Representation and Noise
Despite its faults I tend to gravitate toward a representational theory of mind... which makes noise a little concerning. Noise is raw. It lacks representation.
Do we sense the unrepresented?
Do we sense the unrepresented?
Comments (77)
In phil of mind the idea is that you're not directly aware of something. Rather, there's an additional layer, so to speak, where what you're aware of is your mind's (re)construction in response to external data.
The visual counterpart would be...muddled like a Jackson Pollock.
Or maybe we never sense the unrepresented. We just talk about it.
This is a fascinating issue. Can we conceive of "pure randomness"? Even white noise has a structure.
Related, I like to think of the sensation/emotion that we can conceptualize without being able to actually exhaust in this conceptualization. The idea of red is not redness itself, though we need the idea to point at redness and maybe to give it unity as an object. And yet once we have this idea, we can see that redness exceeds its concept. I just don't believe that a man born blind knows everything about red, though this connects to one's conception of knowledge.
Right. Another way to explain "noise" is that it's sensation unassociated with any form or idea.
Is it possible to see without interpretation? In other words... if you don't call it red, is it correct to say you've seen it at all?
Where there is the perception of noise, is there necessarily an accompanying idea of the uninterpreted... the unrepresented? IOW... is that the form associated with noise... the formless?
Quoting Hoo
Hoo is right. Even noise has form. Any model of randomness still depends on identifiable boundary conditions. So noise comes in many colours - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_noise
So in an ontological sense, randomness comes in different varieties that speak to different states of global constraint. Randomness is an actual pattern. And "pure randomness" would be something "actually patternless" - what I would define as a vagueness (which is pretty unpicturable).
But then there is a further question of how good are we are psychologically at distinguishing the various shades of randomness in the world? And of course mostly we are quite bad because we are untrained in this level of pattern recognition. Or to put it another way, mostly in life it doesn't really matter.
Also our perceptual equipment has its own signal processing biases - like an increased sensitivity to noises in the range of spoken speech which "distorts" the bare physical pattern of energies the world might be producing. So to see types of randomness in their "wild state", we would have to somehow cancel out that kind of inbuilt perceptual bias.
Thus in a general way, we are seeing patterns that are really there in nature when we dismiss something as just "random noise". But as patterns, they are also patterns with the least possible meaning or message. In paying attention to randomness as itself "a perceptual thing" - a field of activity like the crackling sound of white noise, or the restless firing of static on an old vacuum tube TV screen - we are thinking about precisely that which we are normally set-up to filter out. We are representing as present what we would normally want to suppress and render absent. We are making meaningful what is usually interpreted in terms of a generalised lack of significance - a collection of differences that precisely don't make a difference.
Let's say that we're actually talking about white noise--either as sound or visual data, so either between-radio-station "static" or "snow" on a TV. Well again, whatever our philosophy of perception stance, we still process that data just like we process anything else. It's just different aural or visual data than other things but it's still particular sound waves/light waves that we process.
So I'm not sure what exactly you have in mind re or just what you see as the potential issue here.
One way to put it would be this: if that's true, then does that amount to idealism? Are you an idealist?
I don't think uninterpreted means random.
No idea how that is a response to anything I said.
I still don't get you. All I said was that we can surely have representations of randomness. When I look at TV snow, my interpretation is that I'm staring at "white noise". I see it positively as a characteristic natural pattern, a form, and so it is not uninterpreted or unrepresented.
So whatever exists is formed. I think that's true. And yet:
Imagine a candle melting. The wax had the form of a candle, and now it has the form of a puddle. But it's the same wax. So there's a difference between the wax and any particular form. (stolen from Descartes, obviously). How do you deal with this argument?
So the form only appears as distinct when we're looking at events over time.
Whoa. It has to do with becoming.
But let's imagine for a minute that it is the same wax in some sense. Part of the confusion there would be a scope problem. Just what are we referring to by "the wax"? One thing we might be referring to is paraffin, and specifically, a particular molecular composition re hydrocarbons. If that's what we're referring to, and we imagine it can remain identical through time, then indeed it is the same wax as a candle and as the melted puddle, and it hasn't changed form, because the form we're referring to is that molecular composition of hydrocarbons. (Actually, we'd be ignoring more fine-grained differences in the molecular behavior at least if we're talking about it in its solid versus liquid state, but we can ignore that out of charity, because we're trying to charitably talk about a sense in which we can say the wax is indeed the same.)
