If reality is within us, and reality and interpretation are different aspects of reality, then reality and interpretation are within us, and yet others are a part of reality, and yet others are not within us...
Cannot make sense of any of it.
Making use of "some", "all", "not all", would go a long way...
timw:That is a tree." What does "that" refer to? Do you begin to see the difficulty? If it's another interpretation, then you never escape from an endless chain of interpretation. On the other hand, if there is something about the tree that is not merely interpreted by you, then you have a grasp of reality not interpreted.
It is interpretation all the way down. But also, part of what we then experience is the recalcitrant nature of our experiences. So every time we open our eyes, the tree is still there. That is extra information we can interpret - especially if we happen to wake up and realise we were dreaming. Reality becomes defined by having the particular further property of seeming to be unquestionable.
Another commonsense point is that interpretation also bottoms out of its own accord. Eventually we lose interest as we feel that further inquiry doesn't matter. That tree could be a fake, a phantom, something other than what it presents. But if it is just part of the scenery, we weren't planning to turn it into a boat or throw it on the fire, then who cares?
So while we might never know the world in some direct and complete sense, it doesn't matter. Our habits of interpretation only need to be good enough for the purposes we have. Our lack of real concern about the nature of reality will take over long before we get that far down a chain of increasingly refined interpretance.
The answer is: both given, and interpreted. it's not one or the other. We're embedded in a 'web of meaning' which we can't be extricated from as it is an aspect of thought and speech. But I don't buy solipsism or the idea that the world is 'all in the mind'.
What I would say is that reality is irreducibly subjective - that the subject of experience is a pole or aspect of anything whatever we can say exists. But this subject is never fully disclosed for the obvious reason that it's never an object of experience; it is the unknown knower, the unseen seer, the un-experienced experiencer, to paraphrase the Upanisad. (I also think this is the subject of Descartes' 'cogito', although I don't agree with the way he developed the idea.)
But this doesn't deny the efficacy of science. Science after all rests on observation, measurement and prediction. As Galileo emphasised, the mathematical attributes of nature were uniform and the same for all observers - well, until relativity came along, although Galileo's method still holds good across an enormous range of phenomena ('medium-sized dry goods' was how my professor of metaphysics of matter described it.)
We live immersed in language and thought, there is no path to the great outdoors.
Interpretations are not all equal. Some are more probability than others. All we can know is what we as a species agree can be known or knowable, and what is known or knowable is in terms of probabilities, not absolutes. The noumenal can't be known., some say it can't even be thought..
There is something out there. We are entangled within it, just as TV set is entangled within TV transmissions.
Our minds reveal what is out there, as a holographic reconstruction wave reveals a light pattern which becomes memory. Our life is constructed out of memory. The memory is described by by us and others via discourse and education, and we agree to give it a name. Do we all see exactly the same thing? No. Everyone perceives something different (but close enough in most cases) because the reconstructive wave is different and memories are different, but via new perception and new discourse those memories evolve and via acts of will new things out there evolve.
There is something real, there are memories (interpretations) being formed, there is a constant evolution occurring, and yes, new creations are being formed all of the time out there in memory field of the universe.
You have to begin by dropping the ideas that the brain is some sort of computer that is magically coming up with all of this stuff and you have to drop the idea that it is all emerging from the brain. If you don't, you'll be perpetually asking the same questions. This is precisely the process of understanding that I went through. The scientific explanation leads you down a dead end path.
One has to begin by looking at life as one holistic, entangled process with mind as a creative, learning force.
...and have no access to anything but interpretation...
My point is that you in fact have access to two things - your general theory and your particular acts of measurement. So this allows for a process of triangulation.
You have this general idea that there is a reality out there, of which a tree is one of its material objects. Such a theory of your experience then has natural consequences that can be deduced and tested. Real objects should endure in our experience even if we might wish their facts to be otherwise. And so I can test this theory about the reality of the tree by trying to walk through it, or whatever. The extent to which my beliefs are unchanged as the result of such actions rightfully goes to the certainty of my original interpretation. I have evidence of an internal model consistency even if I don't have direct experience of the world.
I dare say the question about the reality of the objects of the senses is an artificial latecomer. There is really no sense in which it can be definitively answered, which rather seems to make asking it a waste of time and energy.
Our brains are locked up in our skull; there is no way for the brain to directly access anything outside the skull, except chemical signals that are delivered by blood from elsewhere in the body. There are the senses, nerves plugged into the brain. But the senses are limited to picking up vibrations of various kinds, which gets interpreted by the brain. The nerves in the fingers don't actually touch the tree -- they come very close, but not quite.
Maybe the closest we come to direct experience is smell. Open a bottle of carbon tetrachloride and the chemical is up one's nose and into the brain, or so it seems. Smell enough carbon tetrachloride and the stuff will be in your brain, doing you no good.
If this is reality, and it seems to be, then it is appalling that we never actually come in contact with reality. I mean, reality just seems so real... And it's all a construction (but not a one-off construction -- the brain revises the construction all the time.)
We (our brains) are always at least 2 steps away from reality. (Vibration stimulates nerve impulse transmissions to the brain, and then the brain interprets the impulses.) Mustn't forget proprioception -- it's an import sense too, telling the brain how the body is positioned with respect to constructed objects.
I definitely don't like this, but I don't see any way around it.
Our brains are locked up in our skull; there is no way for the brain to directly access anything outside the skull, except chemical signals that are delivered by blood from elsewhere in the body.
It seems odd to think of the body as being discontinuous, separate, from the environment. You seem to be thinking of "direct access" in terms of some kind of 'prime-itive' intuition of it as being analogical to touching objects with the skin.
And it's all a construction (but not a one-off construction -- the brain revises the construction all the time.)
I don't think of "reality" as being constructed by the brain, I don't think of it as "construction" at all, but as a collaboration involving the environment and the body (the brain being merely a part of the latter). The collaboration is ever changing, just as the environment and the body are constantly changing.
If you brought up a group of infants to always wear a virtual reality headset, I wonder how they would understand reality. (There might be a Mary's room question lurking in here: what happens when little Ocula and Oculus first have the headset removed?)
I don't think of "reality" as being constructed by the brain, I don't think of it as "construction" at all, but as a collaboration involving the environment and the body (the brain being merely a part of the latter). The collaboration is ever changing, just as the environment and the body are constantly changing.
