Donald Hoffman
The work of Donald Hoffman, and especially his book "the case against reality", has been discussed on this forum before, so I'll assume you know something about it. Basically he says evolution has not provided us with tools to truly see reality. But he has to see reality in order to come to this conclusion (that, he has to prove evolution and his own theory). Hoffman is not a philosopher and doesn't seem to like philosophers. What he doesn't understand: you can't have a first premise (reality exists) and then from this premise prove that the premise is wrong. That's not a valid argument. How can he even ever say again "evolution is true" if all the research into it is based on illusions. His is a self-defeating thesis. In fact Occam's razor would suggest he accept an ancient alien theory according to which aliens interferred with scientific research and planted "evidence" instead of throwing all of reality out the window. Such keeps reality intact and isn't self-refuting.
Note: how strong is his "case" such that evolution is refuted. That is, does evolution lead to an absurd conclusion?
Note: how strong is his "case" such that evolution is refuted. That is, does evolution lead to an absurd conclusion?
Comments (442)
If evolution happens (to humans also) because 'reality bites', then it follows that evolution must necessarily put pressure on humanity to have a realistic world view. Hence, "Darwin awards".
Obviously one does not 'have' reality in one's eye or in one's brain, one has visions and models and heuristics. But crossing the road without attending to what one can see and hear is perilous and foolish.
Hint: "... truly see reality" is a dog's breakfast of a phrase.
My eyesight is poor, but I can see truly enough to truly cross a real road without getting extinctified by the truly really real predatory traffic.
You may have taken his metaphorical language too literally. Hoffman makes no attempt to "refute" Reality or Evolution. Instead, he takes Darwinian Evolution for granted, as the mechanism that produced human observers, such as scientists & philosophers, and assumes that a real world is out there.
Then, he merely notes that our knowledge of that vast & complex world is inherently, and necessarily, incomplete. Also, our personal worldview is an interpretation, not an observation. Moreover, as the link below implies, we create our own Ideal version of Reality by selectively omitting most of the available information. His metaphor portrays your perspective on the world as something like an icon on your computer or phone screen : it serves as an abstract symbol of the underlying world, and "hides" irrelevant details that are not necessary for your livelihood.
Whether his conclusion is "absurd" or not, largely depends on the worldview that you bring to the book. For a Christian or Muslim, the creator of the human mind is God, not an accidental fluke of random evolution. So, if you don't accept the concept of godless evolution, Hoffman's "conclusion" won't make sense. Unless perhaps, God wanted to spare you from certain harsh realities that are beyond your comprehension. :smile:
PS___ The "Reality" he refers to is your personal partial worldview : subjective vs objective reality.
What is the case against reality summary?
The Case against reality can be summed up succinctly. We are participants in the creation of reality, we operate using a species specific user interface which selects information that's out there and condenses it into information that guides our action.
https://wisewords.blog/book-summaries/case-against-reality-book-summary/
Yes you can; it's called refutation by contradiction.
I think the whole "what is reality?" question is insoluble because all the answers aren't really answers at all, they're definitions. We can define reality as anything we want, and philosophers do - over and over again - back and forth ad infinitum. Hoffman isn't wrong, he's just defined reality a bit differently than you and I do. You probably mean something different than I do. My personal favorite definition for everyday use runs along same tracks as @unenlightened's. It's what we can see (or taste, or feel, or smell, or hear, or maybe even think of) truly enough to truly live in the real world without getting extinctified by the truly really real predatory reality. It's, you know; apples, electrons, my wife's new hip, tree frogs, the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate, Donald Trump Jr., and maybe Sherlock Holmes and love.
I hadn't heard of Hoffman so I looked him up on Wikipedia. I've been thinking about the evolution of mind and it's relation to reality recently, so this caught my eye:
Quoting Wikipedia
Right now I'm in the middle of Konrad Lorenz's "Behind the Mirror" which also focuses strongly on evolution and objective reality but comes to a completely opposite conclusion.
Lorenz's book is great. It's changed my perspective on a lot of issues that I've been contemplating for a long time. I plan to write more about it here later, but I'm just in the middle of my reading. For a shorter read, you can try his paper "Kant's Doctrine of the A Priori in the Light of Contemporary Biology." Here's a link:
https://archive.org/details/KantsDoctrineOfTheAPrioriInTheLightOfContemporaryBiologyKonradLorenz
Organism and environment coevolve. So what increases the organism's fitness the most is arguably the ability to sense things as they are, not only the parts that happens to increase one's fitness relative to one's current environment. Hence perception of reality evolves towards being correct.
