Hidden Dualism
I find it interesting how many materialist/physicalist accounts of the mind assume the very thing they are explaining. This is often called a "hidden dualism" and amongst other things, I take this to mean that the dualism is "hidden" from the arguer.
Often times this looks like a sleight of hand between process/behavior and mental events.
Example: The neuron fires (process/behavioral). The neurons fire (process/behavioral). The networks form (process/behavioral). The sensory tissues/organs are acted upon (process/behavioral). A line or shape is processed in a visual cortex (mental). An object is perceived (mental). An object is recognized (mental). A long-term potentiation (process/behavioral). A memory is accessed (process/behavioral). "Fires together, wires together" (process/behavioral), associating one thing with another (mental).
As you see with these examples, these often are interchanged all the time, leading to a belief one is talking purely behavioral, when in fact it is a mix of process/behavioral and mental. This muddling of the two is where the hidden dualism comes into play. It is this constant category error that trips people up into not understanding any "hard problem". It leads to blind scientism, and a constant not "getting" the problems that arise from philosophy of mind.
Often times this looks like a sleight of hand between process/behavior and mental events.
Example: The neuron fires (process/behavioral). The neurons fire (process/behavioral). The networks form (process/behavioral). The sensory tissues/organs are acted upon (process/behavioral). A line or shape is processed in a visual cortex (mental). An object is perceived (mental). An object is recognized (mental). A long-term potentiation (process/behavioral). A memory is accessed (process/behavioral). "Fires together, wires together" (process/behavioral), associating one thing with another (mental).
As you see with these examples, these often are interchanged all the time, leading to a belief one is talking purely behavioral, when in fact it is a mix of process/behavioral and mental. This muddling of the two is where the hidden dualism comes into play. It is this constant category error that trips people up into not understanding any "hard problem". It leads to blind scientism, and a constant not "getting" the problems that arise from philosophy of mind.
Comments (328)
But it’s more about how it’s being used more than any particular philosophy. Any stance on philosophy of mind can make these category errors, though it’s particularly pervasive in materialist conceptions.
I stated the so what in the OP.
:clap:
[quote=Ed Feser]Brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, the motion of water molecules, electrical current, and any other physical phenomenon you can think of, seem clearly devoid of any inherent meaning. By themselves they are simply meaningless patterns of electrochemical activity. Yet our thoughts do have inherent meaning – that’s how they are able to impart meaning to otherwise meaningless ink marks, sound waves, etc. In that case, though, it seems that our thoughts cannot possibly be identified with any physical processes in the brain. In short: Thoughts and the like possess inherent meaning or intentionality; brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, and the like, are utterly devoid of any inherent meaning or intentionality; so thoughts and the like cannot possibly be identified with brain processes.[/quote]
I'd agree with everything except the last part. That is yet to be proven. It is certainly correlated (to some degree), if not "identified with" (I take that to mean is one and the same as).
How is that different from ADP chemically reacting (chemical process) to create ATP, which releases energy (chemical process) to power the reactions (chemical processes) that create cellular components (life processes) and operate cellular systems (life processes).
And please don't ask me to go into more detail. I'm already at the end, beyond the end, of my level of competence.
Sorry - what part don’t you agree with? If it’s that you can’t map thought content with neural data, I would have thought that was a clear implication of the rest of the argument.
We seem to agree that some thinkers get a little sloppy and pretend they can do away with subjectivity altogether.
I try to do justice to subjectivity without embracing dualism. I reject indirect realism as confused. [ It's parasitic on direct realism, takes the sense organs for granted, etc. ]
My ontology is 'flat' in the sense that all entities are semantically interdependent. Toothaches are not on a different 'plane' than quarks. Promises are not on a different 'layer' that talons.
The cartoon lightbulb appeared above my head on this issue when I was studying Brandom's inferentialism. Philosophers always already assume the philosophical situation itself, often without noticing it and appreciating the significance of this assumption.
Giving and asking for reasons is absolutely fundamental : More fundamental than any other ontological thesis.
I appeal to toothaches and earthquakes in the one and only inferential-semantic nexus available. All intelligible entities get their intelligibility from this single 'planar' nexus.
The 'logical sin' is bad philosophy is, as Hegel saw, almost always blind or unwitting abstraction. Basically we mistake a reductive map for the whole. We lose ourselves in a usefully simplifying fiction (map) of our situation.
The scientist and philosopher both often forget / ignore the mostly 'transparent' fact of their own project as participants in a discursive normative social enterprise. They think they can paint a picture of reality that doesn't include the painter. In many situations, it's best to not include the painter. But the ontologist can't do that.
I agree that they can't be identified. We need only look at the different roles the concepts play.
On the other hand, my ignorant presupposition is that the brain is profoundly necessary for the world to be 'given' to a personality. I don't think the dead see hear feel or think -- because their brains are dead.
This is a rich issue. Many purveyors of the hard problem are way too cocky about their grip on the concept of consciousness. But I understand their gripe as a reaction to certain thinkers on the other side who might make things too easy for themselves. My musings on the worship of technology are in a similar spirit. Philosophy is 'silly' to the degree that it doesn't help/hinder technology.
I personally found it clarifying to think of consciousness in terms of the being of the world grasped from a certain perspective. Direct realism. We all peep at the one and only world. The rest is round squares.
Too many purveyors of the hard problem take indirect realism for granted. They also take a sort of private language thesis for granted, missing that critical rationality is deeply dependent on the publicity or trans-egoic validity of its concepts.
Yet there 'is' sensation and feeling. Right ? Yes? Or at least roses are red and trumpets are blaring.
The whole monism/dualism question leads to a category error. Is everything derived from physical matter? Assuming yes, then is that the end of it for philosophy? Definitely not. Our biology has developed this ability to manipulate the non-physical at a complex level that departs from physical limits. How would you contain zeros or infinities in physical form without the extra-physical abilities of the brain? Materialism just fails at the level of complexity of our common mental environments.
Big assumption, and also question-begging. I would almost agree with the remainder apart from the appeal to biology. Or maybe you could say that the ability to perceive causal relations has imposed reason upon us - posed us questions that only we, amongst other denizens of the biological realm - can ask and be aware of asking. But is that still determined by biology alone?
So you have an issue with the big assumption and question begging. Going a little deeper, it's a yes no question and I leave it open to how you would like to answer it but the options are yes or no. A no answer tends to lead to abstractions which are a problem for me so I focus on the yes side of the answer. Another assumption is if the correct answer is singular. Or can both answers be correct. So my opinion, in short, is that everything is derived from physical matter and that excludes the no answer. Or is the original question flawed? How? So I'm saying everything is derived from physical matter but that alone doesn't explain our mental activities.
So the big picture is that we are looking for model that is singular and excludes other models.
The resolution to this "hidden dualism" is to recognize that the brain and its functions are also representations and, thusly, the brain-in-itself is not what one ever studies in a lab. E.g., neurons firing is an extrinsic representation (within our perceptions) of whatever the brain-in-itself is doing.
The next step is to realize that the brain-in-itself cannot be quantitative (for quantities never produce qualities and we know directly of qualities as our conscious experience).
After that, all that is left is to decide what is most parsimonious: a material (i.e., tangible) & physical (i.e., mind-independent) brain-in-itself, a immaterial & physical brain-in-itself, or immaterial & mind-dependent brain.
Odd innit? In the attempt for empirical knowledge, the irreducible origin of it is impossible to know.
Humans don’t think/cognize/comprehend in its rational method, in the same terms as the source of their knowledge requires in its physical method.
THAT’S the hidden dualism, I should think.
Undeniably fascinating insight, but I must object.
It's the familiar experience of the brain in causal relationships with other familiar objects that motivates [ a paradoxical ] indirect realism in the first place.
It's because indirect realism makes the brain it depends on an 'illusion' that it fails.
The brain-in-itself (if you continue bravely along the path as you seem to be doing) starts to sound 'mystical as fuck.' I don't think it can be given meaning that it doesn't steal from 'mere appearance.'
I can follow your thinking to some degree. Your point is justified and fascinating within the framework of indirect realism -- but the framework don't work, seems to me.
I claim that methodological solipsism only works properly at the level of the entire species. But this gives us an anthropocentric direct realism.
They're both biological processes, for one. I'm not sure what you would like me to get from that. Do you see a distinction between something that is mental versus a physical process? What you did was just go from process to process and not process to X (mental). This could be making the exact mistake I am describing. That is to say, mental events and processes/behaviors are used interchangeably when they shouldn't be.
That thoughts can't be identified with brain processes. It is at least correlated with that physical phenomenon, so it's not like you can completely disconnect it.
Yep. Hence the hidden dualism problem that does exactly this.
Quoting plaque flag
But we are back at square one. Some processes are not mental. Why? Or if they are, how do you get past the incredulity of saying that rocks and air molecules, or even a tree has "subjectivity" or "consciousness", or "experience"?
Whitehead had a nifty theory that "occasions of experience" (his atoms) were communities that were either equally distributed (like a rock), or hierarchical (like an animal system). The hierarchical communities are the experiential ones.
I am not sure how much that answers the question either as it begs other questions.
I think most materialist/physicalist accounts are that of a form of materialistic monism, or physicalism, that rejects dualism altogether. The claim is that there is only one kind of thing - and that is the physical. Someone with such a stance would say your mistake is in trying to talk of the physical and mental as two different kinds of things.
This claim might be right or wrong, but I don't think it is a claim of hidden dualism.
I am unconvinced by this clam as it appears to me that the mental is categorically different to the physical, even if we are able to perfectly map the mental to the physical (individual neurons firing).
I was making an analogy. Higher levels of organization, e.g. mental processes and life processes, are a mixture of higher level processes and processes from lower levels of organization, e.g. chemical processes and neurological processes. That's the way hierarchies and emergence work.
I actually agree with this. Materialists often propose a brain/body dualism that is just as fraught as mind/body dualism, and for the same reasons.
Direct realism assumes the human animal has a god-like view of the universe. As if we are seeing it for "what it is in reality". There is no mediating factors (contra something like Kant). That seems pretty fantastical that we just happened to have this view. As a squirrel, a fish, a bat, a rat, and a bee all have their own view, and yet, do they have direct access to the world too? If it is different, then certainly there is something that mediates between directly observing the object, and processing it (i.e. indirect realism). Surely something is causing differences upon the objects perceived between species.
Yes, this is indeed the proto-panexperientialist view. The map isn't the territory. But that doesn't say much either towards a solution, it just restates the problem. This doesn't then immediately point to anything because there is no explanation why other territories don't seem to have the same properties as this nervous system one.
Right, it rejects dualism, but that is precisely why these category errors can trip them up if they are not careful. If you switch (even inadvertently) from physical to mental without explaining how, as if both are the same thing, you have asserted the thing being explained in the explanation.
Just saying, "that's the way hierarchies and emergence work" doesn't explain how mental comes from physical processes.
It's like one is made apparent and the other is assumed (but not acknowledged). It's interesting. Like we know mental has to come out of the equation somehow. We know we observe physical objects and processes. And language can often confuse the two as it weaves in and out of scientific and psychological accounts. Correlation becomes identity etc. but without any explanation of how. And thus the hidden dualism.
Some physical processes are information processing apt, while most physical processes aren't information processing apt. If what we refer to as mental processes can only supervene on information processing apt physical processes, then we are some distance from square one.
As I pointed out, the relationship between chemistry and life is analogous to the relationship between neurology and mind. Are you saying there is a hard problem of biology too? If that's true, then there must be a hard problem of chemistry also. Otherwise how to explain all those atomic processes all mixed up with chemical processes.
Yes I understand the move to describe it as information processing, but does that really solve anything different for the hard problem? Searle's Chinese Room Argument provides the problem with this sort of "pat" answer. As you walk away self-assured, this beckons back out to you that you haven't solved anything. Where is the "there" in the processing in terms of mental outputs? There is a point of view somewhere, but it's not necessarily simply "processing".
It is superficially so, but not actually, no.
As often is the case, you confuse your refusal to engage in discussion with making a coherent argument.
Interestingly, you draw a distinction between "process/behavioral," vs "mental," but it seems like all your examples could as easily distinguish between "process vs object."
But is consciousness fundamentally an object rather than a process? I might go with the latter. I cannot recall ever thinking without time passing or living the same moment more than once. It seems like first person subjective experience is a process then, not an object that springs forth from other objects or a property that objects possess. It's the difference between a song being a series of notes in time and thinking of a song as being the notes abstracted from time.
IMO, part of the gordian knot of the Hard Problem is that we have developed a 2,000 year habit of thinking in terms of "objects and substances," instead of patterns. Information theory seems like a prime example where we should be taking the process view, and yet the legacy of Platonism in mathematics seems to keep dragging it back.
It's how you define mental versus process. You can't just say mental is a process. That is the point. That is what is to be explained.
1) My thought of red is a subjective, internal, felt, experience.
2) A wavelength of a certain frequency hitting the rods and cones hitting the optic nerve and transmitted to various cortical and subcortical networks is the physical correlated property.
The example of chemistry and biology are examples of 2 to 2. This is 2 to 1. If you don't see there is a distinction there, then you are playing word games or being purposefully ignorant, which I am not interested in.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I too have deep problems with hand waving appeals to "information" and "complexity," re the Hard Problem. However, the Chinese Room always seemed like simply begging the question when applied to the Hard Problem.
"Imagine you don't understand Chinese," is a premise right in the thought experiment. Well, yes, given "I don't understand Chinese," then I won't understand Chinese, but as an analogy to consciousness the thought experiment fails by essentially recreating the Cartesian Homunculus. It's like asking someone to "find the neuron in the brain that speaks English."
However, I think the Chinese Room is interesting in the sense that it shows that it appears to be metaphysically possible for something to show the behaviors we associate with consciousness without being conscious. That said, if we knew what caused consciousness, the analogy might fail. It's successful because we have to rely on "correlates" of consciousness precisely because we don't have a clear causal hypothesis for what generates consciousness.
IMO, this is a problem for idealists too. Idealism is all well and good, but most idealists want to say that other people are conscious and rocks aren't, even if rocks only exist as objects of consciousness. So, they still have the problem of explaining what empirical criteria can be used to determine what is or isn't conscious. Dualists have this same problem. Is the suis generis cause of consciousness observable?
But the Chinese Room is not really relevant for that set of problems since we could take the Room apart to see how it works very easily, all you'd need is something to knock the door in. The same hasn't been true for us.
Consider this possibility: Consciousness is just the being of the world for various embodied subjects. We don't live in private dreams. Your toothache is part of my reality. It doesn't matter that I access it differently. I can reason about it with you. It lives as concept in the logical space we share.
I disagree. A good description of what I'm talking about is Zahavi's interpretation of Husserl in his intro book. But I'll sketch the basics.
I see the rose and not an image of the rose. I see it from a certain perspective, with my eyes.--because I'm a primate, not a god. I can be mistaken. Maybe it's dark or I'm sleepy. But my being mistaken need not be explained in terms of some ghostly stuff about which I cannot be mistaken. [Indirect realists tend to misunderstand direct realism, loaded as they are with certain assumptions, used to as they are to incorrigible images.]
One of the stronger arguments for [ sophisticated ] direct realism is that indirect realism secretly depends on assuming it in order to insist on the necessity of some mediating layer. If the brain is a mere representation (an 'image on a screen'), it's absurd to use it to claim that all the subject ever has is representation (an 'image on a screen.')
If you and your mom are on opposite sides of the room, and she is nearsighted as fuck and can't find her glasses and you have an eagle's eyesight but are colorblind, are you looking at the same furniture or not ?
Or let's say there's a clone of you across the room. Are you looking at the same furniture, seeing it from different perspectives?
I do not at all contest that there are all kinds of causal relationships that can be examined between eyes and objects and brains. No one is denying the biological complexity of seeing. But when I talk about the Eiffel tower, I'm talking about the fucking Eiffel tower and not my idea of it. Language is deeply ego-transcending and social. We intend the worldly object. Even my toothache is a worldly object, despite my special access to it. I can use it to explain being rude. Its cessation might be explained by Novocain.
What you ignored in my first post was the absolute centrality of giving and asking for reasons -- the philosophical situation itself. This is prior to any ontological thesis. We reason about and intend worldly objects. I talk about the rose, our worldly rose. It's not completely insane or absurd to invent a private rose for everyone, but it is insane or absurd to get rid of the worldly rose.
We can just as well talk about brains. Presumably you like indirect realism because the brain is conceived as a mediation machine. But then the brain is an illusion. The brain-in-itself (the one that does the work) is now a wild hypothesis.