Agreed. Duration that we live in it's a process, and in this process we are constantly interacting with all that is around us and in this process creating memories which are equally fluid. Memories define who we are and are the source of future actions/choices.
It is an ongoing process. This is the real time that we experience and call it life.
It seems odd to think of the body as being discontinuous, separate, from the environment. You seem to be thinking of "direct access" in terms of some kind of 'prime-itive' intuition of it as being analogical to touching objects with the skin.
A body IS part of the environment, quite right, and visa versa. But, the activity of the brain which we are talking about is not part of the environment, which is why we are having this discussion. If the energetic physical world were directly accessible to the brain we wouldn't talk about a representation of the real world.
Some parts of the brain are in contact with the real world -- smoke some weed, drink a gin and tonic, eat a piece of cake -- and the THC, alcohol, and sugar end up in neurons. On the other hand, some parts of the environment don't end up in the brain. One of the problems of medicine is that some drugs don't cross the blood-brain barrier. The anti-vital medicines for HIV can't cross the B-B barrier.
I don't think of "reality" as being constructed by the brain, I don't think of it as "construction" at all, but as a collaboration involving the environment and the body (the brain being merely a part of the latter). The collaboration is ever changing, just as the environment and the body are constantly changing.
The brain collaborates with the body (of which it is a part) to interact with other brains, bodies, and the energetic physical environment around us. But it doesn't seem that brain can have direct access to the reality of other bodies, warmth, cold, soil, rivers, etc. Of course, the CNS and the brain (and the body) are all one. But the interpretive function of the brain -- the making sense of everything -- is inside the skull. From infancy forward, it has to take the heavy flow of meaningless data and make it meaningful. Why does it do that? Because evolution primed brains to do that. It has to 'construct' a consistent reality into which information fits.
And it does fit -- 999 times out of a thousand. Fairly often we come across information that doesn't fit (optical illusions for instance, or a cow walking down Madison Avenue in New York) and we stop and stare at it. "What is a holstein doing here!" we exclaim, seeing it's wide black and white body cow-walking along.
I believe that the reality "out there" matches (more or less) the reality my brain, your brain, everybody's brain, has constructed. I believe it because the body's interaction with the environment is very consistent. I sincerely hope my faith in reality is well founded. IF not -- well, let's not even go there.
Well, on your account these are realities - which you have ruled out. In particular, you (apparently) think they persist across time, but what makes you think so?
Again, I've ruled reality in by making it a testable belief. The recalcitrant nature of some of my experience is the evidence supporting that interpretation. And by the same token, the existence of "my self" as the perceiver/experiencer/interpreter arises as that part of experience which is other to this "real world".
So I am speaking as a pragmatist and not an idealist. The practical psychological and epistemic question I am answering is how we can rightfully put limits on doubt and so have grounds to believe.
My point here is simply that to insist there's no access to reality is to be entangled with a set of arcane presuppositions that predate Kant.
I'd like to sharpen this a bit: my position is that there is a reality that we perceive, that grounds our perception, such that we can know the reality and make true statements about it.
The big question is how the mind - as a model of reality - can have access to reality. And the answer is indirectly.
Your position seems to be that somewhere along the line, there needs to be actual direct contact with something. So it can't be interpretation all the way down. Knowledge has to be founded on actual nakedly apprehended fact.
Hence you have adopted the position of insisting that look closely enough and we will find ourselves able to see those elements of reality upon which a whole edifice of subsequent interpretation then depends.
Yet psychological science has put awareness under the microscope like this and shown that it can't be the case. The modelling of reality only kicks in once an epistemic cut (cf: Howard Pattee) has formed to allow the translation (or interpretation) of physical energies into informational inputs.
There cannot be a model of the world until there is a definite epistemic separation from the world being modelled. So the indirectness is built in as the necessary starting point of perception and cognition. The mind arises where the world is no longer in control of activity by the directness of its physical energies. Instead, the mind - as a modelling relation - is able to start to choose how it reads those physical energies as the sign of something. The sign of a "reality" as usefully conceived.
Psychological science tells us this. Red and green are vivid signals - understood as the very opposite of each other - yet the wavelengths they represent are fractionally different in energy. Sounds are only air pressure variations, but we hear noise. Molecules are shapes that can chemically bind, yet we smell an odour.
Every time we look at sensory processes, there is a translation of physical energies into meaningful signals by a framework of interpretance. And what we experience is nothing like how - as now discovered through scientific models - we imagine the real world to physically be.
So sensation itself is as indirect as everything that follows. The foundation of awareness is in fact the trick of disconnection that allows a process of world-modelling mediated by its own system of signs.
Your position looks to depend on some "proper connection" between our signs of reality and reality as the thing in itself. Somehow, we must read reality directly down there at the foundational level. Our signs, our bits of information, must be "true" and not merely learnt and developed convention - habits of interpretance.
Again, my pragmatic modelling relations approach - which is simple psychological science - makes the point that modelling can't even start unless there is a cut off imposed on the real physical energy of the world. The only way mind can arise is by shutting out the world so it can form its own regulated system of sign which permits it to insert its own self-interested point of view into the energetic flows of that reality.
As usual, what you look to be making out to be a bug is the feature. We can only be in control of reality to the extent we have constrained it as a habit of interpretation. What is foundational is the epistemic cut that puts us on the informational side of a modelling relationship with a "real" flux of material dynamics or physical energies.
But the interpretive function of the brain -- the making sense of everything -- is inside the skull.
I think this is highly questionable. I'm not convinced the notion of interpretation being in the brain even makes sense. There may be neuronal activities in the brain that are correlated with interpretative activities, but I don't see how those activities can be artificially cordoned off, so to speak, from the activities (cellular, muscular, electrochemical, and so on) of the whole body, nor how the activities of the whole body can coherently be separated from the energetic environmental processes that they are responses to. Sure these "cordoning-offs" and "separations" are fine for conceptual modeling purposes, but I doubt they have any real provenance beyond that.
Well. Kant took a shot at it. Maybe he's why you can write a phrase like "objects of the senses" and think you understand it.
Kant did have a shot at it, and I have studied Kant quite a bit. Kant was not the first to notice that we know objects via the senses, so I'm not sure what you are driving at with that comment.
