediate affective impact phenomenologically speaking, what affects us predominately in terms of being a sight, a sound, a smell, a taste, a bodily sensation, regardless of whatever story we might tell about the underlying machinery. I agree it's not black and white; that there is a continuum from what might be thought to be purely abstract to what is concrete. And of course I'm not denying that abstract thinking includes affectivity; as embodied beings there are always nuances of feeling and association going on.
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Some of them made serious mistakes. I'll grant you that readily.
Quoting creativesoul
Of course I agree, as a matter of common sense and ordinary language. But personally I wouldn't want all philosophers to have to take so much for granted...even if most of the time we get silly talk from this license.
Only if you admit you are admitting defeat.
Haha, this comment is about ten days old. Posted accidentally now. Wrong thread, too. Forgive me. Been enjoying it, but... why cling to the mentalist talk in a "manner of speaking"? Why not be literal? And eliminativist?
Right, this is what I’ve characterized as the concreteness of bodily felt sensation. I think we’re taking about the same thing. What I’m claiming is that, in addition to this bodily sensation there is another aspect of feeling which is not concrete, not bodily and not a sensation. This more fundamental aspect of social feeling or emotion is what makes bodily sensations coherently meaningful as emotions. The concrete body sensations act as symbols for the abstract feelings. We tend to treat the body sensations of emotions the same way we treat other sensations , as simple concrete immediate sensations , without recognizing the existence of the more fundamental aspect. We substitute the simple and concrete for the abstract because then abstract component of feeling is invisible to us. Fundamental social emotions do not need to be accompanied by any concrete body sensations whatsoever in order to produce their meaning for us, just as abstract word concepts can produce their meaning in the absence of any specific concrete imagery.
This notion of affect is consonant with Heidegger’s Befindlichkeit, ways of being in the world.
You're clearly not talking about the same thing.
Janus set out a criterion that does not include the 'aspect of feeling' that you've set out.
I'm curious what this other 'aspect of feeling' could possibly be if it's a bodily sensation that is not concrete, not bodily, and not a sensation. Looks like nonsense to me.
All of them have...
...gotten human thought and belief, meaning, and/or truth wrong. Not all positions are wrong in the exact same way. Just to be clear. Some are wrong about the origen/nature of meaning, some are wrong about the origen/nature of truth, others are wrong about human thought and belief. All of them have gotten meaningful human experience wrong as a result.
There are all sorts of underlying problems stemming from overestimating the appropriate usefulness of dichotomous frameworks such as subject/object, subjective/objective, mind/body, internal/external, subject/world, individual/world, self/other, real/imaginary, real/fiction, etc. In addition to that, the very notion of proposition has led us even further astray.
Epistemology(JTB) suffered blows that it has yet to have recovered from(Russell's clock, and Gettier's paper). The failure of recovery is as a result of treating propositions as though they are equivalent to belief to begin with. They are not. Those problems were fostered, were made possible, by virtue of working from an emaciated notion of thought and belief to begin with. They are easily dissolved within an adequate account of meaningful human thought and belief.
Current discourse remains trapped by the sticky residue of those frameworks as well as other accounting malpractices. Postmodern thought works from the basic argument that truth is a property of true claims/propositions, and that propositions are language constructs, therefore truth is a construct of language, for example. It only follows that truth cannot exist prior to language. From that we arrive at saying that there can be no true thought and/or belief prior to language acquisition. If truth is a language construct, then a language less creature would be incapable of forming, having, and/or holding true belief. The problem, of course, is that some can and do and none of the conventional approaches are capable of making much sense of them. So, those who hold that truth is existentially dependent upon language(including but not limited to postmodern thought) must either deny language less true belief or be faced with defending how true belief could exist without truth.
Conventional understanding regarding theories of meaning are also found wanting and/or sorely lacking as a result of not having gotten human thought and belief right to begin with. Current convention has two primary schools of thought when it comes to theories of meaning. Both of them presuppose, are based upon, and/or work from the hidden, undisclosed tenet that meaning is to be found in language and/or linguistic expressions. Again, this leads to saying that there is no meaning prior to language, that meaning is a language construct, that language is necessary for meaning, and/or that meaning is existentially dependent upon language.
Some language less creatures are capable of forming, having, and/or holding belief that is meaningful as well as true or false. It's truth-apt in that they can be true or false. The difficulty is in attempting to set this out in a philosophically respectable manner, despite abandoning many and/or much of the historical frameworks.
Language less true and false belief is easily explained, old problems are dissolved, and doors of understanding previously nailed shut with consistent inadequate language use are thrown open wide when and if we understand how human thought and belief works(how all things become meaningful to creatures capable of attributing meaning).
Meaning and truth emerge as a result of thought and belief formation, and nary a one philosopher has ever gotten meaning and truth both right. All are wrong about meaningful human experience, because it consists entirely of meaningful human thought and/or belief, some of which exist in their entirety prior to language acquisition, and they are true.
If a language less creature is capable of forming meaningful true belief, then meaning and truth are prior to language, and not all belief is equivalent to a propositional attitude.
Quoting bongo fury
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Good questions, and I'm glad you're following. I'm not sure what words I'd reach for in a context where I could assume folks had read and assimilated some of the criticisms of the grand old ghost story.
There is an ordinary, 'innocent' version of 'private mind' (journal entries) that gets confused with its evil twin, which is itself a confusion, a mystified Nothing. Show them a problem with the Nothing Ghost...and they fall back on the journal entries and wicked thoughts about wives' sisters, which was never challenged in the first place.
Your view seems reasonable to me, but I prefer to use/understand some of your keywords differently. The philosophers who want to find truth and meaning in full-fledged language are reacting to problems in their context, naturally trying to make sense of claims that a play a role in inferences --- of what they themselves, already at a high level of development, are doing.
I don't think philosophers must or even do insist that other understandings/uses of 'meaning' are invalid.
Another implicit premise here seems to be that languageless creatures can't have propositional attitudes. To me the question arises...how could we tell ? Can we, locked in language, help but attributing such 'attitudes' in trying to understand such creatures ?
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This other aspect of feeling is not a bodily sensation.
Here’s more from an article I wrote:
Social feeling is the very core of so-called conceptual and perceptual thought, merging narrative-thematic consistency and global self-transformation, the subjective and the objective, the felt and the understood, in the same gesture. The presumed partial independence of rationality and affect vanishes, and the distinction re-emerges as aspects inherent in each event. The inter-affecting of context and novelty which defines an event simultaneously produces a fresh, particular modulation of change (empirical aspect) and a unique momentum (hedonic component) of self-transformation. From this vantage, the valuative, hedonic (the perceived goodness or badness of things), aesthetic aspect of experience, underlying ‘non-emotional' appraisals as well as our sadnesses, fears and joys, simply IS our vicissitudes of momentum of sense-making through situations, rather than arising from causal feedback loops. Affective valences are contractions and expansions, coherences and incoherences, accelerations and regressions, consonances and dissonances, expressing how intimately and harmoniously we are able to anticipate and relate to, and thus how densely, richly, intensely we are able to move through, new experience. If we can believe that a unique qualitative moment of momentum, ranging from the confused paralysis of unintelligibility to the exhilaration of dense transformative movement, is intrinsic to ALL events, then perhaps there is no need to attribute the origin of aesthetic pleasures and pains to the functioning of a limited class of entities like bodily affects, even if it is understandable why this kind of assumption has survived for so long in psychology .
