Nothing to do with Dennett's "Quining Qualia"
So, here it is:
Quining Qualia
Let's take a closer look.
Going over my own notes, I found an admission that I did not understand qualia - from 2012. In 2013, I said I do not think that there is worth in giving a name to the subjective experience of a colour or a smell. In 2014, I doubted the usefulness of differentiating a smell from the experience-of-that-smell. Never understood qualia. I still don't see their purpose.
So I have some sympathy for Dennett's take here: to deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant.
No definition of qualia. But providing such a definition, to be fair, is not up to Dennett, if he is rejecting them, but up to their advocates. Instead we get:
SO, can we list these?
Quining Qualia
Let's take a closer look.
My goal is subversive. I am out to overthrow an idea that, in one form or another, is "obvious" to most people--to scientists, philosophers, lay people. My quarry is frustratingly elusive; no sooner does it retreat in the face of one argument than "it" reappears, apparently innocent of all charges, in a new guise.
Going over my own notes, I found an admission that I did not understand qualia - from 2012. In 2013, I said I do not think that there is worth in giving a name to the subjective experience of a colour or a smell. In 2014, I doubted the usefulness of differentiating a smell from the experience-of-that-smell. Never understood qualia. I still don't see their purpose.
So I have some sympathy for Dennett's take here: to deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant.
No definition of qualia. But providing such a definition, to be fair, is not up to Dennett, if he is rejecting them, but up to their advocates. Instead we get:
What follows is a series of fifteen intuition pumps, posed in a sequence designed to flush out--and then flush away--the offending intuitions.
SO, can we list these?
Comments (2977)
I'm not overly enamoured with detailed descriptions of physiology, so i hadn't much been following @Isaac's contributions. Do you fell up to summarising?
I'm searching for a public model to express my experience of seeing a deleted comment. Disappointment? I'll have to shiver harder.
It would be an even longer post to write, I think!
The images that we see are constructed unconsciously in our head based on sensory data, understood as a constant updating of our expectations. Something like that.
So feeling anger or seeing the red of an apple is the result of telling ourselves about the public model, I think. An outside-in or top-down sort of construction of consciousness.
What I'm not sure about is whether @Isaac thinks this means consciousness is a kind of illusion, or merely just identical to the public model self-reporting mechanism (or expectations).
I don’t know about no ‘public model’. Is that a meme? An official theory? A frequent practice? A common sense position? Sounds like a slippery concept to me.
Quoting Isaac
So we're apparently interpreting some physiological response via a public model and that becomes what we're conscious of, or at least what we say we are.
We shiver about unable to know the truth that would set us free of that awful model.
Ah ah... you really want to perceive Beethoven’s 5th as ‘a variation of air pressure’?
But we do know quite a lot about what it's doing, by looking at the activity and what is causing it.
What if Dennett is right that qualia are incoherent, but wrong about reductionism?
This is simply not true, or at least is true only given that you adhere to the assumptions about materialism and just what it consists in of those who condemn it, which obviously begs the question.
Just why and account of just what is materialism "self-denying and life-demeaning"? And then what's the alternative exactly? Those are the two questions that critics of materialism never seem to be able to answer.
(And just to be clear I am not referring to so-called materialistic values as opposed to so-called spiritual values. The question is why is it not possible for a materialist to hold spiritual, ethical and aesthetical values)?
Hi Wayfarer,
I've seen this said before, but I don't see the force of it. We can explain many aspects of consciousness, using our consciousnesses to examine and experiment. We can't yet say what the mechanism is that triggers it all, but I can't see why there's an insurmountable barrier to that.
Maybe we're already looking at the explanation. It seems very plausible that conscious experience is a development of unconscious reflexes, and we can explain the processes involved in those. So maybe the explanation of consciousness is, when you put all those processes together in a certain way, you get consciousness. I realise this is simplistic and I'm not actually explaining consciousness here, I'm just interested in your reasons for thinking that we can't explain consciousness.
Olivier was commenting on a Michel Bitbol article I had linked to. Of course he can answer for himself, but when he made this remark to me, the answer I gave regarding the motivation of eliminativism, is 'fear'. It is literally fear of the fact that the mind itself is terra incognita in some basic way. That's why they wave their arms and yell 'woo': the mind, consciousness, whatever, is not amenable to objective reduction. Therefore, it has to be eliminated! I mentioned to Olivier the Nagel essay, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion - which is not a defense of religion, but an analysis of how the 'fear of religion' drives so much of the 'materialism and reductionism' of this day. 'Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world. Instead they become epiphenomena, generated incidentally by a process that can be entirely explained by the operation of the non-teleological laws of physics on the material of which we and our environments are all composed.'
Quoting Janus
As for why materialism is self denying and life demeaning, it's because it sees no difference between beings and things. Beings are simply the types of things that seem to act intentionally. Dennett says this, it's not a straw man argument. Dennett also recognises that this is a highly demoralising perspective on the human condition but insists that it's true nevertheless, we have to adapt to it. The idea that we're free agents is one of the things that's been dissolved in the 'acid of Darwin's dangerous idea'. (This is a critical essay on Dennett I think outlines the issues.)
Quoting Daemon
Consider, at a very high level, what 'an explanation' comprises. You have the explanation, hypothesis, prediction on one side - that heat will melt ice, uranium will emit radiation, or whatever - and on the 'right hand side' you have the experiment, observation and result. I can't think of any empirical hypothesis that doesn't conform to that basic outline.
But when it comes to consciousness - or 'mind', as I prefer to put it - we're never apart from that, or outside it, so we don't actually have the same basic parameters within which to operate. We are that which we seek to know. (Actually the essay I mentioned above by Michel Bitbol It is never known but it is the knower is a useful reference for this.)
Quoting Daemon
Sure. But what are the implications? I mean, as humans we have to deal with this all the time. I don't know about you, but I find unconscious impulses and tendencies are often a source of discord in my own existence. Anyone who finds habits hard to control has to deal with that. I'm also aware of the fact that there are things about myself that I don't know - and I know this principally because of 'aha!' experiences I've had in the past, when something about myself suddenly became clear. That, I think, is the precise meaning of 'catharsis'.
But I digress. The point is, here, 'consciousness' is not some abstract whatever about which specialists in white coats have privileged and exclusive access. It is also what we are, our fundamental nature. It is not a 'that' to us. It is a 'that' to cognitive science and also to psychology, to some extent, but this is also why many questions remain about the extent to which psychology is truly a science.
I don't think the white coated specialists have exclusive access, but aren't they likely to be the ones who do provide the answer to the so-called "hard question"? If some white coated specialist said tomorrow "I've discovered that when you connect this bit here to this bit here, it goes conscious", would that solve the hard problem? I think so.
I think if you think that, then you don't understand the point of the hard question!
That seems harsh.
My imaginary white coated specialist above has explained how those processes are accompanied by experience, so he's solved at least one part of the problem. The "why" part is something that's been vaguely troubling me for a while. It seems obvious to me that we can have experiences, like seeing stuff, and it's really useful to be able to see stuff. So that's the "why" question answered. No?
That would be interesting. How would we characterize consciousness in that case?
What's problematic here is accepting or rejecting the Dennett article (Remember the Dennett article? This is a thread about the Dennett article) on the basis of pre-judgements (prejudices) that are to do with what consciousness is or isn't and not so much to do with the article. Hence the argument here that has little to do with qualia.
And folk cannot show them to us, because they are private.
But rejecting qualia does not lead directly and inevitably to materialism.
Let the neuroscientists do their neuroscience and see how far they can get. It keeps them off the streets and will be fun to watch.
:lol:
Errr... ummm... ahhh... maybe something like what I've been doing?
I honestly can't remember at this point. Brief summary?
Then the notion of "qualia" is incoherent, and conscious experience cannot be reduced to physical processes.
That's the position I'm arguing for/from. I'll keep on kicking...
:wink:
Nah. I'm more than willing to set things out for those willing to listen. Given the last few exchanges, including the refutation of "what it's like" that you neglected only to mischaracterize in summary, I'll wait for a clear sign that I'm not talking to myself.
If there's any sincerity in the query of yours, it's vey easy to click on my avatar, then click on my comments, then browse through quickly stopping at the ones relevant to this thread. Most of late are.
I'm not sure how I mischaracterized it. I just don't agree that there's nothing it's like to see color or hear sound. Maybe I misunderstood.
Ok. Explain it then. What's it like to see red?
I obviously can't explain that other than to say it's one of the three primary shades of objects in visual experience, which differs from other sensory modalities. Maybe "What it's like" is a misleading phrase. All it means is that a bat may have sonar sensations like we have color sensations, but we can't know what those are.
Ya think? Too bad the paper hinges upon it. Go back a few pages and re-read my critique.
Quoting Marchesk
You cannot explain it because there is no it...
Plain and simple.
There is a conscious visual experience with red in it.
Quoting creativesoul
The paper hinges on the possibility that bats have kinds of conscious experiences we don't. If not bats, then almost certainly dolphins.
Quoting creativesoul
I don't undestand what you mean by "consciousness" then. Color is an aspect or property of visual experience. We could substitute "What it's like" with what are the properties of sonar experience?
There's a conscious visual experience with a dog in it.
And???
Only 32 more pages to 100.
Of course bats have conscious experiences. Of course dolphins have conscious experience as well.
The "we don't" part is irrelevant. When we're reporting upon another's conscious experience, in order to know what we're talking about, we must be able to take that conscious experience into proper account.
Agree?
It's just noting a hard limit to our understanding, at least as things stand now.
Hold on a minute.
Quoting creativesoul
:brow:
Because the second one is awful anthropocentric. But maybe I don't follow your death knell blow.
Yeah, I know. Me too. So who have these other folk been arguing with?
:lol:
adjective
incapable of being expressed or described in words; inexpressible:
ineffable [s]joy[/s] sonary.
Should I circle back to Luke's comment on showing?
It'll never stay dead. The corpse will be reanimated, probably several times, over the coming years.
You can't tell us what qualia are, because they are ineffable.
And you cannot show them to us, because they are private.
But they are there, he cries!
http://digitalcollections.library.cmu.edu/awweb/awarchive?type=file&item=47537
I thought we were talking about red. I don't know whether the concept of qualia is worth salvaging, but trying to explain a sensation is impossible other than via analogy. Doesn't mean there is no sensation of color.
Problem is that sensations tend to lead back to qualia, so round and round we go.
The ability to attribute meaning.
As is The Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Is it just a conflict about what qualia is?
If we cannot somehow, someway, adequately explain what it's like(for our own selves) to see red, then we certainly have no business talking about - or in terms of - "what it's like" to be some other conscious creature. We seem to be fatally disconnected from ourselves on such a rendering...
Odd indeed.
Yes. It is the human being (a living, sentient organism) that has the capacity to think, not brains or Cartesian minds.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, Jaworski knows his stuff. Perhaps of interest, he also presents and compares hylomorphism to the standard physicalist and dualist theories.
Quoting Philosophy of Mind: A Comprehensive Introduction p314, p321 - William Jaworski
So the "it" in "what it's like to see red" is a conscious visual experience with red in it?
I prefer to just say qualia is the contents (or properties) of conscious experience, whatever that turns out to be. If qualia is too problematic, we can drop it in favor of colors, sounds, pains, etc. Or just sensations.
Or one can defend qualia against it's critics, maybe with some amendments to the concept. Your choice. The interesting thing is that conscious properties do tend to circle back to those four properties Dennett critiqued. Or three, since he didn't really do anything with privacy.
So you have your own definition for consciousness.
Wouldn't that better fall under intentionality, cognition or intelligence?
Is that what counts as an acceptable reply nowadays?
Primitive is another way to put it. You can't break down red into anything else, unless there is someday a neurological explanation from neural function to red experience.
Quoting Banno
Certainly not if you've never seen red before. But if you have, I can remind you or point out a red thing.
HOWEVER, a major caveat with that is, in Aquinas' epistemology, there's a sense in which the intellect receives the form of the object per this blog post. Otherwise, they would be like modern realists, but they're not - they're scholastic realists, and there's a world of difference.
Is it acceptable to use a different definition? Attributing meaning is a separate topic.
in·ten·tion·al·i·ty
the fact of being deliberate or purposive.
PHILOSOPHY
the quality of mental states (e.g., thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes) that consists in their being directed toward some object or state of affairs.
Maybe that's not exhaustive enough, thus I mentioned cognition and intelligence.
I'm not saying you do. That would be the Cartesian dualism model.
Quoting creativesoul
Those predicates are inapplicable if Cartesian dualism is rejected. One might kick a football either purposefully or aimlessly. Nothing meaningful is added by characterizing those experiences with physical/non-physical, or internal/external qualifiers.
So functionalism? If not, why not?
And here yet another obtuse question...
:roll:
Of course it is!
That's exactly what the problem is... the criterion underwriting what counts as conscious experience. Part of a few different definitions is under direct attack. That's the freaking point of the paper.
Shakes head and walks away...
Because colors and pains don't make up functional explanations.
Because there's no color or pain in neurons?
That works.
I'm beginning to think some of you don't actually experience colors or pains. How else could you claim to be conscious and argue the way you do? Maybe Jaron Lanier was right. You can't argue with a zombie.
Yes, but apparently we can just talk about something else and there's no problem.
I'm not at all understanding what reason there is for any one of us to believe that the terms "internal", "external", "physical", "non-physical" have no use unless they are being used within a Cartesian influenced framework, particularly mind/body dualism???
Yeah, I'm not following that at all, Andrew.
Everything I've said supports the notion of embodied consciousness, and nothing I've said supports any form of disembodied consciousness.
Oh, but I do beg to differ...
:smile: And is sanity a controlled form of battiness? Slogans and metaphors are all good fun and might be useful to illustrate a point. But to actually be coherent, a model needs to be defined without equivocation or circularity. Otherwise it's Cartesian theaters all the way down.
In this case, one might ask how "controlled" is defined. That's what is doing all the work here.
Don't be a dick. You won't like it.
What does that have to do with anything I've written here?
Well, internal and external are useful when talking about a house (or a theater). They can refer to the internal and external walls of the house, for example. But I'm not seeing their applicability when talking about experience. Their use in that context instead implies a Cartesian theater model.
If you disagree, perhaps you could give a non-Cartesian example.
Attributing meaning sounds like something to do with "the quality of mental states (e.g., thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes) that consists in their being directed toward some object or state of affairs.".
Now obviously you think this is a conscious activity. But it sounds like a different topic than the sensations that make up consciousness. If you agree there are any.
Well, you could say that. We've spent the last two thousand years failing to come to acceptable terms with our minds and how they work. Why not offer a much better 'definition', one that is capable of taking proper account of conscious experience that does not succumb to the historical pitfalls and problems that all of the other ones have?
:smirk:
What's the problem with it? I'm fairly certain that you do not understand it. I could be wrong, but there are not too many folks around here that seem to be capable of unpacking that. That's not a problem with the definition, for it takes into proper account what all conscious experience consists of. Rather, it shows the problem of academia having some very important aspects of the human 'mind' wrong to begin with. The beauty lies in killing several birds with one stone.
I've offered nothing but. I'd be more than happy to unpack something I've already said should it seem like it implies such a linguistic framework. I can assure you that I reject mind/body dualism.
Do not be misled by my stage name.
Descartes, had he better understanding of all human thought and belief, would have said...
I think about my own thoughts and/or beliefs as well as others', therefore, I am, and he would have been right.
So, I take it that you've no idea what it takes to attribute meaning? Thought and belief are not mental states on my view, by the way.
Are you ready to listen yet?
But this thread has broadened to other related matters so ...
Whose thread is it?
Oh!
Nah, we can keep it here. It's relevant.
You seemed to want to defend the use of internal/external and physical/non-physical qualifiers as meaningful when talking about experiences. If not, all fine and good - we agree. But if you think there is a use for them, can you give a concrete example that doesn't assume Cartesian thinking?
Defend? Against what? Was there a valid objection to anything I've said somewhere that I missed?
Are you claiming that red cups are not external, or that biological machinery is not internal?
Kantian? I should know better than to argue consciousness or direct/indirect perception with a Kantian, if that's the case. That's a different enough position to make those irrelevant. It's the bloody physicalists and functionalists that need to shouted down.
Quoting creativesoul
I don't know what you mean here. What are they?
No. Simple, basic, primitive(if you like) conscious experience kan't be so difficult to understand. Not with today's knowledge.
They are meaningful correlations drawn between different things. They are what all conscious experience consists of. They are the basic elements thereof.
The red cup, the bitterness in one's mouth, and the connection drawn between the cup and the bitterness by the very creature who just tasted Maxwell House coffee from the red cup.
That's exactly what all conscious experience of tasting bitter Maxwell House coffee from a red cup consists of.
And by attribute meaning, do you mean we project these correlations onto the world? We're conscious of correlations we draw among cats and mats?
See the edit, and it ought answer that first question. In short...
No. I meant what I said.
Yes. We can become conscious of the correlations we draw between cats and mats.
I mean draw correlations between different things.
So our conscious experience consists of relations we notice in the world between things like coffee drinking and cats on mats. The tastes and colors are relational properties, then.
I've already answered the question of what all conscious experience consists of. Meaningful correlations drawn between different things. I've accounted for all conscious experience of tasting bitter Maxwell House coffee from a red cup.
Did you notice?
No, and I already gave a similar example here (with internal and external house walls). I'm just trying to make sense of your earlier comments which are still unclear to me:
Quoting creativesoul
But those meaningful correlations might include the coffee being bitter when you drink it and the cat being black on a white mat when you see it over in the corner.
Sideline question: could you give a checklist for a position not to count as Cartesian? Just to be clear, I'm not trying to "gotcha" question you into "lol the term is meaningless", since non-Cartesians are good company, but I'd struggle to write a list.
I have some more questions in that direction:
Does Cartesian = adhering to subject/object and the attendant distinctions (internal/external, mental/physical)?
Would you throw a doctrine like "environmental patterns are represented by mental patterns + mental pattern = neural pattern" in the Cartesian bin because what it's trying to reduce (mental patterns) still adheres to a Cartesian model?
Can you do an "in the body/in the environment" distinction without being a Cartesian?
Quoting Andrew M
Fair enough.
Conscious experience of tasting bitter Maxwell House coffee from a red cup...
So, the red cups are external, the biological machinery is internal, and conscious experience of drinking bitter Maxwell House coffee from red cups consists entirely of correlations drawn between the bitterness(which results from the biological machinery) and the Maxwell House coffee by a creature capable of doing so.
The content of the conscious experience is the content of the correlations... that includes both internal things and external things, however the correlation drawn between those things is neither for it consists of both.
That's not half bad.
Thanks. The same thing I've been saying for the better part of ten years.
:wink:
Banno and a few others around here and elsewhere(mostly academics) have proven immensely helpful. No need to talk in terms of "qualia" or "quale".
I'm still worried about the coffee being bitter. One would think Banno could do better.
But then again, maybe Banno likes bitter tasting coffee. I like cauliflower. Dennett finds it repugnant.
I have a feeling that if we quined the relevant qualia, we could add cauliflower to the coffee, and nobody would object.
Sure, with the introduction of language use, we can talk about and/or compare past and present coffee tasting, black cats, and white mats, and that's one worrisome way of doing so.
Eliminative materialism, by definition, attempts to eliminate human consciousness and reason. Eg by saying it’s an epiphenomenon or an illusion. That is self-denying because them materialists are themselves conscious and endowed with reason.
The alternative I am contemplating is a form of non-naive materialism where our minds are not denied (because such denial is futile and absurd), but recognized as useful, effective and causal. That is the only intellectually honest form of materialism: one in which minds matter.
Quoting Janus It IS possible, as long as he does not deny the existence and importance of his own mind.
I'm going to try and explain the bigger picture which might answer the questions in your subsequent posts. If I can borrow from fdrake's post to start with as he put it very succinctly
Quoting fdrake
Those four variables together determine the perceptual feature (or interoceptual feature like emotion). Public models influence priors because in a social group with language there's a significant advantage in maintaining a strong similarity in our priors (language simply wouldn't work without it - thanks @Banno for helping draw this particular thread together for me).
So the extent to which a perceptual feature (an object of conscious experience, if you like - that which we are conscious of) is determined by hidden states is limited. These variables will have different strength depending on the feature. Some might be most heavily influence by hidden sates (catching a ball, for example), others will be more heavily influenced by prior (emotions - see the Barrett paper I cited earlier). None can be fully determined by anything less than all four, and in normal circumstances all are fully determined by all four (there are no other factors).
Translating a conscious experience into words or social relevant actions (which is most of them) absolutely requires that task parameters and priors strongly dominate the modelling because they are the only areas where it is possible to maintain inter-translatability, and without that the whole use of language or social-relevant action would be unlikely to succeed)
So when modelling my interceptive physiological signals in a task where a socially-relevant action is expected (or likely), I'm going to be reaching for models which are more publicly shaped so that my responses are more likely to have the expected result.
To your specific questions, with that in mind...
Quoting Marchesk
Animals need to model the causes of their internal states no less than we do to help make predicatively useful responses, and if those responses are socially-relevant, they will need to be modelled on something public. Obviously it would not be advanced language in this case, but observed behaviour.
In animals without the mental structures to create modelling hierarchies, I can see why certain responses are important for survival, and certain physiological states which prepare for or facilitate those responses, but whilst useful, I can't see more advanced modelling like emotions being necessary for survival.
Quoting Marchesk
Well, you'd have to do some research work to establish that wouldn't you? Which is what Barrett and Seth (and others) have done. The results are that no, you do not react in anger, because there is no neural correlate for anger.
You earlier said
Quoting Marchesk
We're not going to get anywhere in his stated project if you just insist that whatever you feel is happening is what's actually happening. In order to map brain states to phenomenological reports, you have to accept what neuroscientists are saying about brain states, otherwise you're saying phenomenological reports are infallible in a way the neuroscience isn't. So neuroscience says there is not an identifiable neural correlate for anger - we've looked really hard and can't find one. You've two choices 1) insist that because it feels like there must be one to you then that's the case and neuroscience just isn't trying hard enough, or 2) accept that something feeling like it's the case is not necessarily proof that it is, in fact, the case and work out how those feelings might have come about.
As I said to Khaled, if you're of the former persuasion, there's no point in us talking (there's no point in talking to anyone). If you're just going to assume that the way things seem to you to be is the way they actually are regardless of any evidence to the contrary, then there's no point in seeking other views is there?
Quoting Marchesk
Not necessarily. Public models don't have to be linguistic, they can be behavioural. All public models do is influence priors, anything influencing a prior as a result of cultural homogenisation is a public model.
Quoting Marchesk
I'm no linguist, but the history of the origin of words is hardly a simple matter of us finding new things to name in the world is it? Words are used. It wasn't for idle fun that @Banno made this point earlier. It's quite important. Words don't need to refer, so the mere existence of a word does not imply that some exact referent of it exists. My guess is that if you look to the use of these words you'll find how and why they came about. Why do I tell someone I'm in pain? Maybe to get help, maybe to get them to stop doing something, maybe to feel part of a social group (where being in 'pain' might be a membership criteria). any one of these uses might be why the word came about. But none of these speech acts are going to work unless I can model the physiological signals I want to attend to in a way that is translatable to the people I want to do something for me. That's where the public models come in.
Interesting post.
I'm left with the impression that you and I both hold that fear is the only innate emotion.
Yep, that's it.
Quoting fdrake
Yeah, I'd agree there and I think it's an important distinction because values of hidden states do more than just work for object recognition, objects can be in states.
Quoting fdrake
Yes, to a point. I think you and I might agree on this in principle but perhaps disagree in extent. My issue comes when we translate values of objects of perception into words (like temperature) and so in doing model them with a heavy reliance on priors (to make them mutually understandable). The hidden values of hidden states certainly must be relatively faithfully represented by our models in order for them to function pragmatically, but the public models of those hidden values need not. They only need serve their social purpose of inter-translatability. Which is not to remove them entirely from the hidden values - there's nothing quite so useful for inter-translatability as strong reference to a shared variable - but it does reintroduce the effect of socially mediated priors.
Quoting fdrake
Yes, that's how I understand it.
Quoting fdrake
Yes. We could interpret a single saccade as a perception event if there's a model generated by it. It depends on the hierarchical level we're interested in
Quoting fdrake
I'm not entirely sure what you mean here.
Quoting fdrake
Salience and categorisation effect models present in both pathways. Recall the poor monkeys with thier ventral and dorsal pathways severed. The model they use to handle the banana (knowing his soft it is, how heavy...) is informed by priors from the entire previous experience, but at the time of the perception event (thinking about a cortical level higher than a single saccade here), the two are not connected.
So, in your face example, at this higher cortical level, the movement from one feature to where the next feature is expected might be initiated by the link between the dorsal pathway and the sensorimotor systems which move the eye. These models are already in place in the fusiform gyrus, informed by object recognition models just above them (in the hierarchy).
Quoting fdrake
That's exactly right, as far as I understand it.
Quoting fdrake
Yeah. Essentially once models are generated in lower level cortices, they need not refer back to the signals which informed the model acting as a constraint on it (at the time of a perception event). But it will have been strongly influenced by them during the course of its formation (prior to the perception event). I know I've said this before, but this is why infant psychology is so fascinating, what we see in infant eye tracking experiments is the actual formation of some of these saccade level models.
A VALID AND USEFUL function, yes, which therefore fails to eliminate anything in it.
It depends what you mean by "happening". Qualia proponents might insist that however it seems or feels is no more than how it seems or feels, regardless of "what's actually happening". The latter seems to be an attempt to force the discussion into neurological/behavioural terms.
Quoting Isaac
Why do neuroscientists need to rely on the phenomenological reports of subjects? Why don't they study the phenomenological states of subjects instead?
It could equally be said: In order to map brain states to phenomenological reports, neuroscientists have to accept what subjects are reporting about their phenomenological states (to some degree), otherwise you're saying neuroscience is infallible in a way the phenomenological reports aren't.
Quoting Isaac
There's no anger, but there's still these unexplained "feelings" that people continue to call 'anger'? And since neuroscience can find no neural correlate for 'anger' then the feelings must be wrong? Jesus.
Probably because I was misinterpreting you. I thought you were construing the lower level "upwardly mobile" signals as being uninfluenced by salience+categorisation in their entirety, rather than being relatively less influential in their formation when compared to hidden state values (prior+task acting down and generating noise minimising expectations, hidden state induced discrepancies acting up to create noise).
The rest of the perceptual event stuff was to embed a single update step in the history of its update steps; which would restore instantaneous dependence on salience+categorisation through the priors+task parameters even if the upward acting signal wasn't salience+categorisation influenced in its "measurements" of the hidden state values. In other words, why the noise took those values and how the noise is incorporated is still prior+task dependent, so salience and categorisation play a role.
Seeing as you already agree with that (I think) and I was addressing a misinterpretation, I don't think it's relevant.
Quoting Isaac
I would expect that larger saccades do involve higher cortical levels, since they're informed by the emerging concept of what has been foraged already (see start of face, look for rest of face). Within fixation microsaccades probably don't, they seem more similar to heartbeats to me - some low level organ function maintenance phenomenon. But people are also more likely to be aware (so a perceptual event has occurred) of larger saccades - you can even feel particularly large ones in your eyes!
If salience and categorisation do influence both dorsal and ventral signals even in the dorsal/ventral severing case, and language can influence both those signals, is the point you're making that language and culture only effect the integration of both streams because they're particularly high order processes? I guess I don't understand the link of the dorsal/ventral stream dissociations to the role language and culture play, if salience and categorisation effect both, and salience and categorisation in humans have language and culture acting on the emerging perceptual landscape through the priors.
When it comes to denying emotions like anger, then yeah I'm going to have to strongly object. But thanks for answering my questions in detail.
What about love and social bonding???
Indeed. What the hell?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28863-3[/quote]
That study by Olga M. Klimecki, David Sander & Patrik Vuilleumier takes anger to be a real emotion with neural correlates and behaviors.
