The intelligibility of the world
The world is clearly intelligible in some respects. If we're realists about an external world, we can see, hear, touch, taste, smell and generally observe the outside world. If we're skeptics or full-blown anti-realists, perhaps we'll say that the world at least presents itself to us, i.e. as a representation.
From this basis we can do various things. We can manipulate the world. Manipulation requires conscious thought, specifically an understanding of how things work. That's precisely what intelligibility means: the ability to be understood.
But how is this possible? Why is the world intelligible, and what is the structure that makes it so? Furthermore, are there different ways of understanding the world, or just one?
It is common today to encounter scientistic leanings, or the belief that science can and will answer all our questions (and remedy all our problems). Usually this is justified by an appeal to the history of science (usually under a naive realism as well) - it's done well in the past, and it'll continue to do well in the future. Science, bitches!
I don't think scientism is really defensible. For example, "science" cannot tell us whether or not we should be scientific realists, or what a property is, or what constitutes knowledge. However the alternatives (such as philosophy as being First Inquiry) must be justified in itself. There needs to be an explanation as to why science cannot tell us these things, a meta-philosophical question. Why is science limited in its scope, and how do we know science will never answer questions we typically assign to philosophy or even theology/mysticism?
Does the world contain empirical aspects and non-empirical aspects? When do we know when we are actually studying nature, or the nature of nature, or if we're just telling ourselves a story?
From this basis we can do various things. We can manipulate the world. Manipulation requires conscious thought, specifically an understanding of how things work. That's precisely what intelligibility means: the ability to be understood.
But how is this possible? Why is the world intelligible, and what is the structure that makes it so? Furthermore, are there different ways of understanding the world, or just one?
It is common today to encounter scientistic leanings, or the belief that science can and will answer all our questions (and remedy all our problems). Usually this is justified by an appeal to the history of science (usually under a naive realism as well) - it's done well in the past, and it'll continue to do well in the future. Science, bitches!
I don't think scientism is really defensible. For example, "science" cannot tell us whether or not we should be scientific realists, or what a property is, or what constitutes knowledge. However the alternatives (such as philosophy as being First Inquiry) must be justified in itself. There needs to be an explanation as to why science cannot tell us these things, a meta-philosophical question. Why is science limited in its scope, and how do we know science will never answer questions we typically assign to philosophy or even theology/mysticism?
Does the world contain empirical aspects and non-empirical aspects? When do we know when we are actually studying nature, or the nature of nature, or if we're just telling ourselves a story?
Comments (174)
So science has no epistemology? Gee, that's news to me.
If it is indeed the case that science has an epistemology, then this just further shows how philosophy is a separate and prior domain.
I think "explain" is a word to be sniffed. So-called explanations have weight to the degree that they help us manipulate/predict physical and social reality and/or make our emotional/intellectual peace with it, or so it seems to me. As I see it, reason is intrinsically instrumental. Veblen comes to mind when I think of the piety directed toward non-instrumental Reason. Roughly speaking, it takes on a status-boosting function in its distance from work. I do experience the "lyrical why," but this is almost like a glitch in human cognition. We can arrange entities within the totality into a system of causes and effects, so why not the totality? Because it cannot be related to anything.
Why the snobbery? Historically, science has clearly been philosophy's best and sharpest expression of itself. It's pragmatism deals with idealism/realism in systematic self-grounding fashion.
You seem to miss the whole point of intelligibility. It is about constraining possibility so that it leaves you with a crisp framework of yes/no binary questions about existence. And once you have a theory expressed in counterfactuals, then you can actually make matchingly crisp measurements in the name of the theory. You can answer the questions with experienced facts.
So intelligibility is pragmatism. It doesn't mean "being able to be understood". It means being understood in that particular way.
If you want to understand reality some other way, say a prayer or hold a seance. Or learn to write obscure PoMo texts that are the opposite of intelligible models of existence.
"When do we know when we are actually studying nature, or the nature of nature, or if we're just telling ourselves a story? "
From Popper and Kojeve I got the idea that these are all one and the same. Some stories address the physical/social more the emotional/personal. Some stories address the relationships that hold between stories. In my view, creativity is central. We come up with a new story or fusion of stories and we are seduced by it. Then it gets banged against other stories. We always already believe lots of stories. We abandon them when we are seduced by a better incompatible story or when a story keeps getting us into trouble, physical or social. I suppose philosophy has been for me largely a collection of stories about stories. One starts to see (doesn't one?) certain structures that sum to a story about human nature (its story-telling aspect).
"So intelligibility is pragmatism."
I strongly agree with what I think you're getting at here. I "understand" insofar as I can make use of. Utility is vast, of course, or so I intend it. In short, understanding is a handle on things. Apart from motive and action, the handle doesn't exist in a way worth talking about. Note the mention of worth/value, which is a sort of ineffable ground.
Yes, it is important to a proper understanding of pragmatism - the original Peircean version rather than the popularised Jamesian one - that is isn't simply a presumption of some utilitarian ground of value. What it means to "work" - to serve a purpose - is also up for discussion as part of the epistemology. So it is really a claim about the value of a general reasoning method.
In my view, we are ALWAYS telling each other a story, and there's no 'just' about that. Story-telling is the pinnacle!
On the question of intelligibility, I'm always a little mystified at questions like that, or the similar 'why is mathematics so effective'. It's like asking why the person that won the lottery won the lottery (what are the odds!!?!). If the world were not at least fairly intelligible, we would be unable to survive. So its partial intelligibility is a logical consequence of our survival. Similarly, if mathematics we were not so effective we would not use it. It is so effective because we chose it as the most effective thing we could get hold of. And again, if there were nothing nearly so effective, we would not have survived.
In my view the universe is predominantly, and ultimately, unintelligible. The fact that some minor aspects of it are intelligible to us should not come as a surprise. It could not be otherwise.
One non-empirical aspect is the "what-it's-likeness" of an individual organism. It is only empirical in that the individual person is the only who can access their own experience. At what point is experience not a part of the world? Can experience itself (the basis for empirical observation, imitation, connection-making, inference-making, synthesizing, analyzing, and memory-storage, etc.) have ever been non-existent in total or was it always there in some way as a product of how particles/forces/molecules work? When does experience pop in the picture? Amoeba? Multi-cellular life? Clusters of neurons? If it is one of these bags-of-chemicals- what makes those bags of chemicals different from previous ones where a "what-it's-like" experiential phenomena is entailed with its very nature. If it did come about at a point-in-time and not there all along, what is this big explosion of experience like to come on the scene from non-experience? Can the idea of having no-experience what-so-ever then having one instance of experience exist even be truly comprehensible?
The qualifier ruins it. In the traditional understanding, something is either intelligible or it isn't.
Quoting darthbarracuda
The scientific method proceeds from speculation. Speculation itself cannot be said to be scientific or non-scientific, as science is a particular means by which speculation is tested. The direction in which individual human beings speculate is influenced by interests which cannot be said to be scientific either.
When individuals such as yourself, speculate that perhaps the world (the medium) is unintelligible, you approach that self-defeating assumption. If you understand the necessity in concluding that the medium is indeed intelligible, (a conclusion produced by logic rather than the scientific method), you will adopt this idealist premise. If you do not understand the logic behind this premise, you may assume as a premise, that the world is unintelligible. Therefore the world (the medium) will be unintelligible, to you.
There's a book I know about (as distinct from know) which is called 'The Eclipse of Reason', by Horkheimer. He's Frankfurt school, and despite the fact that I hate communism, this book has some important things to say. One of them is that up until, oh, I don't know, sometime in the 19th Century, it was simply assumed that 'the world made sense', that it was animated by reason, that things existed for a reason, and that reason could be used to discover what that reason was. But one of the things that 'Darwinism' did, was cast doubt on the idea of reason in that classical sense, because, accoding to the Tangled Bank Theory, 'what grasps reason' is essentially the same thing that causes earthworms to mate, writ large - 'evolved', it is said. To say anything else is - you guessed it! - a quaint anthropomorphism, the nostalgia for the times when we (falsely) believed we were anything but animals.
So I have been musing on the depressing thought that the denizens of hell probably don't know 'this is hell'. I bet they think where they live is actually pretty good. They've become accustomed to it, and they can't imagine it could be some other way. And that's the main reason they're in it! Whereas, for us earthlings, we have this dim recollection that things could actually be other than, and better than, what they are, and a sim sense we ought to try and remember or discover why that is.
Hence, questions about inteligibility.
I find that a very odd point of view. What Darwinism has actually done is provide an explanation where there was none. The reason for biodiversity has been discovered!
Say I load a gun with a blank and fire it at you. You don't know that there's a blank in the gun, and believe that it is loaded with a real bullet. After it fires, you are unharmed. You would not be surprised that you're not making the observation, "I am dead." You would, however, be surprised that you are making the observation, "I am alive."
For all of us, really, unless we've committed ourselves (perversely) to inhuman standards of intelligibility. Many of us have unreasonable expectations regarding the world, sad to say.
Schopenhauer was not alone in this kind of empirical-philosophical reasoning. Existential questions seem to be empirical - a point that IIRC Brassier pointedly advocates. It's just that empiricism is now dominated by science. And so these kinds of questions and answers must be undertaken by science. But I think the part that makes it philosophy is knowing where to look, i.e. identifying problems and having the gall to do so.
What strikes me as odd is that in modern philosophy you get philosophers who have carved their own little intellectual realm in which they get to study while everyone else waits outside, as if reality itself is actually structured this way as well. Lots of reactionary metaphysicians today are apt to call certain questions "ontologically metaphysical", or outside of the realm of empiricism and science, and only a priori intuitions can even attempt to solve these issues. Now I'm skeptical of science alone being able to answer these questions, as if it can operate without a rudimentary metaphysical structure, but what remains to be shown is why this is the case - that is to say, why some questions are empirical and other apparently not.
What would seem to be the case, then, is that many of these philosophical insights are produced through reasoning "shortcuts" rather than a specific methodology that you see in the special sciences.
Where do we draw the line in what we call a story? Because if the sequence of if-then statements a computer uses to understand a given problem is a story, "story" becomes a rather swollen and meaningless term, no?
It is a faulty binary to go about saying science is empirical, philosophy is rational, therefore the two are mutually exclusive. Sure, you can advance that theory of the world in a way that makes it intelligible for you. But measurement should demonstrate the faultiness of such reasoning.
You yourself just said Schopenhauer was a rather empirical chap. And science is a deeply metaphysical exerercise, explicit in making ontic commitments to get its games going.
So you are applying the method by which we attempt to achieve intelligibility - trying to force through some LEM based account of the world. But you are failing to support it with evidence.
Of course you would have to have useless understandings. That is what justifies talking about the contrary of a useful understanding. Again, this is how we render the world intelligible - A exists because not-A exists to make the existence of A crisply a fact.
A biological explanation - but at the cost of the devaluing of reason.
In the Eclipse of Reason, (1947), Max Horkheimer argues that individuals in contemporary industrial culture experience a universal feeling of fear and disillusionment, which can be traced back to the impact of ideas that originate in the Enlightenment conception of reason, as well as the historical development of industrial society. Before the Enlightenment, reason was seen as a reality which underwrote the order of the cosmos. Now, reason is seen as a subjective faculty of the mind. This attitude undermines metaphysics and the objective concept of reason itself. Reason no longer determines the guiding principles of our own lives, but is subordinated to the ends it can achieve. In other words, reason is instumentalized.
The effects of this shift are devaluing. Philosophies, such as pragmatism and positivism, "aim at mastering reality, not at criticizing it." Man comes to dominate nature, but in the process dominates other men by dehumanizing them. He forgets the unrepeatable and unique nature of every human life and instead sees all living things as fields of means. His inner life is rationalized and planned. "On the one hand, nature has been stripped of all intrinsic value or meaning. On the other, man has been stripped of all aims except self-preservation....
The idea inherent in all idealistic metaphysics – that the world is in some sense a product of the mind –is thus turned into its opposite: the mind is a product of the world, of the processes of nature. Hence, according to popular Darwinism, nature does not need philosophy to speak for her: nature, a powerful and venerable deity, is ruler rather than ruled. Darwinism ultimately comes to the aid of rebellious nature in undermining any doctrine, theological or philosophical, that regards nature itself as expressing a truth that reason must try to recognize. The equating of reason with nature, by which reason is debased and raw nature exalted, is a typical fallacy of the era of rationalization. Instrumentalized subjective reason either eulogizes nature as pure vitality or disparages it as brute force, instead of treating it as a text to be interpreted by philosophy...