It's much easier to believe that we see the familiar brain directly, if never completely and perfectly and exhaustively. Objects have depth and complexity. They are seen from different perspectives, understood with more or less sophistication.
We can be wrong about them. But this does not force indirect dualism on us. A daydream, for instance, doesn't need its own level or plane of reality. We can understand consciousness as the being of the world for this or that subject, instead of its own kind of being.
[quote=Marcello Barbieri, What is Information?] The idea that life evolved naturally on the primitive Earth suggests that the first cells came into being by spontaneous chemical reactions, and this is equivalent to saying that there is no fundamental divide between life and matter. This is the chemical paradigm, a view that is very popular today and that is often considered in agreement with the Darwinian paradigm, but this is not the case. The reason is that natural selection, the cornerstone of Darwinian evolution, does not exist in inanimate matter. In the 1950s and 1960s, furthermore, molecular biology uncovered two fundamental components of life—biological information and the genetic code—that are totally absent in the inorganic world, which means that information is present only in living systems, that chemistry alone is not enough and that a deep divide does exist between life and matter.[/quote]
[quote=Thomas Nagel] The physical sciences can describe organisms… as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – [their] structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all.[/quote]
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The divide between organisms and minerals is pretty clear, is it not (leaving aside viruses and prions which seem to straddle it.)
Quoting schopenhauer1
Kastrup's answer is that the physical process is what the thought looks like from across the dissociative boundary, when viewed from the outside. Just as 'sadness' appears as tears and facial contortions to an observer, but is a subjective reality to those undergoing it. So it's not as if there's physical sadness and mental sadness.
Isn't that the point? It is supposed to fail in recreating it. That is to say, the homunculus in this case is all appearance only (to us who do have consciousness), and not actually "there".
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I think the main takeaway in the context of "information processing" is that information processing itself doesn't necessitate consciousness. A monitor's outputs means something or is about something (intentional stance) because there is already an observer in the equation, not because the monitor is outputting.
You'd have to flesh that out...Otherwise it's words coherently put together that don't mean much for me.
Quoting plaque flag
I come at it from an evolutionary standpoint. Humans perceive the object because our primate ancestors needed to perceive it that way. Rather, unlike DR, we don't see the apple "as it is in reality" beyond our evolutionary apparatus. How can it be otherwise? Why does a bat and a human have different perceptions of the same object? No one is arguing that there is an object, and that it might have its own properties even, but that the epistemological framework is a "window into the reality" of the object? That seems a bit too far, and hence why it is often called "naive realism".
Well it's all what we mean by mental representation isn't it? Why does a human see certain colors and other animals do not? Are we seeing reality more clearly or simply represent it differently?
There's a dualism taken for granted here.
In my opinion, the issue is especially here:
but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view.
I think the better path is 'how the world appears.' For this is the rat looking at the cheese and not some internal image of the cheese. The problem with 'subjective experiences' is that it slides toward looking only at the image of the cheese. Then one is tempted to say the image of the cheese is made of a special 'nonphysical' stuff. As if there's no other option.
If the rat is looking at the worldly cheese, why can't we ( fallibly ) describe how the cheese appears to it ? Trivially, my talk about brown is not itself brown. Nor is my talk about a rat itself a rat. Describing what the rat sees is, as description, bound to be conceptual. It's trivially not what the rat saw but my fallible description of it. 'I don't think it saw that cheese, because it just sat in the corner.' It's like me trying to figure out what my mother saw when I forgot to lock the door that one time. Note that I can't put my actual seeing into my description of what my mom looks like in the shower.
So why can't I fallibly describe what the rat saw in the spatio-temporal order ? Must I be infallibly omniscient for it to count ? Must I mindmeld with the rat ? Be the rat to study the rat ?
It's not a question of being fallible or infallible. The difficulty is that the experiential dimension is not included in any description. Skilled writers can describe an experience or evoke it, but conveying anything of it will rely on the fact that the reader is also a subject of experience. 'Ah, I know how that feels', 'that must have been an amazing experience'. But there's no way you could capture an experience in a description. There is an experiential dimension to existence, which is never captured by the descriptive process. That's the hard problem in a nutshell.
The main thing here is to grasp the radical and I think surprising centrality of the usually backgrounded philosophical situation itself. If you want to make a case to me about objects X and Y and their relationship, they have to be available to me in some sense. Your toothache is literally meaningless unless it's related inferentially to other concepts. It's in my world too. It's in the only world that philosophers can talk about. The world. Our world.
I'm afraid this is trivially true. As John Berger says at the beginning of Ways of Seeing, we see before we can talk. The world surrounds us. A painting is not a poem. A melody is not a painting. Conceptuality is its own dimension. If I describe a painting, I give you concepts and not a painting (not shapes and colors).
I will happily grant you that toothaches exist in a different way than protons. But they too are in the one-layer world, seen from many perspectives, part of the one and only semantic-inferential network along with marriages and voltages.
But it's more than trivially true in respect of the question posed in the thread, the question being, what does the ground of experience really comprise? Are beings concatenations of atoms behaving in accordance with the laws of physics, or something other than that? And if 'other', then what is that?
Please remember, I was responding to your question:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Do you see your question as a purely rhetorical question? Or do you want to learn about the answers? To develop some understanding of how far beyond square one (some of) humanity is?
Searle's Chinese Room is an argument against computationalism. We could have a nuanced discussion of the argument's merits and limitations, but let's suppose the argument totally succeeds against computationalism. In that case we have reason to narrow our view of the sort of information processing which could result in mental events to non-computational information processing. However, I only presented information processing as a criteria for ruling out the many physical processes which aren't the sort of physical processes suitable for resulting in mental events. Narrowing things down further is not a problem, depending on how specific we want to get in various ways.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I solved the problem I wanted to solve - providing a relatively informed answer to your question, as to why some processes don't have mental results. Now I'm going to swagger away from your moved goal posts. :razz:
One reason I hate these debates of direct and indirect realism is this notion of "mental representation" and what that really means. It's very vague and becomes a weird sticking point. We are sensing an actual object that is interacting with the organism, yes. So in the sense that I think we are actually perceiving an object and not some intermediary, call me a direct realist then.. However, do brains process the inputs in a way that was shaped by the environment? Yes, so perhaps that is indirect realist. I really don't like the labels either way and think they are not very useful, or were part of a historical context that perhaps doesn't pertain to every argument about philosophy of mind.
Note that I'm saying that nostalgia and rumors and butter and integers are all equally real.
Integers aren't easy to place in space-time. Rumors are also hard to localize, but not in the same way or for the same reason.
Dualists seem to want to create an extra world for every sentient creature, but then they go on to reason about entities that exist in this extra world, proving that this extra world is just a little glovebox in our world. Whatever we can reason about as philosophers is in our world. Isn't the alternative confusion and nonsense ? You may have special access to your nostalgia, but you are in my world and so therefore is your nostalgia. I 'see' it from a different 'perspective.'
Oh come now, get off the pedestal. I was just pointing out problems with the move to information processing which I know is a popular approach.
Quoting wonderer1
I think his argument stands for any processing really. I don't see the functional difference, because the POV is always out of reach. I see it as a computer monitor. The monitor is outputting, but so what? You need an observer already in the equation for that to have any meaning. There is no there there. There is no point of view, otherwise. There is no view even.
Well I think it's hard work getting clear on the most basic concepts especially. Hence the foolishness of the ontologist who should be marketing dick pills on Instagram for big bucks. But I insist that we are striving to find the truth and clarify our situation.
You're not progressing your argument by obfuscating and trivialising. I don't think you're clear about what is actually being called into question, and why it matters. What is called into question in 'facing up to the problem of consciousness' is the applicability of the natural sciences to the nature of experience.
To make it clearer, consider Daniel Dennett's response to Chalmers:
I refer to Dennett as a canonical materialist, ergo, not a straw man.
Yes, that's the issue.
We are discursive subjects. Is the 'ego' trapped in the brain ? Or is the ego a character on the stage of the world ? Making a case ? A philosopher is always already on the normative stage, 'performing' critical rationality, making a case, responsible for the coherence of his claims. No rational argument could begin to deny this stage without performative contradiction. The mechanics of seeing depend on taking the eyes and brain as real. Or do we have the eyes-in-themselves and light-in-itself and brains-in-themselves .... insane ! We'd never dream up such stuff if not for a disavowed direct realism that taught us about causal relationships involved in seeing to begin with.
Do you expect the sort of simple answer that someone might post here? Or do you expect the answer would take years of study to get a handle on?
I'm trying to actually resolve some confusion here, on both sides. You seem to ignore what it means to grant toothaches and rumors the same ontological dignity as electrons and peaches.
Husserl has a kind of direct realism in some of his work that's brilliant.
Consider:
1. Subjectivity is the being of the world from/for a certain perspective.
2. The world is only given perspectively.
3. All entities exist interdependently in the same semantic-inferential-causal nexus.
#1 nondual consciousness-world
#2 rejects scientific realism
#3 help from Hegel and Brandom
:up:
I don't like labels much either. The real stuff is in the back and forth. Meaning is intensely cumulative and contextual.
Come now, crawl out of the pit of scientific ignorance you are in.
I was t saying that for rhetoric. You were pretty haughty sounding there. Information processing is not necessarily scientific, though it is technical.
:up:
'In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place.' (Quoted the other day.)
Quoting plaque flag (from another thread)
Quoting plaque flag
True, but what this nexus is, is very much the question at issue.
Notice that Husserl was critical of naturalism, something that often seems overlooked. Not from the perspective of 'belief in the supernatural' but from a realisation of the conditioned nature of cognition.
A related point. One of the challenges to dualism is, 'if you say "the mind" is separate from the things of the phenomenal domain, then what is it?', looking for some kind of objective definition. But "the mind" does not appear to us, it appears as us.
I suggest that it's just the world. The world itself is not an entity. There's a radical pluralism in this view in that we don't force being to be univocal. So deciding that the world itself is X [ mind, matter, etc. ] is probably inappropriate. Isn't reduction is the wrong way to go when describing Reality as a whole ? It just is what it is, including things of every category you like, too 'big' to fit in any of them.
I agree with you that when we study the brain, just as when we study anything else, we are studying the brain as it appears to us. We have no idea what it, or anything else, is in itself apart from how it appears to us.
Quantities and qualities are merely different categories of appearances, we don't know what quantity in itself or quality in itself could be, so again, we cannot come to any warranted conclusions about the in itself.
The in itself is simply the dialectical counterpart of appearance, and that's all we can say. We know that we cannot be conscious of whatever gives rise to the network of interrelated appearances we call the world, but it seems obvious that it cannot give rise to itself, so we cannot but assume that there is something behind the veil.
We can imagine various possibilities, but what we cannot know is whether those possibilities are all merely associations derived from our experiences of the world of appearances or whether there is a kind of intellectual intuition that may allow us to glimpse behind or beyond it.
Whatever we might think about that must remain a matter of faith, we can live our lives believing one thing or another about what is behind the veil, and it is the imaginative diversity that situation and the role of faith affords, that makes the in itself an important, indeed central, part of human life.
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Along these lines, he would also only accept the potentially experienceable as meaningful. Reality is 'horizonal.' We haven't seen all of it. What we see suggests the possibility of seeing more. There's always a fuzzy background. The house has a back if we want to walk around and see it. The moment itself is not punctual but anticipatory and reminiscent, which is why music makes sense to us and we can read sentences over the course of seconds. We never see even familiar objects exhaustively.
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To me this is a big piece of Husserl, the seeing of our seeing. The subject is usually 'transparent' unless it's practical to drag him or her (or it ?) out of the background. We mostly don't care about how the object is given but only what is given. We can learn to focus on the way that objects are given, including objects like melodies and memories. I think this is the real point of the bracketing, just to get us to stop obsessing over the what and its status and focus on the how.
It's a rich concept. As consciousness, we can say it's a view on the world. As a discursive subject, it has views and responsibilities. We keep score on it. But 'matter' is pretty rich too.
My issue is: why do we insist that the familiar world is appearance behind which lurks some Reality ? As far as I can tell, it's only by taking brains and eyes in the familiar world seriously that we can find indirect realism plausible, but indirect realism says those same brains and eyes are mere appearance.
I sincerely don't think this objection has been addressed sufficiently by indirect realists.
This reminds me of Harman's "vicarious causation" and the "hiddeness/withdrawal" of objects. See here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology#:~:text=Object%2Doriented%20ontology%20is%20often,of%20this%20correlation%20is%20unknowable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology#Metaphysics_of_Graham_Harman
I've looked into Harman. Can't say that I was won over, though I like his style. I embrace anthropocentrism as inescapable myself. I'm a correlationalist too, it seems. So I'm one of his bad guys. But I think you are correct about the relationship. Husserl => Heidegger => Harman.
I think the assumption is based on the known fact that we cannot be conscious of the processes of self and world arising. We inhabit our cognitions, and we know they cannot be explained in in terms of themselves: thus, we cannot but assume that something more that we cannot be aware of is going on.
The alternative is phenomenalism, which seems to be incapable of explaining anything.
I think we both agree very much that there's always more to find out and clarify.
Quoting Janus
I have to disagree there. I think maybe this is an indirect realist's misunderstanding of what I call direct realism in terms of indirect realist assumptions.
My thinking is that the ego that philosophy ought to prioritize is the participant in the ontological discussion --the ontologist among other ontologists. You and I right now are discursive subjects, responsible for the coherence of our claims. We make our case in terms of worldly objects and public concepts. Given that we are rational and not giving up on critical thinking, the conditions of the possibility for this critical thinking are [onto- ] logically necessary. [ We can't deny a shared world and language, etc. ]
So the stuff our language intends --- the stuff of experience we can talk about meaningfully, -- ought to be embraced as real rather than as mere appearance. But this does not mean we pretend that we do or can ever know it exhaustively. The lifeworld has depth, horizon, a kind of infinity.
Small difference in practice and epistemological humility. I admit. So I'm making a case for a thesis I think is a bit more solid in terms of impractical criteria. I am being unworldly and foolish, trying to offer what I find, by my grasp of ideally universal criteria, the most coherent and complete articulation of the structure of our shared situation.
I don't intend to imply that appearances are not real. I think they are real on account of real pre-cognitive effects on our senses. In principle we can know exhaustively whatever is accessible to our senses, both what is available naturally and what is available to our senses however augmented technologically. We have no way of knowing what is not, even in principle, accessible to our senses, but I see that as no reason to claim that there is nothing more than what can be known, in principle, via the senses. In other words, I think that from the fact that there can be nothing else knowable to us than what is accessible in fact and in principle to the senses, it does not follow that there can be nothing more tout court, nothing more that exists.
I also want to say that although that position is what seems reasonable to me. I don't think there is any imperative that it must seem reasonable to you, because in matters that cannot be determined either empirically or logically, I think what is acceptable or rejectable comes down to personal assessments of what seems plausible or coherent.
FWIW, I think Husserl makes a good case that even familiar objects have a kind of transcendent infinity. I can't see this lamp on my desk from every possible angle in every possible lighting and so on.
I am familiar with the idea of the phenomenon as appearance or representation (indirect realism) which is given completely and certainly. This is the idea that I can't be wrong about how things seem to me. It's a classic and respectable thesis, though I've pointed out my objections.
More positively, I think we can put seemings and toothaches with doves and quasars on the same plane of rational discourse. Instead of dualism, we have a radical pluralism, you might say. A melody exists differently than the memory of ice cream exists differently than the integer. But it's also a monism, because all of these entities are caught up in the same rational discussion, getting their significance from relationships with one another.
Quoting Janus
FWIW, I don't think like a classical empiricist. I think concepts are directly given in experience. We see apples and not blobs of red. Numbers have a reality that transcends me as individual human being (but maybe not the species, and I wouldn't try to talk beyond the species.)
For me the point in this context is semantic. I suspect that experience informs what we can mean by words. So I, anyway, don't know what I'm saying if I talk beyond my experience. I have experience being surprised, so I understand epistemic humility. I also don't think others are compelled to be so 'ascetic' as someone who happened to adopt the project of critical-rational ontology. I sincerely respect that a mystic or even the bookfleeing athlete may live a better and wiser life than me. I flatter myself that I am 'existentially' humble. I don't buttonhole people and preach my way of life. I even confess its foolishness in worldly terms. But on the 'chessboard' or at the 'poker table' of ontology, where we're all on the path together, I go at it passionately, which might misleadingly suggest that I take it as the only game in town.
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Yes. I totally embrace our freedom. Counterfactual hypothetical conversational community. To me it's crucial that we have our personal creativity, and not just for the tribe but for ourselves.