If we're instead referring to the candle, more or less wholesale, then it's not the same wax after it melted, because we were referring to the candle by "the wax."
Say you encounter some music. Later on, you remember the sounds. You aren't hearing the music now, you're remembering it. Form is what you're left with once the music stops.
Form usually answers a what-question. What is it?
The concept of the unformed as long confused me. I think Cavacava is onto something.... it has to do with becoming.
Everybody else would say it's the same wax. Candle melts, we're left with a puddle. Its the same wax.
Therefore, the wax is not identical to any particular form it takes.
Suppose that each plank on the Theseus is replaced exactly with a steel plank. Is it the same ship? & of course if each of the old planks were conserved and reassembled, is it the real 'real' Theseus?
Anyway, the rest of your comment seems like you didn't bother to read or you didn't understand my comment.
The idea of form being separable from its material/structure/processes is incoherent on my view.
It's definitely the same wax.
Perhaps the "unrepresented" is a kind of retrospective formation. We experience things as they are presented to us. Then we say we represent them to ourselves, when we think about them or remember them. To re-member is to re-present. The scientific theory of perception posits that objects are imaged by or 'in' the brain; this seems to be one basis for representational theories. Another basis would be the logical idea that if something is presented to, and/or represented by, us, then there must be 'something' that is presented or represented.
Perhaps you could restate what exactly it might be that you are keen to discuss. Seems like you are channeling Banno at the moment. :)
What I am getting is that there is the usual hylomorphic issue when it comes to thinking of substantial being. We only know being when it is formed into some thing. And thus the notion of unformed being becomes deeply "other".
Somehow the stuff that accepts the form must be some kind of already formed material itself, and yet we just said that can't be. And so the "prime matter" becomes something itself immaterial - lacking the very definiteness we require of materiality. The material part of the substantial equation turns into something more akin to becoming - a potential to be.
So when talking about wax, we can try to talk about the matter that endures or is conserved as a kind of proper material stuff by saying its all still just a bunch of atoms. The arrangement is different - a candle stick vs a wax puddle. Or we could enlarge the view and talk about the entropy change that makes a (less materialistic) material difference. In some sense, a potential has been spent. Some part of what was an orderly candle with its waxy energy bonds has been dissipated in the light and heat that helped melt the rest of it into the more entropic form of a waxy puddle.
Yet still, atoms are a formed kind of stuff. Even energy is a formed kind of stuff - electromagnetic radiation or some other such thing. We still haven't drilled down far enough to hit bottom and discover what matter is once its formal clothing has been stripped away to leave it standing bare.
As we were discussing earlier, even randomness is only conceivable in the guise of already formed material patterns - possibility not naked, but corralled by boundary conditions to give it statistical regularity.
Sorry to be boringly repetitive, but it is precisely these considerations that lead me eventually mentioning vagueness as the primary material principle here.
In some way - some way that we would have to make metaphysically good on - the deepest level of materiality would be unbound action. Unlimited fluctuation. Energy unrestrained by dimension. Chaos without boundaries.
Talking about the world in terms of constrained form is easy. Imposing further rational pattern on found substantial actuality of the physical world is something that has become second nature to Homo mechanicus.
But conceiving of prime matter, pure potential, unformed possibility, uninterpreted existence, is at the opposite end of metaphysics - the hardest and last thing we would do.
I think it is just here where have nothing more than intuition to rely on. Anything we might believe regarding "prime matter, pure potential, unformed possibility, uninterpreted existence" will be the result of a groundless (in the empirical or logical sense) leap of faith.
Why can't we apply rational argument in the way that I have done to arrive at some image of the unsayable and unthinkable?
I agree following that path is what is difficult - the most extreme abstraction. But also its seems obvious that intuition doesn't even make a start because whoever has spontaneously intuited the notion of vagueness in your experience?
When talking about things, like the creation of existence or prime matter, normal folk only apply "intuitions" like something can't come from nothing, everything has a reason, causes precede effects, etc.
In other words, normal folk are only going to continue to think about foundational issues using the same mechanistic habits of logic that have been drummed into them by Western enlightenment culture - a culture evolved to build machines. Or else they are going to default to the antithesis to that - Romanticism and its idealist causality, a world moved by ghostly spirits.