Quoting T Clark
The conclusions don't seem so much in opposition to me. It seems to me that the following two sentences are just different ways of expressing a similar understanding.
Yes. After I wrote my post and then read some of the other comments, I started to come to the same conclusion. But it was a set up job - I was framed. The title of the book is "The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes." The first line of the writeup in Amazon is "Challenging leading scientific theories that claim that our senses report back objective reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally." But it seems, as you note, that that's not what Hoffman was saying at all. Lorenz, on the other hand, explicitly stated that our understanding of the evolution of mind in humans and animals demonstrates that there is an objective reality.
Hoffman often addresses this criticism directly in interviews I have seen. He says something like his theory can be measured by its practical utility and explanatory power and not by its correspondence to objective reality. You'd need to look it up.
I guess Hoffman is a kind of epistemological idealist. The real question is how useful is such a theory - it's a bit Kantian - we only see phenomena (the human dashboard or 'interface theory of perception' versus the noumena (the world we don't and can't see).
If accurate, how does this model assist us in dealing with the world? Any ideas? Or is it all just a kind of conceptual metaphysical toy for a certain kind of academic to play with? I guess ultimately Hoffman and his friend Kastrup (and fellow Essentia Foundation member) are saying similar things. Reality is an illusion and consciousness is fundamental.
Quoting unenlightened
Hoffman often likes to say the same kind of thing. The consequences of being run over by a bus on Main Street if we are not looking while we cross remains an ontological danger. It just isn't what we think it is. Evolution has programmed us with a 'dashboard' of sense experiences, a kind of a simulation of reality - this realm still holds risks and threats and rewards and experiences, it's just that we do not see them for what they really are.
Quoting T Clark
I may be wrong but as I understand Hoffman he also acknowledges an objective reality. But he contends that the reality we experience is not that objective reality. According to him, evolution programs us to survive by using practical shortcuts. The reality we perceive with our senses is one of those shortcuts, a vastly simplified version (perception as heuristics) with many gaps.
Lorenz explicitly connects his views with Kant. As I noted, the title of the paper I linked is "Kant's Doctrine Of The A Priori In The Light Of Contemporary Biology." In contradiction to my initial impressions, Hoffman's position doesn't seem that far off.
Quoting Tom Storm
I think Lorenz would say it is an image of reality, not a simulation and I think, or at least I think Lorenz thought, that's an important difference. We see things the way they really are, but we don't see everything. I have a metaphysical prejudice against the idea of objective reality, so I have some sympathy for Hoffman's perspective.
Yes, I think many have accused Hoffman of a self-refuting contradiction. As I say he addresses this, but I don't recall exactly what he says.
I seem to recall that Hoffman uses the terms icon and image too. I may have been unwise to write 'simulation' - Hoffman is not a simulation theory guy as far as I recall.
The problem with all of this material is we seek undertaking in a few paragraphs, when deep study is probably required.
Quoting T Clark
I hear you.
I guess the main quibble I have is that his fitness beats truth puts too much weight on biological determinism. Ive long argued that not every human faculty is determined by biology alone, and that through language, reason and abstract thought we are able to discern things that other creatures cannot. Yes, bats can see by sonar, and many other animals have uncanny perceptual abilities, but only h.sapiens can, as it were, weigh and measure the Universe. And indeed Hoffman is appealing to science to arrive at his judgement about the misleading aspects of cognition so presumably he has attained a perspective outside that. Anyway Ill keep reading it, as its a book Ive been meaning to finish for a good while.
Yes. I'm in the middle of the Lorenz book and it's having a big effect on my views in this area. I definitely need to think more on the subject.
Maybe not fitness beats truth. Maybe fitness shows us the truth. Or at least that there is a truth to be shown.
His 'theorem' - and there are objections to his use of that term in this context - is precisely that 'fitness beats truth'. It is that natural selection favors organisms that perceive the world in a way that enhances their survival and reproduction, rather than in a way that accurately depicts objective reality. This means that our perceptions and cognitive processes are shaped more by evolutionary pressures to survive and reproduce than by the need to see the world as it truly is. As a result, the way we perceive reality might not be a true reflection of it, but rather an adaptive construction that helps us navigate and thrive in our environment.