Ontology is like creative nonfiction. You know how Popper regards creativity as central. I think he's right. But weirdly it's aimed at truth --creatively guessing what might be true and making a case for it.
But what physical properties, at any level, explain the various aspects of consciousness - such as my experience of blueness, or my awareness at different levels - that exist on top of the physical properties that explain vision and behavior?
Right. They take the sense organs as real in order to argue they are not real. But they don't notice the dependence on the thing they cancel --- because the move was inherited, traditional. And because it captures the way the world is given perspectively but misunderstands that it's the world that's given and not some mediating image.
People felt compelled to interpret our fallibility in terms of us being wrapped up like a humunculus in a bubblescreen about which we could not be wrong, though the screen could fail to match up with a reality that was now utterly inaccessible.
I think there's a nondualist way to do justice to subjectivity. If we think of consciousness as the being of the world 'for' a subject and from a perspective, then of course the world is blue in some places and sounds like a trumpet in other places. We can even explain my seeing blue in terms of wavelengths and explain wavelengths in terms of mathematical intuitions and witnessings of successful experiments.
All of these entities are already in the same causal-inferential nexus. Flat ontology. Equal dignity for promises and quarks.
First off, I appreciate the clear, direct response. I've been in a lot of discussions about consciousness and it always comes down to this. I keep telling myself not to get involved, but the subject is right at the heart of the kinds of issues I like best. Even when it never gets resolved, I get to reexamine my understanding of how the world and my own self-awareness work.
I think what bothered me most about this particular iteration of the conflict is it's blatant circularity. The evidence that there is a hard problem of consciousness is that it consists of mental processes which can't be studied by science because of... the hard problem of consciousness. Of course, as I noted, all these arguments come down to this same contradiction.
You seem to be misconstruing something. Issues of correlation between mental processes and physical processes can be studied empirically and are studied, for example.
The hard problem is well, harder, because it’s explaining the nature of mental events as opposed to physical events. This makes it a more complex issue.
But in your case, the first step is recognizing the distinction, even if for semantic or historical reason, if not substantial ones of ontology.
I recognize the distinction between mental and physical events and processes in the same sense that I recognize the distinction between chemical and biological events and processes. The fact that you don't is an indicator of how unlikely we are to come to agreement.
Quoting T ClarkI look at it this way... If we saw a skyscraper made entirely of liquid water, we would be stunned. To put it mildly. The properties of water and/or H2O molecules do not allow for such a thing. But here it is! A skyscraper made of water! We'd think there was something going on that we are, for some reason, unable to see. And we'd put quite a bit of effort into figuring out what was going on.
The case of consciousness seems even more unfathomable. Even if the properties of water cannot account for a skyscraper, at least both things are physical. There seems some hope off figuring out what the trick is. And properties of particles and groups of particles give us other physical properties, such as lift, friction, and aerodynamics, so flight is entirely explainable in the physical.
But, while everything about the brain and body are physical, consciousness does not seem to be. What properties of particles, or bio-chemical energy running along neurons, or brain structures, suggest that the system can be aware of itself? Or have subjective experience, even without awareness? If beings from elsewhere studied our brains in all possible detail, what would they point to and say, "Ah! They are conscious! You can tell, because of X, Y, and Z."
And on top of that, the physical things and processes in the brain are already doiny something. They are making more complicated physical processes, such as vision and behavior. How is it that those same physical things and processes are making something very different at the same time? That seems to be asking quite a lot.
Hello Mww,
Then wouldn’t it be impossible to know that one has a representative faculty, let alone that one is?
This is fair to an extent; however, we are still able to understand that world, which certainly is not of the same rational construction as our own faculties, better.
Hello Plaque Flag,
As an indirect realist myself (of an idealist flavor), I agree; but this exactly my point!
The brain-in-itself is represented as the brain-for-us. It is ‘mystical’ only insofar as we will never come to know it absolutely with our currently evolved minds (i.e., brains-in-themselves).
Why doesn’t it hold?
I didn’t understand this part. What do you mean by methodological solipsism? And how does that lead to direct realism? By my lights, direct realism is only possible if we were not representing the world—and we clearly are (by my lights).
Hello Janus,
Since we have already discussed this, I will be brief here: I disagree that we cannot come to know things at all in-themselves. It does not follow that because “We have no idea what it, or anything else, is in itself apart from how it appears to us” that we are likewise not acquiring indirect knowledge of the in-themselves (which, in turn, negate the idea that we cannot know anything about the in-themselves).
Quantities are not a category of appearances. You, nor I, have ever experienced a quantity.
Just as a side note, in the same manner, I take it up on faith that gravity will still operate on me the next time I try to jump into the air: there is no field of study which is exempt from this so-called “faith” you speak of.
Suppose aliens come to us. Can we study them to a point that we decide that they are very likely conscious?
Just offering a hidden dualism. No big deal. All the other ones been beat to death, so,…..
Only when considered as objects - when you look at the brain as a neuroscientist or eyes as an ophthalmologist, then you’re viewing them as objects. But in the act of seeing, the eyes and the central nervous system are not objects but integral constituents.
True, you could not see the lamp from every possible angle and lighting, but you could in principle see it from any possible angle or lighting.
Quoting plaque flag
Right, but that's not really what I'm saying. I'm not saying that we just see appearances, but that we just see things as they appear, and can appear, to us. I'm not really concerned about whether we can be wrong about how things appear to us, that seems to be a separate, and unrelated, question, but there might be a connection I'm not aware of.
Quoting plaque flag
This reminds me of Justus Buchler's radically pluralist ontology, although I'm not saying that he would necessarily agree; it's too long since I read him and then only cursorily. I think there are things which are publicly available and things which are not, but I don't think of any of them as unreal or non-existent on account of that difference. For me the difference just consists in the degree of determinability with which we can talk about different things.
Quoting plaque flag
I allow for the possibility of intellectual intuition, but I do not hold that anything purportedly issuing from that constitutes any inter-subjectively corroborable evidence for anything. So, as an example the idea of an infinite being could just be the dialectical counterpart of our experience of finite beings, or it could be an intellectual intuition of something transcendent: the problem being that there is no way to tell which is the case.
So, people can be convinced of transcendent things by experiences and intuitions they have had, and we can dismiss those as mere interpretations, or wishful thinking or whatever, but since we have no way of knowing what such people have experienced, we are not really in a position to judge as to the validity of the faith that they might have on account of such experiences.
On the other hand, they have no justification for considering their experiences to be valid evidence of anything for anyone else. We all live with our own private mythologies, and I would not have it any other way.
Yeah, I don't agree with that at all; I think all the evidence points to the fact that the only world we share is the publicly accessible empirical world.
Those who have faith in transcendence may have that much in common but comparative religion shows the tremendous differences in interpretation, so it can hardly be called "a world in common".
So, I think that quote is just a nice little bit of fluff that has nothing to do with any justifiable argument for anything.
Since the very idea of "in itself" denotes that which cannot be known by us, I think what you are saying cannot be substantiated. Intellectual intuition may give us insight into the ultimate nature of things, but we have no way of knowing whether it does or doesn't, so it remains a question of faith. And faith-based beleifs cannot be argued for, because there is no publicly available evidence for them.
There's an anecdote I often share, re-told in Frank Moorehouse's account of Cook's discovery of Australia. According to Joseph Bank's scientific logs of the first encounter, the Endeavour sailed in to Botany Bay and dropped anchor about a league (little more than a mile) from an indigenous group mending nets and fishing on a sandbank. They were in clear sight and the crew could make out individual details through telescopes. But the indigenes showed no response whatever to the appearance of the ship. It wasn't until a small boat was lowered and rowed towards the shore, some hours later, and began to pull away from the Endeavour, that they started to show any signs of recognising the newcomers, gesticulating with spears and running back and forth on the shore. My hunch is that they didn't ignore the Endeavour, but that they didn't actually see it. It was too remote an object from their life experience for them to actually recognise it.
A second anecdote I learned in cog sci was that of a Pygmy chieftan who was taken by car to a mountain lookout with sweeping views over an African plain. The anthropologists were puzzled by his behaviour, as he began to stoop down and make clutching motions in front of him. After much back-and-forth with an interpreter, it turned out that he was trying to pick up the distant animals on the plains below. He had spent his entire life in dense forest where he only ever saw things at a range of a few meters, so he thought the animals below were small insects at his feet.
The moral is, we see what we're culturally conditoned to see. We all have a consensus worldview, nowadays highly diverse and fractured, of course, due to the enormous variety of information and imagery we're now presented with. But even in that context, our understanding is conditioned by cultural consensus.
I don't believe that story because even animals can see and respond to things they have never encountered,
The pygmy story is more plausible, but I think that is probably apocryphal too.
Quoting Quixodian
Our understanding may be somewhat conditioned by a degree of cultural consensus, but there is much we disagree about, so I doubt there is any overarching cultural consensus about anything.
Quoting Janus
Another story in the same class was about kittens raised in an environment with only vertical barriers. When after some weeks they were introduced to horizontal barriers, they walked into them, at least until they acquired the new behaviour necessary.
An important aspect of neuroscience is developing scientific understanding of the information processing that occurs in brains. Neuroscience involves knowledge of other relevant sciences such as physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology. Yes, technology plays a huge role in humanity's ability to make progress in understanding the information processing which occurs in brains, but that is fairly tangential to the question of what is being learned in neuroscience.
In my estimation, it's much cleaner to say that we'll never run out of things to learn about the brain.
Given that we can't look around our own cognition, the brain-for-us just is the brain-in-itself. I think we have a nonobvious roundsquare situation here.
Perhaps it's because we can look around one another's cognition [ biases , limitations ] that we try to radicalize this and look around all human cognition.
What experience have or could we have apart from the [ life-world-entangled ] human nervous system ? Yet philosophers talk of a radically and explicitly anti-empirical concept as the truly real instead of as a sort of liar's paradox or outright mysticism.
But how can we know what they say and do? Only by perceiving them physically with our senses. We have no way to get into immaterial mental communion with them. Any evidence that they are conscious would be physical. If we are studying their behaviors, we are studying their physical bodies. We conclude that the body is mental by what the body does. Otherwise we would have to assume they are just self-propelled Chinese rooms.
I think you make your position abundantly clear.
And some chat program might be conscious.
Do you have a reference for that?
First let me support me claim about indirect realism, because I think you raise a good but different issue.
https://iep.utm.edu/perc-obj/
Just to clarify, I'm saying that the indirect realist uses an 'image' of the brain and its (imaginary?) causal relationship with images of coffee cups to argue that all we get directly are images.
This is like a lawyer using documents as evidence to argue that the documents are forgeries. It's some perverse twist on people quoting the bible to prove the bible is the word of God.
Quoting Quixodian
We agree that the human nervous system is special. The question here might be where or what is the self ? In this context it's the being of the world in its fused sensual and conceptual fullness from a certain 'perspective' [literally in the visual sense, metaphorically in many others.]
But the free/responsible discursive subject is radically temporal --- fundamentally dragging a past behind and on the way to an ideal future, keeping and making promises. To say discursive is to say conceptual. This is where timebinding is crucial and all the beautiful Hegelian stuff about the cloud self comes in : Zeitgeist, delocalized spirt, the immortal graveleaping self-explicating Conversation, dependent on human nervous systems in general but on no particular nervous system.
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To me that sounds like direct realism. Respectfully, what work is being done by 'as they appear' ? Are you thinking in Flatland terms (a great little book) ? Perhaps in Reality there's a sphere, but we flatlander humans see only a circle, a projection of the sphere into our smaller world ? If so, it's a beautiful idea. But I still find it a bit paradoxical, as if a beautiful analogy is leading us astray.
Sure, it all might be possible, but we do not believe that, we conclude that it is likely other people are conscious and that aliens would be conscious, based on physical evidence alone.
It was a long time ago. I checked with ChatGPT and it returned this.
That sounds good to me. And there are real things that no everyone can see. A biologist or a mathematician has seen patterns that others haven't. Those patterns are part of potential human experience, connected causally and semantically to more familiar and publicly accessible entities.
Quoting Janus
I agree. This goes along with my self-conscious embrace of an 'empirical' [skeptical, critical, rational] ontology as merely one path among others -- which doesn't mean that I wouldn't fight against those who tried to censor forcefully convert me, but it does mean I won't try to censor or forcefully convert others.
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Feuerbach is great on the beauty of this plurality, writing of
a belief in the infinity of Spirit and in the everlasting youth of humanity, in the inexhaustible love and creative power of Spirit, in its eternally unfolding itself into new individuals out of the womb of its plenitude and granting new beings for the glorification, enjoyment, and contemplation of itself
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/
We might reflect too that evidence can only make sense as belonging within such a public world. Rational inquiry presupposes the world.
This quote from Hume is what I have in mind:
We may observe, that 'tis universally allow'd by philosophers, and is besides pretty obvious of itself, that nothing is ever really present with the mind but its perceptions or impressions and ideas, and that external objects become known to us only by those perceptions they occasion.
With Kant, even time and space are placed 'in' the mind. So the brain-in-itself may not even be 3-dimensional. There may be no such brain. One can try to imagine (perhaps 'illegally') a radically different reality without brains that we experience as (represent as ) including brains.
But we only embraced this representational approach in the first place because of familiar causal relationships between brains and eyes and roses that we took for real.
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An important insight. Taken too far, one has a self-subverting relativism, yet culture clearly plays a role in perception. We might say that a community lives in its own lifeworld, just as thinkers have talk about the human Unwelt.
Some weird stuff happens here though. Because that means that we can't see around our community anymore than we can see around our species. But we keep pretending we can --presumably because philosophers (for instance) get more distance on their culture than some its other members.
Definitely in disagreement. It's more that I don't understand where you are coming from because it seems incredulous to me that you don't recognize the difference in kind and not just degree between the sensation of red, or seeing an apple, versus the physiological correlates such as electromagnetic frequencies, optic anatomy, neural anatomy, and the like. We can say that consciousness is natural but it is yet to be determined the nature of experiential-ness and how it is identified with or arises from the physical aspects that correlate with it.
I'd have some quibbles as what is "science" but it would be going on a tangent. Is social science a "science" just because it uses data? Perhaps. But is there some aspects that make it different than say physics? Is engineering "science proper" or more of an applied aspect to the research done in "science proper"? Is mathematics and computational theory a science or is it more that it is its own thing that can be then applied to science? Yes neural networks can be studied, but I don't want to get in the weeds of how to parse out the term "science" (perhaps you can open another thread on that if you want to discuss it further).
Rather, I want to focus on the idea of the difference between what is going on in the Chinese Room experiment and an actual experiencer or interpreter of events that integrates meaning from the computation. Thus, the term we would be parsing would be "meaning" and what that means. What does it mean to truly have a "point of view" versus computing. What is it to have behavior/process only rather than a "what it's like-ness" to it?
Agree. I listened to a Q&A with Bernardo Kastrup where he says one of the common objections to his 'analytic idealism' is actually based on the fact that the questioner can't see the point of the 'hard problem of consciousness' argument. They can't grasp why a precise objective description cannot but omit the ontic dimension of felt experience. There are quite a few worthy contributors to this forum who are dismissive of the argument on those grounds.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I know you said you didn’t want to digress, but consider the idea that physics is concerned with objects the behavior of which can be minutely described in objective terms. That is the sense in which physics (and so, physicalism) are considered paradigmatic for science generally. But the social sciences are not concerned with objects, but the behaviors of [i]subjects[/I] which introduces a dimension that defies physical reductionism.
Yes, and very close to what I am getting at in the OP. People tend to take the mental "for granted", and thus people mistakenly hold an implicit (hidden) dualism, not in their stated view, but in how they use language surrounding the mental and physical events. They might not even realize they are doing it. Neurons networking becomes some mental event, and it's already committed a category error.
Quoting Quixodian
Agreed. Any further would be going into ideas like, "Is using quantitative methods on human behavior already assuming the stance it wants to present?" and on and on.
It is the essence of a hierarchical view of scale that processes at one level must be completely consistent with the rules of all lower levels. Biological processes can't violate chemical principles, but chemical principles are not adequate to determine biological principles. Principles of building design must consider the properties of building materials.
Quoting Patterner
Back to the unbridgeable chasm. Some people see it that way and others don't. As I noted, that's where the argument runs into a brick wall.
Quoting Patterner
Back to my architectural argument. The properties of materials and characteristics of buildings are physical, but at the next step up, the properties of cities are not. They are social, economic, organizational, political.
Quoting Patterner
To vastly oversimplify, chemistry doesn't make biology, it manifests as biology. That's one of the ways it is expressed in the world. In the same way, neurology doesn't make consciousness. Consciousness is a manifestation, an expression, of neurology.