A nice colorful graphic of the eight emotions.
[quote=The Science Of Emotion: Exploring The Basics Of Emotional Psychology]Similarly, in the 1980s, psychologist Robert Plutchik identified eight basic emotions which he grouped into pairs of opposites, including joy and sadness, anger and fear, trust and disgust, and surprise and anticipation. This classification is known as a wheel of emotions and can be compared to a color wheel in that certain emotions mixed together can create new complex emotions.
More recently, a new study from the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Glasgow in 2014 found that instead of six, there may only be four easily recognizable basic emotions. The study discovered that anger and disgust shared similar facial expressions, as did surprise and fear. This suggests that the differences between those emotions are sociologically-based and not biologically-based. Despite all the conflicting research and adaptations, most research acknowledge that there are a set of universal basic emotions with recognizable facial features.
https://online.uwa.edu/news/emotional-psychology/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20American%20Psychological,situations%20they%20find%20personally%20significant.
[/quote]
So there is some evidence for that anger and disgust form a basic emotion which is developed separately by social factors.
Do you believe it is accurate to say, according to the conceptual act theory of emotion (the Barrett paper you linked earlier and I reread) that while there are no neural correlates that match the aggregate state of "anger", there are neural correlates that match conceptualising (summarising inferentially) sufficiently similar neural correlates together with "anger"?
Even if the role "anger" plays is as a character in a play, that doesn't make it cease existing, it might exist with a changed interpretation (that it's no longer a natural kind with a devoted and human-wide neural mechanism for it, it's instead a contextualised inferential summary for arousal and valence). Ie, there are angers which "anger" marks as a post-processed, publicly accessible, summary.
Perhaps like this picture (from Dennett's "Real Patterns") is two elephants (angers), each may be described as "an elephant" (an instance of anger), even though they are presented (simulated) differently.
(Though that the two things are distortions of the same base image might break the analogy; it could be that the neural correlates of state classes conceptualised as anger wouldn't "feel the same" if you took one process and put it into another brain - the patterns might differ quite a bit over people)
[quote=Real Patterns]ARE there really beliefs? Or are we learning (from neuroscience and psychology, presumably) that, strictly speaking, beliefs are figments of our imagination, items in a superseded ontology? Philosophers generally regard such ontological questions as admitting just two possible answers: either beliefs exist or they do not. There is no such state as quasi existence; there are no stable doctrines of semi realism. Beliefs must either be vindicated along with the viruses or banished along with the banshees. A bracing conviction prevails, then, to the effect that when it comes to beliefs (and other mental items) one must be either a realist or an eliminative materialist.[/quote]
I haven't read that paper before. Looks like Dennett will be defending quasi-realism about certian mental content like beliefs. I always wondered what a proper definition for quasi-realism is.
That is interesting. Could make for it's own thread on forms of realism. But we could apply Dennett's five flavors of realism to qualia as well, and wonder why he's on the Churchland side when it comes to conscious sensations, whereas he's a mild realist about beliefs.
Isaac's words above could easily be those of a staunch idealist arguing with Moore. Moore's point was that whatever an idealist claims about the illusory nature of the physical, she still jumps out of the way of on-coming tractor trailers.
Moore on phenomenal consciousness: deny it if you like, you still understand your own behavior (and that of others) in terms of it.
Surely Dennett would have thought of this: that simple irrational belief underpins science in general.
if you were Dennett, how would you counter this?
I don't know, maybe the illusion is useful? It was adaptive for creatures to evolve that belief that they were phenomenologically conscious in some real manner. He has used the computer desktop metaphor before in talks about evolution and consciousness.
I guess what I'm asking is: if you succeed in creating doubt about the content of consciousness, doesn't that doubt invade everything you think you know?
How do you make the physical sciences immune from this doubt?
Or do you need to? Can you just say that science is a body of *true* statements where *true* means generally accepted?
No, because phenomenal consciousness is generally accepted.
Hmm.
Good question. I would as soon doubt the existence of neuroscience as I would anger.
I got into this with Isaac as well. What does it mean to "know of what you speak"? If it is purely being able to use the word, then yes even if you can't feel fear you know what fear is since you are able to use the word. But I don't think that's a reasonable model for understanding. Talking to a vietnam veteran about the horrors of war when you've never fought yourself you'll likely be met with "You don't know what you're talking about". It is in that colloquial sense that I mean that the person who can't experience fear doesn't know what fear is, I don't mean to say they can't formulate sentences with the word.
But then again, an 8 year old (or a parrot) can formulate sentences about integral calculus if you teach them. But I'm pretty sure we can agree they don't know what they're talking about.
Or like how a sociopath learns to fake emotion and lie to manipulate people. A sociopath can say they love you and empathize with your situation, while at the same time plotting to empty your bank account.
Here's an intereting Radio Lab podcast on deception. One segment discusses a a pathological liar and how they conned a bunch of people who cared for them.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/91612-deception
So we're back with Chalmers and a certain amount of ontological anti-realism, which just means questioning the usefulness of labels like physical and mental, especially if those words are causing more confusion than clarify.
Maybe that's where Dennett eventually landed, assuming he's still alive.
Quoting Isaac
You're taking talk of phenomenology as implying neurological theory. How about:
3- Recognize that despite there not being a neural correlate for anger, you still feel angry when punched.
This is not to say that there is a neurological correlate that has not yet been found (though you keep insisting it is for no reason) this is to say that the connection between neurology and phenomenology is not well understood. You clearly feel angry when punched, despite there being no neural correlate for it.
It is, in fact, the case that I feel angry when I feel angry (don't know why I have to say this). This is a very different statement from "Since I experience anger as this distinct thing then there must be a neural correlate for anger". I never once made a statement to that effect about any emotion. So you either didn't understand me or you're misrepresenting.
I'm just going to answer you all at once because you're all saying the same thing "because I feel angry, anger must be a thing (the thing I feel)"
How do you know you feel angry? You know you want to punch something, you know your heart is racing, you know you're inclined to growl, your speech has got louder, you're thinking less rationally... but how do you know that lot is 'anger', or even any specific collection? If you had all the same features but without the racing heart, would you still be 'angry'? How about if we took away the desire to punch something? If we kept the same collection but added a compulsion to laugh out loud, are we still dealing with anger?
From the other side, if I was skipping down the street laughing and singing and said "I'm really angry" would you just accept that, or be inclined to think I'd used the word wrongly. If the former, then how do we learn how to use the word in the first place?
So when you say "I feel angry, so there must be such a thing as 'anger'", what is it you're committing to the existence of? The loose grouping of physiological states? - seemingly not, as this would be just a taxonomic question, we can class things however we please. The physiological states themselves? - again, seemingly not as these are not denied by what I'm saying, and yet there's still problems. Your personal preference for identifying some group of physiological states? - would seem odd to defend what amounts to a private language.
So I'm left no clearer from this latest barage of indignation what exactly you're all insisting exists.
A second issue which seems common to you all is the reach of phenomenal experience. Take an example of referred pain. A sufferer might say "I'm in pain, I think there's something stabbing inside my thigh and it's shooting down my leg". The doctor will carry out a series of examinations. On finding no nerve or tissue damage in the thigh he might think about referred back pain. We take no issue with him saying something like "I know it feels like there's something stabbing inside your thigh, but there isn't, you're mistaken. What's actually happening is that you have some tissue damage in your back". Or, if he finds no damage there he might consider the pain neuropathic, or even (worst case) made up entirely. Either way, we consider his knowledge of physiology to trump our gut feeling about the cause.
Given the trivial normality of such an occurrence, I'm baffled by the resentment that anyone might dare do the exact same thing with mental processes. Why would you assume privileged and accurate access to your mental states when you already know you have no such privilege over your bodily states?
The phenomenological end result is the thing we're taking seriously (the feeling of pain in the thigh, the feeling of anger), not the phenomenological 'gut feeling' about how such a result came about.
So if I say 'anger' is a public model of certain physiological states coupled with socially-mediated contextual parameters from the environment. That is not denying the end result. It's explaining how it came to be. Interoception detects certain physiological states, environmental cues provide context, learned cultural artifacts and language provide options - you land on 'angry' as the best model for the cause of those physiological states. That's an explanation. It doesn't deny anything except your arbitry armchair guesswork as to how your mind works (which I'm not going to apologise for denying).
Probably my bad. Yes, I do agree.
Quoting fdrake
In a sense, although language affect the two stream disproportionately. People with certain types of aphasia have associated difficulties with object recognition, but not with object manipulation. Something might even be used (to an extent) without any apparent ability to recognise what it is. Capgras syndrome doesn't affect fine motor treatment (patients aren't expecting the imposter to have irregular features, or be taller, or something). The models which identify objects 'duck' exist in a quite separate part of the visual processing cascade than those which tell us how to interact with it. There has to be a feedback in a higher order model to say "I reckon it's a duck, check if it's got a bill, duck's have those", than the basic saccade-controlling models which say "there's an edge, they usually end with corners, check along it and see". The former is heavily language and culture dependent, the latter much less so - and all other stages in the hierarchy are somewhere in between in terms of influence.
I think we're talking past one another.
I've read it before. Is the summary in Wikipedia incorrect?
Yes, so long as we see 'sufficiently' as culturally mediated. I think interoception features are no different to perception features (which is the motivation for Barrett's collaboration with both Friston and Seth), so your list of four individually underdetermining variables is no less appropriate here than it is with perception. The cultural/linguistic priors were the missing element in the effort to map neural states to phenomenological reports.
Quoting fdrake
I think it's difficult to for me to make any ontological commitment here. People use the word. The term plays a role, I'm not so sure the thing itself does.
Quoting fdrake
This is the key to the issue I have with committing to it. I'm not sure though. Do 'games' exist despite only having a family resemblance, or do we only commit to 'activities' with 'games' being a functional term, a speech act which achieves some task in context but doesn't refer? I'm inclined to think of more and more of language as speech acts rather than sortal terms, but there may be limits to this tendency.
No, but with respect, I don't think you're conveying an appreciation of it.
If the issue turns on whether patterns summarising and aggregating other patterns are real, I don't think the dispute is rooted in neuroscience. If the issue is specifically with emotions being natural kinds and whether there are neural correlates for those natural kinds, I think Barrett's critique applies. I believe those are very separate issues; the first is something like a nominalism/realism dispute, the second concerns modelling emotion [hide=*](or perception+interoception)[/hide] accurately.
Quoting fdrake
Quoting Isaac
This exchange makes me believe you do commit to neural correlates for states that can be said to be like anger or, "angry", so long as those are understood in terms of the conceptual act theory of emotion. If having a neural correlate suffices for the existence of a state, and we grant Barrett's work, that gives us commitments to neural correlates of emotions as situated conceptions. So you are committed to emotions as situated conceptions, no?
What's being eliminated is the notion that the mind is non-physical, not the notion that it is important.
What about Dennett's quasi-realism with a focus on patterns underlying emotions or beliefs?
By physical, you mean natural, like, not involving a supernatural being or substance? Because one usual, common meaning of ‘physical’ is in opposition to ‘mental’...
No one has successfully shown that the mental is not exhausted by the physical either. Whether you adhere to one position or the other will depend on what seems the more coherent and plausible to you. Metaphysical dualism is plagued by the so-called interaction problem. Physicalism eliminates that problem.
Yes, but it's not the only thing it eliminates. Also, property dualism and panpsychism don't have an interaction problem.
I'm more in favor of a neutral monism. Nature is something other than merely physical (or mathematical, informational, functional) which includes whatever consciousness is. Something which both (or our understanding/mapping of both) emerges from.
What is property dualism, but merely an acknowledgement that we reify our linguistic concepts and think in dualistic categories? If you want to say it's more than that, the next step seems to be metaphysical dualism. Is there an intermediate position?
Quoting Olivier5
Something is physical if it, or its effects are detectable. We count something as physical if we can form a causal hypothesis as to its detectable effects.
You mean perceptual sensations?
Quoting Janus
Property dualism isn't substance dualism. It's just saying that are additional properties beyond the physical. Chalmers has defended a functional property dualism where integrated information has the extra properties of some conscious experience. Which I guess is a form of limited panpsychism.
That's empirical. A Kantian would agree, while not being a physicalist, for example. So would Berkeley, for that matter.
Physical means mind independent stuff supervening on the fundamental microstructure physicists posit, like particles, forces and fields in a spacetime topology.
Well, that’s an easy decision then: the effects of the human mind cannot be denied. We’re even screwing up the climate now, thanks to our sciences and technology... we don’t need much philosophy to establish that.
That’s much too easy. Anyone can form a causal hypothesis as to the detectable effects of God and the Devil, or the great Tao or something. This criteria simply doesn’t work. It doesn’t exclude anything.
I think it's truer to say we are screwing up the climate due to our prior ignorance of the effects of our technology. It is only science itself that tells us how we are screwing up the climate. Wilful ignorance of science is now the problem.
Quoting Olivier5
A causal hypothesis must be testable to count as such. Hypotheses about God, the Devil or the Tao are metaphysical hypotheses and are not testable.
Our scientific knowledge of climate change as a theoretical possibility dates from the mid 19th century. In other words, it’s as old as the industrial revolution. Climatology validated the predictions in the 1960’s and 70’s.
Okay so by ‘physical’ you mean ‘testable’? Minds are testable all right. But more importantly, minds are what is testing anything. In order to test anything, you first need a mind to do the testing... So your very criteria for physicality presupposes the existence, centrality and effectiveness of minds.
Yes, I know that; so what?
Quoting Olivier5
I haven't anywhere claimed that minds are not central to all our investigations. We investigate with our minds (and bodies of course). Physicalism, even eliminative physicalism, does not necessarily claim that minds are not central, or that they are illusory, all it necessarily claims is that there is nothing substantively non-physical about minds and their thoughts.
Of course a Kantian or a subjective idealist can agree with the definition. So what? If they purported to reject physicalism then they would necessarily be postulating "something else". What do you think that "something else" could be?
It's also true that the physicalist thinks that physical reality (what we are modeling, but not our models though) is "mind-independent". Don't you? Don't you believe there were dinosaurs prior to humans? Or better, since dinosaurs presumably also were minded, don't you believe there were stars and nebulae prior to the dinosaurs? And that those stars and nebulae were physical?
The point is that the human mind is having a huge ‘physical’ impact. Through science and technology for instance.
Quoting Janus
The point is that your criteria for ‘physicality’ is based on the existence of minds able to have phenomenological experiences. So if one applies your criteria, the question ought not to be if minds are physical, since minds decide what is physical... The question should be: beside minds, what else is physical.
In other words, if one applies your criteria, minds are evidently physical, since minds decide what is physical.
I conclude that ‘physical’, if not defined in opposition to minds, is a vague and empty concept. And if defined in opposition to minds (is physical what is mind-independent) then of course minds are not physical.
I prefer the term ‘natural’, in the sense of excluding the intervention of a supernatural being. No magic, not local anyway. Only universal laws apply, which of course can be created by some gods but the gods obey and observe their own laws so to speak, so there’s no local exception to the rules. ‘Natural’ also evokes biology rather than physics, and I am a strong believer in the powers of biology to explain (ultimately) symbolic human thought.
Kantians would be talking about categories of the mind as they structure experience, and idealists would be talking about ideas. Physical for both is something mental.
Quoting Janus
Yes, but is a physical description exhaustive? We can say the world is physical, but what is meant by that? Does it mean it's only made of the stuff that physicists posit and nothing else?
From the fact that minds decide what is physical, it certainly does not follow that minds are not physical.
Humans decide what is human; does it follow that humans are not human?
Quoting Olivier5
This doesn't follow either. There is no logical proof that minds are physical or not. Both are metaphysical assumptions based on what we found most coherent, consistent, parsimonious and plausible.
Quoting Marchesk
Yes, but then you get the problem of the speculative realists' "arche-fossil". There is no coherent way to subsume the category "physical" under the category "mental". because mental just means, in its ordinary sense, non-physical. Things we can detect are, by definition, physical, at least insofar as we are modeling them. Whether what we are modeling should be counted as physical is another (metaphysical) question. If it were mental, then under that definition it would think and experience; it would be a universal mind or some such. If it were physical it would not think and experience. It would not be a universal mind that thinks and experiences but rather would be some kind of energetic/ informational dynamic. Which seems the more plausible to you?
Okay so the question is not important. The important thing is that minds decide what is physical and what is not.
An even more important thing is that minds are natural. Forget ‘physical’.
I agree that minds are natural (as opposed to supernatural or transcendent or of another substance). I just don't see any point in claiming they are non-physical, if you are not claiming that they are not more than the physical; since physical just is what we count the natural world to be.
That is an interesting topic for debate in its own right. In practice, naturalism is suspicious of transcendentals, because by definition they're not defineable in purely naturalistic terms; nature is what they're transcendent in respect of, you might say. This shows up in debates about platonic realism and whether maths is invented or discovered.
The point about the mind being non-physical was traditionally understood as an aspect of its nature 'imago dei'. In scholastic philosophy (and derived from Aristotle), the 'rational soul' was the aspect of the intellect that could grasp transcendentals, and was therefore associated with the immortal.
Hmmm... and if the mind is in part, physical?
:wink:
It should show up in discussions of meaning... because meaning most certainly transcends the individual and/or community. Naturalism doesn't seem to me to have an issue accounting for meaning. If meaning is transcendental then, it doesn't have a problem with that either...
What about them? Social bonding clearly is not innate, let alone whether or not it is an emotion.
Love? I'm pretty much along the lines of a Spinozist on love.
Nonsensical question. By definition, when it seems to you that you are angry you are, in fact, angry. There is no point at which you can think you're angry but you're actually not angry or vice versa. Because the way things seem to us ("I am angry" for example) is, in fact, the way things seem to us (the experience)
Quoting Isaac
This is only apparent after the fact. Note: I am not saying that these things do not cause or at least correlate with anger, I am saying that in the moment you're angry you're not examining your heart or your voice.
Quoting Isaac
Qualia.
Quoting Isaac
Again:
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Isaac
are not in any way contradictory statements. The former is an attempt to allow the doctor to imagine the pain you're having. Damaged tissue in the back feels like stabbing in the thigh. The latter is an explanation of fact.
Quoting Isaac
Now you're getting it.
Quoting Isaac
It doesn't even deny that. An explanation of how the brain works (what you just gave) does not contradict an explanation of how the mind works (what I talk about). As in, again: Saying "I am angry" is not to imply "There is a neural correlate of anger". Phenomenology does not imply neurology. I've been saying this since we first started talking.
Which parts of what counts as being angry is established by social convention?
Nonsense, bonding is found in all sorts of animal species. From parents to mates to social groups.
Quoting fdrake
Nice. I don't think the critique of Davidson amounts to much, so that's were I'll sit on the realist-eliminativist continuum he constructs. Different schema are translatable in so far as they are true, but that leaves to one side the question of whether or not they are properly to be called true or false. I don't think Dennett is sufficiently nuanced in his treatment fo the variety of intentional states. Belief can be taken as propositional; but, say, hunger?
In deciding the status of emotions, it might help to look at primate studies and see whether a similar range of emotions is seen there.
This actually does not address the issue. There are no facts about a traumatic experience that cannot be stated. But of course no set of statements will be complete; there will always be more that can be said. Taken literally, say that someone does not know what they are talking about is to say they cannot say anything.
That we cannot say everything does not imply that we cannot say anything.
Checkmate, Qualiasts?
"I know I was angry because I felt angry"?
Knowledge is usually taken as justified true belief.
So you can justify your belief that London is in England by pointing to a map, or citing third party authorities, or plenty of other things. But you could not justify your belief that London was in England by claiming London was in England... you need a different proposition for the justification.
What would count as a justification for your belief that you were angry?
It can't be a feeling - "I felt angry"; because that would be the same as saying "I know London is in England because London is in England".
Note the difference between "I know I was angry" and "I know Marchesk was angry"; we see @Marchesk bare his teeth, beat his chest, stare, and vocalise. That's our justification.
You don't know you are angry. You just are angry.
The feeling.
Quoting Isaac
"I'm in pain" is not a causal explanation (a causal explanation for what, the pain?). Saying that you feel a stabbing pain in the thigh is an expression of the pain, not an attempt to explain its cause. You expect the doctor to tell you what the cause is.
Quoting Isaac
Maybe the doctor should be telling the patient how their pain feels? Why does the doctor need any verbal cues at all to know what the ailment of "the sufferer" is?
Quoting Isaac
You're taking it seriously? I thought you wanted to "quine" it.
Actually it varies from an itch to a burning; and I don't care what the doctor does or does not imagine. An unimaginative doctor might be just as effective.
You still think of the meaning of talk of pain in terms of pain having a referent. This is why you can't make sense of your opponents.
Another good thing about the article cited is that it provides a more nuanced account than the rather mundane "qualia or eliminative materialism" spectrum apparently assumed by folk here - @Luke, @Olivier5?
Yes, if the term mind is understood as it is used in everyday experience then it's probably fine. That is:
Whereas the Cartesian considers mind as a container or theater where "internal" experiences occur. This is not just a dualist tendency. Materialists sometimes talk about what the brain produces. But this is just the flipside of dualism. For the materialist, there is no ghostly mind so therefore the brain must be producing the illusion of a ghostly mind. But this is just the Cartesian theater all over again in a materialist guise.
The right approach is to reject the entire Cartesian framing. The human being (interacting in the world) is the relevant agent here, not minds or brains. We see things because we have eyes (and brains), not because our brain projects things on a virtual screen for us.
Quoting fdrake
Pretty much. The use of those terms reinforce the Cartesian theater such that its difficult to understand that there can even be an alternative. Per Ryle's ghost in the machine metaphor the materialist, in rejecting the ghost, simply endorses the machine (where physical things are external, third-person, objective). But that still accepts the underlying Cartesian framing and so doesn't resolve anything.
Quoting fdrake
As far as I can tell, yes. It seems to be adding an unnecessary middle-man (mental patterns).
Quoting fdrake
Yes. As long as we keep in mind that a human being is not just a body, but how it is organized (just as a university is not just a set of buildings, but how they're organized). That is, we predicate experiences, beliefs, perceptions, actions, etc., of human beings, not bodies (or brains).
Quoting Marchesk
The main issue for me there is to recognize dreams and inner dialog as distinct from perception. So the first step is understanding perception in a natural (non-Cartesian) way.
Dialog, by definition, is a conversation between two or more people. Inner dialog extends this idea in a metaphorical way. It's like dialog, except it is conducted in a way that bypasses the normal perceptual channels. Similarly with dreams. An analogy here might be with software that is designed to communicate with some other device on the network. The program could be enhanced to communicate with a virtual device that runs on the same computer as itself, or even as a module within the same program. Human beings similarly have the capability to do that kind of self-referential thing. But that self-reference presupposes a prior capability for reference (and language) generally, which perception provides.
While I agree that the red cup is external to you, and your taste buds (etc.) are internal to you, I don't think it follows that those predicates are applicable to the experience itself. An experience is not a concrete thing like cups and taste buds are. It instead describes your practical contact with things in the environment, which occurred at some time and location.
Anyway, either way, no Cartesian issues there!
Software exists inside some computer system. It's not external to the computer or network. A simulation is a program running inside a computer. We don't interact with software, we interact with computers that run software.
Getting rid of internal/external distinctions doesn't work as long as there are things that have internal and external relationships. It's like saying we shouldn't talk about a movie playing inside a theater because the theater is part of the world!
Dreams are experienced inside brains and nowhere else, because you are asleep.
I suppose it would depend on what one defines as ‘natural’ and ‘naturalism’. Historically the latter is synonymous with ‘ physicalism’. But for me it just means ‘without god’s intervention’. Remember that ‘physical’ has no meaning In this context, since it usually means ‘mind-independent’. So natural does not mean physical, it just means ‘without need for a god or fairy’. And transcendence needs no fairy.
1. Isn't the "practical" (physical?) contact between you and your environment a "concrete thing"?
2. Isn't there more to an "experience" than this physical contact? E.g. There's not just the "practical contact" experience of light entering the eye, there's also the experience of seeing red.
Yes, and that experience happens inside the brain.
You want to summarize the conclusion for us, Banno? Personally I hold Dennett as a fake thinker, as a snake oil salesman à la Trump. In typical fashion for a faker, he says nothing precise in Quining Qualia. I suppose the same is true of this other article.
Since you don't back this up with any form of erudition, I don't really much care.
Likewise, why should I care about your Dennett article, if you can’t even be bothered to summarize what it says?
Fakers everywhere...
Indeed.
Perhaps, but that doesn't explain (away) the duality of the experience.
Agreed. The experience of red is something more than the perceptual process leading up to it. Or at least our description of it.
Not necessarily. I said what the purpose of the statement was, ignore referents. It's why we say "It feels like someone stabbed my leg" instead of "Ouch". Even though both would work at informing the doctor we're in pain. The former give the doctor more to work with, IE: it specifies a certain pain as opposed to just the blanket statement that you are in pain.
Quoting Banno
When did I say that a urbach-wiethe disease patient cannot say anything about fear? They can say under what conditions people tend to be afraid for example. But they cannot say much more than that.
But it does seem to imply a mind or foregoing intelligence. Religion is not all gods and fairies, you know ;-)
We agreed already with Janus that minds exist and are effective (i.e. causal). What is religion without a belief in the supernatural?
I asked Marchesk this earlier:
"Moore's point was that whatever an idealist claims about the illusory nature of the physical, she still jumps out of the way of on-coming tractor trailers.
Moore on phenomenal consciousness: deny it if you like, you still understand your own behavior (and that of others) in terms of it."
In the essay fdrake pointed to, Dennett mentions the necessity of the content of folk psychology. So on the one hand, he wants his readers to doubt, and on the other, be assured that belief, for instance, has some sort of liminal status as an abstract object.
Does that keep Dennettian doubt (about the phenomenal) from invading science?
Of course it’s a boo word, so what? I am entitled to have likes and dislikes, just like everyone else. And I don’t like mythological explanations that much. So to me, minds emerge naturally from our biology.
Balls.
Sorry. I was replying by phone, I should unpack what I'm saying here.
'Supernatural' is associated with everything that science is not, in other words, 'naturalism' is defined to be differentiated from 'the supernatural'. But in my view it's an artificial distinction, based on historical definitions and notions of the domains of religion and science. This colors many of the debates on topics of philosophy of mind, because there's a kind of tacit understanding of what is not admissable, on account of it being associated with religion. You know the Greek term 'metaphysical' is an exact translation of the Latin 'supernatural'. And many positivistic philosophies reject anything supernatural or metaphysical or transcendent, BECAUSE they concern ideas which can't be validated empirically. Dennett simply takes that to one logical conclusion.
That's why Nagel's essay Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion is important. He's not a religious apologist, in fact he professes atheism, but in this essay he analyses the role of Darwinian materialism in philosophy of mind, that you see in Daniel Dennett.
But somehow, physicalism has come to mean the same thing as naturalism.
My understanding of the prefix "meta" is that it simply means "about", often in some reflexive way (metadata = data about the data, metacognition = cognition about cognition). Metaphysics is a discourse about physics, itself understood as a discourse about nature.
While "super" in supernatural means today something very different: "at odds with nature".
I've started reading, found it a good piece. But rest assured that I am not afraid of anything here, except facile deus ex machina cop-outs. One can answer "God did it" to any philosophical question; it's just a bit too easy, which is why I stay away from theology.
Actually the title 'meta-physics' came from an editor of the Aristotelian corpus, who placed those books after the physics books, so in that case 'meta' simply meant 'after'. But it also has the connotation 'beyond' or 'transcending'. So it reasonable to say that 'meta-physic' is an equivalent of the latin 'super-natural'. (There's also a Buddhist version, 'lokuttara', meaning world-transcending. Many secular Buddhists would like the Buddha to be a 'natural person', but, alas, not.)
Quoting Olivier5
That's what I'm getting at. It has been defined in such a way as to mean almost exactly that. So ideas associated with 'religion' are placed on one side, and those with 'science' on the other. Often this demarcation is assumed or tacit.