I think that is just what people have been doing for centuries; I'm just not convinced that subsequent scientific advances bestow any improved ability to do it, in fact they may well get in the way. Probably meditations and 'altered states' of various kinds offers the best inroad. If we, and all of nature, are manifestations of the unthinkable, if that is the essence of our beings and being itself, then it would seem that to look within, free of all prejudice and discursive 'noise', might provide the best possibility of envisioning the unthinkable.
a dialectic.
We weren't exactly expecting quantum indeterminism, but science found that. Just like science found Newtonian determinism and Boylean atoms 500 years ago and metaphysics spent a very long time being shook up by what that seemed to imply for everything.
Is there any fundamental conceptual advance that science hasn't delivered - even if it is in the guise of an antithetical reaction provoked by that very conceptual advance?
Yes, but all those advances are in regard to the world we experience and precisely how it is thinkable. They really say nothing about the unthinkable; which is as would be expected since nothing definitive can be said about it. But via meditation the ineffable may be experienced; and what can be spoken about is not the ineffable itself, but only the way in which it is experienced, and only using a language and metaphors borrowed from the sayable. I understand that this may not satisfy you, because if you have not personally experienced such things that is to be expected.
Not for me. I've never had a particularly clear sense of identity. Being somewhat amorphous is my homebase.
The OP came from a passage in a book: Philosophy of Freedom by Rudolph Steiner. He was saying that without adding ideas to sensation, all we would have is something like raw sense data... noise... and nothing to react to one way or another.
From there, I pondered if that doesn't mean that it's really ideas we react to... not sounds or sights... if that makes any sense.
You're saying the objective picture can be populated with noise. The author does that. But if there's no idea attached to it, it involves a dance between subjective and objective? Is that what you mean?
Re Steiner and what I have been saying about modes of effort to penetrate and think the unthinkable: I think Steiner would agree that there is no "raw sense data", no unthinkable, except for thought. The unthinkable is a kind of retrospective formation; something we cannot help imagining must be there as the prior 'condition' for any experience and thought.
So, as you say, I think it is thoughts that we respond to...and sounds and sights...but only insofar as sounds and sights are permeated through and through by thought.
It's hard to see how you're not talking about a conceptualization of that which, by definition, cannot be conceived. (Sensation, redness for instance, "overflows" the conceptual grasp we have on it, but we need the concept in order to speak of its "overflow.")
Quoting apokrisis
I do think it's great to question the PSR and cause and effect. Taking these for granted imposes tunnel vision.
Quoting apokrisis
I'd stress feeling and imagination when it comes to Romanticism.
[quote=Keats]
What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth - whether it existed before or not - for I have the same idea of all our passions as of love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential beauty.
[/quote]
Also sensation.
[quote=Blake]
My senses discovered the infinite in everything.
[/quote]
Then there's irony and pluralism. Hegel griped about "The Irony" in his day, presumably in the name of the rigor of the concept.
[quote=SEP]
“Philosophy is the true home of irony, which might be defined as logical beauty,” Schlegel writes in Lyceumfragment 42: “for wherever men are philosophizing in spoken or written dialogues, and provided they are not entirely systematic, irony ought to be produced and postulated.” The task of a literary work with respect to irony is, while presenting an inherently limited perspective, nonetheless to open up the possibility of the infinity of other perspectives: “Irony is, as it were, the demonstration [epideixis] of infinity, of universality, of the feeling for the universe” (KA 18.128); irony is the “clear consciousness of eternal agility, of an infinitely teeming chaos.” (Ideas 69).
[/quote]
The "world moved by ghostly spirits" doesn't fit with my image of Romanticism. I'm not an expert, but I sure did love those Romantic poets (and there theories of poetry) back in the day.
Yep. Ghostly spirits. The essences that Newtonian mechanicalism so clearly leaves out.
Now of course Romanticism was also a retreat into vagueness about what exactly it might mean in this regard.
Theology had a perfectly substantial notion of souls and Gods. The Enlightenment undermined that concreteness in radical fashion. And so Romanticism was the retreat to talk about the ineffable, the sublime, the aesthetic, the personal, the existential, the ideal.
It all became fuzzy in a way that made it un-attackable by the reductionists. There was no longer any definite thesis to come under examination. A firm position on the realm of spirit was turned into a metaphysical waffle that evaded its pursuers.
