Indirect Realism and Direct Realism
Hey, all! For context, I'm planning to write an article on indirect realism for my blog and would like to hear some good arguments for direct realism and some good arguments against my arguments for indirect realism. I've had some interesting responses from discord, so I thought that I would come here!
Here we go.
So, Indirect Realism is the thesis that we only have direct access to our perceptions. That is to say, we don't ever directly experience the external world, but our perception of it. That isn't to say that the external world is not real, as some may think, just that we experience it with a "middle man", of sorts - our perception.
Ok, with this aside, let us define Direct Realism, the thesis that do indeed have direct access to the external world.
Now let me propose a few arguments for Indirect Realism that I run. Note that all the names I'm giving these are non-standard.
First, the argument from the indiscernability of veridical and hallucinatory experiences.
Non-veridical experiences like hallucinations are not subjectively distinct from veridical experiences, that seem to represent what they actually represent. A dream is as subjectively real as your current experiences. These two are exactly the same to us. However, what we experience in the dream cannot be real. So, what we are directly acquainted with cannot be the real thing, but our perception of the real thing.
In a more formal articulation, the argument would go as such:
P1 if we were directly acquainted with external objects, then hallucinatory and veridical experiences would be subjectively distinct
P2 hallucinatory and veridical experiences are not subjectively distinct(i.e., subjectively identical)
P3 therefore, we are not directly acquainted with external objects
P4 if we are not directly acquainted with external objects, then we are directly acquainted with our perceptions of external objects
P5 therefore, we are directly acquainted with out perceptions of external objects
P6 therefore, Indirect Realism is true
Second, the argument from process.
Science has told us that there is a long chain of causal processes that has to occur before you perceive an object. Take your sight. To see the words on this post, light must first bounce off the screen and travel into your eyes. Then, your eyes must send an electrical signal into you brain. Then, you brain must process this electrical signal. Finally, you perceive the words on this screen. This is a simplified version of the process, not mentioning each individual instance where the light or electrical signal is travelling. With all this in mind, how could your perception of the words on this screen be direct?
In a more formal articulation, this argument would go like this:
P1 if there is a long causal process between the object that we perceive and our perception of the object, then we do not know the object directly
P2 there is a long causal process between the object that we perceive and our perception of the object
P3 therefore, we do not know the object directly
P4 either we know the object directly or we know the object indirectly
P5 therefore, we know the object indirectly
P6 therefore, Indirect Realism is true
Third, the argument from delay.
This is an extension of the argument from process. It takes special note of the fact that the causal process that forms your perception of an object takes time to occur. Let us consider the fact that light takes time to travel. This may have no real effect on your perception of things in everyday life. However, if we consider things like the sun, that are very far away, its effects start to be more obvious. It takes the light from the sun 8 minutes to reach your eyes. This means that the sun that you see now does not even exist! With this in mind, how could it be that you know this sun directly?
To put it more formally:
P1 if the things we perceive do not exist, then we do not know the things we perceive directly
P2 if the causal process that allows us to perceive things takes time, then the things that we perceive do not exist
P3 the causal process that allows us to perceive things takes time
P4 therefore, the things that we perceive do not exist
P5 therefore, we do not know the things we perceive directly
P6 therefore, Indirect Realism is true
Lastly, the argument from skepticism.
This argument argues from the fact that Indirect Realism has more explanatory power over other hypotheses when it comes to the existence of skepticism, specifically over Direct Realism.
Skepticism comes from the realisation that it is logically possible for your experiences and reality not to properly correspond. For example, during hallucinations, your experiences(the hallucination) and reality do not correspond.
On Indirect Realism, where what you are directly acquainted with is your perceptions and experiences, this is hardly surprising and even possibly expected. What you perceive is separate from what is real. So, what you perceive may not be real. Thus, Indirect Realism can account for and even possibly explain the existence of skepticism.
However, on Direct Realism, it is far more surprising that skepticism is a possibility. If what we directly know is the external world, then how could it be that it is possible that what we know and the external world do not correspond, if they are indeed identical? Thus, Direct Realism has difficulties accounting for the existence of skepticism, much less to predict it.
If you would like the argument more formally:
P1 if H1 can better account for P than H2, then we should accept H1 over H2
P2 Indirect Realism can better account for skepticism than Direct Realism
P3 therefore, we should accept Indirect Realism over Direct Realism
Please give constructive feedback and arguments for direct realism.
Here we go.
So, Indirect Realism is the thesis that we only have direct access to our perceptions. That is to say, we don't ever directly experience the external world, but our perception of it. That isn't to say that the external world is not real, as some may think, just that we experience it with a "middle man", of sorts - our perception.
Ok, with this aside, let us define Direct Realism, the thesis that do indeed have direct access to the external world.
Now let me propose a few arguments for Indirect Realism that I run. Note that all the names I'm giving these are non-standard.
First, the argument from the indiscernability of veridical and hallucinatory experiences.
Non-veridical experiences like hallucinations are not subjectively distinct from veridical experiences, that seem to represent what they actually represent. A dream is as subjectively real as your current experiences. These two are exactly the same to us. However, what we experience in the dream cannot be real. So, what we are directly acquainted with cannot be the real thing, but our perception of the real thing.
In a more formal articulation, the argument would go as such:
P1 if we were directly acquainted with external objects, then hallucinatory and veridical experiences would be subjectively distinct
P2 hallucinatory and veridical experiences are not subjectively distinct(i.e., subjectively identical)
P3 therefore, we are not directly acquainted with external objects
P4 if we are not directly acquainted with external objects, then we are directly acquainted with our perceptions of external objects
P5 therefore, we are directly acquainted with out perceptions of external objects
P6 therefore, Indirect Realism is true
Second, the argument from process.
Science has told us that there is a long chain of causal processes that has to occur before you perceive an object. Take your sight. To see the words on this post, light must first bounce off the screen and travel into your eyes. Then, your eyes must send an electrical signal into you brain. Then, you brain must process this electrical signal. Finally, you perceive the words on this screen. This is a simplified version of the process, not mentioning each individual instance where the light or electrical signal is travelling. With all this in mind, how could your perception of the words on this screen be direct?
In a more formal articulation, this argument would go like this:
P1 if there is a long causal process between the object that we perceive and our perception of the object, then we do not know the object directly
P2 there is a long causal process between the object that we perceive and our perception of the object
P3 therefore, we do not know the object directly
P4 either we know the object directly or we know the object indirectly
P5 therefore, we know the object indirectly
P6 therefore, Indirect Realism is true
Third, the argument from delay.
This is an extension of the argument from process. It takes special note of the fact that the causal process that forms your perception of an object takes time to occur. Let us consider the fact that light takes time to travel. This may have no real effect on your perception of things in everyday life. However, if we consider things like the sun, that are very far away, its effects start to be more obvious. It takes the light from the sun 8 minutes to reach your eyes. This means that the sun that you see now does not even exist! With this in mind, how could it be that you know this sun directly?
To put it more formally:
P1 if the things we perceive do not exist, then we do not know the things we perceive directly
P2 if the causal process that allows us to perceive things takes time, then the things that we perceive do not exist
P3 the causal process that allows us to perceive things takes time
P4 therefore, the things that we perceive do not exist
P5 therefore, we do not know the things we perceive directly
P6 therefore, Indirect Realism is true
Lastly, the argument from skepticism.
This argument argues from the fact that Indirect Realism has more explanatory power over other hypotheses when it comes to the existence of skepticism, specifically over Direct Realism.
Skepticism comes from the realisation that it is logically possible for your experiences and reality not to properly correspond. For example, during hallucinations, your experiences(the hallucination) and reality do not correspond.
On Indirect Realism, where what you are directly acquainted with is your perceptions and experiences, this is hardly surprising and even possibly expected. What you perceive is separate from what is real. So, what you perceive may not be real. Thus, Indirect Realism can account for and even possibly explain the existence of skepticism.
However, on Direct Realism, it is far more surprising that skepticism is a possibility. If what we directly know is the external world, then how could it be that it is possible that what we know and the external world do not correspond, if they are indeed identical? Thus, Direct Realism has difficulties accounting for the existence of skepticism, much less to predict it.
If you would like the argument more formally:
P1 if H1 can better account for P than H2, then we should accept H1 over H2
P2 Indirect Realism can better account for skepticism than Direct Realism
P3 therefore, we should accept Indirect Realism over Direct Realism
Please give constructive feedback and arguments for direct realism.
Comments (2225)
Makes sense.
P1. We are acquainted with the phenomenal character of experience.
P2. According to the naive realist, the phenomenal character of experience is constituted of distal objects and their properties.
C1. Therefore, according to the naive realist, we are acquainted with distal objects and their properties.
P3. According to the indirect realist, the phenomenal character of experience is constituted of mental phenomena.
C2. Therefore, according to the indirect realist, we are acquainted with mental phenomena.
Note that the term "mental phenomena" is impartial to property dualism and eliminative materialism.
Note also the technical term "acquainted", as described here.
And as explained above, for the phenomenal character of experience to be constituted of distal objects and their properties it requires that perceptual experiences "literally extend beyond the subject's head, to encompass what the experience is of".
Well, I hope not. That's the idea! :D
Notice how it parallels the claim of indirect realism -- experience or sense data is what we are directly acquainted with while objects are inferred and judged. My thought is this is a conceptual distinction rather than a scientific one. I don't think it's a matter of knowledge as much as an interpretation of what we know.
I don't know why I'd prioritize ipseity over the object. In a way I'd be more tempted to say we have an indirect knowledge of ourselves more than we have indirect knowledge of objects. We make inferences about the kind of creature we are and we do so through the direct mediation of the familiar world. At the most extreme I'd say there is no knowledge to be had about ourselves, though I know where my car keys are all the same, and that seems a bit too much to me in the same way: conceptual clarity is achieved as the sacrifice of fidelity to our intuitions.
If, in this decomposition, one could name something which is not a part of the world then you might have a candidate for indirect realism.
I think it's harder to do than with internal/external, or with Cartesian assumptions. Descartes' philosophy is pretty lock tight if we want to favor it, and it even appeals to a lot of basic intuitions. It's almost like there's a reason we still talk about it! :D
A lot of where I'm coming from is in rethinking these questions at a philosophical level so it's not so much these facts that's at dispute: Rather, I can't see how we'd be able to tell the story about retina, photons, or brains without knowing -- rather than inferring -- about the world.
Else, "retina, photons, brains" are themselves just inferences about an experiential projection in a causal relationship with a reality we know nothing about, but just make guesses about.
The only problem with this view being that we do know things, so it falls in error on the other side -- on the side of certain knowledge which rejects beliefs which could be wrong, when all proper judgment takes place exactly where we could be wrong.
Quoting Apustimelogist
There's a difference between being able to accomplish something, and knowing something.
I'd liken our neuroscientists to medieval engineers -- they can make some observations and throw together some catapults, but they do not know the mechanical laws of Newton or its extensions.
It's more because we're ignorant of how this whole thing works -- even at the conceptual level, which is why it's interesting in philosophy -- so I wouldn't believe it without more. I'd think the person was making some sort of mistake along the way, in the same way that I thought about the Google employee who thought that later iterations of ChatGPT are conscious.
We experience experience. We are aware of awareness. We are conscious of consciousness.
Yet we are unable to describe a single quale, or any of the mediums upon which they supposedly appear.
Pain, cold, red, sour, etc.
You can name them.
Yes. They're primitives, so can't be explained further. I am simply acquainted with them.
You treat them and speak about them like they are objects. If you are acquainted with an object it can be explained further.
I don't know what you mean by "object".
I'm only saying that in perception I am acquainted with mental phenomena.
I’m just saying that you’re not acquainted with mental phenomena. We’re so unacquainted with mental phenomena that we cannot even describe one. If we were acquainted with mental phenomena this whole issue wouldn’t be such a struggle.
I'm definitely acquainted with the pain I feel when I stub my toe, and the cold I feel when it's winter, and the blue I see when I look to the sky.
If you are you ought be able to describe a property or two of each.
This doesn't follow. It is properties with which I am acquainted. You're asking for a property of a property.
Is a quale a property of experience or of mental objects?
Qualia:
So which is it?
We don't know; the hard problem of consciousness hasn't been resolved. All I know is that I am acquainted with pain and that I can't describe this pain in any simpler terms; pain is just pain.
You’re acquainted with qualia but do not know about qualia. This troubles me. I’m just trying to figure how one can agree with the first premise.
Direct awareness as knowledge, as contrasted with descriptive knowledge, sure. I’m just asking if you can afford me some of that knowledge that you have derived from your acquaintance.
I am simply, irreducibly, aware of my pain. I don't know what my pain is or what causes it; it's just there in awareness.
Right, you’ve gained knowledge of qualia through your non-judgemental acquaintance of it rather than by gaining knowledge of it through a description of it being so-and-so. I, on the other hand, have no acquaintance with qualia. So what, if anything, can you say of the experiential evidence you’ve gathered in regards to qualia?
I don't understand your question.
It is simply the case that I'm acquainted with the phenomenal character of my experience, and that this phenomenal character is some sort of mental phenomena, whatever mental phenomena turn out to be (e.g. property dualism or eliminative materialism).
Given that conscious experience doesn't "literally extend beyond the subject's head, to encompass what the experience is of", the naïve realist's claim that distal objects and their properties are literal, non-representational constituents of conscious experience is false, and so the indirect realist account above is true.
So you have no knowledge of qualia that you can illustrate, even though you assert that you are acquainted with qualia. That comes off as quite convenient.
But given that experience is an act involving a practical relationship between oneself and the rest of the world (and never a space located in the body with area and volume), it follows that objects are often participants of that act.
Quoting Moliere
Well alright, but then I think I would be interested in whether you would think it acceptable for an indirect realist to call you an indirect realist, since you are not necessarily contradicting their beliefs at all as far as I can tell.
Quoting Moliere
Some interesting thoughts here.
Quoting Moliere
Not sure I agree. I don't see the contradiction in the idea that there are things that happen beyond our immediate perceptions which we create stories to try and explain even if we cannot definitively know anything in a perfect way.
Quoting Moliere
Well all of our knowledge about the world is enacted within experiences which are not identical with things in the outside world beyond those experiences.
Quoting Moliere
I am not sure I understand.
Quoting Moliere
I really don't think its as complicated as you make out. The only way information gets into our brain and cause sensory experiences is by stimulating sensory receptors. The light hitting my retina is causing patterns of excitation at any given time. If artificially exciting them in an identical way did not produce the same results it would seem inexplicable to me. Why wouldn't it? To me that is an unnecessary skepticism.
The relevant concern is the phenomenal character of conscious experience. Everyone agrees that veridical perception involves the body responding to and interacting with objects in the wider environment. You're equivocating.
Maybe it’s relevant for indirect realists and dualists of all types, no doubt, but my relevant concern is why they’re begging the question, why they proliferate unobservables into a menagerie of ineffable terms and concepts, and why they’d eschew the 3rd-person perspective in favor of one that cannot even see his own ears, let alone what is occurring in the skull.
It’s not begging the question to accept the reality of a first-person perspective with phenomenal character; it’s the foundation upon which the dispute between naive and indirect realism rests.
Their argument is over whether or not distal objects are constituents of this first-person experience.
The foundation is the biology, which can be experienced from all perspectives. But from the first-person perspective most of it remains invisible, thus what it is doing and how it works is largely inaccessible. With this in mind the notion that a first-person perspective grants special access seems incoherent.
The “what it’s like” to be so and so lacks more data than it could possibly provide. It’s more “what it seems like”. This is the reason why the foundation is forever “phenomenal”, and never actual. All that could ever be provided from that perspective is belief.
Nope, we sure don’t. To talk about what the brain is doing there doesn’t even need to be a cow to talk about. But to talk about what the brain is doing when presented with a cow, there damn sure better be one.
Good on ya for “acquaintance”. Might be useful to juxtaposition with “description”; all the cool kids have already done it.
Brains aren't presented with cows. Brains respond to signals sent by the body's sense organs. But most importantly, the phenomenal character of conscious experience – which as a property dualist I take to be a non-physical emergent phenomenon – is ontologically distinct from the cow.
Correct; you’re preachin’ to the choir. See my comment to Banno three days ago, pg. 66.
The difference now is, you said “talk of what the cow is doing”, which presupposes it as an extant experience.
Not sure what you're going through mate, but I really hope you come out of it better off :) You sometimes say things with substance, and I'd hate to think you'd devolved into a 180-style fuddy-duddyness.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I would answer: Patently, yes. Unless we are irrational reductionists, there is no direct link between most things in the world and our experience of them. This is, in fact, the hard problem - and hand-waving away using arguments like this seems to me to entirely side-step the question, and assumes that the very concept of 'direct'ness is somehow intensional and not something which can be ascertained 'correctly' seems both unsatisfactory, and under-explanatory. We have facts that are not explained. Such as experience. Which you're using. To make the claim.
It's a really weird position, when one steps back. Though, i take it that since thinkers like Wittgenstein and Haabermas are taken seriously, this may be an uphill (albeit, risible) battle.
Quoting Mww (using this is a prompt - I'm not replying to your argument or position, just fyi, below:
This is a really, really good point that It hurts I didn't think to bring up. The DRist must hold that we experience both a physical object, and an empirically different representation of it in consciousness.
If that's the case, I'll need something separating the two in my experience. Otherwise, thsi is a ghost. And not even a very good one. It's totally opaque. There is no such connection in experience.
Feigned interest is rather unbecoming.
Re read our exchanges, or better yet, click my avatar, click my comments and read for yourself how I use the word. Then you'll know what it means.
I am not sure I would say that the hard problem is the crux of the problem - if anything, the hard problem probably presupposes indirect realism. It's also an interesting question whether indirect realism is a construct that can be applied to things that don't have experience.
Quoting AmadeusD
Well yes, I think it's difficult to ignore steps of mediation in the chain of events leading to experience, especially under a notion of indirect realism defined by the idea that perception is governed by experiences or representations different from the objects-in-themselves. I guess under that definition I could equally ask whether anything could count as direct which seems quite difficult imo under modern understandings of science and partly why I wasn't sure what people were meaning by direct realism.
The indirect realist says that we are acquainted with sense-data, and that we only infer that there are objects from that sense data.
I believe we are acquainted with the world, which happen to contain objects.
Is that not different to your mind?
Quoting Apustimelogist
I haven't claimed there's a contradiction. Indirect realism is logically possible.
Let's grant indirect realism: There are objects which cause experiences and the objects, while real, are not what we are directly acquainted with. Rather we are directly acquainted with our experience and make judgments about objects from that experience, and the so-called naive realist is ignorant of this fact -- so the indirect realist denies naive realism.
The motivation for indirect realism comes from various phenomena of perception such as dreams, hallucinations, and variance in discriminatory ability.
My thought is -- according to the indirect realist we can be in error about perception evidenced by the belief that there is some belief called "naive realism" that is false.
So how does the indirect realist account for error about perception, if not another intermediary?
To me it seems like it's much more elegant to simply say we can be fallible, and not come up with some metaphysical explanation as to why towers which are square appear round from a distance. Which to me indicates there's no separation between myself and objects, no experiential-film or sense-data that exists between myself and the really real objects -- there's just the familiar world that we can be wrong about sometimes.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Eh, no worries. I was on a bit of a tangent about how there's a more extreme version of the belief which just flips the indirect realist's priorities on its head -- no subject, only objects, and from these objects we make inferences about perception.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I'd believe that if we recreated the conditions for creating perception then we'd produce the same results, but I don't believe anyone really knows those conditions.
This topic finds agreement between us.
What the cow is doing may or may not qualify as an experience. Extant behaviour seems better here. Experience is always meaningful to the creature having the experience. So, we ought to know how creatures attribute meaning in order to have any clue about whether or not cows can have experience, and to what extent they are or become meaningful to the cow.
Biology looms large.
In principle, I think I'm getting you - though it's not all that satisfying to me to say that the hard problem presupposes anything. It's just a gap in our understanding; I don't think it supposes anything other than we currently don't know. Are you able to elucidate how you're posing this element?
The bold: Yes, very interesting, but I think its a straight forward: no. If there's no conscious experience, there's nothing to compare with mind-independence. Though, this goes to the Hard Problem, again. We can't know whether that's true, in any particular case, I don't think.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I'll admit, I have no problem with supposing nothing is direct with regard to experience. Just less mediated, in certain ways.
Quoting Moliere
A lot of people take this line, but it seems plainly available to deny that there's any necessity between awareness and experience.