From the standpoint of verbal expressivity, what has traditionally been called emotion often appears to be a minimalist art, because it is the situational momentum of experiencing slowing or accelerating so rapidly that feelings seem to distill meaning down to a bare inarticulate essence. When the momentum of our reflective thought shifts in such dramatic ways (acceleratively enriched in joyful comprehension, impoverished in grief, ambivalent in fear, alternately disappointed and confident in anger), such so-called emotional events may appear to be a species apart from conceptual reason, a blind intuitive force (surge, glow, twinge, sensation, arousal, energy) invading, conditioning and orienting perceptual and conceptual thought from without as a background field. It is said that such ‘raw' or primitive feeling is bodily-physiological, pre-reflective and non-conceptual, contentless hedonic valuation, innate, passive, something we are overcome by. At other times, situational change may be intermediate, just modulated and gradual enough that content seems to perpetuate itself in self-cohering narratives. Such situations have been called rational, voluntary, factual, reflective, stable, conceptual, propositional, rational, logical, theoretical, non-aesthetic. However, as I have said, these dichotomies: hedonic versus reflective, voluntary versus involuntary, conceptual versus pre-reflective bodily-affective, are not effectively understood as reciprocally causal innate or learned associations between perceptions and body states; they are relative variations in the momentum of a contextually unfolding process which is always, at the same time, within the same event, intentional and affective.
Is there a physical world? Yes, but only in as much as there is a dream world.
Which is to prefer doing different things with the very same words/marks. There's nothing - in and of itself - wrong with doing that, and I am quite curious to see exactly what you're going to do differently than me.
Indeed.
They were taking account of their own thought and belief while attempting to sort out the differences between true and false belief/statements/propositions as well as what ought to count as good/adequate enough reason to believe something or another. Any and all philosophical positions are the result of metacognitive endeavors such as these. They knew they were fallible. The general aim was to minimize the likelihood of being mistaken(of forming, having, and/or holding false belief) while increasing the likelihood of better understanding the world and/or themselves . This, in turn, required pinpointing exactly how they could be mistaken to begin with, what sorts of things they could have been mistaken about, as well as in what sorts of ways.
An admirable endeavor, even to this day...
However, when that endeavor results in holding a philosophical position that - when maintained - leads to an outright denial of language less creature's ability to form, have, and/or hold belief, then it's clearly wrong somewhere along the line. Language less creatures are capable of having meaningful experiences(of forming thought and/or belief), it's just not the sort of thought and belief that could be appropriately described and/or characterized as having an attitude towards a proposition such that they hold it as true(believe it).
Whether or not they are invalid isn't under consideration. That is determined by how consistent their language use is, as well as whether or not any argument given follows the rules of correct inference.
Language less belief negates/falsifies current conventional understanding. If there is such a thing as meaningful language less thought and/or belief, then current convention is wrong. It has nothing to do with validity(consistent language use that follows the rules of correct inference), and everything to do with truth and/or contradicting what's happened and/or is happening. We already know it's valid, that's how we arrived at the logical consequence that shed light upon the inherently inadequate framework. It's where it leads that is problematic.
Good eye!
All propositions are existentially dependent upon(emerge via) common language use. They all consist of words. Language less creatures do not have language, do not understand words, and thus cannot understand propositions. Propositions are utterly meaningless to language less creatures. They cannot have an attitude towards some proposition or another such that they believe it to be true, and/or take it to be the case.
When it comes to ourselves, we ought not try to stop doing that, at least, whenever it's appropriate to do so. I mean the belief that approach has proven quite useful. S knows that P... is as well.
Generally speaking, if we wish to acquire knowledge of how human thought and belief initially emerges, we must begin with ourselves, and when it comes to describing much of our own thought and belief in terms of propositional attitudes we can do so quite successfully. So, the practice has some very good use, and has led to acquiring knowledge about ourselves and/or the world which can help us to much better situate ourselves and/or one another in the world. However, like many - arguably most - useful practices, this one too has a limited scope of rightful/sensible application. It is only capable of properly accounting for some of our own complex belief, and it's completely incapable of taking account of language less creatures' belief. Most cannot even admit of such belief!
Imagine a white sheet hanging over a wire fence in the middle of an expansive meadow where sheep are commonly found grazing. Someone two acres away from the sheet mistakes it for a sheep. That person believes that the sheet is a sheep. The person does not - cannot - believe that "the sheet is a sheep" is true.
The same type of critique holds good regarding Russell's stopped clock. The person believed that a stopped clock was working. They most certainly did not have any attitude at all towards the proposition "the stopped clock is working" when and while they trusted what a stopped clock said about the time.
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Quoting creativesoul
:up: Quoting creativesoul
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The issue seems to be whether beliefs are best understood or not in terms of propositions.
Quoting creativesoul
Lately I find Sellar's myth of Jones illuminating. Note that Jones lives in a implicitly behaviorist society. They don't even think of themwselves as such, because it's Jones who first postulates 'internal speech' or 'talking without talking.' In the same way that the atomic theory could prove itself with increased powers of prediction and control, Jones' peers come to embrace thoughts as useful fictions. With practice, they even get good at guessing what they are thinking.
Now Jones could even extend his theory to creatures who never talk at all, explaining the beaver's movements in terms of its belief that food was waiting on the other side. Note that beliefs are still propsitional here, without us being committed to the animal 'having' them 'directly ' (inside their postulated ghostly consciousness.)
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We have no other way to contemplate our own thought and belief save common language replete with naming and descriptive practices. That brute fact has given rise to all sorts of different language games. Throughout the history of Western civilization there have been scores upon scores of individuals creating and/or inventing new ways to talk about human experiences. From Plato through Dennett there have been ingenious individuals employing some accounting practice or another, that they themselves 'invented', as a novel way of talking about human thought and belief.
The shared fatal flaw of them all is that none of them draw and maintain the distinction between thought and belief, and thinking about thought and belief in terms of their basic elemental constituency and existential dependency.
On behaviourism...
Given that there are any number of possible reasons why we may exhibit some behaviour or another, behaviour alone cannot always reliably inform us of anothers' thought and belief. The sheer volume of people on social media telling the viewer what this or that behaviour means would be better sized if most everyone already knew that outward behaviour alone does not constitute sufficient reason to believe and/or adequate evidence to conclude that the observer can be certain what the candidate under consideration is thinking. Rather, it's more along the lines of good evidence that is not quite strong enough. Reliably true conclusions about the thought and/or belief of others requires more than just outward observable behaviours.