Here's rather a good interview with Hoffman, from which:
But what does 'not taking it literally' mean? That the train is not really' 'a train'?
He answers:
But I'm only up to Chapter 2 of the book (out of 10) so I intend to keep reading.
This is an interesting point. A pragmatist might argue that this amounts to a definition of truth anyway- that which is useful for certain purposes (Rorty).
I guess the meaningful quesion that emerges from this position is what the nature of truth might be. The notion of truth like our 'desktop reality' may just be a useful heuristic rather than anything linked to an objective reality or even, dare I say, it a transcendent realm. Thoughts?
Based on Buddhist studies readings, I see a convergence between Hoffman's views and the Buddhist principle of ??nyat? (emptiness). In Buddhism, ??nyat? refers to the principle that all phenomena are empty of intrinsic existence or inherent nature (svabhava). This means that objects do not possess an independent, unchanging existence; rather, their existence and characteristics depend on various conditions and also on the perception of the observer.
Hoffman's idea that snakes and trains (and all objects) are not objective, observer-independent entities aligns with this Buddhist perspective. According to Hoffman, what we perceive as a snake or a train is a mental representation created by our sensory system to help us navigate our environment effectively. These representations are shaped by evolutionary pressures, but they do not necessarily reflect an truly observer-independent reality. Similarly, in Buddhism, objects are seen as lacking inherent existence and being dependent on our perceptions and conceptual impositions. This is especially characteristic of the 'mind-only' school of Buddhism (Yog?c?ra).
Both perspectives suggest that our experience of the world is in some fundamental sense constructed by the mind and that the nature of objects is not fixed but contingent on our cognitive and perceptual processes. This convergence highlights a shared view that our understanding of reality is deeply intertwined with our mental constructs and not an accurate portrayal of an independent external world.
You might think this leads to solipsism, which is the idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist. But both perspectives suggest that while our individual perceptions are subjective, there is a shared aspect of our experience due to the similarities in how minds operate. This is the basis for inter-subjectivity.
In Buddhism, the concept of dependent origination (prat?tyasamutp?da) explains how phenomena arise in dependence on causes and conditions, including the perceiving mind. This interconnectedness means that while our perceptions are not independent realities, they are not entirely isolated either. The shared conditions and the way our minds work allow for a common experience of the world among different individuals. That's also why there are different worlds ('lokas') of which the human world and animal worlds are examples.
Similarly, Hoffman's idea that our perceptions are shaped by evolutionary pressures implies that there is a common framework within which human minds operate. This shared evolutionary heritage means that "like minds see like things." While our perceptions are not objective realities, the similarities in our sensory and cognitive systems result in a coherent and consistent experience of the world among different individuals.
Therefore, both views maintain that while our perceptions are subjective and constructed, there is a commonality in how we perceive the world due to shared mental and sensory structures. This shared framework allows for a coherent and intersubjective experience of reality, avoiding the pitfalls of solipsism.
My comment wasn't clear. I wasn't questioning your characterization of Hoffman's position. I was offering an alternative I think is more consistent with what Konrad Lorenz wrote in the book I referenced. I think you might still judge that it puts too much weight on biological determinism. I'm not sure which one I like more or, I guess, dislike less. Either one makes me rethink some questions I thought I had answered to my satisfaction.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is an issue I raised in my first post in this thread. Nobody seems to agree on, or even have a good understanding of, what reality really is. If I don't think the idea of an objective reality is a useful one, what difference does it make whether what I perceive is a true reflection or just an adaptive construction.
Lorentz would disagree with this, but I don't. Or at least I don't think I do.
A pragmatist might also argue that truth is irrelevant, maybe even meaningless. All that's needed is to know what to do next.(T Clark)
I think at stake is Capital T Truth. There's not much consideration for that in philosophy today. 'Whatever works' becomes the measure.
Hoffman makes the same mistake as Kant, supposing that there is a really, truly world out there that is different to and inaccessible from the world we live in.
But the world is the world we live in.
Quoting Gnomon
His book is titled "The case against reality"...
Spot on. So do you have an account of the reductio Hoffman uses?