Quoting Olivier5
Care to mention an example? I didn't see anything of that kind in it, myself.
This demarcation is useful, though.
Quoting Wayfarer
In what? Nagel's essay? No, of course not. I am just saying that I personally go by some rules while philosophizing, rules which exclude the facile recourse to mythology and theology. It's not an ontic statement about the existence or absence of the gods, just a methodological statement.
Oh good. Sorry, I misinterpreted your remark.
Well explain where I'm going wrong then, please.
That’s looks like I felt, after analyzing entries on page 72.
And... social bonding is not innate. These are not mutually exclusive.
What would a perfect model of the cosmos look like compared to imperfect models? It seems to me that it is the nature of models to leave things out - things that are not useful to what your goal is in modeling some aspect of the cosmos. Why do we model?
:up:
I loathe the idea that certain very useful apt terms must be tied to certain philosophical positions and the problems that those positions lead to or have.
Quoting Marchesk
More than that...
:smile:
Some of your mind is in your cell phone.
The red cup full of Maxwell House coffee. The ability to draw correlations between the coffee, the sipping behaviours, and the autonomous involuntary physiological response(s) of the sensory apparatus. These are the things required for any and all meaningful conscious experience involving tasting Maxwell House coffee from red cups. In the case of the cat's discontent, she draws correlations between her own discontentment and coffee drinking. That's the part of the overall experience that can stand alone as a conscious experience of coffee drinking/tasting. The cat becomes aware of causality, by attributing the results of her drinking coffee(the response of her physiological sensory apparatus) to her own actions of drinking coffee, and in doing so learns that she does not like drinking coffee.
It only takes once.
Clearly she'd had a conscious experience of drinking Maxwell House coffee from a red cup. It's private, in the sense that it happened... to her. It's ineffable... to and from her limited point of view. It's immediately or directly apprehensible to her. It's meaningful to her. She has no language. Clearly meaningful conscious experience is prior to language. That which is prior to language cannot be existentially dependent upon it. My cat's conscious experience of coffee drinking is prior to language. Some conscious experience of coffee drinking exists in it's entirety prior to language. That's pretheoretical.
The problem...
There's no red quale as a property of her experience. There's also no reason to deny the same limitations apply to human conscious experience of drinking Maxwell House coffee from a red cup prior to language acquisition. The cat drinks from a red cup without ever perceiving the red cup as such. That's because there has been no correlations drawn between the cup's color and something else. Some conscious experience involving red cups do not have the property/quale of red, despite the fact that a red cup is an irrevocable necessary elemental constituent thereof.
Are linguistic constructs based upon subject/object ontology. That ontology, that dichotomy, that linguistic framework is garbage.
A set isn't a linguistic object. A set is an abstract object: neither mental nor physical.
If you say so.
According to???
Coming from someone who advocates for the use of "qualia"...
...that's a tad bit ironic if it's meant to be a critique.
And is the argument that sets exist in their entirety prior to our naming and descriptive practices?
:brow:
Weird.
I don't know what it would mean to say an abstract object exists at a certain time. Dennett counts beliefs as abstract objects. A belief is true a certain time.
Belief B could be true during the Devonian, but not during the Pleistocene.
All in one acid trip.
A simulated brain in a vat dreaming it's a bat while on acid.
I would argue against Dennett.
:point:
The code for which is running on a simulated android who's trying to get out of the matrix so he can find out what chicken actually tastes like.
Well, if you must.
This seems to me to say that there are actually ineffable private directly apprehensible meaningful experiences. Just that they are not necessarily formed from "red" and "cup". From the cat's POV all that happened is it just drank something disgusting. This is not to say that it does not see the red cup, only that it didn't "categorize" it in her experience, didn't emphasize or notice it. Am I understanding this correctly?
Hypothetically, so pre-theoretical.
Does it matter what is the cat is drinking? Is it the same to say, cats can have a conscious experience of drinking without ever experiencing it as such, which reduces to, can cats have a conscious experience of drinking without ever experiencing it as drinking? If so, what the cat can have a conscious experiencing of, in this case, is undefined. Given it is a conscious experience the cat can have, yet the experience is undefined, it follows that whatever permits the cat to be conscious of its experiences, is at the same time insufficient for it, from which it is perfectly permissible to surmise either the cat isn’t experiencing, or, it isn’t conscious enough.
Cat’s been drinking since it was birthed. Of the manifold of things it has imbibed, because it is assumed to be in good health, none of those things have been detrimental to its health. From the fact it is in good health because nothing imbibed has the properties to cause otherwise, that which is henceforth imbibed can be recognized as detrimental, merely from the fact it is nothing like that which has never hurt it. If such be the case, the cat isn’t drawing any conscious correlations at all, for all such recognizant operations are sufficiently attributable to instinctive reaction to pure biological physiology, no part of which can be called necessarily conscious. And of course, cats being language-less creatures is utterly irrelevant, for even in language-imbued humans, instinct is quite sufficient for involuntary reaction.
With respect to higher as opposed to lower intelligences, it is the preemptive capacity to consciously create the correlations to draw, rather than the consequential drawing of them. The latter we do, but only because the former is the condition that makes the doing, possible. Even of there is a valid argument that lesser intelligences have the capacity to create that which is not already extant, in which ever form but for us it is conceptions, it remains hypothetical that such creations, and thereby any employment of them, are inaccessible to any intelligence that didn’t create them, and by which the logical right to talk about them is immediately sacrificed, unless indulging in rampant. anthropomorphism.
Me....enjoi-ing. For a change.
But the philosophical challenge is to then get literal again. Lest your poetry be seized on.
Inner dialog (and music) is a good place to be literal about thinking, as it is relatively easy to recognise as being supported, even if not utterly constituted, by neural shivering. In the extreme, we might catch our lips (fingers) moving; but plenty of more central neural/neuro-muscular twitching is also noticeable.
Such recognition may not threaten anyone's intuition of purely phenomenal "sound" events, even if they begin to notice that shivering at some level always accompanies them. After all, perhaps the alleged theatrics are something weird emerging from the bio-physics of the more central shivering.
But it's a good place to start.
Most people on the phenomenal side admit to the shivering accompaniment. The question is how/why it's not just shivering.
If we have a shivering ontology, then it's strange that our experiences are more than the shivering. Thus the weird emerging from bio-physics.
That's exactly what I meant about how I think you see it. I hope that was clear.
Anyway, as I say, I think it's a promising area in which to offer you reasonable cause for doubt, all the same.
That is so unfair! I've been very precise about what I mean by qualia.
Quoting Olivier5
Quoting Olivier5
Very precise.
And the bloody arthritis is playing up again, making me even grumpier.
I dunno. I sorta hoped you would begin to make sense at some stage.
I think there's a pretty strong alliance between that perspective and embodied cognition approaches, though there's a rabbit hole to go down regarding how much of embodiment is the brain's doing. Do you think the role of the brain can be emphasised without falling into the Cartesian trap?
I think it can, so long as the image of the brain producing output mind states as distinct phenomena from their production is discarded. Body patterns as environmental patterns. Refusing to put events involving an agent on a privileged ontological stratum - like as a separate substance (a "res cogitans") or aspect of substance (an "infinite mode" or "attribute").
As an aside, I also think it's a separate kind of question from discussions of superveniance; as "the mind supervenes on physical states" doesn't tell you much about which conception of the mind is supervening on which conception of the physical.
Quoting Andrew M
This makes a lot of sense to me (maybe). In what way do you believe conceptualising things in terms of mental and physical phenomena can propagate or reinforce a Cartesian perspective?
Don’t worry about it, pain qualia don’t exist.
But pain exists.
What is pain?
Oh baby, don't hurt me
Don't hurt me
No more
So I will fall asleep with a zombie other than you
I had a thought you would take me seriously
And keep posting on
Serpents in my mind
I am searching for your qualia
Everything changes
In time
If you started a thread to debate consciousness (because we need yet another one of those), what word(s) would you use instead? I do agree qualia is a problematic term. That's why I try to talk about sensations instead.
But It seems everyone has their own criteria for what counts as being conscious.
If you really think through what elminativism is saying, it eliminates reason itself.
[quote=Leon Wieseltier] Dennett does not believe in reason. He will be outraged to hear this, since he regards himself as a giant of rationalism. But the reason he imputes to the human creatures depicted in his book [Breaking the Spell] is merely a creaturely reason. Dennett's natural history does not deny reason, it animalizes reason. It portrays reason in service to natural selection, and as a product of natural selection. But if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection?[/quote]
That’s why I keep harking back to Nagel’s essay. The elimination of reason really means foreclosing the possibility of philosophy itself.
:cool:
:blush:
Indeed, and had you been reading and/or listening to my efforts in our exchanges, that should not have come to surprise you. I've certainly never denied that much. To quite the contrary, I've been arguing for it, just not the same way that the qualia proponents have been. "Qualia" adds nothing to our understanding of conscious experience. Not our own, which is the only place to start, and certainly not any other 'lesser' animals'.
Well, given that those are names, names are part of common language, common language is not private, I've stipulated language less creatures for good reason, and common sense alone tells us that a language less creatures' conscious experience cannot include language use as content...
Yeah, not just 'not necessarily', but not at all... ever.
I did not say that. I mean, just to be clear. I'm not going to defend that either. That is your account/report of the cat's point of view, not mine. I actually stated what I am willing to say is the cat's conscious experience, from both the cat's point of view(it learned that it does not like the taste of coffee), and in terms of the content of the conscious experience of drinking coffee from a red cup, and how it arrived at that meaningful thought or belief about coffee tasting(conscious experience of drinking coffee from a red cup).
It's crucial to separate our report from what we're reporting upon. That cannot be overstated. Absolutely crucial.
Good of you to pause and ask... nice improvement.
Seems you've understood some important aspects of it. She certainly saw the red cup full of Maxwell House coffee, she just did not see it as such. Who knows what it was to her? We can safely say she paid attention to it, we can safely say she noticed it. I mean she drank from it. However, the red cup itself may or may not have been meaningful to her. The coffee tasting bitter most certainly was.
Coming from someone who claimed to have taught me how to use the word "pre-theoretical", all the while ignoring the remarkable difference between their's and mine...
... again, that's a tad bit ironic.
:flower:
Sorry, I couldn't pass that up! Just joking with you. Don't take it personally, it's not meant to be.
My apologies... I suppose I could have been a bit clearer. Nice to have a Kantian around to take notice of such details!
:wink:
I meant experience drinking Maxwell House coffee from a red cup as drinking Maxwell House coffee from a red cup. I was merely drawing distinctions between our report of a language less creature's conscious experience and the language less creature's conscious experience.
It's all about the content.
That would be the distinction between rudimentary, basic, language less thought and belief(pre-theoretical conscious experience), and our accounts thereof. As I stated just moments ago, but it bears repeating... it is crucial to separate our account/report of language less creatures' conscious experience from the actual conscious experience of the creature.
Glad I could help.
:razz:
Anthropomorphism is most certainly a mistake that I am conscientious of. It's part of my standard to make certain of not committing it. Rightfully so.
By the way, there's quite a bit that can be ascertained by that cat post than may seem at first blush, particularly regarding how our own experience involving red cups begins should that be prior to language acquisition. It's also relevant with respect to how the private aspect is no longer. It's also relevant to how the ineffable aspect is no longer. It's also relevant to which parts are directly apprehensible and what it takes for them to become so...
Not really. Consciousness is an illusion, remember? So your conscious feeling of pain is an illusion, as per Dennett... Stop complaining.
In one sense the term is, like the term 'natural', a distiction without a difference insofar as everything is both physical and natural.
There is most certainly a red cup in the experience, but the color is meaningless to the cat. There is no red qualia in the cat's experience. All conscious experience is meaningful to the creature having the experience. All conscious experience of seeing red requires that the color be meaningful to the cat. The color of the cup that that cat drank from is not meaningful to the cat, despite it's having been autonomously detected by the cat's eyes. Seeing red does not equate to conscious experience of red, unless one wishes to draw and maintain a distinction between detecting red autonomously, and seeing red.
When color is meaningful, that meaningfulness always comes by virtue of being part of a correlation being drawn between it and something else. Being a part of the correlation is exactly how red becomes meaningful to the creature. Meaningful conscious experience of seeing red happens at the precise moment in time that red becomes part of the correlations drawn by the creature between the color and something else.
It's the something else that matters most here when it comes to the actual content of another's conscious experience of red. The something else must already exist in it's entirety prior to becoming meaningful to the creature... names of colors notwithstanding.
I would be more than willing to grant that some basic correlations between red and some autonomous biological function, like fear, hunger, thirst, could be drawn without issue at the language less level during the right sorts of circumstances.
It's important to state precisely what and why you exclude certain hypotheses. I personally exclude from my reasoning entities whose existence I haven't ascertained, such as gods, for reasons probably similar to yours. On this ground I exclude an interventionist god as a possible explanation for minds, where I differ from Descartes. That's what the term natural means to me: we can produce a new mind without divine intervention, just by making a baby. Ergo minds emerge naturally, as opposed to needing a miracle (an exception to the rules) to emerge.
So, when you say: 'minds are physical", what type of explanation are your trying to exclude?
Quoting Wayfarer
Me, page 1:
Qualia....a metaphysical invention by those to whom “representation” doesn’t say enough, by means of that which is itself a representation, but attempts to say too much.
Bonnie Raitt:
“...A little mystery to figure out
Let's give 'em somethin' to talk about...”
.......Counterpoint: I’m not sure we have the warrant for that.
Point sustained: Quoting creativesoul
.......Counterpoint sustained: where is the surety of what the content is.
Quoting creativesoul
BOO-YAAH!!!!
Those elusive, enigmatic, nay, even damnable, “elemental constituents”, yes?
Now I'm convinced I'm going inner
How about red, pain, anger, looooOOOVE?
I’m guessing “going inner” wasn’t a typo.......was it?
If you alternate Mozart and Lorn it makes both of them seem more sinister. Just thought I'd share that.
External qualia good.
Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends.
We’re so glad you could attend, step inside, step inside.
Sufficient reason to believe that other creatures' conscious experience is different from our accounts thereof ought be fairly uncontentious... no?
Surety is not the sort of thing that has a spatiotemporal location, so the question doesn't make sense as written. Can you reword it so that I understand what you're asking me to provide?
Are you asking me to justify my asserting what the content of the cat's conscious experience is?
No. Elusive... perhaps depending upon method.
Not too difficult. What they can actually be is determined, in part, by virtue of their own existential dependency. For example, language less conscious experience cannot consist of language use, but some other mid-level pre-theoretical conscious experience can.
Never mind. Your post was blank for 3 hours, now it isn’t. My response no longer applies.
Quoting creativesoul
Determination by virtue of existential dependency doesn’t say what the dependency is. If I knew what the something depends on, I might be able to figure out what the something is.
The breakdown intrigues me, honest.
Very simple; I am trying to exclude any meta-physical explanation.
Thanks for asking.
Janus belongs to the Secular Thought Police. That's right, isn't it, Janus?
Correct, but surety, the quality, has a definite relation to its object. I’m suggesting the quality of non-personal experiences in general, because they can only be second-hand, have none.
The only way out of the dilemma is to assert that cat’s experiences have only empirical content, which is certainly determinable by mere observation, but if such is the case, the “conscious” part of the content....because it is being called “conscious experience” of the cat....would seem to be completely absent. This, in turn, reflects on the quality....the surety.....of the cat’s experience.
————-
Quoting creativesoul
Apparently, the content is that which exists in its entirety, and so far, that’s the extent of the assertion. Maybe not asking so much the justification for asserting content, but asking instead, what the something’s content actually is. And even if the something’s content is some ubiquitous or pervasive correlation, I still have no more understanding of that, than I had with understanding merely the ambiguous something.
Distaste.
The qualia Banno mixes into his morning coffee.
Probably needs to add more Bailey's, except I think it's ineffable. :grimace:
This doesn't seem quite right to me; a body is not a separate thing from "how it is organized"; so there would seem to be no problem involved in saying a human being is a (minded, organized) body, in which case "experiences, beliefs, perceptions, actions etc.," can indeed be coherently predicated of (enbrained) bodies. To say that they cannot is to introduce another, differently nuanced layer of separation which begins (again) to look like dualism.
No, it's not right at all; I wouldn't mind metaphysical explanations if any of them seemed coherent. It's also an egregious irony, considering you are the one who insists that there must be metaphysical explanations, without being able to give the slightest account of what they might be, and you are the one asserting without any cogent argument that physical explanations are demeaning, tout court, which amounts to a form of puritanism; and puritans are the archetypal holier than thou "thought police".
BTW, I'm not telling anyone what to think, but merely outlining what seems most plausible to me, and my reasons for finding it most plausible. I respect anyone's right to believe whatever they want for whatever reason they want; but if they want to argue for the universal inter-subjective truth of their beliefs, in a public forum, as you do, that is to prescribe, or at least insinuate, that others should think as they do, because alternative forms of belief are "demeaning" of humanity, or whatever, then they need to present good cogent arguments, not the bare assertions and innuendo you usually present instead.
If you don't agree all you have to do is cite an example of a detailed model with "determinable interacting parts and ways of interaction between them" that is not given in terms of physical entities and their interactions.
Hence, my preference is neither ineffable, nor private.
If qualia are ineffable and private, they have nothing to do with my drinking preferences.
While I agree that a physical reality is the most compelling explanation for the empirical, it's not the only coherent one. And I don't agree that it's necessarily complete. As in, there could be more to the world than what physics, chemistry or biology posits, since those are explanations we come up with, not some God's eye view.
The idea of the physical is the idea of mind independent structure and interaction. How those structures and interactions appear to us is not taken to be exhaustive of their nature. What does it matter that our understandings of the world are not complete; how could we ever know if they were, or what it would even mean for them to be complete?
In any case the point is that our understandings of things are in terms of physical, material and energetic, structures and their powers and causal interactions. I don't see how Hume, Kant or Berkeley are relevant to this point of fact.
Quoting Marchesk
Since we can't achieve a "God's eye view", what relevance could such an imagined thing have to us? Don't we have to test our explanations and choose those which seem most consistent with our observations and experience; those, in other words, which seem most plausible?
Guess it could be close to my idea if by metaphysical you meant what I mean by supernatural: exceptions to the causal laws of the universe.
Quoting Janus
Defined as such, you cannot say that minds are physical, since they cannot be 'mind-independent'.
:-)
Click on my avatar, then on my discussions. There are several OP's and discussions that you would find interesting. The titles are indicative of the subject matter.
Well, in the end it seems to me that intuition pumps will not work on folk with the wrong intuition. It's clear that the arguments in the article are successful in removing from reasonable discourse qualia that are both ineffable and private. The reasonable folk who defend qualia have followed the only course open, which was to shift the definition of one or more of the concepts involved.
That's in keeping with the approach of the SEP article, which lists Dennett's definition as one of several.
The trouble with this is the tendency to slide between definitions, seen most clearly in @khaled.
Quoting khaled
Then anger is neither private, nor ineffable. Qualia are(by definition). Therefore, anger is not qualia.
I'm trying to quine conscious experience, thought, and belief...
:wink:
Did I, really?
Or to put it another way, most of this thread is his fault.
That was about how Dennett avoids global skepticism. Except the Mozart and Lorn thing. Alternating them really is freaky. Also the Nutcracker and Marilyn Manson. Woo.
Here since page 1. Derailed at page 2.
Mww uses Kantain terminology and framework.
The underlying topic is conscience experience(consciousness). If language less creatures can have conscious experience too, then an adequate account of all conscious experience must be capable of taking them into proper account as well as our own. The historical renderings(different schools of thought) do not, cannot. Since Aristotle(I think) we've placed our own conscious experience upon a pedestal, so to speak, and ferociously defended our own superiority over 'dumb' animals, by virtue of claiming that they are incapable of the kind of thought and belief - like reason - that we are. While that is most certainly true, and there are all sorts of other reasons we've wanted to be superior to other creatures, the mistake made by all was to not have taken proper account of our own minds to start with. The methodological approach was all wrong.
When methodological naturalism split from philosophy proper, it was already doomed to fail because it was already based upon and working from utterly inadequate dichotomies... subject/object, internal/external, objective/subjective, physical/non physical, mind/body, physical/mental, etc.
Emergent consciousness requires an ontological basis of at least three different categories.
I very much appreciated how you actually addressed the text of Dennett's article. Closer to what I had in mind when I started this. The purpose of threads based on a specific text is of course to critique that text; and usually they go for a few tens of pages. This one grew in several directions, mostly away from the text. That explains it;s length. @CreativeSoul is right that the parts that you, Isaac, and Kenosha Kid on modelling were of interest. I have a divergent take on that, since after Davidson I'm not particularly happy with the notion of modelling; Both time and a desire not to lead the thread any further from the text prevented me from entering into a critique. I think there's still a hint of the homunculus in @Isaac's approach, along the lines of @Andrew M's Cartesian theatre... Roughly, when we refer to the cup, we are not referring to the model of the cup we have in mind, but directly to the cup.
Well, as we both know, our positions sharply diverge at that point. Maybe, just maybe, we will bridge that divide one day.
:wink:
I guess this is because representation mechanisms can sit pretty uneasy with direct realism?
I think it's hard to have a notion of representation playing around in a philosophy of mind without sliding into Cartesian intuitions (mental represents physical, split them up like subject states representing object states), but I do think Dennett manages to have a representational account of perception without being a Cartesian; the thing doing all the representing is a bodily process' pattern, that matches environmental patterns in some way, so there's no mental/physical event distinction in the ontology for the Cartesian distinction to attach to (a consequence of characterising experiential properties as "extrinsic relational properties").
That'd take all the fun out of it.
Would be a good thread.
I'm not sure what you mean by "in the context of consciousness". Do you mean 'in the context of how consciousness intuitively seems to us"? If so, then physical explanations will always seem inadequate, because they necessarily leave out how consciousness intuitively seem to us. It's like expecting science to be able to give a physical explanation of the meaning of a poem or musical work.
Isaac is an indirect realist.
I have in mind the difference between talking about a calculator adding up a series of numbers and talking of a calculator flicking transistors on and off. These are two quite different ways of talking about the very same thing. Like the duck-rabbit, the argument can go on interminably as to which is "right", to the entertainment of those watching from the sideline who see both.
I'm just not at all clear as to what you position is...
Quoting Marchesk
...beyond name-calling.
Or as Chalmers puts it, the structure and function does not account for the sensations of experience without positing some extra natural law, like integrated information theory.
Maybe I'm a little too close to the fence.
It does not end well for the position Banno is arguing from/for.
...yeah, that bit.
Was that here, or in The Other Place?
Yes, that's it. I prefer to speak of ontological rather than metaphysical commitments, because the very term 'metaphysical' is a tendentious one; suggesting that there is something beyond the physical (or over and above the natural in the sense of 'manifest natural law') as it does. 'Meta" and "super' are pretty much synonymous.
Quoting Olivier5
I don't think this is right. 'Mind-independent existence' just means something like 'existing independently of whether it is perceived'. It is arguable that we don't, or at least don't necessarily, perceive mind. Humans had minds before they were aware that they had minds. Animals have minds without being aware of the fact.
That of which we cannot speak ...?
I think mentioned before that his discussion of Davidson did not work for me. We always have a basis for translation in our shared reality.
What is the basis of that judgement? From what perspective do we match the bodily pattern with those environmental patterns? What faculty does that?
So, for example, recognising dolphin noises as a language is exactly recognising that it is about fish and waves or some such.
Quoting Marchesk Yah, I looked for that but couldn't find it. Can you link?
Sounds good. (Goodman referenced noted.)
The main issue for me is that a description of a human being at a physical level should not contradict descriptions at other levels of abstraction. What differentiates a human being (and other living creatures) from the rest of the universe is not the fundamental material they are composed of (say, atoms, etc.), but their structure and organization. And it is this structure that gives rise to the predicates we use at different levels of abstraction. For example, that we absorb and reflect light as physical systems. That we perceive things, feel pain, etc., as sentient creatures. And that we have thoughts, desires, and purposes, etc., as human beings.
So the point there is that thoughts, desires, perceptions, etc., are not something in addition to, or separate from, the physical. They are instead characteristics that are specific to certain kinds of physical systems - in our case, as human beings. So to seek to understand these characteristics is to seek to understand our physical structure and organization (as compared to and differentiated from other physical systems).
Some things cannot be reliably quantified to be sure. I don't believe that everything can be explained in terms of the laws of physics, so in that sense I am not an eliminative physicalist. No 'third person' explanation of experience is ever going to satisfy us, because intuitively experience is 'first person' to us. That's why we have poetry and literature, the arts and music. But that is not surprising, it seems only reasonable; how else would you expect the situation to seem?
If we reify the first person seemingness as qualia; then we are committing Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced concreteness", insofar as we are trying to render the first person seemingness as third person quasi-entities. It's a category error of thinking so easy to fall into, and that's the problem I see with qualia.
I remember that several different ones ended similarly.
Quoting fdrake
You do not seem to remember that the above ends here:Either propositions exist in their entirety in the complete absence of language such that a language less creature is even capable of having an attitude towards them, or language less creatures have no belief.
A belief is an abstract object probably, all patterned and what not.
Quoting Marchesk
The Greeks made a terrible mistake in taking their frustrations out on the Trojans. They should have won with grace and mercy. So we have to just walk away knowing the gods will bless us for being so civilized about it. :confused:
Yes, agreed.
Quoting fdrake
Thoughts, feelings, perceptions, etc., are embodied - they aren't non-physical. So the mental and physical aren't opposing duals. But neither is the mental eliminable, or reducible to some lowest-common-denominator set of physical characteristics that we might share with other things (say, lower animals or machines).
The root of the problem is that the mental-physical division is a philosophical idealization, not a naturally arising distinction. It's as if some philosophers have found the world too unwieldy for their tastes, so have decided to split it into two parts and categorize everything as one or the other. (Different philosophers do this differently, but the principle is the same.)
From an earlier example, suppose you were playing a game of football where you scored a goal. It was clearly a physical activity. Yet it was also an activity that required intelligence and purpose. You can't separate your experience into physical and mental phenomena, nor separate your thinking from your bodily movements. To suppose one can is to create a (dualist) puzzle where none previously existed.
Instead we can describe the activity from a particular point-of-view, and at a particular level of abstraction. For example, we can note that the ball curled into the net (a physical description), or that it was a deliberate strike rather than an accidental deflection (a description of one's purpose), or that the score is now 2-1 (a logical consequence of the rules of the game). So categorical terms like physical, mental, psychological, biological, mechanical, logical, etc., arise as natural distinctions depending on the scenario and what one wishes to say.
Duals like subject/object, internal/external, physical/mental, mind/body, are assumptions that frame the analysis for dualists and materialists alike. Yet these terms do have natural uses when understood apart from dualism, as suggested above.
The notion of a proposition without language is nonsense.
I would concur.
How can a language less creature have an attitude towards a proposition?
‘S ok. Take refuge in my having quined qualia years ago. In principle anyway, insofar as nothing with which qualia is supposed to be concerned, hasn’t already been accounted for.
Banno's not a fan of Kantian frameworks.
How about we do it for the first time?
:smile: :flower:
Hardly anyone is.
It's the conflating perception with reality stigma.
That question needs answered.
No, it's an abstraction over concrete things. It describes something that a person does or has. That is, no person, no experience. (Which we can appreciate if we substituted a robot for the person, since robots don't have experiences.)
Quoting Luke
Those aren't experiences, at least on an ordinary definition. This is a good example of how we're using language in completely different ways.
Experience isn't merely physical contact. A robot can do physical contact. But it isn't therefore something separate from physical contact either (which would be dualism). It's an abstraction over that physical contact in a manner applicable to human beings.
And I would add that the practical contact is between the cup/coffee and the person, not between the person's eyes and the photons. The latter is detail about the physical process and operates at a different level of abstraction than what I'm describing here.
Their food is not a proposition.
Cats do not have belief.