Above emphasis is mine.
That's a common practice across the board! I've participated in countless discussions, and been a participant in a debate on this very forum concerning that very idea(that the content of thought and belief is propositional). It makes perfect sense for us to go through such a stage in our development. I mean that's how we learned to talk about others as well as ourselves. We talk about how happy our dogs are upon our arrival. We talk about how our cats' behaviour differs significantly from our dogs in those same situations. Nature show narrators often talk about how species of male birds 'perform for the females', 'hope to get the females attention', and other such things.
We say things like our cat believes that it's food bowl is empty. There's certainly no good reason to deny saying such a thing. People talk like that all the time, and few if any have qualms about doing so. The results can bring about positive change in that such conversations bring people closer together, develop friendships, etc. Common ground and all. So, it's not a horrible thing - in and of itself. However, talking about language less minds can also result in fostering language games that inhibit the users' ability to acquire understanding of themselves and/or other animals by virtue of false belief formation and/or the subsequent perpetuation each time people talk like that. That seems to be the case, writ large, right now. Anthropomorphism was inevitable. I mean, we had to have already been guilty of attributing human features and/or characteristics to things not human in order to become aware of our having done so. The only way to avoid such a practice is to develop some sort of good idea regarding what the nature of language less thought and belief amounts to. We know it cannot consist of propositional attitude(s).
When we try to parse the cat's belief in propositional terms, we're confusing the contents of our report with the content of what we're reporting upon. unless we draw and maintain the distinction between the cat's belief and our report thereof in terms of their respective elemental constituency. Our report is language use, and as such consists of words. Language less belief does not - cannot - consist of language and/or words! The same critique holds good if we replace "words" with "propositions". So, those are accounting malpractices when inappropriately applied to things incapable of developing an attitude towards some proposition or other.
We can do a great job of talking about language less creatures' belief so long as we go about doing so in the best way we know how. When we say that a cat believes that a mouse is behind a tree, we are not saying that a cat has an attitude towards the proposition "a mouse is behind a tree" such that it takes it to be the case(or true).
What are we saying then, about language less belief? What could it possibly consist of?
What is needed is a bare minimum criterion for what counts as thought and/or belief. This bare minimum would need to be simple enough to include the initial emergence of the most rudimentary thought and belief, rich enough in potential to be able to exhaust the most complex sorts of thinking such as thinking about our own thought and belief as a subject matter in its own right, and each and every thought and/or evolution thereof in the meantime. That seems like a taller order than it is. All we need is an adequate outline that has good bones, like an elemental structure capable of covering all that's important...
We're still in the early stages of properly taking account of meaningful human thought and belief.
Anthropomorphism is much more common than not! Most people do not place much, if any, value upon avoiding such mistakes. It's a fun way talk! All sorts of people attribute thought and belief that only humans are capable of forming, having, and/or holding to non human creatures. I've watched countless 'nature' documentaries about all sorts of different kinds of fauna and flora. I've more recently witnessed writers claim that certain species of crows somehow performed some sort of language less 'Bayesian reasoning'.
I suggest inferentialism.
What if selves are thought of as being constituted by their doings and sayings ? Above you suggest a box that cannot be looked into by others, an approach I consider to have been shown wanting.
It seems pointless to guess at what-it's-really-like-for-a-crow. If a model agrees with the data (I don't know the details), that seems like progress. Some physicists thought of atoms as mere aids to calculation, not really there, just useful for prediction, etc.
Quoting creativesoul
It'd be fun to find such a thing, but it seems indeed like a tall order. Does an ameoba have its reasons ?
Something like this ?
Quoting creativesoul
It need not be confusion. What if we tried to understand aliens who seemed to have a language ? Less confusion there, intuitively, but we are still trying to model behavior using postulate internal entities ( attributing human-like beliefs to a non-human, probing for explanatory/predictive power.)
I feel like the alien or the cat. i’m not sure I know what a human-like belief , or a proposition is. I don’t think it’s simply my own ignorance, but the fact that when concepts like ‘belief’ and ‘proposition’ are analyzed rigorously in terms of their conditions of possibility, we find no ‘there’ there. As Witt would argue ‘belief’ has a near infinity of potential senses, tied together not by an overarching categorical frame , but by family resemblance, which is not at all the same thing as a pre-existing rule or category. The logical form of a proposition S is P presupposes a pragmatic act of taking something AS something within a wider context of pragmatic relevance.
The proposition is an artificially worked -up idealization and abstraction derived from this pragmatic intentionality.
From this vantage, it is this primordial functioning of human language as person, situation and context-specific use that we need to compare with the perceptual and conceptual activities of other animals. Some argue that human intentionality is continuous with animal intentionality, more a matter of difference of degree than of kind.
I really am open to what you say, but my theme lately is that...here we are public with only words to trade. I don't know how else to settle belief rationally. It's a fact that AI is pretty good at translating simple speech, and these models are built on mountains of scraped data, actual human conversation...so there is a strong pattern in our doings, strong enough for a machine to catch on.
I don't deny that there is stuff in our box of arbitrary complexity and richness, but I don't see how it can play a direct role.
Quoting Joshs
I love animals, and I'd like to believe this. I guess it hinges on how we take 'degree' and 'kind.' If it is only a degree, that degree is so substantial that we are currently alone in the conversation.
Quoting Pie
My point is that belief is only one of myriad ways of sense-making , and far from the most important. Furthermore, the code cost of belief is not itself unitary.
As Ray Monk explains:
“In Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein had investigated one form of language: the assertoric sentence, or 'proposition'. His defence of this was to say that other forms of language, questions and commands, can be regarded as modified assertions, so that a common core to all three can be identified (e.g., from The door is shut', we can derive 'Is the door shut? and 'Shut the door!"). Thus, by investigating the logical form of propositions, we can legitimately claim to be investigating the structure of our whole language. Using the notion of a language game, Wittgenstein now exposes this view to a merciless attack:
“But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question, and command? -There are countless kinds: countless different kinds of use of what we call 'symbols', words', 'sentences. And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten. (We can get a rough picture of this from the changes in mathematics.)
Here the term 'language game' is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.Review the multiplicity of language games in the following examples, and in others:
Giving orders, and obeying them- Describing the appearance of an object, or giving itsmeasurements Constructing an object from a description (a drawing) Reporting an event- Speculating about an event Forming and testing a hypothesis- Presenting the results of an experiment in tables anddiagrams- Making up a story; and reading it Play-acting- Singing catches- Guessing riddles Making a joke; telling it- Solving a problem in practical arithmetic Translating from one language into another Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying.”(P.I. #23)
I agree there are lots of ways to make sense. That belief is far from the most important is so far a mere claim. I tend to think it's central for philosophy anyway. I take the 'big event' to have been escaping superstition, claiming human autonomy (which is that of reason which is gloriously one and universal). Since then, if I can half-joke, we see lots of rebellions by those educated enough to pull off seductive self-contradicting irrationalisms which aren't obviously so. Yet I can't deny the attraction of some free-for-all it's-all-just-conceptual-art vision of philosophy. In fact, I used to try to defend and perform that vision. In the end, I think we want (among other institutions no doubt) something 'anal' and sober and careful.