Quoting Hoo
I think that is different - and more like Peirce's abduction. We can indeed retreat into vaguer states of conception with the self-conscious purpose of then making some new creative jump that might land in a better place.
So Romanticism I see as a refuge - a cloak of obscurity, an asking just to be left alone with a "mystery" that is more fun, more real, more whatever it takes to get serious questioning off its back.
But scientific reasoners use vagueness as a productive tool. An ironic stance to your own professed beliefs is a pre-condition for being able to start all over again in another direction. You have to be able to step back from your own current certainty to make another leap towards possibly more convincing certainty.
You can't be right unless you are prepared to be wrong. So the question for Romanticism is in what sense is it putting itself in a position that it could be shown wrong? In claiming the transcendent authenticity of personal feelings and imaginings, it just puts itself in a place where that becomes a social impossibility.
Although I'm not completely unromantic. As John argues, one can learn this social practice called meditation and find what that feels like. One can go to art galleries or watch the sun set. Culturally and psychologically, there is stuff that is important which is very human and a long distance from any cosmological-level discussion. So Romanticism as a movement makes great cultural experience. It speaks to that part of our lives.
But does it make great philosophy? I say no. It just isn't designed for that task. Although of course being a professional mystifyer in the form of a Continental academic is probably a quite gratifying kind of career if one is not really serious about cosmological issues. :)
Oh, well those can indeed be called ghosts and spirits. But perhaps you'll grant that numbers are also figments of the imagination. So science is just a ghost or system of ghosts that gets things done.
How is the retreat into vagueness avoidable as we move away from numbers? Metaphors seem to me like a cutting edge of the creative imagination, and they are basically abuses or mutations of the language that sometimes succeed and become literalized (the exception becomes a rule if not the rule.) When someone asks us what we mean by our words, we can only offer more words. So "meaning" is a slippery ghost. On the other hand, an airplane or a stick of TNT speaks to the ancient, sensual animal. When I see a building from the sidewalk, I have no genuine doubt that others see this building. But as language becomes more complex and abstract, I very much lose this sense of "seeing the same building." I like pragmatism for trying to glue abstract statements to results in the concrete, manifest world. Instead of proving metaphysical "theorems" in a sort of "word math," we take them "modulo practice" and look at the result. (This isn't perfect or simply, but it's a promising path.)
Quoting apokrisis
Or one could define serious questioning as the questioning that one cannot get off one's back. This is inquiry powered by genuine doubt, cognitive dissonance, a fork in the road that matters. No doubt, poetry isn't science. But only a few of us are paid to do science, just as only a few of us are paid to be poets. Placing poetry and science and all the rest in the hierarchy is one of those issues that is under-determined (for individuals) by constraints on practice. Should the insurance salesman learn quantum physics or French? For the most part, it only matters to him.
Quoting apokrisis
Poets might be seen as (among other things) inventors of personalities. They give us new images/conceptions of what we might want to become. They are the "unacknowledged legislators" of the world to the degree that they impose the values that shape the social and physical world. Perhaps you'll agree that we don't as thinkers merely construct and evaluate propositions. We invent new conceptions and therefore "disclose" things that thereby become visible. For instance, philosophy seems largely dominated by the image of a sort of armchair scientists. He's like a scientist in his intentions, but he can work like a mathematician with just a pencil and paper. If we shift to the engineer metaphor, however, we are going to look for results instead or at the "math." If we dwell on the philosopher as poet, we concentrate on how the world looks through the lens of a new personality. In fact, we probably operate on all of these levels simultaneously. But, consciously, the scientist metaphor seems to dominate.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm not crazy about mystification either. But "seriousness about cosmological issues" seems optional. For the consumer, a "black box prediction machine" and a "physical reality manipulation machine" are going to be enough. That's always going to convince more than "word math," no matter how respectable the reasoning. If this "word math" allows for better machines, it will be embraced for its indirect contribution. Some of us will give a damn about the details, but that seems like an esthetic choice. Why not pure math or King Lear or just Arrested Development? If someone feels especially talented at metaphysics, there's an extra motivation: honor, maybe even $. If the stuff leads to new machines, there will surely be $. But without the machines, how is it so different from Romanticism?