You lost me. Nobody’s a Kantian because that’s what they do, or that’s what he did?
Indeed.
The way things are, in and of themselves, serves as a basis. It is distinct from the way things appear. We only have access to the latter.
Something like that.
Ok. I didn't think you were willing to say that that statement is true.
That is a new statement of contention.
:brow:
Surprisingly.
I’m game. You’re inclined to more modern thought than I, so....there is that.
Human beings and their bodies are not separate, but we predicate them differently. I have a body (as do other animals). But my body doesn't have beliefs, or experiences. Instead, I do. What a human being is, in contrast, is an animal. In this case an animal that has particular capabilities that distinguish it from other animals (such as the capability for rational thought and language).
Whereas Cartesian dualism does literally separate mind and body. For the Cartesian dualist, experiences and beliefs are in the mind, and "I" is identified with that separable mind.
It isn't.
Of course cats have beliefs. It's just that they cannot be propositional attitudes in cats, although we can set them out as propositional attitudes.
So, then some belief is not an attitude towards a proposition, and we've arrived at incoherence and/or self-contradiction.
Belief is an attitude towards a proposition(propositional attitude). Cats have beliefs. Cat's beliefs are not propositional attitudes.
To say "I have a body" instead of "I am a body" is precisely the way of thinking/ speaking that leads to Cartesian dualism. So, yes, you're right; according to that dualistic way of thinking, the body does not have beliefs, but according to the monistic ways of thinking myself as a body, the body does indeed have beliefs; or perhaps better expressed beliefs are embodied, they are modes or dispositions of the body.
On a second reading... it seems that the similarity may end sooner than I thought.
Oh, ok. Yes, that’s the Kantian representational system. Nowadays folks tend to think what we perceive is just the way things really are.
Quoting Andrew M
Ok, it seems you can't agree about the philosophical challenge. You want to settle: for different levels of description, not literally commensurable. Then, unfortunately, I have to dispute your continual claims to have risen above dualism.
But I answered that already in the longer posts about the cat's experience.
Understanding that conscious experience consists of correlations drawn between different things is just the start of a very disciplined practice.
Anyone who does that is truly naive, both philosophically and scientifically. One might be a direct realist, but it does take more work than just "things are exactly as they look". Or at least I hope they bother to do the work.
Because if not, their lack of philosophical rigor will be called out. Lazy bastards!
Because that's how it is!
Kids these days and their direct realism. Jeese!
Nonsense. Unless you can taste wavefunctions and see X-Rays.
I bet you can't even do sonar!
Sarcasm doesn't translate well into written word alone.
Quoting Banno
We know beliefs to mean a certain something, and we come by them is some certain way. If cats don’t come by their beliefs in the same way, what right do we have to claim they have them?
:cool:
Statements are combinations of nouns and verbs and such like; Some statements are either true or false, and we can call these propositions. So, "The present king of France is bald" is a statement, but not a proposition.
Beliefs range over propositions. (arguably, they might be made to range over statements: Fred believes the present king of France is bald.)
Beliefs set out a relation of a particular sort between an agent and a proposition. This relation is such that if the agent acts in some way then there is a belief and a desire that together are sufficient to explain the agent's action. Banno wants water; he believes he can pour a glass from the tap; so he goes to the tap to pour a glass of water.
The logical problem here, the philosophical interesting side issue, is that beliefs overdetermine our actions. There are other beliefs and desires that could explain my going to the tap.
The issue you want to develop is how we attribute beliefs to others, including those of the feline persuasion.
Absolutely. And you’re the only current participant that even attempts an exposition of some form of the discipline, even if it’s your own personal creation. I’m down with the attempting the discipline, but promise nothing regarding the practice of it.
You look?
Yep, for even without all the -isms and -ists so prevalent these days, that kind of naive rationality cannot explain how it is we don’t have immediate knowledge of everything upon its being presented to us.
For as long as we can say, “WHAT WAS THAT!?!?!?”.....is as long as naive realism will be a less than sufficiently explanatory paradigm.
What id I add, “In some possible universe, the present king of France is bald.”?
Not at what you mentioned, no. Just regarding our conversations.
I’d be interested in how someone else might develop that issue, but I’m of the mind beliefs are far too subjective to attribute to any intelligence other than the singular intelligence arriving at them.
—————-
Quoting Banno
Perhaps, but that’s what beliefs do. If we want to know what a belief is, in order to then know what a belief can do, we need to delve a lot deeper than language.
You and I agree Trump is venial. Don’t we have the same belief? So what is it that is subjective?
Subjective, whatever it is, is not private. Beliefs can be attributed to others.
...unless what they are is what they do.
1:45 the start of the good part where he complains about being designed to perceive like a limited human being.
Quoting Banno
I’d rather say we have the same agreement.
The ice in your toddie is just like the ice in my cocktail, but the ices are not the same ices. You manufacture your beliefs in the same way I manufacture mine, but your brain is not my brain.
——————
Quoting Banno
Under what domain? Philosophically, the subjective is private, private taken to mean inaccessible to an observer.
Or like when Q on Star Trek Next Generation takes human form to annoy Picard.
Wouldn't have taken you for a modal realist, but if we're going to defeat Trump so you can a very nice warm qualia inside, we best put all our cards on the table.
Quoting Mww
OK; a divergence from common practice. Such things are worthy of care. So we do say things such as "Mww and Banno both believe that Trump is venial", but whereas casually that seems to be attributing the very same belief to us both, you're suggesting it is to be analysed in a deeper way by looking to private... somethings... to which others do not have access.
This is were I differ, since it seems to me that those things which are private, ineffable, inaccessible, are also not suitable for analysis.
Kant, like Wittgenstein, pointed to stuff about which we cannot speak. We should take their advice, and not.
I'm not keen on argument by name-calling.
In terms of modality, I tend to Kripke; yet I still don't see a point to your addition.
I was probably unclear. You said that an experience "describes your practical contact with things in the environment". Could you clarify whether "practical contact" is the same as "physical contact"? If so, isn't one's physical contact with the environment a concrete (i.e. physical) thing? (This would imply that an experience is a physical thing.)
Quoting Andrew M
Seeing red is not an experience? To be clear, I'm talking about a person seeing red (e.g. seeing a red object).
Quoting Andrew M
I'm not sure that I understand. You're saying it's not merely physical contact but it's also no more than physical contact...? How are robots any different in this regard?
Quoting Andrew M
On the one hand, there is practical contact between a person and a coffee. On the other hand, there is practical contact between a person and photons. What's the difference? What other process is there besides "the physical process"?
Yeah. It was a great idea for a thread, and, Dennett's frequent invocation of neuroscientific principles (especially section 5), justifies the introduction of neuroscience into the topic.
I just don't see the point in continuing a discussion in which the primary counter-argument is "...but it's obvious". If we take that which seems obvious to just be the case then all discussion is rendered pointless, not to mention us being stuck banging rocks together in a cave somewhere.
That was never the argument. Rather, the point that you and others kept missing was that any knowledge of any kind comes from our self-awarenes and the phenomena we perceive. Including of course scientific knowledge. There is no such thing as a third person view, or an impersonal view. It’s always a mind that speaks, writes, observes, deducts, etc. And therefore any attempt by any scientist to reduce minds to brains is self defeating. It saws the branch on which it sits.
Where has any scientist reduced minds to brains?
Nowhere, to my knowledge. That would be self-contradictory and thus in my opinion highly unlikely to ever happen. But there were on this thread many attempts to deny a phenomenological ‘layer’, a ‘representation’ of the world constructed in (or for) our minds based on sense data, and we know that’s precisely what Dennett is after: the idea of a mental theater.
The problem is that without such a Cartesian theater, without representation, there can be no science since science IS NOTHING BUT representation of reality by minds.
Or is it the creation of texts and pictures by organisms able to play a social game of agreeing to pretend that these symbols point at the world, according to principles of pointing that differ in interesting ways from those of art, music and literature?
You do take many things as obvious. For instance, if you hold up a hand and say "Here's a hand.”, there's nothing wrong with that. There's no ontological commitment in that.
Clean away the strawmen piled in the idea of phenomenal consciousness, and it's the same situation.
Ah.
If that was the case, science would have no authority and no effectiveness. And yet it works.
Hence induction.
Best tv show ever.
Because they designed him to be a dualist? :wink:
Did they?
Not shivering Zombie Dennett's "Quining Color"
Then why bring it up?
Quoting Olivier5
The second is not just a simile for the first. There's a world of difference between merely asserting a 'phenomenological layer' and asserting that it is 'constructed in (or for)our minds based in sense data'.
Bug then this has been the standard trick. Make some fundamentally indubitable claim, then tack on a load of properties to it which have no warrant and attempt to smuggle them in under the certainty accompanying the more basic claim. I've really no desire to play that game.
Why not have him complain:
The objects (or illumination events) not the light rays. (Are what we see.)
See, but act
Grow, but stand firm
Shiver, if only to woo
And lose nothing
--Asian poem
Yeah, but since that's not a sufficient reason to accept all matters which seem obvious prima facie, it hardly stands alone without further justification. Even Moore wrote at great length as to why we should accept that 'here is a hand' and the like.
You have to make an argument for it being the same situation, not merely claim it is.
Moore's argument was that the skeptic could not provide more reason to doubt than he had to not. That is evidendtly not the case for qualia as both knowledge of physiology and confusion over intuitions gives ample reason to doubt.
Generally speaking, sure. Precious little need for analytic or speculative philosophy fulfilling a grocery list. If life in general was only that mundane, we wouldn’t have gone to the moon.
—————-
Quoting Banno
Sure, but that still asks, do you not compare the words you hear, to the words you yourself use, and is that not an analysis? And doesn’t that analysis transpire between your ears? And is not the space between your ears your own personal private space? If that is the case, and every single rational agency does the same thing, it is clear none of them are analyzing each other, but each of them are analyzing themselves. In this sense, you are correct, insofar as it is not my analysis of your private, ineffable attributes, but is really my analysis of their affect on my private, ineffable attributes.
Problem is of course, all that analysis is almost always immediate because that to which it applies is familiar. Nature’s way of not cluttering up the works, doncha know. It is only when presented with something new and different, that the active analysis comes center-stage and we become conscious of its activity. Still, being inattentive to it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
Nahhhhh.....we analyze, to some extent, every damn thing we come in contact with, before, now or later; it’s called thinking.
————
Quoting Banno
What kind of stuff can be pointed to, but not spoken about? Tell me that, in order that I can consider their advice.
Anything pointed to, that is, indicated by thought, is conceivable, anything conceivable has its representation, any representation has its schema. The schemata representing conceivable things are words, words are that which are spoken. If it can be thought, it can be spoken about.
Witt said that of which we cannot think is that of which we cannot speak, which is tautologically true, because there wouldn’t be anything to point to if it isn’t thought. Kant never makes mention of what we cannot think, meaning, for him, that which is not present to possible cognition, which translates to, we can speak about anything we do think. Kant generally seeks to affirm, rather than disavow.
Ever onward.....
Moore's waving his hand about is no different than us pointing out colors and pains. They're both just as much a part of experience.
No, that's not Moore's argument at all. It had nothing to do with experience and everything to do with the alternative the skeptic had to offer in place of his naturalism. Active inference presents not only a cogent alternative, but one which is better at making predictions than the Cartesian theatre version.
Inference doesn't make colors or pains go away anymore than it does hands. Except for zombies.
Yes it does, that's the point. Naming colour names is part of a response to stimuli modelled at a cultural level. You do not 'experience' redness. But we've been through this to no avail, I'm not just re-doing it, I'll leave you all to it.
Yes, but the question now is, why is it inaccessible to an observer? And what does it mean to be inaccessible to an observer? Isn't it indirectly accessed via observation of behavior and neural activity? In other words, is the subjective accessible objectively?
Knowledge of physiology confirms phenomenal consciousness: Much of the activity of the CNS takes place without any associated awareness, and some of its activity is. The part that is, is phenomenal consciousness.
Confusion over intuitions only lets us doubt those particular intuitions, not phenomenal consciousness itself, the doubt of which will lead to global skepticism unless you put in a stop somewhere.
Dennett does it at the level of belief. Where's your stop?
I don't think this is true. Dennett defines qualia according to a survey of literature, which is reasonable: unlike a lot of the current discussions on panpsychism (Pfhorrest's aside) and anti-physicalism proliferating atm, Dennett has the integrity to define what he is talking about. He cannot proceed under the broadest definition because that definition is too vague. So he looks to the lowest common denominators. But you and I and Dennett agree that the authors of this conception were wrong: qualia with these properties do not exist. So why on the one hand do we hold them as the authority on what qualia *are* and on the other dismiss their philosophy on the existential properties of qualia? In other words, if they can be *that* wrong, why do we accept their definition as accurate? Indeed, how can we accept a definition of a non-existent thing as authoratitive at all? I point this out because, as far as I can see, the keystone of the arguments for the non-existence / irrelevance of qualia is this diabolical quaternity of properties. It looks like a straw man.
If we define mind according to the misguided notions of dualists or panpsychists, we'd find that that too doesn't exist. Or if we define energy according to the hippy BS of new age insufferables, there's no energy either.
It just seems infinitely more useful to pin down what people actually mean by the word and describe that in terms of how the brain works than to forge a definition that is doomed to undermine far more interesting discussion. Yes, a wine-tasting machine is viable. Yes, there are people who will not accept that. But whatever the contents and properties of my consciousness pertaining to me taking a particular sip of a particular barolo, be it a singular sensation or a time-evolving one, be it a constant or state-dependent, be it a linear progression or an iterative one, be it pleasurable only for two years or forever, is still the thing I am referring to when I talk about that particular qualia, and that's what I would like to understand: it assuredly happens, so *how* does that happen? I am aware that most of that explanation has nothing to do with qualia and is a lot more similar to a wine-tasting machine, but how does this particular discerning, middle-class-alcoholic wine-tasting machine work?
An observer is so from his own perceptions; that which is inaccessible to an observer indicates that which is unperceivable by him. All perception is only possible from an empirical condition, the subjective, which is the rational activity of a subject, which is subjectivity, is never an empirical condition, hence subjectivity is never possibly given to perception, hence inaccessible to that which perceives as an observer.
—————
Quoting Harry Hindu
No one, and I mean no one, has ever seen my neural activity, and if subjectivity is necessarily predicated on neural activity, it follows no one has, even indirectly, accessed my subjectivity.
Again, observation is perception, perception is empirical, no observation of other than the empirical is at all possible. If that which is observed must be empirical, and if it is behavior that is observed, behavior must be empirical. If it stands as proved that subjectivity is never empirical, it follows necessarily that observation of behavior can never be observation of subjectivity.
—————
Quoting Harry Hindu
The subject may represent himself objectively, yes. But the observer only perceives the object of subjectivity, not the means by which the representation obtains its form.
....and language itself can be quined away from the necessities of evolution, but maybe not the accidental convenience of it.
Dunno, I’m not much of an anthropologist. Seems odd, though, that Nature mandated us with reason, by which we confuse ourselves, then mandated we should have language, by which we confuse ourselves even more.
Cruel Mistress indeed.
Should I take your word for it, or are you trying to make an argument? And don’t forget to mention why oh why this matters to the subject at hand, unless you’re just nitpicking...
No, our ancestors evolved to respond to wavelengths of light, prior to language. Had they not then they would not all have picked the ripe berries (which are united in the wavelength the reflect, not the experience they produce). If you want to have wavelengths of light as 'colours' I'm happy with that, but qualia aren't required here either.
You can. Just keep saying "Not brains!"
That's the go to critique, a ridicule of sorts, and it's a charge that those making seem to think counts as a knock-down argument or some such. I suppose it could be, if only it were true. Saying something is so doesn't make it so. The move seems more like grasping at some familiar straws when faced with admitting of much better accounting practices, and/or escaping cognitive dissonance.
The underlying mistake is - once again - thinking in terms of either/or when it comes to direct/indirect perception. There's also the use of "perception" that is always extremely problematic, particularly when used as a blanket term to include both linguistically informed and non linguistically informed conscious experiences(which is also an inadequate dichotomy). Not all conscious experience is all direct perception or all indirect perception. Leaning too far either way leads to conflating pre-theoretical language less conscious experience, pre-theoretical linguistically informed conscious experience, and theoretical linguistically informed conscious experience. Notice there are three distinctions here... not two. Only the first of the three consists entirely of directly perceptible things.
That's where we all start.
This discussion is not only going on in the space between your ears.
Of course it isn’t, only. But the ground of it, the beginnings, the source, the construction of it, are, and are only.
It’s the same hole everybody’s in; some admit it, some don’t.
All we would have is wrong, we all would have, is right.
‘Nother topic?
Quoting Isaac
Well said.
Quoting BannoI'm hoping that my present chat with @Mww might proceed in a new direction.
"Here is one hand"; we can perhaps agree and move on. But apparently here is a much greater difference in opinion between "I have an apple in my hand" and "I have a pain in my hand", a difference hidden by the superficial grammatical similarity, and which might underpin the apparent difference in intuitions. Some folk would treat "I have a pain in my hand" as if it were "I have an apple in my hand"; others would treat "I have an apple in my hand" as if it were "I have a pain in my hand". We might be better served by mapping out the differences and similarities.
These are notdistinctions that depends on neuroscientific principles. The answer is in philosophical analysis.
As @Isaac pointed out, there's no point in continuing a discussion in which the primary counter-argument is "...but it's obvious".
No, it is not obvious. Indeed, the evidence to the contrary is before you, in the very sentence you are reading, right now.
There is stuff that is not between your ears.
If they're insane maybe.
Which is not true: that "(i)t's clear that the arguments in the article are successful in removing from reasonable discourse qualia that are both ineffable and private", or that "(t)he reasonable folk who defend qualia have followed the only course open, which was to shift the definition of one or more of the concepts involved."? Or both?
Yet that is what @Mww apparently wants to do, since he thinks that both are "between your ears": Quoting Mww
Yes, insane.
Apples are directly perceptible external things. Pains are directly perceptible internal things.
Does Wittgenstein mesh well with realism?
Again.....there most obviously is stuff not between the ears. Nobody ever said all stuff was between the ears, not even ol’ Bishop Berkeley.
It is pointless to continue a discussion in which it cannot be agreed that some stuff is only between the ears.
Biological machinery.
Nope, he doesn’t think that.
Quoting Mww
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Mww
In so far as that stuff between your ears is private and ineffable, there is indeed no point in continuing the discussion.
Irreducibly, yes. But not practically.
We operate in terms of biological machinery, but we don’t think or talk in those terms.
OK, he thinks "the ground of it, the beginnings, the source, the construction of it" are between his ears.
But has he an argument for this? Or is it just obvious?
Ahhh....so if we can’t talk about some things we can’t talk about anything?
Besides, there can be talk about.....has been for millennia.....the subjective, the private, the ineffable, just not at the same time as its use by the one talking. Hell....every time the first person personal pronoun is used in an objective expression, a subjective condition is rendered by the expression.
————-
Quoting Banno
Yep, and, should be, assuming you think about stuff the same way I do. If you don’t think, or if you think in a different way, I got nothing.
Again, I can see how you dug that hole for yourself. If everything begins with what is between your ears, and what is between your ears is ineffable, then it might seem that the ineffability carries on to everything...
But the problem there is your own, not mine. I don't agree that everything begins with what is between your ears. And you have yet to provide a suitable argument.
Sure, there has been talk about the ineffable; extended philosophical discussion on a par with the noise the fly makes inside the fly trap.
Drop the notion that the stuff between your ears has primacy. The stuff you might describe as "out there" is just as valid. Minds do not come into existence by themselves, but by interacting with the world.
This I tell you brother, you can't have one without the other.
We make the stuff by doing the things.
Drop meaning, look to use.
One can hold an apple in one's hands prior to language use, just as one can have a pain in one's hand prior to language use. Language use is not part of the content of a language less creature's belief(conscious experience). It is most certainly a part of our accounting practices thereof.
So, it becomes clear that there is an actual distinction to be drawn and maintained between our reports of an experience(Jack's notwithstanding) and the experience being reported upon, particularly when we're discussing how to best take an account of language less creatures' belief. That distinction between another's belief and our account must be drawn in terms of content, particularly regarding the content of language less pre-theoretical conscious experience, linguistically informed pre-theoretical conscious experience, and linguistically informed theoretical conscious experience.
There are always apples and pains in all such experiences. There is not always the ability for the creature having the experience to report upon it's experience, nor need there be.
The interesting, relevant to the topic, portion is what sorts of beliefs(conscious experiences) are existentially dependent upon language use, and are thus neither private nor ineffable. There are also a broad category of 'properties' and experiences that are quite simply not immediately apprehensible without prior language use. The coffee tasting comparisons between then and now come immediately to mind. Such experiences are not private for they are existentially dependent upon language use, and language use is not. Remove language use, and you remove the capability to compare past and present. Remove the capability to compare past and present and there is no such experience as a change in one's preference, even if it actually happened. A change in one's own personal preferences would not even be possible to experience as such, for that change would not even be apprehended without the comparison/contrast that only language can facilitate.
At least, not literally.
Quoting Banno
Oh my. The goalposts went from the end zone clear out to the farging parking lot!!
—————
Quoting Banno
As well you shouldn’t; not everything does. No empirical stuff, as such, has its origin between the ears. If it did, there could be no such thing as an itch, or a ‘57 DeSoto. Knowing what an itch or a car with ridiculously over-sized fins is.....begins and ends only between the ears.
—————-
Quoting Banno
It absolutely must.....for certain stuff.
Quoting Banno
Not only valid, but necessary.
Quoting Banno
No, you cannot. Hence.....wait for it......the subjective and the objective. By whichever name you wish to call it.
Quoting Mww
Ha! Might steal that line.
But just to be sure, the first mention of it all being between the ears, so far as I am aware, was here:
Quoting Mww
So the goals were already in the carpark, where you put 'em.
Talk of cats having beliefs is at best metaphorical.
Quoting bongo fury
@Isaac might disagree, which would be interesting. Presumably, for example, there are neural structures in place in a new born that permit the development of vision. But that is not Kant's a priori concepts.
Oh no you don’t. Check it out:.
“The words you hear....” are every bit the same empirical perception as the itch, or the huge car. The sound of words, the touch of an itch, the sight of a car, are all empirical conditions of perception. The understanding and possible knowledge about all those things.....all things so perceived.....is the analysis of them, done between the ears. The difference is, with the discussion, the object is put out in the form of sentences by me; with the empirical perceptions, the objects of the discussion, the words in the sentences, are brought in by you. (Me too, but I don’t care....I wrote ‘em)
Do you see that in order to understand each other, what goes on between our respective ears must be at least congruent, if not fully matching? If they matched exactly, one of us would have what’s call an epiphany.
As in, those first two paragraphs make no sense to me. Especially that second one - is that a quote? Where from?
Quoting bongo fury
See? No minds.
No. What goes on between the ears is irrelevant. That's rather the point pushed by PI, that it's what happens that counts, not what goes on in heads. "Can I have two apples, please" is understood if I get the two apples. What happens in the head of the grocer is irrelevant.
That's one way to skirt around the issue, but leaves you with being forced to admit that cats do not have belief. Otherwise it's still an equivocation fallacy, incoherence, and/or self-contradiction regarding the use of "belief". I say that that is ground for rejecting the "attitude towards a proposition" definition. It's wrong, plain and simple. The notion that all belief has propositional content is based upon conflating reports of belief with belief.
Red cups, apples, and pains in hands are not propositional content. They are most certainly always part of the correlational content of belief about them.
I would completely agree that a cat cannot believe it is hungry, but it can be hungry.
For you, maybe.
Quoting bongo fury
In your case perhaps qualism more than dualism.
Obfuscation is disappointing.
Do cats have beliefs?
According to the position you're working from, in order to avoid self-contradiction, incoherence, and/or equivocating the term, you must admit that they do not.
It's not my accounting of belief that has been found wanting.
Then stop obfuscating.
A belief is an attitude towards a proposition. A cat cannot have an attitude towards a proposition, and hence cannot have a belief.
In so far as we ascribed beliefs to cats, we are not treating beliefs as attitudes towards propositions. We are using the word differently.
No, your account wants for nothing. It is incoherent, and hence not an account.
In the same argument, using the word differently is equivocating.
Not to the grocer, it isn’t. For you, the grocer is an object and his subjectivity is irrelevant to you. For the grocer, you are the object and your subjectivity is irrelevant to him. You want two apples, the grocer must understand you want two apples, or he isn’t going to do anything, or he will do what doesn't conform to your ask.
If we have to have both, between the ears and not between the ears, as you say, this is the way. In order to have two apples in your hand, unless you get them yourself, you and the grocer must understand each other. How do you suppose it is you asked for two apples but it happens you were given two rutabagas? Asking for and getting in hand the same thing you asked for, makes explicit the happening of mutual understanding.
——————
Quoting Banno
Yes, what happens counts, as verification. But how does P.I. take account if what happens is wrong?
Can’t they be subjects or objects of propositions, hence contents of them? Or can propositions not have content?
Quoting creativesoul
Yes, always, with the caveat that correlational content of belief is not propositional.
He he.
Quoting creativesoul
Fair enough, but if the goal is to distinguish "conscious experience" from a non-conscious variety of something or other (experience?), and all three of your sub-categories fall on the positive side of the distinction, what exactly is the point of the proposed sub-division? Ah...
Quoting creativesoul
Ok, I'm curious to know in what way you aren't offering to help @frank here to,
Quoting frank
?
Just interested.
Unless the grocer is a serial killer who’s triggered when he’s asked for two apples. Then it kind of matters what’s going on between his ears.
Both have models in my field, although in truth the pain models are fairly ridiculous, however the pediatric pain model is accurate enough, excluding the fundamental aspect of assigning an objective level to the subjective experience of pain as indicated by the facial expression on the individual experiencing it. Still, the models exist.
:flower:
I'll leave that alone.
But not necessarily to the purchaser of the apples. The grocer is triggered by the request, makes the sale and proceeds to plan and execute his next murder. The assumption that the serial killing grocer will elect to murder the apple purchaser is flawed and operates on the assumption that the grocer is a lower functioning serial killer. Maybe that is accurate, but it is a bold assumption.
Sure, thousands of years after humans have been seeing color and feeling pain, a few ambitious behaviorists created some models to Quine the woo away.
Off topic. Did you go here yet?
Red cups, apples, and pains can be directly perceived, named, and further described.
I reject the subject/object framework altogether. We are both objects in the world and subjects taking account of it and/or ourselves. As far as the objective/subjective dichotomy goes, I grant subjectivity in it's entirety. Everything ever thought, believed, spoken, written, signed, expressed, and/or otherwise uttered comes through a subject. Thus, the notion cannot be used to further discriminate between anything we're saying. It's all subjective.
Quoting Mww
I take similar issue with the very notion of "proposition"(the historical renditions). It's fraught with confusion regarding what meaning is, how it emerges, and the role that it plays in our experiences, including language less, pre-theoretical linguistically informed, and theoretical linguistically informed. Of course, philosophy proper - at large - has very deep-seated issues regarding meaning. Hence, there is no consensus on the matter, to this day, despite it's being so basic, so pivotal, so crucial, so irrevocable, so fundamental to each and every philosophical position throughout history...
How are those two assertions not contradictory?
——————
Quoting creativesoul
I don’t think they play a role in our experiences, but necessarily play a role in the expression our experiences. But that’s just me.
—————
Sidebar: is a language-less creature one that has no language to use, or one that has no use of the language he has?
It would be if I were not setting out explicitly how I am using the word.
One that has no language to use is language-less. The other one is simply poorly educated, the language is there, willingness to use/learn it may be lacking.
Ok. Thanks.
See top of pg 83 for context.
It's a conventional way of speaking. We also speak of a person who acts independently as having a mind of their own. But before assuming dualism, we should first investigate the contexts that give rise to those usages.
Quoting Janus
Suppose that someone shoots and kills Bob. Bob, as we knew him, no longer exists. Yet his body remains.