My thinking is that we're ignorant about any relationship between awareness (or perception) and experience, so we ought not believe people who claim to know until they demonstrate more. But, ultimately, if what I'm saying is true -- that we are a part of the world -- then I can't think of a reason why we couldn't, in principle, recreate the conditions. I just think we're ignorant now to a point where we're not even sure what would count as consciousness -- so there's a good reason to remain skeptical.*
In terms of perception I'd say AI demonstrates some of the more dry and functional ways of putting "perception", but I don't believe the internet is conscious for all that.
*EDIT: Also why it's a good topic for philosophy: It's not clear enough yet to be a science.
Do you hold the view that we must perceive mental phenomena in order to perceive real objects? If so, then this is where our positions differ and we have more than a grammatical dispute, since it is not my position that we must perceive mental phenomena in order to perceive real objects. If not, then you are not an indirect realist.
I think I've managed to rephrase in these terms in my conversation with @Apustimelogist
And I believe I accept "literally extend beyond the subject's head" -- sure.
I'm not sure how else we'd be acquainted with the world unless our experiences literally extended beyond our head. Otherwise we'd only know our head, and infer that we have a body.
I think I am acquainted with my toes in the same way I am acquainted with my head.
But I'd say that the distinction between naive and indirect realism operates at a higher level of abstraction than the problem of consciousness -- we could be consciousness-realists or anti-realists, and fall either way with respect to naive or indirect realism regarding perception and objects, just framing it in different ways when it's brought up (it's different, but understandable why the problem comes up regarding perception)
For my part I think reductios work because if the indirect realist position turns out to be absurd, or at least results in undesirable conclusions, then it seems that the indirect realist has some explaining to do -- if the naive realist position accommodates these absurdities and can explain the original problems that the indirect realist brings up, then it'd be better to believe in naive realism.
This is not indirect realism according to the linked page provided by @Michael, which describes the relevant mediation as a perception of a perception; the sort of mediation which is lacking in the description of direct realism:
Quoting Michael
I agree that this “perception of a perception” is confusing and unnecessary. It’s a large part of the reason why I am not an indirect realist.
Also, I don’t understand how you get from “unmediated empirical affect” to “mediated representation”. What is being mediated here? Are you talking about the mediation of our perceptions of objects? What are they mediated by? If you are saying that our perceptions of objects is itself the mediation, then our perceptions of objects are not mediated by anything (else), so that’s not indirect realism.
THis is a really interesting thing to think about. IN some regard, I deny its possible - there is, intuitively, a definite difference between inputs to a biological system, and inputs to a digital system. I would think the Hard Problem is where it lies. So, back to vagueness hahaha.
Yes, when you put them side-by-side but I am still not sure what the latter really means in terms of being aquainted with the world.
Quoting Moliere
To me, there are basically just sequences of experiences and we can be erroneous about what experiences will happen next, or what experiences accompany each other. That is all. And recognizing errors itself involves some sequence of experiences.
Quoting Moliere
What if two people see the same object in two different ways due to an illusion, yet they are both directly aquainted with that object?
Quoting Moliere
Well I think we agree here.
I think it does. If you are like an idealist and the world of experience is just the world, then I don't think there is a hard problem for them in the way you imply. For there to be a hard problem I think there must be a kind of dualism where what is going on outside the head differs from inside the head (presupposing indirectness that would not be there for the idealist where the nature of the world as it is is right before their very eyes).
Quoting AmadeusD
Why can't I just talk about some kind of representations an A.I. has?
Edit: ( ).
And if one rejects this? I don't think this is true, personally. Consciousness does not extend at all.. It couldn't, on any account of it i've heard. That some pretend that consciousness is something even capable of 'literally' touching the world is probably one of the more embarrassing aspects of human theorizing.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Italicised: No theory has an explanation of why experience compliments activity. Idealism still cannot answer the hard problem. It just shifts from having experiences of 'the world', to having experiences of one's mind. But the problem of experience remains. Hand waving ala Searle does nothing for this. Some pretty intense discussions that pretend to have answered the question (Consciousness Explained, anyone?) are clear misapprehensions of hte problem, attempts to ignore it by stealth. I think this is hte case here.
Onto the discussion we're actually having LOL - I do not understand why The Hard Problem presupposes anything. The problem may be answered by evidence that Consciousness is continuous with matter, and therefore there is no hard problem. Experience is a brute fact of reality.
The bolded, appears to me, an absolute fact as long as one is not an Idealist. There is the world. There is inside the head.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I'm not entirely sure what's being suggested here. AI doesn't have conscious experience, that we know of. It cannot 'talk about' anything. It can relay complex outputs from even more complex matrices drawn from human-derived information (in all cases).
A human, ipso facto, has conscious experience. THis is the mystery we are talking about. Not information processing. Not awareness. Not input-output reactions (like learning). experience. It is entirely missed in these discussions, which are essentially ignoring experience and trying to explain how the brain produces behaviour. We have no issues explaining AI behaviour. BUt experience isn't even in the frame.
Quoting Luke
As was pointed out several times in the first 20 pages of this thread, this is purely a mistake in terminology. It's not accurate at all, so let's maybe not use it...
If we, instead, actually f'ing do our jobs and sharpen our tools, instead of wallowing in our prior failures, we can use terms like the below:
1.The act of turning ones eyes: To look at -->causes
2.The act of processing visual data: To perceive --> causes
3. Having the resulting conscious experience: To see.
These aren't airtight as more specific terms could be invented - but at the least they actually delineate the three aspects of the process of perception and do not conflate terms such as 'perception' being a process, and an experience (it's not the latter).
So, use the above terms because they're better than the ones your using, at the very least. We can see that the debate is actually not a debate. Being a Direct Realist is a position which requires that (2.) is (3.) which it patently is not, and can't be explained in terms of. The conscious experience is simply not reducible to either of (1.) or (2.). There is nothing in the facts that explains the experience or even derives it, fundamentally, from the inputs.
Hand-waving aside, there has been no response whatsoever in this thread that even tries to solve this problem in Direct Realist terms. Hell, literally the best-known and respected proponent of Direct Realism has to (literally) hand-wave away the problems of perception, claims to be a Direct Realist, then gives an intentionalist account of perception, while utterly and completely overlooking the lack of connection between object and experience. It isn't even touched.
(ala Searle above, is the reference to make sense of this part)Ironically, one of his biggest arguments is the exact same as mine above - except he is so obviously wrong in his own terms, its hard to understand why this book is around.
"The reason we feel an urge to put sneer quotes around “see” when we describe hallucinatory “seeing” is that, in the sense of intentionality, in such cases we do not see anything. If I am having a visual hallucination of the book on the table, then literally I do not see anything."
This is him making the mistake he's arguing everyone else makes.
"This shift is to move from the object-directed intentionality of the perceptual experience to treating the visual experience itself as the object of visual consciousness. I do indeed have a conscious experience when I see the table, but the conscious experience is of the table. The conscious experience is also an entity, but it is not the object of perception; it is indeed the experience itself of perceiving. [...]"
This is not only counter to what actually happens in perception, it is clearly an attempt to escape from the problem of conscious experience qua experience and instead substitute in it's place the 'perception of an object'. Which is not an experience, and he admits is not a constituent of experience - yet advocates speaking as if that's the case. That final sentence is a doozy in terms of how utterly ridiculous this man is. The sentence reduces to: The conscious experience is the experience of perception, but perception is not an object of experience.
This is such an intense example of stupidity, I cannot understand how this has been taken seriously for so long.
Then I'd set aside whether we are conscious or figure out some other way to work consciousness into an account of direct, or naive, realism.
Especially since perception doesn't need to be described in phenomenological terms to understand it in a functional manner -- we can sidestep the question entirely and just focus on perception and whether or not perception is an intermediary between ourself and the world, and why.
Even from the head, or is consciousness limited to the going-ons of the brain?
I'm not sure why.
I think it's interesting stuff.
As I explained here, the dispute between direct and indirect realists concerns the directness or indirectness of our perceptual experiences of real objects. When I asked you for evidence of your usage, you provided an article which, in its first line, states that "Perception refers to our sensory experience of the world". The very evidence you provided in support of your view contradicts it.
What do you think "perceive mental phenomena" means? Do you think it means that my eyes respond to light reflected by mental phenomena? Do you think it means that my ears respond to sound emitted by mental phenomena?
I think you're reading something into the meaning of "perceive mental phenomena" that just isn't there. Indirect realists probably aren't saying what you think they're saying when they say that we perceive mental phenomena. Acquaintance with mental phenomena is the appropriate interpretation. This is how to interpret the meaning of "feel" in "I feel pain" and the meaning of "hear" in "the schizophrenic hears voice" and the meaning of "see" in "I see colours".
This sense of acquaintance with mental phenomena occurs also in veridical perception, and this is all that is meant when the indirect realist says that awareness of distal objects is mediated by awareness of mental phenomena. The former sense of "awareness" is the sense of intention and the latter sense of "awareness" is the sense of acquaintance. And it is for precisely this reason that, as argued in Semantic Direct Realism, the intentional theory of perception (a non-naive direct realism) is consistent with the sense datum theory of perception (an indirect realism).
From the object’s point of view, it is an effect on human sensory devices. From the point of view of those devices, the object is an affect on them, they are affected by it. Upon transformation by the components of the system, the object that effects has become a mediated representation, called phenomenon.
Just as perception is that by which the external object passes into the internal domain of sensation, so too is intuition that by which the sensation passes into the domain of representation. Perception is where an object is sensed, intuition is where the sensed object is represented.
————-
Quoting Luke
Not exactly. Perception is just like a knock on the door, letting you know there’s someone on the other side wanting something from you. Also called the veil of perception, the epistemic problem, when all it really is, is an occassion for initiating the use of the intellect under empirical conditions alone.
—————
Quoting Luke
The effect the object has on the human sensory receptivity, called sensation.
—————
Quoting Luke
Scientifically, this sensation goes to this part of the brain, that sensation goes to that part of the brain, so as not to confuse one with the other. Sensation, then, is mediated by the section of the brain to which it is sent in accordance with the nerve bundles in the body responsible for transferring from one place to another.
Metaphysically, hence the implication of indirect realism itself, sensations are mediated by that which arranges the content of a sensation according to its form, meaning from which apparatus the sensation arose. All this is doing, is informing the downstream cognitive part of the system which conceptions belong to which kind of sensation, such that those related to the smell are not adjoined to what is heard, and so on. It is the reason we never associate the concept “loud” in the determination of an object’s sensation delivered by the nose. Understanding, according to rules, donchaknow.
Some folks have better luck with, and actually this whole snafu originated from, the conceptions mediate and immediate, rather than direct and indirect. Objects are given to us immediately….they are there or they are not, no gray area, nothing controversial, insofar as it makes no difference what the something is, but only that something is there. Objects considered, contemplated, conceived, judged, experienced, whatever……are mediated, meaning something is being done to the given by that which is not contained in it.
————-
Quoting Luke
Oh, but as soon, or as long, as you talk about this kind of stuff, you must be. The really real is the brain at work you can’t talk about because you don’t know what to say, the indirectly real is the brain at work that you can talk about because terms are invented in order to make it possible.
Hopefully you’ve understood and I were both talking about human experience related to things active in the world, re: “what a cow is doing”, and its manifestation as an appearance to people such that experience of it is possible.
Under the assumption you’ve understood that, it causes consternation when juxtapositioned to…..
Quoting creativesoul
…..which is quite disconnected from human experience, and for which….
Quoting creativesoul
……would have no apparent relevance insofar as all humans have the same biology.
Help me understand what agreement we’re having here?
Let's go with 's link and pick out a definition, such as:
So I'd claim that I am aware of my toe, and that awareness is not intentional, which I take "intentional" to mean the philosophical use:
Something that's probably confusing in the mix is that I'd be inclined to endorse this version:
I wouldn't pick up foundationalism, but in a debate between naive and indirect realism I'd be inclined to accept that there is non-inferential awareness, at least. The bit on "intentionality" I'm a little less certain about -- it seems to me that awareness can be about something without being inferential or judgmental, so there's a kind of intention I'd accept while still using some of the specifications of the SEP's article on acquaintance.
Quoting Apustimelogist
If it's all just experience then wouldn't that be a kind of direct realism? There wouldn't even be a self as much as a local bundle of experiences which gets in the habit of calling itself "I", erroneously.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I think objects have affordances more than distinct properties.
So the black/gold/blue/white dress: The dress is all four colors, and which you see depends upon the context. It's our logic of "color" which is amiss, because we believe that an object cannot be both black and gold in the same place at the same time, but given the intersubjective nature of color I'd revise our logic on color -- it seems that objects can be both at once, given the dress -- and we're inclined to call the affordance we don't perceive an illusion.
Quoting Moliere
Right. For me this almost implies some form of idealism where the object of my toe is just the experience of my toe, without anything more. I think I would also be open though toward some kind of notion of direct awareness of information or something like that which I
think is similar to this comment here you made:
Quoting Moliere
But to clarify I wasn't trying to necessarily imply anything about the universe being just experiences. I don't believe sufficiently clear notions of fundamental metaphysics are accessible so I don't bother with that.
I was just saying that I am having what I call experiences and they flow and any time I recognize errors, that is just encompassed in types of experiential flow. And yes, what I would call the self is enacted in the flow too just like you said.
It might not be apt to call it direct realism though because I wouldn't say it conflicted with the idea of mediational processes and a chain of causes originating outside of what is experienced. It is more appropriately, and perhaps trivially, a direct awareness of what is going on in my head which I think is then not the same as the kind of direct realism described on wikipedia or something. It would be quite weakened and I would even push back against the notion of there being a fact of the matter about the sense that these experiences are about objective objects out in the world in the same kind of way I push back against scientific realism. As an analogy, I would say what we perceive is closer to a notion of an instrumentalist science where we construct theories that predict data, as opposed to theories being objectively real.
Quoting Moliere
But what does it mean for a color itself to be an affordance? What is it inherently that colors afford? On the contrary, color seems more closely related to wavelength properties in light, which maybe then can be used to construct affordances in some sense afterward (and cannot be identical per se).
And sometimes people do see features which are not actually there from some other person's perspective, like hallucinations. Someone on an LSD trip might see motion in the carpet where another person sees none at all. (Though I guess you might say motion and non-motion are both there?)
Tbh I think the affordance/J.J.Gibson-kind of direct perception is closer to my "direct awareness of information" than it is to more literal direct realism. But I suspect maybe that interpretation may be particular to me. The idea of affordances definitely was a significant input, among others, to what led me to the idea that our experiences are fundamentally just about "what happens next?" and enacting that... which I see as pretty much just a more general view of affordances. So affordances is an important concept to me but I have gone away from the idea that the kind of qualities I directly experience are literally affordances. If sensory information arises from patterns on sensory boundaries like the retina, then the connection to affordances must come in afterwards.
For me, I don't think it makes sense to say the dress can be two colors without loosening realism and directness, arguably both. But again, I don't think that contradicts my "direct awareness of information" thing imo.
Edit: ( ).
I think hallucinations are a different case than illusions in that I wouldn't reconcile them the same way. Illusions can be covered pretty well by the duck-rabbit, but hallucinations like one experiences on hallucinogens or when they don't have enough sugar to make the brain function as it normally does don't work that way.
For hallucinations I simply note that in every case we can find some physiological reason why they are hallucinating -- usually it's a physical, chemical reaction that's taking place which disrupts our normal functioning. I like to point out starvation as a means for visions because it demonstrates that we don't need a "foreign" substance to our bodies, but even if our bodies don't get what we need then our minds don't behave like we normally expect -- that is, total hallucinations, if we do not analyze them using Cartesian assumptions, are evidence that our mind is a part of the world because the world influences it, rather than the other way about. (Still thinking over the other stuff, but I had a ready-made response for the example of total hallucinations, or dreaming too if we want to go through that :D )
Seeing a cow requires a cow. It's the direct perception part we agree on, I think? Perhaps it's the a priori reasoning that cows are necessary for seeing cows? We differ when it comes to what all is involved in/for experience.
I am not sure I see a profound difference tbh. Disruption of normal functioning is what the indirect realist sees as disruption of normal representations.
Quoting Moliere
Again, maybe this is all just a semantics issue rather than representing deep conflicts with what the indirect realist conventionally believes.
I don't know exactly what you mean for experience to compliment activity.
If everything is experience, there is no hard problem because the problem just becomes "why are there experiences?" but if everything is experience, then this is no different from "why does anything exist?" which is equally applicable to a physicalist. There is no physical things in idealism just experiential phenomena that follow the laws of physics.
This is a hard problem but not the one of consciousness and is arguably even more intractable to the point that most people don't consider it that interesting except perhaps people who believe in God or something.
Aside:
And maybe people similarly-minded to Dennett actually want to turn the hard problem of consciousness into this kind of more trivial hard problem - i.e. the reasoning going something like - Why does anything exist? Can we even answer that? Do we have to make up an additional metaphysical substance of consciousness that needs its own separate answer? This is probably close to my view on that matter. I don't think there are sufficiently clear notions of fundamental metaphysics that warrant an intrinsic dualism of experience vs. physical so there is no reason to postulate that a different kind of creation story should exist for something called experience. I think that the nature and limits of our information processing is plausibly a sufficient way of explaining why the hard problem arises for people (in terms of being unable to explaim certain things about reality)**.
Back to idealism:
To my mind, problems analogous to the hard problem of consciousness (which I think are probably actually closer in spirit to the combination problems of panpsychism e.g. see stanford encyclopedia panpsychism page) only come about in idealism when you postulate something like observers that have a way they seem to themselves, via their own experiences, which is different to how they seem from another observer's perspective.
Obviously, this construction has an inherent indirect aspect to it in the sense that there are experiences out in the world and then your own experiences which seem to be about those experiences but are not the same - they are separated. For instance, I have my own experience of what is going on inside my mind. Presumably other people perceive what is going on in my mind as brains in their own experience, through various levels of mediation. And it is only then imo that there is this kind of hard problem/combination-type problem of consciousness for idealism - because it seems inexplicable that my experiences right now look like a brain to someone else, which is an objects that seems structurally completely different. But again, this presupposes an indirectness about how we observe things. At the same time it is not identical to the hard problem because physical things still don't exist - its more the problem of how certain experiences can produce other disparate experiences (i.e. my experiences create the impression of a brain).
I think if you take away that indirectness and just have mental observers all observing a common experiential world then this hard-type problem doesn't arise. It might not actually be a plausible way to view the world based on scientific knowledge we have, but that is because imo scientific knowledge paints a picture of indirect mediation (i.e. object perception mediated by chains of events from the surface of an object to a brain which implies boundaries that gatekeep information and separate internal events / representations / experiences from different external stuff out there). Indirect mediation is precisely why I have both the notion of a ball and the atoms that make it up... at least, that is the best explanation. At the same time, without indirect mediation I feel like there would be no need to identify brain processes and experiences or distinguish internal experiences from external stuff. That's not to say older Cartesian notions of mind-body problem wouldn't arise but not sure its same as more modern versions I would be interested in.
So I think in that sense hard-type problems in idealism do presuppose indirect realism (including external objects to be realist about which are qualitatively different from internal perception). If everything were direct, the hard problem of consciousness would just reduce to the problem of why experiences exist? why are the laws of nature they are? - which isn't particularly different from analogous questions for a physicist.. Why do we have certain physical laws? etc.
Quoting AmadeusD
So it appears you already anticipated the answer I gave about why idealism doesn't necessarily have a hard problem of consciousness.
Obviously, you may think it an absolute fact, but then what I am saying is if it wasn't, the idealist would have no hard problem.
Quoting AmadeusD
It's not clear to me that indirect realism needs to be a concept restricted to conscious experiencers. For instance, if realism is a concept that can be attributed to mathematical scientific theories, why can't it be attributed to the representations and models built in machine learning? And often, these machine learning models quite aptly embody the idea of in-direct realism, since they are what neuroscientists use to model how the brain and mind works. For instance, Bayesian statistics involving the idea of learning internal representations or models about hidden variables based on noisy sensory data. This is similar to how debates about indirect vs direct perception in psychology have been framed (e.g. gregory vs gibson https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Gregory). A mathematical scientific theory cannot talk about anything about as much as A.I., yet people often attribute realism to them.
So I think really these debates about direct and indirect realism, though obviously may involve the concept of experience, may not be directly related to the hard problem of consciousness itself.
Edit: ()**
I don't think that undermines the point, though. Hallucinations show that the mind can create experience. Once you notice that, reality will always be taken with a grain of salt.
Ahhhh….yes, sounds good to me.
Quoting creativesoul
It’s tough, innit? On the one hand we just don’t know, on the other we make stuff up to tell ourselves at least something.
What all is involved? That’s gonna be a pretty long list, I should think, depending on what one thinks experience is. In my world, experience is an end, the terminus of the human speculative intellectual methodology, from which follows, all that is involved for that end, is the sum of the means necessary for the attainment of it.