No more than biological processes are identical to chemical processes.
Isn't every biological process a chemical process?
I do recognize the difference in kind between neurological processes and mental experiences. I just don't think it matters. I don't think neurological processes are the same as conscious experience. I think neurological processes express themselves as conscious experiences in the same sense chemical processes express themselves as biological processes.
I think that's enough for me till the next discussion.
But can biology be reduced to chemistry, or is there an attribute that biological organisms possess that non-organic chemistry does not? The no case is given below:
[quote=What is Information? Marcello Barbieri; https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.2015.0060] Chemical reactions in non-living systems are not controlled by a message … There is nothing in the physico-chemical world that remotely resembles reactions being determined by a sequence and codes between sequences' (that is characteristic of organic processes such as mitosis and reproduction)[/quote]
No, not at all. As I said to @Patterner and @Quixodian, chemical processes manifest as biological processes, they are not the same thing.
No, biology can not be reduced to chemistry. That's not at all inconsistent with the argument I'm making.
Now I really am done.
But your first entry was this one:
Quoting T Clark
What the argument is claiming is that the subjective feeling of experience ('what it is like to be'...) eludes scientific description:
[quote=Chalmers, Facing up to...;https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf] Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. [/quote]
So, I don't see how that is a circular argument. It's an argument about the shortcomings of objective explanations in respect of subjective experience. The evidence for that is deductive, rather than empirical, but I don't see how it is circular.
There is a lot here.
But as Bertrand Russell points out, in a long quote, worth citing in full:
"To return to the physiologist observing another man’s brain: what the physiologist sees is by no means identical with what happens in the brain he is observing, but is a somewhat remote effect. From what he sees, therefore, he cannot judge whether what is happening in the brain he is observing is, or is not, the sort of event that he would call "mental". When he says that certain physical events in the brain are accompanied by mental events, he is thinking of physical events as if they were what he sees. He does not see a mental event in the brain he is observing, and therefore supposes there is in that brain a physical process which he can observe and a mental process which he cannot.
This is a complete mistake. In the strict sense, he cannot observe anything in the other brain, but only the percepts which he himself has when he is suitably related to that brain (eye to microscope, etc.). We first identify physical processes with our percepts, and then, since our percepts are not other people’s thoughts, we argue that the physical processes in their brains are something quite different from their thoughts. In fact, everything that we can directly observe of the physical world happens inside our heads, and consists of "mental" events in at least one sense of the word "mental".
It also consists of events which form part of the physical world. The development of this point of view will lead us to the conclusion that the distinction between mind and matter is illusory. The study of the world may be called physical or mental or both or neither, as we please; in fact, the words serve no purpose. There is only one definition of the words that is unobjectionable: "physical" is what is dealt with by physics, and "mental" is what is dealt with by psychology. When, accordingly, I speak of "physical" space, I mean the space that occurs in physics."
- Bertrand Russell "An Outline of Philosophy"
We fool ourselves into thinking we leave our bodies to look at a brain from a "neutral" perspective - this is not what actually happens.
If we acknowledge that we know things only as they appear to us, then the dialectical counterpart of as-they-are-in-themselves becomes obvious. We realize that what we know of things as they appear gives us no guarantee that that knowledge tells us anything about how they are in themselves, and for me it seems that we cannot but think that they have some existence in themselves independent of our perceiving and understanding them. Even if that existence is unknowable to us, it doesn't follow that the idea that there is such an existence is incoherent.
That is how it seems to me at least, and since there is no fact of the matter about what is coherent or not; it really comes down to what seems incoherent to the individual. So, if it seems to be an incoherent thought to you, I am never going to convince you that it is coherent and vice versa.
Also, I don't see how thinking that thought could lead one astray, as it really has no implications for what really matters; the world as it appears to us; it is only thinking in and about that empirical manifest context that being wrong could have consequences, or so it seems to me.
As I see it it also follows that intellectual honesty demands that we just don't know, which opens up the field for metaphysical speculation, which is fine and can be a very positive and creative thing provided we don't believe that there can be evidence for such speculations or that anything we might believe about such speculations could be anything more than a matter of faith.
I think the fact is that you are never going to convince people to give up such speculations and faiths, anyway, even if it could be, per impossibile, proven that they are somehow, in themselves and acknowledged as being faith-based, a negative activity.
Right, however that doesn't seem to support your argument.
Quoting Manuel
This seems to accord very well with Kant's notion of the ding an sich. We know things only as they appear to be and as we model them.
Which argument doesn't it support? I've often, although very inelegantly, advanced an argument very like this:
Quoting Manuel
The way I tried to put it is that you could never see in neural data anything corresponding to a rational inference, because rational inference is internal to thought. (I remember having this argument with Mars Man, and I reckon you're one of the few who's been around long enough to know that reference!)
:up:
Although, yes, behavior is obviously a big factor in our decision. The octopus is not even in our phylum, but we assume some degree of consciousness there. Although the eyes help.
but what would an AI have to do to convince us? Their behavior will have to be far more convincing than any animal's, since they are so very different from us. extraterrestrials could be as different from us as any AI we make. Would we give them the benefit of the doubt?
Quoting T ClarkI agree entirely. Because consciousness is at least as important to the existence of cities as buildings. Cities are the next step up from the combination of physical and mental properties. (I wonder if we could have anything we would call a city without buildings.)
Yes, he even mentions something to that effect about not knowing the intrinsic nature of physics and that this intrinsic nature is irrelevant to the contemporary use of physics.
Indeed, a lot of this stuff (not all to be fair) are stories about what we guess the brain does in relation to mind.
I've seen you quote this, I believe. I got it from reading Russell's book and thought it was quite well put.
Yes, I think I understand your position and it seems like you understand mine. And there we are.
Aren't we getting into Aristotelian causes? A building design could be considered a building without materials. A city plan could be considered a city without buildings.
I'm still here because we've moved away from talking about consciousness and toward the nature of the hierarchy of scales, which I am really interested in. Have you read "More is Different" by P.W. Anderson?
Quoting More is Different - P.W. Anderson
You and I have been in similar discussions before and I've tried to make my attitude towards reductionism clear. See my previous post to @Patterner.
Quoting T Clark
[Quote] The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.[/quote]Is that not exactly how the universe was constructed? It does not imply [I]we[/I] can do that, but that is exactly how things work. At least physical things.
Quoting DarkneosThat's true.
And an illusion that is viewed as real by itself seems strange.
So I'm going to push back on this "mental states 'emerging' from neurological states is the same as biology 'emerging' out of chemistry" in 3 distinct but related ways:
1) Questioning strong emergence in biology from chemistry. I think in principle, even if the level of mechanisms are different, there is at essence, a reducibility by way of organic chemistry from biological formations to chemical ones. This cannot be said of mental states to its physical components. No matter how hard I try, the "sensation of red" or the "perception of an object" or a "sound" does not seem reducible to the realm of neurological activities (that is to say, things like networks, potentiations, neurochemistry, genetics, and the like) the way that organic molecules, and biological systems, reduce to chemical systems.
2) Point of view. That is to say, emergence itself has in the background, the fact that there is already an observer of the "emerging". This does get into ideas of "does a tree make a sound if there is no observer", but there is a reason that trope is so well-known. We always take for granted that we have a certain point of view already whereby events are integrated and known.
3) Taking seriously the difference in kind. As it says, that mental events are such a different type of phenomenon, that it would be an abuse of the concept to equate it with the physical correlates without explanation other than "other things in nature work thusly". But other things in nature don't confer qualities itself! They are the predicates with which the mental events interpret the very world! That is quite a different and unique thing.
The universe wasn't constructed, it grew up from itself, from within. That's what reductionism misses.
I don't see any reason to believe this is true. What makes you think it is?
Quoting schopenhauer1
I don't understand. How is this different in my way of seeing things verses your way?
Quoting schopenhauer1
I've acknowledged that mental events are different kinds of things than physical, chemical, biological, and neurological events and processes. I think you're saying that those differences mean that the analogy I am making doesn't work. I don't agree. It's like the old SAT questions - chemistry is to biology as neurology is to [X]. Correct answer is C - psychology.
People have to stop with the "does a tree make a sound" line as it doesn't mean what they think it does.
Before I answer, I'm just going to point out, since the SAT isn't interested in metaphysical analysis, the superficial connection of the analogy was good enough to include that question. However, if it said something like, "Neural networks is to neuroscience as the color red is to psychology", I think that would be more apt. It is precisely that jump from "neural networks, et al." to the color red, that is a difference in kind, not degree.
I'm using it by way of "What I am saying sounds like this trope..." which it sort of does. But my focus was not on that particular idea, so you can move beyond that and ignore it if you want.
We 'transcend' not only entities but the world / being as a whole.
Can science explain that there is being in the first place ? As opposed to finding patterns in the movement of changes of entities ? Being is endlessly presupposed, so it's hard to say yes. Being is given perspectively, not to just any objects it seems, but is it not given as the same world to all ?We are thrown into wonder when we are ejected from immersion in the practical and see the strangeness in things existing.
With the hard problem of conscious, our own consciousness is always presupposed, so it's always (especially?) the weirdness of not-mine-flesh being like me but not, also seeing being.
That's actually what I think. I think what David Chalmer tries to express rather awkwardly as 'what it is like to be...' is, really, just 'being'. Furthermore that we universally assume that we know what 'being' means when actually we don't. (That's where I think it dovetails with Heidegger's 'forgetfulness of being', although not having read Being and Time, I'm not sure about that.)
Quoting plaque flag
Enlightenment naturalism always begins with the apparently obvious fact of our existence as subjects in the domain of objects. It doesn't actually question the nature of being as such although due to the forgetfulness of being, it often doesn't realise the distinction between the scientific and the existential.
Same with chemistry expressing itself as biology.
Well, not really. It grew up from within itself in accordance with it's nature and then we called the pattern of that growth "laws." I don't think this is a trivial or nitpicky distinction.
Quoting Patterner
You say "not unrelated to." That makes you seem like a spokesman for reductionism, which I know you're not. I say "not predictable from." To me, that is the essence of why reductionism doesn't work.
[quote=What is Information?;https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.2015.0060]Ernst Mayr, one of the architects of the modern (neo-darwinian) synthesis, has been one of the most outspoken supporters of the view that life is fundamentally different from inanimate matter. In The growth of biological thought [15], p. 124, he made this point in no uncertain terms: ‘… The discovery of the genetic code was a breakthrough of the first order. It showed why organisms are fundamentally different from any kind of nonliving material. There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information with a history of three thousand million years!’[/quote]
On a more general level, it is an instance of the principle that information-based systems, which includes organisms, embody a level of organisation which defies reduction to physics and chemistry. There's an often-quoted meme by Norbert Weiner, founder of cybernetics, to wit, 'The mechanical brain does not secrete thought "as the liver does bile," as the earlier materialists claimed, nor does it put it out in the form of energy, as the muscle puts out its activity. Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.'
In a discussion of theory of mind, consideration of neuroscience would be going on a tangent?
Do you see yourself as particularly well qualified to judge what is science?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Why do you want to talk about what is going on in a Chinese Room rather than what goes on in brains? I thought I had already explained that the Chinese Room argument is an argument against computationalism, and not particularly relevant.
I'm getting the impression that you are wanting to beat on a straw man, rather than have an enlightening discussion of the topic. Say it ain't so.
I have no problem agreeing with this. I agree that it makes sense to recognize that living matter is fundamentally different from non-living matter. I don't think it says anything that resolves the differences between our ways of seeing things.
It is just as much of a 'faith-based' reasoning as PSR or that there laws (as opposed to mere observed regularities): do you reject those as "unprovable" as well?
Not what I was saying. Rather if information processing is strictly a science or something else applied to science...
Quoting wonderer1
You are getting mighty close to arguing from a place of bad faith. But please do continue...poison well commence I guess.
Quoting wonderer1
Ok, either you can make an argument or you will continue with the bad faith rhetoric. If so, prepare for me to ignore you. Clearly I don't ignore 99% of posts that are out of good faith if you look at my posts. Meaning, we can disagree but not poison wells whilst we do so..
But to "good faith argue" your "bad faith arguing".. I'll answer your questions, "in good faith" (to demonstrate disagreement without being disagreeable):
Quoting wonderer1
If you don't like the Chinese Room argument because it seems too narrow, then call my version, the "Danish Room Argument". That is to say, my point that I wanted to take away was that processing can miss the "what-it's-like" aspect of consciousness whilst still being valid for processing inputs and outputs, whether that be computationalist models, connectionis models, both, none of them or all of them. I don't think it is model-dependent in the Danish Room argument.
:up:
Quoting Quixodian
:up:
And possibly we can't. Maybe we can get clearer ? Or do we only ever keep reminding ourselves that it's not an entity, but that there is that entity or any entity in the first place ? But to experience the wonder seems important even if we can't. The 'world' or 'being' or the 'there' or the 'shining' of any and every tautology.
[quote=Wittgenstein]
The experience that we need in order to understand logic is not that something or other is the state of things, but that something is: that, however, is not experience.
To say 'I wonder at such and such being the case' has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case. In this sense one can wonder at the existence of, say, a house when one sees it and has not visited it for a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the meantime. But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it's clouded. But that's not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then it's just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.
[/quote]
Hello Plaque Flag,
But the brain-for-us is not the brain-in-itself, exactly because it is a representation of it.
Let's try this. What right do you (do we) have to believe in the brain-in-itself ? Why can't the hidden reality be 57 dimensional ? Why can't we all be made of purple homogenous hypergoo there ?
Hello Plaque Flag,
Oh I see: are you arguing that the only thing one can directly know is the result of their brain’s processes (and thusly are immersed in ideas)? If so, then I would say that is epistemic idealism and not a form of solipsism; but I could be misunderstanding you.
But, regardless, the brain is a informationally adequate representation of a vital aspect of oneself, as a product of oneself representation an aspect of oneself to oneself.
Wait a minute, are the Bob Ross -for Bob Ross or the Bob Ross -in itself ? Can you trust logic if you are the first ? Or why should a realm of appearance include trustworthy logic ? Weird things happen when you put illusion closer to you than reality as a matter of principle.
I'm a direct realist. I quoted Hume to give an example of what I oppose. What I finally escaped !
The classic problem is that you are trapped on the side of appearance with no way to compare. You end up with (at best, IMO) a kind of instrumentalism or 'coping' pragmatism/irrationalism.
We could be 'hypergoo', but that is an incredibly unparsimonious account of reality (and, not to mention, completely unwarranted). Moreover, even if there is 57 dimensions to reality, that wouldn't negate that one is representing a vital aspect of themselves (their brain) to themselves and that that brain is not a mere phantom of the imagination: that is all that is required (i.e., an objective world being represented) to prove that there is a 'brain-in-itself'.
But you only associate representing with brains due to what you've seen in mere appearance. It's circular, perhaps a slipknot, seems to me. You are smuggling in common sense. That's my fundamental objection to indirect realism. The whole game depends on direct realism in the background. Brains and eyes and apples and their causal relationships. Seeing others see with eyes. And so on.
What is observable can be confirmed by observation: no faith required, unless we want to claim that what is observable is real beyond the context of its observability. What logically follows is what logically follows, no faith required unless we want to claim that what logically follows tells us something more than the premises, and their entailments, from which it logically follows.
Anything else is either mere speculation or the result of intellectual intuition into reality, but we cannot determine which; so here we have entered the realm where faith rules. This also applies to scientific theories; we don't know if they tell us anything about how things are beyond the context of appearances.
I didn’t follow this sentence: could you please restate it?
First what?
Prima facie, it doesn’t. However, upon investigation, there are strong inductive arguments for our (1) at least our representative faculties using logic and (2) I would go so far as to say that reality has logic, as a Platonic form, which conditions the universal mind. The ‘realm of appearance’ is informationally-accurate (enough for survival purposes) and, consequently, is an indirect window into the world-in-itself.
I agree; but I never claimed to put illusions closer to me than reality (as a matter of principle). Appearances are not synonymous with illusions.
How can you be a direct realist if everything you come to know is filtered through your representative faculties?
I would say that it is based off of parsimony, explanatory power, intuitions, etc.; there are many unfalsifiable claims (such as solipsism) which are incredibly unparsimonious and go against strong intuitions. My position is neither of what you stated: it is a form of objective idealism.
Just like reason, senses are impossible to completely untrust or doubt. I don’t see how the use of comparison representations is any form of circular logic, and it seems to be how we penetrate into the world-in-itself indirectly.