Inferentialism makes a good case for building a theory on assertions. If irony is the trope of tropes, we get lots of mileage from a little spin on an assertion. We philosophers especially might want to consider how central inferences are in the lives of the 'rational' animal...and what are premises and conclusions ? How do we explain ourselves to one another ? To ourselves ? Inferences.
Quoting Pie
Perhaps I can get philosopher of science Joseph Rouse to make my point better than I can.
“A familiar conception of science emphasizes its role in justifying belief; we are accustomed to thinking of ourselves as believers who formulate and accept representations of how things are. The meaning and justification of those beliefs would then be the primary target for philosophical explication and assessment. Sellars, Brandom, McDowell, Haugeland, and others within this tradition suggest a different conception of ourselves, which also changes the central tasks for science and philosophy. We are concept users who engage others and our partially shared surroundings in discursive practice. The primary phenomenon to understand naturalistically is not the content, justification, and truth of beliefs but instead the opening and sustaining of a “space of reasons” in which there could be conceptually articulated meaning and justification at all, including meaningful disagreement and conceptual difference.
This “space of reasons” is an ongoing pattern of interaction among ourselves and with our partially shared surroundings. As Ian Hacking once noted, “Whether a proposition is as it were up for grabs, as a candidate for being true-or-false, depends on whether we have ways to reason about it” (2002, 160). The space of reasons encompasses not only the claims that we take to be true or false but also the conceptual field and patterns of reasoning within which those claims become intelligible possibilities whose epistemic status can be assessed. Any determination of the content, justification, or truth of beliefs emerges from that larger process of ongoing interaction. Whether conceived as second nature (McDowell 1994), discursive practice (Brandom 1994), constituted domains (Haugeland 1998), or a functional linguistic pluralism (Price 2011), the space of reasons cannot be reduced to the various contents expressed or expressible within it. The familiar epistemological conception of us as believers, who might ideally share a common representation of the world in the scientific image, thus conflates particular moves within discursive practice or the space of reasons with the space or practice itself.”
Food for thought. Thanks.
Do you actually....believe this ? Do you endorse this as a claim that I should take seriously ?
FWIW, this is precisely what my "our minimal epistemic commitment" thread is about.
I like your quote, but I don't see it taking those pesky assertions down a notch.
Do I believe what, that there is a familiar epistemological conception of us as believers? Sure. What I invite you to take seriously is Rouse’s articulation of the relation between belief-justification and the space of reasons within which any such claims are intelligible.
That beliefs are propositional is not an observation, subject to verification or falsification. It's a definition. It serves to differentiate beliefs from other feelings and sensations. What characterises a belief is its propositional content together with an attitude: p is the case.
Beliefs are a way of explaining behaviour in an intentional fashion. They need not be, indeed almost certainly are not, some identifiable structure in the brain. They are a way of making sense of people's actions using intentional language. John went to the fridge because he wanted a beer and believed that there was beer in the fridge.
It works equally well for creatures that do not speak. The cat went to the food bowl because it was hungry and believed that the bowl might contain food. There's no need for the cat to be able to talk in order for this way of speaking to work. To think that therefore the cat must have a thing in it's brain that somehow corresponds to the belief is a category error, confusing a brain state with an intentional description.
Assertion have a key place in philosophical thinking because their analysis is relatively straightforward. We might have built a logic around questions, or perhaps commands, but we didn't. that's probably of historical interest as much as grammatical. Logic presents us with a way of setting out the grammar of assertions, a grammar that lends itself to the analysis of other intents. So a question is often an incomplete proposition together with an intent to elicit completion: "What food did you give the cat?" can be analysed as the incomplete proposition "You gave the cat x" together with an intent to elicit the missing individual.
How many kinds of sentence are there? Innumerable, of course, as many as there are sentences. Like Eucalyptus trees, their specification is fraught because of the way they intermix and cross over. But like Eucalyptus trees we can classify them based on their characteristics. We've already seen how questions are incomplete propositions with a particular intent. We can add direction of fit to derive a distinction between asserting and commanding: an assertion sets out how the world is, while a command (wish, promise, etc) sets out a way the world is desired to be; one changes the word to fit the world, the other changes the world to fit the words. Searle uses these to suggest a taxonomy for expressions. But of course any such taxonomy will be subject to the considerations of A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs, such that any such theory of meaning will be subject to instant revision:
I like to think I take it quite seriously. I take it that the Enlightenment was the big event. This is when the space of reasons blossomed, when reason became autonomous. Philosophy 'is' (ideally) the flower of this space of reasons...and even its self-consciousness, as Brandom might put it. We evolve a metacognitive vocabulary so that we can not only endorse inferences, but explain why, in detail. We make explicit what we've always done, not only to do it even better, but just to know ourselves.
We invented words like 'premise' and 'conclusion,' long after there were premises and conclusions. An inferential semantics explains how claims are intelligible in terms of the inferences that are and are not allowed. "He closed his umbrella while it was raining, because he wanted to stay dry." This is confusion or nonsense without some extra context that rescues it. We can't know one concept without knowing many. To cash out the rational in the rational animal, we emphasize inferential.
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And given the importance of 'know thyself,'...
Quoting Banno
Another approach: it's we who are making sense of the cat, and we aren't going to do that in cat-speak. Let them attribute a sequence of meows to us, if they care enough. It's only fair.
What inference is or is not allowed only exists in its actual use.
“… we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, I have argued, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances (Wittgenstein 1953). Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.” (Rouse)
What Rouse is trying to do is show that our participation within normative practices is not simply a matter of conformity ( or not) to pre-established norms, but a continual re-framing and re-configuration. The norms continue to exist the same differently through their use, and their use re-defines their relevance and sense.
“Representationalist conceptions identify scientific understanding with some position or set of positions within the space of reasons—that is, as a body of knowledge. I instead locate scientific understanding in the ongoing reconfiguration of the entire space. The sciences continually revise the terms and inferential relations through which we understand the world, which aspects of the world are salient and significant within that understanding, and how those aspects of the world matter to our overall understanding.”
If you are referring to the concept of belief, you give me all I need, which is that it's essentially a public concept, however flexible. It's the clash of peanut butter and jelly. Speaking as peanut butter (you are what you eat), I say that jelly tends to emphasize how fuzzy and individual everything is semantically...and that this eventually (if pushed too far) lapses into self-subversion. Presumably you want this very point to be understood and to be right about something that applies or matters to both of us.
@Pie, I doubt that you disagree with this; rather, it seems obvious, no?