I know you’re not a great fan of this kind of method, and you’re certainly not alone. But we’ve all got our favorite persuasions, for better or worse.
Right -- but indirect realism has problems. These are explanations for phenomena used to support indirect realism which don't resort to the position of indirect realism to make the case for naive realism more plausible.
Quoting frank
Hallucinations show that we experience the world differently from one another -- but that doesn't mean it's the mind creating experience, I'd say.
In the case of starvation, for instance, sometimes people's experiences have been interpreted as religious visions of a truth beyond the everyday -- what is colloquially called "hallucination" can be interpreted as another layer of reality which our normal functioning has been trained to ignore (and which is why the disruption of normal functioning turns the mind on itself -- which is what I'd say hallucinations are.)
Direct realism means hallucinators are peeping into other dimensions?
I think "information" counts as kind of idealism, if you're positing it as a kind of fundamental substance that everything is composed of.
I'm attempting to articulate a material view of direct realism, however -- along with no foundations I'd say there is no one or two substances which everything is composed of. The task then becomes: how to articulate a direct realism that is material, and yet does not rely upon a notion of substance?
For my part I'm more in favor of the naive view of the world, though I think it's hard to formulate into a proper philosophical thesis.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Isn't that pretty much what the topic of indirect or naive realism is about? Fundamental metaphysics?
We can make the notions clear in our conversation at least, I'd say, and I'd even hazard to say that this entire conversation is a bothering about insufficiently clear notions.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Quoting Apustimelogist
I'm uncertain of the best way to put it, but at the very least what it means is that though direct realists directly perceive objects in the world that does not then entail that what they see is a fixed property, or that there are not other properties which a given perception is not perceiving.
It's mostly the notion of permanent objects and their essences that I'd try to avoid -- things are in constant flux.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I had to look up J.J. Gibson. I was using the term more locally, in our conversation -- a term of art meant to contrast with "properties", is what I was thinking.
The objects are there, I just don't think they are what the naive view might believe. Perhaps this is a way of differentiating the naive from the direct realist: I think the naive realist is seeing something real, that literal objects are a part of their experience, but that does not then mean that every judgment about that real thing which a naive realist makes is going to be true or comprehensive.
But judgment is judgment of what is directly perceived (and, of course, judgment influences perception -- but that's not the same thing as saying perceptions are judgments, or rather, must be judgments). (in a sense I'd say that every judgment has a dual-awareness -- the judgment ,and what the judgment is about)
While I've come to discount the notion of an information ontology, you're far from alone in thinking like that.
What can I say? I'm a disagreeable sort. ;)
Heh. Well, I've clarified, but also -- it could just be a case of dueling intuitions here. You'd prefer to start with the information, I'd prefer to start with the objects.
But how do we really differentiate which is the better way to talk?
I think that maybe this is the sort of stuff that might differentiate naive from direct realists -- naive realists won't have a reason or address the indirect realist's objections, but direct realists attempt to do so with philosophy rather than bald assertion.
We're kind of stuck with our own worldview though. They used to think it was demonic possession, our poor capitalist selves call it schizophrenia.
It's a malfunction where a person hears voices that aren't coming from an external source. It's the mind creating the experience of an audible voice.
Quoting Moliere
But most indirect realists do think that these explanations are directly evidencing indirect realisms.
Quoting Moliere
No, I'm not implying it in a fundamental metaphysical sense. But some have pointed out that my actual view on mind-body metaphysics is not so dissimilar from a kind of neutral monism (maybe a very minimalist one) so maybe you would still think it the case of my view anyway. Though I don't think I see my view that way.
Quoting Moliere
I'm not sure to be honest. I think it depends on the angle you take. As you say below, it can be quite vague all this talk I think. I don't think indirect realists necessarily have to bring strong metaphysics into it beyond the talk of realism about representations, similar to the way you can talk about whether scientific theories (are real)*. The science I think provides quite a good description of how perceptions would be indirect so not much work is needed to be done there. Naive direct realism I'm not so sure.
Quoting Moliere
My intuition is that this would certainly require a more elaborate metaphysics about the world.
Quoting Moliere
Ah well, fair enough.
Quoting Moliere
But the experiences still extend into the outside world beyond the head?
Quoting Moliere
Well I only use it in a weak sense as opposed to a fundamental, tangible ontology.
Quoting Moliere
Yes, I think I understand.
Quoting Moliere
Well I'm not sure since it seems you were perhaps using affordance in different sense, ha. But possibly yes, I definitely think I have preferred starting points in my reasonings that are probably not the same as yours.
Edit: ( )*.
It's not like I started thinking these thoughts from birth, right?
This morning I heard on NPR a person who has schizophrenia who started a podcast, or something like that, to interview people at his campus about what it would feel like if they knew a person with schizoaffective disorder was on campus.
It was NPR so it was a feel good story -- he knew what he was getting into, and had a positive spin on what people said with a hope for more acceptance.
I say this by way of suggesting, at least, that it's not a malfunction so much.
One of the parts of the radio programme that touched me, with my own shit, is where the people he knew learned how to prefer him as he was, and would not want him to be otherwise.
The social model of disability.
There's a great YouTube channel where this woman talks to her audience while she's in the hospital, having a psychotic episode. You can tell when she looks to the side that she's listening to the voices. According to her it's horrible.
The point is: she hears voices that aren't coming from an external source.
I've never seen a case of schizophrenia that wasn't heart breaking in some way. It's a terrible disease.
But I also thought that the notion that the person with that disability was valuable even with it was nice to hear, and not just as a hallmark card -- but as a genuine thing. People with disabilities often have unique perspectives, and so they are worthwhile even in the economic sense (which is all we care about)
It's nice to see someone with your struggles succeed.
It makes me feel like I can do it too.
Yep. You're not less than normal, there is no normal.
In an attempt to bring it back: that notion of normal, so it seems to me, is more of an indirect realist belief to reconcile how representations can be right or wrong, even when it comes to perception. (for me, "representations" is definitely a turn-off)
To me, it's just obvious that the brain is creating a unified experience out of a flood of discrete sensory input. I think for some, that's direct realism. I don't see how, but ok?
Here is an illuminating example Marvin Minsky proposed a couple decades ago. I'll expand on it a little.
Suppose you are looking at a tree with thousands of leaves flickering in the wind and evening sunlight. Your experience doesn't resemble a patchwork of sharply detailed leaves surrounded by fuzzy, indistinct areas - even though only your foveal vision resolves fine details at any given moment. As your attention wanders over different parts of the tree, the rich details seem to be present across the whole scene.
This unified, richly detailed phenomenology has two complementary sources. First, your conceptual and proto-conceptual abilities allow you to understand the tree as a coherent whole, with the leaves related to the branches and the overall structure. This conceptual framing helps unify your experience.
But there's also a second source of unity - the tree itself, which remains present and stable as your gaze shifts from one part to another, or as you close and reopen your eyes. The tree as an enduring, mind-independent object grounds the unity of your experience, even as your attention and focus change.
So the unitary, richly detailed character of your perceptual experience isn't simply a matter of your brain constructing a unified representation from discrete sensory inputs. It arises from the dynamic interplay between your embodied, conceptual engagement with the world and the mind-independent structure of the objects you perceive. This suggests a much more direct, enactive relationship between the perceiving agent and the environment than a purely representationalist view would allow.
Yes, I think something along these lines is required when talking about perceiving something, especially since the main point of contention in this debate is whether our sensory perception of external objects is direct or indirect.
Quoting Michael
User
Is Russellian acquaintance a form of perception?
ChatGPT
Russellian acquaintance, as conceptualized by Bertrand Russell, is not typically considered a form of perception. Instead, it's a type of immediate, non-inferential knowledge or awareness of particular things or experiences.
Perception usually refers to the process by which we become aware of or acquire knowledge about the external world through our senses. It involves the direct experience of sensory information, such as seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, or smelling external objects.
Russellian acquaintance, on the other hand, doesn't necessarily involve sensory experience or sensory data. It's more about direct awareness or acquaintance with specific entities or experiences without the need for inference or mediation. This direct awareness can encompass various aspects of reality, including perceptual experiences, but it's not inherently tied to sensory perception in the same way.
So, while both perception and Russellian acquaintance involve direct awareness or knowledge, they are distinct concepts with different focuses and implications within the realm of epistemology and philosophy of mind.
Quoting Michael
The first two of these examples do not concern the perception of external objects, or else the external object (as the cause of the sensation) is absent. The third example (colours) may concern the perception of external objects, however, you have already acknowledged that the sensory perception of a mental representation is excluded.
Quoting Michael
User
Is the direct/indirect realism debate about perception or awareness?
ChatGPT
The direct/indirect realism debate primarily concerns the nature of perception rather than mere awareness. It revolves around questions such as:
In this debate, "perception" refers to the process by which we become aware of or acquire knowledge about the external world through our senses. Direct realists argue that our perceptual experiences directly correspond to features of the external world, meaning that when we perceive an object, we are directly aware of that object itself.
Indirect realists, on the other hand, propose that our perception of the external world is mediated by mental representations or sense data. According to this view, when we perceive an object, we are not directly perceiving the object itself but rather a mental representation or sense data that represents the object to us.
So, while both direct and indirect realism involve questions of awareness, they primarily focus on the process and nature of perception and how our perceptions relate to the external world.
Indirect realists don't believe or claim that our eyes respond to light reflected by mental phenomena and that our ears respond to sound emitted by mental phenomena, so you clearly misunderstand indirect realism and are arguing against a strawman.
Indeed. Carelessly worded on my part. I suspect neither of us requires omniscience from us in order to know anything about experience though. I also note the use of "human" here. Combined with the earlier reply concerning the cow, I'm left with a question: Do you restrict experience to only humans? Are non human animals forbidden, by definition, from having any experience?
For my part, although we cannot know everything, we can surmise one very important feature of our own experience. It is meaningful to us. Thus, if any other mind is capable of experience, it ought at least be meaningful to them. I'm curious what you think about that?
Coherency/consistency demands that all constituents of experience reside in the mind.
Light comes from where? External to the mind. So, light itself cannot be a constituent of experience. What is color again?
Qualia/sense-data/mental phenomena.
Yes.
Quoting creativesoul
How so?
Have you abandoned the eliminative materialist approach in favor of a sense data theorist one?
As I've said before, I'm undecided between eliminative materialism and property dualism. If eliminative materialism is true then experience and its constituent properties (e.g. smells, tastes, colours) are reducible to physical phenomena like certain brain states. If property dualism is true then experience and its constituent properties are non-physical emergent phenomena.
You do realize that they are incompatible with one another, yes?
Either way, distal objects and their properties are not constituents of experience. Naive realism would seem to require some sort of substance dualism, as only that would seem to allow for experience to "literally extend beyond the subject's head, to encompass what the experience is of".
How is Russellian acquaintance with mental representations of external objects an indirect perception? Russellian acquaintance is not a perception, so it cannot be an indirect perception of an external object.
Light is color. Light does not reside in the brain/mind. Remember this?
Your words about color matching. Either light resides in the mind or color is not a constituent of experience.
Arguing for them both results in saying incompatible things when compared to one another. Have you been arguing for both throughout this thread, at different times arguing for one, and then the other later?
This is where you're getting confused by grammar. The words "see" and "experience" and "perceive" and "aware" are all being used ambiguously and interchangeably.
Naive realists claim that distal objects and their properties are literal constituents of conscious experience and that as such we are acquainted with distal objects and their properties, and so our knowledge of them is direct and there is no epistemological problem of perception. The external world just is as it appears. They call this "direct perception of distal objects".
Indirect realists claim that distal objects and their properties are not literal constituents of conscious experience – that the constituents of conscious experience are something like sense data/qualia/mental representations – and so that we are not acquainted with distal objects and their properties – only this sense data/qualia/mental representations – and so our knowledge of them is indirect and there is an epistemological problem of perception. The external world might not be as it appears. They call this "indirect perception of distal objects".
That's all there is to it. You're misunderstanding indirect realism if you think it's saying something else, e.g. that our eyes respond to light reflected by mental phenomena and that our ears respond to sound emitted by mental phenomena.
An open admission of equivocation.
No it's not. Light often causes us to see colours, but they are not the same thing, as evidenced by the obvious fact that I can see colours when I dream and my eyes are closed in a dark room.
Quoting creativesoul
I have only been arguing that distal objects are not constituents of conscious experience given that conscious experience does not extend beyond the head. This is impartial to which of property dualism and eliminative materialism is correct.
Well, say what you will... when your eyes are closed in a dark room or you're dreaming, you're doing neither seeing light nor seeing colors. You're dreaming or hallucinating. I've seen enough here.
Be well.
According to the Fish article, this is the naive part (3), not the direct part (2):
You keep trying to argue that the rejection of (3) is also the rejection of (2), but it's not.
I don't think there's much point in continuing since you refuse to acknowledge that my position is even possible: that one can reject naive realism without being an indirect realist.
If you get a few minutes I wonder if you could give this article a read and tell me what you think?
As has been established, your position misunderstands indirect realism. You think that by "we perceive mental phenomena" the indirect realist means "our eyes respond to light reflected by mental phenomena". They don't.
So given that neither non-naive direct realism nor indirect realism believe that our eyes respond to light reflected by mental phenomena; given that both groups believe that some distal object reflects light, that this light stimulates the sense receptors in our eyes, that this then triggers activity in the visual cortex, and that distal objects and their properties are not literal constituents of the resulting conscious experience, where is it that non-naive direct realism and indirect realism diverge?
It's a big one. But I'll have a look at it for sure!
Bye the way, my outlook owes much to John Haugeland, Hubert Dreyfus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty who themselves owe much to Heidegger.
Cool. If you're cut for time, 2.4 and 2.5 are the sections where subjectivism is discussed: that tendency to oppose the subject and object.
I think I'm starting to understand what you're saying.
Direct realists claim that we have direct sensory perceptions of external objects:
DR: Sensory perception----of----external object
Indirect realists claim that we have indirect sensory perceptions of external objects:
IR: Sensory perception----of-----[something, e.g. mental representation]----of----external object
This is consistent with Fish's definition. Otherwise, I don't know what indirect realists mean by indirect perception.
Quoting Michael
As I've stated several times now, it is over part (2) of Fish's definition:
Except according to what you mean by "perceive some other entity, such as sense-data", (2) is something that indirect realists accept.
Quoting Luke
I have spent 70 pages explaining it.
It's something I do not accept.
According to what I mean by it, it is that we have sensory perceptions of sense-data. but you have been telling me that that's not what you mean by it.
By "we do not perceive some other entity, such as sense-data" you mean "our eyes do not respond to light reflected by some other entity, such as sense-data".
Indirect realists agree with you that our eyes do not respond to light reflected by some other entity, such as sense-data.
So what is it that indirect realists believe that you do not?
That our perceptions of material objects are mediated by the perception of some other entity, such as sense-data.
Except by this you mean "our eyes respond to light reflected by sense data" which isn't what indirect realists believe.
Except your explanation of what indirect realists believe is that our perceptions of material objects are not mediated by the perception of some other entity, which is therefore not indirect realism.
What indirect realists mean by "perception of some other entity" isn't what you mean by "perception of some other entity". You're equivocating.
Indirect realists do not and never have believed or claimed that our eyes respond to light reflected by sense data.
My usage is consistent. Indirect realists equivocate over the meaning of "perception", using it to mean both the sensory perception of external objects and the Russellian acquaintance of mental representations.
It's only equivocation if they start from the premise that we are acquainted with mental phenomena and then conclude that our eyes respond to light reflected by mental phenomena, but they never make this conclusion. This is the strawman conclusion that you are fabricating.
There is no sensory perception, then, only acquaintance?
Acquaintance primarily concerns knowledge. The direct/indirect realism dispute primarily concerns sensory perception, as I (and ChatGPT) noted in this post.
Yes, hence the epistemological problem of perception.
Quoting Luke
It concerns whether or not sensory perception provides us with direct knowledge of distal objects.
Naive realists claim that sensory perception does provide us with direct knowledge of distal objects because distal objects are literal constituents of conscious experience, and so we are acquainted with distal objects.
Indirect realists claim that sensory perception does not provide us with direct knowledge of distal objects because distal objects are not literal constituents of conscious experience, and so we are only acquainted with mental phenomena.
The direct/indirect realist debate concerns perceptual directness, not epistemological directness. Russellian acquaintance is concerned with epistemological directness, not perceptual directness.
Quoting Michael
Also, as Fish notes, direct realists claim that sensory perception does provide us with direct knowledge of external objects because such perception is not mediated by the perception of some other entity, such as sense data.
And indirect realists claim that sensory perception does not provide us with direct knowledge of external objects because such perception is mediated by the perception of some other entity, such as sense data.
Experience, as such, yes, the reason being, all of that by which experience is considered a valid concept is derived purely a priori from the nature of human intelligence alone, and insofar as this concept is a priori, it can never apply outside the intelligence from which it arises. That being said, experience, as such, is forbidden to non-human animals, but that does not preclude them having something conceptually congruent with it, albeit exclusive to their kind of intelligence.
Besides, and we’ve previously agreed on this without equivocation, to profess that a human condition may also be assigned to non-humans, is anthropomorphism, the bane of good philosophizing. So while other animals may have something, we aren’t qualified to say what that something is, even if logically we are authorized to say what it is not.
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Quoting creativesoul
Yes, I suppose experiences are meaningful, but to surmise meaning from experience is to presuppose experience, which still leaves the primary question of what it is, which just means that in order for experiences to be meaningful, experience would need to be defined in such a way as to accommodate meaningfulness in it.
(Sidebar: my definition of experience is unlikely to meet with more than your passing glance, which is fine; I don’t mind. No theoretical philosophy is correct, after all, right?)
I rather attribute meaning to conceptions, in that whatever is represented by a conception is the meaning of it. To attribute “round” to an object just means that object is understood to have a certain shape and no other is attributable to it without self-contradiction. This pertains because we can attribute concepts and thereby meanings to a thing without ever actually experiencing it, that is to say, we can merely think it, re: algebra. Or, heaven. But I guess all that just reduces to all experiences are meaningful but not all meaningfulness is experiential.
Anyway…..for what it’s worth.
Even granting Kantian terms, that first part makes little to no sense to me whatsoever M.
:brow:
Have you forgotten that, in philosophy, a priori and a posteriori are used to distinguish types of knowledge, justification, or argument by their reliance on experience. A priori knowledge is supposed to be independent of any experience.
I agree that there are differences between human experience and other animals', but there also are similarities. Finding and/or figuring out what those similarities are finds importance here. I mentioned a general rule of thumb which ought help guide our endeavor. All experience is meaningful to the creature having the experience. Here, despite our differences in preferred terminological frameworks, perhaps progress can be made. You wrote "exclusive to their kind of intelligence" which may provide segue.
I'm arguing that there are things we can know about other creatures' minds, and thus experience, based upon adequate evidence and sufficient reason to infer/conclude that other creatures have minds/experiences. The catch here, however, is that we must first get our own meaningful experience right prior to being capable of discriminating between experiences that only humans are capable of and experiences that some other creatures are as well. Successfully doing so avoids anthropomorphism. It is worth mentioning here again, that we need not know everything in order to know some things.
Circling back to the OP...
Direct perception of distal objects is one physiological capability that all experiencing creatures must possess. This points towards the irrevocably important role that biological machinery plays.
These sort of considerations warrant their own thread.
And how do we get our experiences right?
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Quoting creativesoul
This presupposes all experiencing creatures experience via direct perception, which makes explicit there is no other way to experience, irrespective of the type of creature. We have no warrant for claiming that is a valid condition, from which follows there is nothing necessarily pointing to the irrevocably important role biological machinery plays. Just because it is so for humans does not mean it is so for all intellects.
Agreed. A little early on for an anthropomorphism charge though.
If it is the case that multiple kinds of creatures are capable of meaningful experience, including those without naming and descriptive practices, then we would expect to find some shared common denominators/elemental constituents between the candidates that satisfy the bare minimum criterion for being a meaningful experience. One basic common denominator - a bare minimum criterion for experience - shared between all individual cases thereof, is that the experience itself is meaningful to the creature having it.
If all experience is meaningful to the creature having the experience, then the candidate under consideration(the creature having the experience) must be capable of attributing meaning to different things. That basic capability must be shared/possessed by all creatures capable of having meaningful experience(s). I'm saying that direct perception of distal objects is necessary for all cases of human perception, and that there are many other creatures capable of it as well.
Are you saying that direct perception of distal objects is not necessary for meaningful experience, or that direct perception of distal objects is insufficient for meaningful experience, or that direct perception of distal objects is something that is exclusive to only humans?