My point here is simply that to insist there's no access to reality is to be entangled with a set of arcane presuppositions that predate Kant.
The only philosophers I can think of that you might be referring to here are Leibniz and Wolff. And I haven't claimed that "there's no access to reality". I would want to claim precisely the opposite; that there is no access to anything else, and that the very idea that there could be is incoherent.
On your account, your and my agreement as to a tree is simply a coinciding of interpretations and nothing more (and how would we know?!). My position is that your account is an incomplete account, and at the least fails to account for the tree or how we can agree?
That's not in accordance with my account at all. Our agreement about the tree is on account of the characteristics of the tree and the similar structures of our human senses. The question that cannot be answered is the one as to the ultimate metaphysical status of the tree, which is really the same as the question as to what are the absolute conditions that give rise to human experience of a world of discernible objects. I think such questions are fine insofar as they focus us on the realization that we are the center of a profound mystery, but are fool's errands if we deceive ourselves into thinking they can ever be definitively answered. It is precisely on account of the fact that they can never be answered that life has any value at all.
Agreed. Duration that we live in it's a process, and in this process we are constantly interacting with all that is around us and in this process creating memories which are equally fluid. Memories define who we are and are the source of future actions/choices.
It is an ongoing process. This is the real time that we experience and call it life.
I agree with this except perhaps that the idea that "memories define who we are and are the source of future actions/ choices". I think this is certainly true in part, but I don't believe it can be the whole story. I think we are also influenced by what we don't remember, and were perhaps never even aware of.
I'm not convinced the notion of interpretation being in the brain even makes sense. There may be neuronal activities in the brain that are correlated with interpretative activities, but I don't see how those activities can be artificially cordoned off, so to speak, from the activities (cellular, muscular, electrochemical, and so on) of the whole body
If interpretation doesn't go on in the brain, pray tell, where does it go on?
I'm not suggesting any sort of mind/body dualism. The brain is part of the body and they are coordinated through the CNS and blood stream. What comes and goes through the CNS are very specifically channeled, and what comes and goes through the blood are diffused. But, as it happens, the brain is in charge. Not breathing enough? Feeling too hot or too cold? Fall asleep at the table? Wake up too early? Not sweating enough? Hungry? Scared spitless by a big snake? Avoiding spiders? Chatting up the UPS driver? Screwing your brains out? Addicted to cigarettes? Write great poetry? Doing groundbreaking research into String Theory? All that stuff, from not breathing enough to String Theory is all BRAIN.
nor how the activities of the whole body can coherently be separated from the energetic environmental processes that they are responses to.
I don't know about you, but I seem to exist pretty much inside my skin. Not that the buzzing, blooming world doesn't impinge on me all the time, but I am enough me and not everything else to notice when I am getting rained on, getting burned by the sun, froze, and everything else.
I think bodies are cordoned off from everything else, whether the body be a tree, a squirrel, a carp, or a human. The wind is very general, but trees are very specific. The environment is very general, but you and I are very specific.
I think this is certainly true in part, but I don't believe it can be the whole story. I think we are also influenced by what we don't remember, and were perhaps never even aware of.
In the context I am using memory, I am referring to all memory including that which is recalled and that which might be have been perceived at one time and may be recalled in the order may not. There is also cellular memory in our bodies as well as memory of the 10s of millions of microbes. But since it is all life then it is all memory. Much of memory reveals itself as habit.
The fabric of this memory I've talked about in other threads.
"A deeper understanding of this mass of neural tissue, filled with important neurotransmitters, is revealing that it does much more than merely handle digestion or inflict the occasional nervous pang. The little brain in our innards, in connection with the big one in our skulls, partly determines our mental state and plays key roles in certain diseases throughout the body."
Reply to Rich I am familiar with the enteric nervous system, or brain in the belly. Familiar with the concept, not the details. Yes, it plays a large role in our lives, like the upstairs brain does. My guess is that the enteric nervous system is a survival of the tubular organization of creatures, sponges on up. Something has to look after all that stuff going on in there. The upstairs brain has it's own evolutionary history -- the gut brain isn't an offspring of the head brain, or visa versa. My guess.
Reply to Bitter Crank I'm all over. Everything is learning and everything is evolving. Lots of this I experience while developing skills in the arts and sports as well as my own health practices. It's all about body memory and intelligence.
Reply to Bitter Crank
Whoops, I forgot. You are just a Bitter Crank. Sorry. Do you suppose every one just spends their life being a Bitter Crank? I spent my life learning about what I (all of me) can do.
You can "rule" whatever you want, in any way you want, so what? Or why should anyone pay any attention? Ruling doesn't make something so.
Are you that hard of understanding? It is the way I've ruled reality in that I'm defending. So yes, you could rule it in "any old way" and so what. But I am talking about a particular way. And you need to focus your response on that.
What have you got against the something, that I'm calling reality?
That you are calling it reality is the point. Others (idealists) would call it experience. I am arguing the third epistemic position of pragmatism which steps back to speak explicitly of a modelling relation.
One of the critical points that emerges from pragmatism is the realisation that it is a useful thing - not a problem - that the reality of our experience is never the thing in itself. That is why a model works - by not being the thing itself.
But so far you have shown a tin ear to these epistemology 101 points.
The point between us is simply, and irreducibly, that I say there's something that corresponds to the tree, and you say there is not. If this isn't your position. maybe best to clarify here.
That is, reality, yes or no.
Why would I go in for your idiotic simplicities? You don't even seem to realise that you just talked about a correspondence relationship between an abstraction - this Platonic tree that is the "real exemplar" - and some discriminative act, the forming of a sensory impression guided by such a remembered notion.
So you are telling me you have a general idea of a tree, a particular image of a tree, and that there is also a "real tree". But you are failing to tell me how you know about this "real tree" apart from there being your experience of some idea-conforming state of impression.
As I quite reasonably point out, this ain't a problem when such a belief is understood to rely on particular characteristics of the said experience - such as its recalcitrant nature. But still, your beliefs about a tree are not the same as some imagined unemboddied God's eye view of existence. To the degree that you assert naive realism, you will always be wrong.
Reply to Rich Since we're talking about reality here, a reminder is apropos that "handles" (Rich, Schopenhauer1, Bitter Crank, etc.) are just placeholders representing an account, and have no revealing connection to the person behind the account.