In traditional theology and metaphysics, the natural was largely conceived as the evil, and the spiritual or supernatural as the good. In popular Darwinism, the good is the well-adapted, and the value of that to which the organism adapts itself is unquestioned or is measured only in terms of further adaptation. However, being well adapted to one’s surroundings is tantamount to being capable of coping successfully with them, of mastering the forces that beset one. Thus the theoretical denial of the spirit’s antagonism to nature – even as implied in the doctrine of interrelation between the various forms of organic life, including man – frequently amounts in practice to subscribing to the principle of man’s continuous and thoroughgoing domination of nature.
... the abdication of the spirit in popular Darwinism entails the rejection of any elements of the mind that transcend the function of adaptation and consequently are not instruments of self-preservation. Reason disavows its own primacy and professes to be a mere servant of natural selection. On the surface, this new empirical reason seems more humble toward nature than the reason of the metaphysical tradition. Actually, however, it is arrogant, practical mind riding roughshod over the ‘useless spiritual,’ and dismissing any view of nature in which the latter is taken to be more than a stimulus to human activity. The effects of this view are not confined to modern philosophy."
Actually No! The modern theory of evolution is not biological. Replicators subject to variation and selection can is not a biology-specific theory.
Quoting Wayfarer
Reason does not determine anything. Reason consists of how ideas are treated, not how they are determined or justified.
Quoting Wayfarer
And you are complaining about the status of reason??!!
I would say that a necessary condition for something being a story is that it have a conscious narrator (story-teller) and at least one consciousness listener. They may be the same entity - as we sometimes tell ourselves stories - but usually they are different.
But unless a computer is conscious, a computer executing a series of statements, or even printing out a story written by somebody else, is not telling a story. And I don't think the primitive computers we have now could possibly be conscious.
A consequence of this, to which some may object, is that a computer typing out random symbols endlessly, that by a sheer fluke prints out a sequence at some stage that reads just like Thumbelina, has not told a story. The same applies to a tree branch tapping against a cliff that by fluke produces a Morse Code version of Thumbelina.
Trying to produce necessary and sufficient conditions for what a story is would be challenging, and I don't have an answer for that right now. It would have difficulties similar to those in trying to define a 'game'. But the above necessary conditions are enough to rule out computer story-telling.
Do you think so?
I think 'intelligible' traditionally relates to ordinary speech, not to philosophical discourse, and means that we can make out what the person is trying to communicate.
In most spoken sentences we hear, we do not catch every word, but we can still understand the sentence because there is redundancy in the language and we can interpolate. Sometimes we miss so many words that we are unable to interpret the sentence, but then, usually a few sentences later, we are able to make up for the loss of that sentence by the redundancy between that and the other sentences. This effect is amplified when listening to a language in which one is not fluent. That's why, when one is speaking to another adult in front of one's young children about something one doesn't want them to understand, one talks fast and in big words, to prevent the child from using redundancy to understand.
So we are usually able to understand one another, even though we miss much of what we each say. We could say that the message of a speech is still fully intelligible, because the redundancy enables us to capture the full meaning despite the missed words and sentences.
But in anything other than a short passage of speech, there are likely to be multiple themes. We may capture some of them but not all. For instance a prosecuting barrister may argue the defendant is guilty because of reasons A, B and C. A juror may not capture C, but be convinced by A and B, and vote to convict. I suggest that in that case the barrister's speech is only partially intelligible to the juror.
I am trying to learn German, and am reading short stories in it to improve my comprehension. I don't understand many of the words but I can get the meaning of most sentences via redundancy. There are some sentences or paragraphs that escape me entirely. I generally get the overall drift, but I never found out whether Eskol the Viking was angry or just sad when he was telling the others that their ship was broken and they'd have to stay in America. I would say the story is partly intelligible to me. Maybe even mostly intelligible, but that may be flattering myself.
I suppose I'm not really arguing here. It's just that your interesting comment set up a chain of thought in my head about intelligibility that I found curious.
But that's not what I was referring to. I was referring to the traditionalist, (neo)Platonist idea of 'intelligibility', which is considerably harder to understand and to convey (not that I'm an expert in it). But the traditionalist account of intelligibility was such that it conveyed the sense of a complete, (if you like illuminated) understanding, in the sense of there no longer being any shortcoming or gap between the understanding and the thing understood. The pinnacle of this understanding was 'the vision of the One' - a vision of the 'order of the cosmos', which you will find in the more mystical Platonic dialogues and also in Plotinus' Enneads. The ideas in those texts are that the intelligible domain of mathematical and geometric laws, and of the forms of things, is real in a way that the domain of perception can never be. Now, of course, our modern sensibility is so thoroughly embedded in what the Platonists would dismiss as 'the sensory domain', that we no longer understand what they're talking about at all.
Consider it an historical footnote.
Given this is a philosophy board and the OP was clearly meaning to apply the philosophical usage, talking instead about issues of ordinary language comprehension is an unhelpful sidetrack.
I'll post the Wiki definition if it helps....
So the metaphysical surprise is that reality is logically structured. It appears to conform to the laws of thought. The world seem to operate with order and reason - regulated by formal/final cause or abstract rational principles.
Traditionally, this seemed such a surprise that it was mystical. A transcendent cause of order seemed necessary because nature itself is naturally messy, with an ever-present tendency towards disorder.
But now - through science and maths - we have discovered how structure in fact arises quite naturally in nature through fundamental principles of thermodynamic self-organisation. Disorder itself must fall into regular patterns for basic geometric reasons to do with symmetries and symmetry-breakings.
So the intelligibility of the Cosmos is far less of an issue these days. We have things like selection principles and least action principles that explain the emergence of order even from randomness.
Whether it be 'things fall towards the Earth because of Newton's inverse square law of gravity' or 'the world exists because Yahweh manufactured it / Brahman dreamed it', one can still ask why.
If so, doesn't the concept of intellligibility become useless, since it does not distinguish?
No, because I think within Platonism there is, I think, a terminus of explanation or a vision of the intelligibility of the Cosmos, which originated with Plato, and found completer expression by later Platonism (and neo-Platonism).
And to say that the ancient religious philosophies simply constitute a sticker saying 'God did it - ask no further!' betrays a basic misunderstanding of such accounts. They're not, after all, hypotheses, in the sense we now use that term, but are expressions from various cultures, of what they considered the first cause or first principle. But such understandings are embedded in a realm of discourse - taking them out of that, and referring to them as kind of formulae or slogans, can't convey anything meaningful about them.
(Anyway, speaking of intelligibility, currently physics is gloomily contemplating the nightmare scenario which is, to my mind, precisely a crisis of intelligibility.)
You wrote:
' Philosophies, such as pragmatism and positivism, "aim at mastering reality, not at criticizing it." Man comes to dominate nature, but in the process dominates other men by dehumanizing them.'
But I don't see much difference between criticizing and mastering. We are driven by pain and desire in either case. And when weren't we trying to squeeze food and safety out of nature, including human nature? I'll agree that modern life is cognitively dissonant (so much freedom and variety and so many disagreeing voices), but I don't see why there must be more dehumanization going on.
In short, instrumentalism is more descriptive than prescriptive. Even the argument against it serves a purpose and raises a status flag, or so it seems to me.
The Greeks were naturally stunned at finding that mathematical arguments have the force of logical necessity. If we take certain geometric axioms as unquestionable truths, then a whole bunch of incontrovertible results follow deductively.
It was literally the creation of a machinery of thought. And rather than some spiritual illumination, it was a Philosophism (as a precursor to Scientism). :) Plato was the Dawkins of his day to the degree that he reduced the world to a literal abstraction. A perfect triangle or perfect sphere was something real and substantial that could be grasped via the rationality of the mind - and as an idea, acted to form up the imperfect matter of the world.
So this worshipful approach to the awe of mathematical reason - the demonstration that axiom-generated truths looked to explain the hidden regularity of nature - was understandable as a first reaction. But we've since also learnt that maths is only as good as the assumptions contained in its axioms. So maths itself is no longer quite so magical, just pragmatically effective. Yet also our connecting of maths to the world via the scientific method has developed so much that the essential wonder - that existence is intelligible in this pragmatic modelling fashion - persists.
Is no longer amazing that the Cosmos is intelligible - it has to be just to exist as a self-organised state of global regularity. But it is amazing that we can really get at that structure through the dynamic duo of maths and measurement.
Or where it becomes less amazing again, we should qualify it by mentioning that humans naturally favour the knowledge that pays its own way in terms of serving humanity's most immediate interests. Which is where Scientism and reductionism comes in - the narrower view of causation that produces all our technology (including our political and economic "technology").
Both philosophy and science are not big fans of holism. The great metaphysical system builders like Peirce and Hegel are held in deep suspicion. Neither AP nor PoMo likes grand totalising narratives. The idea that reality might be a reasonable place - actually driven by the purpose of becoming organised - is as unfashionable as it gets ... because society wants the machine thinking that creates the machines it is now dependent upon. He who pays the piper, etc.
Reduction of the world to a particular underlying principle is the point. Understand final cause and we will know why the world has to exist the way it does. It's about making the world by reason, rather than existing states.
I still can't see how anything could ever satisfy that definition of intelligible, so to pick on physics just because some people find the Standard Model inelegant (and I include myself amongst those people)and many of those would prefer some resources to be diverted from particle physics to condensed matter physics, is arbitrary at best.
Also, I'm mystified by this:
Against whom are you arguing here? Has anybody in this thread accused ancient philosophies of using slogans or resting upon 'God did it'? Where?
I feel very confident indeed that it is impossible, although I doubt I could formally prove that.
Understanding of what exactly? The "why" of the world? No. Reason does not give the world. Final cause is incoherent. No instance of reason is capable of removing the possibility of existence. The world may always be something different to what we understand. Reason cannot be used to define what must exist. We can't say the world is because we (or God) thinks it is.
This is a bit different to most accounts of "cannot understand though." Often people use it to dismiss the idea we can understand parts of the world or logical turths themsleves. I'm against this in the strongest possible terms. Endless possibilities and alternative meanings doesn't destroy the ones we have.
The inability to know "why" is because the concept is incoherent, not because our capacity for knowledge is compromised.
Final cause isn't an empirical state or distinction of the world. Someone suggesting final cause isn't talking about a state of causality. They are trying to say a particular logic defines the world's presence-- e.g. God, evolution, biology, manifest destiny, human nature, experience, etc., etc.
Any of these is immune to the "why" question because it's logically defined as the answer. To ask "why God" is to misunderstanding what God means. The same is true of any answer to the question. An inability to ask "why" of final cause is its entire point.
I like this: you can't ask 'Why?' of the final cause because the final cause is the final why in the series.
Science is a deeply metaphysical "exercise"? How so? Making an ontic commitment is just that, making an ontic commitment, it is not an exercise. Determining which ontic commitment ought to be made is a metaphysical exercise, but this is directed by interests other than science.
Quoting apokrisis"Thermodynamic self-organization". That sounds like some speculative notion, without any real science. Why do you call it "fact"?
Here's a definition of self-organization I came across at BusinessDictionary.com: "Ability of a system to spontaneously arrange its components or elements in a purposeful (non-random) manner, under appropriate conditions without the help of an external agency."
There are a number of questionable issues here. First, what defines "purposeful" other than a relation to some intent? If the intent is internal to the system, then who's intent is it. If the intent is external, the intent of the individual making the observation, then the system may simply be judged as purposeful (non-random), and the prior state judged as random, for the sake of claiming "self-organization". What would distinguish purposeful from random, except the intent of the one making the judgement? Secondly, "under appropriate conditions without the help of an external agency" is itself contradictory. If appropriate conditions are necessary for such "self-organization", then clearly such appropriate conditions are acting as an external agency.
Another definition I came across relied on "interaction rules". The components could only produce a self-organized system by following some interaction rules. Where would such rules come from, and how could the components know how to follow these rules in order to produce a self-organized system? Why were the components not following these rules in the disorganized state preceding the self-organized state? Did they suddenly decide to start following the rules?
So this is an example of how science does think through its metaphysics. As already said to you in other threads where you have rabbited on about the nature of purpose, a naturalistic systems view demystifies it by talking about final cause in terms of specific gradations of semiosis.
{teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}.
Or in more regular language, {propensity {function {purpose}}}.
So we would have a mere physico-chemical level of finality as a propensity, a material tendency. A bio-genetic level of finality would be a function, as in an organism. And then a psycho-linguistic level of finality would be that which we recognise in a thinking human.
See: http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/189/284
But I should add, that as far as the theistic traditions are concerned, to ask why God - the intent of the question, 'who made God' - is to put God on the same level as the things that are to be explained. In their view, God is the end of questions, in the sense of being the ultimate reason or explanation for why anything exists, so to ask 'why' of God is to essentially not see that, or not understand what you're asking. Away from desk will be back later.
I think the answer starts with 'learn Ancient Greek' :-|
So, no, I don't expect that I could give any account of the 'idea of the intelligibility of the world according to later Platonism' without recommending a whole course of study which I myself have not undertaken. It's more just an intuition or a hunch than a serious argument.
This doesn't automatically mean that 'the world' is or isn't intelligible - 'the world' may not be an object of intelligibility at all. But things 'in' the world, local structures, as it were, of which we make sense of everyday in our interactions with them - perhaps sometimes because of our interactions with them - means at the least that if it doesn't make sense to speak of an 'intelligible world', there is at least a suffusion of intelligibility - sense - throughout it.
Yes I think I agree with that.
Quoting StreetlightXI don't think that this makes any sense at all, to think that "the world" could be unintelligible, yet local structures are intelligible? Are you disassociating local structures from the world, such that they are intelligible but the wold is not? How would you support such a separation?
If the world appears to us as local structures which are intelligible, yet you assume some transcending "world", which is unintelligible, how can you create consistency, coherency, in this type of thinking? How could local structures, which are intelligible, be a part of an overall world which is unintelligible?
Wouldn't you prefer to use a principle of inductive reason, and assume that if all the local things, which we come into contact with on a day to day basis, are intelligible, then the parts which we do not come into contact with are also intelligible.
In a tax calculating program, the if-then - which are themselves real-time conflict statements - cause the user to fill in information about their yearly taxes. I have read "this is your story of taxes" once by a tax program. But there is something very different from either of these when Frodo sojourns to Mount Doom. The tax programs use of story seems like a propaganda to make me feel romantic about taxes. The program itself seems story-like, but is just an equation. The "science-story" is also just an accounting of a process. But Lord of the Rings is a true story, with no other purpose then to tell it.
You mistake me - I didn't say that 'the world is unintelligible'; I said that it may well be the case that something as abstract as 'the world' doesn't submit to the criteria of intelligibility at all - that it may well be neither intelligible or unintelligible; the very notion of intelligibility may not even apply to something as strange as 'the world' - whatever that even means. Put it this way - I know what it means to 'make sense' of this or that phenomenon: 'how does that work?', 'what contributes to function of that process?'; but when you ask these questions of 'the world', the questions themselves start to lose any cogency.
In any case, the idea is that sense is like any other thing in the world; something produced, the result - always provisional - of an (ongoing) process. For one thing, to make something intelligible is always to do so against the background of a certain (set of) interests - for whom, for what purpose, to what end is the intelligibility of the thing sought? Things and phenomena are not simply 'intelligible' tout court; there is no intelligibility-in-itself; it is always a question of relevance - in what context and under what circumstances does intelligibility come into question? 'We' tend to make sense of just enough of what we need to to get by; anything that doesn't bear on our living tends to get left by the wayside. And what makes sense in one context may not do in another. Sense might well be an acosmic phenomenon; local, context-bound, multiply overlapping, conflicting, fleeting.
I'm not trying to separate philosophy and science per se, merely point out that there seems to be more than one method of understanding the world. In other words, what I'm trying to access here is a systematic understanding of how we come to understand the world in the first place. Surely it is not as simple as the naive realist "self-object" dichotomy, but requires at least a third instance, or perhaps a transcendental element if we are non-realists.
So apart from "scientific" reasoning - a process of guessing a general mechanism, deducing its particular consequences, then checking to see if the behaviour of the world conforms as predicted - what are these other methods? Can you explain them?
To say the world is intelligible is to say it is structured in terms of local instances of global rules. And so any method is going to boil down to seeking the global rules that can account for local instances. Where's the variety there?
So I guess what matters here, then, is the subject matter. Different subjects require different equipment, methods, specialization, etc. The point being made, though, is what exactly is the subject matter of philosophy, in particular metaphysics, that makes it a legitimate attempt to understand the world, and why this subject matter is usually unable to be studied by more..."mainstream" science.
We can be realists here and go Aristotelian, and say that metaphysics studies being qua being, or being itself. The most general attempt to understand the world. But as it is currently practiced today, metaphysics is quite different from any other sciences. It doesn't have to go out and explore the world like all the other sciences do. There aren't really any "discoveries" within metaphysics, just explanations of what we already see on a day-to-day basis. Why is it that this field is such a black sheep?
But science and philosophy are different because their methods are different. Specifically, philosophy is not falsifiable. Hasn't this all been settled, and can't we just move on?
Quoting darthbarracuda
The method by which we reach our understanding of the world has been fully analyzed. Popper has a lot to say about this.
Yes, the business of measurement is various.
But I thought you were saying there are other methods of seeking intelligibility itself - methods that aren't just the general method of scientific reasoning.
Again, my position is that the world is intelligible - it is actually is structured in terms of constraints and freedoms, global rules that shape local instances.
And so it is not surprising that once human thinking aligns with that - once that is our conscious method of inquiry - then we find the world to be surprisingly easy to make sense of.
And on this score, science is just applied metaphysics. It is a historical continuation of a method to its natural conclusion. Science has just taken the intelligible categories of Greek metaphysics - the dichotomous questions like is existence atomistic or is it holistic - and polished up the mathematical expression of the ideas, and the ability to then check them through a process of supporting measurements.
You can rightfully point out that the purpose for even thinking this way about existence is a further matter of complication.
The point about metaphysical/scientific reasoning is that it is meant to be dispassionate. It is meant to be the view of reality that transcends any particular human or social interests. By replacing gods, spirits, customs and values with a naked system of theory and measurement, the thought was that this would allow the Cosmos to speak its own truth, whatever that might be. We would see its reality unfiltered.
But of course it is really difficult in fact to suppress all our own natural interests when investigating the world. It is obvious that even science embeds a strong human interest in gaining a mechanical/technological control over material existence. So science, in practice, is not as dispassionate as it likes to pretend.
But still, the reasoning method is designed to let the Cosmos speak for itself as much as might be possible. It is objective in offering ways to take ourselves out of the equation as much as we let it.
So then, on that score, scientific reasoning conjures up its own Romantic other. If cosmological reasoning - the kind that targets intelligible existence - has the goal of being dispassionate, then of course that opens the door to the notion of a counter-method based on being humanly passionate in trying to answer the same questions.
So everything reason does, Romanticism would want to do the opposite.
Instead of objectivity, let's have maximum subjectivity. Instead of careful measurement of the world, now any imagined idea about the world is good enough. Instead of the formal mathematical expression of ideas, let's try opaque poetic grandiloquence. Instead of expecting global intelligibility, let's expect global incoherence.
So it is an inevitable part of rationality's success at developing itself into a tight self-supporting methodology that it should also, automatically, produce its Bizarro world other.
I guess on that score, science could be said to have only room for the one method, modern philosophy - having less culturally patrolled boundaries - certainly has room for the two.
But that is my analysis of the variety of methods that might exist in philosophy. I haven't heard what other methods of "reasoning" you have in mind when it comes to the standard issue approach of intelligibility-seeking metaphysics.
Quoting darthbarracuda
So it is important to you that there be a difference? Are you seeking to erect a cultural fenceline even if it need not exist? This is what I find weird about your stance.
Or I guess not. It is daunting if it is the case that to do metaphysics in the modern era requires one to actually have a deep knowledge of science and maths as well. That's a lot of work.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Nope. That seems an utterly random statement to me. Do you have an example of current metaphysics papers of this kind?
I don't really understand what you have in mind when you say "romanticism" or "PoMo". Do you not appreciate Spinoza, Descartes, Husserl, Heidegger, etc? Only some? Only those who aren't easily fitted into your pragmatism?
Quoting apokrisis
Well, yes and no. If measurement is the only way of understanding the world (what I see as empiricism), then either is must be shown how philosophy utilizes measurement, or it must be seen with skepticism.
Outside of measurement, I'm not sure. Surely we need some kind of cognitive architecture to be able to even measure to begin with, something Aristotle, Aquinas, or Plato would have called the Intellect/Soul/Mind/etc.
Usually philosophy utilizes things like counterfactual reasoning, thought experiments, etc. Other fields use these as well. These are generally "fuzzy" in their nature, though. When a philosopher thinks up something like, let's say, Neo-Platonism, it's extremely abstract and fuzzy.
If it can be modelled, then presumably it can be theoretically seen in action, i.e. able to be measured. Metaphysical things, on other hand, seem to be able to be at least conceptualized but never actually seen outside of how they manifest in other things. For example, you can't imagine a "constraint" without associating this with various other things, whether that be a metaphorical image of a fence, or a set of numerals, or anything else. Similarly, we can't imagine a "property" without associating this with an object. We can't imagine "God", we can only know what he isn't. We can't imagine what these metaphysical "forces" (that structure reality) by-themselves - if we could, then a physicist or some other scientist would be studying them as a specimen in-themselves.
In other words, a constraint is a totally different kind of thing from a zebra. The latter is studied by biologists, the former (as it is-itself) the metaphysician.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm referring to contemporary realist analytic metaphysics.
It occurs to me that an additional necessary condition of something being a story (additional to the conscious teller and conscious listener) is that the sentences be in the indicative mode of speech, not the imperative or interrogative.
Instructions to a computer are in the imperative mode (I command you to do this!).
All celebrated figures are celebrated for some reason. So I wouldn't dismiss anyone or any movement out of hand. But yes, I am saying something much stronger than merely that romanticism does not fit easily with rationalism. I'm saying it is the maximally confused "other" of rationalism.
And pragmatism - if understood properly - is the best balance of the realist and idealist tendencies in philosophy. So it already incorporates phenomenology, or the irreducibility of being in a modelling relation with the world, in its epistemology.
Science - as a method - isn't naive realism or even bald empiricism. It is rational idealism. It is a method that starts by accepting knowledge is radically provisional, and then working out how to proceed from there.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Do you think philosophy could have got going if philosophers were blind, deaf and unfeeling? Of course measurement is already involved in having sensations of the world.
The point of philosophy is that ideas and perceptions are so biologically and culturally entangled with each other in ordinary life. So as a method, it works to separate these two aspects of the modelling relation from each other. It started by showing sensation (biological measurement) could be doubted, just as beliefs (cultural ideas) could be doubted.
Then eventually this evolved into science where acts of measurement - turning an awareness of the world into numbers read off a dial - became the "objective" way to operate. But calling measurement objective is a little ironic given that it is so completely subjective now in being dependent on understanding the world only in terms of dial readings. Science says, well, if in the end there is only our phenomenology, our structure of experience, then lets make even measurement something consciously a phenomenological act.
Quoting darthbarracuda
If we are talking about metaphysics, there is nothing fuzzy about its reasoning method. The dichotomy or dialectic says quite simply that possibility must divide into either this or that - two choices that can be seen to be mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive.
The only thing "fuzzy" is that people then take up different positions about the result of this primary philosophical act. You can treat a dichotomy as either a problem - only one possibility can be true, the other must be false. Or the opposite to such monism is to embrace the triadic holism that resolves the division - adopt the hierarchical view where dichotomies are differentiations that also result then in integration. In splitting vague possibility apart into two crisply complementary things, that then is what becomes the basis of an existence in which the contrasts can mix. The world is the everything that can stand between two poles that represent mutually-derived extremum principles.
Quoting darthbarracuda
WTF? Have you ever taken a biology class? Are you so completely unaware of the impact that science's understanding of constraints has had on metaphysics? Next you will be saying Newton and Darwin told us a lot about falling apples and finch beaks, and contemporary philosophy shrugged its shoulders and said "nah, nothing to see here folks".
Quoting darthbarracuda
It's true that those employed in philosophy departments struggle to produce anything much that feels new these days. The real metaphysics of this kind is being done within the theoretical circles of science itself. The people involved would be paid as scientists.