Quoting Mww
Sure we do. It just hasn't been laid bare yet. It's a complicated topic, and you're not easily convinced into believing anything that contradicts your current view.
What meaningful experience is of a creature that is entirely incapable of perceiving distal objects? How could mindless behaviour evolve into meaningful experience(becoming meaningful to the creature) if not by virtue of the creature being and/or becoming capable of attributing meaning to different elements/constituents therein?
That's a great question. Methodological approach matters. Guiding principles matter. Basic assumptions matter. Comparison to/with current knowledge base matters.
I think one important thing to keep in mind is that meaningful human experience happens long before we begin to take account of it. I would go as far as to say that meaningful human experience began happening prior to language creation, acquisition, usage, and/or mastery of it.
There is when and where we would 'look for' common denominators with language less creatures also capable of having meaningful experience(s).
Again, I think that one basic necessity for having meaningful experience is the ability/capability of attributing meaning to different things. I do not see how it is possible for any creature that is inherently incapable of perceiving different things. Hence...
The biology matters.
I agree that for a creature to have a meaningful experience, such creature must be able to at the very least describe the conditions of that experience, even if only to himself, in order for the meaning of it to be given.
Quoting creativesoul
I agree with that as well, with the caveat that mere direct perception is very far from meaningful experience. It would be far less contradictory to posit creatures with eyes directly see things, than it is to posit that same creature that directly sees things obtains a meaningful experience from that direct perception alone.
Quoting creativesoul
Assuming the possibility of experience in general, yes, not necessary for [s]meaningful[/s] experience, re: echolocation in bats and whales. Direct perception is an unmediated receptivity by the creature, whereas echolocation is direct receptivity of that which has been initially projected from the creature.
(awful loosely-goosey here, cuz the counterpoint will inevitably take the form….light reflected off objects enabling direct perception by vision is no different in kind that echolocation reflecting off objects. Depends on how precisely one needs his definitions to be, I guess, and their relation to a complete system)
Quoting creativesoul
In humans, yes, it is very much the case that very much more than mere perception is necessary for experience. In any other creature, it is impossible to justify with the same irreducible certainty, in that it is not so certain that other creatures have experiences, as such, in the same form as those creatures which require more than mere perception for the meaningfulness of their experiences to even be possible in the first place.
Quoting creativesoul
We are entitled to say that direct perception is necessary for human experience, but we are not entitled to say experience predicated on direct perception is exclusive to humans.
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Quoting creativesoul
Oh, absolutely. One of my philosophical pet peeves is the gross mistake in thinking a speculative prescription of the human cognitive system, which requires language use, is how the damn thing actually works, which needs no language use whatsoever. I’ve said in this conversation, that we in fact do not know what experience in humans really is, but that doesn’t dissuade us from inventing stuff in order to relieve the itch of wanting tell ourselves at least something about it.
So, yes, I agree without equivocation that whatever human experience is, it happens long before it can be talked about. And if such is the case, and is the case beyond legitimate scepticism, what does that say about our talking about those creatures, the only indicator for the possibility of experience in them, manifests as nothing more than mere behavior? From which logically follows…plants have meaningful experience insofar as they behave in a very specific fashion in relation to sunlight.
How dare we, from no more than perceiving whales in the motionless vertical position, suppose they are experiencing sweet dreams over gruesome nightmares.
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Quoting creativesoul
This still leaves the problem of attribution of meaning even when the perception is given. It now becomes the situation where the perception is merely the occassion by which a meaningful experience is possible, but in itself, perception does not give whatever meaning the experience will end up having.
This relates to our conversation because in humans there is an established methodology for attribution of meaning to experience predicated on biological structure, and it is always and only by this methodology we can say what experience is. It is, therefore, illegitimate to attribute this known established methodology to those creatures the biological structure of which cannot support the conclusions thereof.
Ya know….if we say other creatures have meaningful experiences, just not like ours….what have we really said? Nothing. Not a damn thing. Who the hell cares about an experience that isn’t like ours, when it is ours alone by which we can understand anything at all?
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Quoting creativesoul
Do you have, can you iterate, offer examples of, those?
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Quoting creativesoul
Distinguish types, yes, but not by reliance on experience. By the origins of conceptions and their relation to each other in cognitive propositions which are one or more of either knowledge, judgement or argument. All of which is a function of understanding alone, not of, hence not in reliance on, experience. This minor rejoinder would have been different if you’d said distinguished in relation to, rather than by reliance on, experience.
Right.
My take is that there isn't really evidence for indirect realism as much as indirect realism is an interpretation of what we know -- so I'm providing an alternate interpretation to weaken the justification for indirect realism. Or at least that's the strategy.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I'll take your view of your view over my view of it any day :) -- if I view your view differently then I'd say I'm incorrect about your view.
I think a neutral monism could go either way regarding in/direct realism -- it'd depend upon whether our perceptions are representations or presentations, I think. But cool, I can take up the notion that this isn't an issue of fundamental metaphysics.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Mkay, fair.
Quoting Apustimelogist
It seems so to me, yes.
I can understand the motivation for representation when it comes to sight, but I don't understand what a representation of my toe would be when I'm stubbing it or not.
Minimally I have a hard time thinking of the perception of my body as a representation: I can go as far as to say it's a bundle, and there is no "I", but I don't think my body is a bundle of representations.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Cool.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Probably :)
Of course, that's why it's interesting to converse in the first place, so nothing wrong with that.
Behaviour viz adaptation, metabolism, sensitivity (in the physical sense) do not entail experience. Yet, we have experience. It appears to be something over and above the physical facts, on it's face. This is what I mean. Experience accompanies behaviour.
Quoting Apustimelogist
That literally is the hard problem. Perhaps you have an erroneous idea of what it is? The hard problem consists in this exact question.
Quoting Apustimelogist
AS above, clearly this is not right.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Agreed, but that's pretty senseless. Its just ignoring one problem for another. Dennett, as it goes, actually denies qualia. So, that's novel, but even less coherent that ignoring hte problem, I think.
Quoting Apustimelogist
It's very hard to see how this could matter. If one is having an experience, that's all that's needed. The framework in whcih is sits isn't relevant the Hard Problem. It is the experience per se that needs explaining.
Quoting Apustimelogist
This is hte empirical notion of how perception produces experience (and leads to the problem this thread has instantiated. Using hte word 'perception' for both the experience and the process it arises from is ridiculous).
Quoting Apustimelogist
I think is true, and is weakly entailed by my positions on the above passages of yours. Indirect causal processes result in experience. That much is known in experience. We can't access anything other than experience, so it seems were stuck with the Hard Problem however we slice it. The indirect nature of perceptual awareness is just another spanner for the likes of Banno who are deathly afraid of being less-directly acquainted with objects than they'd like to be.
Quoting Apustimelogist
An idealist rejects that there are external objects. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you're getting at here.
Quoting Apustimelogist
It isn't clear to me - what I was doing with that passage was cutting off, at its base, the chess move you tried to make earlier in the post around an Idealist holding that external objects exist. They don't, but this has nothing to do with teh Hard Problem. Is it the experience per se that needs explaining.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Because you're misattributing what 'realism' stands for within each framework. Perceptually indirect/direct realism is not the same debate as that among scientifici realists/antirealists or moral realists/antirealists. You could be a scientific realist, and just deny that we have adequate acces to the world for our experiments to mean a huge amount. Or just take the probablity response to Hume hook line and sinker.
Quoting Luke
As was pointed out several times in the first 20 pages of this thread, this is purely a mistake in terminology.
If we, instead, actually f'ing do our jobs and improve our tools, we can use terms like the below:
1.The act of turning ones eyes: To look at -->causes
2.The act of processing visual data: To perceive --> causes
3. Having the resulting conscious experience: To see.
These aren't airtight as more specific terms could be invented, but if we use them, we can see that the debate is actually not a debate. Being a Direct Realist is a position which requires that (2.) is (3.) which is patently is not, and can't be explained in terms of. The conscious experience is simply not reducible to either of (1.) or (2.).
Hand-waving aside, there has been no response whatsoever in this thread that even tries to solve this problem in Direct Realist terms. Hell, literally hte best-known and respected proponent of Direct Realism has to (literally) hand-wave away the problems of perception, claims to be a Direct Realist, then gives an intentionalist account of perception, while utterly and completely overlooking the lack of connection between object and experience. It isn't even touched.
(ala Searle above, is the reference to make sense of this part)Ironically, one of his biggest arguments is the exact same as mine above - except he is so obviously wrong in his own terms, its hard to understand why this book is around.
"The reason we feel an urge to put sneer quotes around “see” when we describe hallucinatory “seeing” is that, in the sense of intentionality, in such cases we do not see anything. If I am having a visual hallucination of the book on the table, then literally I do not see anything."
This is him making the mistake he's arguing everyone else makes.
"This shift is to move from the object-directed intentionality of the perceptual experience to treating the visual experience itself as the object of visual consciousness. I do indeed have a conscious experience when I see the table, but the conscious experience is of the table. The conscious experience is also an entity, but it is not the object of perception; it is indeed the experience itself of perceiving. [...]"
This is not only counter to what actually happens in perception, it is clearly an attempt to escape from the problem of conscious experience qua experience and instead substitute in it's place the 'perception of an object'. Which is not an experience, and he admits is not a constituent of experience - yet advocates speaking as if that's the case.
Yeah, fair enough. I do agree you can plausibly see it different ways depending on how you frame things.
Quoting Moliere
I think our metaphysics clearly are just quite different and don't agree.
Quoting Moliere
Quoting Moliere
Very interesting; can you elaborate? Especially the first bit.
Quoting AmadeusD
If the only thing that exists is experiences, then how are the questions different? "Why is there experience?" would be precisely the same as "Why is there anything at all?"
Quoting AmadeusD
Well from this perspective, it isn't a true metaphysical problem which is why illusionists may be more interested in the meta-problem of consciousness instead, aiming to explain what it is about human cognition and computation that leads to these limits of explanation.
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_vis=1&q=metaproblem+chalmers&btnG=
Quoting AmadeusD
This is not my understanding of the hard problem. The issue is the reducibility of consciousness to physical explanations. If you remove the physical from the equation then there is no hard problem. The issue I was talking about in the quote you replied to effectively also amounts to a problem of irreducibility but between different experiences.
Quoting AmadeusD
The kind of idealism I have in mind is just that everything in the universe is mental (definition exists in the paper below), which I guess could be quite broad in terms of possible types of idealism.
https://scholar.googleusercontent.com/scholar?q=cache:-7cyUpbkVq4J:scholar.google.com/+modern+idealism+chalmers&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_ylo=2020&as_vis=1
Quoting AmadeusD
Can you elaborate the differences in realism for science vs. perceptual representations?
I don't agree with that. Weird way to use "I agree".
At what age are we able to do that?
I agree that that is one kind of meaningful experience. There are several. Your proposal has several layers of complexity; several layers of existential dependency. We're looking for a bare minimum form of meaningful experience. We start with us. We set that out. Then, we look to see if there are any parts that do not require language. We end up with parts and kinds of experience that require language, and parts that are not existentially dependent upon language. Perception is one necessary constituent thereof. Perception is necessary but insufficient for attributing meaning to different things. I think we agree there.
All experience is meaningful to the creature having the experience. Perception is necessary but insufficient for attributing meaning to different things; meaningful experience.
The experience you suggest as bare minimum is itself existentially dependent upon language use(naming and descriptive practices). The consequence is not being able to admit that any of us have meaningful experience prior to becoming able to describe the conditions of our own experience. That is metacognition. We're looking for cognition.
You begin by denying that all sorts of humans have meaningful experience.
My thought is that representationalism is tempting because we often think in terms of vision, but our bodily sensations are sense-organs too: yet we'd be more apt to say we're connected to our toe -- that consciousness extends beyond the head -- than we'd be to say we're connected to the truck across the parking lot, which I admit is where things sound weird.
With sight it's easy to interpret as if the pictures we make -- like the ones we hang on walls -- are just smaller versions of sight and so everything we see is a representation of some kind of underlying world. This is especially so because of the separation of self/world pretty much implicitly assumed in modern philosophy.
But when I stub my toe, I can't think what the analogue to "picture" would be such that my pain is a representation of something rather than just what it is. The closest thing I can think of is phantom pains -- but that doesn't seem like a representation, either, but a memory so intense that even losing the body part doesn't separate the pains remembered.
Rather than a bundle of representations, I'd say I'm a bundle of meat that's been socialized enough to have a thought or two to share. (these thoughts, these judgments, I can see as representations -- they are about something. But it seems funny to say my pain is about my toe rather than the pain being a part of the toe being a toe -- sensitive to environmental damage)
I have to say I find this questionable to say the least. Animals can recognize this as food, that as shelter or a source of warmth and so on. They can recognize their own offspring and kin. If these don't qualify for you as meaningful experiences, I'd be interested to hear why not.
Quoting creativesoul
It depends on how you are using "perception". For me, seeing something is always seeing something as something. So I think anything perceived, in the sense I use the word, is always already something interpreted, and I think that interpretation is not dependent on language, and that in fact language could never get started without it already being in place, and I think it is the case with the other animals just as it is with us.
So, I would say, to reverse what you have said, that attributing meaning to different things, in the sense that they stand out for an organism as meaningful, is necessary, but not sufficient for perception.
Agreed. Necessary but insufficient.
How do you square that with your minimum criterion presented earlier which demanded being able to describe the conditions of one's own experience in order to count as meaningful experience?
You see the problem?
Hmm, I don;t think this is quite right. While I understand exactly why you've landed there, its seems entirely right to say in world A' there is only cognition. But that coginition arises as points of view which can still conceptualise (and indeed may phenomenally experience) seemingly external objects. Indeed this would be the case if Idealism is true in world A (ours). All you need is awareness of that fact for the two considerations to come apart adequately:
1. Why is there anything, rather than nothing?; and
2. Why is anything conscious, rather than everything being unconscious?
Neither is applicable without hte other as a background consideration, but they address two specifically different problems and would require very different answers. Both are given in experience, so we need not question the existence of either, so the order in whcih we address the questions is not all that interesting. It could have been world A' and that's what's at odds here because our experiences would be the same as tehy currently are (though, based on current data this simply isn't the case so we have no real basis to claim this).
You'll also note (though, it's a little cheeky doing this) that both conceptions are phenomenal experiences which still need explaining. Why anything gives rise to an experience is exactly the same question under any theory but Dennett's really. He just thinks its not even happening lol.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I'm not quite sure I'm understand thsi reply. To clarify my statements there, I'm driving at what I get clear in my first response above - that the 'other' question simply ignores the one of consciousness - it has no explanatory power even if sufficiently answered (for clarity, the position is that htis is true of idealism though clearly true for other theories too). I think it is patently wrong to hand-wave away consciousness. Things like reductive functionalism are simply infantile theories in the face of the serious problem we have with why consciousness arises (or ingresses) from/in the physical at all. |
Quoting Apustimelogist
Ah i see waht you mean. Yes, but I think you're mis-understanding the profundity of what you've written there. If consciousness does not reduce to the physical (it doesn't seem to, at this stage) we have a serious problem akin to having to explain ghosts. If consciousness fails to supervene on the physical then we have zero notion of how it arises or what causal relationship it has with the physical world. We would still need to understand experience in terms of something else in world A' because our awareness must be of something. There is also the problem noted above, in that world A' may be phenomenally exactly like A intimating that even in an idealistic universe a 'point of view\ can consider why it's mental activity results in it consciousness apprehending whatever it is menta...ting...?LOL.
That said, you're right that it's formulated that way because we live in world A, but that doesn't change that it is a live question in world A' too. From where does consciousness come? Why is there any conscious experience. Chalmers goes over a few objections from that camp and rejects on similar grounds - that they simply ignore the core issue.
Quoting Apustimelogist
This was what I took it to be. This entails no external objects as nothing could be non-mind. All comments hold (whether correct is in the air lol).
Quoting Apustimelogist
Sure. So, this is a little bit like (i think) the two questions about existence and consciousness I canvassed earlier.
One question here is going to be (or more accurately "How do we produce conscious experiences of the external world?") but another, separate and probably more profound question is "How could we know that anything in the external world is actually as-it-seems? Even if we have 'direct' perception we still have the issue of Descartes Demon and all that fun stuff - whereas the question around scientific realism addresses the problem of whether our perception is of actual things. In world A' we may have direct perceptions of things which are not actually things, for instance. It is a false perception, but its a direct relation with the mental substance that it arises from. Even in world A, we might have indirect perception yet trust that our scientific instruments are relaying the actual behind our perceptions. This is definitely open to a charge of being a bit incoherent, but I'm unsure that's entirely warranted. We bypass shitty sense perception for better data (which we trust) all the time. Principle holds here.
So in the Scientific sense, are we even metaphysically able to ascertain the world as-it-is? And for Perception its do we, humans, naturally, perceive the world in direct causal relation (regardless of whether the world actually allows for accurate measurement. You can see that one couldn't be a scientific antirealist and a DRist. That would imply our eyes were better visual organs than the trillion-frame-per-second camera in a mechanical sense.
P.S: I've just come across this article for school and the opening lines are very much apt:
Quoting Derek Parfit
You can keep question one, and simply swap question two for the more specific version: Why is anything in the Universe conscious? To essentially outline the two distinct questions that idealism would still post. Consciousness not supervening on the physical simply doesn't explain it as the majority of cognition is not accompanied by any experience.
Sometimes. Not all the time.
Perceiving the tree in the yard does not require perceiving it "as a tree". Surely, we perceive the distal objects being named, right? See it "as a tree" presupposes naming and descriptive practices. Cats interact with trees all the time. They do not perceive the tree, "as a tree". That invokes a middleman where none is necessary, indeed where none can be. It could be that the tree in the yard is being directly perceived in direct relation to the rest of the hunters' mind, the tree is what the mouse is hiding behind. That's all it is at the time. It is and remains the tree, nonetheless.
Perceiving a tree "as a tree" only makes sense to me when we're referring to those who know how to use the phrase.
Perceiving something-you-know-not-what that might turn out to be a tree in the yard does not require perceiving it as a tree. Perceiving the tree in the yard would require perceiving it as a tree by mere definition I would have thought.
I have not said that cats perceive trees as trees, but they perceive trees as some kind of affordance or other (although I am not saying they could conceive of it linguistically as an affordance or as anything else).
You may enjoy Chamlers treatment of intensions when speaking about logical possibilities. In his view, the intensions differ - so 'that tree' as a primary intension picks out hte tree you are currently looking at. As a secondary intension it would pick out 'that tree' where it obtained in any possible world. He extensively uses Kripke to establish why this is relevant for understanding some of these issues (consciousness, perception and what not).
If the cat is perceiving what we perceive, it's a tree.
That's what I was thinking with the term, too -- objects with affordances make sense of a cat's or a bat's experience being different, but still about the same objects all while their experiences are probably different because human language can bring out features that I've missed upon a first listen.
Music, in particularly, is like this with me. Upon reading about a composer often I'll be able to hear and separate out more of the orchestra because of the words I've been given to organize that experience -- language enhances listening rather than cuts off the listener from the object.
Interpretation is always of something already meaningful. The meaning is what is being interpreted. So, only previously meaningful things are perceived?
I think that's right. But it might not be the only way to use the term, and this can result in confusion. Can we say that a percipient has perceived something if it does not stand out in some way? If not, then the question would follow: 'On account of what do things stand out for percipients?'. I tend to think it is because they are of some interest, concern, significance, meaning or whatever you want to call it to the perceiver.
So, on that account perceptible things become meaningful, and are thus perceived. On this account there must be some pre-perceptual interactions already going on of course, and of course they involve the objects and the senses but are yet to reach the status of perception. I think Kant refers to this as "intuition", but @Mww may correct me on this.
What the mouse is behind? Where the bird is?
Perception is necessary, we agree presumably. The tree is perceived as something it affords the creature? A place to sleep? Does the bear perceive the cave as a place to sleep? Bears go there to sleep, but unless they think about the cave as a subject matter in its own right, they do not perceive it as anything. They perceive the cave. The cave is part of the bear's experience. The cave is meaningful to the bear. Going back to the cave is a meaningful experience to the bear.
See my post above yours. We agree that the bear does not conceive of the cave as cave, It may in some pre or proto-conceptual thinking of it as a place to sleep—we don't really know.
So when you say they perceive the cave that is a kind of "mixed metaphor" because you are just saying they perceive what we would call a cave. They perceive something and conceive (or if that word seems wrong then substitute "imagine") that something (the cave in this example) as of some use or other. I think this qualifies the claim that the cave has meaning for them
We don't really know what bears specifically experience, but it seems reasonable to think they can imagine even if they cannot conceive, because we think of the former as involving images and the latter as requiring linguistically mediated ideas.
