Can a Thought Cause Another Thought?
This is a problem that arises when considering psychologism and logic as rival accounts of what
thinking is. Versions of this go back as far as Frege, probably further. Karl Popper also addresses this implicitly when he considers “objective knowledge” versus the psychological fact of thinking. Similarly, Donald Davidson is interested in reasons as causes of physical actions, but his thesis in “Actions, Reasons, and Causes” would presumably apply to mental actions (thoughts) as well. On the other hand, Nietzsche wrote, “It is just an illusion that one thought is the immediate cause of another thought. The events which are actually connected are played out below our consciousness.” (What he has in mind here is of great interest, but outside the scope of my OP.)
There are reasons for questioning whether the concept of causality as such is even a useful one; the excellent OP by @T Clark and subsequent discussion shows why. But for this thread, I’m going to accept the idea that our common understanding and use of “cause” is meaningful, and refers to a genuine phenomenon in the world. As @T Clark allows, “It works for certain everyday events at human scale, e.g. if I push the grocery cart it moves.” I think we should see “thought-to-thought connection” as another example of an everyday event at human scale – at any rate, that’s the premise of what follows.
The question is whether the movement from one thought to another is a type of causation, and if it is not, how should we describe this familiar experience? I’m not going to defend a particular answer to this question, but try to show why the problem needs consideration.
Here’s the set-up:
A. I think: “I wonder how my friend Ann is doing.”
B. I then think: “It’s her birthday soon; I must get her a present.”
The most standard description of what’s going on here is, I believe, something like: “The first thought reminded me of the second thought,” or “When I thought of Ann, I remembered it was her birthday soon, which reminded me that I want to get her a present.”
But can we also speak of this in casual terms? Again, this seems in accord with common usage. We might say, “Thinking of Ann caused me to remember her birthday.” But perhaps this is just loose talk.
What sense of “thought” is being appealed to here? Is it “thought” as a mental event (presumably grounded in brain activity), or is it “thought” as proposition or propositional content?
Google’s ever-helpful chat-program – presumably reflecting some kind of cyberworld consensus – would like to straighten this out for us:
“Causation involves a physical connection between events, while entailment is a relationship between propositions.”
The first thing to notice about Google’s “physical connection between events” idea is that it begs the question of what mental-to-physical causation would have to consist of. The connection between a thought (“I want to call my friend”) and an action (I pick up my phone) is stipulated to be a physical connection, if it is indeed to be causal. Now our helpful but not very deep chat-program has in “mind” things like billiard balls, of course, where both cause and effect are physical. But this won’t do as an allegedly obvious description of mental-to-physical causation; it would need to be demonstrated and argued for, showing that the “mental” part is really somehow physical.
A causal connection between thoughts is even less acceptable as a “physical connection between events.” If it were causal, it would be an example of mental-to-mental causation, with no reference to the physical whatsoever.
Or would it? Putting aside the question of physical reduction, is a thought a strictly mental or psychological event, something that happens in time?
We need two important discriminations here. First: There is an entire debate that could be launched at this point concerning the relation between minds and brains, between thoughts and neural events. That is not the debate I want to open. If you believe, with Google’s chat-program, that any causal connection must be physical, and that therefore, if thoughts cause other thoughts, then they can only do so via a description in terms of neuronal activity – not much in this OP will really interest you. The physicalist reduction of mind to brain is a respectable (though I think misguided) position, but the problem I’m raising assumes it is incorrect.
Second: We need to further distinguish the two senses of “thought.” Let’s return to the two quoted statements in A and B. We can view these statements in two distinct ways. On one view, they represent thoughts that occur to a particular mind at a particular time. They are psychological events. They begin and end. They will presumably be correlated in some way with brain events but, as above, we’re assuming they don’t reduce to brain events.
The other way to view them is as propositions. On that view, neither A nor B is to be identified with any particular “mental utterance.” They are not thoughts, except in Frege’s use of the term, by which he only means what we now call propositions.
Since propositions, on the common understanding, occupy no physical or mental space – this is somewhat mysterious, but it is the usual construal – they can hardly be the subjects or objects of causality, or so it would appear. (In this they are rather like numbers: we certainly don’t say that 2 + 2 cause 4.)
But the first view, where the quoted statements in A and B are my thoughts or your thoughts, can be analyzed differently. We all know the experience of having a thought, A, which leads directly to another thought, B. Ordinary language endorses statements like my “When I thought of Ann (A), it made me remember that I hadn’t yet gotten her birthday present (B).” How strong is “made me remember” in such a phrasing? This can be debated, but the causal implication remains, or at the least a cause-like influence: Thought B would not have occurred to me, had I not had Thought A first, and this happened very directly, much as an efficient cause operates.
To keep this use of “thought” distinct from the propositional content of a thought, I’ll call it a “W2 thought” from now on, in honor of Popper’s World 2 of mental events. (Those of you who know Popper will recognize my set-up as Popperian in origin, with propositions in this case being examples of World 3 objects.) The key distinction between thoughts and propositions, on this view, is that W2 thoughts occur in time and space, as individual mental or psychological utterances, whereas propositions (again, somewhat mysteriously) do not. My W2 thought can never be the same thought as your W2 thought, even if we think the same proposition. That is because it occurs in my mind, not yours.
As philosophers, we’ll probably also want to give a more nuanced story about this, which might include an account of how the mental supervenes on the physical, such that brains and W2 thoughts can thrive together. But even without such a story, there’s a clear sense that the arrow of causation (or influence, if you prefer) goes one way and not the other, when it comes to W2 thoughts – just as it does in the physical world. And we certainly make counter-factual assertions about how W2 thoughts link together (“If I hadn’t W2-thought about Ann, I wouldn’t have W2-thought of her birthday present”).
So the question I want to pose is simply this: When we speak of one thought causing another, are we speaking about W2 thoughts, or about propositions?
If the former, then we need a theory about how psychological events can be causative. I think (though I’m not certain) that such a theory – long the Holy Grail of this area of inquiry – would equally explain both mental and physical effects. In other words, if we can understand how my thought of Ann causes me to think about her birthday present, we can also understand how that thought might cause me to pick up the phone and call her. This seems to be a general problem about the causal power of W2 thoughts, not a specific one about mental-to-mental causation.
If the latter, then we need a theory about how propositions can be causative. Why this is different from W2 thoughts being causative is crucial to understand. If a proposition can be said to have causal power, then this must be so regardless of any particular instantiation or utterance of that proposition. Such a theory would argue that the power is not psychological but rational. The fact that the W2 thought of Ann leads to the W2 thought about her birthday is not (adequately) explained merely by the congruence in time, in my brain, of the two thoughts. Rather, it is explained by the rational connection between the meaning or content of the two thoughts – that is, their propositional content.
This idea is perhaps clearer if we substitute a genuine entailment for the less formal example of Ann and her birthday: I think, “If all humans are mortal and everything that is mortal is beautiful, and Socrates is human, then Socrates is beautiful.” I then think, “Socrates is mortal”. Lastly, I think, “Therefore Socrates is beautiful”. Why do I think “Therefore Socrates is beautiful”? Am I “caused” to do so? Not everyone who has the first two thoughts – understood now as W2 thoughts – would go on to conclude that Socrates is beautiful. Only someone who understands the connections of propositional content will see the necessity of this. So a great deal hangs on whether this kind of necessity – a strictly logical or rational necessity – can ever be considered causative.
This takes us back to the Google chatbot’s confident statement that “causation involves a physical connection between events, while entailment is a relationship between propositions.” We have good reason to doubt the first half of that statement; I’m suggesting that the second half is also suspicious, if it’s meant to imply that entailment is not or cannot be causative. Entailment is indeed “a relationship between propositions,” and the connection between the two Ann thoughts is also “a relationship between propositions,” but this formulation is nearly empty. What do we actually understand about the nature of these relationships?
Not enough, I believe. The floor is open. And if I were critiquing my own OP, I’d start by asking, “Is it really possible to ?have’ a W2 thought without understanding its propositional content (assuming it has one)?” What do we mean when we talk about “having a thought”, anyway? I’d also raise the question of whether asking “Can a Thought Cause Another Thought?” is clear enough, without first being much more specific about what we want “cause” to cover.
Comments (310)
Do all thoughts have or need a cause? But first of all exactly what is a thought? Is it that voice we hear in our heard, or do we have unheard thoughts as well?
Thoughts are like actions. They're a continuous process. Whether one gives birth to another or spawns subsequently is not the question here. When I eat, I drink. It's continuous. My throat is full, so I water down. You can call it a reaction or a simple chain of actions.
Good question. But do you mean "thoughts" understood as my W2 thoughts, or thoughts as propositions?
Quoting Sir2u
I'm suggesting that "thought" can be understood in at least two ways. The "voice in the head" version would be what I'm calling a W2 thought. Unheard thoughts? I think not, for purposes of this discussion. (I'm assuming you mean "unheard" metaphorically, so it translates to "thoughts I'm not aware of having.")
Quoting Copernicus
I agree, they are. So, as with actions, we tend to divide them up into identifiable segments, while allowing that the process is continuous. We can ask, How does thought A lead to/cause/remind us of thought B, in the same way that we can ask, How does my action of chewing a mouthful of food lead to/cause me to have a drink? There are still causal questions involved, or at least there may be.
Causality (necessity and response).
Now, if you ask why the universe has causality as its founding grammar, that's a different discussion.
Can you give the source to the quotations you are using?
Quoting J
You have to define what you mean by a cause if this conversation is to go anywhere. If you think @T Clark has given that definition, then you need to provide the source where he does so.
Quoting J
If you disagree with the LLM's definition then you need to provide an alternative definition of "cause."
Quoting J
(Another thread where we are taking our cue from LLMs, by the way - in this case apparently without any real understanding of what one is even appealing to.)
Quoting J
Quoting J
So what made you think of Ann (W2) in the first place?
I come from sociology rather than philosophy, so my first impulse is always two things: (a) what's the theory, and (b) how do we operationalise it? But I'm not a very systematic thinker at the outset. So here I go:
My first thought reading this was that you went straight for the "hidden variable". As far I read you, you meant to ask whether thought A causes thought B. But you interpret thought A as "thinking of Ann". However, thought A is literally wondering how Ann is doing. You topicalise a rather specific ignorance and thereby show interest. That is I was automatically seeing "thinking of Ann" as a background process that instatiates as both A and B. Wondering how Ann is doing and her birthday are two different elements you could connect with Ann.
That suggests we're instinctively leaning towards a different approach: (a) A --> B, or (b) A <--[Thinking of Ann]-->B, where the order of the alphabet is the order of the surface manifistation.
You address the difference here, I think:
Quoting J
Here's the thing: I don't have an inner voice, and when I think words its formulating a thought with a background stream running to see if my word-thought expresses what I'm actually thinking. For me, "unheard thought" is core thinking and the verbalisation is surface expression there-of, at most assymptotic to the "real" thought. This is why the connection to propositions feels... strange. Propositions, for me, go top-down, while thinking is bottom-up, and verbalising a thought creats a loop of bottom-up - top-down - bottom up.... Words are externalised meaning and thought is internalised meaning. It's not quite so clear a differentiation, and verbalising a thought changes the flow of consciousness of course. But I can't easily pin down a single thought.
So for me, in the above example there would be an ongoing Ann-stream, with "how is she" surfacing firt and then the topic of birthday "intruding" and integrating. To do this, a second stream must be present (a keep-track-of-the-date stream, maybe; or a I-recently-forgot-another-birthday stream).
Isolating words is far easier than isolating thoughts, so propositions are helpful tools to put down an anchor so to speak, but I think it would be a mistake to conclude from a clearly demarkated proposition to a clearly demarkated thought. Words kind of externalise meaning and thereby encourage the repetition and variation of a thought-pattern. They're kind of thought attractors.
So if you'd be excluding "unheard thoughts", I probably have little to contribute. It leads to a highly unintuitive theoretical frame work for me.
It might be any number of things -- a picture, a scent, a dream, Proust's cookie, or, of course, a previous thought. I'm not suggesting that only a previous thought can cause a current thought. The OP is asking into what might be going on when such a situation does appear to occur.
And then there's "unheard thoughts" . . . see below.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Ah, I see. No, that wasn't the situation I was presenting. To be more specific: Something brings the thought of Ann to mind (see above). The "thought of Ann" might be a mental image, or her name, a memory associated with her -- I can only call upon your agreement here that something happens to which we refer when we say "All at once I thought of Ann and [now the words enter] wondered how she was doing". So this is thought A. And this, in turn, begins the process of reminding or causing which produces thought B -- I must get her a birthday present.
Quoting Dawnstorm
It does sound as if our mental processes are quite different, but I hope you'll stay on the thread anyway. The issue you're raising about "unheard" or background thoughts is definitely germane. I'm quite sure that some such thing goes on, just as you say (it may be part of what Nietzsche had in mind); I only hesitate to call them thoughts, preferring to reserve that term for what presents itself to awareness. But I'm happy to consider a different, broader categorization. Would you say that, in your "stream-of-Ann" thoughts, there is an element of causation that produces A, B, C, et al.? And can the surface-level thought A indeed cause thought B to rise up as well? Or is causality altogether the wrong way to think about this process?
Looking at it in terms of semantics, I'd say the connections between thoughts is associative. There are many common, that is communally shared, associations between ideas. Entailment would seem to be a stricter rule-based associative relation between ideas.
Looking at it from a physical perspective, the semantic relations could be physically instantiated as interconnections between neural networks.
I have no problem with that but, like talk of "relationships", are we really saying much when we say that connections between thoughts are associative? What we want to know is the nature(s) of those associations. And my question here is, specifically, can these associations include causal connections?
Quoting Janus
Something like that, yes. In the OP I tried to sidestep the question of mind/brain, since it's so complicated and contentious. But it's like a fly that won't go away. Might it be the case that there is no tractable way to understand non-physical causation (if it exists) until we understand how a brain can be a mind? Could be. (Even phrasing it this way becomes controversial, of course.)
Quoting J
The processes of smelling and recognizing a scent or image would then be the unheard thought, a trigger or as you said "a mental event (presumably grounded in brain activity)" that activates the little voice in the head (W2) thought “All at once I thought of Ann”.
Not all thought processes are voices in our heads. When you touch something hot, the last thing you literally do is think "Shit, it's hot". The brain has already finished the processing of the information and taken the necessary actions.
Think of a spiders web, is there any part of it that is not connected to every other part of it? As memories are created there is a lot of information recorded about that event and are tied to it. If you later come across one of those details in other circumstances they will cause a connection to the other event.
Imagine that you are getting your first kiss, the place that you are at, the time of day, the music you are listening to, the food you eat, and many other details get recorded as well. Depending on the actual event the emotions you feel, like getting horny, embarrassment because your hornyness is showing will be recorded as well.
Now imagine being with your parents and the music that you heard during your first kiss starts playing. You might just get embarrassed again.
This is the key (problematic) statement. What sort of causality is involved here? Do you mean "cause" at the level of neuronal activity? Or does one idea cause the other? If so, how? Or -- if this were a matter of strict entailment -- does the first idea necessitate the other?
Great. That's exactly what I'd like to hear about: Can we give a sense of causality to entailment or logical equivalence?
Thanks for the call out. All of the issues that have shown up in this thread so far are exactly the reason I tried to avoid a discussion of mental cause in my previous thread. It just gets too muddled and confused and physical cause is muddled and confused enough without any help.
Yeah, I think that is correct:
Quoting Leontiskos
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Quoting J
Association has a causal component. For the example given, the association will only occur within a mind that has assigned the name "grasshopper" to both the cocktail and the insect. Such an assignation does not occur without causal experiences, and beyond this, the names themselves become entangled in the experiences via memory.
But if you want a causal-deterministic account of association or mental thought sequencing, then you are effectively negating the possibility of mental phenomena that is qualitatively different from physical-deterministic phenomena.
Well, I used the words "externalise" above in a context like "language externalises throught". Maybe I should use the World 2 & 3 model to give you some hotch-potch ad-hoc model of my own?
Basically, both A and B are part of the "stream of Ann", so part of the stream of Ann is also part A and B. So what you have here is a sequence A -> B, where both A and B are part of an ongoing process.
So: some initial trigger made you "think of Ann". This is vague and unspecific; some set of neurons triggering maybe? It's pre-conscious and manifests as "How is Ann doing?" That manifestation is what you would like to call a thought. Now, if these exact words pop into your head, then you have something that persists in its form longer than anything in the actual stream. But it's made of language, which, for you to learn it, has to be a World 3 object, and once you have these words, you have soething that endures and triggers compatible World 2 thoughts. That works as communication from person to person, or as a particular form of memory from self to future self.
For example, if Ann were a mutual acquaintance of ours, you could say "I wonder how Ann is doing," and then I would wonder, too. Inside your head, it's a similar process; you just eliminate one person and it's all yourself. But the words are cultural set-ups that you've calibrated to your word-habits. Basically:
Thinking of Ann -> World2 thought of how Ann is doing -> Production of World3 object "I wonder how Ann is doing" which overlaps with ongoing World 2 thought -> Potential for recall of World3 object ("I wondered how Ann is doing.") and creation of World 2 thought similar to earlier thought.
You can analytically set the boarders anywhere in the process. Is the thought "I wonder Ann is doing" viewed as a type that anyone can have? Is it the thought that's in your brain? Is it the World 3 words and its associated propostion?
It's possible, for example, that "thinking of Ann" sets the stream in motion and some other stream (the birthday stream, the october stream, whatever) intersects and creates the World 3 sentence "Oh, right, Ann's birthday is coming up soon." And it's possible that stream initiates at roughly the same time as "how is Ann doing," but the former is more "primal" so it finishes production sooner. If that is the case, there is little causal connection. But if the production of the World 3 object somehow influences the "thinking-of-Ann-stream", it could do so in a way that kick-starts the Ann's-Birthday stream, and then there could be some causal connection (how do we differentiate between cause, influence and trigger, for starters).
I'd also like to note that world 3 objects aren't always as fixed as words. Take the concept of "story". I've never read much of the Moby Dick book, but I've seen the film with Gregory Peck. I've read Kipling's Jungle Books and seen the Disney "adaption". To what extent do the books and films contain the same story? Does the mode of "telling" change the story? The Moby Dick story as presented in book and film is a World 3 concept, and it frames the differences between instantiations. There are more differences with the jungle books, here. You extend the scope of the term "story" to some extent. You might, for example, feel as I did that it's "not the same story anymore". But that's influenced by context: it's supposed to be an adaption, but it isn't. This flips on its head with "Kimba the White Lion" --> "Lion King", where "it's practically the same story" because the inspiration goes unnoticed. If attributed and names kept, for example, one might say "it's not the same story anymore"; i.e. create mutually exclusive sentences that on the thought-level are quite compatible if contextualised. So what is a "story"?
If you're substituting "thought" here, you'll run into similar problems, because a thought put into words is always also a world 3 object. You're referring to propositions, here, for example. Now I think that, and that's probably controversial, that a thought you don't share and only think to yourself is also partly a world 3 object if you include the words. You certainly have a world 2 thought, too, but when looking at this from an analytic point of view there's a danger that you attribute world 3 properties to a world 2 object. For example:
Quoting Patterner
Quoting J
As maths, a world 3 object, entailment pertains even outside of any thought.
Inside a thought, that particular mind must know how to do addition first. Which is why the description of a causal chain is complex.
I think there's a danger here that the straightforward and stable entailment serves as a model for mental causation. It's not an invalid model, necessarily, but the mental processes just aren't as straightforward. (And then there's the problem that world 3 objects need to be maintained by world 2 process for them to exist, but my head's spinning already.)
I hope I'm making sense. This is the third version of this post.
I would bet a large majority of those who read my post had the thought of what I had in spoilers in their minds before they looked. If so, the only reason was that they were thinking about 7 + 5. I didn't even have to put the =, or say to add the numbers. But they thought, even if not explicitly, "I need to find the sum of those two numbers." Then they did so. Adding is thinking, and having "12" in your head means you're thinking "12". And it came about because the thought "7 + 5" was put in your head. What else could be responsible for you thinking "12"?
There's a lot to reply to, but let me start with the important point you raise about where to place language in our model of thought. If I understand you, the W2 thought should be seen as pre-linguistic, and this is part of why it is a W2 object. Its nature is "mentalese," not linguistic or propositional. When words enter the picture, we now have a W3 object, because language is a human construction. So: Quoting Dawnstorm
Next, this W3 linguistic object may (though it needn't) "exert an influence" on the stream-of-Ann thoughts (which, to repeat, are understood as W2 objects) so as to generate a W2 thought about Ann's birthday, which gives rise to the W3 proposition "It's her birthday soon". You ask, sensibly:
Quoting Dawnstorm
I can't decide if this matters. In my OP I tried to use phrases such as "cause-like" or "influence" in addition to "cause," to show that I wasn't committed to a strict view of what a cause must be, in this context. Suppose we accept the premise -- "there could be some causal connection" -- and take it as written that we're including a whole family of verbs like "trigger," "influence," "give rise to," "generate" etc. The important point seems to be that a counter-factual explanation can be offered using any of them.
You also raise this problem:
Quoting Dawnstorm
In raising this, are you asking whether linguistic expressions using indexicals can be shared types? That's a sub-problem, and an interesting one; I'm not sure. But are you also asking whether the W3, linguistic thought "I wonder how Ann is doing" can ever be a W2 thought? That is, must it somehow be stripped of language before we can place it "in the brain" as a psychological or mental phenomenon? I wouldn't say so, but your model may insist on it. I'd stay closer to our common way of speaking: When I say, "This morning, I thought about how Ann is doing", I'm saying both that I had the mentalese, W2 experience we're both trying to pin down, and that I formed the thought into words. In doing so, it remained a thought, thought it's now arguably crossed over into the human-made world of linguistic artifacts.
Actually, let me stop right here and ask whether I'm understanding you. I don't want to maunder on if I haven't grasped your basic points. (And I'll come back to your issues about how fixed a W3 object must be, and whether entailment can be fitted comfortably into this scheme.)
So why is any of this a problem? Isn't your straightforward description adequate?
Here's how I would put the problem: We don't know how mental events can cause anything. We don't know if this happens by virtue of what they mean -- which I think is your suggestion -- or because of some other property. We like to conceive of an entire world of meanings "in our heads": thoughts and images and memories all influencing and generating each other. What I'm calling the logical or propositional version of this would endow the meanings/contents/propositional content of thought with causal power. The psychological version, in contrast, would call this hopelessly mysterious, and insist that the causal relations must lie elsewhere -- @Dawnstorm's "stream of thought", perhaps. And this is to ignore the physical-reduction model (as I promised I would, since I think it's wrong) which says that only brain events can cause other brain events, period, end of story -- the "meanings" are free riders of some sort.
If I'm right that you see a clear explanatory connection between Thought A ("7 + 5") and Thought B ("12"), can you say more about the causation involved? How does A cause B? Where does such a relation occur?
Come around for the thread of Proclus' Elements in a few weeks; he's got some great ideas on this. :grin:
Most W2, I think.
Quoting J
One such is epiphenomenalism: mental events supervene on physical events, and are not reducible to them, but themselves have no causative power. Here, the apparent causation is illusory.
I prefer: mental events supervene on physical events because they are two perspectives on the same thing. Both are equally causative because both refer to the same reality.
Causation between billiard balls is not illusory. What is "really" happening is not electrostatic forces between atoms transmititting momentum. Rather, both the macro view (the billiard ball of everyday life) and the micro view are different perspectives one can take on the same thing. One perspective is not privileged over the other.
And so, mental events cause mental events, and brain events cause brain events: both are true, depending on how the event is framed.
How the very same thing can be framed as a brain event or a mental event is just the hard problem.
Most W2, I think.
Quoting J
One such is epiphenomenalism: mental events supervene on physical events, and are not reducible to them, but themselves have no causative power. Here, the apparent causation is illusory.
I prefer: mental events supervene on physical events because they are two perspectives on the same thing. Both are equally causative because both refer to the same reality.
Causation between billiard balls is not illusory. What is "really" happening is not electrostatic forces between atoms transmititting momentum. Rather, both the macro view (the billiard ball of everyday life) and the micro view are different perspectives one can take on the same thing. One perspective is not privileged over the other.
And so, mental events cause mental events, and brain events cause brain events: both are true, depending on how the event is framed.
How the very same thing can be framed as a brain event or a mental event is just the hard problem.
From a phenomenological perspective associations would not seem to be rigid or precise. They are more analogical, metaphorical, than logical. As to whether they are causal, if all our thoughts are preceded by neural activity, then the activation of one network which we might be conscious of as an association would presumably have a causal relationship with the neural network which it is experienced by us as being associated with.
Quoting J
That's an interesting question which I'm afraid I have no idea how to answer. I have often thought that we cannot ever understand how a brain can become a mind, because the latter just intractably seems to be something so different to any physical process. That said, I have an open mind about what understandings might appear in the future.
It's not causation. It's memory retrieval. With unfamiliar people or territory, however, imagination is the source of continued thoughts.
Causation is physical. Causation is the true measure of empirical observation.
Could you expand on this? I have Thought A and then retrieve a memory so as to have Thought B? Why that particular memory?
Quoting L'éléphant
We can stipulate that, certainly. Do you think there's an argument for why it must be the case, or does it represent a kind of bedrock commitment to how to understand the concept?
Quoting Janus
Agreed. The term is vague for the very reason that it can cover so many varieties.
Quoting Janus
This is a version of the reductive argument I proposed to ignore: It's the neuronal activity doing the causing, not the thoughts or the meanings themselves. On this understanding, do you think we should deny that my thought of "7 + 5" causes (or otherwise influences or leads to) the thought of "12"? Would this be better understood as loose talk, a kind of shorthand for "The neuronal activity that somehow correlates with or gives rise to the thought '7 + 5' causes the neuronal activity that . . . " etc?
Quoting hypericin
Good, though of course "perspectives" needs a lot of filling in.
Quoting hypericin
The interesting question here is whether we need to reform our use of "cause" and "causative" so as to allow legitimate talk of mental causation, or whether it's the concept itself that has to be expanded. "Equally causative" could be understood either way.
I think what you're describing is close to the truth, but as you say:
Quoting hypericin
Which leads back to my observation that we probably can't pick and choose different threads of this tangled web and claim to understand them while remaining ignorant about the others. We may need an entire comprehensive theory of consciousness before we'll understand what we now call, rather gropingly, mental causation. But we also need good philosophical analysis of the current concepts, so maybe we can do something useful in the interim.
Once the thoughts were in your head, they caused other thoughts. That's what they do. It's not always as predictable as with simple arithmetic, because other factors are involved. Other thoughts you're already having; memories that the implanted thought brings up; other sensory input your receiving; and others. But 7 + 5 is such a simple thing that it isn't easily overwhelmed by other things before 12 shows up. So it's good for the demonstration.
As to the "how" that you're asking? Good question. But we don't really have the answer to that for physical causation, when it comes right down to it. The negative charge of the electrons on the outer surface of one object repel the negative charge of the electrons on the outer surface of another object? In [I]Until the End of Time[/I], Brian Greene writes:
We don't know what charge is. We can't know how it works. We only know what it does. Maybe that's bottom-level.
I don't know that we can't figure out more about thoughts causing thoughts than we currently know. I'm very happy to discuss it, but can't be of much help. But I imagine we'll reach a bottom level.