Trust me, I don’t think anything about my objective idealism is considered common sense (; . However, there’s plenty of evidence that your brain (and more generally body) is responsible for representing the world to you: I don’t see how you could argue against that. Are you saying it is circular to use representations to understand that they are representations? If you are right, then how would one even know they are appearances?
Not at all: the causal relationships that we perceive are indirect representations of events ‘happening’ (whether that be atemporally or temporally) in the world-in-itself. We do not have direct knowledge of the world as it is.
Please demonstrate to me how you are able to empirically verify that every change has a cause.
Also, logic is never empirically verified definitively. You cannot observe that there is a law whereof an object must equal itself; nor that no two objects can be in the same place at the same time. All of this must be taken on 'faith', I would argue, under your view. I don't think it's faith, but if you are going to say metaphysics is all 'faith', in the sense you described, then so is literally every philosophical prerequisite for all scientific and practical inquiries.
I have never claimed that our understanding that every change has a cause is universally applicable, or that it tells us anything beyond how things seem.
Without logic, whether inductive, deductive or abductive, we might as well give up discussion altogether. Logic is what demands that we be consistent, coherent and not contradict ourselves.
Mental states are things such as feelings, sensations, thoughts, concepts, ideas. There is a "what-it's-likeness" to them. There is a point of view. Interesting enough, the mental states epistemically need to be in place for anything else to be "known". Known, is not a thing unless there is a point of view, something that "knows".
With that being a loose definition of mental states. It seems to me that despite the novelty of biological systems, that they are not different in kind, then their chemical substrates. That is to say, they are still not anything like the loose definition I gave of mental events. They are still physical events, despite being novel, and possibly epistemically non-reducible (meaning, perhaps we simply can't make the connections yet. But I am not caught on the fact that mind is so far "irreducible" and so are some biological systems (at the moment). That wasn't the crux of my case here. Rather it is that biological fits the definition of physical events just like every other reducible/emergent phenomenon (except mind/consciousness). Which brings me to 2 (these are all connected really so I can't really isolate 1 from 2 from 3 without the argument not making sense).
I am not sure your way of seeing about this, but what I am saying is that it may be the case that "emergence" needs "something" for which to "emerge within" (i.e. a point of view). That is to say, assuming there are these "jumps" (which we call "emergent properties"), whence are these properties taking place? We, as the already-observing observer, have the vantage point of "seeing the emergence" but "where" do these "jumps" take place without a point of view? I guess, as another poster used to say, Where is the epistemic cut?. And also, how would that cut take place without an already-existing observer? What does that new enclosure (of the new emergent property) even look like without a vantage point, or point of view already in the equation?.
Yes, and here is the biggest reason. Indeed, going back to what I was saying in 1, these are not just differences in the complexities of chemical structures (thus loosing the a 1-1 reduction analysis to the new property) but of something else entirely. It is something that is a feeling, a point of view, and is necessary to even understand every other phenomenon. So there are quite unique things above and beyond all other natural things that are strictly "physical". Basically I am saying, we must keep in mind the incredible difference and distinction between mental and physical versus physical and other physical events. If we don't understand how incredibly different they are, the problem at hand is not as apparent.
I'm sympathetic in general but I think mental and physical events are palpably in the same inferential nexus. [ See my latest OP for more on that. ] Is explanation the right word ? Is conscious stuff or merely being from a perspective --- with being ONLY so far as we know given perspectively ? I reject scientific realism (the independent object) on semantic and empirical grounds. I don't know anything about anything apart from this living brain...it's a lamp I've never dared to unplug. No one who ever told stuff about the world did either, not before they were done talking. I think trying to put the scientific image 'behind' appearance is wacky. My frustration is all the to-me-credulous semantic atomism --- as if stuff just keeps on making sense completely out of context.
Well specifically, what do you think of this?
Quoting schopenhauer1
I guess the tricky part is already lower in the animal kingdom. Are ants a point of view on the world ?Are bacteria ? I feel strongly that cats and dogs are (and so on), but they don't know they are. They recognize entities but not being itself.
One of the problems of correlationism is making sense of the ancestral world. Emergence looks tempting, despite its problems and complexities. But I really don't know.
I forgot to answer here...
Yes Professor Russell had some good insight there. The physical is always our mental description of the physical and thus, we are using mentality to understand physical processes, that are about mentality. Of course, his intellectual partner in mathematics and logic, A.N. Whitehead, went on quite the speculative rampage to explicate how that might look in a sort of neutral monism of processes.
Quoting T ClarkIt's true that we likely could not have predicted many of these things. There's way too much we don't know or haven't figured out. But us not being able to predict liquidity from three properties of H2O molecules doesn't mean those properties are not directly responsible for liquidity. The physical universe is in the form it is in because of extremely consistent characteristics.
I'm a reductionist regarding the physical. I don't believe consciousness is physical, not a thing nor a process. Consciousness is already responsible for amazing things that never would have come about with obituary the physical. So I'm ultimately not a reductionist.
Heh, well you went full-tilt into it. I am only speculating at the edges. That is to say, I am posing the question, but I am not going to say necessarily, "Thus we always need an observer", but it is simply to ask the fair question, "How is there emergence without an observer in the equation?".
Another little thing to consider is Popper's idea of basic statements --where the rubber meets the road. He skipped over the metaphysical strangeness of the witnessing of a measurement and went right to the 'politics' of what a community will fallibly accept as a report. Seems like a good vector of attack or illumination.
I was asking whether you were the real Bob Ross himself or just Bob Ross for Bob Ross.
I feel like you are using logic to prove that you should be allowed to use logic ?
How do you know that it is good enough for survival purposes ? If the real you and real everything is hidden, you may be doing very badly down there. What's going on 'up here' in representation might be a escapist daydream from starvation down there. Or maybe down there everything is immortal.
As far as I can tell, there's no possible evidence for any kind of relationship --and so no material with which to make progress one step at a time. It seems to me that indirect realism puts all evidence out of reach.
Except I do think biological processes are different in kind from physical or chemical processes in the same sense that mental processes are different from biological/neurological processes.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I've never understood the concept of epistemic cut. Does it mean, e.g., the break between chemistry and biology we're talking about? If so, we need to recognize this is an artificial break. It doesn't really represent some deeper sense of reality. I've been trying to fit it into a category and I'm not satisfied I've done it effectively. Is it metaphysics? Whatever it is, the universe without us in it is not aware of it. Is that the point you're trying to make? For me, that just means that the distinction between physical and chemical and biological and mental processes is also artificial. There's just the world wiggling around, doing it's thing.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Again, I don't get it.
Those are all just conceptual overlays humans have placed over the world. At bottom, there is only the world doing it's thing. The rest is just our trying to jam it into categories. See my previous post to @schopenhauer1.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/828994
Quoting Patterner
The claim is they are not predictable even in principle.
Quoting Patterner
I've already agreed that all biological processes are completely consistent with the laws of chemistry and ditto for all the rest of the hierarchy of scale. I think that's the strongest statement that can correctly be made. If you are saying more than that, and I think you are, I think you're wrong.
You misinterpret how “physical” is being used in its juxtaposition to mental. It doesn’t mean “physics” as you seem to be using it. There is a way in which atomic, chemical, biological are physical events that are different in kind than qualia, ideas, what-it’s-likeness and so on. This is what I mean by taking this distinction seriously.
Perhaps you have a theory on how they are the same, but that is the distinction. By pointing to differences in physical events to other physical events you are pointing out distinctions within the same kind of events and again, why I’m saying that it’s not taking seriously the difference in kind of mental events from physical events. An atom is not a tree but they are both physical which is different in kind than the sensation of something or a thought or a concept etc.
Hello Plaque Flag,
I don’t follow what you mean. If you are talking about my body, then I would say that my body within my conscious experience is a representation of my body-in-itself: thusly, the my-body-for-me is the former, and my-body-in-itself is the latter. Is that what you are asking?
See:
Quoting Bob Ross
There is nothing higher than reason (epistemically). You cannot dethrone her without thereby trusting her to be able to dethrone herself, and, thusly, the position of a hard skeptic pertaining to logic is self-refuting.
I know this because it is much more parsimonious to explain the data of experience by believing that one’s conscious experience is an indirect window into the world-in-itself. Contrariwise, one has to makeup crazy alterative stories to suffice the point you are trying to make; for example, to account for the fact if your representations are completely inaccurate, then it seems that you have being able to live a persistent life in an observably regular world without dying or seeing other people randomly drop dead (since their representations are just a hallucinated-like la-la-land) would be to posit an absurdly epistemically costly explanation of something like “well, it’s because we are in a matrix and stored safely in a encapsulated container in the real world” or “the simulation is fabricating the existence of the people died in the real world, which appear random in the dream world” or, worse yet, “there are no other people”.
Moreover, you didn’t answer my question:
The evidence is that you are experiencing a regular, persistent world and only when your faculties are damaged do you appear to lose one’s ability to accurately-enough represent the world to themselves; and, not to mention, that we have loads of evidence of evolution, which entails that your brain evolved to represent the world for survival purposes: otherwise, you would have been dead by now.
Hello Janus,
You said:
Either you (1) believe there are laws (which are inductively affirmed by science) and philosophical principles (which are presupposed in science) or (2) you don’t. Laws are not observed regularities: the latter is evidence of the former. If #1, then you are admitting that a significant portion of science is (1) based off of faith and (2) unprovable because it is not observed (as it is an intellectual inference we make inductively). If #2, then you have to reject science, as it cannot function if you reject PSR (at least of becoming: that every change does have a cause); but if you accept it then, according to you, it is based off of faith (because you never observe that every change has a cause). Janus, although you may not explicitly subscribe to it, scientism doesn’t work, which is what you seem to be expounding here.
To me, ‘beliefs’ can be justified and proven with reason, and observations supplement those arguments. I can know things beyond mere observation (e.g., 1 = 1, a = a, p ? q, laws of nature, laws of logic, PSR [of becoming], etc.). According to your view, as I understand, we are forced to claim that anything not directly observed is epistemically unjustified (as so-called ‘non-public’ evidence).
This is incoherent with your belief that anything which is not directly observed (and thusly so-called ‘non-public evidence’) is not epistemically justified: laws of logic is not something you directly observe and would consequently be a ‘faith-based’ absurdity under your view.
:up:
Now that is where we agree.
A sophisticated direct realism is more parsimonious still. This is exactly because nothing is higher than reason (for philosophers) AND because the rational discussion is primarily concerned with worldly public objects (the stuff in our world). As discursive subjects establishing truth together rationally, we must already be in the same world. What the indirect realist is trying to account for is bias and error and hallucination. But there are other ways to do this without dualism. One can even accept hallucinations in one's ontology without putting the subject in a bubble.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14575/rationalisms-flat-ontology
Perhaps it's a metaphysical position. I'm not positive it's true or that, if it is, it's truth can be demonstrated. It certainly is true for the foreseeable future.
Now, to contradict that, I'll make an argument that it is true. As Stephen J. Gould used to say, the world is massively contingent. If we reran the history of the world, things would turn out differently. [Vague arm waving about chaos theory and quantum mechanics here] Assuming life on Earth would get started at all, I've heard arguments that it would still have to be based on water and carbon for chemistry reasons. But would it still have to be based on DNA? After single cell life first developed, it just sat around twiddling it's thumbs for a couple of billion years before multi-cell life and sexual reproduction popped up. On the other side, I've heard arguments that life would probably look a lot like it does now because of converging evolution. Even if that's true, it still would be different in very significant ways that, it seems to me, would not be predictable.
Quoting Patterner
I thought this was an accidental discovery by some geeks with a microwave detector in the 1960s.
I did understand what you wrote, but I don't think the distinction you are making is important in this particular context. As I noted, the universe is just out there wiggling around. We're the ones who put labels like "physical" and "mental" on stuff. Your the one who chose this particular epistemic cut.
By the way, is my understanding of the meaning of that phrase, which I discussed in my previous post, correct?
Quoting T Clark
Looking on the web, it doesn't seem to me this is what epistemic cut means, but I'm not sure.
Reason is rooted in emotion fundamentally and even then we did make up the rules for it as well. So that sort of blows a few holes in its reliability. I mean just look at flat earth and vaccine denialism.
Your example doesn’t show you know things beyond mere observation, it’s more just assertions like 1=1.
Science was able to show us the holes in our reasoning through the myriad of unconscious biases we employ each day.
But it isn't: you can't account, by my lights, for the fact that our brains are representing the world to us. For example, how do you account for the fact that if your brain is damaged in a particular way, then you lose your ability to see red if you aren't experiencing a representation of the world?
You are right that our faculty of reason is using one's perceptions as input, but in order to account for many of those perceptions (and their relation to one another) the brain (and, more generally, the body) is best posited as representing the world (i.e., experiencing it via a filtered result from the understanding). You are basically throwing away, by my lights, the vast majority of biological and neurological knowledge that we have gained in the past 2 centuries and saying that, somehow, we are actually not filtering the world but, rather, directly experiencing it. Are you saying that our brains just let the data of experience 1 to 1 pass-through?
You can only ever use reason: you have no choice. How else would you suggest that you can prove something or warrant a belief?
It is true that reasoning is rooted in emotions; however, we do not makeup the rules of logic: we discover them; and we can certainly fumble our way through such a discovery.
It was not a flaw in reason that these were wrong, but, rather, in one's reasoning. Our faculty of reason is our deployment of logic, modality, etc.: it is not a particular chain of derivation.
You will never observe the number 1, ever. Nor that 1 must equal itself.
I think you are conflating our faculty of reason with the term 'reasoning'.
Quoting Bob Ross
Kinda sounds like a flaw in reason, I mean why should anyone take your word for it? What makes your reasoning better?
Quoting Bob Ross
Allegedly, I get by fine without reason.
I feel that calling it hidden dualism is a bit misleading because this is a wider problem afflicting the whole of Western philosophy. 'Hidden mind-matter dualism' would be sharper. I wouldn't call it hidden but just rather obvious sloppy or devious thinking. I share the view of you and Chalmers as to the amount of sleight of hand that goes on in consciousness studies. It's an epidemic. . .
Note please that you are assuming your own framework -- talking of 'representations' of the world -- in the presentation of the 'problem.' For various reasons, I frame awareness on terms of the direct apprehension of the world --not representation but good old fashioned seeing and smelling and ...
I have no objection to our determining causal relationships between states of awareness and whether the brain is intact. No dualism required.
---He cannot contemplate [math] \sqrt{2} [/math], because he's dead.
---He's feeling no pain, because they gave him morphine.
Pain and [math] \sqrt{2} [/math] are just entities in a 'flat' ontology inferentially related to other entities like Paris and protons. We 'scientific' ontologists in our demand for justifications are not on the outside looking in --that's a failure of self-consciousness, an 'alienated' failure to notice our own central role.
As far as I understand, the person who first adopted neutral monism, though I don't believe his used this term, was William James. Russell was influenced by it and then developed a version of it. I unsure if Whitehead would accept this very label, probably sticking to "the philosophy of organism".
Whitehead did influence Russell to think of the world in terms of "events", rather than object and properties.
In any case, I think that the actual problem is matter - not consciousness, we know very little about matter, much more about consciousness. But people tend to go the opposite route and say that experience is the problem.
I understand why you want to say that, but I think you are reifying the [ discursive, dramaturgical ] subject. Are we gremlins in the pineal gland ? Do you sit behind your eyes, looking out the windows ? But then the tiny actual you must also have eyes that a tinier man sits behind, ad infinitum.
Or our we always already on the 'public stage' of the rational conversation ? Are we not better understand as discursive selves ? The conditions for the possibility of rational conversation cannot be rationally denied.
Our linguistic-conceptuals selves are more like softwhere on the crowd than the lardwhere they run on.
Quoting T ClarkIIRC, The people who got the Nobel accidentally discovered it. They were trying to find the source of the "noise" in there readings. Something like that?
But other people had just started looking for it at the same time, because their calculations told them it should be there. Which sucks for them!!
Yeah I was trying to think the best label. “Process philosophy” or organism seems very specific. I meant neutral monism in that it’s all occasions of experience organized differently. Not a dualist or traditional physicalist etc.
Quoting Manuel
I think I can agree here. That seems to be the incredulous move for many materialists because it gives mental qualities to physical. Panexperientialism and it’s varieties, seems a bridge too far. At best it seems, the materialist makes the move to say mental is “illusory” or somehow epiphenomenal or something like this. That is to say it simply relabels the phenomena or begs the question.
I think many of us on the other side of the argument would agree with, obviously, different opinions about who is doing the prestidigitation.