I wonder if the Amazon writeup is decribing what Hoffman is arguing for accurately. But regardless, (and with the cutesy 'seriously but not literally' aside) I can easily see myself agreeing with Hoffman if he means to say something like, "We need to take our perceptions seriously, because they are the result of interactions within reality, but there is a lot of benefit to understanding that things are a lot more complex than our perceptions suggest, and we can benefit from being cognizant of that."
Quoting T Clark
I wouldn't say "demonstrates", but certainly biological findings are consistent with there being an objective reality, not to mention such biological findings having great explanatory power.
Of all the metaphysical entities, I think Truth is the most misleading. It takes up too much of philosophers's attention and distracts from issues I see as more central to our lives.
Quoting Wayfarer
No, promoting human values is the measure. If "whatever works" can achieve that, I don't see any reason to object.
I assumed that the writeup was provided by the author or publisher. If so, it is consistent with the provocative language in the title.
Quoting wonderer1
I'm ok with that. One of the reasons I like the Lorenz book I've been referencing is that he gives concrete examples of the ways that reality is "a lot more complex than our perceptions suggest." Those examples are supported by the results of scientific observations and experiments. He then goes on to examine the philosophical implications of those results.
Quoting wonderer1
I might agree with you. I'm still thinking about it. But that is what Lorenz wrote and I found it substantive enough that I didn't dismiss it out of hand.
However, saw Phillip Goff's and Keith Frankish's Mindchat episode with him and was just basically spewing unintelligible garbage.
In Chapter 3, Hoffman discusses the background to his ideas, including his apprenticeship under Francis Crick among others. He also introduces the Fitness Beats Truth idea and the kinds of experiments that he says proves its validity. (For the first time, I'm actually understanding what he means when he talks about mathematical models of the theory.)
A question I have is, what is 'truth' as distinct from 'perceived reality'? I think he means 'what exists independently of perception' or what really is so. Thus, the 'truth' about realityhow things really are in themselvesis fundamentally different from the constructed, adaptive realities we perceive.
In this framework, 'objective truth' represents the underlying reality that exists independently of observers, akin to Kant's noumenal realm or things in themselves. Our perceptual reality, on the other hand, is the subjective experience generated by our sensory systems, tailored by evolutionary pressures to help us navigate our environment effectively rather than to accurately reflect this objective truth.
I'll keep going with the book.
Truth only applies to propositions. Most of what we perceive and know about reality doesn't fit comfortably into propositions. If I have 1,000 data points generated by measurements, what can I say about them that is true? If my understanding of reality is based on thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of informal observations, where is the truth in that if I can't or don't want to put it in the form of thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of propositions?
Quoting Wayfarer
It is a respectable metaphysical position that there is no underlying reality that exists independently of observers. This is Verse 40 from Gia-Fu Feng's translation of the Tao Te Ching.
Quoting Lao Tzu - Tao Te Ching Verse 40
The ten thousand things are the multiplicity of things existing in the world. Not being refers to the Tao, the inconceivable, unspeakable unity.
It's called 'scepticism'.
We don't cotton to your gol'darned metric "scepticism" here in the USofA. We'll stick with our good old American customary units skepticism.
A quote from Chapter 4 - the Interface Theory of Perception (ITP), which compares our perception of objects to the icons on a computer interface. The icons are operative, and useful to us, in a way the underlying code and electronics of a computer could not be.
Excerpt from The Case Against Reality, Donald Hoffman, Kindle Edition
Very similar argument to 'mind-created world'.
All of those types of objections are addressed in the book, with references to papers that make such arguments. Besides, saying that we dont perceive reality as it is, is a far cry from saying that reality doesnt exist. Really the book should be called 'the case against realism' or something like that.
Having seen a blurb from Deepak Chopra on the Amazon page, I can't say I'm surprised.
I hadn't heard of Hoffman before this thread, so I looked him up. Sounds like what you are describing is multimodal user interface theory, which makes some sense to me. That's sort of like how I thought about this issue originally. Now I find myself questioning whether that is the clearest way to think about it.
Not preposterous maybe, but I think it's misleading. Yes, I know Hoffman is a cognitive scientist. Of course the spoon doesn't cease to exist. It seems to me it exists in the same sense it does while I'm looking at it - at the interface between my mind and the external world. The quote also seems to ignore the extent to which reality is a social phenomena. Even if I'm not looking at the spoon, somebody else is or might be.