This theme has cropped up early and often on the thread: Our conceptual understanding of an apparently local, tractable problem like "How does one thought cause another?" immediately draws us into a theoretical morass about causality and consciousness, with so many empty places on the map that it's hard to know what more to say. In that spirit, your insistence on (what seems) the undeniable causal connection between the thought of "7 + 5" and the thought of "12" is salutary. This much, at least, we know, phenomenologically -- this is certainly how it appears. Or if this isn't true, I'd say the burden of proof is on the denier to say why not, even in the absence of a good explanation for it.
I think that's how I presented it, but it's a simplification. There's a lot of overlap. Language that doesn't create an artifact (sound or scribbles or signing) is entirely "inside the head", so to speak. This is difficulat to parse out. The key issue here is that there is a pre-linguistic flow that is less clearly demarkated and also less repeatable than the linguistic aspect of the flow. A W2 thought will involve language, but not all of the language in your head is exhausted within the W2 framework. (Maybe it becomes clearer if you consider Wittgenstein's private language argument here.)
Maybe (not sure but maybe), there's this mentales flow that is entirely a W2 object; the linguistic level that is both a W2 and a W3 object, and then the propositional layer which is entirely a W3 object, but has to be represented in W2 to exist (as all W3 objects) - probably via the W2 part of language, which has to connect to the sublinguistic flow for meaning to occur.
Under that model it's not entirely clear what a W2 thought is. I don't think can begin to delimit a "thought" before I've got a model of what actually happens. For example, I said this:
Quoting Dawnstorm
But it's entirely possible that in some situation it's:
Thinking of Ann -> Production of World 3 object "I wonder how Ann is doing" -> World2 thought of how Ann is doing...
A particular situation might trigger a word habit, which is then associated with a thought habit. That is: I could easily imagine both word-first and concept-first situations.
Now that I've (hopefully) clarified, it should be clear that I'm not saying this:
Quoting J
When you think a word, you think the sign-body as well as the meaning. It depends on the person how you internally think the signbody: some people might hear it said (they literally have a word in the head), some people might just think the word purely abstractly - I don't know if that is possible; for me, thinking a word is performative - I believe I can sometimes - not always - detect micro movements of the speech aparatus (the vocal chords are probably not involved, I'm more thinking about the tongue, palate etc.)
But the meaning is doubled; the canonical meaning of the word needs to fit into the stream of what you want to say. That process would usually be automatic and unconscious, but you'll notice it when you can't think of word, or think of many words none of which fit. What I'm thinking here is that there's not necessarily a 1:1 relationship between say a word (both it's sign-body and canonical meaning) and what concept you wish to impart. But I'm not sure how to model that relationship. There's a wholistic flow that you need to partition for langauge, but there's also the pre-partitioned word-stuff that you import, so there's some sort of give and take here (and that give and take regularly crosses the borders between worlds 2 and 3). I have no model for how this works at this point.
That said, we can still pose the question, Is anything in the process of stringing two thoughts together an instance of causality? I don't think it matters where we draw the borders, taxonomically, between W2 and W3 thoughts, or how we conceive of that fuzzy realm of experience. If we decide that some sort of causation is indeed a factor, then we can go back and try to understand what causal powers W2 or W3 thoughts (or combinations thereof) might have. My OP was meant to highlight some of the problems with both W2 and W3 thought-causality, when the two are taken as distinct types -- but they needn't be.
Getting back to your point that Popper's World 3 isn't reliably populated with discrete "objects" -- I quite agree. Your example of "story" shows this very well. But I suppose the same could be said for good old World 1 objects. For most purposes, we may want to regard a toothbrush as a single object, but there may be occasions when we need to see it as more than one (if I'm in the bristle-making business, for instance). The division among Popper's worlds mostly holds up, and is useful; it's the addition of "object" that is problematic. But let's not get sidetracked in mereology.
You also said, in your earlier post:
Quoting Dawnstorm
and:
Quoting Dawnstorm
Both these observations are at the heart of the causal problem. Does entailment pertain/exist even with no mind to think the constituent propositions? (If a conclusion follows/falls in a forest with no one to think it, does it display an entailment? :smile: ) Understandably, "Yes" is a tempting answer. But this raises the headache I alluded to in the OP: What sort of being do propositions have? Can they be created (thought) as W3 objects in good standing, and then persist "out there" somewhere when no one thinks them? I'll send us all back to Plato for that one.
But if it is meaningful to speak of an entailment as forcing or necessitating a conclusion, doesn't this have to happen in a mind, in conjunction with some W2 thoughts? I can just about accept mindless propositions (though see Rödl and others); but causing new ones, by virtue of entailment, without a mind to do it looks like a step too far. If there is mental causation, perhaps we require some kind of instantiation or embodiment (en-mind-ment?) of the entailing propositions in order to effect the conclusion. Someone has to think it. Ah, but is that thinking an invention or a discovery? And is it genuinely necessitated? "I was caused to conclude that Socrates is mortal!" Sounds odd, yet . . .
I think we can reasonably say that the thought "7 + 5" may lead to the thought "12", or it may lead to the thought "5 +7" or "7-5" or "7 divided by 5" or "these two prime numbers do not sum to a prime" or whatever.
I won't rehearse possible stories about neural networks, since that it what you propose to ignore.
I don't think it even needs to be expanded. If we understand that thought and brain activity are actually the same things, and brain activity is understood as causative, then thought must also be causative, and we can use causative language around it.
Quoting J
Again, I don't see why. We don't need to understand how thought can be brain activity, only that thought is brain activity.
I agree that '12' would be the most common association, my point was only that it is not, by any means, the only possible association. If '7+5' can be said to cause '12' in those common cases where that association occurs, then it could be said to cause any other association that might occur it would seem.
I've had that happen plenty of times too! Which perhaps reminds us that "to understand" is broad, and often incomplete. Math isn't my forte, so I've frequently looked at a piece of math and said to myself, Yeah, I get that, and then it turns out that there was a whole other level of implication and elegance that I'd missed. I wasn't wrong, exactly, in what I thought I understood; it was just "through a glass darkly."
On the other hand causation is often distinguished from correlation (association?) with the idea that to qualify as causal, when X occurs Y must occur.
I think you're right. But, regardless of the specific thought "7 + 5" causes, it causes another thought. I'd say it's overwhelmingly likely that it will cause "12" or another mathematical thought than, say, "Fidel Castro". Because meaning is the key, and there's very little possibility that anyone associates "7 + 5" with Castro more than with 12 or some other mathematical idea. Even now that I've created an association between 7 + 5 and Castro, 12 is still stronger, and the next time you think 7 + 5, you'll first think "12", [I]then[/I] you'll think "Castro", [I]then[/I] you'll think "Patterner is an idiot."
Perhaps an image worth considering, is a pulsating web of causality, with many thoughts causally interacting with each other, and those interactions occurring in what for the most part are subconscious ways? Are the thoughts Keynes thinks in things, or rather complex dynamic sequences of events?
I haven't heard of that one; thanks for bringing it up. I was vaguely aware of research, but nothing drug related.
Quoting J
I'd like to highlight the difference between an entailment not being thought, and there being no mind to potentially think it. People who can work through an entailment can do so because they know how entailment works. Knowledge underlies all thought in many ways, but is passive without thought OR action.
So:
Quoting J
Yes, they can "persist", but no, not, in a platonic idealist way. I think propositions are at their most stable when they're not being thought, because that means they're passively available as memory traces. It's when they activate in social situations that they change. Knowing of a proposition is passive and provides structure; thinking it is making a problem of it and potentially changing it.
But that's not the extent of it. If the knowledge of knowledgable agents across a relevant population then there's a structural conflict potential: that's when stuff gets unstable, and people try to push for more favourable knowledge or repair what they have (as it's been useful so far). The most prominent example currently, I think, is the gender discourse. The need to express certainty hints at conflict. Things that actually are certain don't even need to be thought. And that's a problem with the current gender discourse: there are people who are forced to think of gender nearly always, and people for whom the binary is so certain that they don't even understand what others are talking about, with all sorts inbetween.
For an example of shared knowledge that nearly no-one questions in daily life, look at money. (Things might be different in specialised context like the stock market. I don't know enought to even speculate.) Certain aspects of language come to mind; for example, every native speaker of English knows that English is an accusative-nominative language, which they demonstrate just by speaking. That knowledge is embedded in the praxis of speaking, though. Most people don't know that they know that; they don't know it could be different (you'd need to be either interested in linguistics, or speak a language that's ergative-absolutive, like Basque).
So finally:
Quoting J
Yes and no. Again you need to step from the mental level to the social level. An entailment doesn't force a conclusion in any given individual's W2. There's ignorance; there's making mistakes, etc. But all these things only make sense before a social background; there has to be someone to plausibly be able to convince you that you're ignorant, wrong, etc. by demonstrating what it is like to be right. Unsuccessful demonstrations cause social unrest, and you have predictable conflict which is also part of the knowledge. Think again about the gender discourse, people on the extreme ends may not understand each other, but what they have in common is their mutual knowledge that they won't find agreement. Which makes much of the posturing performative for their own knowledge group.
There are many measures of the stability of social facts (W3 objects): for example, do we tend to trust the experts? Do we just act on knowledge without topicalising it? And so on.
Sociologists often speak of "consensus" here, but it's mostly not a conscious act of agreeing. Much of it is a tacit performance of the way things are. The less it's questioned the more stable it is (think for example toilet training). There could be a social scale of stability for W3 objects:
Things that most people agree upon, and disagreement is a form of stigma to reinforce the status quo.
Things that people take for granted that opportunities to agree or disagree rarely arise.
Things that people take for granted so much that most people don't know it could be different.
W3 objects do ultimately rely on W2 activity, but there's never really a context where a single mind's enough.
So:
Quoting J
Rather than "Someone has to think it," think "many people have to know it," where knowledge isn't some "justified true belief", but the capability to successfully complete social situations. You can't buy something from someone who doesn't know how to sell.
One important difference between knowledge and thought is that knowledge is continually present in the background (unless forgotten) and only activates when situationally relevant. (You could, I suppose, assume that knowledge doesn't persist but comes into being again every time we need it, but that doesn't sound plausible to me.) Meanwhile thought is situated much more episodically. This is why stuff that persists in W3 must be known but can go a long time without being thought. It mustn't be forgotten, and must be passed on to the next generation of minds to persist.
Furthermore, because what one mind "knows" (in the social sense) can be wrong only because there are people who know differently, So as long as enough people know that 5+7=12, entailment will pertain. This is an iterative process; a chicken-egg situation if you will. People know what they learn, and they teach what they know. And just like with chicken and eggs the process allows for change. What one generation teaches isn't necessarily what the next generation learns, but it could be close enough that the difference only surface in concrete situations once it's too late.
There's a hierarchy of dependence from W1 to W3. You need W1 for W2 and W2 for W3, but neither W2 nor W3 is necessary for W1 to exist. Influence, however, can go the other way. W3 can influence W2 and W2 can influence W1. It's this asymmetry that makes me think the difference between causation and influence could be vital to pin down. To put it in concrete terms: I don't think "Matter causes minds," and "Money causes anxiety," use the word cause in the same way. But I can't pin down a concrete difference.
I wonder if those who do not think in words have these sub-vocalizations.
I see what you mean, but when I spoke about "understanding mental causation," I intended to include the how as well as the fact of it. To me, that would provide true, complete understanding.
Quoting Janus
Quoting Janus
This highlights a problem with "cause" language in this context. Certainly "7 + 5" is not a necessary cause of "12" (assuming it's causal at all). Nor is it a sufficient cause, though, as has been argued, it's a very likely one. If we end up saying that whatever follows from the thought of "7 + 5" has been caused by that thought, doesn't this amount to saying that only a W2 thought can be causative? That is, the propositional or meaning content of the thought can lead to anything, so no causation is involved at that level.
Quoting wonderer1
The latter, and surely Keynes would agree. Our linguistic habits tend to reify processes or events into discrete "things" or objects so we can talk about them more readily.
Compare it with a pool table. The cue ball, 8 ball, and corner pocket are in a straight line. Hit the cue straight into the 8, and the 8 goed in the pocket.
That doesn't mean every time you hit the cue ball straight into the 8, it will go into the corner pocket. The three are not always in a straight line. Sometimes there are other balls between the 8 and the pocket. Nevertheless, wherever the 8 ends up, having been hit by the cue ball is always the cause. At least having been hit by the cue ball is always a big factor in where it ends up.
Getting the thought 7 + 5 in your head is getting hit by the cue ball. Which specific thought it causes depends on the layout of the table. Meaning your past experiences with "7 + 5" specifically, your past experiences with math in general, and even non-math considerations (now to include my connecting 7 + 5 and Castro). But the thought of 7 + 5 is always the cause, or where you end up.
I have had an idea for a story for many years. People in a certain area seen to be going crazy. Many people are found talking nonsense. Strings of seemingly unconnected words. It is eventually noticed that they are all speaking the [I]same[/I] string of seemingly unconnected words. It turns out they have all been in an extensive, recently discovered cave that contains various archaeologically interesting things. Glyphs, carvings, textures on the walls, containers of scented things. It turns out that, seeing and smelling these things in the order you encounter them while walking through the cave inevitably leads all people to a specific chain of thoughts, because the chain of stimuli acts upon things in the psyche common to all humans. (I suppose a civilization was wiped out. As people become caught in the chain of thoughts, they become incapable of breaking out of it, and stop eating.)
I thought your Castro example was meant to show the opposite. Or perhaps we're debating shades of meaning, because I also agree that "certain things for anyone" is a valid way of putting it. It's just that these "certain things" are, as far as I can understand, limitless. Not random, though, which is perhaps your point.
My Castro example is demonstrating that the association can be anything. Because of my posts, If you get the thought "7 + 5", you will soon have the thought "Castro". "7 + 5" will have caused "Castro". Possibly even if you just have the thought "12" for any other reason. Obviously, the association is necessary. You now have an association.
I guess not all thoughts are caused by thoughts. If I see a cloud that I think looks like Godzilla, I wouldn't say a thought caused the thought of Godzilla. Sensory input and memory caused it.
We can make sentences that have never been thought before. [I]Kathmandu will be the site of a giant mushroom festival in the year 2145.[/I] I think we can be reasonably sure that's the first time that sentence was ever thought, spoken, or written. While constructing it, I intentionally discarded anything that came to me from my surroundings. I believe no part of the sentence was was inspired by anything at all. I wanted a sentence that was entirely out of the blue. So what caused the thought of a giant mushroom festival in Kathmandu in 2145?
I happened to run across this, in Peirce:
"Affectibility" is yet another near-synonym, like "relationship" or "association" or "influence," a way of approaching the idea of "cause" without committing to it. It's also interesting that Peirce must have had propositions or other World 3 objects in mind here, since it wouldn't make much sense to suggest that my thought or your thought (qua W2 thoughts) could have this effect. What's needed is the content, the meaning, in order for the idea to "spread continuously." In fact, the very term "idea" already implies a separation from the psychologically grounded W2 thought.
In Susan Haack's essay on Peirce's "synechism," she provides this suggestion:
Here again, the distinction between World 2 and World 3 thoughts. I wouldn't care to make an argument that there is a thought-like "intelligible pattern" to be found in aspects of Nature, as Haack thinks Peirce believed. But the idea that such patterns are outside of particular minds is the whole point of asking into whether, and how, they might be causative.
Yeah, saw that. It was on the internet. Why did you think you made it up? :wink:
Quoting Patterner
Absolutely right. Those that are caused by previous thoughts are a special category. We can stretch the term "thought" until it snaps, but I agree with you (though I think @Dawnstorm would not) that whatever made you invent that sentence, it wasn't some previous thought standing in a causal relation. Dawnstorm might argue for a stream-of-thought, out of which the (linguistic) elements of your sentence popped up. But regardless of our terminology, you question is a good one: What caused that sentence (as a thought in your mind, that is, not in your post)? We're drawn to a World 2 explanation, aren't we? Some individual, particular elements in your mind and no other were the key links of the causal chain. But that's not quite right. The words and the grammar are available to all. But the absence of anything resembling entailment, or even rationality, is striking: no part of the sentence seems required by any other. (And of course it's ambiguous: Giant festival, or festival featuring giant mushrooms?)
Try to construct an explanation, assuming a sincere questioner asked you, "What caused you to think that sentence?" I wonder what you'd get. Would you wind up denying causality completely?
We can make sentences that have no clear-cut meaning until you figure out later what they might mean. I'm not even joking. I used to write SF stories, and one of my exercises was to improvise meaningless sentences to world-build around. The only example I remember:
A couple of sinker limpets got hold of me, but then the afterwash set in.
The world I came up with was one with migrating lakes instead of rivers. (Never finished thinking this through, which is probably why I remember the sentence.)
The idea I have is that thinking words is one type of thought and thinking content another, and since they run together, you can't quite distinguish word-first content from content-first words. It is a proposition universally acknowledged, that a single sentence of good standing must be in want of a truth...
That's a fun exercise! And I think it's even more difficult to answer J's question regarding your sentence than my mushroom festival sentence:Quoting J
I'm actually not ready to argue for anything yet. I'm still trying to find a way to describe what we're asking here. For example, if I were to stick with the stream metaphor, I might say that the stream isn't all there is - there's plenty of stuff that doesn't flow: the river bed, sediment, big heavy objects that cause turbulence...
My pre-occupation at that time is simply that it's hard to pin down what about the stuff that surrounds the readily-accessible sentence is thought and what isn't. And my major concern, as I think I said before (though I might have done so in a deleted response...), is that we shouldn't confuse the stability of the sentence-form with stability of sentence meaning.
Adding a 3-worlds-model on top here complicates things because now the sentence-meaning multiplies, even just from the production point of view:
A primal W2 element - what triggers the sentence productions
A W2 object triggered by the sentence - the expectation of what the W3 object is meaning to a generalised other - did I say it right?
A realigned W2 object based on using the sentence W2 object - I think I meant to say what I think others will hear.
The re-aligned W2 object is something I see people rarely pay attention to. The thing is that I suspect the re-aligned W2 object can but needn't replace the primal W2 object. The primal W2 object drives your actions while the re-aligned W2 object comes up when you need to legitimise your actions. In some cases that might lead to others seeing you as a hypocrite, while you're incapable seeing yourself as such (as your world view integrates both W2 objects as unproblematic).
Take for example grammar. It's easy to use but hard to analyse. You mention the "giant mushroom festiveal" ambiguity. Is the mushrum festival giant or are the mushrooms giant? Phrasing the ambiguity like this makes it a semantic ambiguity, but there's also a syntanctic ambiguity [giant[mushroom festival]] or [[gaint mushroom]festival], where the brackets mark constiutients ("Immediate Constituent Analysis" if you're curious). There's a different ambiguity in the whole clause, that's an obvious syntactic ambiguity, a subtle semantic ambiguity (one of emphasis probably), and rarely ever a situationally relevant ambiguity:
[[Kathmandu] [will be] [the site [of a giant mushroom festival]] [in the year 2145].] vs. [[Kathmandu] [will be] [the site of [a giant mushroom festival in the year 2145]].]
The syntactic ambiguity concerns whether "in the year 2145" is an adverbial to the clauses verb phrase, or whether it's part of the noun phrase. In either case, the festival takes place in 2145, but where in the sentence we express this changes. My hunch is that most people will have the first syntactic reading as the ad-hoc reading. But what if I replied:
A giant mushroom festival in the year 2145 is unlikely, but if it did take place Kathmandu would make for a good site.
I now copied the exact string of words, but there's now no syntactic ambiguity anymore.
If the sentence represents the thought, what about the instinctive syntactic reading of what "in the year 2145" attaches to? Is this a "thought"? Is this some background linguistic mental behaviour yet to be named, but not falling under "thought"? Is this an aspect of your model of all thought that includes linguistic aspects?
Sometimes the syntactically easier parsing is at odds with the intended syntactic perception. Take garden path sentences, where you miss the end of a unit and don't notice until the sentence either fails to parse or gives a clearly unintended reading (e.g. "The old man the boat.")
So, how many sentences can express the same thought, then?
For example: In 2145 there will be a giant mushroom festival in Kathmandu.
Same thought? The difference in formality expressed by the more conversational wording - part of the thought, or part of the thought's context?
I sort of need to answer questions like these before I can start building a model. Given that I myself have never really had cause to wonder whether thoughts can cause thoughts before reading this thread (I actually might have read similar threads in the past, but for simplicity's sake let's pretend I haven't) so I have no intuitive substratus here. I'm still trying to figure out what the topic is.
[B]How Does a Thought Cause Another Thought?[/B]
That's what we need to work on. It can happen in different ways.
"7+5" shows one way. It's such an easy one, we can't stop ourselves from solving it.
"Grassy knoll" shows another way. (At least if you're above a certain age, or you learned the association in some other way.) This type would include personal memories. At least I don't think personal memories is a different way?
Word Association shows a third way. A different type of association. When I write "black", "wet", and "boy", do you think "white", "dry", and "girl"? Not specific associations, and there are surely more likely responses to these than there are to "7+5". In response to "boy", did you think "George"? "Tarzan"? (Gilligan said "oh" when Ginger was testing him. Because "Oh boy." :rofl:) Did "wet" cause "slippery"? "Water"? "Paint"? "Willie"?
In what other ways does one thought cause another thought?
I don't think every thought causes another thought. (And I don't think every thought is caused by a thought.) But maybe every thought causes thinking?
Before asking this question, or @J's original question (Can a Thought Cause Another Thought?), I think we should ask ourselves: Do we need to analyze thoughts in terms of causation? Because so far, this discussion looks to me like a solution in search of a problem.
:rofl: Maybe so. But, then, the site could be asolutioninsearchofaproblem.com
It's precisely what counts as a thought that is insuffienctly described for me to have much of an oppinion about it.
Take "7+5". In what ways is that even thught? If I read "7+5" and think "12" then I might just cover this with a stimulus-response model without ever invoking the concept of "a thought".
Another problem: 5+7=12 is usually just memorised, so what happens is that we're completing a culturual template. In a manner of speaking, we're completing a default thought: filling a gap we automically perceive. So "5+7" might be an incomplete thought where we automatically fill the gap in the proper way.
This is not mainly describing what actually happens. For example, "5+7" = thought 1 and "12" = thought 2 might require a different theoretical model of thought than "5 + 7 = 12" is a common and context-evoking cultural template, so that "5 + 7" is auto-completed to make a recurring thought happen once again.
Take "432 + 493 = 925". If you were to see "432 + 493" and you recognise this as addition. You may solve, or you may shrug and walk away. These are two responses: do any of those involve thought? Is shrugging and walking away less of a thought than mumbling "Who cares?" and walking away, because the latter includes language and the former doesn't? Is the recognition of addition already thought, given that it's implied but not expressed in either reactions? How many thoughts are involved in solving the addition?
For example, I just went back to front: 3+2, put down 5, 9+3, put down 2, carry over 1, 4+4+1, put down 9. I could have been quicker if I'd just used 432 + 500 = 932; 932 - 7 = 925. I realised that too late. Is me automatically choosing my habitual mode a thought? To me this type of choice has a lot in common with completing 7+5; both happen almost without thinking.
What's different here is the output. If the output is language we tend to name it "a thought". I'm reminded of the line "A sentence is a complete thought". In creative writing circles this is usually used to stigmatise run-on sentences, or advocate for many short sentences over one long sentence. This has always struck me as silly. My intuition is to decouple thought and language, but if I do that what remains to look at. What kind of concrete entities remain as hints that you are thinking?
If "thought" is the process and "a thought" is a usefully demarcated stretch of that but that demarcation does not necessarily co-incide with the demarcation of the words what is there to go into the model. I'm not saying that words shouldn't be in the model, just that we should be careful not to use words and sentences as stand-in for thoughts.
This is me just rambling, really. To cut it short: I'm not convinced that "7+5" illiciting the response "12" is usefully modelled as one thought causing another (though I'm also not convinced that it doesn't). Maybe you just see "7 + 5" and think "7 + 5 = 12": maybe it's a visual stimulus triggering your mental copy of culturally template. But then for the reflected light on your retina to transform into a visual stimulus is thought necessary? And if so, how much of it? And if thought happens is there anything you could usefully demarcate into "a thought"?
Quoting SophistiCat
I just want to note that I understand these comments. For me, they point to two things: First, the difficulty of adapting our concepts of causality on the one hand, and the mental on the other, to even frame a sensible question. And second, as we've already noticed, the disconcerting way in which a perfectly simple (!) query -- Can a thought cause another thought? -- quickly expands into large theoretical questions, most of which we have at best tentative answer to.
Nevertheless, I'm going to try to post a reformulation of my initial OP question, in light of the very interesting discussion that's ensued. Hopefully later today.
Quoting SophistiCat
To this, I'd say no, we don't. I'm quite open to other hypotheses about the "relations," "affinities," "influences," "associations," et al. among thoughts. The only line I'd draw in the sand would be: We mustn't talk as if we already understand this issue, or as if there is no issue.
Yes, I'm joking.
:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:
Quoting DawnstormYou think? I intentionally looked for an example that I didn't think is memorized. I don't know that people memorize addition the way we do the Times Tables. It's also more involved than counting by 2s. And not as thoughtlessly easy as adding 1 or 2 to any number.
Well, even if it's not the best example, I'm sure we can find one that is net memorized, but is easy enough that the majority of people would add it up sticky and reading, rather than shrug and walk away.
Quoting DawnstormI haven't thought about this before, but I'm inclined to disagree. I don't see how something we are thinking short isn't, but definition, a thought. And even if we're talking about counting by 2s, which most beyond whatever age can do easily, without any sort of calculating, do we not have to think to do it?
Quoting DawnstormEither is a decision. Which sounds like a thought to me.
Quoting DawnstormI don't see how it's possible that it's not thought. Photons can hit our retinas without us really seeing it. We don't notice everything in our visual field, and wr sometimes don't notice things dead center in our visual field. But if you notice it enough to decide you are not going to do the math, you're thinking about it.
Quoting DawnstormIt seems like running to me. Running happens. It's a process. And you go for a run. Thought happens. It's a process. And you have a thought.
(Although it might be better to use the word [I]thinking[/I] for the process. Sometimes we do strange things with words. "Lowe's delivered the fencing yesterday.")
It's a difficult thing sometimes. Can a voluntary action become so habitual that there is literally no thinking involved any longer?
I do not believe driving, or walking through a crowded store, on "auto-pilot" is done without thought. We certainly relegate such things to the background. Sometimes so much so that we have accidents. And, not dwelling on any moment, nothing makes it into our long-term memory. But I have to believe there is [I]some[/I] thought involved.
I think or at least thought so. I'm, of course, uncertain, even more so now that you brought it into question. The thing is, when I read 5 + 7 in your post I didn't think 12. I knew you what you were going for, and that was enough for the purpose of this thread, which is very mentally demanding.
Now what's going on my mind here? I really did think that 5+7 is mostly memorised (of course not always for everyone). That's definitely true. So what was my thought process here? What's clear is that, even though I was prompted to "retrieve 12" and I knew I was prompted such, I didn't bother to retrieve twelve. Given my memorisation bias, I didn't bother to retrieve a synonym. "7 + 5" and "12" are labels for the same thought, so there was no need.
If that really is what happened, then we would have one concept beneath and two labels on top, and maybe three thoughts in total (one of which I didn't find necessary to activate). If this is not what happened, then it's possible that I misinterpret what's going on between thoughts and language inside my head. An my testimony on the topic would be at best unreliable.