Thanks for your post! Yes, I agree, it is the slipping in and out of these categories that can cause problems all over, especially correlation versus identity, etc.
Perhaps, but I find the problem more one sided. The OPs position is more open minded so needs less wriggling on the hook. But I accept there's two sides to the debate. .
Hello Plaque Flag,
So, under your view, the brain is not representing anything? ‘Seeing’ and ‘smelling’, by my lights, are senses: are you saying we have senses without perceptions (i.e., formulations of those sensations)?
I am particularly interested in this one, as this demonstrates that ‘he’ is representing the world, and that is in the form of his conscious experience; for giving him morphine has inhibited his sensory receptors and cognitive functions and thusly he has lost his ability to represent pain (i.e., and lost his ability to have the sense of touch in general). How would you explain it if his body is not responsible for representing unpleasurable and unwanted damage to his body in the form of pain?
I read your OP on flat ontology, and I don’t understand it yet. Is it a form of quantitative monism?
Pain, as the qualitative sensation, is not in the world like, for mathematically realists, the square root of two is; so I don’t understand how it is ‘flat’ in that sense.
Science can’t afford ontology: it afford a map, not the territory. Ontology is metaphysics, not physics.
I don’t think anyone in contemporary metaphysics thinks that they are on the outside looking in: we are on the inside looking out.
No we are not gremlins in a pineal gland. No I do not sit behind my eyes. I am a collective organism that represents the world to itself via sensibility, receptivity, and the understanding. The eyes are what are used to see, and there is no reason to posit another set of ‘eyes’ within them, so no ad infinitum here (by my lights).
What do you mean by ‘public stage’? Rational conversation is of our representations. What else would it be?
I did not understand your answer to this question: could you elaborate? I am not asking about language nor concepts (in the sense of our faculty of reason taking in our perceptions as input and derive ideas/concepts of them in our native language)—I am talking about representations (i.e., our faculty of understanding producing a filtered representation of the world).
Hello Darkneos,
Let’s take an example (of what I believe you are referring to here): there’s a red block on the table in front of me and I say “there’s one red block!”. Did I thereby experience the number 1? I would say: no! Why? Two reasons. Firstly, and the most common argument, is that the object is distinct from the number 1. There is an object which is 1 object, but that is not the number one: it has the form of one; so, what you experience is an concrete object, which is not the number one, with the form of one (i.e., unity: a whole) and never the abstract object of one (or the abstract concept, if you are nominalist, of one). Numbers are abstract, they aren’t concrete. In other words, you will never bump into the number 1, but you may bump into one (concrete) object.
Another, secondly, is because singling out an object within the sea of experience is not equivalent to experiencing a quantity of one. I can easily split the ‘red block’ into two red blocks without manipulating it whasoever by simply conceptually divvying the red block in half: no different than how I can single out 1 finger or 2 parts of that finger—it’s all just nominal.
I don’t want anyone to blindly follow me: please see the above arguments—let’s start there.
You must use reason, in the sense that you cannot avoid it. You are using your faculty of reason to argue against me right now; and you use it in practical life every time you so much as think (implicitly or explicitly).
I'm tempted to say we should talk as simply as possible to get at my point. I see this lamp on my desk. I perceive it. It's right there in front of me. I put my hand on it, and the metal is cool to the touch.
All the background biological stuff that enables this is not being denied. But the discursive subject only makes senes as a worldly 'public' entity. We now are on a 'stage' together or at a table enacting the norms of a scientific inquiry. Anything talk that calls that into question is necessarily unjustifiable.
I embrace the existence of pain. The meaning of pain is (roughly) its inferential relationships with other entities, like morphine and the spinal cord and spiritual training perhaps. Both 'mental' and 'physical' entities exist on the same inferential plane. All entities are interdependent. The pain is not and cannot be part of some absolutely disconnected 'interior.' The concept could have no meaning, no use.
Your pain exists in my world, even if I access it differently than you. Otherwise we could never talk about it. Pain plays a role in inferences like umbrellas and sardines.
The pain need not be understood as a representation of something else, even if we do indeed articulate a causal relationship of the pain or its absence with rusty nails and doses of morphine.
The main idea in my flat ontology is that the 'fundamental' aspect of entities is their inferential relationships to one another. That they exist otherwise in very different ways is something like a distraction. It's fine that nickels and protons and octonions exist and are accessed very differently. They are all connected by the role they play in our giving and asking for reasons for claims about them. We rational ontologists are not outside looking in. Our normative discourse establishes the conceptual structure of the only reality we can talk about sensibly.
I agree: an organism. But... as a scientist / ontologist, you are not just goo or even just self-modelling goo. You are at this table with me talking about reality, living into and toward an ideal of rationality. Dramaturgical ontology. The biological details that make this possible are secondary to the dramaturgical possibility of establishing such details rationally.
Rational conversation is, I insist, about the worldly object, the public object. Occasionally we might talk about your 'take' on Hegel instead of Hegel. But both are worldly objects accessed differently.
I'm trying to say that normative linguistic rationality and the inferential relationships between entities are, for us, the 'deepest' level. Whether or not the representational framework is meaningful and appropriate depends on logical and semantic norms that transcend any particular ontologist on the 'stage' of the public ontological inquiry.
What does it mean for a person to be rational ? What does it mean to feel the responsibility to justify claims ? And the duty to change a set of beliefs when they are not coherent? Our rational inquiry is not outside of Being peeping in.
The necessary being for ontology is a community of ontologists articulating reality together. This implies a shared world and a shared language.
I guess I see it more as imagining a hook so you have something to wriggle on.
Quoting FrancisRay
So insightful :clap:
I asked a question which you didn't answer. Do you know why are you are jumping to conclusions about whatever arguing you are speculating about?
In any case, I'd say the poisoning of the well began with your OP.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Well, by all means, present your Danish Room Argument, but it's sounding like it amounts to an assertion that science has no role to play in explaining "what it is like".
That seems fairly out of touch with what the Philpapers survey suggests is mainstream philosophy of mind:
As for me, scientific understanding has proven to be of enormous explanatory value in understanding what is like to be me. (And to some degree, what it is like to be you.) More and more it looks to me, as if you are a modern day analog to a geocentrist, when it comes to the topic of philosophy of mind, but you do you.
BTW, I'm rather accustomed to, and unbothered by, people finding things I say disagreeable. Respond or don't, as you like.
I looked at the survey you referenced and don't think I could get through all the questions without a dictionary of philosophy although the questions are rather simple.
On the mind question, physicalism or non-physicalism, I would be stuck picking 'other'.
For the majority picking physicalism how do they account for our endless mental content of non-physical subject matter? For example anything outside their present time and location. Of course it's done by physical means but shouldn't brains with the capability to deal with non-physicals be considered? And do the physicalists have any way of dealing with time outside the present? Past and future are non-physical to me.
So for a physicalists dealing with the past or future there really might be a hidden dualism.
Very much agree.I couldn't complete the survey because my view is not listed. The survey gives away just how hidebound and ideologically limited academic consciousness studies is. It's as if nobody has even heard of non-dualism.
Could you give an example of this explanatory value?
It's interesting you use the word hidebound to describe the...academics. Have you noticed the inconsistencies in their positions? They want everything to be physical but are alright with information being an abstract concept. Or claiming scientific understanding of information by referencing Claude Shannon. Or genetic information. Or physical information. The point being these are all incompatible as a whole and they don't see the problem in it....they are saying 'because science' without backing it up with a fundamental basis.
I'm saying physicalism or dualism should be logically consistent with your position on consciousness, information, time perception, physical matter...the whole list.
A nice feature of the Philpapers survey webpage is the choices in results display that can be selected. (Hit refresh to get a page updated to show the new results display.) Earlier I copied and pasted the default coarse grained results, but selecting fine grained shows:
Quoting Mark Nyquist
I couldn't speak for the survey respondents. For myself, I'd ask you to clarify what you would find surprising about a physical system being able to represent ideas of things which don't exist in our physical reality.
I asked the physical system ChatGPT, "who is voldemort" and got the response:
Physical representations of things which don't actually exist in physical reality doesn't seem problematic from my perspective.
Quoting Mark Nyquist
Brains which can encode memories of the past, and use those memories to project possible futures, seems to be one of the major reasons that brains have been evolutionarily adaptive. A lot of the benefit of our brains' modelling capabilities lies in our ability to imagine multiple possible futures, and only one of those multiple possible futures might actually occur. Our ability to imagine counterfactuals plays an important role in us having human level abilities to affect how the future unfolds.
So, I guess I would say that "brains with the capability to deal with non-physicals" are considered by physicalists, but perhaps I am not understanding your question.
Sure. Understanding the nature of deep learning in neural nets has given me a lot of insight into the nature of human intuitions, the reliabilty or lack thereof of human intuitions, and what it takes to change intuitions.
Actually I don't disagree. Great explanation of how a physicalists could deal with the non-physical. I think this secondary level gives the detail that can resolve physicalism vs dualism.
Those things are all ideas/concepts that you gave examples of. Ideas are part of the "what-it's-like" subjective nature of "mental". That is the thing to be explained. That physical things "represent" them, has never been in question, even by dualists or idealists.
And this is where this particular argument always ends. It's only a question of how long it will go on till it peters out. And then in a day, or a week, or 10 minutes, it will just start up again. I'll see you then.
There do seem to be laws of nature; there are constantly observed regularities, and very little, or perhaps even no, transgression of those laws. Are those laws independently existing or are they human formulations that merely codify observed invariances? Who knows?
Quoting Bob Ross
I have said that both what is publicly observable and the principle of consistency (validity) in logic are unarguably important in those domains of inquiry where knowledge is most determinable. Consistency alone is important everywhere. So, there is no "incoherency" or inconsistency in what I've said, since I've never claimed that logical principles are observable.
They are pragmatically necessary if you want to have a coherent and consistent discussion about anything is all. But they cannot determine what is true. This is a basic understanding in logic; that you can have valid arguments which are unsound, because although the conclusion(s) are consistent with the premises, the premises may be untrue, or even nonsensical.
There really is a problem of terms and definitions here to sort out:
Physicalism - only the physical exists
Or
Physicalism -the physical exists AND physical brains have the ability to deal with.the non-physical
Dualism - the physical and the non-physical exist
Or
Dualism - the physical exists AND physical brains have the ability to deal with the non-physical
So for me the second definitions are both the same and both correct.
Of course these are my own definitions based on our short discussion of the issue.
This wouldn't happen if you argued with me.
Yes, I cannot grasp why researchers are usually so afraid of thinking outside their box. Not long ago scientists were arguing that consciousness doesn't exist and they still haven't found a 'scientific' way to prove that it does. They don;t seem to notice that the study of consciousness goes back to before the invention of writing but prefer just to ignore previous research. No hard problems arise for the traditional explanation of consciousness, provided by people who actually study it and do not just speculate/ Physicalism and dualism do not survive analysis,and yet still they are endorsed. Apparently ideology trumps logic and reason. . . . .
If you're saying that an explanation of consciousness must work in metaphysics then I fully agree and would expect everyone to do so. Otherwise the explanation will not work. I happen to like information theories, but only if the information space is part of the theory and not just forgotten. As Schrodinger notes, as well as all the multitude of phenomena there is the 'canvas on which they are painted'. .
I seriously doubt this - but can't imagine how you could demonstrate your new understanding so won't push the point.
It's not just my understanding, and it is not all that new. If you are interested in learning about the subject, the 2016 Atlantic article How Google's AlphaGo Imitates Human Intuition is a decent popular level article touching on salient points.
Alternatively, if there is something that you have real expertise in, and you recognize the role that intuition plays in your exercising that expertise, then perhaps in discussing your area of expertise I could point out things that would give you a greater recognition of how intuition works in yourself.
Admittedly, this stuff is somewhat esoteric at this point in human history, but there is no magic involved, and understanding of it is inevitably going to become more widespread. (Barring a near total collapse of human culture.)
Sorry, I wasn't thinking about metaphysics at all.
But if you get as far as our brains operating in an environment of non-physical content then metaphysics...or mental content without physical limits...is better understood.
My instincts are to avoid metaphysics so I just don't deal with it much unless someone brings it up.
Anyone who has been around here long knows we have beat information theories to death. And there is no consensus.
I like information as brain state because it's logically defensible in a philosophical debate and is a singular definition that doesn't separate brains from what information is.
Hello Janus,
Do you agree that your commitment to the laws of nature is faith-based and not a publicly observed piece of data? Observed regularities not laws: these are two different things. One is the absolute principle which affects entities within its jurisdiction, and the other is simply something we have observed many times.
Are you saying that logical consistency coupled without observation is all that we can know? That would exclude all laws of logic except for the law of noncontradiction (which, to me, seems like special pleading), the laws of nature, and literally any other metaphysical claim. Why?
Secondly, that one should be logically consistent, since it is not publicly observed, would be a matter of faith under your view as well. Again, either, I think, you will have to concede that we can know things without observation (and then open the door to metaphysics proper) or get rid of all principles which are beyond observation (including logical consistency).
Correct. But it would be faith based on your view irregardless: you were arguing that metaphysics (such as idealist theories) are faith-based because they are not publicly observable evidence. My point is that this self-refutes many principles (such as logical consistency) under your own view: you are cutting your own head off (and this is why full-blown empiricism, which is just scientism, is self-defeating).
Logical principles determines what is true insofar as they are the form of the argument; so I can say that an argument with a logical contradiction in it is false because it violates that logical law. Logic itself, as you noted, cannot invalidate nor validate arguments past their form. But, why does this matter for you claim? If you admit that using logic is not faith based, then I can equally claim that using occam’s razor is not faith based; and just use the argument from parsimony to argue for idealism, which you said was somehow faith based!
Is that because you are so wise and articulate? I already spent three or four days discussing this with @Quixodian, @Patterner, and @schopenhauer1 before you started to participate. Those three are certainly capable of making the case. As I noted, this subject gets worn out pretty quickly. We've all made the same arguments before and will again.
I'm trying to decide whether our differences are matters of fact or metaphysics. I have a prejudice toward considering intractable questions as metaphysics, which allows me to put them aside without it feeling like I'm cheating, but I'm not sure here.
If science is not the correct method for studying consciousness, please describe a program of study that might be.
Oh no. Certainly not. It's because I endorse non-dualism and for this no problems arise.
You'll find that those who do not understand non-dualism do not understand metaphysics and as a consequence cannot make sense of consciousness. I would cite the whole of modern consciousness studies for evidence. I'm coming from somewhere else and endorse the explanations given by the Buddha, Lao Tzu.and Schrodinger, which are entirely ignored and usually unknown to most people working in modern consciousness studies.
I don't believe there are any intractable problems in metaphysics. If you look you'll see that all those who claim metaphysical problems are intractable do not know the Perennial philosophy. This is not a coincidence.
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The empirical sciences are unable to prove consciousness exists. This is why back in the mid 20th century the orthodox 'scientific' view was that it doesn't. Using sensory empirical methods to study consciousness is not a scientific approach. A scientific approach would study the actual phenomenon. This requires a 'hands-on' approach, as employed by the old science of consciousness,
The critical issue is dualism in whatever form it takes. To make sense of metaphysics and consciousness requires abandoning it. Once one abandons dualism progress is possible, If one sticks to it no progress is possible, as is evidenced by the history of Western philosophy.
I don't regard the approach taken by modern consciousness studies as scientific and suspect neither would Karl Popper. I feel a scientific approach is required. But this would mean investigating consciousness and not just talking about it, and this idea is too mystical for dualists and materiallsts.
The fact remains, however, that non-dualism allows us to explain consciousness and metaphysics, and until it is falsified or refuted there will be no good reason to conjecture it is wrong. But on this topic ideology seems to cause endless problems. Most people argue against it without even bothering to find out what it is. This approach is not scientific or even in accord with basic standards of scholarship.
I hope my indignation at this sloppy workmanship is not too obvious. .
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. .
I'm confused. I've always considered the people who search for answers to the so-called hard problem of as the dualists. Looking back over your posts in this thread, you come down on the side of @schopenhauer1 and the rest of the hard problemers. Doesn't that make you a dualist? Or do I have the terminology mixed up?
Quoting FrancisRay
If you've read much of what I've written here on the forum, you've seen that a lot of my metaphysics is based on my understanding of the Tao Te Ching. I don't see any contradiction between that and a belief that consciousness can be fruitfully studied using science.
Sorry, it's the first I've heard about non-dualism, but that's not surprising because I just hate reading philosophy, so I never do.