I don't think it is quite right to say that meditation is a social practice. It can be done in the company of others but I think the presence of others is irrelevant to the practice itself. Meditation is a culturally enshrined practice, no doubt, in the sense that many of the various methods that people have discovered, are described in texts, and taught to novices, and so on.
So, I would agree with you that contemplative meditation, viewing artworks, communing with nature, and so on are "a long way from cosmological-level discussion" if by that you mean that they do not (obviously) constitute doing cosmology and/or don't have any direct bearing on how we might think the physical universe has evolved.
But why is it only so-called 'outer' observations, which may be collectively observed and confirmed, that are taken into account when it comes to inter-subjectively motivated, conducted and judged discussions about the nature of things, and not the 'inner' observations of meditators, or the intuitions of imagination? I think the answer is obvious; because the latter are not subject to easy corroboration, or even any of the kind of more or less universal corroboration, which is possible and demanded when it comes to empirical observations.
So, those kinds of aesthetic or contemplative practices are not going to yield any testable theory about the origin of the cosmos, for sure. But the very fact that we can have those kinds of experiences (and who that has not enjoyed many, and/ or temporally sustained, such experiences can know just how comprehensive and utterly convincing they may be?) might lead some to believe that, since they are not satisfactorily explainable in physicalistic causal terms, they 'come from somewhere else'.
I don't mean by this that these kinds of experiences might come from some 'hidden' outer realm, but that they come from an inner dimension which is not accessible to the rational intellect, and that the rational intellect may only emptily speculate as to an 'explanation' for that inner dimension, and is quite impotent to give an adequate description of it, unless it maintains a position of faith in relation to the intuitions that seem to be quite natural to humans. Any such description and/or explanation will only be thought to be adequate in virtue of thinking that intuition may, if coupled with the right kind of skeptical attitude, offer a good guide in non-empirical matters. But it must also be acknowledged that such descriptions and explanations are couched in metaphor and cannot be understood to be of the kind of propositional hypotheses that empirical science works with.
It is one thing to get involved in a social practice in a way that produces an experiential state of social value. It is another to then analyse that as phenomenology. At that point you must be able to justify a further epistemic method of inquiry. It is no longer good enough to "just experience it" because that experiencing itself involves the conceptualistion which is the social practice's culturally constructed frame.
Naked phenomenology is a pipe dream. Introspective states come already culturally legitimated. People think all kinds of wrong things about the way that they dream because that is the way they are told dreams are in stories about dreams, or movie recreations of dream states. You have to strip away such expectations and - scaffolded by other theories now - see those phenomenal states "for real" ... as much as they will ever be seen so nakedly.
Quoting John
People think they know the deep secrets of the universe when they are on drugs, in church, psychotic, crackpot, drunk in the gutter. Indeed, the psychotic and the crackpot are the most strongly convinced.
So you are being very defensive about meditation. But I'm not attacking it as something that is not good to do - anymore than I would say art has no value in life. And it is plainly better than drugs or psychosis as an altered state - for reasons that I would give based on a neuropsychological justification.
And you would probably too? Just as you would point to the pragmatic utility of LSD as a creative aid if push came to shove in a social setting - where the meaning of such trips is having to be culturally framed.
Now OK. You might in fact say that meditation connects you transcendentally with a spiritual plane beyond our material one. And now we are off the charts when it comes to empirically defensible mechanism.
Yet still, I would be left with the neuropsychological story about why meditation feels like it does and might do you good. And you would be left unable to demonstrate that it was in fact anything more.
It is like psi. If it exists, then produce it in the lab. Otherwise we can put coincidence down to coincidence. And you can continue to lose money at the casino while listening to your dreams or using your lucky numbers.
I don't have time to respond more comprehensively right now, but I will just say this: it is precisely (some) people on drugs, in church, crackpots, drunks in the gutter that make positivistic, purportedly empirical, claims about what they have experienced.
Sensible psychonauts, mystics, religious thinkers, and perhaps even sensible crackpots (although "sensible crackpots" sounds a bit odd) and sensible drunks in the gutter (are there any such?), don't make such kinds of claims; and that is precisely the point I have been trying to make.
The theoretic dimension of philosophy is one side, for sure; and I don't want to diminish its importance in any way, but I say there is another to philosophy which is captured by the etymology. And I believe that it makes perfect sense that some kinds (at least) of mystical experience may, and do, have great bearing on questions of how to live, that is on the love and pursuit of wisdom. It is on those grounds and not on the basis of the purported irrelevance of mystical or aesthetic experience to theoretic philosophy that I disagree with your position.