The type of social study I gravitated towards while in University (sciology) relied a lot on self-report. So there's that.
I don't mean delibertaly sitting down and memorising tables. 12 is a low enough number so that if you've done a lot of addition by hand (as I have; when I was a kid in the 70ies even pocket calculators were expensive; these days everyone has smart phone) then you'll remember 5+7 as 12 simply by repetition. I assumed that's normal. Not something I now think I should assume.
Not for me. 5+7 and 12 are literally synonymous in my mind. No extra steps needed. No need to retrieve 12, when I already have 5+7. Interestingly, I just went through other digit-pairs that end up at 12, and it seems I take slightly longer even with 11+1. It seems 5+7 is special for me somehow. Huh. Not what I expected.
I agree.Quoting Patterner
I think you misunderstand my position. "Thought" is what's going on in when we're thinking. The process; the stream of consciousness (or part of it, whatever we're willing to count as thinking). "A thought" is unit that occurs with that process. It's perfectly possible to be thinking, but there's no good way to break what's going on apart to isolate "a single unit that makes up a thought".
So, if two thoughts are part of the same stream of consciousness, then if you zoom in one thought might cause another, but if you zoom out they're both part of a bigger thought. And it's easy to skip zoom levels without noticing. So, maybe we suspect thought 1 causes thought 2, when thought 1 is really just the beginning stage of thought 2. We've not been clear enough what happens on what level. But to be clear about that we need a sane model (and I have none).
I'm suggesting we need a model of what type of thoughts can reasonable compared to each other on a level that's relevant to causation. I'm sorry for being so convoluted, but that's just how I... think.
Quoting Patterner
Again, this was meant to be a terminological enquiry. Above it was "thought" vs. "a thought". Here it is about the place of thought within a cognitive framework. Is all cognition "thought" or is it a specialised form of cognition distinct from other terms, such as "memory", "recognition". Maybe some people would like to use "thought" only for "reasoning"?
Quoting Patterner
Yes, that's my intuition, too, until that last sentence. Here I'd deiverge, maybe like this: "...It's a process. And you have a thought/thoughts." The slash is supposed to represent a modal "or" - depending on how you count what different grammatical structures apply. I wish English would mark this in its number system: singular, plural, either. I'd have used the third form here.
Quoting Patterner
Yes, that's my intuition, too, but it makes for a really broad term. The trade off is that - suddenly - thought is everything and nothing that goes on in the mind. With a definition so broad the question "can a thought cause another thought," becomes a trivial yes, but it's no longer an interesting question on it's own. It's a doorway to host of different questions.
Finally, thought in the context of cause and effect needs certain traits amenable to cause. What are they? If we review the thread we've had "causation = physical" and "entailment = logical", and then pair that up with Popper's 3 worlds. Causation would then inhabit world 1, and entailment would inhabit world 3, but thought would inhabit world 2 (as it's centre of operation, but it has tendrils in both world 1 and 3). If causation language is biased towards world 1, then how should we model thought, if we want to focus on world 2. Does that seem like a fair description of the confusion this thread is in (or is just me overthinking things again...)
I want to hear @Patterner's response, but I'll just jump in to say that I do think it's a fair description of the confusion -- or at any rate the uncertainty -- with which I began, and which prompted me to start the thread in the first place. I don't know that anyone's responses has made it any worse, or that there would have been a clearer path to follow. I'm still working on my own restatement of the OP question. . .
"I don't see how something we are thinking short isn't, but definition, a thought."
might be better as
"I don't see how something we are thinking about isn't, by definition, a thought."
Anyway, I'll be back.
To clarify, my question was not rhetorical. Where I was going with this is that causal analysis is a choice that we make, and so is the form that it takes. We shouldn't presuppose that causation is there, and we just need to elucidate it, or if it turns out that causation is absent, then we are in trouble (epiphenomenalism!)
That said, we need a proper motivation to look for causation. The place to start would probably be the field of psychology (less so philosophy of mind, for that is where idle and wrongheaded questions often originate...) Does mental-to-mental causation figure in psychology - as distinct from reason or explanation (informally, those words are often used interchangeably)?
As for the type of causation, perhaps inferential causation would be more promising in this context, since it is quite loose (being a spiritual descendant of Humean regularity theory) and does not rely on any physicalist ontology, such as energy.
Because of the operation of the mind -- thoughts are modes of thinking. If a thought can cause you another thought, are you not removing the mind from the equation?
A thought cannot cause another thought in the way that "causation" is used in philosophy.
You seem to think that a thought that can cause another thought is a starting point of an idea. If you think of an idea then another idea comes up, this thought that you said was caused by the first thought does not enjoy a particular hierarchy in the way actual causation happens. The mind is in control. It is also selective. A thought comes as a presentation from your mind. If further information is lacking or forgetfulness ensues, then another idea will come up.
Quoting J
Because causation is an observed phenomenon. That's why it is the case that it is physical.
Quoting L'éléphantMaybe that [I]is[/I] the mind. I've asked elsewhere - What is the mind when there is no thinking taking place?
Regarding causation in general… A famous example of correlation not being causation is watching a train station for a day, and noticing that every time a bunch of people gather at it, a train shows up.
One thought following another is not correlation. it is causation. Think of paparazzi. Your next thought might be that Lady Di was killed because they were trying to outrun the paparazzi. It might be pizza, because both words start with p, have zz, and have at least one a and i. Who knows how many other things the word causes people to think? But none of those thoughts were about to be thought anyway. They wouldn't have been thought (well, there are coincidences) if you hadn't been thinking about paparazzi. And paparazzi obviously did not become a thought in anticipation of Lady Di or pizza.
obviously, there are times when one thought was not caused by a previous thought. One example is you might be in the middle of thinking anything, and then you see or hear or smell something, and it entirely changes your thoughts.
They're most definitely causing the trains to show up. The proof of that if that if those people would stop showing up, the trains would eventually also stop showing up :wink:
Maybe the issue is classifying causation as "physical" or "mental" rather than simply "procedural"?
Quoting Dawnstorm
This is the way it is for you now, but what about when you were in grade school learning arithmetic? Are you saying that we only think when we are learning something new and when it becomes reflexive it is no longer a thought?
It seems to me that consciousness has out-sourced it's thinking to other (sub/un-conscious parts of the brain) once something has been learned sufficiently enough where conscious thought is no longer needed. Does this mean that thinking is no longer involved, or that thinking was simply relegated to another part of the brain that does not require updated information from the senses?
Quoting DawnstormYes, I was misunderstanding. However, I think I disagree. In what way can we not break apart what's going on and isolate a single thought? Driving into work this morning I see a lot of leaves on the ground. It's autumn. I think New Yorkers as a rule like autumn. Pumpkins and squash and apples are big this time of year. All the apple orchards have apple cider and cider donuts this time of year, and there's usually fudge also. One orchard has a cupcake festival every year, which is as wonderful thing as you can imagine. Autumn also reminds me of a particular Monty Python moment with the leaves falling off the tree, seen here:
https://youtu.be/O7rU2l9WiYo?si=r0N021_livZ8fVd2
Allof these things can be seen as separate images/moments/thoughts, can't they?
Quoting DawnstormSure, we should be able to come up with ideas for models along these lines. Any suggestions? I can't say I'm entirely clear on what you have in mind.
Quoting DawnstormDifficult to answer, since, as I've said, we don't even know what charge, which is fairly important for physical causation, is. If mental causation is a significantly different thing, it's going to be even more mysterious, since we don't have centuries of systematic study of it.
My apologies to you and . I don't know anything at all about Popper. I only heard his name for the first time recently, in another thread, and haven't been able to make head or tail out of what you two are saying about his Worlds.
Got that, I was joking, but also kind of highlighting the contrastive character of causal explanation. Claims that event A caused event B always are ambiguous if one doesn't specify (or relies on shared assumptions) regarding what counts relevantly as event A happening: is it its happening in general, its happening once, its happening in some particular way, etc.
Sorry, perhaps we should have elaborated more. Fortunately it's a pretty easy concept to grasp.
This schema, which at first glance seems a bit rough and simplistic, proves surprisingly useful as a way to at least get a foothold in these ontological distinctions.
So, for thoughts, we have a World 2 event -- a "psychological process" -- and, often, a World 3 event as well -- language, math, often expressed as propositions and entailments.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
It could also simply be that we are wrong about the causes. Train stations are built where there are towns, or close to interesting locations that humans might want to visit. It's not necessarily about where humans are, but where they might want to go. A locomotive company might make a bad investment building tracks to somewhere people are not interested in going, or are no longer interested in going.
As such, our ideas, dreams and predictions play a causal role in the world.
I'm saying that's one way to look at it. It's not actually my preferred way, but I think in a context of causation a more narrow concept of what constitutes "a thought" may be more useful than my intuitive model that is broader.
Quoting Harry Hindu
As I replied to Patterner, I'm not concerned with "thought"; I'm concerned with how to isolate "a thought" from the process of thinking such one can say that "thing" is caused. And I need to be concerned with this because I'm denying that thought corresponds either with words or propositions. The problem is that have no clear alternative.
If I engage with other people on this topic, I can't just assume we mean the same concepts just because we use the same words. I'll go into examples when replying to Patterner.
Quoting Patterner
To be precise, at no point did I retrieve the word "12". That is a fact, if my memory is reliable, which it might not be. The choice would have been subconcsious, if it's a choice at all, and not just me being busy with other things. One of my interpretations, is that - on account of me having made a strong connection between "5+7" and "12" - thinking of "5+7" already is thinking of "12". Me recognising your intention is me foregrounding your intention and thus actualising the connection between "5+7" and "12" was not neccessary. This is not a fact. This is me guessing what went on my in mind.
Part of that is - again - the connection between thought and language. Thinking "5+7=12" has many aspects to it. One is the idea of an equation. "5+7" and "12" are literally synonymous on account of what an equation means. So I can recognise addition as an equation, and can see 5+7 (and through reading actualise it in the moment) and then not actualise "12", the sign, as it refers to the same concept of the compound sign of "5+7". They have the same meaning in the value sense, but different meanings in what they represent within a mathematical operation. Since this thread, though, isn't about maths, I think I felt no need to actualise "12" because my mind/brain was busy with the topic of the thread.
This is plausible to me because the topic of this thread is highly complex; not having time for associations that would otherwise trigger seems plausible. That doesn't mean it's true, but it's the best I have.
Quoting Patterner
All I really have in mind is vague ideas and a question. That is to say, I'm not entirely clear on what I have mind either. I'm not ready to make a model yet. Currently I'm waiting for "@J's" post.
As for the three worlds: it's basically physical world, experience, and abstraction. I'm sure I use it differently than Popper did. But the basic distinction is useful when it comes up. I'm not sure I'd ever have brought it up myself.
Thus is the incredibly opaque nature of a thought having any bearing on "physical reality".
Thoughts give rise to eachother in terms of their topical content, like with your example of thinking about ann. This reminded you of her upcoming birthday.
However, i would argue this whole process is fully dependent on emotional content. Thoughts that carry less emotion are less likely to have any importance to you, and continue any newtonian chain reaction.
1) I began by saying that the question of “thought-to-thought” causation should be understood in the context of psychologism vs. logicism. I still think this is a possible approach, but most of the discussion focused on the Popperian vocabulary of World 2 and World 3 objects/processes, so I’ll stick with that.
2) The OP assumes an overly binary version of how we have to understand what a thought is. This was partly for purposes of simplification and tractability, but also partly because I hadn’t deeply considered some of the points about “streams of thought” and non-verbal thoughts that subsequently arose. I proposed that when we have the ordinary mental experience of first thinking “I wonder how Ann is doing” and then “It’s her birthday soon; I must get her a present,” we must choose between seeing these thoughts as either psychological events in my mind, or as propositions that could find expression – and possibly necessitation of some sort – in anyone’s mind. And this is fair enough, but it suggests that “thought” must come equipped with certain properties it may not have, especially linguistic expression. The problems that @Dawnstorm and others raised about this are exigent.
3) So what does the question “Can a thought cause another thought?” really ask? I now believe it’s a question about a certain kind of thought, namely a thought that has been expressed linguistically and is thus a candidate for being described in propositional, World 3 terms. But not all thoughts are like this. If we ask, “But what caused the original thought about Ann?” we are giving proper importance to this point – what “caused” (if this is even appropriate) the original thought may have been completely non-verbal, but nonetheless a thought if we allow “thought” to cover many more mind-events than the OP suggested was possible. And I’m inclined to think we should.
4) Now there’s the danger that the discussion will swerve into a terminological dispute. Let’s avoid that. I don’t much care about deriving a precise definition of what a thought is, or what are the correct ways of using the term “thought.” I’m happy to narrow my questions about mental-to-mental causation to a certain type of thought; call it a J-thought. Such a thought is one that can be given a description in either World 2 or World 3 terms – thus, it is likely linguistic, or at least a linguistic thought would be the type-specimen of a J-thought. So my initial question is now: “Can one J-thought cause another, and if so, is this by virtue of a World 2 relationship, a World 3 relationship, or some combination?” And lurking behind this question is another, broader one, which has also been raised repeatedly here: If causation isn’t a very good model of what happens when we think J-thoughts, then can we come up with a better description, something more contentful than merely “association” or “affinity”?
Happy to forge on, or of course we can let it go at this point.
Quoting JI won't be able to help you with this. I just don't get the idea well enough. Or maybe the point of it. We'll see if I catch on as you guys discuss.
Quoting JI think causation is a good model, and I think it's because of associations.
I don't see how one isolates a thought from the process of thinking. It would be like trying to isolate the stomach from digestion, and I don't see how that would get us any closer to how thoughts are caused.
Would you agree that conclusions are caused by reasons? Have you ever reached a conclusion without a reason? Would that still qualify as reasoning (thinking)?
In what sense are we using "cause" and "effect"? It seems obvious that similar causes lead to similar effects, so why wouldn't it be that some thought leads to similar thoughts. You can tell because part of the thought is shared with the other. In what way is a baseball causing a window to break different than 2+ 2 causing 4? 2+2 isn't necessarily equal to 4. 2+2 is an act of adding two groups of two. 4 is one group of four and what you get AFTER adding two groups of two. Essentially addition and subtraction are moving the goalposts of the boundaries of what we are talking about. Are we talking about two groups of two, or one group of four?
It seems more important to lay out what we mean by "cause" so even understand how it happens in the physical realm to understand how it might apply to the mental. If we admit that the mind and the world are connected causally - that the physical realm can cause changes in the mental realm (try stubbing your toe) and vice versa (think about all the holiday decorations you see at your local mall during the holiday season), then it seems to me there is no distinction between physical and mental causes, and that making this distinction (dualism) could be part of the problem.
Quoting Dawnstorm
This doesn't make any sense. How did you know that there is a relationship between the scribbles "5+7" and the scribble "12", or even what that relationship is? WHY does 5+7=12? These are just scribbles on the screen in which the relationship is not obvious with a simply observation. You have to already have learned what the relationship is. Your recognition that 5+7 and 12 mean the same thing is an effect of your prior experiences. If you had never seen those scribbles before your thoughts about them would be different.
We can talk about many separate thoughts in all that.
-My door letting in the cold
-carpenters
-The Carpenters
-Karen's death
-anorexia
Quoting Harry HinduI would agree that conclusions are caused by reasons. I think reasoning is one way a thought can cause another.
But I don't think all thoughts caused by another are the result of reasoning. Sometimes it's just an association, which means memory.
And not all thoughts are caused by other thoughts. For example, sensory input often causes thoughts.
Quoting Harry HinduMy definition might be something like:
[I]Thought B was caused by Thought A if B would not have come into existence at the time it did had A not existed first.[/I]
As for how it works, I'm thinking of this:
[I]B came into existence because of an association work A (meaning A triggered a memory); because it was the conclusion of a line of reasoning that lead from A to B; (other "mental mechanisms"?).[/I]
But did they really occur in isolation? What do you mean by isolated? It seems to me that the isolation is a mental projection onto the thinking process just as we project our categorical boundaries onto other natural processes. And each thought shares a property with the thought before it.
Quoting Patterner
We can agree that thinking and recalling are both mental processes and causally related (why would you recall something if not to think about it).
Quoting Patterner
Yes. And thoughts can be the cause of things that are not thoughts.
Quoting Patterner
Quoting Patterner
Yes, the effect always seems to retain some property of the cause.
I just ate a salad.
Quoting Harry Hindu
That wasn't well-phrased by me. If "a thought" causes another "thought" (countable: one thought, two thoughts...) and it's all "thought" an ongoing process, then we need to divvy up the stream of thought into distinct pieces each of which is "a thought".
Since I came into this thread saying that "sentences" aren't clear expressions of thoughts and thus "I wonder how Ann is doing," isn't a 1:1 expression of thought, it's up to me to say what a thought is and how it's related to its sentence. I tried in this thread, but... it's hard.
I'm not trying to say "thinking over here" and "thoughts over there"; I'm asking something like how many thoughts are there in a given stream of consciousness and do we have a reliable method to tell where one thought ends and a new one begins. This is not a question of "what is going on?"; this is a question of which tools are best for looking at what's going. The theory that leads to a theoretical definition that we can then operationalise so we can look at what's really going on.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I don't know how to approach this question. We might call a particular stretch of thought "a conclusion", but it might just be a subconscious decision which in turn caused us to look for ex-post rationilastions. In other words, I think that sometimes (and if I'm pessimistic, most of the time) we think of our causes the wrong way round.
Why do I think this? Am I right? How would I tell the difference? (I actually second-guess myself like that all the time.)
Quoting Harry Hindu
That's part of the point of the thread, if I'm not mistaken. I don't know, but it's an interesting question. (I think there's a difference.)
Quoting Harry Hindu
That's part of the opening post, too. I focused on "thought" out of personal necessity: it's the thing that's the most unclear to me, so if I can't figure that particular topic out I have little to contribute.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Yeah, we don't seem to be on the same page. Maybe not even in the same book.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Obviously. I'm not sure what to make of this whole paragraph. We're talking past each other.
You were the one that used the word, "isolation" and I was simply trying to get at your meaning of your use of it.
I don't know - that whole block of text might be considered one thought and you only divide it up depending on what your present goal is. If I were more interested to know where you got the salad then that would be the part that would be relevant to me, and it is my goal that isolates a cause from its effects - as if the world is an analog signal and our brain converts it to a digital signal that allows goal-directed behavior (in QM this would be like picking out the particle from the probability wave distribution).
Look a little deeper and you might find that the boundaries of any thought or process are determined by the present goal in the mind. The boundaries are what make some thought relevant and all the rest irrelevant to the goal, but that does not mean that those other thoughts or processes would not be relevant to some other goal if you had it.
Quoting Dawnstorm
The point is that you have a reason to second-guess yourself, and I'd be willing to bet its the same reason I do the same, that we have been wrong in the past. Don't worry. This is healthy behavior, unlike many others on this forum that think they know everything and that it is their feelings, or some authority, that determines truth rather than logic.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Then maybe you should lay out how you came to know what the following scribbles mean: "5+7=" Why would you every return the scribble, "12" when there is nothing inherent in the scribbles themselves as to what they mean or why there is even a relationship between 5+7 and 12.
Think of an alien arriving on Earth after humans have gone extinct and they see a marble tablet with the scribbles, 5+7 = 12. What about the scribbles would allow the alien to know what they mean? Wouldn't they need to get more information (something like a Rosetta Stone) to determine its meaning? In other words, you had to have learned what the relationship of the scribbles 5+7 were to be able to consistently return 12 as an answer. You must be following some rule. Where and how did you obtain this rule?
Well, now you're talking about different minds, not thoughts in the same mind. So yes, I would consider thoughts in different heads different thoughts, but this could just be an outcome of my goal to treat each person as an individual. Are we all separate individuals, or are we only individuals and part of a group when it suits some goal?
I'm not following. In whose mind are my father ordering a chef salad in a restaurant and my wife's boss's desire to get her to eat at their monthly meetings [I]not[/I] easily identifiable as different thoughts?
That is my point - that it is only in some mind that they are identifiable as different thoughts. The world independent of thoughts does not make any distinctions. It is just a wave of probability, according to some interpretations of QM. Think about our minds as stretching all causal relations into what we refer to as the medium of space-time.
I’m not suggesting that thoughts obey quantum mechanics necessarily, but that there’s an analogous structure: just as a quantum wavefunction represents a range of possible outcomes until measured, our experiential field contains a continuous flow of potential meanings or thoughts. It’s our focus, intention, or interpretive stance that ‘collapses’ that field into discrete thoughts or objects. The divisions are in the act of observation, not in the underlying reality.
Yes, this is practically all stuff I took for granted when making my posts. I have no issues with anything you said in this post. Each and every post I made should be based on this. So what went wrong? Why are you trying to lead me to things I think are basic? Where's the misunderstanding? What's the problem? I don't know how to reply. I'm confused.
(I don't remember the details of when and where I learned about "5+7=12"; likely in or shortly before elementary school?)
Philosophy tends to do that - leading you to question things you took for granted only to find out the reason you take it for granted is because the issue was already solved long ago and you "taking it for granted" is you having relegated the process to unconscious thinking, and later in life you participate in runaway philosophical skepticism to bring it back to conscious processing - Why do I believe 5+7 = 12?. What proof is there that 5+7 is 12? You end up discovering that these are actually silly questions precisely because you are trying to solve a problem that was already solved in your grade-school years.
Are there ideas that we hold, or take for granted, that should be questioned? Sure, but not every idea.
Yes, but still divided up in your mind depending on your present intention (goal in the mind). As I said before, "It’s our focus, intention, or interpretive stance that ‘collapses’ that field into discrete thoughts or objects." So it isn't just our thoughts that we divvy up - it is the entire world including the people within it.
Do you think I was questioning that 5+7 is 12 in this thread?
[I]There once was a woman named Bree
Who went for a swim in the sea.
But a man in a punt
Stuck an oar in her eye
And now she's blind, you see[/I]
I wonder if anyone got a certain thought in their mind. A thought that has nothing to do with that limerick, but which I, nevertheless, intended you to think.
If it worked, was it because certain thoughts I put in your mind caused it?
I don't know. It was a question, not a statement.
I said there is nothing inherent in the scribbles that explains why 12 would come after the = sign in this string of scribbles. Why write the scribble "12" after the "="? What makes that correct, and how did you come to know what scribbles comes after the "="?
It may seem like it is inherent but that is because you already learned it and relegated the process to unconscious parts of the brain.
This can be said about language in general as well. When you look at a language you don't understand it looks scribbles. When hearing a language you cannot speak, you can't even distinguish one word from another - its just noise.
When you learn the rules of the language sufficiently enough to use it consistently the scribbles become words and you can pick out the words when you hear the language spoken. The meaning appears to be inherent in the scribbles, but that is an illusion created by your brain as it creates shortcuts to how it thinks.
So in order for you to explain to me how you know that 5 + 7 is equal to 12, you have to go back to grade school in your mind and try to remember the process of learning what the scribbles mean. If you can't then just ask a teacher how they teach students through memorization and repetition.
We can't perceive the entire world. We only perceive our local environment and infer that the rest of the world/universe follows the same laws.
Quoting Patterner
The thought I had upon reading it was, "what is your point"? I don't know if I would say that you put that thought in my mind. I'd rather say that you caused that thought in my mind, but so did I when I chose to read your post. You might say that the Philosophy Forum is also a cause as all these processes are necessary for me to have a thought about your post.
It's all causal where language acts as a causal stimulus that interacts with a receiver’s prior cognitive state. I'm trying to point out that our linguistic distinctions (“I said it,” “you thought it”) are heuristic segmentations of an ongoing causal web. We highlight some nodes (like “speaking” or “thinking”) for convenience, but they’re not ontologically distinct.
Is causation in communication primarily semantic (about meaning structures) or physical (about brain states and sensory processes)? Or is “putting a thought in someone’s mind” just a shorthand for a layered causal process that includes both?
Even if I were to ask a teacher how they typically teach that wouldn't really help me remember. Might even encourage false memories. But is it necessary to go that far back? Simple addition is part of my daily life. I work among other things with cash. Any combination of X + Y where X and Y are below 10 come up daily. It's constantly being reinforced. I need number words only for the last operator. So if I've got a column adding 15 + 27 + 13, I'd look at 5 and 7 and think only 12 but not 5 and 7, presumably because they're visually present. Then it's 12 + 3 = 15, and 15 overrides 12, and then I write down 5, and think "1" because that carries over and then it's basically "2", "4", "5" and I write down "5" and then the result is 55. That's only if I've written it down in a column, though. If I were to read these numbers in a line, I'm less organised. For example, I just stared at what I've written, and noticed that 3 + 7 = 10, so adding 27 + 13 up to 40 comes first and then adding another 15, and I get 55, too, but because the process is more ad-hoc I tend to be less secure about the result and keep a "surveillance stream" open, which requires more concentration and leaves me more vulnerable to distraction. And I could be wrong about anything I just said, since when I'm doing addition I'm not running a self-observance stream, and when I'm running a self-observance stream that might influence (through preconceptions) what I actually do. The further back I go the less reliable what I come up with is going to be. Childhood? It's just gone.
Ask a teacher how they teach? What for?
Quoting J
Take this sequence of events (arbitratily conceptualised as single events on the fly, no thought at all given to detail-level): Event 1 = I drop a vase, Event 2 = it falls to the ground.
Event 1 is the cause of event 2. I cannot imagine a sequence in which event 2 causes event 1. (You'd need to go into semantics to make this work: you could, for example, interpret the vase being heavy as the initial step of falling; for our purposes, I'd consider this a stretch.)
Now, if your two events are: Even 1 = "I wonder how Ann is doing? I haven't seen her in a while." and Event 2 = "Oh, it's Ann's birthday soon," then we don't have the same relationship. The propositions we attach to the mental events are exchangable. Event 1 could have been event 2 and vice versa, and the chain of causation wouldn't change. Now there are discourse markers here: "Oh," suggests its a follow-up thought. But that's not part of the propositional content. Compare:
Event 1 = "Hm, isn't it Ann's birthday soon? I wonder what I should get her." Event 2 = "How's she doing anyway. Haven't seen her in a while."
Different discourse markers, but the same propositional contents. There's a flow that's relevant, but the sequencing is part of you moving through your real life.
If we then take a look at entailment, we see no connection between the events: thinking "It's Ann's Birthday soon," does in no way entail having thought "How is Ann doing?" first. Either of these can come first.
If I'm holding a vase, I need to let go for it to fall. If I was holding the vase, and it is now falling, that logically entails that I let go. (Well, in logical space. Somene might have sliced of both my hands at the wrist, so that I technically didn't let go and hands are falling together with the vase...) But I think you get the drift.
In terms of entailment, though, we can say that both thinking "How's Ann doing," and "It's Ann's birthday soon," entail the more general process of thinking of Ann. What we could then say is if either thought came first, the second has an easier time coming, too. This is the rough area I'd poke around for a cause, if this makes sense. But not while disregarding context.
Maybe I'm thinking "How's Ann doing," then I'm walking past a calendar (or some sort of public digital clock that displays the date), and taken together these two events lead to "Oh, it's Ann's birthday soon." Maybe walking past that calendar would have been suffictient to trigger "It's Ann's birthday," and then something latent in your stream of consciousness triggers "How's she doing?". Physical causation seems less context dependent (though it's context dependent, too: if I let go of a vase in space it drifts instead of falling).
Just rambling to clean the cobwebs in my head really.