In my previous discussion with @Joshs, the contention has been mostly determining what is in contention...
My wanting to be right will also involve a re-articulation of the very sense of being right. What matters to both of us in this will never be more than partially shared, and thus always ahead of us to be achieved more fully.
The situation might be described as an intergenerational dialectic, with science advancing one funeral at a time (if the old dogs refuse to learn new tricks.) Along with reason's autonomy and self-criticism comes endless dynamism, an endless revolution in the memes of seduction.
[quote = Heidegger]
Being-there as being-in-the-world is primarily governed by logos…Coming into the world, one grows into a determinate tradition of speaking, seeing, interpreting. Being-in-the-world is an already-having-the-world-thus-and-so. This peculiar fact, that the world into which I enter, in which I awaken, is there for me in a determinate interpretedness, I designate terminologically as fore-having.
Dasein is history.
...
Dasein, whiling away its own time in each case, is at the same time always a generation. So a specific interpretedness precedes every Dasein in the shape of the generation itself. What is preserved in the generation is itself the outcome of earlier views and disputes, earlier interpretations and past concerns.
...
The wellspring of such persistent elements lies in the past, but they continue to have such an impact in the present that their dominance is taken for granted and their development forgotten. Such a forgotten past is inherent in the prevailing interpretedness of being-together-with-one-another. To the extent that Dasein lives from (cares about) this past, it is this past itself.
...
The world with which we are concerned and being-in itself are both interpreted within the parameters of a particular framework of intelligibility.
...
One has a timeworn conceptuality at one's disposal. It provides the fore-concept for the interpretation. The interpretedness of a 'time' is strictly determined by these structural factors and the variable forms of their realization. And it is precisely the unobtrusiveness of these factors --the fact that one is not aware of them -- which gives public interpretedness its taken-for-granted character. However, the 'fore'-character in the structure of interpretedness shows us that it is none other than what has already been that jumps ahead, as it were, of a present time pervaded by interpretedness. Guided by its interpretedness, expectant concern lives its own past.
[/quote]
This part is key : the 'fore'-character in the structure of interpretedness shows us that it is none other than what has already been that jumps ahead, as it were, of a present time pervaded by interpretedness.
Or: I am my past in the mode of no longer being it.
(I still ride w/ my boy Sartre.)
One is governed by habits of interpretation so automatic that one takes such interpretations for the essence of the world. We are self-interpreting interpreters acting upon and thinking mostly from inconspicuously automatic and therefore unquestionable interpretations of ourselves and the world. One might say that, with especially automatic ('unconscious') interpretations, culture is mistaken for nature, the contingent for the necessary. Sellars likes 'second nature' for this. Perhaps only a little bit of our second nature is 'available' for criticism or adjustment. The tacit is 'necessary' until it becomes contingent and questionable (and possibly editable) when pointed out.
Why not? An error here is picturing language as fixed, as merely the transfer of information, rather than the construction of information. Or picturing it as happening inside individual minds when it happens in a public, and hence political, space that it, itself, creates.
The construction put the lie to realism, the public space puts the lie to idealism.
There's may not be an external, material world, but that there is a world is certain.
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Well said !
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I think the spatial metaphor 'external' is not so bad. The world encompasses little ol' me.
As Kojève puts it, man is [historical] time is the concept[-system] existing empirically.
Indeed. Transformation is patently constant, but changes in the norms are governed by those same changing norms.
[quote = Brandom]
Our practice of language-use is not merely the application of concepts but simultaneously the institution of the conceptual norms governing the correct use of our linguistic expressions; it is our actual use of language itself that settles the meanings of our expressions.
...
A characteristic distinguishing feature of linguistic practices is their protean character, their plasticity and malleability, the way in which language constantly overflows itself, so that any established pattern of usage is immediately built on, developed, and transformed. The very act of using linguistic expressions or applying concepts transforms the content of those expressions or concepts. The way in which discursive norms incorporate and are transformed by novel contingencies arising from their usage is not itself a contingent, but a necessary feature of the practices in which they are implicit. It is easy to see why one would see the whole enterprise of semantic theorizing as wrong–headed if one thinks that, insofar as language has an essence, that essence consists in its restless self–transformation (not coincidentally reminiscent of Nietzsche’s “self–overcoming”). Any theoretical postulation of common meanings associated with expression types that has the goal of systematically deriving all the various proprieties of the use of those expressions according to uniform principles will be seen as itself inevitably doomed to immediate obsolescence as the elusive target practices overflow and evolve beyond those captured by what can only be a still, dead snapshot of a living, growing, moving process. It is an appreciation of this distinctive feature of discursive practice that should be seen as standing behind Wittgenstein’s pessimism about the feasibility and advisability of philosophers engaging in semantic theorizing…
…
[T]he idea that the most basic linguistic know–how is not mastery of proprieties of use that can be expressed once and for all in a fixed set of rules, but the capacity to stay afloat and find and make one’s way on the surface of the raging white–water river of discursive communal practice that we always find ourselves having been thrown into (Wittgensteinian Geworfenheit) is itself a pragmatist insight. It is one that Dewey endorses and applauds. And it is a pragmatist thought that owes more to Hegel than it does to Kant. For Hegel builds his metaphysics and logic around the notion of determinate negation because he takes the normative obligation to do something to resolve the conflict that occurs when the result of our properly applying the concepts we have to new situations is that we (he thinks, inevitably) find ourselves with materially incompatible commitments to be the motor that drives the unceasing further determination and evolution of our concepts and their contents. The process of applying conceptual norms in judgment and intentional action is the very same process that institutes, determines, and transforms those conceptual norms.
[/quote]
And, well known, I think...
[quote=Neurath]
We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.
[/quote]
But Google can translate the simple stuff very well, so it's hasty to exaggerate the velocity of change.
He's fun though.
And how did the end of history work out? He's still trying to eff the ineffable.
Neurath's metaphor only goes so far. The ship meets another ship, sails into port, changes its crew. It's not alone. Language is in the world; it's not alone.
Quoting Pie
i just don't trust his book recommendations.
Oh he's beautifully mad though. His Hegel is both cutting-edge and reactionary. It's like sci-fi. Yet I think much of it endures.
I may be more in the middle. There's great stuff in Heidegger and Derrida, two of his favorites, but I like dragging that stuff over toward a more analytic-friendly style.
I'm not following why you suggest a theory of language as a means to establish what language less belief consists of?
What would inferentialism tell you about the content of my cat's belief when she believes that a gecko is under the stove?
You've misunderstood then. All I've done was point out the fact that outwardly observable behaviour - alone - is not always a reliable means to know what the candidate under consideration is thinking. Don't get me wrong, it's not always unreliable, and there are definitely situations and behaviours that are sufficient. Just not always. Some cases, sure. Not all. That has nothing at all to do with Witt's beetle.