How does anything become meaningful before it is ever perceived?
From my post above:
Quoting Janus
But again, if you want to use "perception" in a different way, then your point might stand.
However, I could ask as to how anything can be perceived if it doesn't stand out for the perceiver, and on account of what could it stand out if not on account of it being already of some significance or other.
Here's another question: imagine your total external surroundings right now including everything that potentially could be seen, heard, smelt, touched. On your use of 'perception' would you say that you are perceiving all of that?
This is interesting. It reads lile you view your bodily sensations as fundamentally different from your visual experiences in some separable way?
Stand out in some way? I think that's far too broad/loose a claim for now. A creature is capable of perception if it is equipped with biological machinery capable of interacting with distal objects.
Things that grab the creature's attention 'stand out'. Anything external to the creature may 'stand out', given the creature is capable of perceiving it. Those things that 'stand out' may already be meaningful to the creature. They may not. That's often the first step in becoming meaningful.
We largely agree upon the requirement of/for biological machinery, so that's good!
They are both senses, and the metaphors change when we go to another sense -- but surely we should treat all the senses in the same logical manner. That's the point of bringing them up together: with senses other than sight I'm not sure what is representative. If I'm eating then I'm tasting what I'm eating, and incorporating it into me -- the world-becomes-me.
If taste were judgmental then we could set up a code of flavors in a meal which would inform you of a mathematical problem.
Now, I have no doubt that, given enough knowledge, we could reliably induce synesthesia such that this would be possible to read a book by eating it encoded into a complex series of flavors.
But right now I'd say the sentences like "This tastes sour" are the representations of the sour things.
Do you count anything which does not stand out as being perceived? Per the question I asked you above, everything perceptible in your external environment is currently broadcasting information in the form of light, sound, smell, and tactile sensation to your eyes, ears, nose and skin. Would you say all that counts as being perceived merely by virtue of that information affecting the body?
Idealism as I described and as entertained in the article I linked is completely consistent with external objects beyond your immediate experience so the idea of external objects is completely consistent, they just happen to be mental or experiential. In the first paragraph it even says that it is analogous to physicalism, the only difference is replacing physical with mental. I think your notion of idealism is far narrower than most people seriously entertaining idealism today.
It then follows that when you say something like:
Quoting AmadeusD
The idealist would agree and then they would say the physical simply does not exist so there is no problem. There is no need to reduce the mental to the physical because the physical just doesn't exist. All there is are experiences. Consciousness doesn't supervene on the physical because consciousness is all there is.
Once you formulate an idealist universe as identical to a physicalist one except that everything is made out of mental stuff, then there is literally no hard problem of consciousness. We can ask in the physicalist universe why energy exists or forces exist or fields exist or anything else. There will always be some point where it just doesn't have an answer - we don't know why things exist or don't exist. The problem of why experience exists would reduce to exactly that problem for an idealist. There is no other thing that gives rise to experience for the idealist because all there is is experience. Existence and being is simply experience at all levels. So the hard problem doesn't exist for the idealist and this is probably one of the major advantages amy idealist will give you to their theory.
Quoting AmadeusD
The reply is saying that a dualist reality where there is a metaphysical divide between the mental and physical is unfounded. It has no basis in science. Now I can also say that I have experiences but the fact that I say I have experiences doesn't entail that there must be some other physical substance which is profoundly metaphysically different and from which experiences arise. We have no idea about the intrinsic nature of what we scientifically observe beyond our experiences because we can only do science within our experiences. It follows that any metaphysical distinction is inaccessible and science gives no reason to suggest that there is one. At the same time given how the information processing that undergirds perception and knowledge is due to brain structure and functional capabilities, there is absolutely no reason why we should be able to have any tangible access to some fundamental metaphysical nature of how the universe is, whether from science or perception. None of this comes from a particular realist viewpoint which I think is probably key. Essentially all that we work with when it comes to knowledge is empirical structures that we happen to find in what we observe, and models we create concerning those observational structures. From that standpoint the most I can say is perhaps that the universe has some kind of structure which I cannot directly access. Loosely, I am what it is like to be some kind of structure in the universe. But then again, neither the notion of "structure" or "what it is like"(experience) have any substantive definitions that let me pick out anything metaphysically or scientifically meaningful, let alone any dichotomy between experience and the physical which would only lead to an incoherent type of epiphenomenalism.
Quoting AmadeusD
Quoting AmadeusD
I don't think you have said anything here that distinguishes realism about scientific theories from that about objects of perceptual. Descartes Demon exemplifies a general skeptical problem that can be applied to anything whereas the question of whether our perception is about actual things seems to me just as much a concern for realism about perception as it is for scientific theories. We may have scientific theories that turn out to not be of actual things also. The last two lines also seem to be basically the same except you have added direct for perception which seems to be besides the issue since you can have indirect-realism.
Quoting AmadeusD
The question of "why the universe is the way it is?" is the same for any kind of metaphysical position because you can imagine the universe in a vast number of different ways even for the physicalist, which are just as arbitrary as the universe being conscious or not or some other distinction. So too you can have an idealist universe where even what you are thinking of as non-experiential cognition is still experience or consciousness. Personally I don't believe in some strong distinction between "conscious" and "non-conscious" cognition in the way that I believe you are thinking about it.
Again, the meat of the hard problem is the reducibility of experience to physical and functional explanation:
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=2544424150595524876&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1
Quotes from above:
"It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of
how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when
our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have
visual or auditory experience:"
"It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical
processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it
should, and yet it does."
"What makes the hard problem hard and almost unique is that it goes beyond problems about the performance of functions."
"Why doesn't all this information-processing go on in the darkí free of any inner feel? Why is it that
when electromagnetic waveforms impinge on a retina and are discriminated and categorized by a visual system, this discrimination and categorization is experienced as a
sensation of vivid red? We know that conscious experience does arise when these
functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery. There is an
explanatory gap (a term due to Levine 1983) between the functions and experience"
The problem of consciousness is only in contrast to the metaphysics of the physical and functional.
I initially misunderstood you yesterday. My apologies. It seems our positions may be very close. I prefer "meaningful" where you may prefer "significant". They are used synonymously sometimes, so it may not matter much.
The bit above applies to both of our positions accordingly, I think. Current knowledge shows us that not all things interacting with our bodies at a given time are being perceived at that time, or at least not in a manner we'd call "consciously perceived".
Circling back...
I think it's important to draw a distinction between what's important for the creature and what's important to the creature. The sun is very important for the survival of all creatures on earth, for instance. So, in that sense the sun is significant, it affords the creature the ability to live, etc. However, it is not necessarily the case that the sun is meaningful to the creature.
Quoting creativesoul
Ok, so how would you attribute meaning to an experience without a description of its conditions? If meaning is a relation, wouldn’t the relations need to be describable in order to comprehend that they belong to each other, which just is the meaning of it?
—————
Quoting creativesoul
I agree we start with us, because “us” is what we know, it is that by which all else is judged. When we examine “us”, we find that the bare minimum form of experience is the very multi-layered complexity of the human cognitive system. No experience is possible at all, without the coordinated systemic process incorporated in human intelligence. Which is why I maintain the position, that without the complexity, experience, as such, the kind we know best and by which all other kinds must be judged, is undeterminable at least, and altogether impossible at most.
Bottom line….in examining meaningful experience the first thing to be done is to eliminate instinct, or any condition that could be attributed to mere instinct. And the best, more assured way to eliminate instinct, is to ground the necessary conditions for experience, as such, in reason alone.
————
Quoting creativesoul
There shouldn’t be one. I said describes even if only to himself. To describe conditions to oneself, is to think; to think is to synthesize conceptions contained in the conditions into a cognition.
Perhaps you’ve subbed in accounting for the experience insofar as it must be meaningful, while I’m accounting for the conditions by which being meaningful is possible. Meaning must be cognized insofar as it is a relation; experience is not a relation hence is not a cognition, it is an end, a terminus, of cognitions.
F’ing language games. When I hear “long before we begin to take account of it” I think long before we talk about it. To account for is to determine conditions; to take account of implies the determinations have been met. Dunno….maybe too analytical on my part.
Because they are all reducible to instinct. Meaningful experience implies reason, or at the very least, understanding, which is not a component of mere instinct.
————-
Quoting Janus
Thanks for the nod, but I wouldn’t ever be so presumptuous as to say I’m right. That being said….
Quoting Janus
….might be better spoken with perceptible things become meaningful and are thus understood. That which has become meaningful, at least empirically, must have already been perceived, which makes “are thus perceived” superfluous. In short, meaning is not a quality of perception itself, but may be for that object which appears to it.
Quoting Janus
There are pre-perceptual conditions, but not as yet interactions. If pre-perceptual, then there isn’t anything to which the pre-perceptual conditions can be connected. They’re there, ready and waiting, but idle, so to speak.
Quoting Janus
It is not actually wrong from a Kantian point of view to say intuition involves objects and the senses. Nevertheless, to be technically correct, one should say, that which Kant refers to as intuition, re: “….the faculty of representation….” involves synthesis in imagination the object of which is a phenomenon. As you can see, this procedural episode is after, thus apart from, perception. That is to say, because they are given from perception, it is impossible that they reach the status of perception. Probably more simply understood by relegating perception to physiology, while holding intuition to mentality, each maintaining its own ground.
Very interesting.
Quoting Moliere
I certainly get the intuition. We know that the sensation of sweetness is associated with certain molecules but its not clear that perceptions of taste are representing anything like this to us. From my viewpoint, vision is not inherently different.
To be honest, for some further reading around the issue, which seems more nuanced than I thought and my own preconception of what indirectness meant, I have become much more sympathetic to the direct view and the ambiguity of what constitutes directness/indirectness. For instance, I find the following passage reasonable:
"In this light, consider the following two
claims:
(i) perception is indirect in the sense that it
involves a series of causal intermediaries
between the external object (or event) and
the percipient;
and
(ii) perception is indirect in the sense of involving a prior awareness of something other
than the external object (or event).
Claims (i) and (ii) thus distinguished,
Direct Realists can argue that it does not
follow from the fact that perception is indirect in the sense of (i) that it is indirect in the sense of (ii). What the Causal Argument establishes is only the causal indirectness of perception in the sense of (i), not the cognitive indirectness in the sense
of (ii)."
Ofcourse, my own inclinations away from realism generally don't take a strong preference of one set of views or the other or even either, perhaps. The topic as a whole seems too complex for me to give a well-thought view without a lot of research.
No such thing! :wink:
We're getting somewhere. I'll give the last reply it's just due upon returning. I think I'm understanding our positions better insofar as they compare/contrast with one another. I hope you are as well. Seems that way to me!
Kudos and thanks for the engagement.
Soon.
Am I answering for your viewpoint or mine?
Quoting Mww
We must first have an experience as well as the ability to reflect upon it prior to being able to describe the conditions thereof/therein. You're starting at some of the most complex sort of meaningful experience(s) we know of.
I think one important thing to keep in mind is that meaningful human experience happens long before we begin to take account of it. I would go as far as to say that meaningful human experience began happening prior to language creation, acquisition, usage, and/or mastery of it.
Some meaningful experience involves talking about it. Not all. We're looking for both kinds of cases some and all.
Seems to me that all meaningful experience consists of an agent capable of meaningful attribution. Attributing/recognizing causality seems a rather uncontentious time/place to think about. It counts as meaningful experience. If the endeavor of meaningful attribution does not count as meaningful experience, then nothing will. We attribute meaning to many different things within our personal experience. This approach promises to offer a glimpse of all sorts of different creatures drawing correlations between different things.
This language less creature need not be able to describe the conditions of its own experience in order to be capable of having it solely by virtue of attributing meaning to different things. It is capable of having meaningful experiences even if language is not a part thereof; even if it has no capability of describing anything at all; even if we never know.
The candidate under consideration(the creature having the experience) must only be capable of drawing correlations, associations, connections, etc., between different things in order to attribute meaning to different things. Language use is not necessary for the emergence of meaningful experience. Despite the fact that it has long since become an inevitable/irreplaceable/irrevocable part of ours. It was not always that way. It does not begin that way.
We are a fine example proving both, that your criterion is shared by most humans, and that a more foundational one must be shared by all. That is also the aim.
If we are capable of having meaningful experience prior to and/or in complete absence of language use, then that fact and that fact alone demands explanation/answer. Any adequate bare minimum criterion for/of meaningful experience will be amenable.
Thought and belief. Thinking about thought and belief. Thought and belief come prior to thinking about
thought and belief. Some experience does not include a creature capable of thinking about its own meaningful experience. That alone refutes/disproves/falsifies your bare minimum criterion.
Quoting Mww
Meaning is not just a relation. We need not comprehend that we are having meaningful experiences in order to have them. That sort of consideration requires talking about our own experiences as a subject matter in their own right. We have meaningful experiences long before we begin talking about it.
What does our own language less meaningful experience consist in/of? Bare minimum criterion.
If meaningful experience happens prior to our awareness of it(prior to language), then any notion of meaning under our consideration better be amenable. Evolutionary progression demands it as well.
:up:
If a cat instinctually chases a mouse, then according to your method, hunting mice is not a meaningful experience for/to the cat. That doesn't seem right M.
Instinct when compared/contrasted to reason is used when setting out why/how creatures behave(what drives/causes the behaviour). It has nothing to do with whether or not that behaviour is part of a meaningful experience for the behaving creature.
Describing conditions to oneself is practicing language. One issue is that your bare minimum criterion for meaningful experience includes/requires language use and yet you've "absolutely" agreed that we have meaningful experience prior to ever taking account of it(taking account of it is necessary on your proposal and doing so requires language use). That is a contradiction. Either we have meaningful experience prior to being able to take account of it, or we don't. Your suggestion fits only into the latter. They are mutually exclusive.
Another issue(shown by reductio) is that the result of the criterion you've suggested, when taken to its logical conclusion, is that only humans capable of describing the conditions of their own experience can be admitted having meaningful experience.
At what age do we begin being capable of describing the conditions of our own experiences?
But do you not see - this IS incoherent? If everything is mental, there are not external objects. That can only appear external. There is nothing to be aware of, outside of mind as you've stipulated a mind-only universe. So this simply is not a consistent notion. If what you're driving at is a reading along the lines of 'transcendental idealism' i think perhaps you're not doing justice to what you're trying to get across. You've posited that this theory holds everything as mental. If that's hte case, there cannot be anything with extension - nothing can be external on that account. That's just not allowed by the theory, on it's own terms. You might need to
elaborate to make sense of how everything could be mental, yet 'something' has extension to be aware of?
Quoting Apustimelogist
I seriously., seriously think you're reading into utterances about it more than is intended. Perhaps you're thinking of some type dualism as analogous? Idealism is necessary precluded from including extension on it's own terms. It deny's the physical. Idealism is a narrow conception. Formal Idealism simply is not idealism, in any proper sense. It's just the same as a Kantian reading, which is actually fundamentally not idealistic. Its a form of mysterianism about perception. It's merely a description of our access to knowledge and not a metaphysical theory of what is available to be aware of.
In the alternative, where I am entirely wrong about how these things are being put forward in current times, I would just say given what I've described in these replies my position is: They are plainly wrong, and there's not really any grey areas to canvass. They are misusing words to maintain incoherent positions. Ryle would be proud.
Quoting Apustimelogist
And this position entails all i've said(you'll note this does fatal damage to the position, as above). I do apologise, but this is becoming very much an exercise in trying to understand how you're confusing certain concepts.
Quoting Apustimelogist
"made of mental stuff" is literally incoherent. If there is extension, there is matter. Either everything is internal, seemingly external(mind), which is entailed by a 'mental-only' Universe (A'), or we're looking at a world in whcih there are things, proper(A - apparently, the actual world). To put this more clearly, if there are only experiences there are no things. There just isn't, on the theory's own terms. Again, I'm having trouble understanding how you could posit a universe that is 'only mental' yet has 'objects'. Objects have extension. Mentation does not. Is the theory just more speculative, in that the mental can in some peculiar way extend, or something similar, in that Universe?
Quoting Apustimelogist
I think this is a little bit of a cop-out - but there are clearly some base-levels that wont have a further explanation. So, yes, i agree with this statement, but I don't think this question is one of them. Either there are physical things, or there are no physical things. 'Why' is literally irrelevant. But that's like.. my opinion man. LOL.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Hm, I can clearly see the confusion in this one, and it is plainly wrong to me. The existence of 'things' and 'experience' are not at all analogous. Again, having trouble. I've been over this twice I think. The two questions are entirely different questions. The idealist has an entirely different question to answer than "why is there something rather than nothing?" because they actually hold that there is nothing. Just experience. So, why the experience? Same question. But in world A' we also want to know why there are 'things' which are not conscious, for lack of a better delineation. One does not reduce to the other. One simply disappears, magically, if you posit idealism. This is why its such a faulty, untenable position to most. It simply says 'that's not real' without a shred of good reason.
Though, this is tied to it's fundamental incoherence, You cannot be experiencing an experience. This is one point Banno has made, that I agree with *but totally ruins his take*. You can't be aware, in consciousness, of perception. Experience is of something. Perception without content is no experience. So, where is the idealist drawing phenomena from? After several hours with Kastrup (not personally) it seems totally clear this is just ignored. Though, I note that given the idealist pretends there is no question to answer about matter, they just run with it as a free lunch. But that is ... really, really dumb. We have phenomena. You can't get around that in explaining reality. Mental "objects" giving rise to conscious experience sans anything else is just dumb. You'll need simulation theory or something behind it.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I agree this si what they would say - but it's stupid. It's raises even less-sensible questions, to my mind. It isn't an advantage at all. Simply saying "i'll ignore that explanatory gap by making an extreme claim that is tenuous and essentially a spiritual position" isn't helpful.
Quoting Apustimelogist
This seems patently wrong, also. This seems more like a dogma. In fact, I am quite convinced it is a dogma. It's just uncomfortable. Property Dualism explains the data better than physicalism, currently. We have zero scientific basis to claim that consciousness is a physical thing. None. Zip. Nada. Your later quotes seem to exemplify this, on idealist terms, well.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Semantically it doesn't but given that the conscious does not supervene on the physical, it is a better explanation than "Muhhh.. duhh Mysterianism". It's not logically entailed, but no other doors are unlocked in that room. Either you need to posit something supernatural causing phenomena of objects, or objects.
In any case any even semi-serious dualism doesn't posit that the Mental is some separate physical substance that is a plain mis-reading. It posits that Consciousness is a fact about the physical (a property - a 'further fact') which does not reduce to the physical (you've noted this.. Makes this an awkward clarification). Natural supervenience is the term used here, as opposed to Logical supervenience. Property Dualism avoids literally all the issues you've brought up, and raises little more than doubts about its reality, not it's coherence.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Agreed. This doesn't seem to have much effect on either of our positions. It just sort of points out that where we see explanatory gaps, you're happy to lean into mysterianism. Not an invalid view, But i think its premature here. Though, again, prima facie, totally agree. We may just be incapable, regardless of what theory we posit. However, I don't think your reasoning entails that position.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Ooof. That seems like a bear trap you've put your own foot in. We can absolutely pick out metaphysical notions based on empirical/mental structure. Given consciousness fails to supervene on the physical we actually have really, really good reason to think we are currently beginning to identity some metaphysically distinct concepts. And, it only makes sense that conscious experience alone would even give rise to the question, i think. Nothing else fails to logically supervene, in some way that explains it's emergence.
Experience clearly does. It just doesn't allow you to convey it. I couldn't possibly know that you are having a profound idea about X, but you are having it, on your own account. You dont need to prove it to another mind for that to be the case. So, "scientifically meaningful' would be wrong, practically but theoretically, its actually the closest to the bone you're ever going to get - entirely removing the problem of induction(or hard sci realism) you laid out further up this paragraph (which I note seems empirically true as a limitation of knowledge and does put a spanner in having strong views either way),
Quoting Apustimelogist
It does not but even where it points toward EP, it's not incoherent at all. I would recommend reading Chalmers section-long treatment of epiphenomenalism (150-160 or so) in the face of his property dualism. It is very compelling. There really is no problem here as I see it. Further work since publication seems to do nothing for either side (other than we still have no fucking clue what's going on - as Koch has had to admit). To taste:
Quoting Chalmers(1996)
Quoting Apustimelogist
I clearly have. One is about experience, and one is about hte external world. Scientific realism posits there is an external world we can accurately measure. Perceptual realism posits that we, without measurement, can directly access an external world. They are plainly different considerations. One is necessarily prior to the other in explanatory terms. Ill leave that there.