Quoting Wayfarer
Seems to me any philosophy other than strict materialism/physicalism/realism could be described as concerning a "mind-created world." I wasn't sure what you meant by that, so I looked it up. You'll be interested to know that the first link on the Google page was from a thread you started eight months ago.
So what do we think it is, that it isn't?
I cn tell you some things I don't think it is; it isn't; neurons, perceptions, thoughts, imaginings, qualia, hallucination, noumena, electro magnetic radiationin fact I think it's most likely a bus on main street. Am I wrong?
On the other hand, a lot of progress is being made, in understanding that things like the smell of coffee are a function of coordinated activity in arrays of neurons, and that expecting to find a "particular neural event" accounting for the smell of coffee evinces a lack of sophistication in considering the subject.
As @Wayfarer can attest, I find the fact that the "hard problem" of consciousness takes up so much attention infuriating. Yes, I know many disagree. This is one of the reasons I had a knee-jerk negative reaction to Hoffman.
Sure, but that doesn't make the problem any easier does it? If it does, please do explain.
No, it doesn't make the problem any easier. Still physicalism is where progress in understanding is being made, whereas dualism and panpsychism seem to dismiss the possibility of progress being made altogether.
Have you made it to the last chapter? He sort of turns everything he has said on his head. His point is that a common way of looking at the relationship between mind and nature is self-refuting. Plantinga has previously made a similar argument. I don't think this is a bad argument, although the way it is framed it does seem like he is refuting himself as well. But I take it that this is exactly the point, his position is self-refuting because it's situated in popular assumptions that are self-refuting.
IMO, much modern philosophy ends up in a sort of Kantian dualism because it's unwilling to challenge dogmatic assumptions stemming for Lockean objectivity and the primacy of "primary properties," reductionism, and the division of the word into subject and object, phenomenal/noumenal.
Panpsychists and dualists probably do typically dismiss the possibility of explaining consciousness (in general terms that would constitute an answer to the hard problem) in terms of complex systems. But this dismissal for many is exactly what motivates them to place consciousness elsewhere in nature than just an emergent characteristic of some complex systems. For my money, the fact that a growing number of philosophers take panpsychism seriously is progress. Bypassing the hard problem instead of trying to solve it is progress. Not that I object to physicalists continuing to theorise, they come up with interesting stuff. Just not a solution to the hard problem. (And before Galen Strawson tells me off, he insists he is a physicalist and a panpsychist at the same time, which last time I read it made sense to me but I've forgotten much of his reasoning.) I personally think the problem of what consciousness is is not hard, I think we know what it is, and we only have to introspect to find out. But the problem of the relationship between consciousness and systems is very obscure for the reasons Hoffman mentions, and I do think science can play a useful role in that.
Well it is a bus, as far as basic human experience is concerned. But is the common sense answer the right one, or the only one?
Given the metaphysics of idealism, the true nature of our reality isn't readily described. Just as the nature of god is said to be ineffable. Wayfarer has certainly gone into this in many threads. He quotes some clues provided by Hoffman himself.
Quoting Wayfarer
I am not convinced by this model but I do think I would need to do some deeper study before rejecting or accepting it. Could it be that our reality is fundamentally rooted in consciousness alone, with the physical world manifesting as a perceptual construct designed to help us comprehend our existence? Who knows? The big question remains - how does it change anything in my day-to-day life?
Yes, that seems to be right. Do you see a way out of this?
David Chalmers, who coined the phrase hard problem of consciousness, wrote this:
. . .even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experienceperceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal reportthere may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?
?David Chalmers, Facing up to the problem of consciousness
OK, lets assume we've answered that question. There is now a further question: "Why is it that such-and-such function causes/realises/is the taste of chocolate instead of the smell of coffee?" A really robust theory of experience should be able to predict in a principled way what a particular function feels like to be instantiated. And this problem remains for everyone, including dualists, panpsychists, and new-agers, because no one denies the correlation between physical systems and what in particular we experience.
So much the worse for idealism! Don't come crying to me about it! The true nature of reality is that it is naturally real, and what one can say about it can sometimes be really true, and the result of saying really true things about the nature of reality is that it is truth-telling.
Bada-bing, bada-boom.
Do you understand the true natural of reality and all that is naturally real? Let's hear about it...
Ring-a-ding-ding,
Use your eyes and your ears when crossing the road, and don't step in front of a bus! And proof read before posting.