What I had in mind was your mention of behaviorism. To me, behaviorism is clearly on the right track, but too rigid, insufficiently sensitive to just how ridiculously verbal and inferential we are. So I offer a theory that is also wary of ye old ghost theory, while making plausible sense of the talky part of our doings.
Key word "explain"...
A language less child can learn that touching fire causes pain. Do they infer?
What's your operational definition of this thinking ? If not a beetle in a box, then presumably there's something ? I don't think you mean dispositions. You seem to mean something 'inside.' Brainstates ?
Okay.
I'd say no, but we, who do infer, might explain them in inferential terms. We could also mathematically model the situation, I suppose. Why not ? But what else is there ? ESP ? A baby whisperer, if that made sense ? Perhaps I'm wrong, but I fear you are pointing at something ineffable.
No. Human thought and belief is not the sort of thing that has a precise spatiotemporal location. It's not in the skull. It's not outside the skull. It consists of internal and external things, and thus it is neither one nor the other... it's both.
Not sure what "operational definition of this thinking" is asking for.
Correlations drawn between different things. <------that's what all human thought and belief amounts to.
For instance, how does one detect/define consciousness ? If one rejects the idea of a mysterious X that makes the difference between an arbitrarily convincing P-Zombie and a 'Real Boy,' then we must have some threshold of recognition. In ordinary life, it'd be something like responsiveness (we could talk the details endlessly, but we wouldn't be worried about P-Zombies.)
So how do you determine or grab a nonlinguistic belief ? Currently I can imagine attributing linguistic belief or a mathematical model.
If belief is internal and external, it'd be hard to grab it, I'd think. How can one report it objectively ? Or is it merely postulated ?
You're definitely wrong about that!
A child that has just been burned as a result of touching fire forms the belief that touching fire caused the pain solely by virtue of drawing a correlation between what they did(touch the fire) and the pain that ensued. We can know this much as a result of their absolute refusal to touch it again.
There's no language necessary for the child's belief. Our knowledge thereof, our accounting practices, well... those most certainly need language. But the child has none. The child cannot have an attitude or disposition towards a proposition such as "touching fire causes pain", but they can and do learn that touching fire causes pain.
I'm not rejecting the practices that I'm criticizing. Rather, I'm simply pointing out the scope of rightful application.
The notion is muddled, as you well know. How one 'detects' consciousness is a matter of what they're looking for to begin with, or at least, one goes about detecting consciousness by looking for whatever they think and/or believe it is, according to the language games they've played involving the term. I am of the well-considered opinion that consciousness amounts to meaningful experience and as such it is the sort of thing that existed long before we began talking about it. Which is to say that it is the sort of thing that we can be wrong about.
Biological machinery is not mysterious. I'm not worried about P-Zombies anyway.
I prefer to use the term language less. I've found that the "non-linguistic" description fails to be able properly account for the content of a language less creature's belief in terms of elemental constituency and existential dependency.
Are you asking me how I've arrived at the bare minimum criterion(elemental outline) for what counts as a language less belief that I have?
It's postulated. Belief as propositional attitude was postulated as well. Turns out that language less belief falsifies it. Not all belief are equivalent to propositional attitudes. I go even farther and argue that some complex human belief is not! I've already touched upon that with Russell's clock and the sheet over the wire fencing.
What I'm setting out is very easy to understand.
I take serious issue with the very notion of what-it's-like regardless of the candidate under consideration. It's not like anything at all to be me. What sense does it make to expect there to be something it is like to be a bat(or a crow)? It's a flawed approach with no clear target. Bottles and flies.
We can arrive at a scientifically and philosophically respectable position when it comes to what our own thought and belief consists of as well as what it is existentially dependent upon, and should that notion be amenable to evolutionary terms as well as being able to bridge language less belief with language use, then we ought have a much better idea of the thought, belief, and/or consciousness of other creatures.
Indeed. There is no problem at all talking in terms of "the cat believes" as a means to make sense of the cat so long as we do not claim that the cat's beliefs are propositional in content. Our report is.
Perfect example of anthropomorphism.
Taken literally it is a ridiculous question: how can it be like anything else to be me, or any individual, animal or human?
But in common parlance it just means "how is it" or "how does it feel". How does it feel to be you? Does it feel good? Sometimes? Mostly? Does it feel terrible or unpleasant sometimes? So what is it like to be a bat? How does it feel to be a bat? What kind of experience(s) does a bat have? We don't know, but we might be able to take a guess, a more or less educated guess, no? Don't we imagine a chiropterologist might have a better idea than we do?
Which was the point, sir.
I'm looking for an alternative to a mathematical model or modeling via linguistic beliefs. So far I think you've only told us what the objects in question are not.
:up:
If it's ghost-like stuff, I agree. There's a boring version that's acceptable, such as a report of what it's like to be blind, to be a kindergartner, etc. But the 'hidden' thing is useless.
Given the medium of communication is bereft of all but word use and my tendency to believe I'm talking to an honest person who's seriously interested in the topic at hand, I'm sure you'll understand how the sarcasm went unnoticed.
Where are you looking? I suggest a very careful re-read of this conversation. What you claim to be looking for has long since been presented
I've said nothing at all about objects.
I would hope such a person would have knowledge about bats that we do not. Seems reasonable to say that that knowledge could be very useful for acquiring knowledge about a bat's experience in the same way that a neuroscientist would have knowledge that is useful to taking account of our own experience.
However, I see no reason to believe that bat experts have knowledge about how thought and belief emerged, simply because they are bat experts. Although they could be very knowledgable when it comes to what sorts of things a bat is capable of drawing correlations between, because that is largely determined by the biological machinery of bats.
To head off any confusion, let me be clear that I'm in earnest. I don't intend sarcasm or rudeness. Here's my view of the situation.
You say you are right where all philosophers up till now are wrong...on an important issue. That's a strong claim, for which a strong case ought to be made. Note that I think talk of models already saves those philosopher from being wrong. We don't have to know or claim to know the secret hearts of cats or amoeba to postulate entities useful for predicting them. [Indeed, I think we agree that such a secret 'inside' is useless.]
How ought we to think of belief in languageless creatures ? The way I'm tracking things, you've said not-this-way and not-that-way. But where's the positive, 'operational' definition, however tentative ?
I don't mean pumpkins or bowling balls. I mean the beliefs in question.
In a way, our common sense attitude does not question this distinction much. This laptop here is external to me, so are these books. What's "behind" the eyes is internal.
But that distinction is extremely delicate, in my opinion.
What does this proposed drawing of a correlation add to the situation ? This sounds either mathematical (statistics) or thought-like or ?
A child is less likely to touch an object that burned him. This we can take as given.
I find the correlation theory initially plausible, but isn't some kind of mathematical/functional already mainstream? I did some digging.
Here's a non-journal but seemingly reputable popularization.