Quoting Apustimelogist
It may, but it's obviously not. It simply doesn't matter in A', as an example of why they're separate. You can subtract the one, and still ahve the other open question.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Yes, that's right and exactly why an idealist actually does not avoid any problems entailed by this question. I may prematurely be thinking you're starting to grok it here... Onward.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Not at all, on my account. Physicalists cannot entertain the majority of metaphysical theories because they posit something over and above hte physical, or remove/re-cast the physical as something other than it is currently understood. This is one of the biggest drawbacks. Physicalism begs several questions about it's foundational tenets. The problem of consciousness seems to pretty squarely jettison the sanguine notions of physicalists.
Quoting Apustimelogist
This is a plain contradiction, unless your position is that I am empirically wrong - that doesn't seem to be what you're saying, so i remain in the position that this sentence is self-contradictory and does nothing for you. If A'- (our world, exactly, but there is no consciousness) exists, there just is no experience. Nothing else changes. Cognition and behaviour remains exactly the same, but is not accompanied, ever, by an experience in S. This specifically disallows phenomenal experience while losing precisely zero about our world that we actually know in the scientific sense.
An 'idealist' universe, on your account, is pure experience. Nothing else. Not experience of anything - just experiences on experiences on experiences. So, you've baked into your notion that both your sentence must be contradictory, and that you can't take an idealistic Universe seriously - you're trying to maintain non-experiential cognition in a world of experience - not cognition - from which experience can be subtracted without a loss of form, structure or function from what we know currently about A.
Quoting Apustimelogist
What's your take here, then? Pure curiosity. To come to table, 'cognition' doesn't seem to me something that is the same as experience. So, all cognition is 'conscious' but barely any cognition arises in experience
Quoting Apustimelogist
While, semantically, I agree, and I wrongly formulated discussions about hte Hard Problem earlier, i'm sorry, but the question of 'why is there conscious experience' is simply live on any theory that allows for experience. Nothing in those quotes changes this. The problem of experience looms over any theory that doesn't deny it. Which is why many theories simply deny it. Idealism being one that does the opposite - denies the physical s a non-problem. They are exactly the same tactics in terms of theorizing. And both are as silly as the other, imo. If the idealist position rested on cognition which is far more coherent than resting on experience you can see that this question is just as much a problem for the idealist.
The sun is a necessary elemental constituent of all interactions between it and other things(all interactions it becomes part of). Not all interaction affecting/effecting individual creatures is meaningful to them. As before, the sun is important - vital, in fact - for all life on earth as we know it to emerge, survive, and/or thrive. The interaction is vital/causal. Significant for the creatures' emergence/persistence, but not necessarily meaningful to the creatures' mind(s).
The language less creature has no inkling of just how important a role the sun plays in its own existence.
Significance to the creature is what we're after here, not just significance for the creature to emerge and/or persist as they do/have.
Meaningful experiences of the sun require creature(s) capable of drawing a correlation, making an association, attributing, and/or otherwise discovering some sort of meaningful connection between the sun and something else. Meaningful experiences of the sun require the sun to somehow or other attain some sort of significance/importance to/within the mind of the candidate under our consideration. It does so by virtue of becoming meaningful to the creature(as compared/contrasted with significant for the creature). This is true concerning previously existing meaningful things as well as novel(newly connected) ones.
Earlier I mentioned the difference between something being significant for a creature and that same something being significant to a creature. In the paragraph above, I offered an outline covering all meaningful experiences of the sun. All meaningful experiences of the sun are meaningful to the creature drawing and/or discovering meaningful correlations, associations, and/or connections between the individual elements of its own thought/belief/experience at that time(to the creature having the experience).
Meaningful experience requires - at a bare minimum - some things to become meaningful, a biological creature/agent for things to become meaningful to, and a means/method/process for those things to go from being meaningless to being meaningful to the biological creature/agent.
The sun is a meaningful part of each and every individual experience of the sun. It is not meaningful to everything that it effects/affects.
I agree with all that, which means I accept your general argument, perhaps while disputing the minutia of the grounds for it.
Quoting creativesoul
Would it have been better for me to have said the conditions for the possibility of our experiences must be apprehended beforehand, rather than described?
Quoting creativesoul
In my world, apprehending the conditions for, manifests in the same mental process as drawing correlations between. I overlooked the pervasiveness of language-use conjoined to descriptive practices, insofar as I see no reason why the human cognitive system in itself, in its synthesis of conceptions to each other, have not in effect described the conditions by which an experience is given, without ever expressing a single linguistic representation of those conceptions or the cognition which follows from them.
Quoting creativesoul
I submit that kind of creature has insufficient rational capacity to apprehend the conditions by which the sun attains its role in a necessary relation to said creature’s existence, from which follows the only creatures known to function under such criteria, is the human creature.
————-
Question: of all that supposedly attributable to lesser animals, in your opinion which is the primordial consideration such creature must attain antecedent to all else, in order for him to be afforded meaningful experiences?
Quoting Mww
Pardon my presumptuous intrusion.
My hastily surfacing answer is, "nothing." No so called lesser animal (a label which I dispute) has any hope/fear of having meaningful experience because meaning is precisely what distinctly human mind constructs out of its incessant and autonomous dialectical processes. Animals, like our own "Real" being, the Organic aware-ing human animal, "independent" of the constructions with which mind has displaced its aware-ing, have no "concern" for meaning.
Upon further thought, however, I think I can answer the question at least hypothetically. [Assuming I am interpreting "consideration" fittingly] The primordial consideration such creature must attain antecedent to all else if they were to similarly construct meaning, is to have evolved organically a system with similarly sophisticated image-ing, similar memory, and a feedback loop involving endorphins and the like.
Why? These allow for what has evolved into the human mind. An image-ing system so complex it no just longer recalls image of tiger to trigger flight; it now calls and recalls, structures and restructures, arranges and rearranges Signifiers to trigger all of our feelings and actions. Part of the evolution of that system of signifiers involved meaning. The system "wants" to thrive in order to best serve the "host" organism; and it is what it is today, because the constant constructing of meaning to displace reality evolved, leading to an astronomical growth of the Brain's image-ing sense. And it's still growing as we construct novel variations (like this) of meaning perpetually.
So yes, indirect realism gets my vote. There is a Real world--we are that real organism in that real world--but we have displaced that real world, its drives, feelings, sensation, with desires, emotions, perception. The former just are; the latter construct meaning in their process of becoming.
That's what I'm saying. (Although it may not be what you're really saying). These signifiers, the vast majority of them, Freud on stilts, operate subtly. So that it seems like they are not expressing a single linguistic representation. But they are. If not the words "its a beautiful day" when you instantly apprehend that it is, there are nonetheless signifiers working, moving, until finally the apprehension surfaces as...
My point (and--because all of our Narratives are written with and for others--I hope this is what you were saying, if not, please correct me) is that though you use "apprehended"
and that triggers belief that at least in some cases when you "know," you are getting it directly from the source, Reality, and only afterwords superimposing "description" (or constructed meaning), its too late for you to hang anything at all on the so called apprehension. Its not that its gone, its that its only there in the present. And you're not. You're already in the description, the constructing of meaning. Sensation is instantly displaced by perception. The fact that there is apprehension is moot. We abide in the constructions of meaning.
Why I think/thought we agreed is because though you said, "without ever expressing linguistic etc." You also said "in effect described the conditions by which an experience is given." I'm inferring that you are holding nonetheless that experiences are their descriptions. That this seemingly silent apprehension, is in fact, yet a subtle description.
My sentiments exactly.
And I mean “lesser” animal to indicate precisely that missing primordial consideration. And I mean “consideration” insofar as only in speculative metaphysics is that missing piece proven logically necessary.
Quoting ENOAH
While this is sufficient cause for a given effect, whatever form the cause has, is reducible. I want to know to what it is reducible, such that THAT is irreducible, hence, primordial.
Quoting ENOAH
That’s gonna get a great big HOOYAH!!! from my most worthy dialectical cohort, .
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Quoting ENOAH
The words just ARE the linguistic representations, of the conceptions apprehended as belonging to each other, from which a cognition, hence a possible experience, follows. Before they become words, they are schemata, that which as a multiplicity of minor conceptions, is subsumed under a major. You touched on it with your “image-ing”, which I hold as a requisite component of human intelligence, in that we actually think in images. But we cannot express an image, project it beyond ourselves, so we developed language to do just that.
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Quoting ENOAH
Pretty much, yep. A strictly internally constructed, and systemically employed, description. To descend another step into the metaphysical morass…..
…..the relation between the apprehension, re: the thought of “this” (an iteration of your “from the source, Reality”),
…..and the description, re: the cognition (your “constructed meaning”) of “this” as “that”…..
…..resides in pure reason, which subsumes the correspondence between “this” and “that” under pure principles a priori, in order for the ensuing experience, whereby “this” becomes knowledge, to be non-contradictory, not with itself, but with some other extant experience “that”, albeit of the same perceived thing…
…..and herein is a form of your implication of time, which follows from my position that experience is an end, a terminus of a speculative procedural methodology.
(From the cognitive neurobiology point of view, “this” is some initially stimulated neural pathway, “that” is a previously enabled pathway, the correspondence manifests in the meeting of the two pathways into a common network, from which the currently perceived thing becomes the same as, or sufficiently congruent with, the “dump truck”….or whatever….. experienced last week)
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Quoting ENOAH
Mine as well. The real that is direct is so from its perception; the real that is indirect is so from its representation. It is by representation alone that knowledge of the real is possible, and knowledge is what we’re after, the real be what it may. The dual nature of human intelligence is required for these to subsist at the same time with respect to the same thing.
Anyway….fun to play with, plus, it’s legal.
Quoting Mww
Perhaps, but I'm leaning more towards the idea that our positions are incompatible as a result of being based upon very different notions of human thought, belief, and/or meaningful experience. Hence, we have incompatible views about the third prong of the criterion. It's became clearer over time that our respective views regarding what exactly counts as the means/method/process for things to go from being meaningless to being meaningful to the creature are seemingly incompatible with one another.
Quoting Mww
Correlations are no longer sensibly called "a mental process" on my view. The very notion of mental implies internal, in the sense of residing/existing/happening completely in the brain/mind, body, etc. I've a more holistic approach that makes the most sense of meaningful experience as neither exclusively internal nor external, but rather - consisting of both; as neither exclusively physical nor mental, but rather - consisting of both; as neither exclusively objective nor subjective, but rather - consisting of both; as neither exclusively material nor immaterial, but rather consisting of both.
Quoting Mww
I agree, setting aside a quibble about the use of "follows".
Stark differences between our views stem from what rightfully counts as meaningful human experience. I strongly suspect you're already well aware of this. My own view regarding what counts as meaningful human thought, belief, and/or experience permits/admits/allows much simpler iterations/forms of human experience than yours can. Again, on my view, one's position regarding meaningful human experience must be able to take proper account of the evolutionary progression of it. This holds good not only in terms of the overall evolution of the species, but it also pertains to all individual humans' lives. Our thought/belief about the world and/or ourselves(hence meaningful experience) evolves from birth(arguably a few months prior to) until death.
From past discussions, you're already aware of a foundational premise of mine; at the moment of biological conception there is no such thing as an experiencing creature. There is no such thing as thought, belief, or meaningful experience of the creature, for the creature does not yet have what that takes. Thought, belief, and meaningful experience begins simply and grows in its complexity over time.
Quoting Mww
This is an interesting question that I find helpful for better understanding the differences between our positions. I'm glad you asked it. The question presupposes any candidate under consideration be capable of what we'd call/classify a "consideration" of some sort or other prior to or perhaps simultaneously with being admitted of having meaningful experience. That's perfectly consistent with your own position. However, I reject that requirement altogether. There is no primordial consideration necessary for admission into the group of creatures capable of having meaningful experience(s). While the ability to consider things highlights perhaps the most significant difference between human minds and other animals'(which I completely agree with), the question points straight at the heart/source/basis of many of the differences between our views. Any notion of human thought, belief, and/or meaningful experience that requires the capability of consideration to admit meaningful experience is utterly incapable of admitting that humans have meaningful experiences prior to and/or during language acquisition; prior to becoming capable of considering anything at all. I'm not at all claiming that language is necessary for all kinds of consideration. However, all kinds of consideration presuppose a creature that knows of more than one option(volition) as well as some basis or other from which to perform comparative assessment.
That basis is past experience.
To put this in the most telling context I can think of at the moment; <-------That's one kind of consideration, and a very complex one at that. Not all are. None are necessary for perhaps the simplest kinds/forms of meaningful human experience. The following example is a favorite of mine.
A toddler need not consider anything at all prior to touching fire for the first time. They learn that touching fire causes pain. They attribute/recognize/discover causality. No language is necessary here. I suspect this holds good for all other language less creatures capable of having meaningful experience. The attribution/recognition of causality may serve as a placemark/benchmark for rationality, reason, and/or the complex sort of cognition your criterion seeks(the distinction between considered acts and instinctual ones). I digress, the toddler is amidst a meaningful experience. The fire becomes meaningful to the creature(toddler in this case) by virtue of the correlations drawn by the creature between the fire, the act of touching the fire(their own behavior), and the immediate subsequent pain that ensues.
The next time they encounter fire, they will consider.
Everything I am saying about idealism is just the basic contemporary opinion on it. I linked an article by David Chalmers as the source for my definition and conceptualization of idealism. Notable contemporary idealists like Bernardo Kastrup and his followers thinking about idealism in precisely this way, as you may have seen.
I feel like you have this strong preconception that any kind of phenomena is necessarily internal to some kind of external physical things, because you are dualist. But I don't see how this view is strictly necessary and how other kinds of views of phenomena as ontology are not at least conceivable.
You seem to agree that:
"We have no idea about the intrinsic nature of what we scientifically observe beyond our experiences ..... there is absolutely no reason why we should be able to have any tangible access to some fundamental metaphysical nature of how the universe is, whether from science or perception"
Elaborating (in a similar way to the Chalmers chapter you linked): all we have direct access to is our personal experiences; our engagement with and articulation of physical theories is through experience; and the content of physical theories is relational or functional.
So if physical theories are defined purely functionally or relationally and say absolutely nothing about the intrinsic nature of what is beyond our personal experiences, I think you have to give an argument to rule out the idea that what is beyond our personal experiences can conceivably be more experiences and nothing else.
Again, we have established that you have no idea about the intrinsic nature of what is going on beyond your immediate experiences so I don't see what standard you are using to judge that what is going on beyond cannot be experiential. There are various options such as one universal mind filled with mental things interacting or many different individual minds interacting. What we think of as physical objects can still exist, just they have to be made of phenomena. What is the basis for saying that "Mental "objects" giving rise to conscious experience sans anything else is just dumb"? I haven't seen justification. What standard are you using if you don't even know what physical things intrinsically are? Does a standard even exist if physical concepts are purely relational?
It then seems pretty clear that if everything were phenomenal, an idealist would avoid the hard problem in its most basic sense (perhaps not the combination problems). The question of "why do experiences exist?" would be no different from the question of why any other different kind of intrinsic stuff were to exist (e.g. why does material exist? (perhaps in a hypothetical universe that only has material and no consciousness)).
With regard to dualism?
There have been absolutely no discoveries in science that suggest some kind of inherent metaphysical separation between mental and physical stuff in any sense. Such a dualism is incoherent.
My main argument against dualism is probably the "paradox of phenomenal judgment" that Chalmers talks about in chapter 5 of the Chalmers link you gave, and it is a consequence of epiphenomenalism (it follows soon after the pages you recommended). The problem is that consciousness is rendered causally irrelevant not only to our behavior but to our own knowledge of consciousness. The absurdity suggests that dualism is an illusion and that there is no dual-aspect.
There is no need for a dual-aspect. Physical theories are just models that are used within the human experience to predict and carve out abstract functional relations to other intrinsic experiences. They cannot tell me anything about the intrinsic nature behind "physical" objects. In fact, I think that not only are all physical theories relational and functional… all beliefs, hypotheses, knowledge, etc, etc, etc, are relational and functional. No knowledge, as a cognitive process, can ever tell you anything about any kind of intrinsicness, simply by the nature of what descriptions and explanations do and that is also why phenomenal experiences are fundamentally ineffable. I think this is less mysterianism than the fact that if you endorse kinds of scientific and metaphysical deflationism / antirealism, then the need for inherent dual-aspects is not pressing. The fact that there is no accepted peer review published scientific evidence for non-physical properties and the incoherence from the "paradox of phenomenal judgment" then presses even more against the idea of dualism. Because this view doesn't rely on falsifying phenomenal experiences, it evades Chalmers' responses. I don't think Chalmers would see this view as adversarial to his though, even if he may not necessarily agree with it.
I think the closest we can get to characterizing reality is that there are objective structures in reality which we cannot directly access; my experiences are what it is like to be some of that structure at some particular scale (or I guess even what it is like to be information to move closer to Chalmers' thoughts). And as more or less an instrumentalist about cognition and knowledge, that characterization doesn't even necessarily mean much other than a story that helps conceptualize the world. At the same time, the brain, information processing and cognition should still in principle be the ultimate basis for explaining why people have difficulties articulating things about consciousness and why explanations about it fail (given the p-zombie who is confused by the hard problem because of his brain independently of consciousness).
Quoting AmadeusD
Your latter definition only accounts for direct realism, not indirect realism. Also, scientific realism is not about positing an external world per se, it posits that our theories about the world are true. Doesn't seem very different from the idea of perceptions being true representations or giving true access to the world.
Quoting AmadeusD
Cognition is just a higher-order description of what is happening in the flow of experience imo. The difference between "conscious" and "non-conscious" cognition essentially comes down to differences in this flow of experience.
Quoting Mww
Do you mean further reduced organically, what are the cellular or bio electrical impulses? Deeper?
The molecular? Atomic?
I know you mean metaphysical, right? And if so, I'm placing that outside of this, the Organic/evolutionary. The metaphysical is an incessant pursuit because (and I am not blind to the hypocrisy/irony: I engage in it wholeheartedly, but I'll comment later)...because it is not going to uncover anything. Mind (the locus of the metaphysical) cannot uncover reality, it can only construct "reality."
But still, though I'm constructing it, I know what you're after. The Real "thing" being while being-displaced-by-becoming is aware-ing, natural consciousness. That is the primordial condition, to be an aware-ing Being. (It's the Body, BTW, aware-ing its sensations, feelings, image-ings, drives, movements--but these become overshadowed by the projections of mind).
But that's not what you're looking for. You/we desire the metaphysical, the brilliant constructions triggering Body to feel that eureka, but getting it through, sure, a special kind, but no less, fiction. Because, every living thing has the primordial condition for Mind, aware-ing. Trees grow to the sun, single cells react to environment. But only our level of image-ing could become its own thing and fool not only its now, host, but even itself into belief.
Quoting Mww
Very nicely worded, and, if I may, exactly what I so clumsily beg to say.
I’m never going to be happy with that approach. Experience is an abstract conception, is entirely a mental construct, hence exclusively internal. What the experience is of, that which is represented by the mental construct, is not, hence is exclusively external.
It is impossible to arrive at experience without an object, but the object itself is not the experience. So rather than consisting of both, I find the one’s relation to the other to have the more explanatory power.
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Quoting creativesoul
Mine doesn’t have form at all; there is, or there is not, experience, period. In that respect, mine is far the simpler iteration. Yours might be simpler iff you meant to say the process by which experience occurs. Still, whatever process you might invoke should capture that which is established as human intellectual composition, such as judgement, understanding…..those abstract conceptions manufactured in order to comprehend something we know so little about we are forced to speculate if we wish to say anything at all.
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Quoting Mww
In other words, what is it about a candidate that experiences, such that he must consider something, the negation of which is impossible.
Answer: he must consider himself as subject. He is that to which all representations, all objects of consciousness belong, such that there resides an implicit unity in the manifold of all rational/intellectual doings.
What is authorized for humans to claim, is that iff lesser animals do not consider themselves as subjects, they will not experience in the same manner as those higher animals that do. Which is all the original claim meant to emphasize in the first place.
Thanks; much appreciated. But in all honesty, taken from a moldy Enlightenment tome, formerly a positive paradigm shift in philosophical thought but now in somewhat diminished favor.
I agree with that, because of the qualifier, "such that there resides an implicit unity," which of course is the function of the Subject. That is, to unify the movements under a surrogate "self" displacing/standing in for, the "embodied" being.