Yet starting with Ernst Mach, there is a real tradition of encouraging a useful level of interaction. And analytic types fit in pretty well as interpreters, critics and synthesisers. At the bleeding edge of ideas, any academic boundaries are in practice rather porous.
I think you may just have an idea that science is somehow basically off track and you need a metaphysical revolution led by philosophers to rescue it.
So instead you see a world where science charges along, and metaphysicians look more like sucker fish hitching a ride, picking off some crumbs. And because it doesn't match your preconception, you read that picture wrong.
Do you have any examples of this?
Quoting apokrisis
It might have had a great affect on your particular conception of metaphysics - again, we're having a meta-philosophical debate here, and your version of metaphysics is not automatically the gold standard. Analytic metaphysics today is largely independent of these kinds of debates, although definitely evolution poked a hole in Aristotle's natural kind ideas.
Quoting apokrisis
Bingo. They are to be considered scientists. Theoretical physics. Why not just call it this and eliminate the confusion?
What legitimate differences are there between your conception of metaphysics and theoretical physics?
Quoting apokrisis
On the contrary I think most scientists don't really care about philosophical problems, at least not enough to publish anything substantial about it and instead stick to what they were trained to do. Nobody pays you to think about the world, they pay you for results that can be applied to the economy in some way, and everyone's gotta pay the bills. Of course they can, and have done so, especially in the beginning of the 20th century. I just don't see this happening today.
As I've already said, I see metaphysics and science as united by a common method of reasoning - the presumption the world is intelligible because it is actually rationally structured in a particular way.
So the only possible other choice - given that method has become so sharply defined and unambiguous - is whatever is its sharp "other". And I am afraid we do see that other showing its Bizzaro head and claiming to be doing Bizzaro metaphysics (and also crackpot science, of course).
Quoting darthbarracuda
That is sadly true on the whole as I say. Even philosophy and fine art courses push the modern marketability of the critical thinking skills they teach.
But still, if we are talking about who is best equipped to do metaphysical-strength thinking these days, that is a different conversation.
What is this particular way? The semiotic trifold?
Quoting apokrisis
Again, you have any examples?
Quoting apokrisis
I'd wager probably those who have a background in both science and philosophy, and the history of both.
That is what I argue is the most penetrating model of it, yes.
Yes, I see your point, but now we're not talking about the meaning of "intelligibility", we're talking about the meaning of "the world". I don't think "the world" is a strange concept at all. It implies a unity of all that is. Of course it has been mostly replaced by "the universe", and now the reality of this unity has been called into question by some, with concepts such as "multiverse". But to deny the reality of the universe, is not to question the intelligibility of "the universe", it is to deny that this concept represents anything real. Sometimes it is the case that a highly useful, and therefore intelligible concept, doesn't represent anything real, like the circle evidently doesn't represent anything real, it's conceptual only. But this ideal, is a very useful standard, for judging real things, with respect to how closely they approximate the ideal circle.
I happen to believe that "the world", or "the universe", as an expression of the oneness, or unity of being, is highly intelligible. So when we ask about "the world", we are not asking about this or that phenomenon, we are asking about the totality of phenomena, as a whole. Does it make sense to talk about the totality of phenomena? Can they all be classed together, as one category? Sure it makes sense, because I've already classed it together, as the "phenomena".
But what if we knew of something which could not be classed with the other phenomena? How could we establish consistency, saying that the world is a unity of all, yet there is something which cannot be classed with the others?
Quoting StreetlightXThis is just like Plato's "the good". The good, as described in The Republic, is what makes intelligible objects intelligible, like the sun makes visible objects visible. It is as you say, that background set of interests, the purpose, which directs the intellect toward understanding this, and not toward that Whatever it is which becomes intelligible to an individual intellect, is dependent on one's interests
Quoting darthbarracudaRight, measurement must be viewed with skepticism. All forms of measurement are methods of comparing one thing to another. The validity of such comparisons must be analyzed. This means that all forms of measurement should be scrutinized.
Quoting apokrisis
Measurement need not be subjective. It gains objectivity through an understanding of what the "dial readings" mean. The dial reading may mean something to you, and something different to me, depending on our purpose, what we are using it for. But if we look at how the dial reading was produced, what it actually signifies, here we find objectivity.
It's hard to be particular because the ways of expressing the generalised confusion of romanticism are so various. But anything panpsychic like Whitehead, or aesthetic like SX cites. I don't mind theistic approaches because they stick to a Greek framework of simplicity and so can deal with the interesting scholarly issues - right up to the point where God finally has to click in.
Again, who are you talking about in particular?
Quoting darthbarracuda
What you might be talking about just keeps getting muddier to me.
The late E.J. Lowe, Jonathan Schaffer, Tuomas Tahko, Ted Sider, Susan Haack, Michael J. Loux, the late David Lewis, Peter van Inwagen, Timothy Williamson, Amie Thomasson, Sally Haslanger, David Chalmers, Kit Fine, D. M. Armstrong, Trenton Merricks, Eli Hirsch, Ernest Sosa, Daniel Korman, Kathrin Koslicki, Jaegwon Kim, etc.
The analytics.
Quoting apokrisis
You read Heidegger, Husserl, the idealists?
This encompasses everything from realist (particularly direct ones), anti-realist (e.g. post-modern accounts of identity and meaning) and probably idealistic ones which view the world as a question a brute experience.
Yep. Most of those I would be in deep disagreement with. But now because they represent the reductionist and dualistic tendency rather than the romantically confused.
That is why I am a Pragmatist. As I said, reductionism tries to make metaphysics too simple by arriving at a dichotomy and then sailing on past it in pursuit of monism. The result is then a conscious or unwitting dualism - because the other pole of being still exists despite attempts to deny it.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Not with any great energy. I'm quite happy to admit that from a systems science standpoint, it is quite clear that the three guys to focus on are Anaximander, Aristotle and Peirce. Others like Kant and Hegel are important, but the ground slopes away sharply in terms of what actually matters to my interests.
So any metaphysics which deny this, such as the realist who argues the object-in-itself or the post-modernist who argues discourse in-itself, are (supposedly) missing the truth that are world is caused through metaphysics, that logic (supposedly) means our world.
Why is this reductionism a bad thing, what is this dichotomy, and what kind of monism do you suppose they are attempting to find?
Quoting apokrisis
Heidegger is extremely important, yo. He owes so much to Aristotle and yet also diverges from him fundamentally. Outside of philosophy he is also very influential in cognitive science programs, particularly those focusing on attention and perception.
It conflicts with the popular sides of the metaphysical divide. The materialists don't like it because it denies their separation of logic and the world. On the other hand, many immaterialists and anti-realists don't like it because it subsumes logical meaning into the world.
How about that it is constantly pointing to a map and not the terrain? If the logic was the terrain.. then please let me know how logic magically turns into sensation and internal experience. I know, I know..it's just my piddly dualistic thinking..
I'd say you are strawmanning. No-one said logic turned into sensation and experience. Under an argument which considers logic a constraining force of causality, it's always consider to be within the world. Sensation and experience were never separate to logic or the world in the first place. They don't need to turn into anything to be there. If logic has always been the terrain, it doesn't need to shift from a map to terrain.
I don't get how logic is sensation then. I'm all ears.
Any secondary literature that talks about my primary interests - Anaximander, Aristotle and Peirce - is going to be interesting to me. And the secondary literature around Aristotle is of course vast. He is the context for metaphysics, so every camp has to have something to say on that.
But we have strayed away from the OP.
The speculative/contentious point that I make there is the one that is represented by Anaximander and Peirce, rather than Aristotle. And that is that the Cosmos is intelligible because it itself represents a creative process that can be understood as the bootstrapping development of intelligibility.
So as a metaphysical position, it is "way out there". :)
But also, it is a holistic way of thinking about existence which is pretty scientific now.
So systems science or natural philosophy is an Aristotelean four causes tradition that indeed detours through German idealist philosophers like Schelling. And then Peirce makes the connection between symbol and matter as the way to operationalise the four causes in the way modern science can recognise. Formal and final purpose become top-down constraints that shape bottom-up material and effective freedoms. And constraints become the symbolised part of nature - the information that is the memory of a system or dissipative structure.
So the intelligibility of nature is a consequence of nature itself being a fundamentally semiotic or "mind-like" process. That is why Peirce described existence as the generalised growth in reasonableness.
But calling it mind-like is really only to stress how far out of Kansas we are when it comes to standard issue reductionist realism which only wants to acknowledge a reality born of material and efficient cause. So calling it mind-like isn't to invoke a phenomenological notion or mind, nor the dualist notion of mind, but instead semiotics own idea of mindfulness, which is quite different in its own way metaphysically.
It is the structure of sensation. And sensation without structure feels like nothing (well, like vagueness to be more accurate).
So if the world is logically structured, then that is the structure sensation needs to develop to be aware of the world.
And the world itself must be logically structured as how else could it arrive at an organisation that was persistent and self-stable enough for there to be "a world", as opposed to a vague chaos of disorganised fluctuations?
I notice you self-justified "Logic" with "logic" and moved the topic away from sensation. You said: "So if the world is logically 'structured' then that is the structure sensation needs to develop to be aware of the world'. Well, that is not sensation, that is the structure in which sensation works within, not the sensation itself.
Sensation "just is" part of the same realm of logic and everything else, rather than being "just not" of the same realm under mind/body dualism. Sensations aren't separate to the world and logic. They are all part of the same system.
Then same response as Apo.
Sensation and logic are what then? The same part of what system?
Well, I was arguing his metaphysics.
Logical realm-- things of the same type which are connected and interact. Sort of like either "mind" or "body" in substance dualism. Or "material" under materialism. Only it has a triform--logic (semiotics, symbols), body (objects) and mind (experiences).
So you say. But good luck with a psychology which is not focused on a structure of distinctions as opposed to your panpsychic pixels.
But these three things are given as brute facts then, and are not explained except as "just there" and essentially this conflates to panpsychism but apparently a panpsychic trinity instead of a strict monism or dualism. Either way, if panpsychists say that matter is mind, and that this can be logically configured and measured using semiotic methods, how is the panpsychist different from the pragmatic semiotic theorist?
I guess I will give a similar response to Willow.. How is the panpyschist that different from a pragmatic semiotic theorist if both take experience as a brute fact? Or does Willow describe your position incorrectly? Semiotics, body, and mind are not the brute triad facts that interact and make reality?
The semiotic theorist doesn't agree with this. A symbol is not a mind. The pixels on the screen might by symbolic, but they are not conscious beings. Experience might be a brute fact, but it's not a brute fact everywhere (and most critically, for the semiotic theorist, these brute facts have a logical structure; there can't be these facts without the first having the logic).
The distinction between panpsychism and non-reductionist realism is also similar. Such a realism understands experience to be brute fact, it just doesn't say it's given with all matter.
This is a really thin distinction if any.. But I'll go along with your pseudo-distinction if that makes you feel better or to have a better grasp on the issue..
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
This is giving short thrift to panpsychists like (presumably) Whitehead, who clearly had a logic for his bits of "occasions of experience". Panpsychists aren't just 'free for allists'. Rather, they too probably think that the occasions of experience that are fundamental (matter/experience bits) and then are shaped by logical structures to form various types of experiential structures.
I would put "experience" in quote marks to show that even to talk about it is already to turn it into a measurable posited within a theoretical structure.
So the main difference is that you are taking experience as a brute fact. Essentially you are being a naive realist about your phenomenological access. Qualia are real things to you.
I would take qualia as being the kinds of facts we can talk about - given a suitable structure of ideas is in place.
Your approach is illogical. Either it is homuncular in requiring a self that stands outside "the realm of brute experience" to do the experiencing of the qualia. Or the qualia simply are "experiential", whatever the heck that could mean in the absence of an experiencer.
My way is logical. It is the global structure of observation that shapes up the appearance of local observables. And these observables have the nature of signs. They are symbols that anchor the habits of interpretation.
So in talking about qualia - the colour red, the smell of a rose - this is simply how pixellating talk goes. It is something we can learn to do by applying a particular idea of experience to the business of shaping up experience's structure. If I focus hard in the right way, I can sort of imagine redness or a rose scent in a disembodied, elemental, isolated, fashion as the qualia social script requires. I can perform that measurement in terms of that theory and - ignoring the issues - go off believing that a panpsychic pixels tale of mind is phenomenologically supported.