So that might be one reason to distinguish Bob from his body. A living body and a dead body consist of the same material, but what makes the difference is how that material is structured and organized.
Whereas the Cartesian dualist says that what makes the difference is a separable mind, and it is that separable mind that is the locus of experiences and beliefs.
Anyway, it's an interesting issue to raise. As with the phrase that "the Sun rises in the East", perhaps problems only arise when one draws philosophical or ontological implications that extend beyond the actual use.
For anyone else not intimately familiar.
Quoting Wikipedia
I suppose I just don't get it. The fact the average person enjoys and focuses more on the sensations of direct experiences as opposed to "what they mean" is supposed to mean.. what exactly?
I think you misunderstand. I didn't say that different levels of description were incommensurable. I said that they depended on structure and organization. So to understand how to relate different levels of description requires investigating a system's structure and organization.
Of relevance here, organization shares the same root as organism and organ (Greek: organon).
I'm not entirely sure what frank is arguing for, so if it is the case that what I'm arguing somehow helps them, it is purely coincidental.
I'm attempting to provide an adequate evolutionarily amenable account of all conscious experience from non linguistic through metacognitive.
If it is the case that we are both objects in the world and subjects taking account of it and/or ourselves, then the dichotomy cannot be used as a means to draw a distinction between us and our accounts...
So, I reject the dichotomy.
You may tell me as often as you like that you're going to be using the same term in different ways, and in most normal everyday situations that would be more than acceptable. This is not one of those normal everyday situations.
What counts as belief is precisely what's at issue.
When you propose that belief is an attitude towards a proposition, that cats have beliefs, that cats cannot have attitudes towards propositions, and that cats cannot have beliefs, you've arrived at self-contradiction and/or incoherency. An open public admission of practicing multiple different accepted uses of a term in the same argument does not exonerate you from equivocation, regardless of whether or not you readily admit to committing the fallacy without outright naming it.
It may save you from seeming to be self-contradictory, but it does not save you from committing the fallacy of equivocation.
You chopped out too much context regarding my comments on propositions for me to make much sense of the rest...
A creature that draws correlations between different things, none of which are language use, and none of which have ever been language use.
While there are all sorts of language less creatures incapable of drawing correlations between different things, those aren't of interest here, for such creatures aren't capable of attributing meaning, and consciousness is the ability to attribute meaning.
All conscious experience is meaningful to the creature having it.
In this context (i.e., regarding human experience), "practical contact" and "physical contact" can have different senses, which is why I gave the robot example. And physical contact is still an abstraction over concrete things. A concrete thing is something that is not predicated of anything else. So the cup and the person are examples of concrete things. Whereas physical contact is a relation between concrete things. Since it's predicated of those concrete things, it is abstract, not concrete.
Quoting Luke
OK, I thought you were saying that "seeing red" was an experience in the mind (but from your qualification, you don't seem to have been intending that). Though even there, I would say that the experience was one of drinking coffee and that seeing the red cup was just an aspect of that broader experience (albeit an aspect that might be commented on at the time or reflected on later).
Quoting Luke
The sense is different. When I touch something, the implication is usually that I felt it (though I need not have), and whatever other human-specific aspects are involved in that event. That's not the case with a robot (though the robot may register it as an event if it has sensors).
Quoting Luke
They are descriptions at different levels of abstraction. By experience, we're referring to a human-level interaction involving coffee and cups. I don't see photons hitting my eyes (even though photons are hitting my eyes), I see the coffee and the cup.
Also suppose that drinking the coffee was part of a job interview process. Then a description of that high-level interview process would be just as valid as a description of the underlying physical process. The level of abstraction that is relevant depends on one's purposes.
What about the hardware and software dichtomy in computers? Do you forgo that dualism in favor of just the hardware?
There.s also the quantic wave-particle duality, and Aristotle’s duality of form and matter. Dualism works just fine.
I realize this remark is partly in jest, and in response to a mind denier. I don’t think people treat other people as pure objects, without ever thinking of other people’s opinions, and never connecting at the subjective level with other ‘souls’. That’s just not how we work. Even when we physically desire somebody (which is sometimes called ‘objectification’) we desire her body and soul.
There are indeed such neural structures and they have an enormous impact on the way we interpret what's 'out there', but...those neural structures are 'out there'. I look at fMRI scans, I ask people for phenomenological reports, I record behaviour...all of which is 'out there' (to me). So I agree it would be lunacy to give primacy to what's between our ears when we have no clue what that is other than by treating it as an object 'out there'.
Cognitive scientists are in an odd position in that we need to communicate something about objects prior to their being recognised as such by the brain (which I hope we all agree does the recognising work). This sometimes necessitates an odd turn of phrase, but it's us that are being odd, not the rest of the world - an (intentionally) self-contained little language game to get a job done so we can move on with what is (hopefully) useful research.
It's translation into philosophical frameworks is fraught (so I'm discovering). Doesn't mean it's irrelevant (that would be to reject naturalism entirely - I'm too Quinean for that), but it also doesn't mean we can simply replace our ordinary talk of apples with talk of 'models of apples' (otherwise, what the hell are actual apples?).
What I've been advocating here is the approach that Seth takes which is to use data from cognitive sciences to better understand how we might have arrived at the phenomenological experience we have, and, more importantly, what exactly goes wrong when those experiences are at odds with normal humans. What I object to is not talk of apples as apples (I'm quite happy with that). It's the confusion we see hereabouts between the actual phenomenological experience (which is the end-point we're trying to better explain) and and armchair speculation as to the process by which it came about.
Cheers. That's as I thought.
But I still like my armchair.
Yes, well... I don't really do any fMRI interpretation, questionnaire asking or behaviour reporting any more either, but rather spend a considerable amount of time in my armchair reading the results of other people's efforts and writing the occasional report on such. Armchairs are good.
That seems weird to me. Physical contact consists in concrete actions and responses. It seems very wrongheaded to me to be saying that there are these concrete objects, but that none of their actions are concrete. Sounds like a Parmenidean world in which change and movement is illusory.
Parmenides? We might just fit the whole of philosophy in this thread!
Quoting Isaac
You will probably agree that if you had nothing between the ears, you wouldn’t look at fMRI scans, ask people for phenomenological reports, and record behaviour. In that sense, what we have between the ears IS indeed primary, as a matter of fact, because it is necessary for any knowledge to accrue. That’s the purely logical aspect of the problem, the easiest aspect to fathom. The really tricky part is to realize what we do when we try to think of consciousness — or of phenomena as they ‘appear’ to our consciousness, i.e. the whole qualia discussion — as an object of knowledge, when we study it as another phenomenon, as another object ‘out there’ as you put it. What happens in our mind when we try to objectify minds; what is the phenomenology of consciousness looking at itself in this objectifying manner? That’s where Michel Bitbol is going in his paper It is never known but it is the knower (thanks Wayfarer), following an intuition by Kitaro Nishida that our effort toward objective knowledge comes from consciousness and subjectivity but turns its back to it, while looking at its objects.
Is it? Not what's in your guts, or your heart. Both of which were once thought to be the seat of various conscious phenomenal experience?
To even say it's 'between your ears' is already to treat it as an object of study. To even say "this is what I thought" is to go back through your memories as one would a library of source material.
You can do nothing to escape from the fact that you have no more privileged access to your original thought processes than a suitability dedicated third-party has. All you have is your memories of those processes, which can be put into words and transferred to a third party with no less fidelity than that with which they were stored (which is, not a lot).
Well, I can hide my thoughts if I want to, and I can share them if I want to. So my thoughts are initially private, but I can decide to share some part of them. Even if I decide to share transparently my experience (as I surmise it by memory), I must always chose what to share, because I could never share the whole of an experience in words. 1, There are things I do not feel like sharing even if I answer your questions faithfully otherwise, e.g. shameful things like ‘I wanted to scratch my balls at some point in that fMRI’... 2, it would last forever while I rack my brain for details that in fact my ‘system’ opted to forget progressively because they were deemed forgettable, and why would I do that?
None of that has anything to do with what has primacy in a philosophical investigation of mind. All of those factors apply equally to a purely phenomenological discussion.
In fact, they apply more because it only takes a few honest people to admit to certain thoughts during fMRI and then I'd have a pretty good idea from your scan that something was going on, regardless of your willingness to admit it. An advantage that pure philosophical discussion cannot claim.
I think this is quite perceptive. It introduces a seeming contradiction: to understand itself from the outside, as an object, consciousness must turn its back on itself. So for consciousness to try and apprehend itself as an object is alienating. One looses touch with oneself, by putting oneself in a catch 22. As Bateson argued, catch 22’s tend to generate schizophrenia.
Another way ro say this is that looking at consciousness as an object necessarily introduces in consciousness a distance with itself.
According to Bitbol, this effect is used in Dennett’s Quining Qualia to introduce confusion in his reader’s mind. Dennett does so by asking his reader to intuit or imagine herself away from her own experience, to take a distance with one’s phenomenological world: imagine your tastes were changed, the colors you see were changed, etc. By going along with the text, the reader walks away from her own intuitions and starts to consider alien ones until she gets confused about herself and her own perceptions, until like Bano, the reader concludes ‘there’s nothing useful to be said about experience, it’s all very confusing...’
And when one does not follow the alienating flute player, when one derives other conclusions from his intuition pumps, when a reader sticks to her own intuitions rather than fabricated, artificial ones, that reader is said to have « the wrong intuitions », or to just go on and on saying « but it’s obvious »...
But what we (Wayfarer, frank, marchesk et al.) are saying is obviously far from obvious, because many of you don’t even start to get it. It goes beyond pointing at logical contradictions in naive materialism. It extends to the need for the subject trying to understand himself to remain connected with his own subjectivity, to include himself as part of his description of any experience, including in scientific experiments and reasoning. According to Bitbol, it’s no coincidence that both the Copernician revolution and the Quantic one repositioned the observer as central to understanding the observed phenomenon. Trying to forget about the place that we occupy and how it shapes our observations is always a mistake. All observation is subjective, and science does recognise this by calling for metadata: data about the observers, their analytic framework and their methodology. This is normal and philosophically sound. Man (in his subjectivity) is the measure of all things.
Yep. But what we're talking about here is your memories of the experiences which preceded knowledge, not the actual experiences themselves. You no longer have direct access to those seconds after you've had them, so their causal primacy is irrelevant.
Quoting Isaac
Hmm. It seems like wavelengths of light aren't necessarily required either. Maybe we should consider the implications of what Sara Walker was saying in Marchesks other thread in that biology is ontological and physics is epistemological. Colors would be ontological and wavelengths epistemological. After all, wavelengths of light is an explanation for the experience of colors, mirages, bent straws in water, etc.
True enough, but in context, the discussion concerns not people in general but a person in particular, in relation to another person in particular, with respect to a certain activity. I have no consideration of opinion, when I require certain things from the only person in the position of grant the requirement. Opinion would count if I asked the grocer which apples would be better for me to want. But when I tell him to give me two apples, his opinion is completely irrelevant to me. Just as my opinion as to why I want apples and not bananas is irrelevant to him. He doesn’t give a damn why I want apples.
————-
Quoting Olivier5
Tricky indeed. To think of consciousness, and to think of phenomena as they appear to consciousness as objects of knowledge, are two completely difference domains within a system common to both. Consciousness cannot be a phenomenon, hence cannot be an object of knowledge. We don’t know consciousness in the same way we know skyscrapers, but we can think consciousness, that is, represent consciousness to ourselves, just as well as we can think skyscrapers without any contradiction, hence.....the primacy of subjectivity. Which is, at bottom, nothing but the activity of pure thought, or, reason itself.
——————
Quoting Olivier5
Extends to the need? If the subject is absolutely indissoluble from himself, how could he NOT include himself? Ever notice the absence of the first person personal pronoun “I” when you think to yourself? You never think “I think.....”, “I am....”, I want.....”, “I feel....”. If that first person personal pronoun is a representation, and in some cases there is no use of the representation, then all thinking IS the subject itself that thinks. Then it becomes the case that subjects don’t include themselves at all, but are that which includes.
To include himself as part of a description of any experience, on the other hand, because all descriptions carry objective implications, requires a representation of the subject that is describing experience as an object, and here the “I” stands as that representation. The description of the going, re: “The other day, I went to the grocery store to get two apples”, is very far removed from the going.
————-
Quoting Olivier5
Boy howdy. Metaphysical reductionism is your very best friend.
Us and our accounts are not the dichotomy, they are the same thing, in that the account is contained in us. An account is, after all, merely a judgement, thus the account belongs to that which judges.
The dichotomy is between the constituency of the account, and that which judges of what the constituency entails. My body (in the world of things) has arms and legs (objects included in the world of things) is an account I make as a judge of things in the world belonging to my body. My account is not in the world, it is in me as the judge of the relatedness of things.
The only way to reject the counter-argument favoring the necessary subject/object dualism, is to deny the human cognitive system is inherently a logical system. We don’t know with apodeitic certainty that the human system is in fact predicated on natural logic, but we certainly know we can’t talk about it unless it is. Besides, it is absurd to suppose Nature allows us to examine ourselves, and then not give us the means to do it with some measurable degree of rational assurance.
No, because what you remember of an experience is yet another form of experience. Therefore experience still precedes any report, and can never be fully described by reporting.
Good. Now we can remove the ghost of anthropomorphism from the dialectic. I just needed assurance, if not actual verification, so....thanks for that.
I’m not onboard with your rendering of consciousness, but that’s ok.We may return to that after I’ve a better understanding of the intricacies of your account.
Unless he’s got no apple, or several different types of apples, in which case he will tell you and I trust you may listen to his opinion and his to yours. He will also ask for a certain price for his apples, and you may have to agree with him on that as well. So even in this simple example there will be some normal, human interaction between the two of you, where he cares a bit for what you want and vice versa.
Quoting Mww
Interesting. See how you fall on both sides of the paradox here? You start by assuming that ‘the subject is absolutely indissoluble from himself’, and end with the idea that ‘subjects don’t include themselves at all, but are that which includes’. Hence when subjects try to understand subjectivity as an object, they must try to take a distance with their own subjectivity, which tends to lead to logical paradoxes.
Quoting Mww
Indeed, a description, a report, is always ‘removed’ from what is reported. The map is not the territory. The word ‘apple’ is quite removed from real apples. Ceci n’est pas une pipe.
Yes. Look to the use of the stuff of categories in order to do things.
In your view opposed to this, in what manner do you come up with numbers, without the stuff of “quantity” beforehand? How do you come up with cause and effect without the stuff of “relation” beforehand? How do you deny the supernatural domain without the stuff of “possibility” beforehand? How do you construct a triangle without the stuff of “necessity” beforehand.
Now, the standard rejoinder is, experience teaches all those things. True, but that presupposes experience and leaves unexplained what happens when there isn’t any.
The spin of an electron could never have been theorized, if it hadn’t first been thought possible that electrons could have what eventually became known as spin. By the same token, do you see that drawing three lines in a certain orientation does not give you the absolute necessity that the sum of the interior angles can only be one number?
It is not the poverty of Kant, but the genius. With some help, if not metaphysical robbery, from Aristotle, of course.
Witt and those guys did much for the human being, but there are others that did infinitely more towards being human.
Sure, but all those are amendments, qualifiers, if you will. Changing the conditions. You’re not wrong, just that such amendments are inadmissible with respect to the principle being discussed.
Quoting Mww
Emphasis added. You also need to understand that he wants money in exchange of the apples. So you need to understand his (subjective) intentions and he needs to understand yours.
But looking at the broader argument I agree that it supports your side of it: the grocer’s subjectivity is important.
Correct, and its name is intuition.
Quoting Olivier5
Correct, there is no need to fully report on an experience, but only the need to report enough to demonstrate understanding of it, the rest being cognitively discarded.**
I understand some experience of fire without needing to report how hot the fire is, for if there is fire, hot is given necessarily, hence reporting hotness is superfluous.
** There is empirical evidence that enabled neural networks subsequently unused, become disentangled, in order to be re-used later. Forgetfulness explained.
Right, consider going to a foreign market. It helps to keep in mind that the grocer may see you as a naive tourist, and jack the price of the apples up. Or as an angry ex, they might lace the apples with cyanide. Just saying.
No, I do not. There might be an apple give-away that day. He might wish to piss off his boss. While I may need to understand monetary exchange is the normal process, in that I should expect to pay for the apples, it is still not a necessary condition, such that if I don’t pay it becomes immediately impossible for me to get my apples.
Don’t mistake a need, for an interest. The difference becomes clear when some little old lady in abject poverty is selling apples on the streetcorner. Her need is something for me to consider, as opposed to a clerk who may very well be the owner of a multi-state chain of stores. I am much more disposed to understand a need as it relates to survival alleviated by paying for her apples, as opposed to an inclination to understand a mere want as it relates to just the grocer not getting yelled at for not collecting my money.
Interesting. What's your present view of the non-linguistic phase? Those of us inclined to agree with this,
Quoting creativesoul
... might assume there wasn't one?
At some point my wife and I would go to this grocery store held by a young couple. He was handsome, she was a bomb. They would alternate at the shop. He was always passive-aggressive with me, while handing out my apples, but she was all smile and flirtatious. I thought she was nice and he was just an asshole.
Then one evening, it was my wife’s turn to do the groceries. Dropping the bags on the kitchen counter she unloaded on how much a bitch that girl fruit vendor was, and how much of a sweetheart her husband, who unlike his wife always smiles when handing out the apples...
If you can run very fast, yes.
What do you suppose would be between the ears of our dear apple seller in that case?
He may feel like chasing after the indelicate customer.
The subjectivity being understood as an object, is the conception of subjectivity in general, the distance, as you say, I must try to take. It isn’t my subjectivity I’m attempting to understand, in which would be found the logical paradox.
That belief is a propositional attitude is not up for debate. It's just part of the logic of belief.
I believe that my cup is behind my laptop. Is that:
A) a belief directed at an event involving the cup
B) a belief directed at the statement "my cup is behind my laptop"
C) A&B both describe the same event
D) fourth option not covered.
If B), how does my belief about the cup become translated into a belief about a statement which refers to the cup without them becoming events of different types (cup regarding beliefs, statement regarding beliefs)?
If C) how do the two describe the same event? Are the two procedurally equivalent - does an agent's act which forms a belief regarding the cup always manifest as a belief regarding a statement about the cup with the event the belief concerns being the propositional content of the statement regarding the event?
If it's the propositional content of the statement that renders the two equivalent in that manner (the event of my cup being behind my laptop being the propositional content of "my cup is behind my laptop"), the statement which states it is only important insofar as it's a statement of an already held belief which actually regards an event. Every belief can be stated doesn't imply every belief regards a statement.
Now this is something I have struggled with, hence my somewhat negative comment.
Perhaps a way to proceed would be to look at the definitions given in the SEP article.
Four uses are provided. The first is the phenomenal character of the experience, which you seem to be adopting. The second is as properties of sense data. The third, as intrinsic non-representational properties. The fourth, as intrinsic, nonphysical, ineffable properties.
The second is out of favour along with sense-data. The fourth is that which Dennett seeks to Quine.
Now I think those of us who reject qualia have been implicitly suggesting that the first entails the third and fourth, and that this is the position taken by Dennett.
How's that?
"My cup is behind the laptop" is true only if my cup is behind the laptop.
Hence, A is true only if B, and so C.
Thanks for your involvement. The argument was stale.
I haven't much commented on @Andrew M's posts because I found little there with which to disagree. Quoting Andrew M
Concrete things here seem to be just individuals. It's a cup and a person, not cups and people.
Burden of proof switching. If you give an argument that beliefs can only concern statements, I'll engage more.
I don't see how. Any belief is a belief that... and the "that..." is always a proposition.
What more argument could you want?
I think this correct; consider:
http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm
Question begging! That only describes a belief which regards a statement. Were it you'd proved that...
Quoting Banno
There are counterexamples.
(1) Someone looking at a face forms beliefs regarding where to look next based on where they have looked.
(2) Those beliefs do not get translated into statements regarding facial features, it's doubtable that they even could be - the process of forming them occurs sufficiently quickly that no intention towards a statement forms, an agent having an attitude towards a statement just doesn't have to be part of the process.
So there's a sense in which a belief need not regard a statement, that breaks the chain of equivalences; beliefs may regard events (expected events), rather than statements or descriptions of events.
If you do the thing where you ask me to state a belief which can't be translated into language, I'd point out to you that that's very disingenuous, as I've already given you an example of a class of beliefs which do not regard statements.
You've just greatly enlarged the scope of belief... Do you really form a belief that you will now look at your keyboard, and then look at your keyboard, or do you just look at your keyboard?
Are you going to posit that any action one performs is actually a belief?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/belief/
All that's required is a single example of a belief that does not regard a statement. I gave you an example of a process of forming beliefs that do not regard statements.
Quoting Banno
You're parsing it in terms of beliefs which can be turned easily into statements in English. Beliefs in the above sense are more similar to: "highly weighted present visual information fits best into nose category which is anticipated to belong on a face therefore since previous experience of faces entails they are shaped in such and such a configuration and their salient features are expected to be in configuration Y promote eye movement towards expected location (given recalled face information) of salient facial features assuming they are in configuration Y", and that's an inaccurate post hoc rendering gesturing towards the process, rather than a verbatim statement of what occurs.
Quoting Banno
Nah, I think any action involves belief formation in the above sense. They occur before we delineate actions post-hoc into linguistic categories too!
And I appreciate that that is the common use in philosophy, belief as a propositional attitude, but that's not the common use everywhere; what a neuroscientist or psychologist means by belief can be much different. Why accept that beliefs only concern statements just because philosophers tend to use the word that way?
It could turn out that the example of beliefs I gave is a misnomer, but it's equally a common usage! Beliefs as perceptual expectations. I don't see why anyone should accept "philosophers use the word this way" as an argument that it must be used that way, do you? Nevermind "philosophers use the word this way" as an argument for why their use adequately describes the phenomenon in question.
No, you havn't. YOu've just presented some fumbling words about faces... Quoting fdrake
..."I believe that's a nose", written badly.
Absolutely fumbling, because (1) the process by which my eyes forage someone's face to produce a stable image of their face occurs sufficiently quickly that no statements are generated within it and (2) because it's a terrible description of an eye movement as a realisation of a mathematical model that is currently promoting eye movements towards where a new facial feature is expected to be, the sense of "belief" there might be rendered as "I believe there will be facial feature X if I look there next", but that belief is held - in the sense of being a perceptual expectation - without being directed toward the statement. At best, the statement is added on afterwards (and it need not be, typically isn't).
If you're happy that it can be described post hoc as "I believe there will be facial feature X if I look there next", I would remind you that the statement has only been added post hoc, and that the perceptual expectation both concerns the face and does not involve any translation into a statement at all at the time.
Edit:
Assume there's a completely accurate Bayesian model of perception, its perceptual expectations in the model might be statable in a propositional form; like an equation; but that does not establish that their beliefs regard statements. On the contrary, what their beliefs regard are parameters; environmental, bodily and contextual factors; rather than statements regarding them. That is, perceptual expectations regard actions, environmental and bodily states and contextual factors. If they count as beliefs, then they are excellent examples of beliefs which do not regard statements; they regard things like heart rates, warmth, sound... not statements about them.
I thought he wanted to show that one can demonstrate belief without it being belief that A.
A test for that would be: is the belief truth apt? If so, it has to be propositional.
This only works if you take propositions to be abstract objects though.
Bolding above is mine
As I said, if it is the case that we are both objects in the world(and we most certainly are), and subjects taking account of the world and/or ourselves(and we most certainly are), then the dichotomy cannot be used to draw and maintain a meaningful distinction between us and our accounts. Your claim that us and our accounts are the same thing is based upon employing the dichotomy, and that conclusion conflates us and our accounts. Thus, you've just confirmed my reasoning for rejecting the dichotomy.
As I mentioned earlier but it bears repeating:The need to draw a distinction between our reports and what we're reporting upon cannot be overstated. Because employing the subject/object dichotomy results in an inability to draw and maintain such distinctions, and drawing and maintaining such distinctions is a required step in the process of acquiring knowledge of that which existed in it's entirety prior to our accounts of it, the employment of that dichotomy becomes an impediment, a self-imposed obstacle to our understanding that is impossible to overcome.
Quoting Mww
These are exactly the sort of conclusions that put the conflation between us and our reports upon public display. They are very problematic, unacceptable, and prima facie... just plain false.
Your body is not an account. Your account is most certainly in the world.
Quoting Mww
Oh, but I beg to differ. I reject it for the reasons given.
I suspect you are trying to understand subjectivity in general, which would include your own subjectivity doing the trying. Or are you trying to understand the subjectivity of a certain person in particular?
...which are statements.
No.
This can also be parsed in physicalist terms. The knower is the brain/body, whose activity is never known (it is blind to the neurophysical activity that enables, gives rise to and is involved in knowing).
Look like just plain 'ole names to me.
"Sounds like" would be better.
Look! An argument for qualia.
Only if you can assess the weight of a statement!
I've a thread about attributing things that are unique to human beings to other animals/things. The personification of other creatures and the world; anthropomorphism.
Quoting Mww
The differences between our approaches are certainly stark enough to be noted. Mine remains incomplete in ways that I'm always attending to. Kant's was far more complete. It just focused upon the wrong sorts of things.
Here's where I differ with Kant...
In order to know that A is not equal to B, we must know what both consist of, because knowing that they are not equal requires comparison/contrast between the two. If A is unknowable, then we cannot know what it consists of. If we cannot know what it consists of, then we cannot ascertain how it is different from B, because by definition all we can know is that it is.
We cannot pick and choose things from the Noumenal world. That's the very first step in comparison.
We cannot know that no thing is as it appears, despite our having long since known that some things are not.
Ok.
A suggestion...
Can we at least agree that there is a difference between our bodies and our reports thereof?
Not if you're a BIV.
What I had in mind:
X believes (placeholder)
What kind of thing goes in (placeholder), can it only be a statement? That's what characterising belief as only an attitude towards statements would commit someone to.
I'm trying to suggest that (placeholder) can also be stuff that happens. Not stuff that happens that can be described at some time later in a way that turns out to be logically equivalent to the event, not stuff that happens that occurs along with an intention towards a statement, just stuff that happens.
I think getting at that by an appeal to some Bayesian neuroscience model shows:
A) There's some scientific precedent for characterising beliefs as targeting non-statements.
B) The eye movement example I think is a concrete example that shows we are acting on perceptual expectations that are not perceptual expectations regarding statements.
C) Going through something very obscure was an attempt to stop @Banno playing "I can turn that into a statement" and "What is it that you cannot say?" moves. Not that it did much good, as the former immediately happened.
I get that you might take a line similar to Patricia Churchland, such that neural networks are not representational. But if that view be granted then I'd just say neural networks are not about beliefs.
In fact Bitbol starts with the physicalist concept of blind spot. Each of our eyes has one, corresponding to where the optic nerve starts, and yet we are not naturally aware of it. It’s not like we see two dark spots on the right and left of our focus area.
Incidentally this is another evidence for the idea that what we see is NOT what we get from our senses. Sense data are actively repackaged, interpreted and corrected before we see them, and that includes erasing the blind spots. But that’s not the point that interest Bitbol. Rather, for him it’s merely a metaphor for the epistemic blind spot of neurology, which thrives to objectify subjectivity and in doing so takes a necessary distance with subjectivity, ignores the subject in order to make of it an object. According to Bitbol, and as talking to Isaac confirms, neurologists don’t necessarily know that they have this epistemic blind spot.