Quoting Mww
No kidding? It seems "ahead" of its time to me. Regardless, I like it. A lot.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I have explained why (it is irrelevant what Kastrup or Chalmers think - though, as far as I;m concerned you are seriously misunderstanding what is entailed by 'mental only' and perhaps not reading that into the theories presented. Or, i could be wrong.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I have. "What are the experiences of" is a good enough question to at the very least, put the position you're driving at on the rocks, if not infer a position that requires externalities (in a 'proper' use of the word - not the economic one) to inform any type of experience. Otherwise, we have infinite regress - at what point would content be involved, if it's experience all the way down? Seems a massive gap here.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Its incoherent, on my account. You don't need a standard. It's logically unsound..As noted a couple of times, and apparently ignored: Experiences must be OF something(if you do not accept this, we may be at an end of the road we travel together). Sure, an experience can be of another experience, on (the surface of) an idealist account but this cannot explain anything about content. That we have experiences of 'things' that must have come from somewhere, even if it isn't 'actually there' in any particular instance (given regress is a fine method for establishing this, to a point). The basis for its invocation cannot be a further, necessarily empty, experience.
Quoting Apustimelogist
IN.CO.HERENT. I'll leave that there, adding that I think this ridiculous claim is why Kastrup is alternatively considered a genius, and a total idiot.
Quoting Apustimelogist
You have.
Quoting Apustimelogist
not-mental. This is the exclusion you seem to just straight-up ignore. Something cannot be physical and mental at once. Mental objects do not exist outside of mind, by definition. What's not getting through?
Quoting Apustimelogist
You seem to have completley ignored that this raises the exact same problem of 'why experience'. All you have done is removed the difference between 'why anything' and 'why experience'. They are both still live questions in an Idealist world. This is not displaced by the removal of physical objects in an account. We could equally say, in a world with no mentation whatsoever(obviously, this is metaphysically impossible) "why does anything exist?" "why isn't anything conscious"? The latter is not irrelevant, in the discussion we're having.
Quoting Apustimelogist
We cannot explain plenty of non-physical phenomena, and the fact that apparently the expectation of a physical explanation is the only way to get past this just ignores the problem. The explanation wont be physical. And given we have absolutely failed to do anything whatsoever with our physical theories to explain consciousness, I'm just not interested in ignoring that problem. Discovering that the consciousness does not logically supervene on the physical is a discovery that literally discounts a fully physicalist account of mind (if it holds).
Quoting Apustimelogist
This is not a problem, and it does not suggest this. I would recommend reading all of Chalmers, if this is where you're going.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Not for scientific reasoning, but for understanding consciousness it remains the central issue. I wont address your other Chalmers-related comments other than to say he's predicted them and responded to them. He wouldn't agree; you're right. He would posit that nothing you've said changes the fact that Consciousness is irreducible. In that sense, property dualism is almost a given (whether hte premise holds is the big Q).
Quoting Apustimelogist
Property dualism doesn't either. Can you explain why this would have any weight in displacing the (potential) property dualist account?
Quoting Apustimelogist
I'm beginning to think you're confusing yourself. It applies to both, but you must reverse the onus of the sentence. Your final sentence betrays the failure of your attempted delineation.
You would need scientific realism to hold to ever establish this position. This is because they are relevant to separate questions, as noted.
Bold: Do you know any idealist scientific realists?Quoting Apustimelogist
But we know, for sure, that cognition happens sans any experience. How could you posit that experience is included in non-experienced cognition?
Quoting Mww
Self-contradiction is a form of unacceptable argument.
Individual personal happiness is not necessary. Either meaningful experience consists of more than just internal parts/components/elements, or it does not.
Quoting Mww
Nah. Maps and territories doesn't quite describe what you're doing here, but it's the same general kind of mistake. Conflation between distinct entities/things.
Picking oranges on a rainy day is neither an abstraction nor a mental construct. It's an experience. Picking oranges on a rainy day does not consist of meaningful marks. All abstract notions do. It does not require meaningful marks in order to happen. All abstract notions do.
Certainly, at numerous times prior to the emergence of humans, oranges were picked. All abstract conceptions are existentially dependent upon language use. Picking oranges is not. Where there has never been language, there could have never been any notion of "picking oranges". Picking oranges quite simply does not share that existential dependency. It's an activity that does not require being take account of.
"Picking oranges" is a grouping of common experience(s). The group itself consists of all the separate instances of picking oranges. They do not require being taken account of. They would all be orange picking either way. Each and every uniquely individual experience of orange picking consists of orange trees bearing fruit, and a creature capable of picking the oranges.
A personal bit of my own life...
There were several different people and/or groups thereof who all participated in picking some very juicy, slightly tart, amazingly sweet and deliciously tangy tangelos from a very particular tree. They were sooo easy to peel, seedless, and virtually no chewy fibrous internal membranes to speak of. We did not reach inside of ourselves to fetch a few seductively acidic sweets. To quite the contrary, we all reached for the tree that grew in yard of the very special lady who cultivated and nurtured that tree. She was very good at what she loved to do. The sheer amount of fruit her plants produced was astounding. The height of that particular tree was such that all the glistening orange orbs were well within reach of the picker/basket she had thoughtfully placed beside the tree, ready at hand. Everyone loved them so much, and she was a very generous soul with them, hanging a basket of freshly picked fruit on the outside of the fence, with a sign bringing people's attention to them. She liked being a positive member of her community, even in such simple ways.
The exact same tree played a pivotal role within each and every single one of our respective individual particular subjective experiences that included fruit from that tree.
Without that tree, numerous experiences never could have happened. That tree was located in her yard. Her yard was not located internally within any single one of the aforementioned peoples' minds/bodies. It was a necessary elemental constituent of each and every individual experience mentioned heretofore.
That's back on topic as well.
We know enough to figure some things out.
In the examination of “us” as the bare minimum form of the possibility of experience is itself a multi-layered complexity.
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Quoting Mww
In the first exchange, the subject was “us”; in the second exchange the subject is…..I understood to be….experience. I guess I figured you’d distinguish the first as the form of the possibility of experience, that is, the necessary conditions for it, while the latter presupposed experience as given. Dunno how to think a form into that which either is or is not.
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Quoting creativesoul
C’mon, man. Really? Would you rather I said…..here is an perfect example of an aesthetic judgement of mine in complete irreconcilable discord with a phenomenal observation?
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Quoting creativesoul
There is a physical activity understood by a certain relation; the relation is then cognized as picking oranges, and THAT is the experience.
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Quoting creativesoul
No, there was not. Never before humans were there oranges; there was, after humans, only non-contradictory inference for the existence of a certain kind of thing, eventually cognized post hoc as an orange by a human. Conception of a thing is not proof of existence.
Picking an orange implies intentionality. Before humans, from whence would intentionality in fact arise such that picking oranges was an existential activity?
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Quoting creativesoul
No, they are not; they are entirely dependent on deductive thought alone, from which they obtain their logical validity whether or not there ever is any existential representation at all.
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Quoting creativesoul
Notions, insofar as the conceptions representing them are predicated on sensuous image, re: phenomenal intuition, don’t need language anyway. The notion of “picking oranges” makes no sense to me; we pick oranges or we don’t. Picking oranges makes explicit we know what we’re doing; “picking oranges” implies we don’t. What’s the big deal?
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Quoting creativesoul
Maybe not, but the metaphysics of it all, does.
Well what is entailed by it then? I haven't understood from what you have said so far. I don't recall talking to or reading about anyone else who has this issue with the notion of idealism.
Quoting AmadeusD
Why do experiences have to be of anything? All I know is that I have experiences. Why can't experiences be externalities? I don't see any justification here for an infinite regress.
Quoting AmadeusD
You should then be able to give a logically entailed justification why an experience must be of something or come from somewhere.
Quoting AmadeusD
This issue can bypassed by just postulating that the universe is a mind or made out of minds. At the same time, I see nothing here suggesting that minds need to be supported by something else like the physical.
Quoting AmadeusD
If it looks like I am ignoring what you have said, it is because you haven't given sufficient justification. You just keep reiterating your position that experiences must be a certain way and must be related to some other external stuff in a certain way. But from what I gather, this is just based on definitions you have started with that you perhaps find very intuitive. You haven't logically ruled out alternatives in any case. You just keep going on that it must be this way without giving me a further reason.
Quoting AmadeusD
Yes, but questions like these and "why is there experience?" are no more or less difficult than asking why the world isn't some other metaphysical kind of way. The point was that the issue of why there is experience is no longer the hard problem of consciousness, which is specifically about the inability to explain consciousness through physical and functional explanation. In an idealist universe, this is no longer a problem.
Quoting AmadeusD
I recommend you reading it because he says this paradox is probably the greatest tension created by dualism. It is definitely a big problem. A p-zombie believes they have consciousness, they report on it in ways identical to any non-p-zombie. Whats worse is they do it for the exact same reasons we do. We report our experiences and profess them because our brain fires in a certain way which leads to our behaviours and reports. Your beliefs about consciousness then seem to have nothing to do with consciousness itself and all to do with the causal action of whats going on in your brain. Chalmers' only response to this is pretty much that we are directly aquainted with out consciousness which is not something I am denying. But I am denying dualism because that story makes no sense, and the only way it can make sense is if there wasn't really any dualism at all.
From this point of view, "Discovering that the consciousness does not logically supervene on the physical" is not saying something about the profound ontology of the world but about how information processing and explanations work, which is exactly why a zombie would come up with the same conclusions. There is no reason why a zombie could know anything about the profound ontologies of the world just from the functional interactions that go on in a brain. There is no reason to think we do either.
Quoting AmadeusD
I think the story of a world that logically makes sense but we don't have direct access to - for pretty reasonable justifications regarding how minds and brains work - is a much better explanation than a world which doesn't logically make any sense at all and then postulates two different ontological categories which we can't even explain anyway under this view.
Quoting AmadeusD
Well then you have not understood a thing I have said. *I am not motivated to change the irreducibility of conscious experiences, only the idea that this represents some fundamental ontological category that sits beside some other fundamental ontological category called the physical*. As I just happened to say earlier in this thread, my view is probably closest to a kind of neutral monism which Chalmers goes through briefly on page 153 - 156 of the excerpt of his book you linked me.
Quoting AmadeusD
No, I think you are confused if you think indirect perceptual realism is about directly accessing the world.
Quoting AmadeusD
There is nothing necessarily inherent that contradicts it if you are open to the kinds of definition in the article on idealism that I linked which the majority of other people seem to think is a reasonable definition.
Quoting AmadeusD
I disagree. I think all of what we call cognition is things we observe ourselves through experience. The difference between conscious and non-conscious experience is to do with things like whether we perceive cognition to be automatic or deliberative, or whether our attention is strong or weak. But they all still occur through the flow of experience and the kinds of non-experiential aspects that explain the flow are the same for both conscious and non-conscious cognition, involving dynamics of brain activity. There is a non-trivial difference in the experiences of conscious and non-conscious cognition, but they are both experiential and are underlaid by the same kind of non-experiential explanations.
Edit: * *
Another weird use of "I agree"; as if I said what followed it.
Your proposal is that in order for one to have meaningful experience they must at least be capable of describing the conditions of their own experience to themselves.
I would hazard a speculation... there is no human capable of doing that until long after they've already began naming and descriptive practices in full earnest... oblivious to the fact that they're learning language. Language changes the way the world is. Language changes the way the world looks.
One can be picking oranges as a very young child. Prior to potty training. One cannot describe the conditions of their own potty training until long after they experience it. It is here, at these early developmental stages that your notion of "experience" is incapable of taking proper account of basic simple forms of human thought/belief/experience.
My apologies.
Do you have a valid objection to what I wrote?
Forgive what must appear a quite glib response, but this line, to me, explains your entire rationale. This seems plainly, empirically wrong. Ants, cilliates and even slime molds are examples which make the vast majority of what you're saying, which basically relies on the assumption above more-or-less moot arguments. There are extant examples of complex behavioural outputs from complex reaction and adaptive cognition without any hint of anything like conscious experience.
In the cases where this isn't what defeats your points, I think my previous comments are adequate to outline my thoughts. If they are not convincing, so be it :) Such is life. I may be dead wrong.
Probably worth noting. cognition is not 'things', it is not 'experience' - cognition is the processing element of perception. thinking. Experiencing that cognition is a separate, and i posit, further element of our world and this is, in fact, in what the mystery, such as it is, consists. Even on the reductionist account, the missing piece of the puzzle is still how consciousness arises from any level of cognition. It clearly does, though. Which is why it is such an enduring problem for thinkers of the bent to approach it. It is patent, inarguable and fundamental.
And yet, all the fun starts here.. how to solve the problem. Waving it away wont do.
Of course I do, to some of what you wrote. We call it a mere difference of opinions, but that reduces to a disparate sets of logical inferences, which are, in my case, themselves the valid objection. Just as are yours relative to me.
No harm no foul?
Quoting AmadeusD
I have made it clear in this discussion that I am not a dualist so why are you interpreting my words in a dualist fashion?
I have used the notion of p-zombie in my posts in a way that specifically alludes to the idea that all cognitive functions can be functionally explained in terms of the brain in the sense that all our reports and behaviours can be seen as following a causally closed chain of interactions as described by entities from physical science.
Given that your interpretation of what I have said is in fact inconsistent with the views I have already set out in this thread, there is no way that what I have said in the last post could "explain [my] entire rationale".
The following that you have pointed out:
Quoting AmadeusD
Is therefore in no way contradictory to anything that I have said. The issue is you are interpreting what I have said as some kind of dualist would even though I am not one.
Either way, what I had in mind was specifically human cognition as studied in psychology. The medium through which we study cognition is 1) what we experience and how those experiences flow; and 2) behavioural responses which is inevitably required to catalogue the former. We can think of cognition as latent models created to explain this empirical data in the flow of experiences and behavioural responses. What we call unconscious and conscious cognition in terms of things like memory, attention, automatic behavior, dual processes, perception, etc., are all embedded and instantiated in the same flow of experience and responses albeit in different ways, perhaps with different latent models or explanations. But ultimately the functional behaviour of the brain is more fundamental than any of the typical kinds of latent cognitive model and it is responsible for both "conscious" and "unconscious" cognition. So I don't see any fundamental difference between "conscious" and "unconscious" cognition. They are both embedded in experience and have the same fundamental explanation. What is different about them I think is something that can be talked about in terms of something like context-sensitivity in terms of things like temporal context, goals, trajectories and similar: e.g.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28416414/
This is a functional difference, not about experience. We can talk about attentional awareness in terms of functional explanations.
Quoting AmadeusD
At this point, I don't know what you mean by things. But "cognition is the processing element of perception." seems more or less a reasonable definition probably. Purely operationally (don't interpret it metaphysically but simply what is required to make the concepts empirically articulable), perception involves our experiences and behavioural responses. What do we mean by processes? I am not sure but maybe another question is how do we know we are "processing" or engaging in cognition? Well, we are experiencing it or experiencing its consequences. Before psychcology was a field I am sure people were aware (or meta-aware) of their own cognition... attention, memory, thought... purely through experiences. Otherwise how else you would know about these things? You are aware of memory through experiencing your recollections or failure to recollect. You experience your losses of attention.
Any cognitive model of that is either a latent explanation constructed to explain those experiences and responses or just an abstract, non-latent description of the flow of experiences (e.g. when talking about memory, you may just be referring to the ability to behave (and experience) with a sensitivity to historical information). But again, if you believe functional brain interactions are ultimately what is both necessary and sufficient to produce cognition as observed in experience or behaviour, then what exactly is the status of the latent cognitive models? Do you really believe they float around in some other realm which is neither experiential or physical? Or possibly are they just models we construct to organize what we empirically observe and have called cognition (or synonyms) before psychology was even a field? Again, there is the non-latent way of thinking about it but as someone who rejects dualism this is ultimately not distinct in a fundamental ontological way from the latent view from my perspective. Only in a superficial sense (e.g. someone might posit different ontologies or paradigms for different scientific fields e.g chemistry vs biology without thinking these represent fundamental ontological distinctions in the same way a dualist would think of experience vs. the physical. We can explain away the ontological difference in different scientific fields simply through the fact that they approach the same world from different perspectives).
Quoting AmadeusD
Well, I can only say that I have already outlined why I believe such a view is incoherent.
Quoting AmadeusD
I guess its just agree to disagree then since I don't find your justifications compelling.
Quoting AmadeusD
I don't think my view is waving it away in any sense because as I have already said, I believe there is very good reason to think that we cannot have access to the fundamental nature of reality in any objective sense while what we perceive and the beliefs about them we come to are obviously constrained by the informational processing of a brain.
On the other hand, you seem to think the problem of irreducibility can be solved when arguably irreducibility by virtue of its meaning means it will never be solved. Even if somehow, science empirically discovered "mental stuff" separate to the physical, such functional explanations of "mental stuff" would still not be able to explain phenomenal experiences and so the problem will still persist. Stands to reason that if dualism is true and we have a complete explanation of both "mental" and "physical" stuff, there would still be a problem of consciousness and it would still suffer from Chalmers' paradox of phenomenal judgement but this time in terms of "mental stuff". There is no possible explanation of experience in virtue of its irreducibility and positing "mental stuff" doesn't help. The basic stipulation of two substances / properties is really as far as you can get; the irreducibility hurdle cannot be overcome because thats what irreducibility means.
There doesn't seem any way to get away from Chalmers' paradoxes without getting rid of dualism, and I don't see any additional reasons to keep it. The fact that dualism is intuitive need not be explained by direct observations about inherent ontology but by discrepancies due to epistemics. If you recall the Mary's room knowledge argument against physicalism, it seems reasonable to think that a p-zombie Mary would give the exact same response to regular Mary in some scenario where she was previously colorblind and then come then became color-able (e.g. due to gene therapy). Her inability to reduce phenomenal experience to physical stuff then is inherently tied to the information processing in her brain in a functional sense. I feel like dualists sometimes underplay that what we are capable of perceiving and believing is not totally unconstrained by brains; in principle there are reasons we think or perceive things in the way we do which are constrained by physics in the same way a car runs in ways constrained by physics. Obviously some dualists may underplay this because they believe in some kind of interactionist substance dualism where the mental actively causally affects the physical but I don't think there is any good scientific reason to believe in this kind of model - I would need good evidence to entertain that.
Imo there is no reason to think these functional capabilities of a brain give an insight into the intrinsicness of reality... in fact when I am talking about a brain, I am invoking a family of constructed models and explanations, not inherent ontologies.
I'm not. This follows from what i take to be your (rather extremely) misguided conception of cognition in relation to phenomenal experience. It seems quite clear to me your monist conception is arbitrary and counter to what's presented to you. The line of yours I quoted should make it sufficient clear that your objection here is not apt, at all, in any way, to my objection/s.
Quoting Apustimelogist
And yet, it does. If that quoted line is incorrect (it factually is incorrect) then your position fails to cohere with anything in reality.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Suffice to say: No. This is squirming away from your position, as supported by the quote I responded to. It is wrong, and it pulls the rug from you reductive position. Nothing I have said intimates any kind of dualist position on your part. It categorically precludes your monist position. If this isn't sufficiently clear, I really don't know what to say. I simply have not inferred what you're getting here - and it seems you're doing it on purpose at this stage.
Quoting Apustimelogist
No we can't. We can understand it as an underlying organisational structure that informs experience in some way, but given we already know 90% of our cognition has absolutely no noticeable effect on our phenomenal experience, this is just not plausible. Experience is irrelevant to the explanations and organisations of cognition. There is nothing in cognitive science that would lead us to predict conscious experience from the underlying structure of, lets call it awareness, which is in turn strictly tied to (theoretically) the underlying physical relational structure of information processing in the brain. This is so much more fine-grained than you're allowing for, while simultaneous so much simpler than you seem to think it really is. Cognition has no per se relationship to experience. This is, in fact, in what that mystery largely consists in. Even if we are to grant a 100% reductive concept of 'consciousness' there is no current, plausible way to connect cognition with experience beyond some vague, uninteresting correlates that amount to 'vibes'.
Quoting Apustimelogist
One is conscious experience, and one is not experience at all, the way we understand experience. We simply have no experiential correlate to the majority of our cognition. This isn't really controversial. And so..
Quoting Apustimelogist
They are empirically not. I will leave further comments on this point alone. This may seem glib, but i am of the view you are woefully, willfully ignorant about hte nature of cognition->experience. Feel free to think the same. Either way, there's no good reason to continue debating it on that view.
Quoting Apustimelogist
As above.
Quoting Apustimelogist
This is the entire f-ing point my dude. We dont. And this is a known fact. We have no idea about most of our cognition. Because "as above.."
Quoting Apustimelogist
These are completely different things and confusing them has wasted the vast majority of your time typing about them.
Quoting Apustimelogist
No. You cannot 'remember to forget'. This is a nonsense. By definition.