The world is vague, not specific forms of the world. Minds and bodies don't pre-exist their logical structure. Bodies and minds are two categories of caused states in the world, constituted in particular logical structure.
There are no "formless fundamental bodies and experience bits" which are shaped in logic. Such a thing makes no sense-- bodies and minds have a logical structure. They cannot be prior to that logical constraint.
I should point out that apo is using "brute fact" differently than I am. I mean it in the sense that experiences are thought to be state of the world, as proposed to some "illusion" or transcendent form.
Apo is using it in the context of the question of perception and explanation-- i.e. how do we explain the presence of these existing experiences? What causes them? How do they mean? What makes them experiences rather than something else?
So intention, attention, thinking, sensation, feelings, emotions, and all these things which are normally associated with mind, and are properly "mind-like", are irrelevant to apokrisis' metaphysics. Apokrisis has assumed a nonsense form of Logic, which operates within the wold, acting to structure it, operating independently of a mind.
You misinterpreted me. I never meant that each of the trinity of the triad is there in some formless way, but that it is indeed the material root or cause. You tend to strawman a lot there Willow.
Then use "sense" or basic perception if experience is too vague or too complex a notion for your material cause.
Quoting apokrisis
Oh come now. A baby or animal doesn't have brute fact experiences? It only becomes experience through some sort of linguistic filter? Blah.
Quoting apokrisis
You simply state the problem, but it doesn't go away. Actually this is the basis of the Hard Problem of Consciousness in the first place. By stating the problem in some sort of dismissive way, the problem itself does not disappear.
Quoting apokrisis
See, this is where lose you. That literally does not make sense to me. You have to explain that better to be relevant in the conversation. As I interpret that when you say "observation that shapes.." you are committing the very fallacy of a homuncular that you accuse me of. When you say "appearance of local observables" it sounds again, like you are committing the fallacy. And then you move the topic all together to signs which does not explain the observation itself, or the appearance of local observables, which to me just seems like a fancy way to say "experience". It's as if you briefly mention the brute fact of experience as material cause but overlook this very fact in your theory by wanting to focus so much on the formal cause. By the way, I am not unsympathetic to semiosis as a way to hash out the formal causes in a modelling format, but I am noticing a trend to stick to the formal and not look at the material.
Good points.
Totally with you there. It is related to the Greek 'nous' as being on the one hand, the individual intellect, but on the other, the intelligible principle that is the source of the order of the cosmos. That is how the individual's grasp of reason can be like a key that can turn in the lock of the order. That is the basis of the idea of intelligibility.
Which, I think, is a generally Kantian point isn't it? So you're saying that, in speaking of 'qualia', you're already turning them into what basically amounts to an abstraction; whereas the real discipline consists of understanding 'the process of abstraction' itself, right?
I know. You didn't interpret the triad as formless. The problem is you envision parts of triad coming out of fundamental formless substance of mind and body. As if there were, before minds and body were constrained by logical structure, a formless mind and body.
My objection to your argument is going the other way to what you interpreted. I'm saying your formless bits of mind and body are incoherent to the semiotic theorist. The problem is not that you've interpreted the triad as formless, it is you are saying mind and body somehow have presence outside the triad.
The semiotic theorist is bumping up against your substance dualism again. You've introduced the mind and body catergories of substance dualism and are now trying to understand the semiotics theorist in those terms. It's not going to work. The semotic theorist rejects the dualism fundamental substances of mind and body.
Yes, there is incoherence, but it is coming from the semiotics side, at least as I see it at this point. How is by positing "triad" vs. "dual" you are solving the problem? Panpsychists essentially say the dualism dissolves in the fact that matter is experiential. They have to bite the bullet regarding the idea that experience is just always there. How is the triad dissolving the problem besides simply explaining "formal cause formal cause formal cause" and using the word "illusion" every once in a while? Like elimintive materialists, but for much different reasons, they must explain the "illusion" and how this illusion even comes about from the triad.
If matter has subjectivity, then why don't animals have it?
In terms of the "hard problem," semiotic theory considers it either incoherent or irrelevant. Since qualia doesn't have an apparent logical structure, there's nothing to say about it with the constraints of logic. It's not needed to talk about how experiences are logically constrained to a form, so it sort of a pointless detour.
"Quaila" is just bad metaphysics for the semiotic theorist because it doesn't reflect a logical constraint on the world. It doesn't tell us how the world is formed, so it's irrelevant to describing what matters (at least that's how the story goes. Of course, the immaterialists, anti-realists and non-reducitve materialists have other things to say, but that's a whole range of different arguments).
Pardon me if I missed this point earlier, I'm traveling around and on my phone.
Do we? Might it not be the other way around: that minds are logic dependent?
Whitehead was not a panpsychist, but a pan-experientialist; a distinction which Whitehead himself was at pains to emphasize.
You miss the point. No matter how we might refer to dasein or whatever, in pointing to it, we are already constructing a conceptualised distance from it. We are introducing the notion of the self which is taking the view of the thing from another place.
So even phenomenology has an irreducible Kantian issue in thinking it can talk about the thing in itself which would be naked or primal experience. Any attempt at description is already categoric and so immediately into the obvious problems of being a model of the thing. You can't just look and check in a naively realistic way to see what is there. Already you have introduced the further theoretical constructs of this "you" and "the thing" which is being checked.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Again, to talk about animals having just brute fact experiences is both a convincing theoretical construct, but still essentially a construct.
How do we imagine it to be an aware animal? Using reason, we can say it is probably most closely like ourselves in a least linguistic and self-conscious state - like staring out the window in a blank unthinking fashion. So we can try to reconstruct a state that is pre-linguistic. It doesn't feel impossible.
But the point of this discussion is that it is humans that have a social machinery for structuring experience in terms of a logical or grammatical intelligibility. We actually have an extra framework to impose on our conceptions and our impressions.
This is why there is an issue of how such a framework relates to the world itself. Is the machinery that seems epistemically useful for structuring experience somehow also essentially the same machinery by which the world ontically structures its own being? Is logic an actual model of causality in other words?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Or you have to understand better to keep up with the conversation. Definitely one or the other. :)
Could someone explain to me what is wrong with the homuncular approach? People speak as if this is some big fallacy, but until the homuncular approach is proven wrong, why should we be afraid of it?
Quoting JohnNo, I don't see how it could be that way. Logic is a process of thinking, reasoning. Clearly thinking and reasoning is what minds do, and it is not the case that thinking and reasoning is a process which starts without a mind, and then proceeds to produce a mind. I think that such an idea requires a misguided definition of "mind".
You assume your own conclusion that logic is dependent on mind, by saying that logic is a process of thinking or reasoning. Logic is what inherently constrains our thinking and reasoning; we don't actually know 'where it comes from'; how could we? A set of principles of logic is a formalization and/or formularization of those inherent constraints, a formalization that has come about via processes of thinking or reasoning; but which is not itself a process of thinking or reasoning, but is a set of principles that is understood to govern processes of thinking or reasoning.
The most often argument against homunculi is it results in infinite regress. Each instance of experience is given in terms of the identity of a different being, so it results in an endless run of homunculi with homunculi.
What I perceive really of a homunculus in my head. But then that homunculus has experience, it's experiencing my perception, so it needs Its own homunculus to be experiencing it's perception. The loop repeats ad-infinitum.
Strictly speaking, this argument isn't quite enough to exclude homunculi, at least in what it describes (why couldn't there by an endless transfinite run of homunculi? They could exist). It's just people think the idea is too absurd to consider.
But they read it as absurd of a reason. The homunculus is incoherent by identity. If my experience was of a homunculus, I wouldn't be myself. I would be merely watching a body which wasn't my own.
My conciousness would by irrelevant to the body I'm perceiving around me. And so it would be to the homunculus of every level. Each would not own their experience. It would belong to the homunculus on the higher level. Now since the line of homunculi is endless, it means the passing of ownership never terminates in the existence of an experiencing being.
The homunculus account of conciousness literally says no-one exists. Quaila never belongs to anyone.
Infinite regress. An explanation endlessly deferred is an explanation never actually given.
I don't see any infinite regress here. Let's say that there is something within me which I call "self", and this self experiences. Why would there need to be another self within that self, and so on? The self is within me, and carrying out the function of experiencing, why would there need to be another self within that self? As an analogy, let's say that there is a part within my computer which carries out the function X, why would you assume another part inside that part carrying out X, and so on.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
You are misrepresenting. No one would say that my experience is an experience of a homunculus experiencing, what they would say is that there is an inner part of me which is experiencing, and this inner part is the homunculus experiencing. it is not that I am experiencing a homunculus experiencing, that would be absurd. It is that I am experiencing, and this experiencing, is the inner part of me, the homunculus, carrying out the function of experiencing. I am breathing, but it is my lungs which are carrying out this function of breathing. No infinite regress with respect to breathing.
That's an interestingly weird result, since it is the very homunculus itself which is meant to be the self in the first place. Does qualia "belong to anyone" in any but a purely formal sense (accepting for the sake of argument that qualia 'them-selves' even exist in some other than a merely formal sense)?
No, you are redefining "logic" to suit your purpose. Logic doesn't constrain our thinking, it is thinking, a particular type of thinking, reasoning. Without thinking and reasoning there is no logic. So you could say that thinking constrains itself, through logic, but that is not what you're saying. You're saying that logic constrains thinking, and that is false, because you are making logic, which is a passive tool of thought, into something which actively constrains thought.
There is a coherent distinction between thoughts, thinking and logic; the inherent 'something' that determines how we think and which we formulate as logical principles that are understood to govern thinking, thinking which is the production of thoughts. I think you are trying to dissolve these valid and useful distinctions in order to support your own agenda.
Just in case you misunderstand, I am not claiming that thinking must be strictly logical, we can think illogical thoughts, but we cannot take them seriously because they do not make sense. So this could not called real thinking, but rather senseless combinations of concepts. I'm also not saying that entities such as God are illogical, either; there is a perfectly coherent logic in theology.
But logic is not a "passive tool of thought"; on the contrary we cannot think cogently without it. If you think we can then present an example of cogent thought that is illogical.
I would make a version of that objection too
Why does my self have to be reduced to a homunculus within a body at all? Why exactly are we proposing the homunculus me rather than my body in the first place?
No doubt my experience is not my body, but that only points to the absudity of the homunculus. How does reducing my experience to the body of a homunculus rather than the one I perceive bring us any closer to giving us an account of my experience which is NOT a body?
Is not to be myself enough? To be an experience, to be qualia? Why are we even suggesting I need to be made up by an inner person in the first place? Is my experience only a function of an homunculus organ in my body?
This is why the homunculus account has the regress. If experience was to terminate at a person within my body, it would be reduced to that state of body-- lungs ( homoculus) would supposedly give a full account of breathing ( conciousness). The Being of conciousness is missing, as with any reductionist argument.
Proponents of the homunculus argument don't accept this. There must always be more it conciousness than the body which causes it. The "hard problem" which the homunculus is thought to be resolving actually applies equally to the homunculus. How can this mere organ ( homoculus) in my body account for my experience? It cannot. It falls to the same sword as the body we perceive.
This is false though, logical principles do not govern thinking. We choose which principles we wish to apply, and some may not be logical . You even admit to this:
Quoting John
If we can think illogical thoughts, then something other than logic is governing our thinking. Therefore logic is not understood to govern thinking, thinking often goes in illogical directions, invalid arguments are often produced. There is a multitude of fallacies. So you need to consider a different relationship between logic and thinking, because clearly we do not understand logic as governing thinking.
A tool is a effective cause. A logical constraint is a formal cause. So you are confusing your Aristotelean categories here.
Quoting John
I agree. It is the structural grounding that makes it even possible to act in a "thoughtful" way.
Of course you can go back before the development of formal language, and even grammatical speech, and argue that animals think without this "tool".
Yet in fact if you check the very structure of the brain, it is "logical" in a general dichotomistic or symmetry-breaking sense. It has an architecture that is making logical breaks at every point of its design.
It starts right with the receptive fields of sensory cells. They are generally divided so that their firing is enhanced when hit centrally, and their firing is suppressed by the same stimulus hitting them peripherally. And then to balance that, a matching set of cells does the exact reverse. This way, a logically binary response is imposed on the world and information processing can begin.