So you're saying you were born with the knowledge that 5+7=12?
Maybe I should rephrase the question. How did you learn addition - what it was, why you needed on a daily basis? How did you learn what the scribbles refer to? 5 what? 7 what? 12 what? How did you know what the relationship between + and = are, or what they do or mean? If you were to go to school on an extraterrestrial planet wouldn't you need to know the symbols they use to represent quantities and mathematical expressions? Do you remember anything you learned in grade school?
As for a cause- that may be different. Hitting a billiard ball causing another billiard ball to move is quite reliable, but to argue that, say, thinking about climate change leads to depression reliably, while true, is vastly more complex. There are many more variables as to what constitutes depression than the regularity in which a ball causes another ball to move.
Of course, I think there are instances in which we enter trains of thought which are real and causal, otherwise I don't know how we could think rationally.
People vary wildly, but that they also find themselves in circumstances in which a pattern of thought arises for each person looks accurate to me.
There's also plenty of random thinking too. And maybe here we don't find connective causes.
Hi J. The topic has been one of historical interest for myself. Has the thread met your expectations, assuming you had any?
Seems that it may be the case that causal language isn't equipped for describing the evolution of thought. The very notion of "thought" is problematic in many ways. In layman's terms, sure it is beyond doubt that thoughts can cause other thoughts.
Thanks for asking. Yes, in great part, it has met my expectations. I was hoping to learn a few new things about this problem, and I have. Probably the most important takeaway, which I've already referred to, is this: Mental causation has to be placed in a larger theoretical framework before posing even apparently simple questions about it. To ask, "Can a thought cause another thought?" is to ask something an intelligent 12-year-old can understand, and relate to their own experience. But the two apparently ordinary terms being used -- "thought" and "cause" -- aren't situated in any one philosophical framework. They invite combinations of construals and relations that immediately plunge us into murky water. As you say, "The very notion of 'thought' is problematic in many ways," some of which I hopefully discussed in this thread. I do think that the Popperian clarification of "thought" into World 2 and World 3 uses is helpful, though as we saw, it opens the door to extremely hard questions about the properties and powers of propositions.
If I had an unmet expectation -- or wish, really! -- it was that somehow we'd come up with a plausible explanation of the unpopular view that inferential reasoning is in fact causative. Probably a bridge too far, though we may have relied too much on ordinary language's verdicts on how "cause" may be used.
What are your thoughts?
Quoting J
When a young child touches fire, they immediately infer that touching the fire is what caused the pain. The effect/affect is that they form the belief that touching fire causes pain. They are right. That can all be done by a languageless human.
Yes, I agree. The kind of inferential reasoning I had in mind is a little different. Let's say you start from premises A, B, C, ...n, and from these premises you can logically infer certain conclusions. The question would be, are you caused to do so by the premises? Is entailment an effect with a cause, in other words?
I would hesitate at that. I'm not a huge fan of the so called 'logical rules of entailment', because they do not preserve truth(as a result of allowing a change in meaning).
Setting that aside, and addressing the question above directly, entailment are 'logical rules', which could only be said to 'cause'(scarequotes intentional) someone to infer certain conclusions, if they know and follow the rules. I think that's what you're getting at.
Gettier comes to mind. Funny, I'm also discussing the paper with Banno in his Russell thread.
I made a point to mention the lack of need for a language speaker because it seemed germane to the commonly held belief that propositions are equivalent to belief. That point's probably too tangential, but it's true and has a very broad scope of far-reaching consequences which place many a common understanding and/or position under overwhelming direct scrutiny.
Sure. "Knowing the rules" is a background condition, just like "all things being equal at room temperature and normal gravity etc." is a background condition for many statements of physical causation. My questions was/is, Given that the mind in question does know the rules, do they actually have a choice about following them? (This is similar to the perennial question in epistemology about whether I can choose what to believe, given a set of facts.) (And yes, the links with JTB issues are obvious as well.)
I'd like to understand this thought better. I think you're saying that I can have a belief without also having a propositional expression or equivalent of that belief? Thus, a non-linguistic animal can form a belief about, say, pain and fire, without entertaining any propositions about it?
If I've got that right, I don't think it's tangential at all. It raises the extremely interesting question of what to do with beliefs, in the taxonomy of Worlds 2 and 3. If we're going to use causal language, as I'm suggesting we might do, what causes a bear to believe that fire will cause pain, and how does that belief in turn cause whatever mental process results in the bear's steering clear of smoke? Is all this happening in the world of psychological events, local to the bear, and explainable in terms of brain processes? Or is there a shadow, so to speak, of propositional content, such that the bear might be said to conclude that smoke is to be avoided?
I think we can get some insight by consulting our own mental behavior when beliefs arise, but I'll stop here.
My own objections to Gettier's Case I and II, as well as the cottage industry cases, serve as prima facie evidence that one can know the rules and not follow them.
Did I have a choice in the matter? I don't think so.
The summary above points towards the general thrust. Not all belief is propositional in content.
Quoting J
There's a lot packed up in there. The taxonomy of beliefs is an interesting subject matter, to me, all by itself. I reject the idea that language less animals' belief(s) have propositional content.
Feeling pain after touching fire causes an animal to infer/conclude that touching fire caused the pain, which in turn forms the belief that touching fire causes pain. That belief will then affect thoughts and effect behaviors, causing the animal to avoid fire.
I agree. I chose the expression "shadow of propositional content" to try to express something closer to what's going on.
Quoting creativesoul
But if we agree that this does not occur in the space of propositions, then what do you mean by "infer" or "conclude"? What is a nonlinguistic conclusion?
That's the problem I want to home in on. If it's only a matter of one neuron-firing pattern causing another, then we shouldn't call it inference or conclusion at all.
A non-linguistic inference/conclusion is one that is arrived at via a language less creature. In this example, the creature recognizes/attributes causality; recognizes and/or attributes a causal relationship between their own behaviour and the subsequent pain.
Well, yes, it would be. But I'm trying to puzzle out whether that's a category mistake. You may well be onto something, but help me understand: What is a conclusion that is not put into words? Do you mean a behavior? Probably not, so it must be some mental event that is the equivalent of a conclusion we would express in language. Can you say more about what that would be, phenomenologically? Taking the bear's point of view, so to speak. :smile:
Quoting creativesoul
So you wouldn't allow that there could be a "thought" in the World 3 sense. All propositions must appear as items in the physical world? Interesting.
Quoting creativesoul
I reject phenomenology.
Propositions are existentially dependent upon language. Where there has never been language, there could have never been propositions. I'm not sure if I rightly understand what the W3 sense is.
Given the direction of our discussion, it's worth saying that the linguistic/nonlinguistic dichotomy is incapable of taking proper account of language less thought and belief, particularly in terms of the content thereof.
OK.
Quoting creativesoul
Popper agrees that all W3 objects, such as propositions, are human-made. The reason he puts them in a separate "world" (and of course that is metaphorical) is that propositions have the peculiar property of being true or false (for example) regardless of whether anyone asserts them -- at least, that's the usual construal, though Kimhi and Rödl are both raising questions about that. So in that sense they don't seem to depend on being instantiated in particular minds.
Quoting creativesoul
Say more about that? Do you mean, the dichotomy is too rigid?
The theory laden nature of these discussions you mentioned as necessary in the OP is showing up here.
What does an unarticulated proposition consist of?
Sort of. The content of a language less creature's thought and belief can include/consist of stuff that is existentially dependent upon language.
OK, but I still wish I understood what the "stuff" was.
Quoting creativesoul
Quoting J
I would ask that question to anyone claiming that there is such thing as an unarticulated proposition. By my lights, it exposes an emaciated ontological framework.
If propositions are existentially dependent upon language use(being proposed), and language use is existentially dependent upon shared meaning, then it only follows that propositions are existentially dependent upon shared meaning. If the capability of being true/false requires saying something meaningful about the world(which is usually held by such positions), and saying something meaningful about the world is language use, then it only follows that in order for a proposition to be capable of being true or false, they must say something meaningful about the world via language use.
There is no such thing as an unarticulated proposition.
Quoting J
A cat can think/believe that a mouse is on the mat. The content of the cat's thought/belief includes the mouse(which is not existentially dependent upon language) and the mat(which is). Both are elemental constituents of the cat's thought/belief. The cat is a language less animal capable of forming thought/belief consisting of elemental constituents that are themselves existentially dependent upon language.
But you're just re-asserting all this. I'm asking why you believe it's true, and what such thoughts or beliefs consist of, if not words? Does the cat perhaps think in images? Can she believe using images? I'm not trying to be difficult, or imply that there are no good answers to my questions, but we need a lot more clarity on what's being proposed. What is the "stuff" that allows this account to go forward?
Quoting creativesoul
But at this very moment (or so goes the usual story) there are propositions about all sorts of things, which are either true or false, yet unarticulated. Your objections are very much in line with Rödl's concerns. He's a tough read, but Self-Consciousness and Objectivity has a lot to recommend it. There was also a long thread jumping off from his re-evaluation of what a proposition is; I believe it's the thread called "p and 'I think p'".
Yup. I'm aware of this dogma. So much the worse for convention. In what sensible way can an unarticulated proposition be said to exist?
What does a proposition consist of?
What does an unarticulated proposition consist of?
Interesting reply given the context.
What are you wanting to know? :brow:
Are you looking for an ontological basis or terminological framework upon which to build an 'updated' conception/understanding of thought/belief... human thought/belief notwithstanding?
All thought and belief reduce to correlations drawn between different things.
Yeah. I read that thread, and followed it fairly closely. It was an interesting thread.
As above: Quoting J
Quoting creativesoul
But what is a correlation? In what mental process does it happen? If animals can do it, then a correlation doesn't use words. What correlates with what? -- again, perhaps you're thinking of images and sensations. OK, is holding two images in some relation the same thing as having a belief about them?
It sounds to me, if I can say this without giving offense, that you've grown used to your own views in this area (and that happens to us all, of course) and you may not realize how un-obvious they are without further explanation. It's a topic that interests me, and I'm genuinely curious to see if we can put together a picture of how non-linguistic creatures may or may not engage in a rudimentary form of reasoning. But you have re-interrogate each of the terms you're using and try to say exactly what they mean. Perhaps start with "non-linguistic belief"? That's the one I find most puzzling.
No offense taken. No worries. I'm very well aware of how unorthodox my views are. I've been working out the kinks for nearly two decades. Further explanation is to be expected. I welcome shouldering any burden they may require. I welcome germane questions about my claims, and any inevitable logical consequences thereof. However, I'm not shouldering any burdens borne of words and claims I've not made.
I'm also quite short on time nowadays. The only reason I've been on here as frequently as I have the past few days was due to being in a state of recovery time limiting my own physical abilities.
You, me, and so many more. There's a ton of work necessary to reach that goal. "Thesis worthy" doesn't even begin to appropriately describe the endeavor.
First of all, I do not talk in terms of "non-linguistic belief" for reasons already explained.
I have no burden regarding that terminological use. You first invoked it. I rejected it.
A correlation is a relationship and/or association that is attributed/recognized/inferred/drawn between different things by a creature so capable. In our example, the creature touching the fire associated/correlated their own behaviour(touching the fire) with/to the subsequent pain, hence attributing/recognizing a causal relationship between the behaviour and pain.
Quoting creativesoul
But you said:
Quoting creativesoul
So if a language-less animal has a belief -- moreover, a belief without propositional content -- isn't it by definition a non-linguistic belief? I'm confused.
The confusion is understandable. The position I argue for/from is quite unusual/unconventional in some ways and includes subtle details that are crucial for understanding.
To the question: What counts as "by definition" depends upon taxonomy/terminological framework. As we both know, this particular subject matter, is extremely nuanced(theory laden).
If there is such a thing as language less thought and/or belief, and evolutionary theory is given a modicum of credence/applicability here, then it only follows that we're attempting to set out/discover/understand that which existed in its entirety(in some form or another) prior to our accounting practices. Thus, our definitions thereof are quite capable of being wrong, particularly regarding the elemental constituents therein/thereof.
On my view, if a language less creature has a thought and/or belief, then that thought and/or belief is - by definition - language less belief, i.e. the thought and/or belief of a language less creature. One aspect of such belief is that they cannot include language use as part of their content. That is one of the defining features. In other words, and circling back to what I've been setting out, language less belief are correlations drawn between different things, but language use is never one of the things(or "stuff") the creature draws correlations between.
However, and this is the subtlety, because language less belief can include(consist of) some things that are existentially dependent upon language(like mats, tables, cars, etc.) and all things that are existentially dependent upon language could sensibly/rightly be called "linguistic" things, the linguistic/nonlinguistic dichotomy is found sorely lacking in its ability to further draw and maintain the distinction between the belief of language users and the belief of language less creatures, particularly when it comes to the content of those.
When we call language less belief "nonlinguistic belief", and then we take further account of the content therein, we will inevitably arrive at the incoherent conclusion that nonlinguistic belief has linguistic content. That serves as ground to reject the dichotomy as a means to draw and maintain the distinction between language users' and language less creatures' thought and/or belief.
That's about as plain as I'm able to put it. Hope that helps.
To be fair, the above words are mine, and they're misleading at best, and downright false at worst. I have now explained it, so. My apologies for what's directly above. Brief mentions are not explanations.
Yes, a bit clearer. One thing first, though: Is the reason that "some things are existentially dependent upon language (like mats, tables, cars, etc.)" because those objects are human artifacts? Or could you just as well have included trees or sunlight? If it's the human-made aspect that makes the difference, how would a language-less animal know about it or be aware of it? In any case, I'm a little puzzled about why a mat, e.g., would depend on language for its existence. If I make an object but don't give it a name, does it exist in some lesser way? Probably I'm just not seeing what you're getting at.
Quoting creativesoul
I appreciate your willingness to re-examine and self-correct. A good model for all of us.
Probably, unless there are human artifacts which are somehow not existentially dependent upon language. It's the existential dependency upon language that matters.
Quoting J
They wouldn't, but the language less creatures' awareness(or lack thereof) regarding what their own belief consists of is irrelevant.
Quoting J
I suppose I'm claiming that the technology involved in textiles is impossible without shared meaning. I haven't tried to prove it, but I'm okay with that. There may be arguments for it, if need be. I don't see the need, because there's no good reason to doubt it, and I cannot imagine a sound argument against the idea. Of course, I may be mistaken and given that none of us are capable of knowingly believing a falsehood or knowingly holding false belief, it would take another to point it out, should there be a mistake with claiming that textile technology is existentially dependent upon language and mats are existentially dependent upon textile technology.
This notion of existential dependency is not to be confused/conflated with subsistence. It's better understood as initial emergence requirements.
Quoting J
It's not whether or not the candidate under consideration has been named that matters. We name things that are not existentially dependent upon language, and some unnamed things are existentially dependent language.
I was making the case for rejecting the linguistic/nonlinguistic dichotomy as a means for taking account of thought and belief. And now I've just went through a process I tried to avoid earlier by mentioning the rejection. It's a bit disheartening that you say what you said at the end.
Sigh.
Edited to remove a comment that harmed the quality of the discussion.
OK, this seems important. I hadn't seen the distinction you want to make between subsistence and what you're calling existential dependency.
Quoting creativesoul
So the idea is that some objects can't come into existence without a language-using community. That makes sense.
The challenge here would be: But natural objects also "come into existence" as a result of language use. For this challenge to bear weight, I think we have to deny the familiar skepticism which says that every single thing out there is somehow created by our identifications of it. No; there are natural kinds, and it seems silly to maintain that sunlight, for instance, is an arbitrary designation that humans make. But nonetheless, a significant amount of what we designate by language is artificial and/or arbitrary, and "created" by us in the sense that we choose what counts as an "object" or a "thing" or an "event." (This is not "subsistence creation," to observe your distinction. We don't somehow bring into being the raw materials of our physical world.) Is a sand dune a natural object? Yes and no. The human intention to see it as a dune -- because we have uses for which the term "sand dune" is needed -- can't be ignored.
Now does any of this matter for your schema? I'll go back to your initial reply:
Quoting creativesoul
Does it matter if we include some non-artifactual objects in the list of things that are existentially dependent upon language? I don't think so. We can add sand dunes and the like without changing your schema.
Now, let's say we do reject the dichotomy between linguistic and non-linguistic things, on the grounds that it is "lacking in its ability to further draw and maintain the distinction between the belief of language users and the belief of language less creatures."
That's the point I want to return to. How does the question of whether a belief concerns a) something that is existentially dependent on language, or b) something that is not so dependent, affect whether a non-linguistic animal can be said to have linguistic beliefs or not? Do you simply mean that we ought to extend the normal meaning of "linguistic belief" so that it can also mean "A belief about something that is existentially dependent on language"?
Quoting creativesoul
Sorry, but don't be disheartened. Philosophical ideas always need repeated unpacking, in my experience.
Since it's about language again (my pet topic) I'll poke my head in again. Might even have more time going forth, who knows? In any case:
When language comes up in here, we're mostly talking about "naming objects". But that's a rather small aspect of language. Naming is something that pets understand (if you've ever called your pet and it responded regularly, you'll know.) Naming is just the most basic operation.
I'd argue that, if the results aren't doctored, Alex the Grey Parrot understood simple syntax, and definiately morphology (when coining new words, such as "cork nut" for almond).
What we haven't so far demonstrated in any animal studies (as far as I'm aware of) is complex syntactic operations, such as embedding smaller structures in larger structures (see these parentesis I keep making)?
Some thought, I do think, relies on language, as language supplies a retrievable label that stands in for a sub routine. If there isn't a word for something, we can still talk about it but it takes longer. If there's a word for it, we just say one word, but mean the same thing (wasting less time). And that process is iterative. "Hm, what do we call this reverse track ball? Kinda looks like a mouse, doesn't it?". There's grammatical crossreference that's quite common: the verb to marry, its participle form "married" ending up ambiguous between verbal and adjectival usage (an ambiguity striking in the analysis of passive voice...)
What I'm ending up with in the current conversation is the question of what even is a "language-less creature"? With respect to thought language is some kind of mental activity. And it seems clear to me that there isn't a clear-cut distinction between humans and other animals to be found. At some point we arrive at complexity we don't see in other creatures, sure. But the basics seem to cut across species.
Beliefs, for example, might all be pre-linguistic, but they might be about things that couldn't exist if we didn't trick our limided attention spans with shortcuts, and then embed those shortcuts in thoughts that again get short-cutted, until we've got a thought-habit no longer reliant on the original thought process. In other words, we can switch on the light without knowing how to fix the circuits in the wall should they break.
Here the difference between animals and humans seems to break down: it's not so much about being "language-less". It's about not being an expert in the origin and nature of the generative concept. I'd argue it's more about result-based perception vs. process-based perception.
With the cat-mouse-mat example as construed by a human observer, I would argue that a human has a more process-centred approach to the mat than the cat (we know where to get one; we know more vaguely how it's made, etc.). There's a difference in the relevance-structure of the human observer and the cat when it comes to the mat. So:
Quoting creativesoul
To what degree does the "mat" feature? There are other questions: to what degree is the "mouse" a mouse? Is there a sequence of: movement over there; focus attention; prey; plan: pounce. Now? Now? Now? Now!
As the referential piece of reality the human and the cat my have, under a theory of comparison, similar believes: compatible ones. Their tied together in a situation: both the human and the cat might like for the cat to catch the mouse. But there are differences, too: the human mightn't want mouse droppings on the mat (it might be harder to clean up than on the floor, depending on the texture of the mat), whereas the cat won't care. And so on. What's important here is that the overlap between worldviews seems stronger when it comes to "mouse", then when it comes to "mat". Or not. Maybe the mat is the place where it's not cold in winter, so there's a sense of "territory" in the situational background that the human lacks specifically for the mat, as it's relevant for the entirety of the house?
As the above paragraphs show, I think that humans and cats have comparable "thoughts". Language isn't irrelevant, but it's not where I would draw the line (given relevance to thought).
I'd say result-based concepts are thing we interact with, but are largely ignorant about and thus don't think of as processes. The light-switch is a thing I use. I have limited process-awareness of it, compared to the electrician who fixes the circuit when the switch doesn't work. The light switch is a thing that works or doesn't. I'd say that's pretty much the relationship between the cat and the mat (except that it might serve less of a function in the current activity).
I see language as an activity, much like switching on the light (but much more complex). It's related to thought, because usually when we utter a sentence we mean something by it. It is possible, though, to utter a sentence in a language we don't understand, maybe focusing on the aspect of getting the pronunciation right. It's hard to get foreign pronunciations right because of acquired speech habits. That is: language itself isn't only a possible tool for thought, it also always a target of thought (we monitor for mistakes, for example).
So the putative difference between a langauge-having and a language-less creature is mostly that a language-less creature cannot and does not have to think about language. But puzzling out what the difference between language-accompanied and language-less thought is seems at the core of this thread.
It occurred to me, while reading the current discussion, that it might be relevant that I grew up bilingually. I grew up in Austria, with my mum being Austrian and my dad being Croatian (which would have been "Yugoslavian" when I was a kid). I'd almost exclusively talk German, even when spoken to in Croation by my dad. Maybe that's why I never associated words and thoughts quite as closely as others, and in turn why I also don't think language is quite as important a creature feature during species distinction. Maybe? (Just an aside.)
Convention has been employing these for centuries. If they were capable of taking adequate account of thought and belief, they would have done a better job by now.
Quoting J
Not according to the position I argue for/from.
On my view, sand dunes are not existentially dependent upon language. "Sand dunes" is. Sand dunes are not equivalent to "sand dunes".
That which is existentially dependent upon language cannot exist prior to language. Sand dunes existed in their entirety prior to language use. "Sand dunes" did not. Sand dunes consist of grains of sand. "Sand dunes" does not. "Sand dunes" consists of meaningful marks. Sand dunes do not. You can find "sand dunes" in some books/literature. You cannot find a sand dune in any book.
"Sand dunes" is existentially dependent upon language use. Sand dunes are not.
Quoting J
If I may...
In the above quote, does the term "it" refer to a sand dune? I think it must, because we do not see the term "sand dune" as a dune.
Substitution results in the following:
"The human intention to see a sand dune as a dune --- because we have uses for which the term "sand dune" is needed --- can't be ignored"
While the manner of speaking/writing I'm critiquing seems innocuous to many. I do not find a need for it. I'd rather not equivocate the term "see", because our visual capacity plays an integral role in the formation of thought and belief. Some content of thought are things we see. This holds good regardless of whether or not we've developing naming and descriptive practices about those things.
We use language(naming and descriptive practices) to talk about, learn about, and think about sand dunes, including knowing what "sand dunes" picks out of this world. <-----On my view that's much better than 'seeing sand dunes as dunes'. We use our eyes to see sand dunes - before and after - naming and describing them.
Quoting J
I'm not okay with saying language less animals have linguistic beliefs.
No, that's not what I mean. I reject the dichotomy for the reasons already explained. In addition, the terms have baggage I'm not willing to carry or explain away as a result of not practicing the normal usage. I find it's much better for me to employ a different framework. As above, I'm not okay with saying that a language less animal is capable of having linguistic belief. I'm okay with saying that language less belief can consist of some things that are existentially dependent upon language(assuming a shared world of course).
Nice additions. I'd like to give your post the attention it deserves. That's my intent...
Manana!
I agree, that's central to a lot of what's been discussed on the thread.
Quoting Dawnstorm
But this already presumes a tentative answer to the question. I'm trying to inquire into something even more basic: Does a cat even have a belief? To sharpen the question: A cat has a desire, arguably even an intention, but can she have beliefs that accompany either desire or intention?
Quoting Dawnstorm
The scare-quotes around "thoughts" are meant to indicate, I presume, that a thought in this sense is not linguistic. You agree that some thoughts depend on language. So here we're talking about the other kind, the kind that don't. Since we know very little about this kind of thought in ourselves -- or I, at any rate, find it mysterious -- and nothing about this kind of thought in cats, we're speculating at this point. But my speculation is that you're right, there is something cognate in my (instantaneous, language-less) thought "Mouse!" when I see one, and the cat's thought. In such a case, the language?/non-language? division isn't so important, as you suggest. My "Mouse!" thought is not couched in terms of the word "mouse," though usually it's instantly followed or categorized by the word, since I'm a very language-oriented person. This doesn't happen for the cat, presumably.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Here I would take issue. Yes, thinking about language is one of the things that a language-using creature can do, that a language-less creature can't. But the more central difference concerns language as symbol, as a potential designator of universals. A dog unquestionably understands how the sounds I make refer to his world, and what he's supposed to do about them. But I find it very unlikely that he understands what "toy" means. He knows what that sound means for him. But he doesn't see that the word "toy" could be uttered in any other context (unless I've taught him another association) and with any other purpose. He can't, quite literally, think about "toy," because "toy" doesn't exist for him as a symbol. Can he, in his doggish non-linguistic way, have an image of a toy, or a desire for one? I'm sure he can. But he doesn't know it's a toy!
Circling back to the question of beliefs, I would say this: We ought to keep an open mind. If you can illustrate what a non-linguistic belief would be like, perhaps I'll come around to believing (sorry!) that it's possible. It would of course involve a major reform of our current analyses of "belief," which emphasize that a belief requires an object of belief, and that one cannot set out a belief without language. But I'm game to try!
Quoting Dawnstorm
Yes! I'm sure that helped you recognize that what we do with words is quite arbitrary, in a way. We try to match them with the important stuff -- the concepts, the ideas, the perceptions, the events -- but which words we pick for the job aren't the point. Also, of course, that different languages emphasize different conceptual nuances. I'm always astonished, for instance, when intelligent Christians don't seem to care what New Testament Greek meant to its readers. They accept an English translation of, say, logos or agape, and build theological worlds on what they would have meant, had they been translated that way into English!
Ah, well, yes. I should have been more careful, I suppose. The problem here is that we might be having very differents of what a "belief" is. For example:
Quoting J
I'll admit I'm on thin ice here. I never quite know what philosophers talk about when they talk about belief. I have two meanings present: one is a behavioural necessity: for the cat to want to catch that mouse over there she would have to believe there's a mouse over there. It's just activity and implicature. That seems too wide. And then there's the conscious commitment to some form of social meaning. This is mostly about belonging and individuation. This seems too narrow.
What you're interested in seems like I'd have to describe as some sort of interaction of the two concepts. I think the "propositional belief", if we were to call it that, is not a thing on its own.
And I'd probably agree a cat wouldn't have that, as the cat-human relevant shared context tends to be entirely located within the living-together context.
So:
Quoting J
So what do humans do to themselves when they use words as designators for universals? That'd be the question here. A dog demonstrates what he understands a toy to be by playing with it, and so do humans. With humans, though, we also have the language layer, so that when we're thinking toy we're think non-active situations as far as they're present in our thought-habits. Dogs lack that. I agree.
I think we have a different scope in mind for "thinking about language". For example, a dog might play with his owner's shoe. For the dog in the moment, this is a toy, as demonstrated by the playing. But the activated guilt when the owner comes back shows that the dog knows he shouldn't have played with the shoe. A human can export these situationals into language: "a shoe is not a toy", so we can then, when we want to play, activate "toy" and auto-exclude "shoe". A dog can't. But you can train a dog not to play with shoes, and then we have a similar effect. And once that works, the concepts have aligned a little more.