Actually, I'm not bitter and not a crank (well, you can call me one if you want). I hope no one spends their lives being a bitter crank, or bitter anything else. Hey, I'm all for maximizing self-realization and lifelong learning.
The topic at hand has been chewed over inconclusively for a long time, so if you find that there is no common agreement, well...
You brought up the enteric brain. Maybe the state of one's digestion sways the cerebral conclusion. Maybe it's the micro biome in the gut that determines how one looks at the relationship between brain/body/environment. Who knows what politics the fungi and bacteria down there struggle with.
What does "ultimate metaphysical status of the tree" mean? If you mean that there is something that corresponds to the tree and grounds our perceptions and knowledge of it, then we agree. If you mean that all that we can know about the tree is both conditioned and limited by our senses and whatever tests we can perform on the tree whether directly or indirectly, then we agree. If, however, you will not or cannot go so far as to affirm the reality of the tree - that it or whatever it is that corresponds to our perception of it is real - and thus argue that it is not the case that the tree is real and eo ipso there is no reality, then we do not agree at all.
I do think that the tree is real, and that what we know about it is conditioned by what we are and what it is. When the question 'what is the tree, ultimately (metaphysically) speaking' is asked, we have reached the limits of language, because 'what it is' means only in regard to what is experienced. So, there is nothing determinate beyond our experience, but the Real is not exhausted by our experience.
If interpretation doesn't go on in the brain, pray tell, where does it go on?
As I said already, I think it makes sense to speak of postulated brain activities being correlated with what we call, and experience as, interpreting (or interpretating?). Do we experience interpreting as going on in the brain? Perhaps in the head? Our hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting and speaking are all experienced as functions of the face and head.
If you close your eyes and feel something with your hand; where do you experience the act of interpreting what it is that you are feeling. If you lie with your sexual partner and feel their entire body against yours where do you experience the feelings and the interpretations of the feelings associated with that? You don't even know, experientially and experimentally speaking that you even have a brain, unless you cut your head open and take a look.
Reply to Janus Yes, I've read Sheldrake together with Bergson (Sheldrake's inspiration), Bohm, and Stephen Robbins. All have very interesting insights.
I would still say the tree is determinate only in the sense that we can share our experiences of it.
I can say to you, for example: " look at the way the third branch from the ground curves up like a sickle" and you know exactly what I mean.
And we can measure and agree upon the arc of that curve. that is the kind of thing determination is; not anything purportedly "beyond experience", as far as I can see. i can't see how the idea of determination could have any sense outside the context of human experience.
i can't see how the idea of determination could have any sense outside the context of human experience.
This compounded by all the evidence that whatever is real and out there is continuously changing in some manner. Thus there is never a "state" but rather a form in flux that the mind can name and compare with other minds, and in doing so can agree on a name.
The analogy would be a hologram which is a unrecognizable wave form until a reconstructive wave is used to reveal some recognizable form (a tree). At this point, different minds will perceive it differently depending upon point of view. No two POVs (subjective memory) will be the same and none will have any resemblance to the source hologram wave structure but the POVs are approximately the same so that agreement can be formed and discussed.
The brain reconstructs but does not store. The mind transforms. Memory is formed in the field along with everything else and can also be reconstructed (recalled) but as with everything else, is such subject to change.
This compounded by all the evidence that whatever is real and out there is continuously changing in some manner. Thus there is never a "state" but rather a form in flux that the mind can name and compare with other minds, and in doing so can agree on a name.
If the mind could see the flux, it's doubtful it could consistently identify it, which seems necessary for survival. There is therefore not a premium placed on those intellects that can accurately observe reality in its most accurate form, but upon those intellects that can use the information they receive to increase their likelihood of survival. If I see the apple as a rigid, defined object and not as a swirling whirlwind of indistinguishable matter, I am better suited for the world. My point being: (1) I agree with you that reality as we observe it is reducible to what we can agree upon, and (2) there is no reason to believe that the data we have in our heads offers an accurate depiction of the world.
Reply to Hanover I am basically in agreement with you except for the emphasis on survival. While it is one aspect of the human experience, it is there to support the mind's continuous experimentation and learn learning process - or evolution. Evolution is thus not a by-product of survival but rather survival becomes one aspect of continuous evolution.
Pretty shitty though when all you see is apples when apples disappear, as they definitely will. Specialization brings dependency, and although the specialist will always be better adapted to any specific circumstance, and dominate the circumstance they become adapted to, the plastic one will in the long run be the one undefeated by changing circumstances, and less harmed by the flux.
Specialization is always a death sentence, and those specialist traits that allowed for the domination in that particular circumstance or environment will die with the environment, and be weeded out in the long run. Plasticity is the ground of evolution though, and is precisely what allows for survival, and the transcending of particular circumstances and environments in the first place.
There is much you can do to become happy and well adjusted to the times, but adversity will hit you harder, and the more you specialize, the faster you'll become obsolete.
There is much you can do to become happy and well adjusted to the times, but adversity will hit you harder, and the more you specialize, the faster you'll become obsolete.
The less you adapt, the faster you will become obsolete. If I specialize in finding apples and that leads to me becoming stronger, faster, meaner, and tougher, my ilk and I will outcompete and destroy all you generalists who are able to find the occasional apple, the occasional orange, and so forth. Then one day all the apples run out and those fuckers who had figured out how to also specialize in finding kiwis will begin to dominate. Their sun will rise and mine will set and the eternal cycle will continue.
It is true that occasionally a man so dominate, so complete, so able in accomplishing all tasks will come along. Such a man will see so many risings and fallings of the sun and will never so much as catch the slightest scent of defeat. Yep, I think you know who I'm talking about.
I don't think that you quite grasp the concept... it isn't that one diversifies against a few different particular options, it's that one is willing to try new and different things all the time. Take risks, be stupid, and risk failure.
That is the great thing about fluid intelligence. It's general. People like to say that everyone is good at something, no one is good at everything, but this isn't actually so. Only in practice are people better at this or that than someone with a higher fluid intelligence, as they put overwhelmingly more time into it, but all things being equal, the one with the fluid intelligence is better at everything, as they would improve more quickly, learn it faster, find easier ways to do it.