Then even when the brain becomes a big lump of grey matter, it still is organised with a dichotomous logic - all the separations between motor and sensory areas, object identity and spatial relation pathways, left vs right hemisphere "focus vs fringe" processing styles, etc.
It's the nature of mind/body dualism. Since the mind is considered a different realm to the body, what mind/body dualism cannot take seriously is the existence of conciousness. If conciousness were existing, then it would be of the same realm as bodies and there would by no opposed dualism.
The mind/body dualist rejection of existing qualia makes perfect sense when you consider their metaphysics say experience must have nothing to do with the world.
Quaila belongs by definition. I am my experience, not yours or anyone else's. You can never access my quaila no matter how much you feel or think like me. It's MY Being and cannot be anyone else's. That's what it means to exist as being of experience.
We have the full account of conciousness in the world everyone has been searching for; each conciousness, each instance of qualia, in-itself. We don't need brains or homunculi.
The mind/body dualist cannot accept this though, for it dissolves their dualism and the "hard problem."
You are ignoring the part where I suggested that what we might call "thinking illogical thoughts" is really nothing more than associating concepts or names or mental images that don't have relation of logical entailment between them together. And even those kinds of 'thoughts' must have some kind of associative logic (as with poetry) or they are nothing more than utter nonsense; just meaninglessly contiguous pictures created by language. They are certainly not cogent thoughts. And you haven't risen to the challenge to present a thought which is not logical, so that we can see what kind of things you have in mind when you say that thoughts are not necessarily logical.
As a cause of change in the wold. logic is a formal cause. But as we know, there are causes of causes, and thinking is the cause of this formal cause, which we call logic. Yes, logic is a formal cause, but it is not the formal cause of thinking. If we were to seek the cause of thinking, we would turn to final cause, which is itself a type of formal cause, but a distinct type. You do not seem to provide a proper separation between the vey distinct formal cause and final cause.
Quoting John
You've lost me in apparent contradiction. You say that we can think illogical thoughts, but this is not really thinking. We can establish mental relations "that don't have relation of logical entailment", but even those thoughts "must have some kind of associative logic". Do you see the contradiction?
The things is, thoughts can jump from one thing to the next, without any apparent logical association, as is evidenced by dreams. And this appears to be the way that brute animals think, their thoughts jump around, depending on what attracts their attention. The human being has the capacity to focus the attention, with intention, thus giving them the capacity to perform logical proceedings.
So this is my presentation of thoughts which are not logical, thoughts which jump around from one thing to another, with no apparent consistency or coherency. This inconsistency is due to the inability of an individual to focus one's attention. That is what is required to carry out a logical proceeding, to focus one's attention, on a particular subject, for a span of time. Without this, one may think, without logic. What is required in order to focus the attention is to exercise the power of intention over attention. That is what human beings do, which enables them to carry out logical proceedings.
You seem to want to deny the distinction between rational and irrational thought, this exercising the power of intention over attention, insisting that all thought must be in some way rational. But this is simply not the case, and there is clear evidence of this. What would you call this, what we call illogical thinking, if not a form of thinking? If we move to deny that this is thinking, as you seem to suggest, then we have nothing to call this. But clearly it is a form of thinking, and that's why we call it thus. Therefore it is you who is trying "to dissolve these valid and useful distinctions in order to support your own agenda", not I. I recognize that logic, and cogent arguments emerge from thinking, which is itself more of a random, "free" process, not constrained by logic.
You and apokrisis alike, seem to be obsessed with this preconceived notion that the freedom within, the local freedom, is necessarily constrained by a larger, global constraint system. But this is clearly not the case, if there are prior constraints on the local freedoms, these must be inherent within, and not of a global character at all. That is why we have substance dualism, to account for the two types of constraints, forms. We have constraints which are inherent within the local freedoms, denying that these freedoms are absolute, acting as upward causation, and we have global constraints, which act as downward causation. Apokrisis does not distinguish between internal and external constraints, and this is a real failing of that metaphysic.
If this were so, it would need to be encoded in the laws of physics or declared a new law of physics. For the moment, there is no indication that physical processes that create qualia and even any particular quale you might possess is inaccessible. Furthermore, there is no reason why I (with suitable augmentation) could not experience any of your qualia exactly.
So how then this does not answer the question at hand by bypasses it to go to an easier problem.
So, you are going to bypass this problem by ignoring it and go on to more answerable problems? Then you are not answering the question at hand. The naked primal experience is at hand. No one is saying you have to provide naked primal experience but explain it. You have not explained the dasein, you have only explained the formal structure for which it evolves. How dasein is generated from the triadic monism or what not is not explained. Even if it was, it would be an emeregence of non-dasein world into dasein world, and then you would have to explain how it is that an inner world of a subjective experience can come out of nowhere at X point in time.
I would argue that animals do have subjectivity- they have a "what it's like aspect". It may not be self-awareness though.
I would agree he is a pan-experientialist. Pan-experientialism is related to panpsychism. But if you do not agree with that, I can use pan-experientialist. Either way, the system has "occasions of experience" baked into it from the start, not emerging from nowhere at X time.
I wish you would. I have never seen an argument for qualia in animals beyond sentimental anthopomorphising.
Animals cannot create the sort of knowledge to possess qualia. If they could create "what it's like" knowledge, then they could create any sort of knowledge, including knowledge of themselves.
You forget that I was addressing the OP, not the Hard Problem.
But we've talked about the Hard Problem often enough. I agree that there is a limit on modelling when modelling runs out of counterfactuality. And this reinforces what I have been saying about intelligibility. To be intelligible, there must be the alternative that gets excluded in presenting the explanation. And once we get down to "raw feels" like redness or the scent of a rose, we don't have counterfactuals - like how red could be other than what it is to us.
But up until the limit, no problem. Or all Easy Problem.
And then - challenging your more general "why should it feel like anything?" - is my response. If the brain is in a running semiotic interaction with the world in a way that it is a model of being in that world, then why should it not feel like something? Why would we expect the brain to be doing everything that it is doing and yet there not be something that it is like to be doing all that?
Of course it requires a considerable understanding of cognitive neuroscience to have a feeling of just how much is in fact going on when brains model worlds in embodied fashion - way and above, orders of magnitude, the most complex knot of activity in the known Universe. But still, the Hard Problem for philosophical zombie believers is why wouldn't it be like something to be a brain in that precise semiotic relation to the world? Answer me that.
Panpsychism is a different kettle of fish. It just buries its lack of explanatory mechanism as far out of sight as possible. It says don't worry folks. Consciousness is this little glow of awareness that inhabits all matter. And that is your "explanation". Tah, dah!
And you've lost me in uncharitable interpretation: it should have been obvious by the way that I qualified what I wrote that I meant to say something like: "we can think what we might call "illogical thoughts"".
There is no contradiction in saying that thoughts might either be merely joined by associative logic (say they are thoughts of objects whose only connection is that they are green for example) or they are connected by logical entailment, such that one thought follows from another. Both can be understood to be logical forms of thought and thinking, in their different ways. But if I merely present a number of thoughts with nothing at all to connect them, then that would not really be thinking; it would just be presenting or laying out a set of random thoughts. It cannot be a process if it is just a series of disconnected thought events; so I say it cannot be counted as 'thinking'.
Now, after merely laying down some random thoughts or images we might engage in thinking about them to try to come up with some logical associations between them, but the mere presenting of them could not be said to be a process of thinking, but instead just a series of selections of whatever appears in the mind. You might want to argue that there are always subconscious associations; and there might well be; but thinking is usually understood to be a conscious and intentional process.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is clearly the case that both our thinking and what we think is "constrained by a larger global constraint system". What we can think is obviously both augmented and constrained by language, for a start. (Note: just to anticipate a possible misinterpretation I think you are likely to commit, I am not saying thought is impossible without language; it might be reasonable to claim that, but that would be a stronger claim than my argument relies on, so I don't need to make it here).
Language is also obviously constrained by actuality, by the nature of what is experienced. It also comes to constrain that experience; it is a reciprocal or symbiotic relation between perception and conception. For me that natural primordial symbiosis consists in the reception of, response to and creation of signs, and I suspect apokrisis would agree. This symbiosis just is semiosis, in other words. Also, I don't see why you think something "inherent within" cannot be something global. Signs are outside us, and we 'take them in'. Language is both external to us and within us, and the language of inner and outer is ultimately an expression of the relative, not of the absolute; what's the problem?
Yep. Symbiosis is a good way to think about it. It all has the causal interdependency that an ecological perspective presumes.
Experiences aren't generated separate to the triad monism. They are part of it. The "hard problem" misunderstands consciousness. It thinks it something separate to the world, outside its formal cause (from a semiotic theory perspective), so it just misses the boat completely in its analysis of experiences and the world.
Naked primal experience in the world just isn't a problem. In the sense the dualists means, it really does come out of nothing. Dasein emerged out of the absence of dasein (e.g. in terms of the dasein, "nothing" ). Experience doesn't have a formal cause separate to the world. That's what emergence means.
From a dualist perceptive (i.e. experience has a formal cause separate to the rest of the world), emergence isn't "unexplained," it's impossible. No account of consciousness works because the dualist considers it be outside and separate to the things that exist ( "body").
Such reasoning is a category error. The identity of qualia is a logical one, not one of causality. My qualia cannot by anyone else by definition.
If that were true, my experiences would have to be someone else. Not in the sense of thinking or feeling the same (that's perfectly possible), but in the sense of the logical object defined as me (I) being the logical object of somebody else (not-I). Even mistakes in understanding oneself can't get around this.
Let's say I mistake my experience for someone else, such that the thoughts and feelings "out there" are really mine. If that's true, I've merely misunderstood myself. What I thought was "not-I" was "I" all along. No-one else has the Being of my qualia.
See, here you approach the same contradiction. How can you set out a set of random thoughts without thinking? Any act of setting out thoughts is necessarily thinking. How could you set out thoughts without thinking? Where would these thoughts come from? A serious of disconnected thought events is necessarily an act of thinking because thoughts cannot be produced from anything else but thinking. You want to deny that this is thinking, but then the thoughts have no source, they come from nothing, or some random act which is not an act of thinking. But how could thoughts spring from some random act which is not an act of thinking? That's illogical, contradictory, to say that thoughts are produced from something other than an act of thinking.
Quoting JohnNow you contradict yourself again, here. You say that what we can think is constrained by language, then in brackets you say that it is not really constrained by language, thought extends beyond the constraints of language. Which do you believe is the case? Is thought constrained by language, or does it extend beyond the confines of language? If thought extends beyond the constraints of language, as you say in brackets, then your original claim, that what we can think is constrained by language, is clearly false.
Why keep contradicting yourself, in an effort to support an untenable position?
It is a consequence of the laws of physics that you, or any aspect of you, including your qualia, can be rendered exactly by a virtual reality generator. We don't know how to achieve that yet, but it is guaranteed possible under known physics.
Alternatively, we could make an AI that experiences your qualia, for whatever reason. Perhaps she wants to know what it feels like to be human.
Of course, it is not possible to render exactly your soul, because that does come under a different category i.e. "things that don't exist".
It's obvious that automatic association cannot properly be called 'thinking'.
I'm not going to waste any more time replying to false accusations of contradiction. Put your magnifying glasses on and read it again properly this time. :-}
Knowing what it's like to be me is possible-- that only takes someone have an experience which is understanding of what I feel or think. We have such experiences all the time.
But they will never BE me. This is not in some immaterial "soul sense", but in a worldly material one. My existing experiences will never be anyone else's. Contary to what the history of idealism and substance dualism would have us believe, my identity is a question of the world, not some separate realm irrelevant to its meaning.
I missed the part where I claimed that the exact rendering of your qualia would BE you.
No. It isn't.
The entire premise of your argument is that my qualia (my being) can be given in someone else (their being).
Supposedly, the virtual reality generator can render my presence exactly, create a repeated instance of my being. This is incoherent. Even if you copy everything about me, it will still be a different person than I. Creating a copy of any part of me, whether my body or qualia, is impossible.
8-)
Have a browse of the essays of Steve Talbott at the New Atlantis. He's not an advocate of semiotics as such, rather a kind of independent philosopher of biology, more aligned with Owen Barfield (although there is some commonality). Have a look in particular at Logic, DNA and Poetry, which touches on some of the themes suggested by the above quote. (He's a friendly guy, too, I wrote to him a few times and he was very responsive.)