I know what you mean. But the rub is in how you now define "sensible" in a fashion that is not how I'm defining it.
If there is no empirical way of telling the difference between the sensible mystics and the cranky mystics - as in listening to the way they talk as an example of "sensible" - then it becomes a distinction that makes no difference.
I used to spend a lot of time with psi researchers - because of the way the field is a living example of the edges of the scientific method. And really, in a formal setting with even its written accord between believers and sceptics, everyone could talk the sensible talk ... for a while. But eventually you learnt by their behaviour who was more honestly sensible, who was secretly still thinking like a crank.
And the sceptics could be the secret cranks at times too.
In a sense maybe some of them do know a temporary secret about the universe in such moments. From over here, it looks as if you're thinking about the universe in terms of the "scientific image (Sellars)." But this largely mathematical "image" is embedded in a far richer totality, including of course the "manifest image." Spiritual practices, drugs, music, fasting, etc., are usually aimed at value insights.
If you, for instance, are locked into an identification with scientificity or investment in objectivity as the measure of a man, then, sure, this won't have much appeal. But this investment is optional. Imagine Beethoven at his piano. Was that objectivity? But would we want him doing something else? There's something in Dead Poet's Society (yes, let's go pop culture for a moment) about science being about how we live and poetry being about why we live. This silly statement has a grain of truth. What gives the facts weight in the first place if not values? And whence the value in objectivity that doesn't cash out in utility? It's there. There's certainly a love of truth and objectivity for its own sake or at least the idea of that love as a mark of virtue. Some of the stuff above may help us (though obviously may harm us in the same way) by adjusting our values and therefore our trajectory and the gap between what we want and what we have.
I get the need to caricature me as the dry-as-dust reductionist scientist to legitimate the otherness that would be your heroic and liberated, yet still dreadfully suffering, poet of nature. It is the quickest way for you to win the argument here. But it doesn't accord with the facts of how I live and think.
If I were to offer you a theory of the measure of a man, it would be all about a balanced life - so a fruitful mix of science and poetry, the objective and the subjective, if those are indeed the dichotomy to be balanced here.
Quoting Hoo
Well I think those things might be fun but also bogus when it comes to insight about values.
If you want real insight like that, go help out at a homeless shelter or do some eco-system restoration. Seriously. Actually being involved with the world is the way to discover its values. The other stuff you mention is largely self-indulgence.
Quoting apokrisis
I wasn't trying to offend you, just to be clear. I don't even identity with Romanticism. I don't care much for nature and I don't find suffering impressive or poetic. But yes liberty is part of my notion of the heroic. Anyway, I just thought you weren't painting a picture of Romanticism that squared with my fairly intense reading in the tradition almost 20 years ago now. I mentioned Beethoven under the assumption you enjoyed him, so I wasn't trying to paint you as a soulless person. You do dwell on philosophy of science or philosophy as science, but so what? Also, on some gut-level there's urge to "win" interactions, but isn't that in all of us? And, yeah, my position is easy to argue, since it's slippery and non-committal. But that's one of its features. Much of life is the clash of personalities, which I particularly contemplate. Still, I don't mean to be rude, just in case that's not clear.
Quoting apokrisis
Just for background and clarification, the best experiences I've had with drugs also involved great friendships. So there was a living community in place, and the drugs and music (listened to and created) just pushed feeling to heights that are otherwise hard to access. From this place of high feeling, certain metaphors and images in art and religion make sense in a new way. It's all "just" feelings, but the feelings are such that you don't give a damn about making objective claims. Everyone there already knows. The music becomes "obviously" something made in the same "spirit." Words seem like poor things. They are cups too small for the bliss.
But these days or rather these years (speaking of involvement in the world) I'm a PhD student in math. My worst vice now is probably typing foolosophy on this forum when I could be wrestling with ordinals and cardinals (or is it the nicotine gum?) As to the other stuff, I won't pretend to care much or pose as an altruist.
No worries on that score. I didn't take it that way because you are a very positive guy. Also, rudeness is part of the fun. It's all a game in the end. With ideas the winner hopefully.
You have to rely on your intuition just as you do when you tell the difference between honest and dishonest people that you have just met. There are no guarantees of being right, of course; but that's just the nature of life in general.