Only in practice are people better at this or that than someone with a higher fluid intelligence, as they put overwhelmingly more time into it, but all things being equal, the one with the fluid intelligence is better at everything, as they would improve more quickly, learn it faster, find easier ways to do it.
You're just saying the smarter guy is always going to prevail. Given two people, one with a highly refined skill set and the other who's just really bright and able to work on the fly and figure things out as he goes, it will be the second who is far safer from obsolescence. I'd just say that if truly "all things being equal" regarding everything, including intelligence, it will be the person who works hardest and specializes who will prevail. That is, if we both have the same fluid intelligence, I'm going to outperform you because you're lazy. But, yeah, if I'm a dumb ass who works real hard and you're a lazy wiz kid, I'll probably lose every time to you and be really pissed off at the unfairness of it all, so I'll take your lunch money and slam your head into the locker.
Conscientiousness is the second greatest trait indicator of success behind intelligence, being about half as effective. Life genuinely is unfair, as I would have to work significantly less in order to attain the same goal. I also won't waste my time on goals that don't matter, or avenues that won't work.
Fluid intelligence is highly related to physicality, as it begins to rapidly decay in your twenties, unless you maintain a good physical discipline. I began half-assed and half-brained, and have climbed myself out, through hard work, because the world actually is just, and being a fantastic human being brings all of the spiritual rewards, and my super-human intelligence. So now I compete with the half-assed, half-brained, and attain great unbinding, awakening, balance, and da center more and more each day. Rather than losing it, I'm aging in reverse. Nothing is denied to me, whereas I'm like staring directly into the abyss itself, so is my depth.
Every time I feel depressed, I just move really fast, as confidence and movement speed are directly correlated.
Anyway, I win. Richer in cultural and spiritual capital, and grasp the highest level concepts humanity has to offer me. I'm sure you have a spiral stair case or something though.
If I see the apple as a rigid, defined object and not as a swirling whirlwind of indistinguishable matter, I am better suited for the world. My point being: (1) I agree with you that reality as we observe it is reducible to what we can agree upon, and (2) there is no reason to believe that the data we have in our heads offers an accurate depiction of the world.
This is the way to look at it. It is the rational argument as to why our experience of reality would be functionally limited, not the thing in itself.
And also that very way of looking at it says there has to be a reality for us to be having our pragmatically simplified view. So it is an argument for indirect realism and not solipsistic idealism.
Another way to phrase it is that we are attempting to look through the flux - the blooming, buzzing, confusion - to see the Platonic forms. The tree, the apple, the whatever substantial entity we claim to apprehend, is ourselves viewing our ideas having managed to filter away all the clutter and detail that seems to stand in the way of a sharp act of object recognition.
So we can apprehend the buzzing confusion. But always we are striving to go beyond the unexamined reality of a sensory flux to arrive in a modelled realm of just us and our Platonically sharp objects of perception.
Reply to Wosret I'd agree with all you say regarding your superiority but for your sunken beady myopic eyes, capable of seeing nothing but the twisted florescent prisms through your burnt retinas.
Comments (54)
Cannot make sense of any of it.
Making use of "some", "all", "not all", would go a long way...
It is interpretation all the way down. But also, part of what we then experience is the recalcitrant nature of our experiences. So every time we open our eyes, the tree is still there. That is extra information we can interpret - especially if we happen to wake up and realise we were dreaming. Reality becomes defined by having the particular further property of seeming to be unquestionable.
Another commonsense point is that interpretation also bottoms out of its own accord. Eventually we lose interest as we feel that further inquiry doesn't matter. That tree could be a fake, a phantom, something other than what it presents. But if it is just part of the scenery, we weren't planning to turn it into a boat or throw it on the fire, then who cares?
So while we might never know the world in some direct and complete sense, it doesn't matter. Our habits of interpretation only need to be good enough for the purposes we have. Our lack of real concern about the nature of reality will take over long before we get that far down a chain of increasingly refined interpretance.
What I would say is that reality is irreducibly subjective - that the subject of experience is a pole or aspect of anything whatever we can say exists. But this subject is never fully disclosed for the obvious reason that it's never an object of experience; it is the unknown knower, the unseen seer, the un-experienced experiencer, to paraphrase the Upanisad. (I also think this is the subject of Descartes' 'cogito', although I don't agree with the way he developed the idea.)
But this doesn't deny the efficacy of science. Science after all rests on observation, measurement and prediction. As Galileo emphasised, the mathematical attributes of nature were uniform and the same for all observers - well, until relativity came along, although Galileo's method still holds good across an enormous range of phenomena ('medium-sized dry goods' was how my professor of metaphysics of matter described it.)
We can't
Therefore, reality isn't all intrepretation
Interpretations are not all equal. Some are more probability than others. All we can know is what we as a species agree can be known or knowable, and what is known or knowable is in terms of probabilities, not absolutes. The noumenal can't be known., some say it can't even be thought..
Our minds reveal what is out there, as a holographic reconstruction wave reveals a light pattern which becomes memory. Our life is constructed out of memory. The memory is described by by us and others via discourse and education, and we agree to give it a name. Do we all see exactly the same thing? No. Everyone perceives something different (but close enough in most cases) because the reconstructive wave is different and memories are different, but via new perception and new discourse those memories evolve and via acts of will new things out there evolve.
There is something real, there are memories (interpretations) being formed, there is a constant evolution occurring, and yes, new creations are being formed all of the time out there in memory field of the universe.
You have to begin by dropping the ideas that the brain is some sort of computer that is magically coming up with all of this stuff and you have to drop the idea that it is all emerging from the brain. If you don't, you'll be perpetually asking the same questions. This is precisely the process of understanding that I went through. The scientific explanation leads you down a dead end path.
One has to begin by looking at life as one holistic, entangled process with mind as a creative, learning force.
My point is that you in fact have access to two things - your general theory and your particular acts of measurement. So this allows for a process of triangulation.
You have this general idea that there is a reality out there, of which a tree is one of its material objects. Such a theory of your experience then has natural consequences that can be deduced and tested. Real objects should endure in our experience even if we might wish their facts to be otherwise. And so I can test this theory about the reality of the tree by trying to walk through it, or whatever. The extent to which my beliefs are unchanged as the result of such actions rightfully goes to the certainty of my original interpretation. I have evidence of an internal model consistency even if I don't have direct experience of the world.