That's not so different from how humans work when they interact with each other. When you internalise as a kid "this is not a toy", then you internalise two things: "don't play with this", and "play with toys(don't play with non-toys". That second layer is relevant, as - henceforth - you classify things into toys and non-toys so you can function socially. And you also grow emotionally attached to the concept of "toy" in some way: this is a toy, this isn't a toy - all's right with the world. Once you're secure in that you can handle exceptions.
Putting things into the categories play-with-this and don't-play-with-this is something a dog can do at the very least on a case-by-case basis, but there's probably some categorisation involved, too: you can teach your dog not to play with shoes (also future shoes you haven't bought yet), without going through all the possible ones. What changes when you have a word for "toy" is that it's practically always available as a category when you encounter something confusing. What is this? It's an "X".
For me it's an open question how much of these categories have to be accompanied by words to activate.
For example, when I go from the train station to work, I'll cross the street at a traffic light. However, there's an exit (relevant for buses, taxis, and a parking lot) that goes green at the same time my traffic light goes green for me. Cars have to take care not to hit pedestrians when they turn. This makes me nervous; I have cars coming from my back and swerving in. So my modus operandi is that I look at the traffic light for the cars on the main road (the one for the exit I can't see). There's a time when this is already red, but my traffic light (and presumably the one for the exit) isn't yet green. I usually start walking when the main-raod trafficlight goes red, but before the pedestrian traffic light becomes green. That way, I'm halfway across the road when the cars behind me start their engines. But there are exceptions: if I see cars still approaching on the main road, I don't walk. If I see mothers with small children on either side of the road, I don't walk. And so on. I make all these decisions without words. I just look. It's all thought habits. And I had terrible trouble even trying to describe this now (and I'm not even sure if I was remotely successful).
Traffic lights are non-linguistic signals. The rules of traffic are something I have learned, and needn't go through. And so on. And more imporantly, I'm usually thinking of other stuff (I might, for example, formulate a version of a post like this in my mind, so that'd be what my linguistic faculty would be busy with). It's not that relevant language never occurs, but it's fragmented and less coherent than what's expressed in me just acting.
In terms of behavioural implicature, you could say that I believe "green means go", even though I never think this. At some point in my life, I'll certainly have words to that effect. But that's just one aspect of the training that went into the belief.
I can, obviously, put into words what I blief. But I can also put into words what a dog or a cat believes. What I think is that it's all approximations, and I'll probably get closer for myself than for another person of the same culture, and then we have different cultures, different species... at some point I might discern no believes at all. What does a plant or a bacterium believe? Huh.
The problem is that language doesn't just go into describing believes: language goes partly into forming believes (for creatures that have language). Language, when it comes to thought, comes with its efficiencies and dangers. But it's plausible to me that language makes difference.
What difference, though? And how much? (And what does "how much" mean here, given that it's not immediately obvious we can quantify this.) My intuitive hunch is that we overestimate the importance of language. For example:
Quoting J
Do we? That there's a meta-level the dog doesn't follow us onto seem plausible to me, but beyond that? Given that we can train a dog not to play with shoes, what about "toy" transcends this? It's not an easy question.
Quoting J
I'm not sure I'm up to it. What do you make of the traffic light example? You need to understand that the assumption that belief always has linguistic components is not intuitive to me, and I don't quite understand what it is that want me to illustrate. For me, figuring out what I believe is a matter of saying something like "I did that so I must believe X". Words are two unreliable. If I read something I wrote some time ago I might no longer know what I wanted to say, and I might be equally in need of interpretation than a non-originator. Even if I voice a thought, there's always a slight sense of unease as if these words are insufficient. In this thread, too. I'm never quite sure what I'm saying; I know better what I think. But especially on a message board I can't get across what I think without saying something. (In person I often substitute showing, demonstrating, etc. for speech. People often wonder why I don't just say what I mean. I often don't know how. What I can say approximates what I think, but might also change what I think via the desire to "own my words" - I must align my thought with what I said. That's a common struggle.)
Belief (in the present context), to me, means something like "working assumption" - nothing more.
:up:
It seems to me that "Some thought relies on language" is undeniable. The content of some language less thought relies on language as well. Hence, such language less thought relies on language.
Cross referencing is a complex manner of drawing correlating/associating/connecting different things. As is naming. I'm curious if you'd agree with that?
Quoting Dawnstorm
That's a great question. Thank you for asking it! A language less creature is one that has never drawn correlations/associations between language use and other things. In this discussion, I'm speaking a bit loosely as "language less creatures" are meant to denote those that do not draw correlations between our language use and other things.
Now, strictly speaking(and part of why I liked the question so much), if we were to begin talking about potential language use of creatures other than humans, I would definitely argue in the affirmative for the idea that some animals use language amongst themselves. Such language also consists of correlations/associations drawn between different things. While that language is starkly different than ours in many ways(all involving the complexity of the correlations and their consequences), it is also strikingly similar enough in its basic elemental constituency(what makes it a language) to ours.
One key point is that the candidates using language do so in precisely the same basic way that we do; language emergence/use by virtue of a plurality of individuals drawing the same(or similar enough) correlations between the use(basic ostension/sounding of alarm/calling/warning all come immediately to mind) and other things.
Indeed. The basics do seem to cut across capable creatures, which makes perfect evolutionary sense. It's the complexities that distinguish us and our thought/belief/language from other animals.
I find that this quandary undermines itself. My attitude/disposition about the suggestion required first reading the suggestion. Hence, clearly not before it. I believe that the suggestion is not true. Your attitude/disposition about the possibility first required articulating the possibility. Again, clearly not before language, assuming you believe it to be true.
I would readily agree that prelinguistic beliefs are sometimes formed by creatures prior to their capabilities for language acquisition. I have argued that language is impossible without prelinguistic beliefs. Unlike what you've suggested may be the case, it seems to me that belief begins prior to language acquisition and continue afterwards.
I don't see how the last statement follows from what preceded it. Although, I agree that there's a difference between result based thought/belief and process based, I would argue that it's not a difference in kind, but rather it's a difference in the complexity level necessary for forming/having it. All result-based thought/belief is process based. Furthermore, it seems to me that avoiding danger and gathering resources is results based. So, I do not see the value in the distinction here.
I could be being swayed by all the baggage that comes with the notion of "perception" as well. I've yet to have witnessed an acceptable sense of "perception" other than when it picks out the autonomous abilities sometimes called "sense perception". (Physiological sensory)"perception" is much better used, on my view, to talk about the autonomous biological structures that are necessary preconditions for drawing certain kinds of correlations/associations between specific things as compared/contrasted to being used to pick out the correlations/associations themselves, which conflates necessary biological preconditions for thought/belief with thought/belief.
"Seeing an ant hill as an ant hill" is guilty of the latter. "That's how s/he/they perceive the situation, but I perceive it differently" is another.
Of course, this is what makes sense to me, given what I hold to be true about thought and belief. I'm certain that I'm missing something. I'm not certain that what's missing matters, but I'm certainly not beyond reproach.
I'm addressing the rest in a separate post. Thanks again for the interesting additions!
I don't know if I understand the first question, but I think you're asking something along the lines of how meaningful the mat is to the cat. That would all depend upon the sheer number of correlations that the mat had been a previous part of in the cat's thought, in addition to the content other than the mat. That's generally the case for all 'degrees' of meaningfulness, on my view. If you meant something else, perhaps you could rephrase the question?
I do not understand the second question at all. A mouse is a mouse. One hundred percent. If you're asking me whether or not the cat sees the mouse as a mouse, I'd defer to my last post which briefly discusses such manners of speaking, and ask if it is possible for a cat to look at a mouse and see something else?
I'm sure there's movement involved(part of the correlational content), physiological sensory perception is necessary, the autonomous drive to eat(hunger pangs could very well be part of the correlation content), possibly previous experiences with hunting mice, etc. that all play a potential role in the current correlational content. I'm not at all keen or fond of the idea that we can read non-human animals' mind with any amount of well-grounded accuracy or precision. We, generally speaking, have a difficult enough time reading the minds of other humans, unless we know them very well. To the contrary, I think we can only provide a well-grounded basic outline for all cases. There are some cases, depending upon specific circumstances that garner a narrower scope of greater detail, but it is on a case-by-case basis.
Some ducks used to have me as their source of food and water. They definitely drew correlations between me and getting fed and/or watered. Did they believe they were about to be fed when I opened the sliding glass doors at the downstairs portion of the back of the house? I think they did based upon all the past correlations. They exhibited behaviours unique to eating. Did they believe they were about to be fed after hearing the food container lid being opened and/or the rustling of the synthetic fabric just before the sound of the plastic food dispenser being plunged into the food? Seems to me that they did. They'd come from everywhere within earshot and exhibit the aforementioned eating behaviours.
I know that they learned how to get fed when they were hungry. They would approach me, come very close, sometimes nipping at my basketball shorts, and exhibit all the feeding behaviours. By my lights, if they drew connections between their own behaviour(approaching me with open mouths) and me getting them food, then that would count as shared meaning between them and myself. A plurality of creatures drawing the same(or similar enough) correlations/associations between the same things. They were telling me they wanted to eat.
All sounds fine with me.
Quoting Dawnstorm
All looks fine here as well. Hopefully "the line" is a bit better understood after the past couple posts.
Sure. I've no problem with this.
:smile:
The one @Dawnstorm offered would be a good example:
Quoting Dawnstorm
And see my somewhat chagrined response below!
This is persuasive. You've done what I asked, which was to paint a convincing picture of how we might think about, and use, the concept of a non-linguistic belief. You've helped me realize that what I called "our current analyses of belief" don't have to commandeer the conversation simply because a robust philosophical tradition -- analytic/language philosophy -- has adopted these analyses. This is ironic, because I'm the one who so often warns against being beguiled by a certain word or term, and believing we can find the Correct Definition.
So: I would still say that propositional or linguistic or "belief that" beliefs are probably not accessible to most non-human animals. The interesting discussion instead focuses on the other kind, about which I was skeptical but now see as a legitimate way of thinking about what a belief is. What should we understand, and say, about the cat's beliefs concerning the mouse, or about your own beliefs concerning the traffic-light situation?
Quoting Dawnstorm
Yes. What you describe (very well) is similar to the idea of background beliefs, which have always given trouble to the analysis of belief as a mental event. But in your case, the necessary beliefs you hold in order to act as you do are not exactly "in the background"; they come into play in this actual situation, and are probably mental events. This contrasts with "I believe the Earth revolves around the Sun" as a background belief, which is merely available to the mind.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Again, this could be understood as a background belief, one which you hold at all times. But the traffic-light situation is a little different. When preparing to cross, you don't think "green means go" in words, but aren't you proposing that the belief is activated and present for you, as your behavior demonstrates? I want to say that therefore you do think it, in the same way the cat thinks that the mouse is present. So I'm agreeing with you about non-linguistic beliefs but going even further.
But what exactly is "the same way"? What actually happens in the cat's mind, in your mind? The only clue I have is a common experience (for me) that I've alluded to earlier in this thread (I think). I am often aware that I've formed a thought or an idea much more quickly than I could form the corresponding language, assuming there is any. I then backtrack, as it were, and "say it to myself" (often, as you point out, having trouble finding the right words). So I'm claiming to have had an extremely rapid thought that is non-linguistic yet contentful, something to which words can then be put. Is this how the cat thinks? She can't find the words, of course, but she may very well think in this same rapid manner. I would add that it's not a matter of thinking in images either, thought that sometimes happens. The non-verbal thought I'm trying to describe is also non-visual or non-imagistic.
Now to claim all this is to explain nothing. But it leads me to agree that we shouldn't insist on narrowing "belief" to its linguistic uses. We can corral such uses into a pen and call them Beliefs1 or whatever, and go on to say very interesting and significant things about how they work. The challenge is to better understand what we can say, philosophically, about the other kind(s).
This sounds mostly fine. The thing is I don't have a clear grasp on what that means, so I can't sign this just yet. We have differences in, I think, terminology that I'll adress further down this post.
But I'm cautiously agreeing here. (What I'm slightly worried about is whether you would agree with my reasons for agreeing with this... It gets complicated. You'll see later.)
Quoting creativesoul
Yes, this happens when I got lost in my inner "quicksand" (to get the reference, refer to the David Bowie song of the same name). I over-extend myself. There are clearly beliefs that are impossible without language. I'll single this line out:
"Your attitude/disposition about the possibility first required articulating the possibility."
Unsure. I'm fairly sure that it's at least possible that that formulating some beliefs is what brings to your attention what you've implicitly believed so far. That is: sometimes formulating a belief is raising it from background to foreground status, and forgrounded beliefs are perceived more at risk. People might think they formed a belief, but really what happened is that - for the first time - they have cause to defend it. A conscious belief has entered the social arena, so to speak, and needs to be defended or modified or even abandoned.
Basically, the "possibility" needn't be articulated to act on it without a hiccup in social situations, and it's the hiccup in the social situation that causes you to formulate your belief. An attitude about a possibility is often part of the unacknowledged social praxis. We formulate possibilities to the degree that our beliefs have become problematic. We act on them without formulating them all the time. For example, all native speakers of English "know" that English is a "nominative-accusative language", in the sense that they use it like that without trouble. But among native speakers of English, you rarely need to formulate this: linguists are one systematic example. They know, too, that one alternative is the "ergative-absolutive language", and they can talk about the difference. A native speaker of English might have trouble understanding what's going on while learning, say, Basque. You now need to go back and formulate what you've always been instinctively doing, so you can then get back at the difference. But you certainly don't need to be able to explain the difference (or even know it exists) to speak English.
We're seeing the same mismatch currently around the gender topic, I think.
Quoting creativesoul
Yes, I'm on shaky ground here. I'm not at all confident about the distinction. However, I also think I might think in a different direction than you do, here. When it comes to ongoing thoughts, a process would provide something like an ongoing stream, a frame for the situation. And a result is something that was likely a frame in some other situation but not the present one with this precise ongoing thought.
Unsure, though. Not sure if this even makes sense. I need to think more on this (and I mean beyond the scope of this conversation; ask me again in a few years, and if I don't remember the distinction I didn't find it useful).
I'll skip a lot mostly because of a time limit, but this seems promising, as this seems to be where our perspectives mainly differ:
Quoting creativesoul
When I think of a thought, I think of what's currently present in the mind and how it presents itself to the "thinker" in question. So, yes, it's about "how meaningful the mat is to the cat," but not only as a generalised object, also how relevant it is in the current situation. What about the mat is represented in the cat, so to speak, and what about the situation draws the attention to the mat. It is entirely possible that whatever-the-mat-means-to-the-cat-in-general is entirely in the background for the present situation. To believe that "the mouse is on the mat" is to draw a connection between the mat and the mouse that may be entirely a potential. The cat *can* have such a belief, but currently doesn't.
But here we stand perpendicular to the situation: whatever-the-mat-means-to-the-cat is not automatically the same as whatever-the-mat-means-to-the-human, though I expect there to be sufficient overlap for comparison.
Now, I think that we might - methodologically - assume a "hunting situation" that we assume we both understand. What then is the minimal overlap we'd expect, what are the opportunities for misunderstanding. The question about the mat then becomes to what degree does the cat have cause to form believes about what the human thinks of as a mat, in this very situation. This goes beyond the situation down to the bits of the cat's world-view that's inaccessible to us, but it always has the hunting situation at its core.
In short, we methodically assume a commonality, so that we don't have to assume commonalities outside of that context (hunting). But that also means we must attempt to scale back what we take for granted about mice and mats - and often the result of that is more a discovery about how we view the world than it is about how the cat views the world.
It's a methodology of controlled estrangement, if you will. The cat will not see anything but a mouse, in the sense that the mouse is there. But the mouse's mouse-ness is called into question - methodologically - by not assuming more commonalities than we must (and we must assume some commonalities, if we are to think at all).
So how to mats and mice correlate here? We can question mats, and we can question mice, and that's comparatively easier to questioning "mats and mice" at the same time. This assumes that there's no particular way any one individual (whether human or feline) might see anything else, though there's probably a set of restrictions of what's possible on the side of what becomes a mouse or a mat when presented to a consciousness.
I'd understand if this is hard going. You said earlier, you don't accept phenomenology (or something to that effect?), and this is definitely somewhat in the vicinity of Husserl, though viewed through the lense of sociology (say Alfred Schütz, or even Helmut Plessner). It's probably fine to drop that angle, if it gets in the way. But it'd be good to bear in mind the difference (if there be one), as I can't excise the influence easily, and it'll come up from time to time.
On the whole, we don't seem so far apart?
Quoting creativesoul
Maybe. I'll know when the dust has settled (I tend to tire myself out.)
Yes, that's the gist of it.
I didn't actually think of "background beliefs" here. I'm not educated enough in philosophy to have that term at the fore of my mind, so I didn't consider that this could interfer (I've heard of those "background beliefs" before, but they're not likely to bubble up into my active consciousness.)
When I was talking about foreground vs. background here, I was thinking more about what's already active in the situation. We're talking about language and thought here: langauge-thought commands attention; that's why I think of it as the foreground. The trafficlight example just demands enough attention so that I don't miss danger. It's active, but background to whatever goes on in the foreground (that might be a book I've read on the train, or a problem I expect to face at work, etc.). If I were to witness an accident, I'd certainly have some of that bumped up to foreground, with a likely lasting effect on future backgrounds (i.e. I might be more cautious for a while, until routine reasserts itself).
That sort of foreground-background analysis is not something I'd dare do for a cat, now that I think of it. Maybe one of the functions of language is to facilitate a foreground? This something I actually haven't thought of before. If there's something to this, how would I handle it?
I think I'm not sure about the word [I]belief[/I] in this context. I don't think I believe there's a television in my living room. It's a fact that there's a tv in the living room. What's the difference between belief and certainty of facts?
If I go in and the tv isn't there - that is, there [I]isn't[/I] a tv in the living room...? Was it only a belief? Is that what being mistaken of the facts is?
When I did a unit in cog sci we were told of an experiment where kittens were brought up in an environment where all the obstacles were vertical. They became adept at navigating them, but when after some period of time horizontal obstacles were introduced they would run into them, until they were able to assimilate the new information. I'm hazy on the details (it was a long time ago) but googling it, it was the Blakemore and Cooper experiments.
Indeed, it is. I've found that this particular pursuit can challenge one's basic ontological underpinnings in unfamiliar ways that can result in cognitive dissonance.
Methodological approach seems key here. I'm thinking that there are a few things we need to carefully consider, in addition to any inevitable consequences. This basics of this pursuit are incommensurate with many conventional positions. That explains the broadly held denial of language less creatures' having thought or belief, on pains of coherency alone.
All belief is meaningful to the creature forming, having, and/or holding the belief.<----That seems like an undeniable basic tenet.
Would you agree?
Quoting Dawnstorm
Yes, we certainly do. I think that those differences could be causal in nature in a certain sense similar to what the OP has been talking about. All of us share the pursuit to remain consistent in our respective positions. Hence, the differences themselves cause us to think a bit differently as a result.
What is interesting to me is that we share the same target. The thought and/or belief of non-human creatures. The key, it seems to me, is understanding what that target consists of.
I'll address your response sometime tomorrow. Looks promising to me in many ways. :smile:
it's a fascinating topic. I find it mind blowing that DNA doesn't determine every detail, but allows for as much variability in response to circumstances as it does.
One reply would be: "Oh, so you don't believe there's a TV in your living room?" But I think your point is rather that belief doesn't enter into it at all.
Quoting Patterner
Sort of, yes. "There is a TV in the living room" doesn't assert the same thing as "I believe there's a TV in the living room." The first statement can be false while the second remains true. But . . . if you assert both statements, then, conventionally, they do mean the same thing; they both express something you claim to be true. This isn't really mysterious, just a matter of equivocal usages.
Quoting creativesoul
Long answer: We'd need to be sure we're on the same page about what "meaningful" is supposed to represent. Short answer: But yes, probably.
I might often use those interchangeably, but they certainly can be different things. Perhaps every assertion is a belief, but not every belief is an assertion. So an assertion is something [I]in addition to[/I] a belief.
And what about, "The TV was on when I left the room five seconds ago"? Can I know that without having the belief, even unexpressed, even unthought, that the TV is still on?
The point being, that when it comes to neurology, association is inherently how our brains work. Right from the neuron level, through to nuclei, regions and brainwaves -- this fires, causing that to fire. Sometimes in a linear fashion -- it may be difficult to remember the first bar of a song but after that the rest of the song is often fully recalled without effort. And sometimes horizontally -- the smell of cut grass bringing back a childhood memory.
But more than that, our whole ability to navigate the world requires us to associate many properties that go together.
So yes, thoughts cause thoughts, almost all of our conscious experience relies on it.
You're not missing the point; our conscious experience certainly seems to rely on something like causation. But the OP question focuses on whether it's the content of a thought that causes another thought, or whether, as you describe, it's the neurons firing. Of course it's tempting to say, "They're the same thing," but as you probably know, that thesis has generated a lot of philosophical controversy.
The further question is whether, if I have a series of thoughts that represent, say, a logical entailment, I am then caused to think the conclusion. This depends on how far we're willing to extend the concept of causation into the rational sphere. I have reasons for concluding X, but am I also caused to do so?
That would be my answer too. And how, exactly, does an assertion add something to a belief? (Neither of us means, I assume, that an assertion has to be spoken. I can mentally assert something, and mentally believe something, and they're still two different things in the way you describe.)
Quoting Patterner
I think not, but what about the opposite?: Can I have the belief that the TV is still on without knowing it? I'd say yes (if "knowledge" is set at a high bar), pointing again to the difference among these terms.
Is there such a thing as possession/awareness of a fact that is [I]not[/I] also belief? I would say so, if I am experiencing the fact. If I'm actually looking at the TV, it's not a belief that there's a TV there. If I hear it from the other room, it's not a belief that the TV is on.
Yet, in ordinary language, if someone asks you, "Do you believe the TV is on?" you'll answer yes. You might also point out that it's a rather strange question: "Why would I not believe it? It's on; see for yourself!" This highlights one of the uses of "believe". We tend to emphasize believing something when there could be doubt.
So what about the phenomenology? I'm actually looking at the TV; do I simultaneously believe that it's on? If belief is reduced to linguistic belief, then clearly not. No such sentence enters my mind. But we've been considering the other, non-linguistic senses of "belief". Is there some mental event that occurs while I watch TV, that's the equivalent of giving credence to the existence of the TV? This seems far-fetched. More likely is the opposite case, when we're watching, say, a pack of elves. The mental event "I don't believe this" is probably present, wouldn't you say? Or least "I don't know whether to believe this or not."
With the TV, we're thrown back on belief understood as analytical philosophy usually does: an attitude, a disposition, not a mental event and not linguistic. To say "I believe the TV is on" is to claim that my experience is factual, and that I am the one having it. It is all but the same as "I assert."
Quoting JRight. I think we should not. Where does it end? I believe I have ten fingers and toes. I believe my name is Eric. I understand the idea that I can't very well [I]not[/I] believe something that I know is factual. But is not not believing it the same as belief? I don't, uh, believe it is.
Quoting JI agree it's far-fetched.
Quoting J How about, "That's not real."? The flip-side of the above. Knowing something is not factual is not the same as not believing it.
There's a fantasy series called [I]The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever[/I]. He had to consciously not believe something he knew could not be factual, even though he was living it.
If you can summarize one or two of the main points of controversy I would appreciate it, as my understanding is there is no issue with that description (though no-one would say it is complete either).
I think what can sometimes happen is that when we talk about neural correlates of consciousness, the temptation is to imagine it as some trivial mapping. That if I see a yellow ball say, there's a cascade of neural firings all resulting from that, like dominos.
But of course it's a lot more complex than that. While yes, some individual firings can be coupled to simple perception, the overall pattern of firings is continuous, extremely complex and largely based on referencing past data -- the brain running a complex internal model with outside perception just having an effect on the model.
I don't know if this slight rant is relevant here, it's just a framing that often seems assumed in these discussions. That as soon as we talk of synapses firing and cause and effect, the temptation to see cognition as serial, synchronous and passive seems too strong.
Yes. That sounds about right, but I do not find that any of this is inevitably contradictory to what I've been saying, although it could be in its underpinnings. I agree that sometimes formulating a belief is raising it from background to foreground status, and in doing so one may have cause to defend it - for the very first time. However, I'm arguing that belief formation is required prior to that belief later becoming a part of the background. In this case, the belief candidate under consideration is/was an attitude/disposition towards the following proposition:
"Beliefs, for example, might all be pre-linguistic".
All propositions are existentially dependent upon language. All attitudes/dispositions towards propositions are existentially dependent upon propositions. All attitudes/dispositions towards propositions are existentially dependent upon language. That which is existentially dependent upon language cannot exist prior to it. Thus, there are no such things as "prelinguistic" propositional attitudes/dispositions.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Well, in our case, the possibility under consideration was whether or not it was/is possible for all belief to be prelinguistic. It was formulated like this: "Beliefs, for example, might all be pre-linguistic".
While I agree that we act on our beliefs without formulating them all the time, that's not what was in question here, nor do those facts pose any issue with what I've been setting out. I now think that you may have meant something strikingly different than me when qualifying belief as "prelinguistic".
There's no doubt that most people hold all sorts of background(foundational) beliefs. I would further say that many people have never really identified, named, and/or talked about those background beliefs as subject matters in their own right. I think our views are commensurate regarding these matters.
I would further claim that these beliefs have efficacy(which returns to the OP's concerns).
I think that our views diverge when it comes to ontological concerns; what beliefs consist of.
Quoting Dawnstorm
I am not one who holds that knowledge of the rules governing language is shown by correct usage(following them). Knowing how to use language does not require knowing how to talk about the rules governing such language. Knowing that English is a nominative-accusative language requires both, knowing how to use English, and knowing what counts as being "a nominative-accusative language"(knowing which descriptions set that out and which do not). Knowing how to use English does not.
I do not find it at all helpful to say that all native English speakers know that English is a nominative-accusative language. That's simply not true, even if it is the case that they'd assent to such a description after understanding what that means.
I'm currently working on a reply to the rest of that post. I wanted to address it separately, for it invoked meaning, and we both find it promising.
If I understand this correctly, I'd agree that the importance that the mat plays in the cat's thought and/or belief is determined by its relevance to the cat in the current situation(at that time). So, if I understand you correctly, I think you're saying something like the mouse can be on the mat, and the cat can have a belief about the mouse that doesn't include the mat. I would agree.
The mat is meaningful to the cat in the sense of being an integral part of where the mouse is located. That's about all I meant by claiming the cat can believe the mouse is on the mat. Although, as you've suggested and I've mentioned, the mat could be much more meaningful than just that to the cat.
Quoting Dawnstorm
I agree and may put that a bit stronger. Whatever the mat means to the cat is never exactly the same as whatever the mat means to the human.
Quoting Dawnstorm
No, I do not think we're so far apart in that we seem to both understand that there are differences and similarities between the cat's point of view and our own, in addition to recognizing the need of a terminological framework capable of setting those out.
I don't disagree. The question, though, is to what degree language needs to be involved in belief formation.
Quoting creativesoul
And it would definitely make sense to say that - in this case - language had to be involved, given what I've said in this thread. So this might count as an example of a belief that is not pre-linguistic.
But then we're almost exclusively talking about the proposition, and the attitude towards it:
Quoting creativesoul
But what's the relationship between a propositional attitude and a belief? I'm fairly sure I've heard beliefs defined as "propositional attitudes", but since I'm comparing language-using and lagnauge-less creatures here, that definition doesn't seem useful. In the traffic-lights example above I've treated belief as "behavioural implicature". But now I have the reverse problem that "behavioural implicature" doesn't quite cut it for "beliefs might all be prelinguistic". Is there away to tie these disparate situations together?