Quoting apokrisis
But "thinking like a crank" is just a subjective characterization. What does thinking like a crank consist in when it comes to psi researchers? You're not saying that thinking like a crank here means being open to the idea that psi might be a genuine phenomenon are you?
No. That's why I said sceptics could also be insincere about their apparent objectivity. So what I am talking about is the difficult thing of what it would mean to be open-minded yet common-sensical.
It is like Bayesian reasoning (or it is Bayesian reasoning). Given the laboratory results (or the general lack of them), how do you then quantify your state of belief. Can you live as though it is 99.9% unlikely there is such a thing as psi, yet not then jump to 100% certainty in your heart, if the literature supports a psi effect of 0.1%?
A sensible person is always seeking falsification of his strong beliefs in some sense. A crank does everything to avoid a confrontation with falsification.
There are other standard good habits of thought like Occam's razor - valuing the theories with the fewest moving parts. Not data-mining for significant results. And so on.
It is not that hard to say something objective about the difference in mental habits of cranks and sensible investigators as it turns out. Philosophy of science is rather focused on the issue.
And as I say, that is why I found parapsychology a good living example of rational inquiry in practice. It both showed what scientific rigour looks like (psi research being far tighter in its protocols than practically anything else - like for instance, pharmaceutical research) and also the social limits of that rigour (how far can you go in supporting a hypothesis that a positive result is the product of experimental fraud?).
Well what's your ontological view then? Are you an idealist?
"One thing we might be referring to is paraffin, and specifically, a particular molecular composition re hydrocarbons. If that's what we're referring to, and we imagine it can remain identical through time, then indeed it is the same wax as a candle and as the melted puddle, and it hasn't changed form, because the form we're referring to is that molecular composition of hydrocarbons. "
And for good reason. The idea of being without form is incoherent.
The forms I referred to were candles and puddles. But if you like molecules better.. the hydrocarbons can take the form of a number of molecules.
And..... it's turtles all the way down. You're fun to pick on Terrapin. No harm intended.
Holy Guacamole!
I don't think I am. It's a slippery designation. I don't think material things are 'made of thought' whatever that might mean, they are by definition materially constituted. There is no-thing there, though, that is not in conceptual form; but that does not mean there is nothing, or even that there is a 'great unrepresented' there. Certainly I am not a materialist. Maybe a neutral monist? I wonder, do I have to be any kind of 'ist', though?
Yeah, Schlegel!
8-)
What is your interpretation of a representative theory of mind?
No, I don't think so. It's just that if you agree that anytime we respond and interact with the world, ideas are attached to what we respond to, then it seems the next step might be that what we call the world is in a sense a complex of ideas.
By this however you could only conclude that the part of the world with which we can interact is a complex of ideas, but not necessarily that the entire world, including the aspects of it with which we have no connection in any way, is a complex of ideas.
You agree right?
I don't quite understand the question, hunter.
Rephrased: What is the definition of a "representative theory of mind''?
Yep. Without some sort of non-idea, it wouldn't make much sense to talk about ideas.
This is an issue which doesn't get enough attention.
Science has searched pretty hard for the material basis of being and what has it found? Matter is really energy. Energy is really a field. If you believe in inflation, that field is scalar and doesn't even start with direction or difference.
Form or structure we can get our head around. Materiality dissolves into bare action and then even ceases to have particular action according to science.
I think one way of thinking about "the world' is that it is a kind of collective representation. It seems to be a leap from there to say that the world is constituted by thought, though. Probably the closest to what I tend to think is that the world is constituted by spirit that manifests in the form of thought in interaction with material, or something like that. So, extending that thought, neither thought nor material, but spirit, is constitutive. The Holy Trinity?
It would be contrasted with behaviorism and probably non-reductive. The idea is that thought takes place in the domain of mental representations. Intention is a relation to those representations, which could have a sentence-like structure.
This seems like a very reasonable thing to say.What opposition is there to this claim?
Behaviorism was once a popular opposing view, but Chomsky squashed it. It still lingers in various forms.