Cheers, I'll have a read. I like some of Barfield's writings that I have come across.
You clearly want to change the topic from your qualia to your existence by conflating the two. "Being" and identity are interesting topics of course, but I'd rather avoid them as the conversation is inevitably bogged down by an adolescent attachment to the idea of one's uniqueness.
It might be useful to remind ourselves what qualia are. Consider a scientist who is a colour expert and a robot. Neither can detect blue due to a genetic and a wiring fault respectively. A doctor gives the scientist a pill that cures her, and an engineer fixes the wiring in the robot. They can both now detect blue, but only the scientist has the subjective sensation of blue. Only she has a "what it is like" experience. There are a couple of other interesting aspects of the scientist's quale of "blue": that she could not predict it, and that she can't describe it.
Both the robot and the scientist possess computationally universal hardware, which are by definition, equivalent. Both the computer and the brain have identical repertoires. So, what could bring about this difference?
By definition the scientist and robot do not possess equivalent hardware. One produces their quale of blue when given the pill, the other does not. The difference is already within their existence.
You ask what could bring about the difference, but we already know: a human body with the pill produced the scientist's blue quale, while in the case of the robot body, there was no production of quale.
That's the difference. The existence of quale as a result of an environment of objects.
According to physics your qualia are not unique, even without simulation. It's a consequence of the Bekenstein Bound in an infinite universe.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
If they both possess computationally universal hardware, then they are equivalent. If only the robot does, then that makes matters easier for the simulation. Once you achieve universality, there is nowhere else to go.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
No, the scientist and the robot are running different software. Qualia are a software feature. It cannot be anything else!
Ok, you refuse to acknowledge your contradictions. Let me explain this issue. It's quite straight forward, but metaphysically important. Your claim that logic constrains thinking cannot be upheld, because logic is a specialized way of thinking which is created by thinking itself. Therefore thinking is necessarily prior to logic, and not constrained by it. That thinking is constrained by logic is an illusion. Dispelling this illusion will open your mind to a vast component of reality, which this illusion has laid inaccessible to you, like Plato's cave people.
The freedom in thinking is described by the concept of free will, and it is an important aspect of reality which should be understood by anyone doing metaphysics. Just like moral principles, and the laws of the land, we are not constrained by the laws of logic, we willfully consent to them. This consent is described by the concept of free will.
When you assume, premise, that thinking is naturally constrained by logic, that it is inherently constrained in such a way, you remove the necessity for this free act of will. So you produce a metaphysics which represents thinking as just naturally constrained, without any reference to this act of will, which is an essential component of any such constraint system. That's the essential component which you and apokrisis are leaving out from your metaphysics. You fail to recognize, that such constraint systems must necessarily be willed into being. Because of this, such metaphysics avoids the very important issue of approaching the thing which does the willing.
This thing which does the willing is excluded from your reality, it is not real, and therefore not approached. That is why recognizing the true relationship between thinking and logic, is important. Once willing is understood as an essential aspect of such a constraint system, then this principle must be extended to all semiotic constraint systems. There is a very clear need to assume a thing which wills such a constraint system into existence.
Why not, if you define "qualia" as "what it's like"? Clearly, the computer, with the software must recognize what the image is like, to make the determination. But if you define "qualia" as "what 'it's like as experienced by a human subject", then obviously not.
My question would be, how do we produce a definition of "qualia" which excludes my experience of what it's like from being the same as your experience of what it's like.
Here's a passage from that article on "Logic, DNA and Poetry".
Although the focus is on "context", notice the last line, "...to select between words..": Poetry is a meaningful use of words, which, through careful word selection, provides a degree of ambiguity. The ambiguity allows freedom of interpretation. The freedom of interpretation allows the poetry to be relevant, meaningful, to the masses of people, despite the fact that I derive a different meaning than you do, from it. This is why we can discuss endlessly the meaning, or content of such art.
But the freedom has two sides, not only is there freedom to interpretation, but there is also freedom in composition. Freedom in composition is of the essence, because it is this freedom which allows for freedom of interpretation.
So where is experience IN the triad monism? If it was always there- panexperientialism. If it "comes about" how is it "semiotics doing their thing" on one side and "semiotics being experience" on the other?
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I don't know what you mean here. I don't want to misinterpret you and lead down more unnecessary rabbit holes of circular arguing. Much of my problem debating you I believe is clarity. If you can, would you please bullet point the exact things you think I am positing and then answer them beneath with your objections? I think that might be a more productive way to debate as it's hard for me to follow you at times, possibly due to the phrasing and wording you use.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
No, they don't think it's "impossible". It happens all the time WHEN there is already-a mind perceiving it (i.e. bricks become buildings, tropical storms become hurricanes, any physical process over time, etc.). Now, experience, DOES appear to be different than physical processes UNLESS one posits that the physical processes ARE in someway EXPERIENTIAL.
Not true; I don't exclude the self that does the willing at all. The self is free to think whatever it likes, within the constraints of logic, where 'logic' is taken in the broadest sense as comprising (at least) entailment and association). This doesn't mean that you cannot put any two ideas together, even if there is no apparent association between them, that is if you don't think of any association between them prior to or when putting them together. But the mind is very inventive and can no doubt find an association between any two ideas you like. But there must always be a logic of association. The ideas are associated by virtue of colour, shape, relationship with some common thing, size, whatever, the list is endless. Here's a challenge for you: present two ideas that have no possible association with one another. I bet you can't do it.
So, as I said, the self is free to think whatever it likes within the constraints of logic, and those very same logics constrain every self, just as the self is free to do whatever it wants within the constraints of gravity and the nature of the physical environment. Why should it be necessary that the self wills these logical constraint conditions into existence any more than it would be necessary that the self wills gravity and the nature of the physical world into existence? Why would you think the latter isn't as much a curtailment of free will as the former? Truth is, the very idea of freedom loses all its sense if you think it (or more accurately if youtry to think it: because you can't really think it) in a context of no constraint at all.
You are arguing:
1. Experience doesn't make sense in the same realm of bodies and other objects.
2. It is not bodies or any other object.
3. As a result, the accounts which say conciousness emerged are unsatisfactory because they don't say how the non-conscious turned into the conscious.
4. To have a successful account of conciousness, we need experience to be its own formal cause. Experience must always be present to begat following experiences. This avoids the problem of the non-conscious turning into the conscious.
My points are:
1. It is true experiences cannot be bodies (you are right in point 2. )
2. However, this truth does not impact on accounts of emergence because they don't equate experiences with bodies-- bodies are the different state that conciousness emerges from.
3. Emergence means the presence of a new and different state, not that bodies are experience. Under emergence, the non-conscious never becomes the conscious.
4. Thus, the major charge leveled against emergence is false. It never entails non-conscious states turning into conscious states. Emergence is constituted new states of consciousness following states of body.
5. Experiences are, therefore, "physical" (a state of the world caused by other states of the world) but are not bodies. The requirement of all objects to have consciousness is lifted. "Physical" experiences are there own state, rather than being equivalent to the processes of body.
6. Emergence is constituted by new distinct "physical" experiences following on "physical" bodies which are not experience.
The point of emergence is that experience is not always so. New states of consciousness appear out of previous states which are not consciousness.
If one rejects that the conscious can come out of the non-conscious, then they consider emergence impossible.
7. Semiotic theory holds the account of emergence. New states which are consciousness appear out of those which are not. Experience's place in triad is a particular state of the world with causal relationships to different states of the world. It not always there, but when it is, it is always itself.
Quoting JohnSee, this is the mistake I pointed you toward. You want to reduce the constraints of logic, to nothing other than a constraint of the physical environment. But this is completely wrong, the constraints of logic are self-imposed, they are necessary for a purpose, to understand. The constraints of the physical environment are not self-imposed, and they present us with a completely different type of necessity.
Quoting JohnThere is a particular type of necessity which exists within the physical wold, it is described by the laws of physics, and such principles. In order to understand the physical world, the thinking being must will into existence rules of thought, laws of logical necessity, which are consistent with the necessity which exists in the physical world around it.
If you consider a variation of Willow's proposition of contingency, the world does not have to be the way it is, it could have been existing in many different ways, with many different possible laws of nature. The living being, when life came into existence in this world, must have been capable of adapting to any possible world which it might be born into. Therefore its mode of thinking cannot have been fixed by any specific form of logic, it must be free to produce logic according to the necessities (laws of nature) of the physical world it has been born into.
Quoting John
Yes, I believe that this is a valid point. But the point I am making is that there is a real need to differentiate between the constraints which are imposed on the living being from its environment, and the constraints which are inherent within that living being. These two types of constraint cannot be reduced to one category of similar type constraints. The reason that they are completely distinct is that the external constraints act to limit our freedoms, while the internal constraints are what allow us to maximize our freedom, in relation to the restrictions of the external constraints. Therefore they are completely opposed, and cannot be reduced to two of the same kind. The external constraints limit our freedom, while the internal constraints maximize our freedom.
That makes no sense. I get that "emergence means the presence of a new a different state". But it does not follow that non-conscious never BECOMES conscious.. You just said that there is a presence of a new state- presumably the very thing (consciousness) that does not "become". Those are two opposing ideas. One that non-conscious does not become conscious and one where new states come from previous states.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
This I agree with and hence I am disagreeing with your argument.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Right, I get this, but as you stated, I don't get how consciousness comes out of non-consciousness. I get how new states come out of new states constructed IN conscious experience. I get how physical things may even begat physical things "prior" to consciousness. I just do not get how physical things beget consciousness, which is the only thing we know which constructs the very world where things emerge in the first place. Prior to this, physical things are "being" or "doing their thing" if you will. But what is this mental "stuff" that is "what it's like to be something" otherwise known as experience?
You really need to read more carefully; you're "pointing" me to a "mistake" I didn't make at all, based on something you apparently think I said, that I didn't say at all. I was merely drawing an analogy between the two kinds of constraint.
I know that what’s dualism holds, but emergence rejects the primacy of consciousness.
Since consciousness is a new state of the world, it is never the states prior to it. The cause of consciousness can never be the emergent state of consciousness. Instead of “becoming,” where previously non-conscious things become conscious, there is only “emergence” of new states which were never there beforehand.
So it does follow that the non-conscious will never become conscious. My body will never be my experience. The non-conscious states which preceded my experience can never be a state of of awareness— if it were otherwise, it would not be “non-conscious.”
This also holds for all levels of panpsychism where consciousness is emergent. Consider a brick. Does it have states of awareness? Is the object of a brick a generator of consciousness like the human body? If so, the brick is in the same boat as us. Its body will never be its experience. The same is true of atoms. And so on and so on, for any non-conscious object there might be. If an object is “non-conscious,” it cannot “become conscious” because that would mean it was a different (conscious) object entirely.
Emergence entails that a new state (consciousness) is never the prior state (non-conscious).
Dualism cannot gasp this idea because it begins with the primacy of consciousness. The subject (be it a human, brick or atom), is first and foremost a being of awareness. It can’t consider, for example, that I was originally two cells with no experience at all. If I was given without consciousness at any point, the given states would simply not be me (at least that’s how the story goes).
This is why dualism read emergence as a question of “becoming.” To maintain the primacy of consciousness, the “non-conscious” must have really been conscious all along. Any object which causes consciousness, therefore, must retroactively “become” an entity of consciousness (despite the contradiction). It’s the only way to avoid entities existing prior to and outside their own conscious states.
That's the primacy of consciousness which the emergent account rejects. Under emergent consciousness, there is no "construction" by consciousness. Our world is not made be consciousness at all. Some states of the world are consciousness. In some instances we might say a conscious state is involved in a casual relationship, but that's it. Otherwise consciousness means nothing for the world.
The "mental stuff" is the existence of a conscious state. "What is it like" is searching for the being of consciousness-- not descriptions of "red," but the existence of being aware of "red." As such this has no description because any description is just words. No matter how I describe experience (even if it's in the first person), it will still only be a description. My telling of the red I saw will never be my seeing of red.
Part of the emergence account is the acceptance that the "mental stuff" or "what is it like" has no description. In "material objects (i.e. things observed in the world)", it has no form. It's it own thing-- experiences which exist. We can't get any closer than such pointers in language. The being of experience is felt, not described.