[quote = Psychology Today]
The brain is an energy-expensive organ, so it had to evolve energy-conserving efficiencies. As a prediction machine, it must take shortcuts for pattern recognition as it processes the vast amounts of information received from the environment by its sense organ outgrowths. Beliefs allow the brain to distill complex information, enabling it to quickly categorize and evaluate information and to jump to conclusions. For example, beliefs are often concerned with understanding the causes of things: If ‘b’ closely followed ‘a’, then ‘a’ might be assumed to have been the cause of ‘b’.
These shortcuts to interpreting and predicting our world often involve connecting dots and filling in gaps, making extrapolations and assumptions based on incomplete information and based on similarity to previously recognized patterns. In jumping to conclusions, our brains have a preference for familiar conclusions over unfamiliar ones. Thus, our brains are prone to error, sometimes seeing patterns where there are none. This may or may not be subsequently identified and corrected by error-detection mechanisms. It’s a trade-off between efficiency and accuracy.
[/quote]
This seems relevant too:
https://iep.utm.edu/functism/
I think we are both functionalists ?
We are using different notions of temporality. Rouse’s temporal externalism doesn’t deal with spans of time (generations) but temporality itself thought more radically. The dialectic begins the moment I interact with others, as a dialogic back and forth that reshapes the sense of both of our conceptions in subtle fashion in continually. Heritage and sedimented habits are remade ( even as they remain recognizably the ‘same’) in this dialogic time.
Quoting Pie
You introduced me to this passage from Heidegger’s early work, for which I am grateful. I went on to incorporate it in a paper that makes the opposite argument from the one you think Heidegger is making concerning time.
A present time pervaded by interpretedness is the vulgar time of public interpretedness, otherwise known as the average everydayness of Das Man. What Heidegger is pointing to here is not the fundamental nature of time for Dasein but ways of thinking about time that we fall into. We convince ourselves that the future that arrives is a duplicate of our past.
"The essence of something is not at all to be discovered simply like a fact; on the contrary, it must be brought forth. To bring forth is a kind of making, and so there resides in all grasping and positing of the essence something creative…. To bring forth means to bring out into the light, to bring something in sight which was up to then not seen at all, and specifically such that the seeing of it is not simply a gaping at something already lying there but a seeing which, in seeing, first brings forth what is to be seen, i.e., a productive seeing. "(Heidegger 1994)
Being-affected always addresses and modifies all of ones prior experience as a whole. Beings can only be produced because the foundation of their being is created anew as a ‘ground-laying' every time we see something as something. The creative re-making of the ground, which Heidegger says is the essence of feeling, is at the same time the productive seeing of an intentional object.
“Every “foundation” in the sense we discussed comes too late with regard to the positing of the essence, because the productive seeing of the essence is itself a productive seeing of that in which the essence has its ground—a productive seeing of what its ground is. Knowledge of the essence is in itself a ground-laying. It is the positing of what lies under as ground“(Heidegger 1994)
Heidegger(1994) refers to this ground-laying as displacement, because the act of laying a ground is the displacing of a previous ground.
“Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general." Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having been temporality.”(Heidegger 2010)
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Quoting Joshs
Glad I could help ! But how do you know what point I'm making. Aren't we still on the way toward making it together ?
A present time pervaded by interpretedness [just] is ... the average everydayness of Das Man.
I see (hope you'll agree) us, the world, and language as a unity. The background or given is the one, what one can assume of one, what everyone 'knows.' The philosopher is a little freakier than others, a little more able to recognize pseudo-necessity (encrusted interpretedness) as historical contingency, the way we happened to end up doing things, the stuff we happened to end up taking for granted...as bedrock reality.
I get that, and I plucked some of the quotes you used from The Concept of Time. A vulgar way of thinking about time hides our profound historicity from us. The past leaps ahead.
In other words, phenomenology is making it explicit, foregrounding the otherwise inconspicuous. We should also make a space for stronger forms of invention, genuine additions to the space of reasons (new abstract objects, new distinctions.) This is expressive rather than inferential. One expects new metaphors and new styles to be part of this.
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Beautiful.
Right, I didn't have that in mind either.
Drawing correlations between different things is a basic outline that adds elegance and explanatory power where it's been found lacking(in our accounting practices of meaningful human experience as well as human thought and belief). It adds a means for arriving at a scientifically and philosophically respectable position when it comes to taking account of the origen and evolution of meaningful experience. The scope of rightful application is as broad as it can be. It applies to everything ever thought, believed, spoken, expressed, and/or otherwise uttered. Well over a decade ago, when I first began delving into this, the scope was daunting. It's much less so now that certain pieces have fallen into place, so to speak.
It adds a bridge for explaining how meaningful thought and belief first emerge and subsequently evolve into our own metacognitive endeavors via language creation and use. It adds the ability to explain how some meaning is not existentially dependent upon language use; how language is created; how naming and descriptive practices work; how rigid designators work; how reference works; how new meaning is formed; how meaningful language use transcends the individual speaker; how users of different languages can say much the same thing about the same things using remarkably different syntax and semantic structures. It's how meaningful language use(marks) becomes utterly meaningless and uninterpretable when all the users have long since perished; how the Rosetta stone became a translation device as a result of having enough shared meaning with at least one language still used; how all meaningful things become so; how symbolism works; etc.
Indeed! Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof/justification/warrant. First things first though.
I've already offered a simple easy to understand distilled version of what convention has been wrong about. Convention has it that both truth and meaning are existentially dependent upon language.<-------That's true, and the basics.
If truth and meaning are existentially dependent upon language, then language less creatures either cannot form thought and belief or language less thought and belief is neither meaningful nor truth apt(capable of being and/or becoming true or false).
There are also all the problems surrounding language use itself and how it emerges. Banno referred to Davidson's paper on malapropisms and the clear refutation of conventional understanding that they posed at the time of the paper. There's a thread about that paper on this site. I think Banno linked it. It's well worth reading!!
I like the correlation approach. I'd just say that this seems to be the kind of mathematical modeling of disposition that I mentioned as an option earlier...as the non-linguistic or less-linguistic approach that made sense. If such modelling is a part of psychology currently, perhaps there are more recent philosophers who have integrated this fact into their thinking?
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All great issues.
I wonder to what degree exactly such an investigation can avoid attributing postulated linguistic beliefs, supplementing the math ? As a math guy myself, I know that the numbers are anchored in real world concepts in applications.
The past leaps ahead for a project in the way it handles the present ?
I like the way Eugene Gendlin put it:
“…the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in”.
Nice ! What's your favorite Gendlin text?
I think his magnum opus is ‘A Process Model’. It’s hard to get through; could have used an editor. But I think it’s important stuff and hasn’t been discovered
yet.
I downloaded all his papers. One of my favorites is ‘The Responsive Order-a new empiricism’.
Properly implementing the approach requires drawing and maintaining the distinction between language less thought and belief and thought and belief that includes language use. That also serves as the basis for calling out anthropomorphism. As mentioned heretofore, it involves setting out thought and belief in terms of their elemental constituency and existential dependency.