Quoting John
This where metaphysics gets exciting and bold. If "material" is our idea of that which is not idea, it's a sort of doomed thing-in-itself. So there is no material, just the concept-systems common-sense but apparently confused attempt to point outside of itself. But there is nothing outside the system, especially if we think of essences as inter-dependent. The essence of a cat involves the essence of a mouse and so on. So the distinction between thought and object is threatened, at least in our high-flying more-logical-than-practical speculations. So the concept-system rechristens itself "spirit," having transcended this subject-object a distinction, although this distinction is a necessary rung on the ladder or a moment that cannot be skipped (since being is dialectical). Then we have an unstable spirit falling forward into its cognitive dissonance and finally (if one can believe this far) "absolute knowledge" or end of cognitive dissonance and hence of falling forward.
[quote=Kojeve]
Taken separately, the Subject and the Object are abstractions that have neither “objective reality” (Wirklichkeit) nor “empirical existence” (Dasein). What exists in reality, as soon as there is a Reality of which one speaks — and since we in fact speak of reality, there can be for us only Reality of which one speaks. What exists in reality, I say, is the Subject that knows the Object, or, what is the same thing, the Object known by the Subject. This double Reality, which is nonetheless one because it is equally real in each aspect, taken in its whole or as Totality, is called in Hegel “Spirit” (Geist) or (in the Logic) “absolute Idea.” ...But the term Begriff can also be applied to a fragment of total revealed Being, to a “constituent-element” (Moment) of the Spirit or Idea (in which case the Idea can be defined as the integration of all the Concepts — that is, of all the particular “ideas”). Taken in this sense, Begriff signifies a particular real entity or a real aspect of being, revealed by the meaning of a word — i.e., by a “general notion"; or else, what is the same thing, Begriff is a “meaning” (“idea”) that exists empirically not only in the form of an actually thought, spoken, or written word, but also as a “thing.” If the (universal or “absolute”) “Idea” is the “Truth” or the Reality revealed by speech of the one and unique totality of what exists, a (particular) "Concept” is the “Truth” of a particular real entity taken separately, but understood as an integral element of the Totality. Or else, again, the “Concept” is a “true entity” (das Wahre) — that is, a real entity named or revealed by the meaning of a word, which meaning relates it to all other real entities and thus inserts it in the "System” of the whole Real revealed by the entirety of “scientific” Discourse.
...
The concrete Real (of which we speak) is both [the] Real revealed by a discourse, and Discourse revealing [the] real. And the Hegelian experience is related neither to the Real nor to Discourse taken separately, but to their indissoluble unity. And since it is itself a revealing Discourse, it is itself an aspect of the concrete Real which it describes. It therefore brings in nothing from outside, and the thought or the discourse which is born from it is not a reflection on the Real: the Real itself is what reflects itself or is reflected in the discourse or as thought.
[/quote]
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/kojeve.htm
I "got high" on this book. And yet we always come back down to the distinctions of common sense and the gap between subject and object. It's as if the meta-physician is a poet. We abandon very little of the "gut-level metaphysics" that sophisticated metaphysics relies on for its construction and appreciation.
Thanks Hoo, some interesting takes. I read the Kojeve intro to Hegel some time ago but I still remember enjoying it, even if I don't remember much of the content.
One comment is that I would not equate subject/object with idea/material or thought/world. As Steiner points out we should not think of thought as either subjective or objective because the subject/ object distinction itself appears only in thought; which means thought is primary.
I agree. I was maybe a little sloppy. Thought is like distinction itself, cutting the totality into self and non-self for instance. But also cutting the totality into thought and non-thought, I suppose. That's probably why I focus on feeling-and-sensation, which plays a better "other" to thinking than the thing-in-itself (an empty negation, whereas we know feeling and sensation).
You point to the analytic function of thought, cutting, separating, making distinctions and so on: but thought has an opposing or balancing synthetic function that fuses, joins and dissolves distinctions. Perhaps the latter is more associated with "feeling-and-sensation. I see, not a dichotomy between thinking and feeling/sensation, but a synthesis of conceptualization and feeling/ sensation in thinking. I would go as far as to say that experience is thinking, for humans as much as animals in their different modes.For me, there is need to distinguish between thought and thinking as much as between what-is-experienced and experience itself.
I agree with everything that you said. I'm just trying to point out how sensation-emotion exceeds the same concept system that organizes it or is its intelligible structure. There's the concept of red and redness itself, that I can't point to without the concept. Maybe there's no-thing outside the essence-system, but that system floats in sensation-emotion.