I dare say the question about the reality of the objects of the senses is an artificial latecomer. There is really no sense in which it can be definitively answered, which rather seems to make asking it a waste of time and energy.
Maybe the closest we come to direct experience is smell. Open a bottle of carbon tetrachloride and the chemical is up one's nose and into the brain, or so it seems. Smell enough carbon tetrachloride and the stuff will be in your brain, doing you no good.
If this is reality, and it seems to be, then it is appalling that we never actually come in contact with reality. I mean, reality just seems so real... And it's all a construction (but not a one-off construction -- the brain revises the construction all the time.)
We (our brains) are always at least 2 steps away from reality. (Vibration stimulates nerve impulse transmissions to the brain, and then the brain interprets the impulses.) Mustn't forget proprioception -- it's an import sense too, telling the brain how the body is positioned with respect to constructed objects.
I definitely don't like this, but I don't see any way around it.
It seems odd to think of the body as being discontinuous, separate, from the environment. You seem to be thinking of "direct access" in terms of some kind of 'prime-itive' intuition of it as being analogical to touching objects with the skin.
Quoting Bitter Crank
I don't think of "reality" as being constructed by the brain, I don't think of it as "construction" at all, but as a collaboration involving the environment and the body (the brain being merely a part of the latter). The collaboration is ever changing, just as the environment and the body are constantly changing.
If you brought up a group of infants to always wear a virtual reality headset, I wonder how they would understand reality. (There might be a Mary's room question lurking in here: what happens when little Ocula and Oculus first have the headset removed?)
Agreed. Duration that we live in it's a process, and in this process we are constantly interacting with all that is around us and in this process creating memories which are equally fluid. Memories define who we are and are the source of future actions/choices.
It is an ongoing process. This is the real time that we experience and call it life.
A body IS part of the environment, quite right, and visa versa. But, the activity of the brain which we are talking about is not part of the environment, which is why we are having this discussion. If the energetic physical world were directly accessible to the brain we wouldn't talk about a representation of the real world.
Some parts of the brain are in contact with the real world -- smoke some weed, drink a gin and tonic, eat a piece of cake -- and the THC, alcohol, and sugar end up in neurons. On the other hand, some parts of the environment don't end up in the brain. One of the problems of medicine is that some drugs don't cross the blood-brain barrier. The anti-vital medicines for HIV can't cross the B-B barrier.
Quoting Janus
The brain collaborates with the body (of which it is a part) to interact with other brains, bodies, and the energetic physical environment around us. But it doesn't seem that brain can have direct access to the reality of other bodies, warmth, cold, soil, rivers, etc. Of course, the CNS and the brain (and the body) are all one. But the interpretive function of the brain -- the making sense of everything -- is inside the skull. From infancy forward, it has to take the heavy flow of meaningless data and make it meaningful. Why does it do that? Because evolution primed brains to do that. It has to 'construct' a consistent reality into which information fits.
And it does fit -- 999 times out of a thousand. Fairly often we come across information that doesn't fit (optical illusions for instance, or a cow walking down Madison Avenue in New York) and we stop and stare at it. "What is a holstein doing here!" we exclaim, seeing it's wide black and white body cow-walking along.
I believe that the reality "out there" matches (more or less) the reality my brain, your brain, everybody's brain, has constructed. I believe it because the body's interaction with the environment is very consistent. I sincerely hope my faith in reality is well founded. IF not -- well, let's not even go there.
Again, I've ruled reality in by making it a testable belief. The recalcitrant nature of some of my experience is the evidence supporting that interpretation. And by the same token, the existence of "my self" as the perceiver/experiencer/interpreter arises as that part of experience which is other to this "real world".
So I am speaking as a pragmatist and not an idealist. The practical psychological and epistemic question I am answering is how we can rightfully put limits on doubt and so have grounds to believe.
Quoting tim wood
The big question is how the mind - as a model of reality - can have access to reality. And the answer is indirectly.
Your position seems to be that somewhere along the line, there needs to be actual direct contact with something. So it can't be interpretation all the way down. Knowledge has to be founded on actual nakedly apprehended fact.
Hence you have adopted the position of insisting that look closely enough and we will find ourselves able to see those elements of reality upon which a whole edifice of subsequent interpretation then depends.
Yet psychological science has put awareness under the microscope like this and shown that it can't be the case. The modelling of reality only kicks in once an epistemic cut (cf: Howard Pattee) has formed to allow the translation (or interpretation) of physical energies into informational inputs.
There cannot be a model of the world until there is a definite epistemic separation from the world being modelled. So the indirectness is built in as the necessary starting point of perception and cognition. The mind arises where the world is no longer in control of activity by the directness of its physical energies. Instead, the mind - as a modelling relation - is able to start to choose how it reads those physical energies as the sign of something. The sign of a "reality" as usefully conceived.
Psychological science tells us this. Red and green are vivid signals - understood as the very opposite of each other - yet the wavelengths they represent are fractionally different in energy. Sounds are only air pressure variations, but we hear noise. Molecules are shapes that can chemically bind, yet we smell an odour.
Every time we look at sensory processes, there is a translation of physical energies into meaningful signals by a framework of interpretance. And what we experience is nothing like how - as now discovered through scientific models - we imagine the real world to physically be.
So sensation itself is as indirect as everything that follows. The foundation of awareness is in fact the trick of disconnection that allows a process of world-modelling mediated by its own system of signs.
Your position looks to depend on some "proper connection" between our signs of reality and reality as the thing in itself. Somehow, we must read reality directly down there at the foundational level. Our signs, our bits of information, must be "true" and not merely learnt and developed convention - habits of interpretance.
Again, my pragmatic modelling relations approach - which is simple psychological science - makes the point that modelling can't even start unless there is a cut off imposed on the real physical energy of the world. The only way mind can arise is by shutting out the world so it can form its own regulated system of sign which permits it to insert its own self-interested point of view into the energetic flows of that reality.
As usual, what you look to be making out to be a bug is the feature. We can only be in control of reality to the extent we have constrained it as a habit of interpretation. What is foundational is the epistemic cut that puts us on the informational side of a modelling relationship with a "real" flux of material dynamics or physical energies.