What does it mean to "have an attitude towards a proposition", and what does it mean to "imply a belief in your actions"?
I think this is instructive here:
Quoting creativesoul
Nor am I. I've chosen the nominative-absolutive thing for a reason: it's so intuitive that most native speaker can't imagine it being different, and they usually have trouble learning an ergative-absolutive language. It's not the rules that determine what people do; it's what people do that determines the rules.
Language is interesting in that the expressed attitudes towards the propositions don't match what you would get from behavioural implicature. Linguists will, in these cases, side with behavioural implicature:
To make it clearer: People who will berate you for splitting an infinitive usually split infinitives themselves. That's not a one-rule-for-you-one-rule-for-me situation. They don't know they do it. They will correct themselves, and then err again. (I'm not sure this occurs with split-infinitives; but it's a common phenomenon.)
So the following is part of it:
But once you do try to talk about such language, you introduce the possibility of a disjunct between your propositional belief and your behavioural implicature.
Note that such a disjunct is not a factor for nominative-accusative languages. People out side of linguistics may have heard "nominative" and "accusative" (less so in English, as only pronouns still decline), but that's usually the extent of it.
Knowing the associated propositions requires knowing about the typology. But the propositions are supposed to describe what people are doing. So if the propositions don't describe the behavioural implicature, the rule isn't there. So, from this perspective, either native speakers know that English is a nominative-accusative language, or linguists are wrong in some way. That's the connection here.
More generally, this is the relationship between theory and praxis. It's a difficult subject to work through, but I think we need to, if we wish to consider what various creatures have in common.
To the degree that the content therein is existentially dependent upon language.
Okay. So, it is not the case that beliefs might all be prelinguistic.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Propositional attitudes are beliefs.
I invoked belief as propositional attitude because it fit the situation. I do not deny that some belief amounts to an attitude/disposition towards some proposition such that the individual takes the proposition to be true(or not). I deny that all belief can be properly taken account of by virtue of using that framework. Notably, because i)all belief must be meaningful to the creature forming, having, and/or holding the belief, and ii)propositions are utterly meaningless to language less creatures, it only follows that belief as propositional attitude is found lacking in its ability to take proper account of language less belief.
I think we're in agreement there.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Indeed, it is not useful for taking account of language less belief, aside from setting out what it cannot consist of.
Hmmm. Is that something like a performative contradiction?
I'm fairly certain I do not quite understand the point being made here. I'm curious about this notion of behavioural implicature. Could you explain it more, please? Thank you.
Is that the only two options: Either native English speakers know that English is a nominative-accusative language, or linguists are wrong in some way? Do all linguists hold that to be true? If they do, then I would say they are wrong in some way.
All I'm saying is that knowing that English is a nominative-accusative language requires knowing how to use "nominative-accusative", whereas plenty of native English speakers have no clue what those words mean(how to use them). They are native English speakers nonetheless.
I suppose that if knowing that English is a nominative-accusative language could somehow be acquired without knowing what "nominative-accusative" means, then it could be possible for all native English speakers to know that English is a nominative-accusative language. I cannot make much sense of what that would entail.
Okay. That's good.
I would think that any acceptable notion/conception/theory of "meaning" would be capable of setting out how things become meaningful, including how thought and/or belief becomes meaningful to thinking/believing creatures.
Neuronal events are nothing like thoughts, so the question is, how can they be the same thing? And if they are co-dependent in some way, does one cause the other? How does that happen? Why should physical experiences such as neurons firing give rise to conscious experience? Are thoughts "really" just brain events?
If you look into the so-called "hard problem of consciousness" as described by Chalmers and others, it will give you a good sense of what the controversy is.
Many phenomena have different characteristics that might seem wholly separate prior to establishing a model linking them. Imagine trying to explain smallpox symptoms as a cellular phenomenon to someone unfamiliar with germ theory. Microscopic jelly-bags with long helices inside is nothing like pain and pustules.
Quoting J
Well I wouldn't use the "really" framing, because I believe both descriptions are valid. We have thoughts and we also have brain events.
But yes, they are different facets of the same thing; this is trivially demonstrable from the fact that physical changes to our brain have a corresponding effect on our conscious experience (e.g. taking an opioid and the effect it has on dopamine receptors and what that feels like).
Quoting J
I'm familiar with the hard problem of consciousness. Indeed I would put it to you that you have misunderstood it, if you believe the point is to claim that the mind cannot be a neural phenomenon.
Would you care to set this disjunct out a bit more?
Where do you suspect the subjective experience shows up?
Sure. To me that's just rephrasing the question.
Quoting creativesoul
The logo-vampires have come and drained this proposition of all its meaning.
Seriously, though: When I say anything with "all... might..." it's almost always the case that I'm wrong, so if I say "no, it's not," here, I don't feel like I have said anything too meaningful. But then I also feel like I haven't said anything meaningful in the first place, here. Agreeing to this feels like a conversation stopper: I no longer know what to say, and I don't feel anything has been accomplished either. I end up walking away feeling vaguely foolish.
As I've said before in this thread, I don't think in words. When I say something, I also do something. But saying something is also doing something, so I do two things at once. When I then need to face what I said in too much detail, I get lost: I forget what it was I was trying to do in the first place, by saying what I said.
I normally don't lay this out, but I feel its pertinent to the topic of this thread, so....
Anyway, I'll take things out of order now:
Quoting creativesoul
By behavioural implicature, I simply mean that if we do X, that implies we believe Y, otherwise our behaviour would be random. On this level, "we" includes any creature capable of meaning. Behavioural implicature, for the cat, means that if the cat wants to catch that mouse over there, it must believe that there is a mouse over there, or it couldn't want to catch "that mouse over there". But that applies to me just as well: if I ask you to pass the salt, I must believe many things: that you understand my language, that there's salt, that you're willing to co-operate, etc.
Now there's an important difference here between natural and institutional facts: If I believe this glass contains some drink, but I forgot that I used this glass to prepare salad dressing, I a sip will disabuse me of my belief: I was wrong.
If I believe that one shouldn't split infinitives but I can't kick the habit, I'm not wrong. I just fail to live up to my "belief". If I'm unaware that I'm splitting infinitives, there are two possibilities: (a) I have the false believe that I don't split infinitives, or (b) I just don't topicalise myself at all until someone points out my usage, and then I have options (consider my usage wrong; allow for exceptions; refine the "rule"...).
On the behavioural-implicature level, what matters for this post is whether I modify my split-infinitive behaviour, or whether I modify surrounding propositional output.
So:
Quoting creativesoul
If behavioural implicature points towards believe, and propositional attitudes are beliefs, then I think a sentence like this would be meaningful: That you belief infinitives shouldn't be split, doesn't mean you belief that infinitives shouldn't be split. I'd just be using the same word in different ways.
So we need to be careful here: if the meaning of a proposition can be present without a proposition (as in the cat-case), and if there are cases where the propositional attitude points towards a different belief than the behavioural implicature, then what are we dealing with here?
It would, for example, be a valid approach to say that if the meaning of a proposition can be present without the proposition, then we can say that the cat has an attitude towards a proposition without needing to hold a proposition in mind (and the same goes for humans). After all, my concept of "behavioural implicature" also imposes mental content I can understand onto a creature which is not me.
But I don't belief that's useful here because it de-emphasises what ties the language and the throught together. All I have here is a vague idea of directionality: behavioural implicature points upwards towards propositional attitudes, and propositional attitudes point downwards towards behavioural implicature. A "belief" would have to be the entire system. The propositional part can miss entirely with no problem, but if there's no behavioural implicature, there's no meaning to the propositional attitudes.
So:
Quoting creativesoul
If the topic is the proposition "English is a nominative-accusative language," then having an attitude towards this would require understanding it, sure. But I said:
Quoting Dawnstorm
They display behavioural implicature that leads linguists to make the appropriate generalisations. The linguists are the humans; the non-linguist native speakers are the cat. The phrase "nominative-accusative language" is not that important here. One needn't priviledge language like that, when it comes to thought. Each of us, in this thread, when we type, reproduce a nominative-accusative language. We simply know how. The linguists describing it like this isn't necessary; other theoretical constellations could conceivably take care of that. But what they do is describe knowledge that exists, even if not in propositional form.
My approach is vague. And it has weaknesses (it's ill equipped to deal with highly abstract stuff - which includes philosophy, heh) It's my bias that leads me to the approach (and the bias stems to the way I think - often without words).
I apologise if none of that makes sense to you; I'm trying to explain something I haven't fully figured out.
This wasn't there when I hit submit on my post above. I'm spent right now. I'll wait to see if something I said above helped make more sense of it. If not I'll (hopefully) come back to this.
ETA: It was there when I hit submit. It wasn't there when I started typing, and I didn't notice it before hitting submit. (So much for my precision...)
A lot of loading in just that one sentence (whether intentional or not).
Firstly, "correlation" massively mischaracterizes what we're talking about here. We're not talking about rubbing my lucky rabbit's foot and my team wins the big game.
We're talking about the highest standard of empirical verification: being able to consistently make accurate predictions and inferences. Every time you take an ibuprofen for a headache you are again testing the idea that conscious experiences are one and the same with neurochemistry. (And I am mentioning that as an example of how often the hypothesis is tested, of course, within medicine and neuroscience the millions of tests are also extremely precise).
Secondly, I just said that my position is that thoughts and neural firings are two descriptions of the same phenomenon, yet you're still asking which way the causation goes. My answer is very obviously: neither.
You may as well be asking me whether ball causes sphere or does sphere cause ball? They're two descriptions of the same thing.
Quoting Patterner
Yes we don't have a good understanding yet of how the brain makes subjective experiences.
Qualia are a fascinating phenomenon, but the fact that they can be triggered, reliably and precisely with tools like deep brain stimulation suggests that they, like the mind in general, are a product of the brain.
Plus it's pretty hard to square how qualia could work as some external phenomenon or ghost in the machine. For example, we understand a lot of how our brain forms the images we see; the edge detection, movement detection, object persistence algorithms etc that happen, we have localized very well where they happen, and of course can create optical illusions based on our understanding.
We don't yet understand how the brain creates subjective experiences like "redness". But, however that happens, it needs to be embedded right within this set of visual processing algorithms, that are completely physical and even mathematical.
Quoting MijinHow does that work?
Quoting MijinYou are trying to make an analogy between two words for the same physical thing, and two things of completely different nature, one physical and one not.
The problem goes the other way too: We don't know how subjective experiences, such as thoughts, create changes in the brain (and then the nervous system, and then the body). In any case, if mind and brain supervene, no given brain event should be said to cause the subjective event.
The closest analogy I can think of for brain/mind would be to ask: Do the players and the field cause the football game? Not really. Are they identical with the football game? Sort of, but not really. Can the football game be described only in terms of what the players do, physically? No. Can the game be played without the players and the field? No. Etc. Like subjectivity, it's obvious there's a football game going on, but it's extremely difficult to explain its ontology. But even this analogy falls short, since subjectivity is way more different from the brain than a football game is from its constituent physical parts.
This answers your question. Thinking is the identity of mind & its object of thought. Ultimately, it isn't algorithmic or sequential, what the ancients called discursive & it can't occur in passive matter alone since that would fail to capture all the universals qua particulars, by not allowing matter to be identical to all other matters. I would identify this active intellect with either the cosmic intellect posterior to the prime mover OR the prime mover itself. Being a physicalist (including a functionalist) is a recipe for a disastrous & poor philosophy of "mind"
Yes. The football-game analogy captures one point of similarity -- that a mere physical description must be incomplete -- and perhaps hints at another -- that different levels of description can apply to the same set of phenomena. But here we are with "same set" again. With football, we can more or less see how the game requires a first-level description of "the same" set of events, but with consciousness, all we can do is assert that it's somehow the case, without being able to understand it in the least.
Thank you, but I don't quite see how. Would Aristotle say that a thought does, or does not, cause another thought?
Ultimately, NO. First of all, it does not make much sense to speak of the mind's objects without establishing an identity between the mind & its objects. Secondly, without all knowledge as already given in the active mind via noesis (direct non sensible intuition), our passive minds would be incapable of generating any thought by themselves since they only have the POTENTIAL for thought. You can insist on them being capable of this, but the process will be unintelligible & magical, a common problem which plagues physicalism
Otherwise, in a qualified sense, sure, one thought does follow another thought in the passive, destructible & limited mind. It's the passive mind transformed by the active mind, so it TAKES ON its causality.
There's not much I can do to help you understand Aristotle with a few quotes here & there. I recommend you check out De Anima. It's totally worth it given your interest/question.
Yes, it's been a while, probably time for a reread. But if I may: To say "one thought does follow another thought" is only to restate the observation we began with. The OP question is about explanation: Why does one thought follow another thought? It's what you're calling the "qualified sense" that interests me (and my passive, destructible and limited mind!).
I don't mean to be rude, but I won't respond to this given your inability to connect the link between the active & passive mind...the answer is already there. Is this functional illiteracy? I don't know. I doubt you understood Aristotle the first time you read him.
Good luck. :up:
False, and refuted by the other parts of what I said that you didn't quote.
We can reliably, and precisely, induce subjective experiences with chemical, electrical or mechanical effects on the brain. No-one would claim that this constitutes a complete model. But we absolutely do have good grounds for thinking the brain makes subjective experiences.
Thinking more about this, I realize that it's important to emphasize the difference between a single, given brain event -- a firing of neurons that occurs at a particular time -- and the entire physical system we call the brain (and nervous system). I believe it's true that, without my brain, I would not be conscious. And the opposite is, trivially, false: "Without my consciousness, I wouldn't have a brain." This demonstrates a grounding or priority that we don't need to contest because we fear it leads to physicalism.
What happens at time T1 is different. Neurons fire = I picture a purple cow. Why? There is no necessarily correct temporal order. We could say, "The neurons fire and so I picture the cow." Or we could say, "I decide to picture the cow and so the neurons fire." Which causes which? To me, the answer is clearly "Neither one," hence supervenience.
Yes, but the opposite is also the case: We can reliably induce chemical and electrical effects on the brain by subjective experiences.
Sure: both support the position that thoughts, and subjective experience, are based in neurochemistry.
Or put it this way: are there ever subjective experiences that aren't coincident with activation of areas of the brain?
Of course it's the brain. Nobody's questioning that. But that's where, not how. We know that wings make an airplane fly. When we ask how, simply repeating "the wings do it" isn't an answer. Certainly, we can mess with subjective experience by affecting voltage gated calcium channels, serotonin reuptake proteins, and any number of other parts of neurons. But that doesn't even begin to address how those physical things don't only release ions when photons of one particular range of wavelengths hit the retina, but experience redness, and don't only act on themselves in feedback loops, but are aware of their own existence.
I understand what you mean, but "based in" is tricky. If I have a thought of someone I love, and the brain fires up in all the ways we can now observe, was my thought caused by a yet previous piece of neurochemistry? Couldn't we equally say that the chicken of neurochemistry was preceded by the egg of subjective thought? In other words, if "based in" is supposed to prioritize one level over the other in this way, it doesn't really hold up. But see my previous post. If "based in" merely means that the brain is necessary for subjective experiences to exist, but subjective experiences are not necessary for the brain to exist, then yes, "based in", in that sense, is fine.
Quoting Patterner
Much pithier than my version! Though in fact there are those who question whether brains are necessary for subjective experience; on this forum many people suggest that a nonbiological entity may achieve consciousness. I find this conceivable but unlikely.
Quoting Patterner
Right, simply saying "Subjectivity is neurochemical" is like saying "Consciousness is an emergent property" or "The brain is the seat of the mind." It gives the illusion of understanding something but no actual content.
Thank you.
Is there a post on TPF where you sketch out your view of consciousness? I'm curious . . .
this is the closest I've come here.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15877/property-dualism/p1
But it's kind of sloppy in ways. Working on getting my thoughts down better.
The topic of this thread is not the hard problem of consciousness though. There are plenty of threads on that, and in those threads I have always been happy to say "we don't know".
This thread is about causation, thoughts to thoughts, and that's very clear IMO. As I've said, it's intrinsic to the whole way our minds -- cognition and perception -- work. It's almost all associative. This is demonstrable and testable.
Quoting J
Or, the position that I am espousing: that they are one and the same thing.
I feel you are poisoning your own well by beginning with the premise that one must cause the other.
If by "same thing" we mean two phenomena in a supervenience relationship, then yes, though "same thing" probably isn't nuanced enough, given how weirdly different they appear. I was trying to show that the chicken-and-egg questions get us nowhere. To re-quote myself:
Quoting J
Quoting Mijin
Again, I began with that premise (which many people do believe) in order to show what's wrong with it. Sorry if that wasn't clear. The relation of brain and mind is not a cause/effect relation. But the relation of one thought to another may be, and the OP asks, broadly, if there's such a thing as causation in the realm of ideas or propositions -- that sort of mental-to-mental causation, as opposed to brain events.
Hmm, from my perspective I do see it as obvious given the neurochemical underpinnings of thoughts and that the causal path is quite clear within that framing. But, now I'm clear on what you're saying, I need to think a bit more about what we can strictly say the entailment regarding ideas / propositions is.
As I think I said somewhere in the OP, if one believes that's the only way in which the idea of causality can be used, then there's really nothing in the OP questions that are worth considering.
Quoting Patterner
Thanks. I didn't go on to read all 7 pages of the thread, so this may have been said already (and maybe by me!) but I'll say it anyway, since this is a different thread.
Property dualism, or something very like it, is what supervenience proposes, it seems to me. If brain and mind are to be understood as "the same thing" (and I'll come back to that troublesome terminology), we need to be able to say how they nonetheless (appear to) differ so dramatically. Property dualism says that "the same thing" can have different properties, depending upon the perspective of the perceiver. A brain, viewed from the outside, has physical properties. A brain, viewed or experienced from the inside, has mental properties. Some versions of property dualism (I think including yours) go on to say that these are actual objective properties which can be discovered using 3rd person inquiry.
I like this perspective because it cuts the knot of what-causes-what, and it doesn’t claim that consciousness is forever a mystery, inaccessible to objective investigation. Yes, it requires the postulate of consciousness, and a 1st person perspective, in order to get off the ground, but that’s a postulate I’m happy to accept.
The idea that proto-consciousness may turn out to be a property of matter, supporting a modest version of panpsychism, seems quite possible. It’s sheer speculation at this point. But it’s no more unwarranted than vague references to “emergent properties.”
My objections begin with the attempt to widen the terms “consciousness” and “experience” to include, say, photons. I think Chalmers is way off track when he says that a proton has “a degree” of consciousness. Might it be proto-conscious, in your sense of having a property that, when scaled up, can result in consciousness? Sure. But that just isn’t “a degree of consciousness,” any more than five or ten atoms have “a degree of liquidity.”
Likewise with “experiences.” We can insist on a reform of how to use that word, so that all material entities can now have them, but that’s arbitrary. If the word is used at all, it refers to events that can be perceived “from the inside,” and the constituents of your rock can’t do this. There are indeed “instantaneous, memory-less moments” involving the rock-particles, but the particles aren’t experiencing them. Or putting it differently: If you want to reform “experience” to include what particles can do, you need to explain what part of the concept of “experience” is being carried over, such that it can justify continuing to use the term.
Lastly . . . we should definitely come up with something better than “the same thing.” It’s a tempting, often useful locution, which I frequently fall back on, but I worry that too often it paints the wrong picture. In one sense, as we’ve already noted, it’s ludicrous to say my mental image of a purple cow and a particular set of neurons firing in my brain are the same thing. That can’t be what we mean when we claim some sort of identity between the two phenomena. What is the same here is what supervenience (and perhaps property dualism) is trying to capture.
We need the concept of “perspective” or “point of view” in order to understand it. From your perspective, having been kept in the dark for two days, a flaring match looks painfully bright. From mine, standing in the sunlight and looking in a window at your match, it’s so dim it’s hard to see. So, does the match have the property of brightness? Obviously, that depends. With 1st and 3rd person, the perspective shift is much more radical. A match, at least, “translates” in visual images and metaphors, but there’s no translation language (yet) between brain and mind. Still, this can help us understand how there might be a “same thing” underlying these two points of view. Or we can use my football-game analogy.
Maybe instead of “the same thing” we should say “the same essent”. I’m not fond of Heideggerian terminology, but this one (I think invented by Mannheim to translate seiend in the lectures on metaphysics) is close to what we want. We could stipulate that an essent is an item that exists, but stripped of perspective. Heidegger might be outraged at putting it this way, but I want a word we can use that acknowledges that there is a level of being beneath or beyond perspective. So brain and mind share the same essent.
Quoting JYes to both.
Quoting JI agree. I don't think there's any such thing as "a degree"of consciousness, or different levels of consciousness, higher consciousness, etc. I think consciousness is consciousness. What's different is the thing that is conscious. The subjective experience of a photon is extremely different from the subjective experience of a human.
Quoting JI don't think so. I don't think anything [I]results[/I] in consciousness. It's always there. We just subjectively experience "scaled up" mental abilities. A photon has none, of course. But our mental abilities are scaled up above those of anything we are aware of that has any mental abilities at all.
Quoting JIt is a difficulty thing to try to imagine what part is being "carried over" such that it can be said that a particle has it. However, I think it's what is needed. It has to be there from the beginning. The alternative is that purely physical structures evolve without the presence of consciousness, without anything directing the evolution in order to bring about consciousness, yet one day, for no reason whatsoever, find themselves in configurations that gives rise to consciousness. I mean, holy cow! Didn't see that coming!!
Regarding "the same thing", is it possible to think of consciousness as another sense? There's no confusion or ambiguity with the idea of one person seeing me and another person hearing me. Consciousness happens to be a sense that only works on the self. Maybe? I don't know. I just thought of it right now. Heh
Yes, we both start from there. I was noting that your "proto-consciousness" might also be an objective fact, though you're clear that we can't find any physical property with which to identify it.
Quoting Patterner
Quoting Patterner
We may have an aporia, then. If it's genuinely needed, and yet nothing can be said to give it content, that suggests to me that the path is closed to further inquiry, at least for now. I can't even posit the idea of a photon's subjective experience -- my mind is blank and the words seem empty. But of course, whenever someone says, "I just can't imagine how . . . " the right response is "Try harder!" So maybe you can!
Quoting Patterner
This is perhaps important. Consistent with your idea that consciousness is a sort of irreducible natural kind, or property, we can view it as creating mental abilities of various sorts. What's "created" is not consciousness (it's there all along) but the mental ability. My concern about this picture is that it sounds like a shell game. We've substituted "mental ability" for "consciousness" in its traditional usages, and are now asserting the same mysterious things about mental abilities that were formally asserted about consciousness. How are they created? What are they? How do we know what has them? etc.
Quoting Patterner
Well, that couldn't be true. If this picture of consciousness as emergent turns out to be the case, we will understand the reasons for its emergence very well. I don't think anyone is suggesting that consciousness is random or fluky.
Quoting Patterner
Hmm. Maybe, at least by analogy. Worth pondering.
The first mind they talk about is that if the archaea. Archaea "is an example of a molecule mind, the first stage of thinking on our journey. All the thinking elements in molecule minds consist of individually identifiable molecules."
The simplicity of this example stretches the definition of 'thinking' and 'mind' past what probably anyone is comfortable with. But it's the beginning. Going up the evolutionary ladder - neuron minds, module minds, super minds - just means adding more physical things. What else [I]can[/I] be added, after all? Physical things that take in sensory input, store information, access information, initiate responses...
I think consciousness is always present, always giving the entity in question, whether a particle, person, or whatever else, subjective experience of itself. We subjectively experience the physical sensory input processes of a range of the electromagnetic spectrum as vision with colors and shapes. We subjectively experience the physical system that stores information as memory. You get the idea.
But consciousness does not create those things. Rather, it is the property by which we subjectively experience them. And things without any mental abilities still have subjective experiences. But they don't have thoughts or memories about the experiences.
Quoting JIt most certainly couldn't.
Quoting JIf there is a reason for the emergence of consciousness, then wouldn't that mean it was intended? If it's emergent, isn't it either blind chance or not blind chance?
Quoting Dawnstorm
And yet, it's an answer, not a question. The question was to what degree "language needs to be involved" in belief formation. I answered as clearly and concisely as I know how. Language needs to be involved in belief formation to the degree(extent) that the belief content is existentially dependent upon language. For instance, if one believes that there's milk in the fridge, then language needs to be involved in that belief in a number of ways. The milk and the fridge are both existentially dependent upon language. Thus, the belief cannot exist in a world that is completely absent of language.
If a cat watches a mouse run behind the stove and subsequently believes that the mouse is behind the stove, then that belief is existentially dependent upon language in the same way that the previous example is. The stove is existentially dependent upon language. So, language needs to be involved in those particular beliefs as an existential precondition for the possibility thereof.
However, if a cat watches a mouse run into a hole burrowed into the hillside and believes that the mouse will eventually come out of that hole, then that belief is not at all existentially dependent upon language. Hence, language does not need to be involved whatsoever in that belief formation.
This hints at two different existential dependency scenarios. It sheds light on the overlap between language less creatures' belief and language users'.
There are far more complex varieties of belief that language needs to be involved to a much greater degree/extent. Belief as propositional attitude fits here, as does believing that English is a nominative-accusative language, understanding and contemplating Gettier's paper, doing theoretical physics, philosophy, etc.
I didn't see it that way at all. You do not look foolish to me. Becoming aware of our own false belief seems like an accomplishment. I mean, we're all aware of our own fallibility, aren't we?
I see. So, how does this notion of behavioural implicature deal with the fact that behaviour alone is indeterminate regarding that? I mean, for example, shrugging one's shoulders can mean more than one thing as a result of having more than one vein of thought going through the individual's mind. For some it means they could not care less. For others, it means they have no clue.
These are the sort of ambiguities my position aims to lessen/minimize.
If we are to attribute thought and belief to another creature, we ought to have at least a well-grounded idea and/or standard regarding what sorts of creatures are capable of forming which sorts of beliefs.
We all know, I presume anyway, that a mouse is incapable of contemplating the consequences of the double slit experiment.
What's the difference between using the English language and using the English language like one knows it is a nominative-accusative language?
I originally thought that this focus upon English was meant to be an example of a background belief that is brought to the foreground.
This bit is something I'm intrigued by.
I suppose it boils down to what it takes in order to know that English is a nominative-accusative language. I mean, I didn't know that at all until this conversation, where you've brought it to my attention, and I've did a bit of reading about it.
Sounds like the belief of the cat the mouse is behind the stove is as dependent on language as my belief that the milk is in the fridge is dependent on cows (if it's cowmilk) - as a cat-external factor (and one the cat might only dimly understand to begin with). Why, then, are we talking about language and not, say, gravity. The stove's existentially dependent on many, many things, few of which seem part of the present belief.
Quoting creativesoul
I didn't become aware of a false belief in that case: I lost track of why I was uttering the proposition, given that statements that include "all" tend to not reflect beliefs of mine, but function more as attractors for... something. I'd forgotten what that was, partly through focussing too much on the truth content.
Truth, for me, tends to erode meaning. Hard to explain psychological process.
Quoting creativesoul
There is none. Since English is a nominitave-accusative language, speaking English is speaking a nominative-accusative langue. I'll have to highlight again that I said "in the sense that they use it like that without trouble". It's not the most precise phrasing, I'll admit, but the point here is very important.