As for a physicalist rendering of knowledge, as in “my body/brain knows A, B or C”, I would concede that a little bit of that is possible in a biosemiotic framework, inasmuch as cells share information all the time by way of hormones and other chemicals. But information is not the same thing as knowledge. Knowledge implies an epistemic cut between subject and object, between an observer and what he observes. This is the real problem, and it does not matter whether one calls the observer a body or a mind... When a subject tries to understand subjectivity as an object, this necessary epistemic cut is introduced within the subject himself. The discursive, analytic self tries to take and maintain a distance with its own subjectivity, e.g. tries to shut down emotions and intuitions that don’t fit with the discourse being attempted. And this may explain a certain cock-sure attitude of materialists who keep contradicting themselves, like Dennett: they have managed to shut down their own subjective intuitions when they don’t conform with their self-denying discourse, so they literally don’t see their own contradictions. Blind spot.
I wonder when we train neural networks to recognize cats on mats, what does that amount to? Or when AlphaZero learns to play superhuman chess. Can we say it has representational knowledge of chess strategy?
I also wonder whether we could pursue an eliminativist view of computing. When you look at the actual hardware, it's just moving electrons around. Where are the software programs in that? Where is the data?
Maybe just looking at neurons firing is missing the higher level view of what all that adds up to, such as belief formation. After-all, it's kind of hard to explain how humans are so adept at navigating and manipulating the environment without positing some knowledge of the world. In fact, that's an ongoing issue for improving AI. The lack of common sense understanding is one of the big remaining obstacles to a more general purpose AI. Somehow biological neural networks are able to handle that.
None of that has to do with the Kantian philosophy pertaining to consciousness, even if it does have correlations to Kantian philosophy pertaining to empirical knowledge.
—————
Quoting creativesoul
Absolutely. I’m going to insist I’ve satisfied the criteria for establishing the difference. Because it seems I’ve failed miserably at it, and in the interest of proper dialectic, the onus of enlightenment is on you.
Do you agree that these two statements don't imply each other?
(1) Everything that happens can be put into a statement.
(2) Every belief regards a statement.
If it is the case that all belief is a propositional attitude, then it cannot be the case that language less creatures have belief.
The problem:Language less creatures have belief.
Because language less creatures have belief, but no ability to form an attitude towards a proposition, it only follows that not all belief is a propositional attitude.
And?
What we get via the senses, specifically the eyes, provides the raw material that makes up what we see. It seems obvious that, as Kant says, “Perception without conception is blind; conception without perception is empty”.
Quoting Olivier5
I don't believe neurologists are so stupid. Of course treating perception as an object to be studied is not the same as perceiving. We cannot perceive perception, although we can be aware that we are perceiving. However this is a second order reflexive conceptual awareness; what Kant aptly calls "apperception".
Quoting Olivier5
"Subject and object" is just the way we conceive the situation vis-à-vis perception and knowledge. I think it's best understood as an artifact of language; a reification. We can know things, just as animals do, without conceiving of the process as 'a subject knowing an object'. Language, with it's binary nature, does allow us to conceive of ourselves as split somehow, of mind and body being separate somehow, but I think there is no real separation; it's merely conceptual.
I'm still not clear on the distinction between the different senses of "physical contact" and "practical contact" or how the robot example helps to distinguish them. Unless you are just stipulating that people can have "practical contact" with their environment but robots can't?
Quoting Andrew M
Surely a physical interaction between a person and a cup is not merely an abstract relation.
Quoting Andrew M
I don't really see much difference between experience vs. experience in the mind. For there to be "seeing red", there needs to be a subject or a person who sees red. This involves a dichotomy between the subject (or person) and their environment, sometimes called subjective/objective. You pay lip service to dispensing of this dichotomy but you cannot avoid speaking in terms of it.
Quoting Andrew M
What is the difference between touching and feeling something? Touching is physical, whereas feeling is... what? Conscious? Experiential? This is simply another manifestation of the subjective/objective or mind/matter divide that you seem to want to eliminate in the name of a Cartesian theatre.
It's a useful distinction. We understand how hardware and software are related, and there is no cause for disagreement.
However with regards to dualism, I would note that there is no ontological hardware/software difference such that the laws of physics apply to one but not the other, or that one is public and the other intrinsically private, or that the executing software has a separate (or otherwise ineffable) existence in relation to the hardware.
If we understood the use of terms like "physical" and "mental" as having naturally arising uses instead of being ontological duals with the above kinds of characteristics, then perhaps there would be little cause for disagreement there as well.
This goes to the approach I've been advocating; that there can be different ways of talking about the same thing, which need not be reducible, one to the other. So I spent the day redesigning spreadsheets, without any reference to the electronics involved. Indeed, talking in terms of the electronics would simply serve to obscure the functionality of the sheets.
Yeah, I've been reading Mary Midgley again.
:up:
Quoting creativesoul
Also fine. We give names to individuals.
Quoting Janus
I think you're using the term "concrete" in the sense of "definite" (or maybe "real"). That's OK, but it's not how I was using it.
Quoting Janus
No, not Parmenides. Though Aristotle could be seen as integrating Parmenides and Heraclitus. That is, how do we account for change in things but also have those things maintain their identity through that change?
Anyway, perhaps an example will help. Suppose we observe Alice kick a ball. If I point in her direction, and ask you what am I pointing to, what do you answer? You might say, "Alice" or you might say "the ball". Those are both concrete things (or individuals). Or you might say "Alice kicking the ball". That's also fine - we observed that. But kicking is an abstract term (a universal) - it doesn't have an independent existence. And kicking is an example of physical contact which is similarly abstract.
So this gets into the issue of universals, which I'm not sure this thread has covered yet... I discuss my position (which is broadly Aristotelian) in more detail here.
Long story short, I think kicking happens out there in the world, not in people's minds (it's a kind of relation, which is part of the physicist's toolkit). However it doesn't follow that it has an independent existence apart from individuals. Which is why it is abstract, not concrete.
We could define "Alice kicked the ball" in extensional terms; Alice is one of the things that kicked the ball. If we do so, is there nothing left that is not concrete? We have Alice, Fred, Jack, the ball, the cat. "Kicked" is defined in terms of relations between these items:
Kicked (Alice, Ball)
Kicked (Fred, Ball)
Kicked (Jack, the cat)
Non linguistic conscious experience consists entirely of correlations drawn between different directly perceptible things, none of which are language use.
Kripke?
Quoting Janus
I don’t believe in ‘artifacts of language’, which I hold as the lamest philosophical argument ever made.
I haven't disagreed that experience can never be fully described by reporting. In fact I've said exactly that, so I'm unsure as to what point you think you're making here. The argument was about whether discussion of neurology of of experience has primacy on some given point (say perception of colour). The point there still stands - that anything you say from a phenomenological perspective about your experience of colour is only selective and filtered data from your memory of having that experience, which is no more accurate than interpreted data from third parties. Pointing out that memories are experiences too doesn't make any difference, the reporting in a discussion of such 'experiences' would still themselves be memories, and so flawed.
This seems to be the perennial trick of the idealists and woo-merchants. To point out that empirical data has flaws (subjectivity, the necessity of an observer etc) and then for some reason assume this counts as an argument in favour of alternative methods of discussion. Pointing out that one approach is flawed does not count as support for another unless you can show that it is not similarly flawed, and in this case you can't.
Yes, those are all concrete. Whereas Kicked as an uninstantiated relation (i.e., without items) would be abstract.
Rigid designators? For Aristotle, things have essential and accidental characteristics.
Actually Aristotle's form/matter distinction was a counter to dualism (in this case, Plato's). Instead of Forms being separate from the material world per Plato, Aristotle regarded observable things as being analyzable in terms of form and matter, but not as ontologically separate. A modern way of putting that would be that physical systems are characterized by state (or information - which derives from the Greek term morphe, or form).
Quoting Marchesk
How is that different than a brain in a skull (BIS)?
Quoting Marchesk
Is the visual of a brain a representation of a brain or something that isn't a brain? If its a representation then how does the visual differ from the actual?Quoting Marchesk
The same can be said of brains.
Quoting Marchesk
Or maybe looking at neurons firing is a naive realists view of what is happening.
No. I'm just saying that phrases can have different senses depending on how they are used. Practical contact is going to be different in some sense for a human than it is for a robot, even though the same phrase might be used for both.
To return to the original issue, an experience is a relation between yourself and the things in your environment (say, the coffee). Experience is a term that applies to humans but not to robots. Not because humans have Cartesian minds (where they have internal experiences), but because humans have different capabilities to robots. A human's practical contact with the world instantiates differently to a robot's.
Quoting Luke
No, you're just reading what I say through that dichotomy. I've said that a person experiences the world (i.e., that there is a relation between the person and the world), and you read that as an experience in the mind.
Quoting Luke
From Lexico, touch means "Come into or be in contact with." while feel (in this context) means "Be aware of (a person or object) through touching or being touched."
If I felt someone touch my shoulder, then I have become aware that someone is there. That's my experience of the world.
What I felt was not "in my mind", it was in the world. It is only the introduction of a Cartesian theater that makes what I felt internal to a container mind.
Yes, that seems to be the case.
We could always marry qualia to universals and really stoke the flames.
So, as a vacillating woo-merchant: I sell @Banno two red apples ...
Didn’t know that, thanks. True that form cannot exist without matter and vice versa. Still it is a duality of sorts, like the two sides of the same coin.
So it can't be just a matter of talking. It's about understanding, for which talking is not necessary. Why even mention it?
To understand what X is, is to be in possession of information. Different points of view give us access to different information. So this is about emergence.
Cats demonstrate purposeful behavior. You're calling this belief.
Whether we want to conflate purposefulness with belief is a decision made at the level of language game, not philosophy. Right?
Behaviour is not belief, on my view. Belief is correlations drawn between things.
Quoting frank
I do not really see much of a difference between the two levels, aside from philosophy being metacognitive and not all language games being so.
"Belief that 'X'" is our report, where X is a statement/proposition. Pointing out that our reports are in propositional/statement form is irrelevant to the content of the creature's belief being reported upon, especially when reporting upon a language less creature's belief.
That is incorrect. I can say all sorts of things about my experience which are at a variance or additional to my memory of said experience. It’s called ‘lying’, and people do it often.
Quoting Isaac
This is a tall claim. How would you go about trying to prove it?
Quoting Isaac
The assumption here is that memories are ‘flawed’, ie that forgetting is necessarily a problem. But forgetting may be a solution to a problem.
Quoting Isaac
Once again, all this talk about ‘flaws’ is yours, not mine. To me, the subjectivity of empirical data is not a flaw, it is sui generis. It follows from the definition of ‘empirical’. Empirical is a strength, not a flaw. It means that any subject can check by him or herself whether some things happen. It means that we, subjects, are like St Thomas: we want proof. We subjects can do our own observations, and base our thinking on them, thank you very much. This is not the problem.
The real problem is bias. Bias is a necessary part of any observation, because any observation is made from a certain view point, typically answers some preformed questions, and is interpreted within a certain belief framework that filters out some of the evidence we collect. It follows that confirmation bias happens quite a lot. Instead of basing our thinking on our observations, we very often chose our observations (those we accept as conclusive) based on our thinking. And this means going around in circle.
Another problem is that individual bias stands in the way of productive communication and comparison of observations between subjects.
A key point to understand here is that the road going from subjective empirical observations to generalisable, objective knowledge and back (the road of science) is built by different observers collaborating with one another, checking, replicating the experiment, verifying the math, etc. Therefore, the road from subjective empirical observation to objective knowledge goes through intersubjectivity: several subjects sharing their observations and coming to an agreement about them. Individual bias makes this work both necessary and difficult. Other tools to control individual bias are therefore necessary, such as triangulation or bias analysis in sociology.
You should not mistake me for an idealist. I just want science to work better at the ‘hard problem’ and get better chances at solving it, by recognizing its blind spots and trying to control its biases. One of which is a misplaced fear of subjectivity.
This statement would be a reflection on your own folk psychology (specifically mind-reading.)
You attribute beliefs and other mental states as a way of predicting behavior. There's a theory that your brain is actually hard-wired to engage in this kind of predictive activity.
So we have a cat, whose brain is hard-wired to produce hunting behavior, and you, whose brain is hard-wired to project beliefs on the cat to explain it's behavior and thereby make predictions.
Philosophy is best a zone of exploration. It's not as helpful when a philosopher takes the role of declaring. Science threatens to pull the rug.
That leaves plenty of room for some version of folk-psychology.
I know. As I wrote that to creative I had this image of me about to lose my grip and fall down into a hermeneutic abyss. And then this huge guy came over and threatened to step on my fingers which were barely hanging on to the edge.
I think it was that guy from the James Bond movie.
Could be I suppose. I doubt it though.
All statements are predication
All predication is correlations drawn between different things
Not all correlations drawn between different things is predication
The question is whether or not all correlations drawn between different things is adequate for belief. They are all meaningful to the creature drawing them.
Belief is not a mental state, on my view. I reject the notion. Correlations are drawn between internal and external things. The correlations drawn consist of both, and thus they themselves are neither.
Then how should we think about these correlations? Reductively? Ideally? Emergently?
Or would you say we don't need to pursue that question?
I see we've devolved into irrelevancies. I'll leave you to it since my part in the conversation is having no effect whatsoever on your jeremiad you may as well carry on without interruption.
LOL. Did I hit a nerve?
What is there that cannot be characterised as "correlations drawn between things"? And if so many functions have this characteristic, what's the point?
Belief is an attitude towards some possible state of affairs such that one takes that state of affairs to be the case.
That is, it is holding that some statement is true.
All this banter about languageless (it's one word) animals is a furphy. Indeed, what you are doing is pretty much the same as those here who take qualia to be real things - you are taking a piece of language and supposing that because we talk as if it refers to something, there must be something to which it refers. You are reifying belief.
That's pretty much it. We use talk of beliefs in order to explain human behaviour. We can extend this to cats, but the belief is not a thing in the mind of the cat; it's just a pattern of behaviour. That is, the belief is not in the cat, but in the explanation.
I have excellent, fruitful conversations with non-zombies though. It’s only with the zombies that it’s over so fast. They run away from me I guess...
A robot has a relationship with its environment as well. Humans are part of the environment. To assert that humans are somehow special in this regard, is unwarranted.
The practical contact with the world for both humans and robots is via the physical senses.
Experience is information.
Can an infant have a belief? Can a cat think?
That makes sense. But I think the same thing applies to individuals. An individual is a being (be-ing) in the sense of the term as verb, yet being, like kicking, does not have an independent existence apart from individuals.
So for me an act of kicking is as concrete as the individual doing the kicking and the object being kicked. And kicking in the general sense, is no more abstract than being or existence in the general sense.
Evolutionarily seems best to me? I'm attempting to put forth an elemental description of a complex entity in such a way that most reasonable people would at least agree that the description has done it's job and provided a basic outline from which all levels of conscious experience from the simplest through the most complex can be derived and/or sensibly said to have evolved within the confines of.
In order for conscious experience to have been able to have gradually emerged over an evolutionary timeline, it must have been able to have begun at some simple, basic, and/or rudimentary level of complexity, and continue to grow and evolve in it's complexity over sufficient time and repetition into something like exactly what we're doing here and now.
So the question is what could all conscious experience consist of such that it is capable of naturally emerging and evolving over time? I'm not looking to answer all the questions of the origin of humanity or the universe. I'm not looking to solve all the problems of philosophy. I'm focusing specifically upon human thought and belief(world-views) and I'm using the general influence of methodological naturalism accompanied by a strive for adequate simplicity in accounting practices.
Verifiability is always a plus too. Falsifiability... well... we cannot falsify a true statement, so there's that.
Quoting Banno
Irrelevant.
We're discussing what I'm arguing/advocating for here:What does it matter if someone can attempt to use that same description as a means to characterize everything as such? I certainly don't. It's the quality of the characterization/criterion/accounting practice/linguistic framework/report/model/conceptual scheme that matters here, not whether or not it is possible to use the same terms differently than I.
To directly answer the question...
On my view, all sorts of things are not characterized as "correlations drawn between different things". Everything that existed in it's entirety prior to becoming part of a meaningful correlation drawn between it and other things by a creature capable of doing so. Simply put:The content of the correlation(the things); the creature drawing the correlations.
The coffee, the tasting, and the resulting bitterness. The creature drawing the correlations between the three is having meaningful conscious experience of tasting bitter coffee.
The fire. The touching. The resulting pain. The creature drawing correlations between the three is having meaningful conscious experience of being burnt by fire.
Exceptions abound with correlations drawn between language use and other things, but that's not an issue given the recursive nature of language. It's to be expected - required even - of a minimalist criterion that is amenable to the evolution of language and meaning. Sometimes we draw correlations between language use and other things. Language use consists of correlations drawn between it and other things. That's not a flaw of the outline. It's a feature to be expected of a model capable of taking proper account of the evolutionary progression of conscious experience, particularly when it comes to the bridge between language-less meaningful conscious experience to conscious experience that is informed thereafter thereby.
Sure. To the precise extent that they are capable of drawing correlations between different things. At that level of cognitive ability it's always correlations drawn between directly perceptible external and internal things.
Banno's position, while very very popular, cannot admit either. His recent participation supports that charge... quite clearly so.
No it's not.
A sure sign that there's no substance to the counter-argument is when a participant focuses upon the author rather than the argument being given.
So, would you describe your overall approach as scientific realism?
Quoting Olivier5
You’re crossing a line there. But then, I think you’re a ‘continental philosopher’.
Yes, this idea that human subjectivity is the cradle or bedrock of scientific objectivity — this idea may be to philosophical zombies what garlic is to vampires. And as is well known, us continental philosophers eat a lot of garlic...
I don't recall making a claim about objectivity. Could you quote me that post?
You presented or assumed subjectivity as flawed. I’m trying to show you that this is not the case. Subjectivity is the bedrock of scientific objectivity.
Science has to reconcile itself with subjectivity. It’s a mistake to try and banish it, or to treat as an illusion, or as flawed.
Where?
Here:
Quoting Isaac
You mean like Descartes taking Plato's Forms (the domain of the Intellect) and adding sentience to posit the Cartesian mind?
That debate has been going on for hundreds of years (if not thousands)...
OK. I think of dualism as an ontological separation thesis, where each dual has its own nature and principles for understanding them.
Yes agreed, and well put. Kicking is concrete when those relational dependencies are met (i.e., when someone is kicking something).
Fair. But ontology is elusive. We don’t really know what matter ‘is’, for instance. Personally I try to stay away from it. (ontology I mean, not matter, as staying away from matter would be difficult)
Quoting Banno
Interesting, didactic, nicely put.
As an aside, in Popper’s three worlds theory, world 1 is the physical world, world 2 is the subjective world of individuals, and world 3 is the world of ideas as historically produced by world 2 (us humans), therefore it is an intersubjective world where human ideas collaborate or fight with one another a little bit like Dennett’s memes do. Popper’s world 3 is of course based on worlds 1 and 2, and made possible by the invention of language and writing. It’s all one world in the end.
What I find interesting in this view — which must have many precedents — is that the Platonic world of ideas is not ‘out there’ and objective; rather it is grounded in human subjectivity, and built by our intersubjective dialogue and intellectual efforts generation after generation.
I may post some examples, but whether this is worthwhile will depend on your response to another question:
Quoting Banno
Would you also hold that your own belief is not a thing in your own mind, but only a pattern of behaviour?
That probably accounts for a lot, thanks. As the article says:
Unexpected segue into Godwin's law at the end there, but as a fan of Dead Snow I approve.
Humans and other living organisms are special in this regard. The specialness comes about with the development of single-celled organisms, and results from the division between "self" and "other".
Humans and certain other living organisms are more special still. We have experiences.
Robots don't have experiences. They don't feel, they don't hear, they don't see things.
You say that experience is information, but then you also say that everything is information, so this claim of yours doesn't explain anything.
How do you know?
I recently posted an article on 15 years of research that showed that humans really aren't like other animals in terms of memory storage.
Human memory is stored in an overlapping jumbled way compared to other animals like us.
An obvious speculation would be that our ability to abstract is related to this anomoly. So human thought may be truly unique in the animal world (now that our cousins are all extinct).
So if your goal is to say something about evolution, you might have to be tentative.
Pots and kettles for a purveyor of belief as propositional attitude.
That's not what a reification fallacy is anyway, and anyone whose read what I've wrote here ought know that I'm not treating belief as if it is physical or concrete.
Sure. Since you are either unable or unwilling to provide an argument for the position you hold (that beliefs only apply to statements), I'll provide a counter argument to the position.
One type of account of belief construes belief as a propositional attitude. That is, an attitude an agent may hold towards a proposition. If x is an agent and p is a proposition, that propositional attitude can be expressed as "x believes that p". Keep "expressed" in your mind for later.
So we don't get bogged down unnecessarily in redundancy, I'll grant you that "x believes that p" and "x believes that "p" is true"" say the same thing, in the sense that to assert that p is to assert ""p" is true". In other words, in this account, the following two things are logically equivalent (one is true when and only when the other is true):
(1) x believes that p
(2) x believes that "p" is true
And we can say that because "p" is true if and only if p. [hide=*](side note: x need only be committed to (1) whenever they are committed to (2) if they believe the implications between them (regardless of the truth value of the implication, set issues regarding belief not distributing over true implication aside)[/hide]
Onto the argument, let's say that x believes that snow is white. Under what conditions is x's belief true? x's belief is true when and only when snow is white. But notice, x may believe that snow is white, and x may believe the statement that "snow is white" is true; but the former is a belief about snow, and the latter is a belief about the statement "snow is white" that is true whenever snow is white. The first has belief directed towards snow being white (as a truthmaker/truth condition/event/state of affairs), the second has belief directed towards a statement that snow is white.
If beliefs can only be directed towards statements, then x will not (definitionally) have beliefs about snow - they can only have beliefs about statements about snow. But I don't just believe the statement "snow is white", I believe snow is white.
Under the account of truth above, when a person believes that snow is white, that does not concern snow. It concerns a statement about snow. Now remember "expressed" earlier - it comes back to haunt us, propositional attitudes are expressed in statements, but are themselves attitudes towards states of affairs.
What the equivalence between (1) and (2) lets you do is to speak as if people only have beliefs about statements, simply because if x believes that p, that is logically equivalent to having the belief about the statement "p" is true (but see the hidden * comment for another wrinkle), despite that one is targeted at a state of affairs - snow being white - and one is targeted at a statement.
That construes beliefs as a relation between agents and states of affairs, rather than between agents and statements. Perceptual expectations are relationships between agents and states of affairs. There will be some overlap; "I believe that my cup is on my table", what else is there to that than seeing my cup on my table and expressing it as a belief statement? If I saw a statement in place of my cup, I would be very surprised. A theory of perceptual expectations can tell you how the "I believe" in "I believe my cup is on my table" comes to apply the state of my cup being on my table. What it means for an agent to form a belief [hide=**](except regarding abstract objects? Wiggle room here, I believe that 1+1=2, a more complicated story would be needed to link that belief to perceptual expectations)[/hide], accounting for that "I believe" part in "I believe my cup is on my table", is what a theory of belief requires. Deflating it into statements just won't do, as beliefs care very much about the truth conditions of belief statements.
I actually agree that our thought is unique in the animal world, as a direct result of written language, but not regarding everything prior to.
I've not read the article mentioned. Do you find that anything I've written stands in conflict?
Nah. I don't do 'isms'.
It's a joke between teammates. The other side has done the same.
Are there sides? Shit. I'm clueless, I seem to be arguing against both.
:wink:
Back when we were tangentally discussing quning qualia, the sides were those in favor of Dennett's intuition pumps, and those of us who were not.
Which most of the posters in this thread seem to agree with. So the question is what does qualia in the first sense amount to, and does the likes of Dennett, Frankish and the Churchlands support it, or is that to be eliminated also?
Same way you know Khaled.
It's panpyshchist robots all the way down.
Interesting. I had in mind the ancient skeptical Cyrenaics school of philosophy, since we had a former poster who was a fan of them.
[quote=IEP, Cyrenaics]Even if all people were to agree on the perceptual quality that some object has–for instance, that a wall appears white–the Cyrenaics still think that we could not confidently say that we are having the same experience. This is because each of us has access only to our own experiences, not to those of other people, and so the mere fact that each of us calls the wall ‘white’ does not show us that we are all having the same experience that I am having when I use the word ‘white.’
https://iep.utm.edu/cyren/#SSH2a.ii[/quote]
One interesting thing about them is that they preferred to say things like, "I am sweetened, or I am whitened.", instead of "The honey is sweet, or the wall is white". And they did this because they were skeptical that we could know whether objects had a taste or color independent of our sensations.
There's much talk in modern philosophy about how language misleads. Well, the Cyrenaics would have said that our way of saying, "The cup is red and the coffee tastes bitter sweet.", is misleading us into attributing properties of sensation onto objects.
Anyway, it sounds to me like that Cyrenaics and other ancient skeptical schools anticipated much of the modern debate around qualia, minus the physicalism and neurological part. I do recall that one criticism of ancient atomism was that atoms and the void couldn't create sensations of color and taste.
A proposition is a state of affairs.
I just remembered that I told you that when I first came to this forum and you were insulting as fuck, something about my not knowing my ass from a hole in the ground.
Jesse you're an asshole.
Possibly due to memory processing.
SEP makes a distinction between propositions and concrete events, I'm using proposition in the sense of what the statements "snow is white" and schnee ist weiß" have in common in terms of truth/falsity; they express the proposition that snow is white. Roughly - sharable truth value bearing aspect of a statement. Snow being white can't be true or false in the way "snow is white" can be true or false, since it's not a statement.
Don't you think it's because of human-style language? Allows us to think in the abstract, frame hypotheses, think about the past and the future, etc etc.
Propositions, per the most common AP meaning, are expressed by uttered sentences. They aren't "aspects of statements."
Per Russell, they're states of affairs which either obtain or don't.
It may be that language and our ability to think abstractly go hand in hand?
There's evidence that crows can count. So for example, if two hunters are behind a blind, and one leaves, the crows are aware that one is still back there. They also apparently can keep track of individual humans and how they've behaved.
They also wash their mushrooms before they eat them.
An octopus knows it's seeing itself in a mirror. Even cats don't do that.
So what exactly is abstract thought?
Remembering we're inside the cave of sensory shadows?
Yep. Nice that we agree. Thanks for expounding our view.
Don't you think "beliefs only apply to statements" goes against my belief that snow is white? Which is an attitude I have towards snow. Not just towards the statement.
So the first is the phenomenal character of the experience. Now if that is the taste of the coffee, then it is clear that it is something we can talk about, at great length, so it is not ineffable, and it is shared.
And pretty uncontroversial.
If that i all that qualia are, I have no problem with them. However I would still avoid using the term because of its ambiguity.
You cannot even tell me how it is that our own brains produce red or bitterness. The best you can do is try and talk of some public model we tell ourselves to come up with redness or bitterness, which sounds absurd.
Fdrake believes that "snow is white" is true.
"snow is white" is true IFF snow is white.
Hence,
Fdrake believes that snow is white.
It amounts to the same thing.
Side note: I use statement rather than proposition because I adopt the common usage of statement for utterances with a particular grammar, and proposition for a subclass of statements that are either true or false. Hence "the present king of France is bald" is a statement but not a proposition. Beliefs apply to statements, because Fred might believe that the present king of France is bald.
I don't know where that falls in Banno's Ramsey sentences. I guess my skepticism is rooted in a philosophical argument against color realism, even though most people would say the snow is factually white (upon seeing the pure snow), and not just that they believe it.
OK, we can work with that.
First, does a submarine experience the phenomenal character of sonar? I guess we might agree that it doesn't.
And does a bat experience the same phenomenal character of sonar as a dolphin? If there is such a thing as the phenomenal character of sonar, then the answer should be "yes". IF the experience differs between bats and dolphins, between bats and bats, between dolphins and dolphins, then on what basis do we call it a somehow unified "phenomenal character of sonar"?
Delve a bit deeper and consider what it would take to answer this question. I submit that there can be no answer, because there can be no grounds for making such a comparison. And if no answer can be formulated, has a question been asked? I suspect this is question without a sense.
And finally, and I think most tellingly, we can talk about the experience of sonar. We can talk about the distance at which a dolphin can recognise a mackerel, or at which a bat can track a moth. This would be a conversation that parallels our discussion of the characteristics of coffee.