I think this is highly questionable. I'm not convinced the notion of interpretation being in the brain even makes sense. There may be neuronal activities in the brain that are correlated with interpretative activities, but I don't see how those activities can be artificially cordoned off, so to speak, from the activities (cellular, muscular, electrochemical, and so on) of the whole body, nor how the activities of the whole body can coherently be separated from the energetic environmental processes that they are responses to. Sure these "cordoning-offs" and "separations" are fine for conceptual modeling purposes, but I doubt they have any real provenance beyond that.
Kant did have a shot at it, and I have studied Kant quite a bit. Kant was not the first to notice that we know objects via the senses, so I'm not sure what you are driving at with that comment.
The only philosophers I can think of that you might be referring to here are Leibniz and Wolff. And I haven't claimed that "there's no access to reality". I would want to claim precisely the opposite; that there is no access to anything else, and that the very idea that there could be is incoherent.
That's not in accordance with my account at all. Our agreement about the tree is on account of the characteristics of the tree and the similar structures of our human senses. The question that cannot be answered is the one as to the ultimate metaphysical status of the tree, which is really the same as the question as to what are the absolute conditions that give rise to human experience of a world of discernible objects. I think such questions are fine insofar as they focus us on the realization that we are the center of a profound mystery, but are fool's errands if we deceive ourselves into thinking they can ever be definitively answered. It is precisely on account of the fact that they can never be answered that life has any value at all.
I agree with this except perhaps that the idea that "memories define who we are and are the source of future actions/ choices". I think this is certainly true in part, but I don't believe it can be the whole story. I think we are also influenced by what we don't remember, and were perhaps never even aware of.
If interpretation doesn't go on in the brain, pray tell, where does it go on?
I'm not suggesting any sort of mind/body dualism. The brain is part of the body and they are coordinated through the CNS and blood stream. What comes and goes through the CNS are very specifically channeled, and what comes and goes through the blood are diffused. But, as it happens, the brain is in charge. Not breathing enough? Feeling too hot or too cold? Fall asleep at the table? Wake up too early? Not sweating enough? Hungry? Scared spitless by a big snake? Avoiding spiders? Chatting up the UPS driver? Screwing your brains out? Addicted to cigarettes? Write great poetry? Doing groundbreaking research into String Theory? All that stuff, from not breathing enough to String Theory is all BRAIN.
Quoting Janus
I don't know about you, but I seem to exist pretty much inside my skin. Not that the buzzing, blooming world doesn't impinge on me all the time, but I am enough me and not everything else to notice when I am getting rained on, getting burned by the sun, froze, and everything else.
I think bodies are cordoned off from everything else, whether the body be a tree, a squirrel, a carp, or a human. The wind is very general, but trees are very specific. The environment is very general, but you and I are very specific.
In the context I am using memory, I am referring to all memory including that which is recalled and that which might be have been perceived at one time and may be recalled in the order may not. There is also cellular memory in our bodies as well as memory of the 10s of millions of microbes. But since it is all life then it is all memory. Much of memory reveals itself as habit.
The fabric of this memory I've talked about in other threads.
Not really.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/
"A deeper understanding of this mass of neural tissue, filled with important neurotransmitters, is revealing that it does much more than merely handle digestion or inflict the occasional nervous pang. The little brain in our innards, in connection with the big one in our skulls, partly determines our mental state and plays key roles in certain diseases throughout the body."
But still, "You" are upstairs, aren't you?
"Rich tried to get himself together, but alas, discovered that he was spread too far all over everything, a fat bug smear on the windshield.
Perhaps in the next reincarnation, he will be incredibly unspreadable and will be able to keep himself together under all sorts of conditions."
Whoops, I forgot. You are just a Bitter Crank. Sorry. Do you suppose every one just spends their life being a Bitter Crank? I spent my life learning about what I (all of me) can do.
Are you that hard of understanding? It is the way I've ruled reality in that I'm defending. So yes, you could rule it in "any old way" and so what. But I am talking about a particular way. And you need to focus your response on that.
Quoting tim wood
That you are calling it reality is the point. Others (idealists) would call it experience. I am arguing the third epistemic position of pragmatism which steps back to speak explicitly of a modelling relation.
One of the critical points that emerges from pragmatism is the realisation that it is a useful thing - not a problem - that the reality of our experience is never the thing in itself. That is why a model works - by not being the thing itself.
But so far you have shown a tin ear to these epistemology 101 points.
Quoting tim wood
Why would I go in for your idiotic simplicities? You don't even seem to realise that you just talked about a correspondence relationship between an abstraction - this Platonic tree that is the "real exemplar" - and some discriminative act, the forming of a sensory impression guided by such a remembered notion.
So you are telling me you have a general idea of a tree, a particular image of a tree, and that there is also a "real tree". But you are failing to tell me how you know about this "real tree" apart from there being your experience of some idea-conforming state of impression.
As I quite reasonably point out, this ain't a problem when such a belief is understood to rely on particular characteristics of the said experience - such as its recalcitrant nature. But still, your beliefs about a tree are not the same as some imagined unemboddied God's eye view of existence. To the degree that you assert naive realism, you will always be wrong.
Actually, I'm not bitter and not a crank (well, you can call me one if you want). I hope no one spends their lives being a bitter crank, or bitter anything else. Hey, I'm all for maximizing self-realization and lifelong learning.
The topic at hand has been chewed over inconclusively for a long time, so if you find that there is no common agreement, well...
You brought up the enteric brain. Maybe the state of one's digestion sways the cerebral conclusion. Maybe it's the micro biome in the gut that determines how one looks at the relationship between brain/body/environment. Who knows what politics the fungi and bacteria down there struggle with.
I do think that the tree is real, and that what we know about it is conditioned by what we are and what it is. When the question 'what is the tree, ultimately (metaphysically) speaking' is asked, we have reached the limits of language, because 'what it is' means only in regard to what is experienced. So, there is nothing determinate beyond our experience, but the Real is not exhausted by our experience.
OK, so by 'memory' you refer to both what is recalled and to what may be unconscious, but preserved as habit. The 'presence of the past' so to speak?
As I said already, I think it makes sense to speak of postulated brain activities being correlated with what we call, and experience as, interpreting (or interpretating?). Do we experience interpreting as going on in the brain? Perhaps in the head? Our hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting and speaking are all experienced as functions of the face and head.