Unfortunately, the rest of that paragraph is pretty hard to grasp. Nothing represents anything i've said though, so I'll leave it given it was mostly questions.
Quoting Apustimelogist
This has literally zero to do with the disagreement we've had here. I am indirect realist, and as such I can assent to all of this and maintain my position both as a positive position, and all of my objections to yours go through. I have no idea what you thought this was addressing? It doesn't touch on the 'nature' of experience (particularly vs cognition).
Quoting Apustimelogist
This is so incoherent I have no idea what to say. You're charging me with dualism (yes, but you're wrong about how property dualism works - it still posits consciousness arises from cognition in some way, but is over-and-above it) and then pretending I think the apparent irreducibility issue could be solved. Woo! But no.
Quoting Apustimelogist
It seems you simply have no idea about hte arguments in this area. If property dualism were true, we could formulate and test psychophysical laws the same way we test physical laws, and come to the same levels of causal, relational and phenomenal certainty about them (what level you take that to be is not tied to the theory, but your view on scientific objectivity in general).
Quoting Apustimelogist
You think a reductionist account is incoherent? Then what do you think is happening? You've rejected dualism fairly clearly, but you are not positing a reductionist account is incoherent? Slippery.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Ha....ha??
Quoting Apustimelogist
There is though. I think i'll just leave you to discover the discussions on your own, at this stage. Chalmers himself deals with these issues in the work we're referring to.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Chinese Room*. Chalmers deals with it head-on aimed at Searle.
Quoting Apustimelogist
This, again, has literally nothing to do with the discussion we're having.
I am happy at this stage to just eat the shit and say I've entirely misunderstood you, but on your key points you're simply empirically wrong.
I see no reason to continue. THank you very much for a long, thoughtful exchange! Rare.
Nonsense. You didn't understand what I was saying. I don't even think what I was saying actually depends on any metaphysical stance. It just depends on you understanding what I mean by unconscious and conscious cognition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscious_cognition
And the triviality that we learn about our own cognition through experience and behavioural responses or reports are used in psychological experiments as a way to access these events that take place in the manifold of our experiences.
Your point about other complex behaviors either does not clearly fit the kind of distinction between conscious and unconscious cognition I was thinking about or it simply begs the question in a way that is sympathetic to dualism by assuming that those certain things don't have experience or that there is a kind of flick of the switch between experience and non-experience. I don't like making claims about what or how things other things would experience because I think ultimately talking about it is ill-posed; but by rejecting the dualism between physical things and experience, my view rejects this notion you have that one thing clearly has experience and another does not. Again, where I was coming from in the first place was a notion of human cognition where.we all agree on the role of experience operationally.
Quoting AmadeusD
Structure of what.
Quoting AmadeusD
You will have to be clear what you mean by this and give examples and then it will probably be easier for me to show you what I mean by interpreting these examples through my lense.
Quoting AmadeusD
Cognitive science is not trying to explain phenomenal experience in any sense in the first place. Experience is relevant because cognition is studied by people reporting or behaving in reaction to their experiences, so cognition is tied to experience in that sense. If you went and participated in a study on memory or attention, you are reporting about your experiences to the experimenter, correct? In that sense, cognition is about your experiences. Cognitive models are constructed by scientists to explain the flow of people's experiences after the fact. We trivially wouldn't know about cognition without our own experiences ans ultimately notions of cognition are less fundamental than the brain which in principle explains all cognition purely through the apparatus of neurons.
Quoting AmadeusD
I will give you a list of cognitions from wikipedia:
"functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, imagination, intelligence, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem-solving and decision-making, comprehension and production of language."
Not one of these is not something you are not directly aquainted with by experience. Perception? Obviously experience. Attention? Obviously attending to experiences. Imagination? Bring up mental images, talk about narratives. Intelligence? Do an intelligence test, you have the experience of doing it and coming up with the answers. Memory? You experience your recollection of a fact or event. Judgement? You experience yourself looking at something and experiencing it and then making the judgement or reporting it and how you feel. Problem Solving? you experience yourself thinking and engaging with a problem. Language? You experience yourself reading or bringing up words.
All of these functions are describing things happening in experience.
Where we ascribe the term unconscious is when we don't really know how we do some of these things. We are unaware of where they came from. They seem automatic. They are not deliberative. But at the same time all of these tasks are being performed experientially and arguably deliberative processes are just products of automatic processes which perhaps show traits of temporal depth as I suggested before. Therefore, "unconscious" and "conscious" cognition has the same foundations in terms of flows of experience which are in some sense automatic. What explains the transition from one experience or behaviour to the next? The brain. The brain in principle is all that is required to explain the changes in the sense of isomorphia., though not the phenomena itself in the sense of the hard problem. This is how I view "conscious" and "unconscious" cognition as inherently separate. Afterall, they are both being performwd by the same brain, perhaps just with different patterns of brain behaviour which nonetheless don't have a strict divide.
Quoting AmadeusD
So how do you know when you have been distracted? There ia obviously a pattern of experiences which characterizes someone who has been distracted and deviates from a task.
Quoting AmadeusD
I am talking about the fact that if you lack access to the fundamental nature of reality you don't have to take intuitions about dualism to be ontological. It is therefore not waving away anything but embracing the reality of the limits to our knowledge.
Quoting AmadeusD
All you had to say.
Quoting AmadeusD
I was talking about dualism being incoherent, i.e. conscious experiemce arising out of and separate to something elae.
Quoting Apustimelogist
It's difficult to when you misunderstand about 85% of what I say.
Quoting AmadeusD
This wouldn't explain why physical things were connected to the particular phenomena though it is beside the point because I was talking about phenomenal experience being irreducible to functional explanations of "mental stuff".
Quoting AmadeusD
I have already explicitly coveredthis with you and told you his responses are irrelevant to my position.
Quoting AmadeusD
Quoting AmadeusD
I don't know. Someone who earlier admitted to misconstruing the hard problem, was seemingly unaware of some very general definitions of idealism and now has shown they are unaware of the knowledge argument, I think it is you who seem to have much less familiarity with this whole topic.
Quoting AmadeusD
Again, more evidence that you just don't understand anything I say. The point is that we can functionally explain why people have an intuition for dualism without requiring the distinction to be about fundamental ontology.
Mistakes are equivalent to neither, harm nor foul. Mistakes have been made.
False. Much of this response confirms.
Quoting Apustimelogist
You do not understand what you're talking about given the above. You're conflating the activitiy in the brain with the (abstract) experience which is not of that action. We are blatantly speaking past each other and you are, unfortunately, flat-the-heck-out-wrong.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Which makes it all the more clear that you're confusing not only the concepts you're discussing, but yourself in the process.
I tried to end this exchange to avoid having to get this 'dirty' but its just blatantly obvious you're protecting positions that are wrong on every level.
Again, appreciate the time - but at this point I really don't care. This is stupid.
Here is the issue. You are talking about the idea of some mysterious unobservable process.
I am coming from a different angle which is what is actually being studied in psychology. We are studying observable data, right? Thats where all psychological study comes from. We then give names to these events we observe. Some of them we describe as involving conscious, deliberate awareness. Others as unconscious or automatic. But both these categories are things that are observable, just like a reflex is something like an act performed automatically but we are still observing empirical data. Or playing music on the piano in a habitual automatic fashion. Both of these things can be experienced by the one performing these acts even though they are categorized as automatic or unconscious - because they lack deliberation. This is what I am talking about when I am saying that both unconscious and conscious cognition arr manifest in experience and so not fundamentally different in that way. Yes the behaviors are different, but after starting from the empirical observations, it is then that models of cognition are constructed to explain those events after the fact.
So when I am talking about unconscious cognition I am talking about these observable events and this is a totally valid way to do it because after all, thats how we know these things are happening and thats the entire basis of the categorization. We don't have access to what is going on in someones head when they automatically and fluidly do some kind of intricate automatic event so we therefore we cannot be distinguishing automatic and controlled cognition through direct observation of the unobservable faculty inside someones head. If you look at lists detailing the differences between automatic and controlled cognition, you will find that all of the things on the lists are what you can observe for yourself through your own experience... because unconscious and conscious processes are defined from whats observable, we do it by categorizing the behaviour that is experienced and observed by people. Models might then built to explain that after the fact and obviously people might construct different latent models to explain the same observable facts.
So by my reasoning we have both of these categories are, on the most superficial level, about behaviours and experiences which are just different in ways which can be directly discerned from experiences or behaviors. They both have in common that we can view them and discerning them through our own personal experience. We can then construct different underling cognitive models to explain them. But at the end of the day brain activity is more fundamental than these models. So at the end, what do we have? Two sets of distinct events observable in experience and, in principle, brains which explain them because the cognitive models can in principle be eliminated as underlying causes. They both can be entirely discerned and explainable in the same two mediums of experience and then the brain in similar ways. The brain is doing all the hardwork for both processes and again the main difference can be thought of in terms of something like temporal and contextual depth of processing. Conscious processes are very sensitive to temporal contexts - to goals, to history, to future - deliberately controlling attention in open ended scenarios. Whereas automatic processing the temporal or contextual depth is thin. Reactions to cues which are indifferent to recent histories or goals and no longer entertain an open endedness in future context presumably due to practise and repetition or expertise. I think it is widely considered though that these are just extremes and most things meet in the middle somewhere; for instance, playing a musical instrument is definitely attentionally demanding but if you are familiar with a piece enough you will be going through passages in a very habitual and automatic pattern. The less familiar you are, the more deliberate is the playing of those passages.
Quoting AmadeusD
No, because that incoherence being referred to ia just referring to the paradox of phenomenal judgement as stated in Chalmers' book.
The charge that I'm invoking some mysterious unobservable is risible, in that context. The causal link between cognition and experience is unobservable, as all causal relationships are. I have not posited that cognition is unobservable. Again, betraying your clear lack of comprehension of what's been said. I am unsure why you're bothering with length replies at this stage.
Quoting AmadeusD
No, not at all. I am just pointing out than in the scientific process we construct concepts and models of cognition abstracting from things people observe in their immediate experience. They are just constructs describing experiences and behaviour. "Unconscious" cognition is a category defined by directly observable experiences in the exact same way "conscious" cognition is. When awake, we are always in the flow of experiences, sometimes with the phenomenology of deliberative thought, sometimes with automaticity where we are not really aware of why or how we have behaved in a certain way. We cannot directly observe the root cause for either but in principle, any underlying hidden cause or explanation for exactly why we go through chains of either "deliberate" acts or "automatic" ones will be explainable completely by a sufficiently complete model of the brain. "Cognitive modules" are in principle completely explainable just by dynamics in the brain. With regards to phenomenal experience, both these kinds of cognition are in the same boat in terms of unfolding on the same experiential space with the same category of underlying explanation very broadly in terms of brain dynamics.
Quoting AmadeusD
I am just trying make sure I am articulating my thoughts as thoroughly as I can, even if just for the case of someone else reading.
Quoting AmadeusD
"We can understand it as an underlying organisational structure that informs experience in some way, but given we already know 90% of our cognition has absolutely no noticeable effect on our phenomenal experience, this is just not plausible. Experience is irrelevant to the explanations and organisations of cognition. There is nothing in cognitive science that would lead us to predict conscious experience from the underlying structure of, lets call it awareness, which is in turn strictly tied to (theoretically) the underlying physical relational structure of information processing in the brain. This is so much more fine-grained than you're allowing for, while simultaneous so much simpler than you seem to think it really is. Cognition has no per se relationship to experience. This is, in fact, in what that mystery largely consists in. Even if we are to grant a 100% reductive concept of 'consciousness' there is no current, plausible way to connect cognition with experience beyond some vague, uninteresting correlates that amount to 'vibes'."
I didn't write this ...
…..and yet, methodological dualism is still not granted as necessarily the case with respect to human intelligence.
Quoting Apustimelogist
…..and yet, there is currently no plausible explanation for experiential space in terms of sufficiently reduced brain dynamics.
So someday some scientific genius figures out how the brain’s dynamics functions right down to a gnat’s ass, and all “I”’s disappear. It shall be known there never was an “I”, never an experiential space that wasn’t legislated by the empirical cause/effect of natural law, and no one really registers the cognition of “broccoli” without this many neurotransmitters crossing this many clefts in this network in this region, neuroplasticity be damned.
Yea. Wonderful. Let’s all stop being human for the sake of facts by science. Probably best to kill off those that remain insisting on cognition by personality rather than cause/effect by activation potential.
(Sigh)
I might steal this phrase to describe how even though I am not a dualist, I often refer to both brains and experiences.
Quoting Mww
The experiences aren't explanatorily reducible to brains, but in principle, the dynamics of how these experiences change will map to the dynamics of how brain states change. Maybe to be more intuitive, a "perfect" model of the brain will produce all of the behaviours and reports you would find in normal people. Maybe that model is used to control a synthetic but perfect replica of a human body - no one would be able to tell the difference. Put that replica in a psychology experiment, it would then demonstrate all the findings of psychology and our various cognitions.
But then, models of brains are just predictive tools that replicate functions and behaviours. They don't tell you anything about the underlying metaphysics or devalue experience imo. A model of a brain we construct isn't necessarily a statement about that, it is a bundle of formal tools and math that we can use.
I don't think such things are a threat to people's humanity.
Yeah, me either, truth be told. I suspect a “perfect” model is altogether impossible, and a relatively perfect model doesn’t tell us what we want to know.
To be clear, he's quoting me here.
I can't entirely grok from you where you sit, but I think we're seeing hte same issue with that quoted passage in relation to Ausp's position that dualism is inherently incoherent. IT is required to speak about what we currently know as to a relationship between the brain an experience. Only a gap serves to plug the gap hehehehehe.
Language is required to speak; dualism is that by which a functional relationship between the real and the abstract, is possible.
For dualism to be inherently incoherent is to prove with apodeictic certainty the relation between brain dynamics and, e.g., its empirical manifestation as experience. To propose a “perfect” model of the brain as being sufficient to provide that proof, violates the principle of induction, insofar as it is impossible to anticipate that the construction of the model won’t destroy the possibility of what it’s trying to prove. Which is immediate sufficient reason for an established doctrine represented as dualism to be left intact as an explanatory device, which contradicts the proposition that it is inherently incoherent.
The problem is quite obvious: the apodeictic certainty of the relation between brain dynamics and its manifestation…..won’t be of experience, in that the natural law of physical dynamics only determines conditions according to natural law, to which experience does not abide. While this seems to eliminate the abstract from the initially proposed functional relationship, the whole purpose of the “perfect” model to begin with, it just leaves us with that which in general we will refuse to accept, and we’ve succeeded wonderfully in making things that much worse.
:eyes:
A fellow... mysterian? Good to find one. We are a rare breed.
If you’re one I wouldn’t hesitate to join up.
What’s a mysterian?
The crazy view that there are problems and mysteries. Problems are those areas in which we can hope to get some insight, mysteries are those parts which we can't get insight.
“…..Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind. (…) The arena of these endless contests is called Metaphysics…”
Looks like the problem-solvers just don’t bother with that sphere of cognition in which the mysterians find their endless contests.
Maybe we’re all problem-solvers from a practical point of view, but mysterians otherwise.
Oh, I metaphysics too. Quite a lot. But, as your mentor suggests, I proceed very little.
It is still fun.
“…. Time was, when she was the queen of all the sciences; and, if we take the will for the deed, she certainly deserves, so far as regards the high importance of her object-matter, this title of honour. Now, it is the fashion of the time to heap contempt and scorn upon her…”
Maybe it’s still fun because we heap no contempt, instead just let it play out.
And he is correct.
Well, this is pure speculation. If nothing else, metaphysics teaches at least about how philosophers go about building mental structures which they believe latches on to the external world.
On a slightly more positive note, it does tell us quite a bit about "folk psychology/science".
Finally, it could be that one system is "closer to truth" than another one. But we have no possible way of finding out which one is correct. There is something here to be said about "common sense" here, of which your guy said:
"It is indeed a great gift from heaven to have plain common sense. But this common sense must be shown in practice, through judicious and reasonable thoughts and words, not by appealing to it as an oracle when one has no rational arguments to offer."
That's not trivial to do.
Ill-disguised poke at British/Scottish empiricism in general?
:scream:
Nope.
In defense of Hume! Against his mis-interpreters!
It's near the very beginning of his Prolegomena.
Wow, I got one point over you on Kant. This made my day.
:cool:
“…. It is positively painful to see bow utterly his opponents, Reid, Oswald, Beattie, and lastly Priestley, missed the point of the problem….”
You’re right: in defense of Hume in particular contra British/Scottish empiricism in general.
Ironic, innit? Hume termed his empirical cause/effect conditions “constant conjunction”, which Kant translated into “habit”, and Kant was himself the epitome of habit, given the anecdotal evidence of his contemporaries.
He interprets the people he reads very well. Not only Hume, but also Locke and Descartes and Leibniz and others. Good stuff.
Do you think maybe that accounts for the rise of the analytic doctrine, the non-systemic program? If one system is no more provably correct than another, why hold with systemic metaphysics at all?
By non-systemic you mean non-systematic? If so, I think that it merely has to do with the fantastic advance of the sciences, by which one can spend one's whole career studying the neuron of a squid, without knowing much more about biology.
We no longer have people who are capable of knowing all the sciences very well - including mathematics, which makes serious system building extremely difficult.
As for your second question, that would be my guess.
Ahhhh….sorta like, video killed the radio star.
Quoting Manuel
Ahhhh…..sorta like OLP: it’s enough that everybody speaks without having to think about how there came to be words.
Which is worse for Mr. or Mrs. Thinking Subject, not caring, or being too lazy to care, about what goes on between the ears that doesn’t require test equipment to discover.
It's an extremely hard topic that does not have empirical evidence by way in which a demonstration could be given that would settle the issue. So why bother when we have all this things we can check?
Of course, you and I will disagree and think that they are granting too much to the given which (actually) belongs to the subject. But then that's why we are around and will continue to be around for quite a bit more.
As in, Sellars, the myth of? Faith in…holding to….sense-data theories of direct empirical knowledge?
I know I would, and I think you would, disagree with that, rather holding to representational, that is, indirect, knowledge theories.
Apologies for the obscure formulation. But you interpreted correctly. Mainly granting the given in experience much more value or force than it merits. Because on closer investigation, a lot of these so called "empirical" things, turn out to depend on the a priori mechanisms we have. And we then attribute to objects things which don't belong to it.
Quoting Michael
And the science of the brain and its processes is important to understand, but philosophy constructed a particular framework we should be aware of, because it did so for its own purposes. As I mentioned before, philosophy does not like the fact that we are sometimes mistaken. Instead of rectifying our errors with the means and explanations in each case, philosophy problematizes our entire relation to the world as an abstracted case—creating a space between us and the world. As an example, instead of accepting that we just see, however corruptible in particular ways and cases (hallucinating, dreaming, physiological issues, etc), philosophy projects a “reality” that we only see “indirectly” (e.g., that we have to “perceive”, or that we each see differently, or that we only see the “appearance” of, or “sense datum” of, or that create “qualia” for us, etc.), which allows philosophy to control the form of error (as a problem we might solve) or that we see “directly” which is judged by a manufactured standard that philosophy desires, creates, and imposes: a kind of knowledge that is certain, universal, generalized, abstract, etc. Basically, the dichotomy is false and manufactured and the world in all its varied forms and criteria gets abstractly judged as a single form of “reality”.
Quoting Michael
Examining the ordinary criteria and mechanics of pain, of how we judge and respond to another’s pain (acknowledging or denying it), shows philosophy’s desire to instead “know”** another’s pain (partly that it wants to avoid the claim another’s pain makes on us). Philosophy would rather turn it into an intellectual problem that is either equated or not (**subject to knowledge and certainty). This, like the example of “reality”, shows philosophy’s inclination to skip over our human lives and split our relation to the world entirely as an abstract problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUmf1Vh7mgc
He sort of goes into perception and experience - he kinda comes at it from what I interpret to be a pretty indirect realist standpoint (I suppose that might be arguable, but if you watch, I think you'd understand why it seems very "indirect realist" to me).
He's not a scientist, he's just an artist who likes to philosophize about things - he philosophizes about quite a lot. Even just listening to the first 20 minutes will give you a gist of where he's going with it. It kinda becomes a bit zen as it goes on - if you want to hear an artist kinda give you a guided meditation on perception, give it a go. If that's not your cup of tea, skip.
Thanks, I enjoyed this intersection of (the practice of) art, Buddhism and philosophy. He has a clear (and very clearly articulated) indirect realist perspective. I wonder how the intransigent direct realists here would respond.
Quite clearly. It also seems you’ve not understood it. But this just adds to the pile..
If you think I have not understood something, then explain why rather than pointless, contentless quips.