Adding the word "phenomenal" moves us onto the third of the definitions of qualia, and out into the fringes of functional language use. Here the term starts to lose any coherence.
I have two different approaches to get you to see the problem, then.
First:
What you wrote actually an invalid argument form:
(1) x believes that p
(2) p iff q
(3: Conclusion) x believes that q
Countermodel:
A student is taking a course on abstract algebra. They've covered groups, they've yet to cover semigroups. They don't know at all what they are, yet.
(1) The student believes that x is a group.
(2) x is a group iff x is a semigroup with an identity and inverses.
(3) The student does not believe that x is a semigroup with identity and inverses.
They don't believe that x is a group because they do not yet believe that x is a group iff x is a semigroup with an identity and inverses. Belief doesn't distribute over implication. You're going to have to spell out what lets you move from one to the other and why, what about the function of the t-sentence restores the validity of the argument?
It has to be both.
How do you know that staying away from matter is difficult if you don't know what matter is? :confused:
Sure, substitution salva veritate. Fdrke might not believe "Schnee ist weiß" despite believing "snow is white". Nevertheless, Fdrake's belief is a propositional attitude: Fdrake believes that snow is white.
None of your counterexamples have weight.
Because I’m evidently made of matter. If you know what matter is, kindly share.
How do you know you're made of matter if you don't know what matter is?
Do crows do that?
The student believes x is a group.
The student believes x is a semigroup with identity and inverses.
The first is true, the second is false. By substituting in the second for the first, you're changing the truth value of the belief statement, you're just not changing the truth value of the statement which is believed. It is not substitution which preserves truth value for the belief statements, then.
I can believe that snow appears white, but not that it is actually white. So it can be true on the ordinary language use as long as it means ?appears to humans that way" and not is the actual state of affairs, even though most people naively think it is.
That’s what they taught me in school.
Ravens do that in some of Poe's poems, I think.
Or if you think matter is ordinary stuff all the way down as opposed to fields and particles. Meaning yo have the wrong model of matter.
Consider that not everything in the intersubjective world was created by humans; a good deal of it is discovered - principles such as non-contradiction, natural numbers, all of the other 'furniture of reason'. In classical philosophy, this is the sense by which h. sapiens is able to transcend the contingent - by discovery of eternal principles and laws discerned by reason (nous). (Of course that is all now regarded as archaic, but still worth a mention.)
Sure something might be able to appear white under extraordinary conditions while not appearing white under ordinary conditions. We would then not say that it is white.
But in any case that is irrelevant to the point. The point is that you cannot believe that 'x is P' is true, without believing that x is P without contradicting yourself.
And?
That's not talking about their experience of sonar though?
We can't talk much (sense) even about our own experiences, to someone who hasn't had such experiences. Experiences can only be described by pointing at them.
So we can't know directly what things taste like or look like to other people: but how likely is it in practical terms that red looks different to all of us? I can see there's room for variability, more or less sensitivity, genetic variation as with colourblindness, but I reckon in general things probably look and feel and taste and smell broadly similar to us all. I know that's not a philosophical argument.
Or, if you prefer, beliefs are expressible as a belief in some possible state of affairs.
They amount to the same thing, even considering substitution salva veritate.
I think of logic as an a priori. So it’s either a part of our operating system, or a world with its own rules that we tap into. I tend to lean for the first solution: a part of our operating system. So in this sense it was indeed not produced by humans, only codified (aka translated in symbols) by them. Likewise we have certain neurons recognising the first few natural numbers when they show up in a pattern or scene. Octopuses too, BTW. Now of course, this leaves totally open the questions of why logic as we know it may be in our operating system, and whether it works or not.
That makes no sense. There are different kinds of "ordinary stuff", of matter. Matter seems to be constituted by fields and particles; what's the problem?
Tell me what you understand "substitution salva veritae" to mean?
Yeah, we can. Bet you never had a perforated bowl. Them suckers hurt. But curiously, the pain felt like having a very, very full bladder. Take the drugs, is all I say.
Having the wrong conception of what ordinary stuff is made up of fundamentally. If you think it's all made of water or the five elements or just the stuff you can feel and see, then you're wrong about the world.
Quoting Janus
Only if propositions must follow classical logic. But what if a proposition is fuzzy, or true under certain ways of looking at things, like how the snow appears to humans?
Well, no, I think that very badly expressed.
Fair enough. I was finding this frustrating too, if you decide to come up with an argument for your position (that beliefs can only be about statements), rather than requiring me to do all the legwork, I'd be down to discuss more.
Sure, it's not impossible that we have the wrong understanding of what constitutes matter. But it does seem vanishingly unlikely, given the predictive success of quantum physics, that it could be completely wrong, like the notions that matter is made of water, or the five elements were. The latter were simply armchair imaginings with no empirical investigation behind them.
The idea that matter could be made of the stuff you can feel and see is absurd, arse-about; the stuff you can feel and see is made of matter.
OK, I've been drawing a distinction between what matter is and what constitutes matter. By definition whatever it is that constitutes matter must be material. It's just that there may be forms of material unknown to us, since our knowledge is not complete.
I can see the appeal of the position, I just don't agree with it.
Quoting Banno
Nah. It's that I don't think I'd be able to make you doubt your position regardless of what I say, and I don't want to try a fifth strategy (fifth!) to start the discussion when you've yet to present a positive argument for your position. "simply an observation" won't do, it's theory ladened.
...as are all observations.
I'm parroting Davidson, or at least my version of Davidson. SO I don't think I'm alone.
Why do you have misgivings?
(Edit: What you are claiming seems to me to be on a par with "'Socrates' is not a noun". It's not about evidence so much as ways of speaking.
So that's not right.
Could I suggest that neither is "made of" the other? Matter is the stuff you can feel and see.
Yes.
Quoting Banno
I don't think you are either. What convinces you that beliefs can only be about statements?
What were you getting at?
Are you a black hole?
Quoting Daemon
Not really sure at this point. Something to do about beliefs, statements and states of affairs. Also, minds. I'm trying to throw a monkey wrench in the gears, but not really sure where I come down on this.
I disagree that "The snow is white" is as simple as it looks.
Oh, I'm sorry, it was an honest attempt to summarise what you said. Where did I go wrong?
I gave what I thought of as a counter example earlier. When you record where people's eyes move about on faces while forming a stable image of them - if someone's fixated on a facial feature, where they tend to look next is where they expect another facial feature to be. Those expectations and actions come out so fast no statement like "Given that I am looking at their nasal septum, I believe that if I rotate my eyes up and left a little bit [hide](specific amounts in reality)[/hide] my eyes will land approximately where I expect an eye to be, given what I know about faces in general and this face" enters the process, but that's the kind of thing that goes into a perceptual expectation informing eye movements promoted to explore someone's face.
Since no statements come to mind during that activity (brief fixations regularly last around 0.15 seconds), and certainly not any of the required complexity to state the event, it seems whatever intentional state the body is in during that time cannot be directed towards a statement; statements about the face are not within the scope of the exploratory process at the time. If perceptual expectations counted as beliefs, they'd be beliefs that aren't intentional states directed towards statements.
Those perceptual expectations get called beliefs. In the absence of necessary and sufficient conditions for a mental+behavioural state to count as a belief (help, @Banno?), here's a list of things perceptual expectations look to satisfy that beliefs also satisfy.
(A) Perceptual expectations inform actions.
(B) Perceptual expectations can be used to explain actions.
(C) Perceptual expectations can cause actions.
(D) They do all the above in functioning as dispositions toward actions "He was hungry so he made a snack" vs "he expected to see an eye there so he looked".
(E) Perceptual expectations can be more or less accurate; if I expect to find an eye to fixate on on a face by moving my eye pupil one degree upwards from its current position, I'm more right if the eye is located at 1.1 degrees than I am if it is at 1.2 degrees. Correcting for inaccuracies is already part of the process (if your eyes overshoot something you're looking for, they move back); so inaccuracies are already part of the process.
(F) Perceptual expectations are information carriers; if you see a glowing red ring on the hob, you infer that it is hot. There's something modelling-y or representation-y about them.
They look a lot like beliefs to me in terms of the functional roles they play and the properties they satisfy. Maybe they don't count all count as beliefs, maybe beliefs can count as perceptual expectations: "I believe that my cup is behind my laptop" - where else is there to that than expecting to perceive my cup behind my laptop if I looked?
Yeah....don’t need no thinkin’ no mo’. Just listen to what yer tol’...poof...snow is white.
The other way I tried to approach it with @Banno is: if you believe snow is white, is your belief directed towards snow or the statement "snow is white"? Is your belief about snow, or about words?
The snow, unless it's during one of these discussions.
So what your'e saying in the previous response is that perception involves all sorts of beliefs about the world, but they're mostly not the sort we put into language when acting.
If it's appropriate to call those perceptual expectations beliefs, yeah. I think there's some intuition that a belief labels an "entire" state of mind, a unified disposition of an agent towards a thing which can be expressed as a statement. I just think it's a case of using words to talk about things and forgetting that "how the statement expresses the belief" isn't the same thing as the statement; "snow is white" is about snow. Words aren't the things they're about.
Quoting Marchesk
That's my intuition too. I believe snow is white, language competence [hide=*](piggybacking off object recognition/segmentation/categorisation)[/hide] does the chunking things into related bits with labels on them for me - what counts as snow, what counts as white, what it means to describe a thing as white and how that's wrapped into the "is" - but what I've got the intentional state toward is snow.
If a is the angle of elevation of gaze from the fielder to the ball, then the acceleration of the tangent of a, d2(tan a)/dt2, will be zero if, and only if, the fielder is standing at the place where the ball will land.
But all this maths is unconscious. It would be straining things to say that the fielder believes that the acceleration of the tangent of a will be zero if he's at the right spot. The purported beliefs in your counterexample are subject to the same criticism.
I think it's true that whatever modelling process a human does won't resemble how we'd calculate things on paper. People do calculus at high school but catch balls as children. I think the trick there is that the world tends to develop in patterns, and however our bodies are wired is very good at guessing [hide=*](and learning to guess)[/hide] what comes next given an input pattern and what we need to do with it.
Sorta like a thrown ball "needs" to fall in a way that roughly resembles a parabola, our bodies "need" to guess what happens next given what we've learned about how balls fall. Perception as less of a manual calculation we'd do - more like perception as a way of adapting to nature's next move based on her play.
I don't presume to answer for @Banno, but I'll tender my own. If I believe snow is white, I necessarily believe 'snow is white' is true. A distinction may be drawn between the two beliefs, one about an actuality and the other about a statement or proposition, but they are inseparable; that is, it is impossible (consistently, if at all) to believe one while disbelieving the other.
Some belief is about what happened, is happening, or what will happen. Some belief about that does not consist of language, nor is it existentially dependent upon language. The fire example serves to make the point better.
A language less creature can learn that touching fire causes pain. The belief that touching the fire caused the subsequent pain is not an attitude towards the proposition "touching fire caused pain". It's a belief about what just happened. The proposition/statement is a part of our report, not a part of the creature's belief. All belief is meaningful to the creature having it. This crucial point gets glossed over and/or outright neglected far too often. We always attribute meaning, and form meaningful thought and belief(conscious experience as a result) by virtue of drawing correlations between different things. In the fire example, the creature draw correlations between the fire, the touching, and the pain. It has conscious experience of being burnt by fire. It learns, and subsequently believes that touching fire caused(causes) pain.
There is no language necessary in order for this to actually happen. No propositions. No statements. There is meaningful conscious experience, thought, belief, the attribution and/or recognition of causality. And... the belief is true(corresponds to what happened). Touching the fire did cause the pain. We know that, as does the creature, despite the creature's inability to say it. It formed meaningful, well-grounded, and true belief about what happened.
I've seen the term rendered as such before. I find it tenuous. A proposition is proposed, it seems. As a result, it requires a creature capable of proposing something; language use. While I do not care too much for rendering with "states of affairs", it seems pretty clear that they do not require language users. At least, not all of them.
I don't understand this insistence - from you and from others. What similar experience could you have to my looking at a tree? You could start by looking at a tree.
I'm still unclear on the distinction.
Quoting Andrew M
You said that the phrase "practical contact" might be used for both humans and robots, so why couldn't the term "experience" also apply to both humans and robots? What different capabilities do robots and humans have if it's not "internal experiences"?
Quoting Andrew M
I understand that the Cartesian theatre indicates having an experience of an experience, but I don't think that I or other Qualists need to commit to any such thing, as the non-Qualists here like yourself have suggested.
You want to say that a feeling is of something "in the world", and not of something "in your mind". Okay, but you are either aware or not aware of being touched, and it is the awareness (or not) that makes it a feeling (or not). You are aware of the experience; you are not having an experience of the experience. The same thing could be said of the awareness of the colour red or of the taste of coffee (or of some property of those). It needn't be some homunculus viewing red on the mind's stage. Otherwise, you would be committed to the same homunculus viewing feeling on the mind's stage.
What about the feeling of pain - is that a feeling of something "in the world"? If so, then what is the distinction between the feeler of pain (i.e. the person) and the world? Do you consider a person to be identical with their physical body?
If we take the point of Wittgenstein's private language argument to be that our words cannot get their meanings from anyone's inner private experiences, and if we further assume that we have inner private experiences, then the flip-side of the argument is that our inner private experiences must be ineffable because language cannot refer to them, so we cannot use language to speak about them.
Related:
Quoting SEP article on Other Minds
Still, we don’t know what matter is. We only know the forms it takes.
You agree that qualia are ineffable?
It’s not someone... it’s everyone.
Or vice versa, in the sense that the body without the mind becomes vegetative.
Short answer, Yes.
There is a way of talking about qualia that is not ineffable, but it appears to be no different to our talk of tastes, sights, fellings and so on - all quite adequatly dealt with without reference to qualia.
So see the conversation from and ; As soon as an effable sense of qualia was admitted, March went straight back to the ineffable version. That's happened repeatedly, with various folk, over the course of this thread.
That is, the effable sense of qualia leads down a philosophical garden path.
I don't
The idea, now lost in the mists of time, was that you couldn't explain what vision is like to someone who lacked vision.
Really? I'm not sure I can help you if your comprehension is genuinely that bad, but I'll have go.
First of all that sentence says that subjectivity is a flaw, not that it itself is flawed, secondly it is attributing such a view to a rhetorical opposition, not claiming it as my own, and thirdly it is claiming an equality with other approaches, which negates any context in which I would claim any superior approach exists (not that I wouldn't).
Perhaps, next time you're going to argue against your own invented cliches you should do a little more work constructing them than simply to look back over the thread for any sentence in which the key words appear regardless of their syntactic role?
Same as sonar, and hearing and smelling then?
Yeah. This is perhaps more difficult to see in "the snow is white" than in "the pub is at the end of the road". If I walk to the end of the road when wanting to go to the pub, I clearly have a belief that the pub is at then end of the road, but it is necessarily (in its execution) tied to beliefs about roads and pubs and 'ends' and walking and the consistency of the world in general, the continuity of physical laws... None of which is captured in the proposition "the pub is at the end of the road", which it is claimed constitutes the same thing as my belief that it is, as evidenced by my tendency to act as if it were.
@Banno
The translation of my belief (tendency to act as if) into a proposition does a lot of simplification. If they were one and the same thing, then what would it be simplifying?
Semantics.
Quoting Isaac
Well then your rhetoric is misdirected, because I never ever said subjectivity was a flaw.
Why are you so pissed all the time? You can’t take a little contradiction without behaving like a petulant child? Or is it some misplaced sense of entitlement? You should work on this.
Belief is an endorsement of a state of the world. You're saying we don't endorse a representation made of sounds or marks. We endorse the thing represented. That's true.
Maybe the problem is that it makes no sense to say "I believe snow." "I believe car." The thing represented is a state of things. A state is not a physical object. We understand states by comparing and contrasting with other states. Maybe a state is like a pattern, I don't know.
You could use the word that way. There's another thing that's call a "proposition" though. It doesn't have to be stated, ever.
Sure. All sorts of definitions for "proposition". I do not know, nor understand them all. Banno's use was the one under consideration, as it pertains to belief and statements thereof.
Uh huh. Banno's may or may not be an Austin-Davidson mash-up. He mentioned Davidson, but Davidson dealt with sentences, not statements, so, who knows.
I believed the pub was at the end of the street.
I wanted a beer
So I walked to the end of the street.
Davidson argued that such explanations are causal. I've some sympathy for that view.
I think that's quite sensible. But...
Quoting Banno
It's not an account of what a belief is! Linking them to perceptual expectations would be.
Statements are in the province of logic; we don't usually subject commands and questions to propositional calculus; we don't consider things such as "what time is it? if and only iff put the cat out!" well-formed.
Davidson does talk as if sentences can be the subject of propositional calculus. He thinks any sentence can be reduced to a string of propositions that basically report the speech act involved. Grossly oversimplifying, he might render "Put the cat out" as "Banno commanded you to put the cat out".
A statement has at least one subject and one predicate. They can have more.
A true statement sets out a state of affairs. A state of affairs is a fact.
That simple explanation is correct, but will cause all sorts of bother as folk try to say that facts are things in the world while statements are just words - as if words were not also things in the world. T-sentences set this out as clearly as possible:
The left hand side is about words, the right hand side is about the world, and truth is what brings them together. The stuff on the right hand side is in unmediated contact with the world; that is, it just says how things are. And it does this simply because that is what words do.
Propositions are a more abstract notion, supposedly they are what "Snow is white" and "Schnee ist weiß" and "Tha sneachda geal" have in common. I'm not convinced, so I tend to avoid that use.
Wait, what? Why does perception need to be part of belief? I believe life exists somewhere outside Earth, but I can't perceive it. I have all sorts of beliefs like that which are not directly tied to any perception on my part, and not always tied to perception on anyone's part, such as life beyond Earth.
I also believe there's a possible world where the present Kind of France is bald, which cannot be perceived.
Perceptual expectations can be put into sentence form: "He expected to see a nose there". You can even put them into the form of beliefs: he believed a nose would be there.
Yes, they happen too fast for this to actually occur, but that is beside the point. Consider:
He believed the ball would hit him in the face if he did not duck.
He did not want to be hit in the face
He ducked.
This works as an explanation as to why he ducked, despite the cogitation taking place post hoc. Indeed, arguably most such explanations are post hoc. Add that to and I don't see that what you call Perceptual expectations work as a counterexample to beliefs ranging over statements.
What does his belief consist in? Would he have believed the ball would hit his face if he did not assess its trajectory and formed a perceptual expectation that it would hit him? I doubt it. That belief is about the ball's trajectory, not about a post hoc rendering of all those assessments into the statement "He believed the ball would hit him in the face if he did not duck". Who cares if it can later be expressed in a statement?
I believed the pub was at the end of the street.
I wanted a beer
So I walked to the end of the street.
Bolding the propositional content of the belief, it is this mooted state of affairs that allows the explanation to work. If it were not a statement, not about how things are, it could not follow that walking to the end of the street was a way of attempting to satisfy the desire for a beer.
It's their propositional content that makes beliefs useful in providing explanations for what we do. IF you deny them, you deny the whole structure of intentional explanation.
Do you really want to do that, @fdrake?
What does a belief consist in? It consists in treating some statement as true.
The paraphernalia of perceptual expectations or correlations does nothing more than add superfluous superstructure.
What I want you to do is...
Quoting Banno
Provide an argument for this claim. Why can beliefs only apply to statements? I agree with you that beliefs can apply to statements, I also think that they can apply to concrete events.
This at least has to be part of what a belief consists in, since we all believe things that we do not, and sometimes, cannot act on.
...and concrete events can be stated; therefore any belief that ranges over a concrete event also ranges over a statement.
T-sentences again, concrete even on one side, true statement on the other.
But they're not always, and never are for other animals (assuming we're the only language users). This way of broadening the definition of beliefs allows for the cat to believe that some better stuff is in the red container thing instead of something worth drinking.
....but there is an implicit desire to find some "concrete" thing that is the equivalent of a belief; to render belief in physical terms, perhaps, somehow to reduce beliefs to something else.
So Fdrake and co will keep insisting that there is something more to belief.
But I think they have a point about perceptual expectations.
I can describe my cat's actions in terms of its beliefs; so that's wrong.
Now we will go off on some bullshit about cats not being able to form sentences and hence their beliefs cannot range over statements and so on. As if the way you attribute belief to a cat is different to the way you attribute a belief to Fdrake.
We're heading towards anomalous monism. Which I think is probably the best explanation at hand.
Metaphysical beliefs? Come on now! I've been in threads where Platonism was considered meaningless because it had no empirical content to ground the claim that universals exist. Stuff like that, possible worlds, religious beliefs, beliefs about chairs on the other side of the universe, etc.
Quoting Banno
I don't know what that means? You mean stuff that we call physical? World-stuff? Nature?
I have an expectation that we will defeat Brexit today.
I'm not trying to say that every belief is directly associated with something perceptible; I don't think there's anything I could perceive that would make me revise my belief that 1+1=2. What I'm trying to get at is part of belief comes from perceptual expectation. One way of putting that might be; perceptual expectations and beliefs mutually evince and constrain each other. I might not believe that my cup is beside my laptop had I not seen it there, if I had not seen my cup beside my laptop I might not believe it was there.
Let's take your belief that life exists somewhere outside Earth. Would you believe that life existed somewhere outside Earth if you did not expect to perceive it given an appropriate circumstance?
Would the person in Banno's example be able to state "I believed that the ball would hit me" if they did not have a perceptual expectation about the ball's trajectory? And what more is there to the belief than a statement of the perceptual expectations they held?
Quoting Banno
You agree that concrete events are not statements - word is not thing -, and that someone who expected the ball to hit them could later state that "I believed that the ball would hit me", why does that imply that their belief that the ball would hit them at the time is directed towards a statement which was only constructed after the fact?
Part of the logic of belief is that they are intentional; they are a directed stance taken toward something. What they are directed towards is an important thing to address in an account of them. Why would humans have an intentional ability which had the sole purpose of rendering their beliefs post hoc and claiming that one way of interpreting T-sentences made that secretly about the world?
Me, either. It's a dreadful term, designed to turn people off before they have any idea what it is.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anomalous-monism/
Glancing over the SEP article, I've never heard that term before. But I tend to agree with what I see there.
But there's more...
With that attitude.
Do you think we'll ever be able to reconstruct a book from the ashes of a fire, or unscramble an omelette? Some things are practically intractable.
This isn't necessarily one of them. Just saying.
'Thoughts must be physical'. There's the problem. Reasoning from premisses to conclusions or making valid inferences - how can these be physical? You can design any kind of system to encode rational inferences and meaningful sentences, but the substance of them is only ever the relationship between ideas - 'because', 'therefore', 'the same as', 'different from'. The same sentence can be written in different languages, encoded in different systems, represented in different media - but the meaning remains invariant. So the physical representation changes, while the meaning is invariant. So how could the idea it carries be physical? Furthermore you need to be able to engage in rational inference to even decide what is 'physical'. So, again, how could rational thought be physical? It's an absurd proposition.
I believe it is raining because it is raining. The thing in the world causes the thought.
If I decide to move my arm up, the damn thing goes up. The thought causes the thing in the world.
Any form of dualism faces the issue of explaining how these simple things can happen. SOmehow, thoughts are causally linked to the world.
Indeed, not just dualism but anything apart from monism.
So, if you dislike the word physical, drop it. but I can't see how one could escape monism. 'Thoughts must be physical' is an expression of the fact that thought is a part of the world.
I'm not sure the question as to what matter is is really coherent. We may find other particles in the future, but how would we ever know if we had arrived at an "ultimate constituent" or if the idea of ultimate constituency is a valid one?
Quoting Olivier5
The thing is their are bodies without minds, albeit vegetative or dead; but we know of no minds without bodies, so what supervenes on what seems fairly clear in the light of that.
Or "pluralism"? There are lots of different kinds of things in the world. Not just two, not just one.
Sure, but they are different kinds of physical things, no?
It depends on whether you count different ways of being as amounting to different forms or different constitutions. If the latter, then the claim would have to be that there are no fundamental constituents of the different forms, or that there are a plurality of fundamental constituents that are not all of the same basic nature; i.e. not all physical, or even not all in the categories of physical and mental.
Modern physics tells us that the basic nature of everything is energy and that energy is equivalent to matter. We do have the four fundamental forces: the electromagnetic, the strong and weak nuclear forces and gravity. (Maybe add to that Dark Matter and Dark Energy) They are all counted as physical forces, though, insofar as we can detect and measure their effects.
For Aristotle, what matter is depends on what you're specifically investigating. An example he uses is of a house - it can be analyzed into form and matter (or material) where, for a particular house, the matter might be bricks. A brick, in turn, can also be analyzed into form and matter, where its matter is clay. And so on, pursuing this hierarchy down until you get to the fundamental elements. While Aristotle's theory of elements was wrong [*], he nonetheless provided a useful schema for investigating the nature of things to whatever level required.
Aristotle applied this same hierarchical schema to living things, both in terms of genus and species, and also in terms of composition. So for humans (and living things generally) the body is the material. And the body, in turn, can be hierarchically analyzed into form/matter components (say, organs, cells, molecules, elements).
In this way, dualism doesn't arise. Everything observable, including living things such as human beings, is a candidate for natural investigation.
--
[*] But still an empirically-grounded theory (and thus scientific in the usual sense):
Quoting Aristotle’s Physics: a Physicist’s Look - Carlo Rovelli, 2014
Agreed, though I would say that it is grounded in human experience, rather than human subjectivity, which I think captures the empirical nature of the enterprise.
Exactly.
The point about designating something physical is that it is able to be described by (or reduced to) the laws of physics. And 'physicalism', which is the basic subject of this debate, is the declaration that physical laws are the only laws in nature. Humans might have civil laws, but the laws that rule physics, rule reality, and everything we know and see boils down to these laws, because everything is ultimately material in nature. That is the assumption behind the statement that 'thoughts must be physical'. It is also why Daniel Dennett is obliged to deny that 'qualia', and indeed, the mind or consciousness as we understand it are real. They must be derivative of physical processes, the output of molecular interactions. That's what physicalism is, and it has nothing to do with liking or disliking the word.
I argue that the laws of logic and reason - such as the 'law of identity' and the 'law of excluded middle' and the other elements of logic - do not resolve to physical laws, and cannot be explained in terms of physical laws or in terms of supervenience on physical laws. It is an almost universal belief that biological evolution provides the explanatory principle - that the sophisticated human brain is capable of grasping such laws, and that, therefore, they are in a sense the product of biological evolution, and so, grounded in a physical process, as evolution is presumed to be a natural, and therefore, almost by definition, physical process.
But I argue that the 'furniture of reason', such as the elementary laws of thought, were discovered by h. sapiens, and are not 'the product of' the hominid brain. They are elements of reality - not physical reality, but the structure of logic and reason, which is assumed by rational thought, abstraction and reason. And that when h. sapiens evolved to the point of being an language-using, meaning-seeking, rational-thinking creature, then she evolved to a point beyond what either the 'laws of physics', or even biological evolution, could have predicted. Reached 'escape velocity', to coin a space-age metaphor.
Now that is very old-fashioned view, some would even say archaic. But that's what I am arguing.
Yes, they are great examples and I agree it looks like much the same debate. The following passage encapsulates what I see as the whole issue with both the Cyrenaics' and the atomists' positions.
Quoting Cyrenaics - i. The Relativity of Perception - IEP
The obvious response (to me) is that why should they think that there would be a criterion outside of experience? That framing seems to be shared by both the Cyrenaics and the atomists. If, instead, the criterion is in experience, then who or what is the obvious candidate here? The ill person? The person with jaundice? The pressing eye person?
How about the healthy person under normal conditions?
But that would just be one mode of several forming the skeptical argument. We could appeal to the healthy person, but then what about other animals? What about super tasters in humans? What grounds any one sensation as the objective true way the world is?