English native speakers needn't reflect that English is a nominative-accusative language, ever. And since they don't need to, they usually don't. In fact they usually don't know that they could reflect on that.
So:
Quoting creativesoul
For a linguist, or someone who knows a linguist, or for someone who's confronted with, say, an ergative-absolutive language, this comes to the foreground. Usually it doesn't. When it does come to the foreground for the first time, it's usually a recontextualisation of what you've been always doing: things could have been very different - in a way that's not immidately, intuitively understandable.
So knowing "that English is a nominative-accusative language" (in the theoretical sense) includes knoledge that knowing that English is a nominative-accusative language (in the practical sense) doesn not include. In the previous sentence I used quotationmarks to distinguish the knowledge-levels, here. This is related.
However, the practical knowledge comes first: it's a way of talking, something you do. The theoretic knowledge is derived, and now a nominative-accusative language is both something you speak and something you can speak about.
Learning that "English is a nominative-accusative language" doesn't impact the way you speak English at all - but understanding what you're doing when you speak English might make it easier to learn, say, Basque. Theorising this way is necessary not to speak English, but to contextualise English. There's potential for new practical knowledge.
Also, a potential for greater awareness of what you're doing, though that might come at the cost of your practical efficiency when speaking English (thought patterns previously impossible might interfere now).
And to some degree this is the relationship between human and cat in the example: when we talk about what the cat believes, we take the point of view of the theoriser. There's a mat and a mouse. And so on.
This is what "behavioural implicature" means to me. A perspectival imputation. Basically: linguist:native speaker = human:cat. And since I'm a pretty staunch relativist, I'm fairly sure there's no way around behavioural implicature.
Quoting creativesoul
Via an iterative process of situational compatibility. Behavioural implicature is reinforced when our expectations are met.
So:
Quoting creativesoul
Under behavioural implicature the question is: what sort of behaviour from a mouse would have you question this piece of "knowledge"? We're not coming at this from a neutral postion. We make working assumptions until they fail us. I mean, I certainly wouldn't assume that a mouse was reading this thread, just because I catch it looking at the screen...
Quoting creativesoul
What sort of commonalities do we start off from here, each of us, to begin with? I mean, in this thread I'm not even quite clear yet what counts as a "thought". Meanings and context relevances change the further we draw back, or the further we move in. I mean, the cat might believe that there's a mouse on the mat, and we might ask questions about meaning overlap and distinct life environments until the cows come home. If we go all the way back to the opening post, I'm fairly sure none of us would assume that the cat's going from "how's Ann doing" to "it's Ann's birthday, I need to catch a juicy mouse for her and drop it in front of her bedroom", at least not if we involve the words. Part of the problem here is scope.
If you remove language what remains? Can you compare across different life environments? And so on.
What does it mean to say: "the cat believes there's a mouse on the mat"? Any question, any answer, any puzzlement around this always comes from a particular perspective within that entire field. It's the philosophy tango. (Can you tell I'm getting tired?)
Quoting Patterner
I think I understand the distinction you're making better than I did before. Am I right that the major reason for proposing this ontology is to avoid needing to have consciousness emerge, or arise, or be caused by something physical?
Quoting Patterner
Not sure I follow that. Intended by whom? I'm using "reason" here in the sense of "What's the reason the seasons change?" But if that's confusing, we could, if you like, reserve the term "reason" for situations involving rationality and intention, and instead speak here of causes. So: "If this picture of consciousness as emergent turns out to be the case, we will understand the causes of its emergence very well." Is that less objectionable? (And mind you, neither of us is necessarily buying the "if" part. We're looking into what the hypothesis would entail.)
I'm open to hearing how consciousness [I]does[/I] emerge from purely physical things. But people like Greene, Hoffman, Crick, and Eagleman say they don't have any clue as to how that can be.
Quoting JI gotcha. And yes, that's fine. But wouldn't that have to mean there are lower level properties? How do we understand liquidity? How do we understand that solid H2O floats in liquid H2O? That plants thrive in sunlight? Where the bulk of trees comes from?
We know the micro properties that are responsible for the structures the next level up; the properties of [I]those[/I] structures that are responsible for the structures the [I]next[/I] level up; etc.
If we understand the causes of the emergence of consciousness very well, can it be possible that it will not involve the properties of the lower levels?
OK. We're saying similar things: Faced with what seems (to you) a nonsensical demand for an explanation of how consciousness could arise from the physical, we have to postulate its permanent existence. My slant is more like: The demand may or not make sense; all we can say is that, as of now, we don't know how to think about it; our conceptual scheme creates a roadblock that might prove decisive, but we can't say.
I'm underlining the reasons for positing this kind of consciousness (call it Ur-consciousness) because I want to see if there are any other, independent reasons for thinking the thesis might be true. I myself don't see any, but tell me what you think: Is there any evidence for Ur-con? Is there a physical theory that can include it? What would be our research program, to find out if Ur-con did or did not exist? Is it, in short, the result of a transcendental argument alone? Something like the cosmological constant used to be? (And there's a lesson there, because the CC now has new conceptual arguments to back it up, so the transcendental arguers were right all along!)
Quoting Patterner
Right, that's the argument. Consciousness can't simply "emerge" like a rabbit out of a hat. So we have to ask what it is about the lower levels of physical reality that might be responsible. Your idea is that proto-consciousness was there all along, and it is this property of all matter that allows what we call mental realities to emerge. (I'm not persuaded that this "mental emergence" is any easier to explain than would be the emergence of consciousness itself, but let that go for now.)
The question I'd want to reflect on is, Are we being too parsimonious in our description of the "lower levels"? Must it be a matter of properties, exclusively? On the analogy with liquidity, then yes, it must be. But what about the analogy of the football game? What is the "property" which, added to the properties of the players and the field, creates the game? Two answers spring to mind: It's the intentions of the players; or, It's the rules that humans have put in place. I'm not sure which of these is right, but they both have the feature of bringing in something from an entirely different category of being, something that really can't be considered a lower-level property. Food for thought, perhaps.
Quoting JI can't see a way to validate any hypothesis, or rule out any. Nobody has come up with a way. All scenarios play out the same. We can't study, or even detect, consciousness with our sciences, so we can't see it come into being. We know it exists, because it's us. But we can't
Is there a physical theory that can include it? Not a physical-only theory. We're physical beings, and we're conscious. One way or another, it happens together.
Quoting JWhether it's the intentions of the players or the rules that humans have put in place, football would not exist without consciousness. Football's lower level is consciousness, but we don't know what all of consciousness' lower levels are yet.
Kind of. Since there are players, and the players are conscious, then yes. But I meant to include that in saying that the lower levels include players and the field. There's still something missing from the description: What makes it a game? What makes it something with rules that we can articulate no matter who the individual players are, and which field they're playing on? I agree that it's human consciousness which does this, but not by virtue of what the players may be thinking about. That would be true bottom-up emergence, but we know that's not how it happens. Rather, something seems to be added to all this activity (and thinking) which comes from a different category; it's not the same as putting enough molecules together in the right way so as to get liquidity.
Micro properties can account for various higher level properties, such as liquidity and solidity.
Solidity can account for higher level properties, such as height and sharpness.
Consciousness can account for higher level properties, such as games with rules and mathematics.
What lower level properties account for consciousness, of course, is hotly debated.
Consciousness does account for the rules of baseball. There can't possibly be another explanation for the Infield Fly Rule, the rule about hitting a foul ball when you have a full count, four balls is a walk, nine innings in a game, three outs per side per inning, and endless more.
But, certainly, as you say, the accounting is not the same as physical accounting. It's not the same as the way micro properties account for liquids and solids. Even if we can't, at least can't always, predict what physical things will happen under specific conditions, we can understand it after the fact. And, if we have the same circumstances, we will get the same results.
There's no way anyone could have predicted or calculated what the rules of baseball would be before the game was invented, or even what the rules would settle on after people were already playing it. And there's no looking at the rules now, and seeing how they couldn't have turned out any other way.
Should we expand the way we think of "accounts for"? Should we use a different phrase, since it's a different kind of accounting? "Conscious accounting"? "Variable accounting"?
Yes, glad you agree that this is crucial.
Quoting Patterner
Good questions. I think it's partially a matter of terminology, as is often the case when we're dealing with philosophical usages that are either shopworn or unclear. It may go deeper than that, though. I'm not convinced we even have the right concepts yet, to which we could then seek to apply helpful terminology. This is the "way we think of 'accounts for'" that you reference.
It's easier to point out what's wrong with the physical-accounting analogies than to replace them. My only possibly useful suggestion is to stick with simple analogies, such as the baseball game, where we're pretty sure some "conscious accounting" is going on, and try to carefully tease out what happens and why. Are we sure this will reveal anything about consciousness itself? No, but in the absence of a traditional scientific apparatus of inquiry, we need to be open-minded and optimistic about what we can learn.
Meanwhile, I would add (though you probably don't agree) that the scientists should go full steam ahead in their efforts to explain consciousness from a biological perspective. If it keeps failing, that will be informative.
Quoting JNo, I quite agree. Not only because I might be wrong, but also because we will doubtless learn all kinds of other things while looking for this answer. Things that are, in the grand scheme of things, more important than solving this mystery. For me, nothing is more fascinating than this. But if an attempt to solve this that has no hope of succeeding helps with Alzheimer's?
But I do think there's no hope of finding any biological/physicalist answer, so I think more thought should be put into other approaches.
Well, I'm talking about the idea of existential dependency upon language use but not gravity because the former is relevant to our process of understanding and setting out the evolutionary progression of belief whereas the latter is utterly irrelevant for such an endeavor. Existential dependency upon language is a tool(factor) that helps establish the contours of evolutionary progression as it pertains to the emergence and evolution of belief over time, which in turn is relevant to whether or not one belief can cause another.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Okay. I assumed that you believed what you wrote, as it was written. Afterwards you agreed that it wasn't true, and that statements using "all" do not typically reflect your beliefs. Understood. It now seems to me to have been a case of being loose with language. You've remarked on precision as well. That's fine. We can move beyond that tangent if you like. No problem here.
Quoting Dawnstorm
That's a statement worthy of a topic in its own right.
Quoting Dawnstorm
This is a very odd reply, especially given the great detail that followed carefully drawing a distinction between the two uses of "knowing" involved in your claims. It's an equivocation fallacy. It is unacceptable to use two completely different senses of the same term in the same argument. At best, unnecessary confusion ensues.
Is it your claim that all English users know that English is a nominative accusative language before they become aware of that background belief?
I'm still a bit unclear on what the point was, even though you reiterated that it's an important one. Could you set it out clearly as well as the relevance it has to our discussion?
Quoting Dawnstorm
Are you saying that when we attempt to set out the cat's beliefs it is a case of imputing our own perspective into the cat, and that the linguist does much the same thing when imputing their own perspective upon native English speakers? To me, that's anthropomorphism in the case of the cat and is to be avoided at all costs. The avoidance of which is a key component/feature of the very methodology I'm working from.
This harks back to the pivotal role that language use has in some thought/belief formation, but not others. If there is some thought or belief that is existentially dependent upon the thinker/believer being capable of using language, then it cannot be the case that a language less creature is capable of having such belief, and hence imputing such belief onto a language less creature is a mistake. The same is true of imputing knowledge that English is a nominative accusative language to a speaker who doesn't know what counts as a nominative accusative language and hence has no clue what those words mean.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Quoting Dawnstorm
But why not? There are unspoken presuppositions at work here. If a mouse was capable of reading this thread, then there would be no trouble with assuming such a thing because you caught them looking at the screen. So what, exactly, is it that stops you from attributing such capabilities to the mouse? What sort of behaviour would the mouse need to display in order to question whether or not they could read this thread?
You see the problem here?
There is an underlying notion of thought/belief at work.
Indeed. The underlying concept/notion/idea is hard at work in each of our contributions. Setting that out in a way that makes sense regarding of all the times we use the terms is key.
By my lights, all thought/belief consists entirely of correlations drawn between different things. The differences involve what those things are. As it pertains to our offshoot here, the thing that's in focus is language use and things that are existentially dependent upon language use.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Correlations drawn between different things by a creature so capable.
Quoting Dawnstorm
It's a question that's more about the speaker's terminological use. I've answered it already.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Yes. Understanding any given perspective requires accepting the speaker's definitions, and subsequently seeing how well they hold up to scrutiny, including how well they are able to articulate/explain the evolutionary progression of belief.
I do apologise for the confusion, but I don't really know how to do better. I'll try, but I'm not confident I'll succeed in being clear here. First, when I said "there is none", what I meant is this:
If you become aware of the linguistic discouse around nominative-accusative languages, you've learned nothing new about using English. You now know that English is one type of language, and there are others. This is not knowledge included in using English. It might help you with learning other languages, such as Basque, but it won't have any impact on your using English.
So:
Quoting creativesoul
Almost. It's not necessarily a background belief, but it's definitely practical knowledge. That's what makes things difficult here. You act as if English is a nominative-accusative language and so do other native speakers, and that's why linguists can come up with the theory. When you learn English as a small child, you internalise the language as a nominative-accusative language. Everyone around you acts as if English is a nominative-accusative language, and so you learn to act like that, too.
As long as you're not aware that things could be different, you have no reason to theorise about what you're doing. Let's say you're Fench, and you have Basque neighbours, and you try to learn Basque. Basque will work in a highly un-intuitive way for you, so this is how you become aware that something you've taken for granted cannot be taken for granted. You now have the impetus to create a theoretical body of knowledge centred around that difference. Your focus is going to be what speakers of Basque are doing, but you'll need to approach this from within what you know about French: from the difference.
You create new practical knowledge about Basque; you don't create new practical knowledge about French. You create new theoretical knowledge that puts the two languages in relation. If you're an autodidact, here, you may never have heard the linguistic terms. Your take may be different from the linguists', so may not even have use for the terms. Who knows?
This is why I kept emphasising: "in the sense that they use it that way."
So:
Quoting creativesoul
I think perspectival bias is inevitable; without it things stop making sense. So, yes, that's what I'm pretty much saying. I, too, would like to avoid anthropomorphism, but my methodology would be strip back what's human about our perspective as much as we can so things still make sense. We need to peel back some of what we know until we go from anthropmorphism to a, maybe, mammal-centred perspective. I recognise this is hard. Me insisting that in a cat-human framework a mat isn't a mat is part of that. We need to stip back as much of the matness as we can and then bring back in as much as we think is warranted, with the bottom-line being what we think we have in common with cats.
This is far from infallible. So see here:
Quoting creativesoul
That is the very question.
"Unspoken presuppositions": Yes.
"If a mouse was capable...": My methodology doesn't even assume a mouse is incapbable of reading. Me "certainly not assuming that" is a data-point, too. And uncovering the presuppositions is important. As many as you can discover, and as many as you can handle without losing the grounding that allowys you to think.
"What sort of behaviour...": the sort of movements that would suggest to me that the mouse is following something from top right to bottom left. I have bad spatial perception, so judging the field of vision of a mouse would be hard. But if it would cock the head back and forth in line-break intervals...
A key point here is that we're not communicating with mice via text. If we did (say in animal-language experiments) we might have to expand the semantic field of what it means to "read". We have only the one concept, but it's been developed for inter-human context rather than inter-species contexts.
***
I've gone back and re-read some of your posts about existential dependency on language. I think there's something in there I don't quite understand, but I can't put my finger on what questions to ask.
Thank you for that. I appreciate the effort. I think it has been helpful. No need to apologize though. I'm not offended, and do not take this personally. I'm examining claims(arguments/reasoning), not you as an author. As I've mentioned, prior to this conversation, I was completely unaware of the jargon. A small amount of research provided more than adequate enough evidence to warrant my belief that the entire enterprise is very heavily theory laden. A good grasp of it is far beyond my current understanding.
That said, I want to say a few things and see if you agree. I think we agree on them, but I'd like to verify.
1.) Becoming aware of the linguistic discourse around nominative-accusative languages is necessary for knowing that English counts as one.
2.) Becoming aware of the linguistic discourse around nominative-accusative languages is not necessary for learning and/or successfully using English
3.) One need not know that English is a nominative-accusative language in order to use it.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Okay. I think I better understand what you're saying. However, I do not think it adds anything beyond unnecessarily confusing rhetoric to claim that we "act is if English is a nominative accusative language", because there's no other way to act when using English. We also act as if gravity is acting upon us when we navigate the world, because there's no other way to act when navigating the world. If I were to say that everyone acts as if they know that gravity is acting upon them when they navigate the world, I would be doing much the same thing you've done here regarding using English "as if they know"...
While I totally agree that English use is practical knowledge - quite literally - it makes no sense to me to say that everyone uses English as if they know that it is a nominative-accusative language.
There is a difference between using English as if one knows it is a nominative-accusative language and using English. It is only when one can use the terms "nominative-accusative language" in a sensible manner(consistent with it's formal use) that one can be sensibly said to be using English like they know it is a nominative-accusative language.
I'll address the rest of your last reply next time. I wish I would've skipped the bit above and went straight to the rest. :blush: Thank you for the interesting conversation.
Yes.
Yes.
Almost. To eliminate any ambiguities (which I should have done much earlier), I'd suggest a minor re-wording: "is a nominative-accusative language" --> "is classified as a nominative-accusative language".
This would rule out practical knowledge and make the wording clearer, I feel.
Quoting creativesoul
But the borders between languages are porous. Non-native speakers might "get it wrong," and still be understood. If you disregard notions of correctness, what language do they speak? You can get a lot wrong and still be understood. A native speaker of Basque might consistently produce "I eat cake," and "Me sleep." (I hasitate to claim "Me eat," because I don't speak Basque and verbs like "eat" that can sometime not take an object might be treated as transitive with object deletion? I never learned a single ergative-absolutive language.) It's actually a fascinating topic, when such usage would cause problems with communication. You can speak some form of English even if you don't fully grasp how a nominative-accusative language works. And a native speaker would likely recognise this as English, but "something's wrong".
I've never been able to quite pin down my point here, but I think it's something like this: There's some kind of vague analogy in how practical knowledge doesn't scale 1:1 onto theoretical knowledge and how the pre-linguistic aspect of thought maps onto propositions. But I'm not sure.
I really do wish I could explain myself better, here. It's familiar terrain for me, but terrain that's difficult to map (if the metaphor makes sense).
Nice recent additions. I think we're doing just fine. Well, you're doing way better than just fine. I say this in light of a few self-doubts you've expressed thus far regarding your contributions/explanations. We're beginning to understand one another.
Some bias may be inevitable, but not all bias renders us incapable of acquiring knowledge of language less thought/belief. I don't find human perspective to be problematic; at least not in and of itself, as a matter of universal fact. Rather, I find that our human perspective[hide="Reveal"](our metacognitive abilities, in particular)[/hide] may just be exactly what facilitates our ability to acquire knowledge regarding the thought/belief and/or 'mental ongoings'(scare-quotes intentional) of not only ourselves but of any creature capable of forming, having, holding thought and/or belief.
Quoting Dawnstorm
I think I agree with the general aim here. Commonality is definitely important. Our terminological frameworks of choice differ tremendously. "Matness" is prima facie evidence. That's not what I want to focus on though. Hopefully, it's enough to mention this in passing. I suspect we will be reminded by consequences that result from our respective schemas/frameworks.
How do we know what a mammal-centered perspective is(consists of)?
On my view, that's not up us. A mammal centered perspective, if there is such a thing, is not determined by our language use. To quite the contrary, if it is the case that cats are capable of thought and belief, then it must be the case that the cat's thought and belief existed in its entirety prior to our naming and descriptive practices, those meant to take account of the cat's thought/belief notwithstanding.
On my view, a cat can see a mat. Furthermore, when a cat looks at a mat, it cannot see anything else(assuming a non-hallucinatory cat).
Assume for a moment that all humans perish but cats and mats persist. There's no "matness" in this world. It dies with humans. Yet, the mat remains. Now, if there are two juvenile mice engrossed in play - wrestling around while chittering at one another like they often do - and the sounds draw the attention of a cat who begins peering around the corner at the two mice, who just so happened to have paused for a rest on top of a mat, I have no issue at all with claiming that the cat believes that the mice are on the mat.
The mat is meaningful to the cat as a result of being part of the spatiotemporal location of the mice.
In my view that's just climbing up and down the abstraction ladder: an anthropocentric view is a version of mammal-centered view. When we go up the abstraction ladder we lose specifity, and when we go down the abstraction ladder we narrow down applicability. We're not only mammals, but neither are cats. Being mammals is one thing we have in common, though.
So:
Quoting creativesoul
What raises the mat from the background of "over there" such that it is relevant? Are the mice easier to catch while on the mat? Are there territorial considerations (I sleep on this mat, as it's warmer than the bare floor)? We're re-constructing matness from a feline point-of-view here.
Let's say this is my mat, and my cat, and we've been sleeping on it together. That'd have been shared practical behaviour. In how far does that create meaning for the cat? I only have access to my own perspective. When I assume my perspective is "anthropocentric", I assume I have more in common with other humans than with my cat, but that's clearly wrong in the case of "living together". For example, I have more shared habits with my cat than, say, with a member of a secluded tribe in a South American rainforest.
For me, the degree of importance of language is not a settled matter. And my hunch is that I grant language less importance than you do. Instead I priviledge behaviour (well, that's not quite as helpful as I hoped it would be, given that language is behaviour, too....)
I do not necessarily disagree. Nice.
The suggestion makes 3 follow from 1 and 2(assuming "counts as" and "is classified as" mean the same thing). As it was written, there was a hidden presupposition/premise. Second, it tells me that you may not agree with that hidden premise, which was that knowing English is a nominative-accusative language and knowing English counts as(is classified as) a nominative-accusative is the exact same bit of knowledge.
So, now I'm curious about something. Do you believe we discovered that English is a nominative-accusative language?
I'm reminded of Davidson's paper "A Nice Derangement Of Epitaphs". If you're not familiar, it may interest you. There's also an older thread on this site by the same name. Interesting thread.
Sure, sometimes nonnative and English speakers alike misuse English, but a native speaker often understands the speaker regardless. I don't see how an example of misusing English addresses the criticism of claiming that using English is to "act as if English is a nominative-accusative language".
If one is using English, then one is using a nominative-accusative language. If using a nominative-accusative language counts as acting like the language one is using is a nominative-accusative language, then there's no other way to act when using English. That's what I was getting at. I just do not see how the bit about "acting as if" helps.
I am uneasy with the mapping of propositions onto language less creatures' thought. Propositions are utterly meaningless to language less creatures. Their thought/belief is not. Hence, their thought/belief is not propositions.
Knowing how to use a nominative-accusative language is different than knowing that a language counts as one.
Understood. Abstraction is necessary here. I would say uniquely human as well. I was skirting around something that is better stated outright. Avoiding anthropomorphism requires knowing which sorts of thoughts and/or beliefs only humans are capable of forming, having, and/or holding and which sorts other creatures are capable of.
I think that mammals are capable of having thought and belief. That said, what is the criterion, which when met by some candidate or another, allows us to sensibly call that perspective a mammalian one?
We're in dire need of a criterion.
How does behavioural implication help us here?
Well, only humans have a well-developed mental capacity called "theory of mind." it's the ability to make inferences about what is in the mind of others - reading another's mind - being aware that the thoughts of another mind may be different from ours. It was a crucial step in our evolution as a social species.
Okay. I think what you're calling "matness from a feline point-of-view" is what I talk about in terms of the meaningfulness of the mat to the cat(how and why the mat is and/or becomes meaningful to the cat). In this example, in was just a matter of where the mice were located.
Quoting Dawnstorm
On my view things become meaningful to a creature by virtue of being part of the creatures' thought and/or beliefs(correlations). The cat's behaviour can be included in these correlations(part of the content of the cat's thought/belief), for the cat - that is. The cat can draw correlations between their sleeping on the mat, the mat itself, you, their own sense of contentment, the smell of the mat, of you, the sound of stepping onto the mat, of moving around on the mat, etc. All of those things can be and/or become thought and/or belief content of the cat; as compared/contrasted to propositional content of belief as propositional attitude(belief that some proposition is true).
I disagree. Perhaps if you'll think about that a bit differently, you'll reassess?
The very same means that allows you access to your own perspective allows you access to others'. We are sharing our own perspectives with each other via common language, replete with the ability to talk about our own worldview/perspective as a subject matter in and of itself. Seems to me that our language use is an integral part of all that allows us access to our own and others'. Seems there's a bunch of biological machinery involved too. :wink:
Quoting Dawnstorm
The degree of the importance of language is not an entirely settled matter for me either. However, it has been extremely helpful for drawing and maintaining the distinctions between thought and/or belief that only humans are capable of and thought and/or belief that other creatures are capable of. Hence, understanding the role that common language plays in thought and belief has been extremely useful in avoiding anthropomorphism.
You sure about that?
I'm not sure which part you mean, but yes, our well-developed theory of mind separates us from other primates.
Quoting J
Sounds like a fascinating book, thanks for the recommendation. Yes, I have read that other primates do have at least some capacity to develop theories of mind, but that they are not anywhere near as developed as the human capacity.
For example, only the human capacity for theory of mind led us to apply this ability to supernatural beings (gods) - paving the way for the development of religion.
And even to objects - like Wilson the volleyball in the Tom Hanks movie Cast Away
Yup. It's fairly clear that some pack mammals have some thought about what other members are feeling/thinking.
Yes. The key element being "well-developed". However, some other animals have a theory of mind, just not nearly as well-developed as ours. Ours is one of the things that separates us from other creatures, other primates notwithstanding. I took it that you were denying that any other primate(creature) had the ability to think about other animals' feeling, thought, and/or belief. That's what I was questioning.
Quoting Questioner
Yup. We're probably the only creatures capable of (mistakenly)projecting our own thought/belief onto things incapable of it. On my view, anthropomorphism is a mistake to be avoided at all costs.
First, sorry for the absence: stress at work, holidays and illness all got together.
could have found time, but wasn't in a state of mind to think... much of anything really.
As for the quote above, I do indeed not agree with this, but it's not a simple "no". I think knowledge comes in bundles that are more numerous than the lables we attach to them. And there's unlabled, practical knowledge, which others then can include in a labled bundle. But the lable is unneccessary for all the knowledge in the bundle. Sometimes the label adds little, but recontextualises the knowledge. So:
Quoting creativesoul
When labelling English as a nominative-accusative language we didn't discover that English is a nominative-accusative language; we discovered that there would have been alternatives and that necessitated a label where heretofore practical knowledge was sufficient. (I simplified for clarity, and skipped over the fact that I'd need more knowledge of the history of linguistics to discuss this properly, but I think my theoretical approach should become clear from this.)
Quoting creativesoul
If you're talking about Banno's thread, I participated in that one. It was indeed an interesting article, but I'd need a refresher. It's been a while.
Quoting creativesoul
This is surprisingly hard to explain.
When we classify English as a nominative-accusative language, we have an idea of how a nominative-accusative language works. We can then check what native-speakers do, and say that English counts as a nonimative-accusative language.
But if some non-native speaker, still learning, were to use English in parts as if it were an ergative-absolutive language, what language would what he's speaking count as? You could say that he's not speaking English, or you could say he's speaking English as if it had ergative-absolutive elements. If this then gets judged as a mistake, the non-native speaker can get to the practical knowledge via the theoretical knowledge. It's a different form of learning.