If you close your eyes and feel something with your hand; where do you experience the act of interpreting what it is that you are feeling. If you lie with your sexual partner and feel their entire body against yours where do you experience the feelings and the interpretations of the feelings associated with that? You don't even know, experientially and experimentally speaking that you even have a brain, unless you cut your head open and take a look.
Yes.
Sounds like you might find Rupert Sheldrake's ideas interesting.
I would still say the tree is determinate only in the sense that we can share our experiences of it.
I can say to you, for example: " look at the way the third branch from the ground curves up like a sickle" and you know exactly what I mean.
And we can measure and agree upon the arc of that curve. that is the kind of thing determination is; not anything purportedly "beyond experience", as far as I can see. i can't see how the idea of determination could have any sense outside the context of human experience.
This compounded by all the evidence that whatever is real and out there is continuously changing in some manner. Thus there is never a "state" but rather a form in flux that the mind can name and compare with other minds, and in doing so can agree on a name.
The analogy would be a hologram which is a unrecognizable wave form until a reconstructive wave is used to reveal some recognizable form (a tree). At this point, different minds will perceive it differently depending upon point of view. No two POVs (subjective memory) will be the same and none will have any resemblance to the source hologram wave structure but the POVs are approximately the same so that agreement can be formed and discussed.
The brain reconstructs but does not store. The mind transforms. Memory is formed in the field along with everything else and can also be reconstructed (recalled) but as with everything else, is such subject to change.
If the mind could see the flux, it's doubtful it could consistently identify it, which seems necessary for survival. There is therefore not a premium placed on those intellects that can accurately observe reality in its most accurate form, but upon those intellects that can use the information they receive to increase their likelihood of survival. If I see the apple as a rigid, defined object and not as a swirling whirlwind of indistinguishable matter, I am better suited for the world. My point being: (1) I agree with you that reality as we observe it is reducible to what we can agree upon, and (2) there is no reason to believe that the data we have in our heads offers an accurate depiction of the world.
Pretty shitty though when all you see is apples when apples disappear, as they definitely will. Specialization brings dependency, and although the specialist will always be better adapted to any specific circumstance, and dominate the circumstance they become adapted to, the plastic one will in the long run be the one undefeated by changing circumstances, and less harmed by the flux.
Specialization is always a death sentence, and those specialist traits that allowed for the domination in that particular circumstance or environment will die with the environment, and be weeded out in the long run. Plasticity is the ground of evolution though, and is precisely what allows for survival, and the transcending of particular circumstances and environments in the first place.
There is much you can do to become happy and well adjusted to the times, but adversity will hit you harder, and the more you specialize, the faster you'll become obsolete.
The less you adapt, the faster you will become obsolete. If I specialize in finding apples and that leads to me becoming stronger, faster, meaner, and tougher, my ilk and I will outcompete and destroy all you generalists who are able to find the occasional apple, the occasional orange, and so forth. Then one day all the apples run out and those fuckers who had figured out how to also specialize in finding kiwis will begin to dominate. Their sun will rise and mine will set and the eternal cycle will continue.
It is true that occasionally a man so dominate, so complete, so able in accomplishing all tasks will come along. Such a man will see so many risings and fallings of the sun and will never so much as catch the slightest scent of defeat. Yep, I think you know who I'm talking about.
I don't think that you quite grasp the concept... it isn't that one diversifies against a few different particular options, it's that one is willing to try new and different things all the time. Take risks, be stupid, and risk failure.
That is the great thing about fluid intelligence. It's general. People like to say that everyone is good at something, no one is good at everything, but this isn't actually so. Only in practice are people better at this or that than someone with a higher fluid intelligence, as they put overwhelmingly more time into it, but all things being equal, the one with the fluid intelligence is better at everything, as they would improve more quickly, learn it faster, find easier ways to do it.
And you're talking about me, of course. Me.
You're just saying the smarter guy is always going to prevail. Given two people, one with a highly refined skill set and the other who's just really bright and able to work on the fly and figure things out as he goes, it will be the second who is far safer from obsolescence. I'd just say that if truly "all things being equal" regarding everything, including intelligence, it will be the person who works hardest and specializes who will prevail. That is, if we both have the same fluid intelligence, I'm going to outperform you because you're lazy. But, yeah, if I'm a dumb ass who works real hard and you're a lazy wiz kid, I'll probably lose every time to you and be really pissed off at the unfairness of it all, so I'll take your lunch money and slam your head into the locker.
Take that bitch.
Conscientiousness is the second greatest trait indicator of success behind intelligence, being about half as effective. Life genuinely is unfair, as I would have to work significantly less in order to attain the same goal. I also won't waste my time on goals that don't matter, or avenues that won't work.
Fluid intelligence is highly related to physicality, as it begins to rapidly decay in your twenties, unless you maintain a good physical discipline. I began half-assed and half-brained, and have climbed myself out, through hard work, because the world actually is just, and being a fantastic human being brings all of the spiritual rewards, and my super-human intelligence. So now I compete with the half-assed, half-brained, and attain great unbinding, awakening, balance, and da center more and more each day. Rather than losing it, I'm aging in reverse. Nothing is denied to me, whereas I'm like staring directly into the abyss itself, so is my depth.
Every time I feel depressed, I just move really fast, as confidence and movement speed are directly correlated.
Anyway, I win. Richer in cultural and spiritual capital, and grasp the highest level concepts humanity has to offer me. I'm sure you have a spiral stair case or something though.
This is the way to look at it. It is the rational argument as to why our experience of reality would be functionally limited, not the thing in itself.
And also that very way of looking at it says there has to be a reality for us to be having our pragmatically simplified view. So it is an argument for indirect realism and not solipsistic idealism.
Another way to phrase it is that we are attempting to look through the flux - the blooming, buzzing, confusion - to see the Platonic forms. The tree, the apple, the whatever substantial entity we claim to apprehend, is ourselves viewing our ideas having managed to filter away all the clutter and detail that seems to stand in the way of a sharp act of object recognition.
So we can apprehend the buzzing confusion. But always we are striving to go beyond the unexamined reality of a sensory flux to arrive in a modelled realm of just us and our Platonically sharp objects of perception.
But for that.
It's good for you to stare at the sun for at least an hour a day, optimally five hours a day. No pain no sunken beady burnt retinas.