As a test, does non-dualism have any insight into time perception? The materialist/physicalist view seems to have some difficulty with it and they may need to concede that the brain has an ability to deal with the non-physical. Dualism based on physical matter seems to do better. Does non-dualism have any insight on how we perceive time? I have a problem with metaphysics being more fundamental than physical matter.
What gives you that impression? I'm a materialist/physicalist/naturalist and certainly don't see myself as having any particular difficulty with time. (Relatively speaking.)
Might that be a conclusion you jumped to, in light of my not having responded to your earlier post?
I agree with you that...
Quoting Mark Nyquist
...and there are matters of learning as well.
Suppose that physical reality is all that there is. In that case, wouldn't "dealing with the non-physical" equate to "dealing with the nonexistent"?
I'm not committed to the laws of nature: I'm saying that regularities are observed everywhere; if you want to study things and try to understand how they work, what alternative is there to observation?
Quoting Bob Ross
Why can you not carry on a discussion with me without distorting what I've said? I've said that what we can know via observation, logic and mathematics is all we can know. If you think there is some other kind of knowledge which can actually be demonstrated to be such, as opposed to being merely speculation, then please offer up an example.
Quoting Bob Ross
More distortion!. That is not my view at all, and nothing I've said states or implies that it is. How will I know what you think if your argument is not coherent, consistent and does not contradict itself? This has nothing to do with faith, but with coherency and intelligibility.
Quoting Bob Ross
I've said many times that all metaphysical positions, including materialism or physicalism, cannot be tested by observation, and so are faith-based, How does this refute the principle of logical consistency and what are the many other principles you claim it refutes?
Quoting Bob Ross
The principle of consistency determines what is valid not what is true. It might help you to take a course in elementary logic. The conclusion of an invalid argument may indeed be true.
There is the non-physical which I agree is by definition physically non-existent. But what I meant is a brain supported concept of something, such as the past, that is understood to be non-physical.
I thought we agreed not so long ago.
Anyway, I was asking FrancisRay.
I need to go back to see who said what.
I forget. I'm regular here sometimes but there are gaps in what I follow. Non-dualism was new to me.
You're probably right. I made it sound like you were conceding something. My fault.
There is still an issue I have with physicalism. Physical matter is restricted to the physical present. Our mental content can deal with past, present and future. Doesn't this stepping outside the physical present make mental content different in kind from physical matter? Without brains nature on it's own would have no mechanisms to know the past or affect the future.
So with brains something extra has been added to the mix that strict physicalism (as a philosophy) doesn't permit.
You've already bragged about not knowing much about philosophy. Now you've verified that by showing you don't know much about metaphysics either.
Hmm. This is an odd place to find someone who hates reading about philosophy.
Non-dualism requires a neutral metaphysical theory.for which time does not really exist. The idea of the practice is to transcend time and space. You might like to check out the mathematician Hermann Weyl's book on the continuum. He points out that we do not perceive the passing of time but create it out of memories and anticipations. The continuum of mathematics and physics he dismisses as a fiction. In this respect he endorses the non-dual doctrine.
Metaphysics rejects time and matter as fundamental phenomena. If we believe they are fundamental then metaphysics will be a muddle of paradoxes and antinomies since this idea contradicts logic. Do you really find ti difficult to imagine that matter has a prior origin? Is it not more difficult to believe it does not? . .
I can see the problem. My position is that the hard problem is metaphysical, and that if this is not recognized then it is hard (intractable) for the reason Chalmers originally gives. As a metaphysical problem it is tractable but only when we abandon dualism. The same would go for all metaphysical problems. In this context 'dualism' would be the belief that two things exist. Non-dualism states there are not two things, hence the phrase 'advaita' (not-two) to describe it. . ,
It can be studied scientifically. and Yoga is often described as a science, but not empirically. Lao Tzu makes no use of empiricism for his knowledge but explains it by saying 'I look inside myself and see'' He endorses the non-dual doctrine for which reality and consciousness are the same phenomenon and it is a unity, and this is how he can know about Tao and the 'ancient origin', the knowledge he calls the 'essence of Tao'. . .
I wonder how you would go about studying consciousness empirically. Can you imagine a way of doing this? Generally, academic researchers have to rely on second-hand reports. It is telling that scientists used to dismiss consciousness as non-existent for the sake of Behaviorism. This view arose because it cannot be studied empirically. Sometime round the 1980s they changed their mind and decided it did exist but I don't know what brought about this change of heart. It was not any new data. .
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Hello Janus,
Where I am confused then, is why you said:
Saying “there do seem to be laws of nature”, by my lights, is admitting that you believe in laws of nature, am I misunderstanding? Irregardless, if you are saying that you don’t believe in laws of nature, then I am asking you: do you agree with me, by your own terms, that believing in laws of nature is on faith?
To me, it seems like you are denying this as well, am I wrong?
Janus, how can I distort what you have said (in any meaningful sense), if I am asking you questions? What you quoted is me asking for clarification! I am not saying you said that, I am asking if that is what you are saying.
To try and be as fair as I possibly can, to demonstrate to you that I am genuinely trying to understand you, I will layout the core of the issue here. You just said this to clarify “my distortions”:
But also said (a while back):
There is not publicly available evidence of the laws of logic nor the principles that guide mathematics; therefore, under you view, they are faith-based. No?
To me, it seems like you are special pleading that somehow only faith-based logic and math is acceptable as knowledge, but all other metaphysics is out the window. Why? There literally can’t be observable proof of logic, as it is presupposed in any observation!
I think we know metaphysical things as well, with principles such as parsimony, logical consistency, coherence, reliability (of the data being used for justification), intuitions, and explanatory power.
I think we can know that every change has a cause, that objects have persistence, that there is a transcendent world (i.e., no solipsism), that there are other proper subjects than oneself, that there are laws of nature, that there are laws of logic, etc; all of which are apparently unwarranted faith-based reasoning since we haven’t observed it—unless we, for some reason, exempt logic from that rule.
I will outline it again. You said:
Public evidence is things which are observed. The law of noncontradiction is not justified under any publicly available evidence; and since “faith-based beliefs” are ones which have “no publicly available evidence for them”, then it logically follows that the law of noncontradiction is faith-based (which is the basis of logical consistency). How is this a distortion of your view? It follows plainly from what you have said, and I quoted you to prove it.
The law of noncontradiction cannot be tested by observation, therefore it is faith-based (according to you terminology: not mine).
When it comes to hard problem (or more broadly mental versus physical or realism versus idealism, etc), one place to start is at the notion of "properties". What does it mean for a property to adhere/inhere in an object, versus a mind?
I agree with your more general comments about metaphysics, but I'm still uncertain about how others apply it to consciousness. I get the impression that hard problemers believe there is a specific, factual explanation for consciousness that is not approachable from a scientific point of view.
Quoting FrancisRay
This seems like a good explanation to me. My point wasn't that Taoism was established empirically, but that it provides an effective metaphysical foundation for science. On the other hand, I've always seen introspection as a valid source of knowledge, so "I look inside myself and see," can be a credible statement of fact.
Quoting FrancisRay
Consciousness already is and always has been studied scientifically. Psychology can be characterized as the study of mind, including consciousness. Second-hand reports can be perfectly valid empirical data. Our own consciousness is the only one we have access to direct evidence for, at least so far. Also - what we call "consciousness", especially in others, is really behavior which we can study more or less objectively. Consciousness can also be studied by more nuts and bolts science as in cognitive science.
You’re literally equivocating here in a way that the OP was questioning. Behavior versus mental. Or if it’s not equivocating it’s at least not acknowledging the distinction as that makes the difference.
The only evidence we have that consciousness exists in anyone but ourselves is our observations of other's behavior. Perhaps that will change with all the new non-intrusive monitoring methods, but we're not there yet.
This seems correct to me.If a 'scientific explanation' is one that depends on materialism being true then it would be my view also. I'd say it's the only available sensible view. Unless we abandon our unnecessary and demonstrably absurd metaphysical views then we cannot explain consciousness, mind, matter or anything else. .
As state it is, of course, a gross misuse of the term 'scientific'. If we use Popper's definition then of course there is a specific and factual explanation for consciousness. It's been around for thousands of years, ever since research into consciousness began. .
Spot on. If science rejects non-sensory experience as valid data then it has no reason to believe that consciousness exists and cannot study it. This is pretty much why Behaviorism became the orthodox view for a couple of decades. To deny the existence of mysticism, which is the study of consciousness, is not just a profoundly unscientific way of avoiding the study of consciousness but a laughable one.
I would collect together every book that has ever been published that correctly explains the Perennial philosophy,and hire a fleet of trucks to deliver them to the science department with a note asking them to produce a scientific explanation for why all their authors agree with each other and why everything they say is irrefutable and in accord with modern science and how what they say allows us to solve all metaphysical problems and put the natural sciences on a solid fundamental foundation. They have no 'scientific' method for studying consciousness and discovering the reason, but it might make make them wonder, Would this count as empirical evidence? . . . .
My view also. The only consciousness we can study scientifically is our own. Every other method depends on speculation. this seem such a basic and simple point that It's hard to imagine why anyone would miss it, other than for ideological reasons. I am very sure that our view will win the day, but how long it will take to do so is not easy to predict. .
:up:
The discursive self 'is' this coherence. Continual self-contradiction is no longer self-contradiction, but the discursive self dissolving into confusion. First philosophy is explication as much as inference. One need not prove a condition for the possibility of proof, though it seems like one of philosophy's job to fallibly make these conditions explicit.
Good question. This is known as the problem of attributes.
For the Perennial philosophy, as for Kant, extended phenomena are empty of substance or essence. They would be conceptual imputations. They would consist of their attributes and properties and in the words of Meister Eckhart are 'literally nothing. Both mind and matter would be illusory in some sense while the origin of all, which hides behind the veil of mind and matter but is always here and now, would would be prior to both.
If you ask the same question about the objects and attributes that appear in your dreams this would be a roughly analogical situation. . . . . ,
It sounds like differences in theories of time is playing a big role in this for you. Do you consider yourself to be a presentist, and if so, are you aware that presentism is problematic in light of all the evidence supporting relativity?
I'm not really interested in getting into an involved discussion of theories of time, so I hope you will look through that link. In any case, it isn't a logical problem for a physicalism, that you hold to a theory of time which is incompatible with physicalism. That only poses a problem for your ability to recognise the merits of a physicalist point of view.
Quoting Mark Nyquist
Why think nature wouldn't have the ability to affect the future without brains existing? Do you think the Sun's gravitational field didn't affect the course through space taken by the Earth before there were brains?
Quoting Mark Nyquist
I'd say the evolution of brains added what we might call new classes of physical processes to what occurs in the universe, although that is rather circular as it dependent on there being brains to classify physical processes into different sorts.
Regardless, I think you need to develop a more accurate picture of what things look like from a physicalist perspective before you will be in a position to say what physicalism does and doesn't permit.
I do like philosophy (as it is here) but I don't pick up books and spend hours. Maybe a short attention span but if you give references I'll usually spend a minute or two.
There is a lot to sort through on the time question. I think it's two problems. What is time physically? (If it exist at all) and what is time mentally?
Materialism is a metaphysical, not a factual, principle. Scientists don't have to be materialists in order to do science. Nothing "depends" on materialism being true.
Quoting FrancisRay
If you are saying the current state of our understanding of consciousness cannot be considered scientific, I disagree. That's not to say there are not a lot of scientific issues yet to resolve.
Quoting FrancisRay
I don't agree that mysticism is the study of consciousness. Psychology is the study of mind, including consciousness. Introspection is a valid method for studying human psychology. Introspection is not necessarily mysticism. Or mysticism is not necessarily introspection. Or something like that.
Quoting FrancisRay
I think you're mixing things up here. As I understand it, "perennial philosophy" is metaphysics.
We can say there is a discursive self, just as we might say there is a poetic self, a feeling self or an experiencing self, but are these selves anything more than ideas which overarch fields of inquiry or practice?
The way I see it this applies to the self tout court. I always liked Kant's use of the cogito, rejecting the Cartesian idea of self-as-substance, but highlighting the fact that in discourse every thought is an "I-think". Is that along the lines of what you are getting at?
It's more of an unfolding of what that actually means. In short, my dramaturgical-discursive self is organized as an essentially temporal being by making and keeping promises. I am held responsible as a temporal ideal-unity-in-progress of claims and deeds. Using a concept as a fully sapient being is understanding what the use of that concept commits one to. A parrot can repeat words without moving in this time-dimension of responsibility.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9752.12407
I emphasize the temporality that is merely implied because I've been interested in why folks might accept so readily that a 'Cartesian' stream of thoughts should 'automatically' be a monologue that understands itself as such. What would unify this stream of thoughts ? And what kind of unity could be expected but a temporal unity ? Turns out William James discusses the same thing in his famous psychology book, my latest purchase.
I think we are trained into being virtual foci of responsibility.
To me we can either call protons instrumental posits (useful fictions) -- or fallibly accept them as real. I use to choose instrumentalism, which is still reasonable, but I now prefer fallible realism.
All we ever have are beliefs, and we basically call beliefs true to say we share them. And that's it. And we can always be wrong. Or so I believe. And so maybe I'm wrong. But being wrong would mean (to me) getting a better view on the world that shows me how I'm wrong. The world-from-no-perspective is not something I can make sense of.
Yes. Although I suppose you could say hard problem depends on it being true.
What current understanding? the natural sciences have no method for acquiring an understanding. My point was that to confuse being ;scientific' with endorsing materialism is a serious error.
This is not a matter of opinion. What else could mysticism study when it teaches that everything is consciousness? .
This is not that case, as is noted by Kant. It studies the intellect, but not the source of the intellect. .
I'd say it depends on how you define 'introspection and how you practice it.
Yes it is, but it is also mysticism. Since Huxley's book under this title the phrase 'Perennial philosophy' and mysticism are synonyms.
If you doubt that mysticism is the study of mind and consciousness then I wonder how you interpret Lao Tzu. Do you see him as just a metaphysician? What else can one study while sitting in meditation? For Lao Tzu and the Perennial philosophy consciousness and reality are the same phenomenon. . .
He says in a post on an internet forum.
Unless, of course, the hard problem is metaphysical too. Let me think about it... I'm not sure, but it may be. For me, that ties in with the question of whether the hierarchies of scale are metaphysical too, which is something I've been thinking about for a while.
Quoting FrancisRay
I'll save this as a great example of begging the question.
Quoting FrancisRay
Isn't that what I just said?
Quoting FrancisRay
Of course it's a matter of opinion, your opinion. Here's what the dictionary says:
Quoting FrancisRay
Another matter of opinion. Again, from the web:
I'm using regular old common usage, i.e. the dictionary, as the source for what the words I use mean.
Quoting FrancisRay
Now you're just being difficult. Valid methods can be used badly.
Quoting FrancisRay
I'm not sure that's true and if it is, I don't understand how it's relevant to this discussion.
Quoting FrancisRay
That's not how I read him. Do you have an example where he says that?
This is what I mean. It is metaphysical, so of course it's going to be a hard problem to prove that it's not. I'm unable to understand people who believe it is not a metaphysical problem for it is ancient and well-known in metaphysics. It's just a guise of the mind-matter problem. .
Belief in direct experience of transcendent reality or God, especially by means of contemplation and asceticism instead of rational thought.
Such experience had by an individual.
Belief in the existence of realities beyond perceptual or intellectual apprehension that are directly accessible by subjective experience.[/quote]
NO, this is not mysticism. It is NOT a system of beliefs. It the pursuit of knowledge. Surely everybody knows this. Mysticism is the endorsement of these 'beliefs', yes, but this is a painfully worded definition. It is the pursuit of the knowledge of these things and it may be acquired only by exploring consciousness. Any fool can have a belief.
I would have thought that it is only necessary to read one book on mysticism to know that mysticism is the study of consciousness. It's goal is the discovery of Being, Consciousness and Bliss. ,.
Exactly. It does not study consciousness.
Always the best idea.
When Lao Tzu is asked how he acquired his knowledge he answers, 'I look inside myself and see'. Is this not a clue?
If you're arguing the mysticism is not the study of consciousness then thanks for the chat but we'd best leave it here. It is such a basic and easily verifiable fact. .
Forgive me, I copied this from the OP for a discussion I started a year or so ago called "What is mysticism."
I have some ideas about what mysticism is, but I’ve never tried to tie them down. For that reason, it’s not a word I use much. It definitely has a bad connotation in some uses – it’s often mixed up with ideas about the occult. Chinese warriors flying through the air with their swords flashing. Just to satisfy my own curiosity, I decided to look for a definition of “mysticism” that I can use from now on. Here are some definitions from several sources:
[1] Belief that union with or absorption into the Deity or the absolute, or the spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect, may be attained through contemplation and self-surrender.