Yes, so it's about as "silly" as panpsychism isn't it? There is this mental stuff which just "exists" but it emerges from non-consciousness at point X time. There is a genie that comes out of the bottle when the right combination of emergence stuff happens..What is it, then that the world is before mental stuff? That too cannot be described with any certainty except mathematical models and thus we are stuck with a genie that came out of mathematical models. It has no efficacy or about just as much cache as panpsychism.. It explains nothing and its only appeal is it seems to conform to our naive common sense version of "first non-conscious' and then "conscious". It really says little, if anything about what mental stuff is other than the strangest most unique property in the universe- one that allows for all other properties to be known, that gives sensation, that allows for thought, imagination, and the other cognitive abilities that animals have and even gives us the ability to understand all other properties is simply like a particle or a force or any other physical process. The otherness of consciousness is not taken serious. Where panpsychists might overmine this idea, emergentists deflate it.
The "silliness"(if we are to call it that) of panpsychism is insisting consciousness emerges out of all existing states. It's a question of over quoting the number of existing states of consciousness, not an issue with a lack of explanation of "mental stuff."
Precisely. The emergentist is the one that respects the "otherness" of consciousness. For them it is enough for mental stuff to be a unique property of the universe.
Sensation, imagination, understanding, etc.,etc., why would we insist that consciousness was anything else? If you call recognising consciousness as a unique property expressed by some states the world "deflating it," the emergenist is certainly guilty. For them consciousness doesn't have to be anything more-- there's nothing more about to describe or explain.
It's the dualist who doesn't recognise consciousness as unique. They are always insisting it is more than the existence of sensation, imagination, understanding, etc.,etc., as if consciousness needed to be something else.
Dualism is reductionist. The emergentist says: "Hey, I found these unique states of the world. They are awareness, sensation, imagination and understanding, etc.,etc." How does the dualist respond? By suggesting the unique state of consciousness is not enough for consciousness, as if consciousness had to be defined by some other sort of presence. The dualist does not take the otherness of consciousness seriously. They suppose there is some way to make it disappear, to reduce it to something else, at which point we will have a "full account of consciousness."
Perhaps, based merely on the quoted passage, but then you went on to criticise the basis of my categorical distinction. What you wrote was not an analogy, but a criticism of the distinction itself. To attack the principle by which a distinction is made, is not to make an analogy, but to question the validity of the distinction itself. This is what you wrote:
Quoting John
Since the distinction I was making, was that logical constraints are the same type of constraint as moral principles, ethics, and legal systems, and these are artificial (willed into existence), while gravity and other constraints of the physical world are natural, it was evident that you had not grasped the point.
Do you recognize the difference between artificial things and natural things, the former being dependent on the human will for existence, the latter not? If you recognize that some things are created by the human mind, and some things are not, why would you ask me such a question as in the quoted passage? Clearly, it is necessary to assume that certain forms (constraints) are willed into existence, to account for the existence of artificial things. Do you not agree, that the constraints of logical systems, along with the rules of language, political and legal systems, as well as moral and ethical principles, all belong in this category, as artificial, constraints which have been willed into existence?
NO, my point is that they do NOT treat it is unique. They UNDERMINE it to be just another physical process. But that seems unjustified based on how unique it is compared to say, a force particle/wave or a matter particle.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
No, we would not. Rather, it is fantastically different in nature than other physical processes. You are being unintentionally patronizing here by stating the obvious- that this stuff exists.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
And that is precisely their problem. There is more than just saying that it exists. Again, it is unique compared to other processes. If this is the case, emergentists are essentially dualists, and then they are one step away from unintentionally saying that there is this mystic mental stuff that is part of existence. No self-respecting emergentist wants that, yet ignoring mental stuff to explain only models, implicitly seems to embrace this.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
No, rather dualists are saying that sensation, imagination, understanding, etc. etc. are not the same as physical processes because the sensation of "red" is not the same as the wavelength hitting rods and cones UNLESS it IS the same (pace panpsychism). Rather dualists (which I personally do not identify with), will say that mental stuff is tied with physical stuff but is not the same. Again, I am not arguing this, just stating some of its ideas.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Actually, I would argue that dualists do the opposite- they overmine consciousness as being so other, it does not fit in any physical framework. It is tied to physical processes but are not constituent in its nature of the physical processes. Again, I am not advocating dualism. However, without being a dualist, I am saying emergentists, are doing the opposite of dualists by simply overlooking how different mental processes are than physical processes. By simply saying mental processes exist, and emerge out of non-mental processes, there has to be an explanation of how this is so, and so far, from you at least, I see no explanation, just a "just so" story and moving forward with semiotics, formal causes, and all the rest.
Sure, the Mind is just another physical process like life, creativity, knowledge, morality, and, a bit more prosaically, information and computation.
You think consciousness is amazing, but I think Life is also amazing, and we know that Life is a physical process. It is a physical process we are beginning to understand rather well, but if you look at the physical theory that explains it, there is no mention of "say, a force particle/wave or a matter particle". It is a theory of replicators subject to variation and selection. But look - a "physical" theory of abstract objects!
To claim that "just another physical process" undermines anything, is simply vacuous.
Yes, a theory or replicators and much much more. A very rich and informed theory. That is still physical processes. Where at the end of the explanation of physical processes (which can be millions of pages in scientific research and academic knowledge), there is no leftover thing called "experience" to be explained. The physical remains the physical. Mental can be tied to physical through causality, but how it is that there is this experiential mental leftover from the theories is not explained, and perhaps cannot be simply through research.
I see you haven't read that little bit which Wayfarer recently referred. If so, perhaps you wouldn't be so sure that we're starting to have a good understanding of life. In the study of biology, each significant advancement has proven to expose us to a vast new realm of unknowns.
And I guess I need to remind you, there is no adequate "physical theory" which explains life, that's why people turn to abiogenesis, as a default hypothesis.
Except biologists themselves would say it is physics regulated by something further - symbols or information.
The two are of course related in some fashion. But you seem to be talking right past that issue - questions like how a molecule can be a message.
I can see the point you are trying to make; but I don't see it is contrary, in regard to the questions of inherency and categorizations of constraints at least, to what I had said at all.
So, there are constraints from the environment and constraints form "within'. I tend to be a monist though, and to think that ultimately the 'internal' and the 'external' are not two separate realms at all. The distinction between the internal and external environments is a useful one to be sure; but I think it has no ultimate ontological force.
I haven't been attempting, then, to reduce physical constraints like gravity and the nature of materials to the same category as logical constraints like association and entailment, but just to point out what you seem to be admitting despite apparently not wanting to; that both kinds of constraints are inherent, are things which we just find ourselves thrown under, as it were, which means that neither are created ex nihilo, so to speak, by us.
And I disagree that external constraints, unlike internal constraints, limit our freedom but do not at the same time enable it. If there were no external constraints then there could be no freedom; one could not do anything of any significance because anything we did would be of equal value, that is of nil value, to everything else we might do. Both internal and external constraints both limit and enable our freedom; what could freedom be if there was nothing to be free from or free in relation to?
This is why you've been denying the distinction I've been trying to make then. Tell me, do you believe that there is a difference between casting your gaze outward, toward a bigger and bigger space, and looking inward toward a smaller and smaller space? If you believe that there is a real difference between these two directions, how can you say that the internal/external distinction has no ontological value?
Quoting JohnThat's only true under your assumed principle that there is no ontological difference between internal and external. The fact though, is that we assign values to potential acts, therefore activities have values assigned to them prior to even existing in the external world. So even if there were no activities in the physical world, this would not deny the existence of values, which are assigned to potential activities. This is what the concept of energy, the capacity to do work, signifies, a value is assigned based on what can be done, potential activities. Lack of external constraint would not leave freedom without value, it would allow unlimited possibility, and this is extremely valuable.
But unlimited freedom or possibility to do what? As soon as you do anything at all your doing of it is constrained by the fact that it cannot be all the things you are not doing, and once it is done you are constrained by the fact that you have done that thing and no other, and all the consequences that inevitably flow from that.
This is a strawman.
Under emergence sensation is not the same as a wavelength hitting rods and cones. Rods and light are only objects involved in the causation of experience. Experience itself is a different state. A "physical state of the world" which is experience-- mental stuff is a physical state of the world itself.
For emergence, mental stuff is physical stuff, just not the same physical stuff as bodies and their environment (e.g. rods, cones and light). Experience is a unique existing state.
In the sense you are thinking, yes. Emergenists have (at least) a dual-aspect monism. Mental stuff is consciousness. Other states never are. The mind and body are always distinct, but part of the same realm. (existence, causality).
The emergentist isn't one step away from saying that mental stuff is part of existence. They claim it outright. Existing experiences emerge out of non-conscious objects. The presence of experience in the world is the intention of their entire position.
Here the only thing you get wrong is the "mystical." Since experience is an existing state, there is nothing strange about it's presence as a unique object. To be more than non-concious states is what the existence of experience entails. There is no "mystery." The uniqueness of consciousness is its nature. If consciousness exists, that's what we get.
That's the point then, once it's done, the act has been externalized, and you're constrained by that external fact, prior to this you are not constrained by the internal possibility. You can decide to do something, then change your mind and decide not to, as long as the act has not been externalized, you are not constrained.
Now we are faced with this fundamental principle, that the internal is prior, and the external is posterior, that is, unless you still deny such a distinction. But I suggest that it is a very important distinction in relation to the passing of time. This principle conflicts with emergentist claims that inner possibilities are derived from external constraints. That is impossible, because for each external constraint which exists, the internal possibility for that constraint is necessarily prior to it. Therefore, if we want to seek a constraint which is prior to possibility, which limits possibility such that possibility is not infinite, we need to look for a constraint which is inherent within the internal possibilities. Such a constraint, actuality, or form, is radically different from the external forms or constraints which we know, being inherent within, and prior to possibility itself.
Oh, so you are saying that it is another state altogether- sounds familiar. So, instead of outright dualism, it is a hidden dualism. Gotcha.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Now you are just stretching what physical stuff is. How is it that mental states have everything classically given to mental states, and relabeling it as "physical stuff" doing anything different except simply relabeling what used to be called one thing another? Fine, everything is "physical stuff" that does not dismiss the fact that the mental states are different than other other types of physical stuff in very unique ways.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Notice I put "mystical" in quotes. Yes it exists, but I disagree that it is not strange in its uniqueness among all other existent things. No other process, semiotic or otherwise, seems to be like this process in its uniqueness- sensation, imagination, cognition, etc. This is not just unique like one process is unique from another, but it is different in its apparent nature in that it has its "what it's likeness" that is leftover and is not explained where other physical processes do not have this explanatory gap. It is in causality (or may be the ground of causality if you think that), like other physical processes, but how it is that this mental stuff exists once other processes are in play, is not explained. Why the genie? What is this "stuff" other than saying that it is a state of existence. It does not seem entailed in the physical processes themselves like almost all other processes are. All other physical processes create simply more combinations of physical stuff.. molecules become more complex molecules.. That makes sense. Molecules become the sensation of red, that does not make sense other than positing a dualism of mental stuff that is simply not explained as to why it is entailed from molecules when all other stuff is not.
Exactly. It's state unique to any other-- it is "what it's likeness": the existence of being aware which is not captured in any description. This is the "stuff" other than just being a state of existence. It's a "what it's likeness" rather than a rock or limb.
Being a "what it's likeness," which is not captured in any description, IS how the state is distinct and unique. It doesn't need to be anything else.
No... that's the strawman again. Molecules do not become the sensation of red. Certain instances of molecules generate a new state (consciousness) which is not molecules.
From the perspective of our experience, as considered, in some contexts, for example perception, the external seems to be prior, and in other contexts, for example volition or thought, the internal seems to be prior. But, in any case, whatever we choose to do or to think, it seems obvious that we are free only within the range of what it is logically and/ or physically possible to do or to think. I just cannot see how that could be sensibly denied.
So it's a brute fact. Cool philosophy man.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Really? That's it? I guess everyone can close the books on the mind. Case closed. I'm glad that was figured out in a sentence.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Right, certain things cause this "red" thing which is unique in the fact that it is a what it's like experience, something that is radically different than any other physical phenomena. If you cannot see how this is so radically different that pit is not like other physical phenomena of nature- even other very unique phenomena.
When you say that the quale "red" is unique, do you mean unique to you, to humans, to all animals?