Quoting Pie
Perhaps.
Just the tip of the iceberg.
Thanks. I plan to check out his work.
Are you not saying (if you allow me to put it in my own words):
"Idealism is true ... to an extent! You really don't want to doubt the external reality because idealism is false."
If idealism is really true, you should be able to save yourself by simply stopping your perception of the boulder - no need to move out of its path.
My interaction with all other people is through the material world. I can't directly access the consciousness of anyone else. So if I doubt the material world, it is logical that I also doubt the existence of consciousness other than that which I directly experience.
But idealism doesn't say there are no risks in what we call the 'physical world'. The physical world is seen as a kid of dashboard of readings which make consciousness apprehensible (al la Donald Hoffman). In this view of idealism, you may still be harmed by things which present as physical to our dashboard system. They just aren't what we think they are.
Whatever else it might be, it remains a three-tonne boulder.
And it will remain a three-tonne boulder regardless of what one believes or knows about it.
So:
Quoting boagie
doesn't look right. There are things which are the case regardless of what we believe or know. boagie mat be right that we only know what we know, but there is stuff we do not know. But then boagie's post is very hard to follow, since it seems to say contrary three things: that without consciousness the world ceases to be; that despite this, biology is real; and biology somehow creates the physical world. There appears to be a vicious circularity here in which we can't have consciousness without biology and yet we can'[t have biology without consciousness.
And again, this seems to be a failure to differentiate between what is true and what is believed. Things like three-tonne boulders do not care what one believes. What is true is quite independent of what one believes.
Quoting PhilosophyRunner
Those with whom I have discussed this issue suppose that one infers the existence of other minds from one's experience. But then, if we can do that, why not infer the existence of three-tonne boulders on that same basis?
Exactly. And I experience other people through the material world the same as I experience a boulder (light, sound, etc). If I doubt that material world, I should question the existence of both boulders and other people.
I don't disagree. But if idealism is true then surely this too is independent of what one believes about it? I am not an idealist - as you probably know. The three-tonne boulder may just be a simulation, but it can destroy me as I am a part of the simulation too. I think that's the idea. Now your question might be - so if it is indistinguishable from physicalism, what does it matter? Or you might just call BS?
I know.
And yes, the difference between realism and idealism is not one that can be decided by observation or experiment. To my now unfashionable eye, the difference is between two ways of talking about how things are, the one in which there are unknown truths, and the other in which what is unknown does not have a truth value.
Quoting Banno
Blame Descartes. If the source of all certainty is "I think therefore I am", then all there is, is what I think.
Mere logic cannot bring things into existence, but instead supposes them in order to talk about them. Hence, if all one supposes is one's own thought, solipsism follows.
So here is one place in which it matters, - do other folk exist, and hence have a claim on one's time and energy? An idealist might argue that since they cannot be certain of the existence of others, they owe others no regard.
My response, in outline, would be that "I think, therefore I am" can only be proposed if one also proposes a shared project that includes others; the cogito can only be framed in a public language that takes others, and a shared reality as given; a sort of holism, if you like.
Yes, If the source of all certainty is "I think therefore I am," then all there is, is what I think. But there is no reason for me to infer from that quote you or anyone else thinks at all, any more than a boulder thinks.
Hence the destination of solipsism.
If I doubt that computers are real, should I also not doubt Banno is real? I experience Banno through my computer after all. How can I infer that Banno is a real conscious entity, if I doubt the medium through which I experience him (or her)?
Of course I don’t live like that - just fun to think about.
In steel-manning most idealism I've encountered, it seems to me the argument is that all human beings exist - in as much as they are separate instantiations of consciousness - and the world as it appears must also be taken seriously as a misadventure can still 'end' this expression of consciousness. So functionally there is not much difference in how one would go about conducting one's life - the difference is down to the metaphysics.
Quoting GLEN willows
Indeed. And I think it is highly unlikely that I wrote all those Beethoven symphonies and George Elliot novels. Not to mention Dan Brown... :vomit:
So the cogito remains as the only undeniable fact - but has been modified to “there is a thinking thing” as opposed to the word “I” which is problematic.
Real philosophers here jump in and correct my simplistic explanation.
Yep, hence the sort of pan-psyche that @Wayfarer seemed to favour.
Quoting GLEN willows
And yet it stands refuted not just in what we do but in how we think. If other minds do not exist, whence embarrassment, pride, envy?
I am not a solipsist in any way. However I am curious about those who doubt the realness of the material world yet accept the realness of other people's consciousness, given that the only interactions we have with other people's consciousnesses is via the material world. I see, hear, touch, etc other people - all material interactions. If I doubt those material interactions are real, surely it follows I must doubt other people are real?
My medium of interaction with other people is no different to my medium of interaction with boulders - material interactions like light, sound, etc. I do not tunnel directly into the consciousness of other people.
That a line of thinking does not lead to contradiction does not imply that it is correct. So even if one supposes that solipsism does not contradict itself, one ought not therefore conclude that it is true. So even if solipsism is neither refutable nor provable, it does not follow that it is correct.
Hence
Quoting GLEN willows
is worth further consideration. That you are occasionally proud or embarrassed shows, rather than proves, that you reject solipsism.
The Matrix does not show idealism, since there is a real world containing our computer overlords and our pods and the rebels and so on. What little philosophical content the film has does not help the idealist case.
Which says nothing about what the world is like. "We only know what we know" tells us nothing.
Theres' the danger of Stove's Gem, the view that one only knows what one knows using one's mind, and hence one never knows the thing itself. One may only ever taste an oyster with ones tongue, so one can never taste the oyster itself.
No. The idea is that physical sensation or matter is how consciousness seems when viewed from a particular perspective - it's like a dashboard or illusion simulated by mind. To more fully understand idealism and the arguments it would help to read some Bernado Kastrup or Donald Hoffman. They present the arguments in a more accessible way and with some humor. They specifically address the familiar and worn, 'I refute it thus!' of Samuel Johnson kicking a rock in response to Bishop Berkeley.
I get this. But how do I know other people are also not just an illusion simulated by my mind? For me experientially, it is only my consciousness that has a privileged position.
My experience of computers, Tom Storm and boulders are indistinguishable in that they are all part of this physical dashboard I experience. It makes no sense for me to privilege Tom Storm as a conscious entity over the rest. They are all just inputs in the dashboard I experience.
However It does make sense for me to privilege my own consciousness, as that is the consciousness that I inhabit and experience directly (a la the Descartes quote). Hence the resultant solipsism.
I lean towards a form of realism. But in these last few posts I'm not arguing either for solipsism or realism or idealism. Rather I am arguing that if one were to subscribe to idealism, that should necessarily lead to solipsism (though I subscribe to neither).
Also thanks for the references to read Kastrup and Hoffman, I'll check them out.
And I didn't say you said it was correct...
Quoting GLEN willows
But you don't think it true...