That's why science ended up going the route of abstracting from the subjective world of sensation to the objective one of mathematical properties, structures and functions, or Locke's primary qualities. We have reason to think those don't vary based on the perceiver.
So while I could say I'm sweetened by the honey as a normal healthy human, I cannot say I'm horsed (a saying used to counter ancient skepticism). Because the form and biology of a horse does not depend on my human senses the way color or taste does.
Maybe we can leave this at anomalous monism instead of going another couple rounds over qualia and subjectivity. Either way, there's a non-reducible psychological component.
I'm surprised by this response. Do you also agree that we have inner private experiences?
Quoting Banno
"There is a way of talking about qualia that is...all quite adequately dealt with without reference to qualia"? (Is this the first rule of qualia club?) Seriously though, how do we talk about qualia without reference to qualia?
I would say subjective experience. It helps show that objectivity stems from subjectivity, rather than be the opposite of it.
Thanks for Rovelli’s quote by the way, Aristotle often gets unfairly attacked by positivists.
IMO, the question is moot (rather than incoherent) and thus ontology is moot. The shapes that matter takes is what is accessible and important to us, not what it is ‘in itself’.
Quoting Janus
I’m not sure a dead body is ‘really’ a body. It’s more a pile of rot. As for minds without bodies, I agree they don’t exist, although that is of course unproven, it seems quite likely to be true. But minds supervene bodies all the time, e.g. in committing suicide.
Cool. Do you think this is apriori?
Could it reflect how we're bound to think about the world, but not how the world really is?
How could we ever know that? It is the way the world is for us.
Anthropomorphically, sure.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quite. But why can't it be fictional?
Very old-fashioned view indeed. Which just goes to show they got the basics put down right early on. No matter what the human learns about, the internal system by which a human learns, hasn’t changed at all.
:up:
Where, in the article, does he argue for this?
Or is this a Dennett boogeyman?
If the argument is "Dennett is a physicalist, so he has to argue against qualia; physicalism is wrong; hence we need pay no attention to the arguments against qualia" then it's not worth considering. Same goes for the implied argument that logic is not physical, therefore qualia are not physical.
That surprises me. It's what I have maintained since the start fo the thread:
Quoting Banno
But more than that, I've argued that they are useless:
Quoting Banno
But I thought you were advocating what Dennett says in the article. Doesn’t he deny that qualia are ineffable?
Do you believe that we have inner private experiences?
:100:
Stove's Gem. We can't see the world as it really is because we have eyes.
No, I was aware of being touched on the shoulder. That was my experience.
It's not that a person touched me on the shoulder (an external occurrence) and then I felt it (a subsequent internal occurrence). It's that I felt a person touch me on the shoulder. That was my experience - a relation between myself and the world. If I hadn't felt it, then my experience would have been different - an alternative experience that didn't include an awareness of being touched on the shoulder (although I nonetheless was).
This is an example of how we're using the word "experience" differently. Dichotomizing it into internal and external occurrences creates ghosts, or shadows on the cave wall.
Quoting Luke
Suppose I stub my toe. I feel pain in my toe. And my toe is in the world. Or, in another case, I might feel a generalized pain. But I am also in the world. So the Cartesian theater doesn't arise.
Quoting Luke
The distinction between a person and the world is one of perception and conceptualization, not one of ontological separation. That is, a person is embedded in the world that they are perceiving. A person is materially constituted by their body, but we conceptualize a person differently from their body (i.e., as having a higher level of structure and organization).
Consider an analogy between a statue and the stone that materially constitutes it. The conceptual difference between the statue and the stone is the form of the stone (i.e., the structure and organization that makes the stone a statue).
Indeed that can and does happen. But we are still capable of seeing things as they are, no?
Do you know of any philosophers who espouse(d) OntPlu?
I'm interested to know where that forms/constitutions terminology comes from.
"Fundamental" is a concept that vaguely troubles me in this context. Of course it's a sensible way to look at things from a practical point of view, but does it properly reflect reality "in itself"? Is there a non-arbitrary, objective distinction between what is fundamental and what is derived? We're only seeing things from our own situation (in time and space).
I'm not dismissing science, I'm pro-science, but these are still only theories, they could be overturned or transcended, our knowledge is far from complete. Maybe there's Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and what else is around that we don't and very likely can't understand? What about adding Space and Time or Spacetime to your list? And particles: where do they feature? Biology? Agency?
Thanks again for prompting these reflections. As you see I am really only starting to explore the topic. And helping us get to 100 pages so we can stop talking about qualia altogether.
Do you know of any philosophers who deny ontological pluralism? No abstracts, no numbers?
In case there's any doubt, I was straightforwardly asking Janus if he or she knew of a school of Ontological Pluralists.
As for your question, surely philosophers have argued over whether abstracts and/or numbers exist? Not that I can name them.
Is a colourblind person capable of seeing things as they are?
If only.
Quoting Banno
More specifically, the left hand side raises the question whether the quoted sentence has succeeded in pointing the word "white" at snow. So it's about both.
Quoting Banno
More specifically, the right hand side raises the question whether snow is such as to be pointed at by the word "white" (in English, else by "weiß" etc.). So, both again.
Quoting Banno
No longer makes sense.
Quoting Banno
Is as mystical as the 'mediated' version.
Quoting Banno
How they are organised by language.
Quoting Banno
Hand waving.
That depends on what one's standard is for seeing things as they are.
Quoting Focal point (game theory)
Best you can hope for is seeing things as people agree they are. I think it makes sense to call this “the way things are” when virtually everyone agrees on them (2+2=4) but even then it doesn’t exceed the point of being an agreement. I don’t think this is controversial.
I'm not sure what to do with this.
If qualia are ineffable, then we can't talk about them.
If not, then they are just everyday tastes and smells and sights; talk of qualia would add nothing tot he conversation...
Quoting Wayfarer
Some folk just gotta 'f the ineffable.
Since we can't, ex hypothesi, see the world as it is, then at the very least we cannot know that what we do see is not the world as it really is.
So there's no way for this approach from @Wayfarer to get past the hot air stage.
Really? So if we all agree on something, that makes it true? Or real? All we need to do to get the plane to fly is to agree that it will fly?
You don't really think that.
See William James, 'A Pluralistic Universe'
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11984
Quoting Daemon
Well, the 'idea of the forms' is central to Platonism. (The wiki entry is useful in that it has an index at the end of all the dialogues in which the matter is discussed but I'd treat the remainder with a large grain of salt.) The theory, if it can be called a theory, was modified by Aristotle, but in one way or another remained central to philosophy up until the advent of modernity and/or the ascent of nominalism, which denies the reality of universals.
Quoting Andrew M
That is the explicit mission of science, but since Galileo, there's something that's been left out. In the attempt to exclude subjectivity, the subject itself becomes excluded; science as now practiced has tended to put exclusive emphasis on the quantitative, what can be specificed mathematically, excluding anything qualitative - hence this debate!
You can see how science itself grew out of the prior conceptions of the Christian intellectual tradition. One of the books I have open is Peter Harrison's 'Fall of Man and Foundations of Science', which argues that 'scientific methods were originally devised as techniques for ameliorating the cognitive damage wrought by human sin'. But later, of course, man him/herself became excluded from the picture, or treated only as a phenomenon through the lens of the biological sciences. The mind is relegated to the role of epiphenomenon which emerges more or less by chance.
No, the other way around. When we call something “true” or “real” all we’re saying is that we agree on it. Nothing more. We’re not accessing some “hotline to truth”. As we could always be mistaken.
That's some Protagorean level of sophistry.
Is "We" just you and I? Or a simple majority? Or can we use Hare-Clark?
Do you agree with Dennett or not?
Quoting Banno
Isn't this to be expected if qualia are ineffable? - Qualists claim that qualia are ineffable and your complaint is that this "adds nothing to the conversation"? To ask for a third time: since you agree that qualia are ineffable, do you also agree that qualia are private? And while I'm here, I may as well ask: do you also agree that qualia are instrinsic and immediately apprehensible in consciousness?
The point here isn't whether or not qualia "add anything to the conversation", but whether or not they exist. As Dennett states:
And further (my emphasis):
Of the four properties that Dennett cites, I consider privacy as the main one, which encompasses the other three. Dennett seems to acknowledge that we have inner private experiences, not only in the above quote, but also in the following sense:
Empirically discoverable by all the usual objective testing procedures except for the main one: another person's experience cannot be directly detected by the senses. In other words, you can't directly see another person's experience (or their "personal and idosyncratic capacity to respond" or their "discrimination profiles"). In short:
Quoting SEP article on Other Minds
And you seem to agree, via your earlier approval of my exegesis of Wittgenstein, that language cannot access or refer to anybody's personal and idiosyncratic experience - which is why such experience is ineffable. Quite obviously, having this personal and idiosyncratic experience is also what makes it intrinsic and immediate to (or perhaps even constitutive of) consciousness. Hence, it is this sort of privacy which encompasses and accounts for qualia's ineffability, intrinsic nature and immediacy to consciousness. The same personal and idiosyncratic privacy that Dennett admits is, I would think, the same kind of privacy that most Qualists are advocating.
No; My complaint is that hence they cannot add anything to the conversation.
Quoting Luke
Qualia exist if they make a difference. They make no difference. Hence they do not exist.
Something exists only if it can make a difference to a conversation? Or what do you mean by "make a difference"?
Wittgenstein seems to acknowledge a distinction between what exists and what can be said.
That seems an odd interpretation of that quote. But then, folk often miss the next paragraph, the remainder of §304, in which the apparent paradox is resolved.
Yet these inner mental processes are just what Wittgenstein claims do not give our words their meanings, as per the private language argument.
Again: it would be absurd to deny that we experience tastes and sights and feelings. But they are not private - we can talk about them. What is absurd is positing another level of experience, qualia, which are private and hence ineffable, and then talking about them by using them to explain consciousness. The illusion is the notion that because folk talk about qualia, there must be something there...
Stove on Kant:
That’s about as funny a joke one can make about Kant. The irony is that Stove remembered Kant’s answer to his own noumena-phenomena question so well that he obsessed about it a great deal and called it the Gem, without ever (apparently) recognizing where that idea originally came from (ie Kant).
And that is an excellent philosophical joke for the (cartesian) logical impossibility of doubting the doubter...
Depends on the context.
Beliefs can be true, but they also might be false.
Also at this point I think it should be renamed to: "General thread"
That question is the same as "what should you believe?"
Would you expect there to be one answer to that question? As if the reason you believe the cat is on the mat could be the same as the reason you believe the square root of nine is three?
How so? Unless you define "true" as "you should believe this".
Mostly.
Qualia is the reason functionalism is wrong. So, yes, the concept has use.
So Quoting khaled
Quoting Banno
Wdym mostly?
Quoting khaled
should be...
When we believe something all we’re saying is that we agree on it.
Well, with an argument like that, who could disagree.
Oh that's what you mean. Ok.
Quoting Banno
That's all I was saying. But that sort of makes stove's gem not such a bad argument does it? I can't tell if you think it's bad or if you just keep mentioning it here and there.
Plus it's common knowledge that we're conscious of tastes, sights, sounds, etc. That consciousness is qualia.
Since it's common knowledge, you have the burden if proof. There's no qualia? Prove it.
It's a dreadful argument. But it is common in neophyte philosophers. The idea is that we only know stuff using our mind, so we cannot know stuff for real.
What do you think of it?
Where? I can't find it.
Sounds exactly like:
Quoting Banno
The point is we don't have any sort of "hotline to truth".
Really? Not to me.
Quoting khaled
Depends on the truth you are looking at. Yeah, despite the pretence, philosophy will not give you any shortcuts. Indeed, it shows how hard the issue actually is.
Well I don't know what "know stuff without our mind" even means (sounds like "see things without eyes") but the closest thing I can approximate it to is: You won't get to a point where you know anything for sure, without any unexplained beliefs. Sounds pretty reasonable.
Well... not too sure about the "unexplained belief" - unjustified, perhaps? But there's lots we know for sure. It's just that philosophy tends to blind us to them.
Yea.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Banno
I've still not seen a way to get that last bit "when it's true". I thought we just agreed you don't. It's easy to tell when a belief is false, but for it to be true would imply that it is impossible that we are mistaken. Can't see how you would prove that.
Whatever we're doing here should be another thread, not that I'm entirely sure where it's going.
Looks suitably relevant.
Yeah, no. We're conscious of seeing trees. That is qualia.
Quoting Banno
What I want to say is that we can always be mistaken about what we see. That to me sounds exactly like "You don't see things as they are". If you mean something different by "You don't see things as they are" then what is it exactly?
Quoting Banno
Not really a difficult achievement at this point :lol:
Quoting Banno
I'd say Qualia is part of what happens when we look at rocks and stuff. But is not a description of what the brain is doing. It's a phenomena, not something to be seen.
Quoting frank
Oh. Thanks!
You jumped form "We might be mistaken..." to "We don't..."; from we might not to we never do.
We get it right sometimes, too.
No that's exactly what I mean. We never get it right. We only get it not-wrong until we get it wrong (or die first). "Getting it right" means there is no room for error. We don't reach no room for error I don't think.
Well, you are right that this thread is in English.
So that's not right.
êtes-vous sûr de cela?
And so are you, since you clearly replied to my English sentences.
But as I said, It's just that philosophy tends to blind us sometimes.
So the thread is not in English. It was in English until it wasn't. So your original statement is wrong. My point is that there is always room for error. Outside of things like "There can be no married bachelor" which are true by definition but also completely pointless to say. If it's not true by definition, you can be wrong about it. Heck even then you still have things like calculations mistakes which you can't be sure you're not making.
But that's not right. You know the thread is in English. It's true, justified and that you believe it is evident in your continuing replies to my English sentences.
There are other things, too. Like the bishop always staying on the same colour, or seawater being salty, or elephants being mammals. Lots and lots of things are true; some of those are even certain.
It isn't.
Quoting khaled
Quoting Banno
First off, me replying in English doesn't show anything about the thread language. Besides that, I believe it is in English apart from that one line alright. I'm saying there is room for error. Or more precisely that claiming there is no room for error is only disadvantageous, and doesn't bring about any benefits. Who cares about whether or not the thread is actually English or not, all we ever deal in is beliefs.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Banno
Until someone breaks the rules.
Quoting Banno
Unless you have rona and can't taste.
Quoting Banno
True by definition. Or until we change what "mammal" means.
Quoting Banno
I would say lots and lots of things are highly agreed upon. Don't see the need to make the jump to "undoubtable". Why do you want to? What is the benefit of claiming there are things we cannot be wrong about? Sounds like a completely useless thing to try to defend.
Anwyays we beat Brexit you're welcome.
Nuh. At a certain point the conversation gets too ridiculous. And it's bed time. I'm sure of it.
We probably need to do some real Quining on this issue.
Don't overlook the end of §308:
Quoting Banno
Yes, it would. But I don't think it's very clear from the paper (and, perhaps more so, from his defenders here) what Dennett intends to deny: whether it's conscious experiences themselves, the four properties of conscious experiences that he cites, qualia as an explanation of consciousness, qualia as a cause of consciousness, our knowledge of the causes of qualia, or something else.
Quoting Banno
We do not and cannot talk about the private aspect of conscious experiences. That, again, is the upshot of the private language argument. However, this doesn't imply that there is no private aspect of conscious experiences (at least, Wittgenstein keeps repeating that he does not want to deny any "inner" or mental processes).
Quoting Banno
Who said anything about "another level of experience"? Dennett, at least, speaks of qualia as properties of conscious experience.
Quoting Banno
Yes...
Quoting Banno
What explanation of consciousness?
Quoting Banno
Both Wittgenstein and Dennett acknowledge that there is a private aspect of conscious experience.
You weren't aware of the experience?
Quoting Andrew M
I never claimed anything of the sort.
Quoting Andrew M
It's implied by your own example. You get touched on your shoulder (externally), and you might feel it or not (internally). You cannot dissolve the distinction between internal and external without dissolving the distinction between self and world.
Quoting Andrew M
You, as a person and as a body, are in the world. But we need to distinguish you as a person (and/or you as a body) from the world. Your toe is in the world, but your toe is a part of you and you are the one feeling pain. It's not the world's toe or feeling of pain, it's yours.
Quoting Andrew M
Do you feel the pain or does the world?
Quoting Andrew M
I disagree. I don't think there's a distinction to be had, with only one proviso: that the person/body is living.
Hi Andrew M,
I'm seeking to apply the Principle of Charity [In philosophy and rhetoric, the principle of charity or charitable interpretation requires interpreting a speaker's statements in the most rational way possible and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation.]
But your response here seems like irremediable bollocks. Were you serious? Are you really saying that how things are is determined by majority vote?
So let's Quine this. The only way to avoid the Quine bombs is to conclude that Banno's sentences perform a function his interaction with us. We want to dispense with folk psychology that says "bishop" refers to a specific object, or that the whole sentence couldn't be replaced with some other with no change seen in our collective behavior.
Anybody need the actual bombs or can we just nod to Dennett's article for the basic idea?
Where's the explicit account of how meaning first emerges onto the world stage in it's most basic identifiable form such that it continues to grow and/or evolve over a sufficient enough time period so as to provide enough groundwork, a semantically rich enough basis, for us to be able to begin naming and describing all of the different aspects of own personal experiences as well as getting the simple language less ones right?
It's certainly not found in semiotics, qualia, belief as propositional attitudes, or meaning as use, although all of them are helpful regarding certain complexity levels throughout the ongoing process, from conception through times like these.
Some correlations were and continue being drawn between directly perceptible aspects of language use, and had to have been, in order for language creation and subsequent use.
If our accounting practices regarding how things become meaningful to us cannot be used to bridge the gap between language less conscious experience and conscious experience informed by language, then we cannot possibly hope to offer an adequate account of belief, whereas what counts as being "adequate" would require building an explanatory bridge between non linguistic language less belief, beliefs formed from simple naming and descriptive practices, and the uber complex metacognitive varieties of belief products like logical notation, predicate calculus, general historical accounts, and metaphilosophy.
When applied to cats, belief as propositional attitude bears a striking resemblance to the little man that wasn't there.
All belief is meaningful to the creature forming/having the belief.
I would like to know what you meant Banno.
Well, we don't see the empty space between or inside atoms, do we? Nor do we see the electromagnetic field holding the molecules together. Nor do we see any the vast majority of the EM spectrum interacting or passing through objects.
So no, we don't see the world as it is. We see the world as we evolved to see it. Even Dennett in some of his later talks agrees with this. He came to favor the computer desktop analogy for how we experience the world. Computer GUIs are metaphors for ease of use in interacting with computers, but files and folders aren't actually icons you click or touch.
Start here.
Glad to see you have that. I don't deny it, either.
Quoting Luke
That's somewhat true, a result of the variability of the definitions used by the advocates of qualia. Hence:
and:
The job of setting out what qualia are is were it should be: with the advocates of qualia. The purpose of the article is to set out the considerable difficulties involved.
So meaning has become a thing; How sad.
If you accept [I]Word and Object[/I] doesn't your realism get weaker? You still have plenty of true statements being uttered, but without the folk realism most people operate by.
Do you want us to conclude that, hence, we cannot not talk about the world as it is? Because plainly, that does not follow.
Creative is replacing vitalism with meaning...?
Why?
(Why do I have to ask this? Why don't folk present arguments here, instead of innuendo?)
True statements are being uttered, but this is stripped of folk psychology surrounding realism.
It's Quine.
Its leaves are more rounded than most Correa leaves, a grey-green that compliments the almost sepia stems. It has white open four petalled flowers, unlike other Coreas these do not resemble the cylindrical form of Fuchsia flowers, but are open. Its procumbent habit works perfectly as a screen, and I think it a rather large specimen from my own observations. It is one of the few things I prune, keeping it clear of the path on two sides and shaping it around a statue on the third. It is often home to the nests of small birds.
But some idiot philosopher will say that we cannot know about the bush, only about how it seems to us; as if that meant something.
Philosophy as dentistry.
Point counterpoint.
Quoting Banno
You responded that it would have to be both. So I sought clarification:
Quoting Daemon
But you said that was very badly expressed. I'd just like to know what I got wrong.
Beliefs are not mental furniture. The expression "a thing in your own mind" is fraught.
Sure, if we ignore the last several centuries of scientific discovery, and restrict ourselves to talk of cats, apples and the five elements ...
If it were so plain, we wouldn't be having this debate ...
Quoting Banno
Covid is up next. Think we can make it there ...?
Where would you put the quale? I doubt you think brains work any better here.
Working that out might take a bit.
:rofl:
You probably believe that the grunge under your left big toe's nail contains microorganisms. But I'd bet you never thought of it up until then. SO in what sense could it have been a thing in your mind?
(edit: ...which seems or be what is saying. )
If it wasn't in your mind/brain, you wouldn't be behaving.
For Quine, our theories populate the world with objects. Isn't that correct? I'm asking.
Why? You can't answer a simple question?
You want me to expound on the ontology of belief. I think that a muddled notion. The best you can say about belief is what I have said: Belief is the attitude that such-and-such a statement is true. Another way of putting the same thing: Belief is holding that such-and-such is the case.
But instead let's talk about my dog. I've had him since he was a puppy and he's 8 now, and I have spent a lot of time over those 8 years thinking about his mind, and what he can know, and believe.
So, can he have the attitude that such-and-such a statement is true, despite being unable to formulate or understand statements? When he sees me go into the other room, does he believe I'm in the other room?
That's the sort of thing we might say. Usually we would say something like "He thought you were in the other room".
Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia
What's that about, then?
The Friends of Qualia didn't seem to want to engage with that, either.
I never said only. I pointed out the difference between being sweetened and being horsed. One makes sense, and the other doesn't. Qualia is ours, but the forms belong to the world.
...which made no sense to me. Why bother with such odd locutions - a sure sign of things going astray.
I agree that structural invariance makes sense, while absent, fading and dancing qualia do not. Chalmers is a functionalist plus qualia.
Because you're bing misled by ordinary language and the way English phrases sensations as if they were objective.
The forms need not be platonic. They can just be patterns in the physical. I don't think Chalmers is a platoniist. I believe he has a paper defending nominalism.
I'll get on with reading the entire paper and get back with a response or two. I'm in the middle of several things, which is causing my qualia to dance about.
Yes. But anyway it's not just patterns of behaviour?
Great, then I only need you to concede on the two remaining properties.
Quoting Banno
The title suggests that the purpose of the article is to "deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant." Dennett appears to begin by saying that he is attempting to resolutely deny the four "special properties" of qualia, and he ends by saying "there simply are no qualia at all."
On closer inspection, however, Dennett does not begin by denying any properties of qualia. Rather, Dennett's four special properties are qualia:
Note that he says qualia are special properties, not that they have special properties.
For Dennett, qualia are not assumed to have the special properties of being private, ineffable, intrinsic and immediate. Instead the special properties of being private, ineffable, intrinsic and immediate are qualia.
However, Wikipedia provides a very different definition of qualia:
This is at odds with Dennett's characterisation of qualia, which is not about the qualitative character of instances of conscious experience, but is instead about some other properties of instances of conscious experience. What Dennett calls qualia are not the taste of wine or the perceived sensation of pain, but are instead the four "special properties" of being private, ineffable, intrinsic, and immediate to consciousness.
To deny Wikipedia's definition of qualia would be to deny the "qualitative characters of sensation". To deny Dennett's definition of qualia would be to deny that a sensation has Dennett's four special properties. Evidently, it is easy to mistake Dennett as trying to deny the qualitative characters of sensation on the basis that sensations do not have his four special properties, rather than merely denying that sensations have his four special properties. Dennett has introduced this confusion through his misuse of the term 'qualia'.
I found it quite difficult to read beyond Chalmers' description of functional organisation and his announcement that he would defend it.
It's absurdly ignorant of what we know about how our bodies work, and how differently computers and robots work.
Good post. Something that has never been settled in this thread is whether the qualitative characters of sensation inevitably lead to the one or more of the properties Dennett is eager to quine, and whether what's left over from quining is anything more than a functional account.
If there is something more, then the hard problem remains hard, and if there is not, then there is no reason to talk of conscious sensations. What doesn't work is to talk of colors and pains, but pretend this is not a challenge for physicalism.
No, but it can be made to sound insane. One should note that the entire article is written from the third person. We only ever hear the reports of the astronauts, without the first person ever being portrayed. And yet we all have first person experiences, so we know what that's like.
[quote=The Mark of Zombie]The first sort is conscious things – things like you and me, cats and dogs, and chimpanzees and tigers. These things, the conscious things, have experiences: they experience the redness of red, the paininess of pain, the yumminess of yum, and so on. Philosophers call these experiences qualia. Qualia, by definition, are the sole preserve of conscious things.[/quote]
Except saying the "redness of red" can be misleading. It's really just pointing out that red, pain and yuminess are the stuff of conscious experiences. It's something more than a detector discriminating color or Siri telling me it's cold outside.
There is Ned Block's The Harder Problem of Consciousness using Commander Data from Star Trek as a superficial functional isomorph as discussed in this podcast:
https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2019/07/01/ep219-block-papineau/
Block's argument is that we can't tell whether consciousness is functionally or biologically based, so we couldn't tell whether an android would be conscious.
I was actually referring to ideas, not objectivity (in the brackets above).
Anyway, I appreciate that you're taking an embedded approach rather than viewing objectivity and subjectivity as opposing duals. I can agree with that.
If we keep talking about things as they are, definitely. Very quickly too.
Science can include the qualitative. Not in the mind as qualia, but in the world as the qualitative characteristics of the things we encounter.
Aristotle discusses this. Along with substances (individuals), quantities, relations, positions and actions, there are also qualities.
Quoting Aristotle's Categories
What Aristotle does or doesn't discuss, is not the point - it was precisely much of Aristotelian science that was demolished by Galileo, was it not? And recall, furthemore, that linked with that, although not established solely by Galileo, was the distinction of 'primary and secondary qualities', which those attributes Arisotle names being designated as 'secondary'.
Quoting creativesoul
Do you agree?
No, I'm not saying that at all. Let's look at that passage again:
Quoting Focal point (game theory)
It's not the agreement that is the standard. It is the focal point - the aspect of the environment that has some kind of prominence.
See also the picture of the coordination game example. Is there a square that stands out to you? That it stands out is not a function of your agreement with others that it does, but of the way you perceive things in the world.
If it so happens that other people perceive things in the same way as you, then the distinction between that square and the other three squares will result in language that the community will use. Per this example, the words "red" and "blue".
Now suppose you were color blind (often this is between red and green, but I'll stick to the example). In that case, the red square won't stand out. So if everyone were color-blind, there would be no red-blue distinction. Language would instead arise around other (for them) prominent features of the environment. But in a world where most people are not color-blind, the color-blind person has to adapt to the color-normal use (say, learning how to navigate traffic lights by noting the light intensity at a bulb position). With regard to this very specific distinction (and the color-normal standard), they would not be seeing things as they are. But if language instead emerged according to the distinctions that they would naturally make, then they would be seeing things as they are.
This idea can be extended to animals that perceive colors differently. Are they seeing the world as it is? Yes, in relation to their perceptual capabilities. But not necessarily in relation to ours as human beings.
"Meaning" is a noun. All nouns are persons, places, or things. That's how English works. Your response is cowardly.
What about in relation to as things are, or at the very least, as modern science describes those things?
Is Banno's coffee bitter and sweet as it is? Will defeating Covid be inherently sweet?
I do agree on one thing regarding p-zombies. A world of zombies would not include talk of colors, tastes and pains. And thus, there would be no qualia or hard problem debate. The philosophical zombies could not originate such notions.
I suspect some of you would rather live in that world.
Yes, and I think he did so on purpose, in order to confuse the simple minded.
In fact, to move from subjectivity to objectivity, one needs more subjects, adding and comparing their observations, So in a sense you get to objectivity by adding subjectivity to subjectivity, not by taking subjectivity away.
How on earth not? How are the blessed creatures expected to agree policy toward the myriad stimuli if not by ordering and classifying them?