[2] Belief characterized by self-delusion or dreamy confusion of thought, especially when based on the assumption of occult qualities or mysterious agencies.
[3] The experience of mystical union or direct communion with ultimate reality
[4] The belief that direct knowledge of God, spiritual truth, or ultimate reality can be attained through subjective experience (such as intuition or insight)
[5] Vague speculation : a belief without sound basis
[6] A theory postulating the possibility of direct and intuitive acquisition of ineffable knowledge or power
[7] Mysticism is popularly known as becoming one with God or the Absolute, but may refer to any kind of ecstasy or altered state of consciousness which is given a religious or spiritual meaning. It may also refer to the attainment of insight in ultimate or hidden truths, and to human transformation supported by various practices and experiences.
[8] The belief that there is hidden meaning in life or that each human being can unite with God
[9] The pursuit or achievement of personal communion with or joining with God (or some other form of the divine or ultimate truth).
I like number 4 the best. Based on that, yes, Taoism is a form of mysticism. The lesson I take from this exercise is that "mysticism" has at least two conflicting meanings. The first; as described in Items 1, 3, 4, and 9; represents a potentially valid method to gain knowledge about the world. The second; as described in Items 2, 5, and 6 represents a vague, undisciplined, invalid method to gain the appearance of knowledge or power. These two meanings are often mixed up. There are clearly those who don't think that mysticism, by whatever definition, is a valid means to knowledge.
Quoting FrancisRay
The Tao Te Ching is not about studying consciousness, it's about using consciousness, i.e. introspection and intuition, to study the world.
I should have said 'physical' sciences. With this qualifier I'd say the same in an academic journal if you wish and wouldn't be the first to do so.
Do you have a significant example of how science has helped us understand consciousness? At this tome I know of no scientist who claims any understand of it except for the rare ones outlier who explores meditation and mysticism. . .
Lot's of things get posted in academic journals by people who don't know the subject they are talking about as well as one might wish. I'm not seeing a need for more of that.
I've already presented the stats of relevant "hidebound" academics - those more likely to have have put significant scholarly effort into becoming informed about science which is of relevance to philosophy of mind, rather than choosing ignorant denial of the relevance of science.
Consider this quote from the home page of The Science of Consciousness Conference.
As you can see, knowledge of meditation is only one aspect of what is involved in being informed about this very interdisciplinary subject.
Quoting FrancisRay
Sure,
Science has helped humanity understand the ability of consciousness to be shut down, in the sense of ansthesia.
Science has helped humanity develop some understanding of the effects of a variety of mind altering physical substances.
Science has learned much about the limits of people's conscious perception. Such scientific understanding leads to the wide variety of optical and other sensory illusions which can be seen today.
I could go on like this forever, if not for my strong tendency to get bored and frustrated with people who want to be spoon fed rather than go educate themselves.
Quoting FrancisRay
Not something to be bragging about.
We are morally responsible for our actions, (although then only insofar as they will impact others) but we don't have to answer to anyone for our thoughts. I can tell you what i think without any expectation or concern that I am going to convince you to think as I do.
Quoting plaque flag
The third option would be to understand the arguments for both positions and to reserve judgement on the basis of what seems undecidable.
Quoting plaque flag
Do you think that the fact that world-from-no-perspective makes no sense to you entails that the world cannot exist without relying on any perspective?
I've believe that: all we ever have is beliefs. Such beliefs are the intelligible structure of the world as it is given to us (from our perspectives.) So this is how I currently experience the world, as given perspectively to myself and others.
I can't believe what I can't make sense of. I believe in 'round squares' as an kind of oxymoron or bad check. It exists in that sense, but I don't otherwise take round squares seriously. They just turn out to have a use as an example of the ability of humans to confuse themselves with sexy paradoxical phrases.
You are basically asking me if my not being able to make sense of the square root of blue means that there is no square root of blue. There's no great answer here. Nonsense does not compute.
But I really don't mind if people believe in things that seem like nonsense to me. I've been a skeptical atheistic fucker for a long time. It's just that here we should finally get to be honest on at least a few issues...as if we all agreed at the door to get our dearest beliefs and favorite phrases taken unseriously by others, so that we ourselves could enjoy the same privilege of not humoring those who make no sense to us.
I don't see the idea of the world existing independently of humans as being nonsensical or contradictory at all, unlike 'round squares" or "the square root of blue", so I'm afraid your thoughts on this point remain incomprehensible to me.
I say look at normative rationality at the heart of science and philosophy, the expectation that one justifies ones claims. Or look at a cheating boyfriend making excuses, or a job applicant making a case for a company's interest in hiring her. Or marriage vows. Or promising to take out the trash, walk the dog. Timestructure. Promises, explanations, justification of claims...
I think ancestral objects are a challenge to my view, but when one tries to imagine a meaning for the world existing independently of humans, one has only the raw material of experience. So one projects a fantasy, forgetting the living human being doing such projecting/imagining.
Just to be clear, the 'problem' is not so obvious as with the round square. But consider the spatial object, which is always seen perspectively. How else could it be seen ? That analogy carries over pretty well I think into this larger issue. We don't know what we are talking about. You can say you have a clear idea, and I can doubt it. And you can doubt my doubt. And so on. And that would be a kind of jam in the conversation.
But if you can make sense of the world existing independently of humans, I politely challenge you to share that sense here.
The question is what do or can you mean ?
I challenge the disconnected entity from a holist position as semantically ungrounded.
It's simply the idea that the cosmos existed before humans. I don't understand what you think is problematic about the idea.
This may help. From a famous book on this issue:
[quote = After Finitude]
...it would be naïve to think of the subject and the object as two separately subsisting entities whose relation is only subsequently added to them. On the contrary, the relation is in some sense primary: the world is only world insofar as it appears to me as world, and the self is only self insofar as it is face to face with the world, that for whom the world discloses itself...
...the metaphysician who upholds the eternal-correlate can point to the existence of an ‘ancestral witness’, an attentive God, who turns every event into a phenomenon, something that is ‘given-to’, whether this event be the accretion of the earth or even the origin of the universe. But correlationism is not a metaphysics: it does not hypostatize the correlation; rather, it invokes the correlation to curb every hypostatization, every substantialization of an object of knowledge which would turn the latter into a being existing in and of itself. To say that we cannot extricate ourselves from the horizon of correlation is not to say that the correlation could exist by itself, independently of its incarnation in individuals. We do not know of any correlation that would be given elsewhere than in human beings, and we cannot get out of our own skins to discover whether it might be possible for such a disincarnation of the correlation to be true. Consequently, the hypothesis of the ancestral witness is illegitimate from the viewpoint of a strict correlationism. Thus the question we raised can be reformulated as follows: once one has situated oneself in the midst of the correlation, while refusing its hypostatization, how is one to interpret an ancestral statement?
...
...our Cartesian physicist will maintain that those statements about the accretion of the earth which can be mathematically formulated designate actual properties of the event in question (such as its date, its duration, its extension), even when there was no observer present to experience it directly. In doing so, our physicist is defending a Cartesian thesis about matter, but not, it is important to note, a Pythagorean one: the claim is not that the being of accretion is inherently mathematical – that the numbers or equations deployed in the ancestral statements exist in themselves. For it would then be necessary to say that accretion is a reality every bit as ideal as that of number or of an equation. Generally speaking, statements are ideal insofar as their reality is one of signification. But their referents, for their part, are not necessarily ideal (the cat is on the mat is real, even though the statement ‘the cat is on the mat’ is ideal). In this particular instance, it would be necessary to specify: the referents of the statements about dates, volumes, etc., existed 4.56 billion years ago as described by these statements – but not these statements themselves, which are contemporaneous with us...
[/quote]
https://altexploit.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/quentin-meillassoux-ray-brassier-alain-badiou-after-finitude-_-an-essay-on-the-necessity-of-contingency-bloomsbury-academic_continuum-2009.pdf
It does seem reasonable to think that what exists prior to or apart from humans has the potential to resolve itself into subject and object if and when humans are present. I acknowledge this is difficult to speak about without being misinterpreted, since our language itself is obviously part of the lifeworld.
So, it does not seem to me at all self-contradictory to say that the cosmos existed prior to humans provided it is not presumed to say what the nature of a perspectiveless existence could be.
I don't doubt that some things make sense to some and not to others, which means that this issue is probably not susceptible to rational argument at all.
Damn, bringing in the speculative realists!
:clap:
I actually might agree here, and I am glad to see the word "perspectiveless" in there.
So we arrive at the mighty mystical X yet again ? It's fine to posit X as long as we admit (and don't even care) that we don't know what we are talking about ? Why not not posit it ? I'd rather just call paradox or confusion what it is. Why bluff ?
I don't agree with M, but I like that he sees the fucking issue. His weird attempt to wriggle out of correlationism is fascinating, and he sees his foe better than those who might be its ally if they understood it. My thread here is an outright variant of correlationism. As is any perspectivism that understands consciousness as the being of the world itself, through or for that perspective.
Quoting plaque flag
I don't see this as mystical. A perspectiveless world cannot be imagined, but it also cannot be imagined that the world absent any percipients could be anything but perspectiveless; I don't believe it can be imagined as simply non-existent, I think that notion is even more incoherent, more mystical.
subscribed to the journal of consciousness studies for three years and in that time did not see one scientific article that moved our understanding of consciousness forward by an inch and only about two philosophical articles that added anything useful. The subject is at a standstill. Fifty years of work and they can't even falsify the traditional explanation of consciousness that dates back three millennia.
But no matter. I'm going to drop out of the discussion. The idea that consciousness is fundamental and was explained long ago is clearly unwelcome. See you around. . . . .
If the absolute cannot be imagined then this is just a fact. Kant established that it is a fact and yet he is not dismissed as 'mystical'. The fats are the facts. But Kant does not say it does not exist and neither does mysticism. They say it lies beyond the categories of thought thus can be known but not thought.
This is just a thought. I'm moving on so no need to reply. . . .
If you don't see cognition and psychology as significant aspects of consciousness, then I don't know what you are referring to with the word "consciousness".
Quoting FrancisRay
That looks like black and white thinking to me. Why think that knowing a bit about the effects of anesthetics doesn't tell us a bit about consciousness. Why think that consciousness is something that might be well understood without knowing all sorts of bits?
It's the presumption that something is known about the real character of consciousness introspectively, or more strongly, that that is the only way anything can be known about the real character of consciousness. Such an attitude may well seem intuitively right, but its correctness or incorrectness can never be demonstrated; hence the interminable arguments that do not consist in arguments.
His thinking is in reference to Descartes.
I'm just referencing it, not endorsing it.
I mean do you want to explain how you want to use Ryle? He’s an early eliminitavist who seems to skirt the hard problem by way of saying that red is a public event. It’s a kind if intersubjective behaviorism whereby we can’t understand red in private way. I think it confuses concepts for the qualia of them. The eliminitavists need there to be a false assigning of origins but they don’t account for the actual phenomena. They replace origin with experience in itself.
I was thinking that hidden dualism and ghost in the machine are the same problem.
For a physicalist, thoughts, ideas, concepts (and possibly qualia) would have their neural correlates. So they exist in a physical state of a dynamic neural configuration. Is that right?
The problem is how do ideas transfer person to person. That suggests some ghostly part that doesn't have a physical basis.
You actually seem to make a hidden dualism error here.
Part 1: thoughts, ideas, concepts (and possibly qualia) would have their neural correlates.
Part 2: So they exist in a physical state of a dynamic neural configuration. Is that right?[/quote]
You are making it seem like the concepts exist in these states, as if, you were to examine the physical state long enough you will find "thoughts ideas, concepts (and possibly qualia).
No errors on my part. Do you have a reading comprehension problem?? Get up to speed or I won't talk to you.
Ha wild reaction man. If you want to correct me, go ahead.
Okay, just rhetorical,
Here's the issue.
I'm giving the physicalist perspective that I have a problem with.
And sorry for the delayed response because I have other obligations..
I've written quite a bit on information theory in philosophy and the problem comes up of how to deal with anything non-physical, like zero or time outside the present moment. Since non-physical by definition doesn't exist, the rational alternative is that the non-physical exists as a physically contained non-physical. Basically, neurons have the ability to contain the non-physical. Sorry, running out of time but if you go back in the archives of my comments you will get the jist of the problem.
But
Quoting Mark Nyquist
If puzzled
Quoting Mark Nyquist
:chin:
Actually, I could say that if a physical chain of control is fundamental to the process. Sure, but not based on abstract concepts.
You could say mental is functions of physical states (functionalism), or phenomenon of physical states (epiphenomenalism), and I feel this makes more sense.
You can imagine a body without mental (e.g. person in comma state - when the physical is in some compromised state), but you cannot imagine mental without body. Well you could, but you would sound like an occultist hiding the confusion.
Here's my take on monism, physicalism vs. dualism... The people who are monists will eventually realize there is something emergent that is non-physical. At that point the people who are dualists will say I told you so. But I think the physicalist may have the better understanding.
It is a mistake for a physicalist to exclude the non-physical. The ones that include it will get it right.
You know this how?
Sorry, typo...exclude, not excuse.
Still have a problem with it?
The sun is not in the sky... non-physical.
Physical and non-physical are embedded in our mental realities.
I'm afraid I don't know how to interpret your statements regarding physical and non-physical.
Suppose I suggest alternatives for your first two sentence.
1. It is 12:00 noon and the sun is in the sky above me.
2. It is 12:00 midnight and sun is in the sky above someone on the other side of the world, but not above me.
Is there a reason to make a physical/non-physical distinction between the two sentences?
Your example shows how our minds can travel time and space in a way that is non-physical.
Your side of the planet, 12 noon, sun visible
Your side of the planet, 12 midnight, sun not visible.
The other side of the planet, your midnight, there 12 noon, sun visible.
So you have sorted out the physical using your brains non-physical abilities.
It still seems to me that there is a need to deal with non-physicals. Because we can't avoid using them.
Our brains don't even depend or the subject matter being physical or non-physical. Both are handled with the same physical process and biology.
Tell you a big difference between physical and biological processes.
Physical processes don't rely on context. The equations of physics treat objects as idealised entities, which act in accordance with the laws of motion, disregarding external or extraneous factors, including goals, intentionality, and so on. (Of course, this has been called into question by the observer problem in quantum physics, in which the way the experimenter sets up the experiment will have a role in what is observed, but that can be left aside.)
Organisms, however, are completely different to that. Whereas the motions of physical objects are fully determined by physical laws, the processes involved in biology are described in terms that go far beyond the language of physics and chemistry. Words like “stimulus”, “response”, “signal”, “adapt”, “inherit”, and “communicate” are routinely used, not only for organisms, but also for organic molecules. And all of it takes place in a context, namely, 'the environment', which can be simply disregarded as far as classical physics is concerned.
The allure of physical reductionism is precisely that we can apply the kind of certainty that physics exhibits across the whole range of phenomena, living things included, leaving no ambiguity and allowing for the complete prediction and control we can obtain in physical systems. That is what physicalism means. But right from the outset, organic life introduces degrees of complexity and kinds of organisation that are completely outside the scope of physics as such. Believing that it can all be explained by physics or in physical terms is one of the reigning myths of today's culture. But that's all it is.
Quoting Mark Nyquist
is in conflict with
Quoting Mark Nyquist
I'm just thinking this through...
Maybe nested non-physicals, which do have a physical form in their neural correlates, proceed to new content.
I appreciate that, I can see you're wrestling with the problem. You mentioned here or some other thread you don't much like reading philosophy, but I think you're going to have to do some more research on it (although nowadays video and audio materials are viable options to reading).
Have you run across Terence Deacon? He's mentioned from time to time on this forum.
Still think I'm on the right track.
I watched part of a Terrence Deacon video.
Just my perspective, but I think he is strong on brain anatomy and monkey to human comparisons but weak on his theory of information and theory of language.
I like defining information as brain state only (because that's how it can exist in physical reality) and language should be a subcategory of our ability to manipulate mental content, as I described it.
So I maybe have a habit of cherry picking what I like and don't like but I try learning new things.
Usually takes a couple times for me.
For argument's sake, I solicited a summary of Deacon's idea of 'incomplete nature' from ChatGPT:
I would say, rather than nature being incomplete, that it's naturalism as currently understood that is incomplete. (But then if he called his book Incomplete Naturalism, probably nobody would have looked at it ;-) )So, it's a critique of naturalism insofar as that is reductionist. Perhaps you could say he's wanting to extend the scope of naturalism beyond the fundamental physical categories that hitherto have defined it.