If a significant amount of non-native speakers bundled geographically together were to speak like that, English might acquire a partly ergative-absolutive dialect.
Quoting creativesoul
This, I think, is a real difference between our perspectives. We have access to our own perspectives, and we construct all others from this perspective. "Common language" needs to be constructed within a unique perspective as well.
Interestingly, my experience is that talking too much estranges me from my own perspective. I feel like formulating my perspective is a step away from it rather than an approach. It's necessary for communication, though.
Understood. No worries. I get it. While this is an interesting discussion, in the big picture - for me anyway - it's a spare time activity, and life can certainly "get in the way" of those. Priorities are not always chosen, and stressful times can be emotional and/or energetic vampires. Besides, this subject matter can be very intense on even the best of days when we look forward to doing it. In addition, our respective views are remarkably different, so we're also tasked with the endeavor of understanding what the other means and/or is trying to say. So, it's not for the faint of heart. All that being said, I hope you're in a better place now.
:smile:
Good thoughts your way...
:flower:
Quoting Dawnstorm
This made me smile. Earlier you expressed both, interest and slight confusion, about the notion/concept of existential dependency that I've grown quite fond of over the years. The bit I emphasized above is relevant and may very well dovetail nicely with it. Hopefully, this presents an opportunity for both of us to acquire an increased overall understanding of each other's perspective/viewpoint/position. Two cans, one stone. I love birds too much to throw stones at them. :wink:
Some things exist in their entirety prior to our noticing, naming, and/or talking about them as subject matters in their own right(prior to our labeling them). If I understand you correctly, the "unlabeled practical knowledge" you refer to above is one such thing(or "bundle", as you say).
Language use is practical knowledge(know how). Knowing how to use language is practical knowledge that is existentially dependent upon common language(our naming and descriptive practices). I mean one cannot use language if there is none to be used, and yet such know how is not existentially dependent upon being identified, named, and/or otherwise picked out of this world to the exclusion of all else. We knew how to use language before we began talking about our language use; prior to the labels "practical knowledge" or "know how".
I think we're largely in agreement there. Would you agree with the paragraph directly above, as it is written?
Well, one aspect of the paper highlighted how we can sometimes say the wrong words(malapropisms) and be understood, nonetheless.
Hence, when your counterexample invoked people with broken English that are often understood anyway, I was reminded of it. You asked what language they were speaking. Freely speaking, they were using English. Strictly speaking, they were misusing it. There is a difference. An example of misuse poses no problems for claims regarding use.
A quick recap of this facet of the conversation:
You claimed earlier that all English speakers act as if they know that English is a nominative-accusative language. <-----that is the claim at the beginning of this tangent. I wondered what that was supposed to mean, so I began questioning it.
I asked what the difference was between using English and "using English as if one knows that it is a nominative-accusative language.
You said "none". Perhaps I should have left it at that. A distinction without a difference.
You then dropped the "know" part and kept the "acts as if" part.
I replied that everyone using English acts as if English is a nominative-accusative language because there's no other way to act when using English. You offered a counterexample of people misusing English.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Sure. I think I understand. I think I'm making sense of it. If the speaker is learning English and already has a grasp of their own native tongue, and that language is an ergative-absolutive language, then the speaker can be taught about the theoretical differences between their native tongue and English while learning English. May even be quite helpful when learning other languages, assuming I understand the general basic thrust of what you're saying.
When studying Spanish, we compared its use to English all the time, verb tense, casual/formal, etc.
I'm sure there are meaningful distinctions between nominative-accusative and ergative absolute languages, and if enough people began mixing elements of the latter into English, that dialect could indeed have an ergative absolute element to it. Meaning is established/determined by common use.
There is something to what you're saying here.
I've lived in a few different places where communities had their own pigeon/creole English dialect(s). Louisiana and Hawai'i both had fairly common prominent mixtures of English and French/Hawai'ian, respectively in addition to 'original' novel colloquialisms I've witnessed being used nowhere else but there.
You were quite right about the differences in our viewpoints pertaining the above and what immediately preceded it.
The map/territory distinction seems relevant here. Common language is not constructed within any single unique perspective. Common language consists of a community of people(a plurality of creatures capable of) drawing correlations between the same (or similar enough) things, whereas some of those things are vocalizations, meaningful marks(in our case), and/or behaviours. "Common language" consists of only meaningful marks. Common language(humans') is spoken by many who have no idea what the words "common language" mean. Common language sometimes includes no meaningful marks whatsoever. Common language existed in its entirety prior to "common language".
Furthermore, if what's claimed above is true, then I construct your perspective, and you construct mine. You said "we construct all others from this perspective"(our own perspective). Well, I'm an other to you, and you're an other to me. Mine is constructed by you, and yours is constructed by me.
That can't be right.
Terminological frameworks are pivotal. Seems to me that there's a bit of phenomenalism/idealism in the background of your view. Is that correct?
On your view, when we look out into the yard at the red oak, do we see a tree or our perception of the tree? I'm just curious.
Thanks. Life should calm down a little now.
Quoting creativesoul
I take things out of order, because I think this might provide a quick way to lay open bias. My point of view is very compatible (and second-hand influenced by) Husserl's phenomenology, certainly. Idealism? I don't think so. (There's the label "transcendental idealism" applied to Husserl and maybe even by Husserl? I never understood why. It doesn't strike me as idealism.)
Quoting creativesoul
I find that question confusing. You can't see a perception. "Seeing a tree" is perception. Visual perception. That involves a lot of things and includes stuff that happens quite a bit away from your body, such as light travelling from the tree to your retina. So from the light hitting the tree to our brain processing nerve signals we have a dynamic system.
I'm fine saying we see a tree, but I'm unsure we attach the same meaning to that clause. Saying we see the perception of a tree feels like a meta-level transgression. Since the terms here are... tricky and I don't need to phrase that to myself I'm not confident I can fully explain. Maybe like this? I believe there's a thing out there that becomes an object when a subject faces it. So when we both see the same tree we see the same thing but not the same object. And treeness is part of the object rather than the thing, but the thing restricts what qualities can attach to the object. Sorry if this is confusing, but I don't think there's an easy way to phrase this.
I certainly can't answer your question with a multiple-choice tick.
Quoting creativesoul
Yes, I see no issues here.
Quoting creativesoul
Ah, that's difficult. Basically, you (general you) need to have the map in your mind or there is no territory. You learn about the territory from the map, you create a map in your mind, and then you proceed to produce part of the territory. The metaphor doesn't quite apply here: The territory is as much dependent on the existance of the map, as the map is dependent on the territory. It's iterative. Chicken/Egg. A million maps converge to producing a territory which in turn modifies the maps ever so slightly...
There's no clear distinction here. Map and territory are pulped together and propagate like slime mold...
Well, we construct our own perspectives, too... from our own perspectives.
Yeah, I agree I've made quite a muddle here. When I first read that quote above I did a double take. What do you think I've been saying? I think I might be getting there.
Maybe try a grid:
Dimensions: self/other; practical/theoretical
A whole perspective is a complex thing: there's a practical underlying stream of habit/routine/conflict resolution. And there's a reflexive stream of keeping track theoretically of that.
The practical-stream perspective starts out primal, but soon gives rise to the theoretical stream, and then it's a mash-up. The sequence likely goes something like this:
practial perspective (self) encounters practical perspective (other). It's the concept of the other-with-a-perspective-like-yours that gives rise to the realisation that you yourself have a perspective, too, and so the constructing of your own theoretical perspective goes hand-in-hand with the construction of other people's perspective.
Your own perspective then is something you construct both in activity and theory, where activity from then on forward is no longer independent of the theory. The perspective you construct of others is always theoretical, and can't be practical, as you don't engage in other people's actions.
Out of this process (from multiple selves interacting) we get a layer of social institutions that's never fully present in any particular constructed perspective, but that also can't be found anywhere else.
So in terms of perspectives: It's not that you have a practical perspective and a theoretical perspective. Your perspective is complex bundle of interconnected theory and praxis. Part of the theory is about other people's perspectives. So when I try to understand you, all I can really do is posit a theoretical me-as-other. What if I were different? That's what I think understanding others amounts to.
In computing terms, your own perspective is the OS, while any other other perspective is an emulator whose purpose it is to run foreign programs. Both the OS and the emulators are regularly updated.
Understanding others is an assymptotic process: can get better, but is never complete.
Okay. Good. Our positions may not be as far apart as I thought earlier. I've no issue with any of that.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Right.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Agreed.
Quoting Dawnstorm
No worries.
I cannot see how "when we both see the same tree, we see the same thing, but not the same object" avoids self-contradiction on its face, unless the object is neither thing nor tree.
What additional work is "object" doing here? I mean how does it help explain anything more than talk of trees? It clearly is supposed to be referring to something different than the tree. What is "object" picking out of this world to the exclusion of all else? I see you've said that "treeness" is part of this "object". It seems that this notion of "treeness" - on my view - amounts to the meaningfulness that the tree has to the subject; this is akin to the matness of the mat in the earlier cat/mouse/mat example.
Would you agree that we see the same thing, the same tree, and that tree is meaningful to each of us?
The differences would be in the meaning we've attributed to the tree. <-----does that fill in this notion of "object". The object includes the meaning we've attributed to the tree, whereas the tree does not?
And yet I painstakingly set the difference out between common language and "common language". In short, the latter consists of meaningful marks, whereas the former consists of that(sometimes) and so much more(all the time).
We may be talking past one another here, on this point. It had to do with what's directly below. I may have misunderstood you.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Can you rephrase this by leaving out "common language" and substituting in it's place whatever that is talking about instead?
That's part of it. An object can't exist outside a subject-object relationship. But a thing persists when no subject is around. When we want wood from a tree, we construe the thing as object(source of wood), but it's the thing that provides the wood.
"Treeness" is more complex, since we don't come to trees naively - not knowing anything about them. And our preconceptions are always already social. So when we both see the same tree, we also already share a context of social knowledge gathering about trees. So the tree-as-object carries traces of subject-to-subject interactions about similiar objects. The tree-as-thing does not. It's the primal instigator of the object, and the subject-object interaction between me and the tree includes unreflected meaning that comes directly from the tree. It's usually overshadowed by our preconceptions and cultural usage of trees.
Quoting creativesoul
No, because it's inherently unclear what that would even be. There is no localised language-as-thing. The parts of words that are word-as-thing are limited to the sign-body (squiggles, sounds, gestures). Language-as-thing is distributed across subjects. That is why your conception of the language you're speaking is part of the language your speaking. We're perpetuating treeness, but not the tree. In contrast, we're perpetuating both languageness (in the sense that we know that sounds, squiggles, gestures constitute language) and language. We cannot face language the way we face tree. The way we face language is more akin to the socially mediated aspects of treeness than to the immediate and primal subject to thing relation. There's a doubling of the object that doesn't occur with trees.
Ah, that's not as well put as I'd like, but I'll leave it. It's my third false start. I hope something in there is... meaningful?
That's chock full of meaning. If you'll forgive my sudden poetic license; it seems that you're setting out 'layers' of the individual significance and/or meaning that things acquire over time while becoming objects to a subject. It is an interesting avenue of thought, packed full of unique avenues.
It also seems that common language plays an important role, which surprises me given how you earlier wondered how important language was when talking about the differences between language less creatures' thought/belief and our own.
I'm still pretty much thinking that most everything you've been explaining dovetails nicely into my own understanding/position regarding how things become meaningful to a creature so capable. It's the sheer quantity of correlations drawn between different things.
Are there any obvious(to you anyway, given I'm interpreting your words) misunderstandings above?
That seems just about right. I'm a little careful about this:
Quoting creativesoul
I don't deny that language plays an important role. I'm not sure, though, when we're going for species comparison, we know enough about the role to make a species distinction over it. For example, if we attribute to language a function or role that really is due to a lower-level shared-meaning process (something any social speceis might be capable of), then we could either overestimate the role language plays, or underestimate the degree to which other species are language-capable. (And to what degree is this either/or a language-induced false dichotomy? Two approaches to the same question?)
When thinking of good food, for instance, it seems as if the mere thought could cause one to feel hunger, perhaps followed by thoughts of cooking or buying food. Also pictures of good food may sometimes seem to have the power to cause hunger or thoughts of buying food... These seemingly causal relations are circumstantial, they typically arise around breakfast, lunch, or dinner. But they with sufficient exposure and repetition they can literally cause, or at least influence, feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. Like the sound of a bell influenced Pavlov's dogs, or like advertisement and PR influence populations.
Do you think that pictures (or the smell) of good food cause hunger in the same way that the thought of "If A, then B; A" causes the thought "therefore B"? That's part of what the OP is trying to get at.
I think the relation between thoughts is logical, not causal. The necessity of a conclusion that follows from a set of premises is a brute fact that does not need to be thought or caused.
But thoughts refer to things, and one can learn to use a thought like we learn to use sounds, pictures, smells etc. as symbols or signs by way of which for example conditioned responses can be evoked.
In this sense, I suppose it is possible for a thought of a set of premises to evoke a thought of its conclusion.
Yes, in one important sense: The entailment I stated above will hold, regardless of who thinks it, or if anyone does. So if we use "thought" in that sense -- as Frege does -- then it is a proposition independent of any particular mental occurrence.
But "thought" also can mean that particular mental occurrence -- your thought, or mine. This is the OP's question: whether thoughts, in that sense, are causal, or whether they require a (more or less) reductive description in terms of brain states in order to be seen as causal. Or, if they are not causal in this sense, don't we need another explanation besides logical entailment? If I think "If A, then B; A" and then think "therefore B", has entailment produced this result? Remember, we're asking now about an actual event in the world, in my brain or yours. It seems mysterious how a logical relation could do this.
Ok, thoughts in that sense are, like other conscious states, biological phenomena. On a physical level they consist of processes in synapses, neural nets etc. but on a biological level they emerge as conscious states which, unlike their constituent parts, enable the organism to interact causally with the environment, other organisms, and with itself even. You can't reduce a conscious state to its constituent physical processes, because they are not part of the things of which one is conscious of. So yes, thoughts can be causal in this sense.
Quoting J
Well the logical relation shows itself, that's about it. When you think of it you can see that its form entails "B". Perhaps one can say that the form is the passive cause for thinking "therefore B", and the thinker's ability to see and accept the entailment is an active cause for thinking "therefore B".
So I assume they can also can be causal in regard to the physical world, not just other thoughts? So this overlaps the familiar problem of how to explain mental causation in general. Do you think that your description of what happens in thought-to-thought causation also explains mental-to-physical causation? (Please don't take my questions as hostile in any way -- what you're laying out seems like an excellent path to explore.)
Quoting jkop
OK, so the logical relation doesn't play any causal role. So we have to separate "entailment", which can properly be said of propositions, from "causation", which can properly be said of thoughts (in the individual sense).
Would you agree, though, that in order to have the thought "therefore B" when I have the thought "If A, then B; A", I have to recognize or understand (not quite sure what verb to use) that the first proposition entails the second?
Quoting J
Does it matter whether the things we think of are mental or physical?
Quoting J
Well, not in an active sense. See below.
Quoting J
Yeah, I used the verb 'see', but I suppose the primary function of seeing, recognizing, understanding etc. is to 'identify' something.
By thinking of the proposition, we can identify its form, that it entails "B". The entailment "B" is not caused by the form (it is the form), however identifying it is caused in the same way a tree, for instance, causes the visual experience of the tree. Well, the form of a proposition is of course not distorted by distance or angle of view etc, but the causal relation is that of identification.
Well, it would matter in the context of what can be causal. We have a kind of intuitive sense of how one thought might lead to another, but when we ask how my thought of standing up leads to the action of doing so, it doesn't feel so intuitive. We know it happens, but actions in the physical world are supposed (by some) to depend on prior physical causes. So how do we make room for a mental cause?
But yes, I agree that the solution to one problem (thought-to-thought causation) might well be the same as the solution to the other (thought-to-action causation).
Quoting jkop
Interesting. Can we say more about what it is that causes us to identify the entailment? In the tree analogy, there is something in the non-mental world that, when constituted as an object by our methods of perception, we identify as a tree -- or, if we're too young to know the word, as a recognizable and discrete visual experience. Likewise for an entailment, we end up identifying it as such (again assuming we know the word and concept) -- but what are we starting with? What's the equivalent of the "non-mental object"?
I agree that an entailment is a form. But (not to get too Platonic) where does the form exist? How are we able to come in contact with it in the first place, in order to identify it? The question is perhaps more familiar in the context of mathematical objects. They seem to have a reality that goes well beyond subjective invention, yet they aren't in the physical world.
This is taking us into bigger questions than the OP can perhaps handle. Let's just ask: Can the premises of an entailment, when thought by me or you, be said to cause the thought of the conclusion? My simple example was maybe too simple, since we see that entailment "all at once." So imagine a more complicated one, something you have to spend a minute working out. Having done so, what should we say about that concluding thought? Did the previous deliberative thoughts cause it? Or was it "seeing the form" of the entailment that caused it? (Or neither :smile: )
To be conscious is a (more or less) continuous state in which one has a readiness for identifying the presence of things or thoughts and what they entail. So when you think of standing up, you have already been conscious for a while, perhaps identified discomfort while sitting on a chair or some other reason for standing up. That's what caused you to think the thought and act accordingly.
It's the "act accordingly" part that's hard to explain. Your account is given in terms of mental events, culminating in thinking the thought of standing up. But what happens next? Some philosophers interpose a "will" or "willing", but that just seems to add more mystery. Nonetheless, we need an explanatory bridge between "thought of standing up" and standing up. The problem is that physical science only countenances physical causes, and a thought is not physical qua content. So we seem to be reduced to saying that it's the neuronal, brain-level events accompanying* the thought that must do the causing of the action. Is that what you would say?
*I'm using "accompanying" as a more or less neutral term, since we don't really know the nature of the relation between brain and mind.
Well, also a fruit fly acts according to what it identifies, such as the presence of obstacles, danger, fruit etc (allegedly, fruit flies love oat meal). On a cellular level, ion channels open or close a cell's membrane according to the presence of specific ions. The ions are identified selectively, and the membrane is opened or closed accordingly. Now add more complexity, synapses, neural nets, and interactions with the environment we live in, and you might end up with a system that identifies chairs and tables, or memories of them, which in some sense are thoughts. The thought of standing up that results in standing up, is not more mysterious than a fruit fly's ability to identify an obstacle and fly around it.
I kind of agree. But the mystery enters when we claim that the person's thought is the cause of the movement. We don't say that about the fly, as you demonstrate: You tell a story about ions, cell membranes, et al., which is no doubt true. You don't say "The fly decides to fly toward the oatmeal." Our view about fruit flies is that they don't decide anything, as such; they "act accordingly"; they are stimulus-response machines, and if there's some sort of consciousness too, then it's along for the ride, and makes no choices. But for a person, if we say, "I didn't really choose to stand up, but rather, my various ions and synapses were the cause that produced this effect," we would be staking out a radical physicalist/behaviorist viewpoint.
Well, sure they respond to the presence of fruit and fly towards it, but they also respond to the presence of a human hand trying to chase them away, which makes them veto their first response and take a detour or stroll on the table instead. It doesn't seem so machine-like.
I have to say, it does to me. A Roomba can do this, and more.
Quoting Patterner
This again brings up the equivocation in what the word "thought" can represent -- either a proposition, or the mental/brain event whose content is that proposition. Pretty sure @jkop had the first in mind here. And yes, the whole idea of these uninstantiated propositions is problematic. All I can say is, that's the received view in most of anal. phil. A proposition is supposed to say or represent what it does, independent of any particular mental event; so we can talk about two minds thinking "the same proposition" etc. But see Kimhi and Rödl for dissenting opinions.
Quoting DifferentiatingEgg
Dunno. It's a little hard to make out what you're saying. Where do you think the illusion comes in?
"I am convinced of the phenomenalism of the inner world also: everything that reaches our consciousness is utterly and completely adjusted, simplified, schematised, interpreted, the actual process of inner "perception," the relation of causes between thoughts, feelings, desires, between subject and object, is absolutely concealed from us, and may be purely imaginary. This "inner world of appearance" is treated with precisely the same forms and procedures as the "outer" world. We never come across a single "fact": pleasure and pain are more recently evolved intellectual phenomena....
Causality evades us; to assume the existence of an immediate causal relation between thoughts, as Logic does, is the result of the coarsest and most clumsy observation. There are all sorts of passions that may intervene between two thoughts: but the interaction is too rapid—that is why we fail to recognise them, that is why we actually deny their existence....
"Thinking," as the epistemologists understand it, never takes place at all: it is an absolutely gratuitous fabrication, arrived at by selecting one element from the process and by eliminating all the rest—an artificial adjustment for the purpose of the understanding....
The "mind," something that thinks: at times, even, "the mind absolute and pure"—this concept is an evolved and second result of false introspection, which believes in "thinking": in the first place an act is imagined here which does not really occur at all, i.e. "thinking"; and, secondly, a subject-substratum is imagined in which every process of this thinking has its origin, and nothing else—that is to say, both the action and the agent are fanciful."
Consequently not Epiphenomenalism
If I put the thought [I]Kant[/I] in person A's head, their next thought is [I]Critique of Pure Reason[/I].
If I put [I]Kant[/I] in B's head, their next thought is [I]Monty Python[/I].
If I put [I]Kant[/I] in C's head, their next thought is [I]West Wing[/I].
None of the consequent thoughts, [I]Critique of Pure Reason[/I], [I]Monty Python[/I], or [I]West Wing[/I], would be thoughts of those respective people if [I]Kant[/I] had not come first. All were caused by [I]Kant[/I]. But there are obviously other factors, or all would have had the same consequent thought. Each person's consequent thought logically followed [I]Kant[/I], because each person has different memories associated with Kant.
That's [I]how[/I] one thought causes another.
I guess this comes down to asking, "What does it mean to think an entailment?" Is there a special sauce we need to add, in order to make it the thought of an entailment, rather than a succession of thoughts with personal causes, so to speak?
I really don't know what you mean by [I]entailment[/I]. I don't think there's any such thing as a "correct conclusion" where this topic is concerned. It's not a math problem. One thought causes another thought. Largely because of memories it triggers. It might also be influenced by other thoughts that are bouncing around in your mind at the same time, medical and environmental factors that are also in play at the time, and whatever other things. But A, B, and C would almost certainly not be thinking the consequent thoughts they have if I hadn't put Kant in their minds, and it is very likely they would be thinking their consequent thoughts after I put Kant in their minds, regardless of any factors other than memory.
This is profound. I've not got much else to say here - but this statement is a clear explication of exactly why an IRist cannot really understand a DR position.
I agree this is difficult. Harking back to my distinction between the two senses of "thought": Suppose we substituted the "proposition" sense of "thought" and said, "One proposition causes another proposition". Do you still think that would be true?
Prop A: "All humans are mortal."
Prop B: "Socrates is a human."
Taken merely as propositions, is there any reasonable sense in which we can say that they cause:
Prop C: "Socrates is mortal."
I don't think so. We've had to invent a new word -- entailment -- to use in order to talk about the relation of Props A and B to Prop C. The question of causation only enters, possibly, when a particular mind thinks Prop A and Prop B. That, I believe, is what you're getting at with saying "One thought causes another thought." And clearly it's contingent: If I'm simply no good at elementary logic, thinking Props A and B will not cause me to think Prop C, no matter the entailment.
If this sounds right to you, then the question would be: What is it about Props A and B that, if you do think them and understand them, causes the thought of Prop C?
In what way can a proposition be "merely" a proposition, and [I]not[/I] a thought?
Quoting JThat's true. But Props A and B will cause [I]some[/I] thought or other. Possibly "What the hell are they talking about? Who is Socrates?" That didn't spring into the person's thoughts for no reason.
This is an excellent question, and something of a thorn in the side of the traditional understanding of what a proposition is.
A prop. is supposed to be the object or content of a thought, much as a tree could be the object of a perception. The tree is there, regardless of whether anyone in particular perceives it; when you and I both perceive it, we are perceiving "the same" tree. And so with a prop.: It's supposed to be independent of any particular thought, and you and I can correctly speak of having "the same" thought when we mean "are thinking of the same proposition." (Obviously we're not having the same brain event, since our brains are separate.) There's also the implication of persistence, so the prop. remains an item in the world even if no one thinks it, just as the tree does. One important difference: Many would argue that a prop. requires a "first thought," so to speak, to bring it into existence, whereas a tree does not. Thus on this view props are mental creations, yet also weirdly independent in the way I've described. (However, the props of math are regarded by the majority of mathematicians as "already out there," requiring no "first thought," at least by a non-divine consciousness.)
Anyway . . . the more we think about this picture, the more problematic it gets. Sebastian Rödl, in Self-Consciousness and Objectivity, offers a strong critique. This passage, while a bit sarcastic, gives the idea ("p" is a proposition here):
Thus, your question, "In what way can a proposition be 'merely' a proposition, and not a thought?" is what Rödl wants to know too. If only we understood the letter p! (The subtitle of his book is "An Introduction to Absolute Idealism," which gives you a clue about how he answers it.) But for our purposes here, suppose we accepted the received view of what a prop. is. Can we then make any sense of the concept of entailment as a special kind of relation between props, but not thoughts?
I guess this is as tricky as anything else, eh? :grin:
I've never heard of this line of thinking, so I can't say further thought and discussion on it won't change my mind. But at the moment, my stance is no, there is no proposition outside of the thoughts of those entities who understand what is being discussed. If Props A and B can, or should, or will lead to C, it will only be in the thoughts of such entities. Write A and B, and all the rules and explanations of Propositions, in a book, and it will never lead to C until such an entity reads it and thinks the next step.
So Nietzsche finds a way around the grammar psychology which smuggles in metaphysics into science by changing a few valuations that are actually logical.
I wrote a little post the other day in my discord group on N's conceptualization of life:
Life is not a substance added to matter, but "a lasting configuration of force-establishing processes." It consists in contending forces growing unequally, stabilizing themselves through resistance, command, and counter-strife. Obedience and coordination are not peaceful states, but tactical relations within an ongoing competition.
The Will to Power names the inner character of energy itself. Energy is not neutral or merely mechanical; it must be understood as having direction, valuation, and drive. Every force seeks to expand its sphere, to appropriate, to incorporate, and to shape what resists it. Where incorporation succeeds, life grows; where it fails, division and disintegration follow. Complexity and differentiation are not goals but expressions of domination, of life simplifying inward while expanding outward. Even “spirit” is only an instrument in the service of higher configurations of life.
Perspectivity arises from this same structure of force. Every center of energy has its own point of view, determined by its immediate relations of attraction and repulsion. Even the inorganic world is perspectival: distant forces cancel out, while what is nearest compels action and resistance. This is why life is “egoistic” to the core, not morally, but structurally. Interpretation is not a mental act added later; it is the continuous activity of the Will to Power itself, the primary means by which forces order, value, and master one another.
Life, will, and perspective are thus not separate domains, but different expressions of the same fundamental dynamic: force interpreting force in order to reconfigure and grow.
This does away with grammar psychology causality of forcing a subject predicate agreement, a doer always doing, which then makes the sense perceptions a cause.
Here's an example of how this will on will works...
The forces that configures a rocks properties, such as weight, size, surface texture etc etc. A 75lb chunk of sharp obsidian may resist attempts at applying enough force to pick it up, especially with unprotected hands.
The rock isn't conscious, of course, just that all energy, kinetic or stored, has the inner character of "will to power."