Donald Hoffman and I intend to do just that. :wink:
As soon as youre talking about the sense in which the spoon exists then youre already in the territory of philosophy, youre qualifying its existence with respect to its being observed. And, as noted, like minds see like things, so theres no question of solipsism.
Quoting T Clark
:clap: Nice to know. Posts from this forum do often come up on top of the search results in questions about philosophy. (Depressing fact: the biggest audience Ive ever had for a piece of writing was on productreviews.com about a domestic appliance.)
Quoting wonderer1
Its not a problem in search of a solution. Its pointing out that a third-party (objective) description cannot be equated with the first-person (subjective) experience, as the latter possesses a qualitative dimension which cannot be reduced to, or represented in, symbolic terminology. Its not a failure on the part of scientific psychology, but a limitation inherent in the objective method.
I laughed a lot when I read this. I hear you.
Well, if you need any inside info on a pond vacuum cleaner, don't hesitate......
No, Donald Hoffman, but as you've dropped the name.....
[quote=Wikipedia] Albert Hofmann (11 January 1906 29 April 2008) was a Swiss chemist known for being the first to synthesize, ingest, and learn of the psychedelic effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). Hofmann's team also isolated, named and synthesized the principal psychedelic mushroom compounds psilocybin and psilocin.[1] He authored more than 100 scientific articles and numerous books, including LSD: Mein Sorgenkind (LSD: My Problem Child).[2] In 2007, he shared first place with Tim Berners-Lee on a list of the 100 greatest living geniuses published by The Daily Telegraph newspaper.[3] ...
While researching lysergic acid derivatives, Hofmann first synthesized LSD on 16 November 1938.[9] ... on 19 April 1943, Hofmann intentionally ingested 250 micrograms of LSD, which he thought would represent a prudently safe, small amount, but was in fact a strong dose. At first, his trip was not pleasant, as people appeared to morph into fantastic creatures, office furniture moved and shifted like living entities, and he felt possessed by otherworldly forces.
April 19 is now widely known as "Bicycle Day", because as Hofmann began to feel LSD's effects, he tried to ride to the safety of his home on his bike. This was the first intentional LSD trip in history.[/quote]
It's not. Is a living organism caused by/realized by/identical with the functions of complex chemical systems? No.
Quoting bert1
Who says they can't? Just because they don't doesn't mean it's not possible.
Quoting bert1
I'm not sure I know what that means, but I'll try this - can a robust theory of chemistry reliably predict which chemical systems are alive? Again, no.
Quoting bert1
I don't see how that differs significantly from the previous question.
I think all of this is philosophy - metaphysics - and people use these metaphysical positions to draw positive factual conclusions about the world, e.g. science will never be able to understand how experience arises out of biological and neurological systems.
I'm going to back off now. I don't really want to get any deeper into a discussion of the hard problem. You and I tend to bark at each other when we do that and we never get any closer to agreement.
I'd say it is more a matter of limited perceptual and cognitive faculties on our parts. We don't have minds capable of comprehensively understanding the complexity of what goes on in our brains. So what you are concerned with is only a pseudo-problem from a physicalist perspective. It's no more a problem for physicalism, than is the fact that you can't demonstrate that your mind is not emergent from physical processes, is a problem for physicalism.
I think it's more that the physical sciences offer pseudo-solutions to a problem that their modus operandi can't accomodate.
Ok, but you aren't coming from a well informed perspective. (Or do you no longer deny that there is evidence for physicalism?)
I made that remark a long time ago, but I really didn't think at the time you understood what I meant. When I say there is no evidence for physicalism, I am referring to the metaphysical view that "what is real is reducible to physics." This claim is not something that can be subject to scientific demonstration. It's not a claim within physics itself - there are physicists who do maintain that claim, and others who question it.
The point is that physicalism is a methodological assumption regarding what can be objectively measured and predicted. While it may be sound methodologically, it is still an assumption that operates within a framework composed of other assumptions and constraints. When this assumption is extrapolated to make claims about the nature of reality or being as such, those assumptions may no longer be applicable. That is the distinction between a metaphysical (or philosophical) claim, and physics as such, which has a more restricted scope.
Do you see the distinction I'm trying to make?
And we couldn't know if they were :up:
What is that common view that he thinks is self-refuting?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_argument_against_naturalism#:~:text=Religion%2C%20and%20Naturalism.-,Plantinga%27s%201993%20formulation%20of%20the%20argument,faculties%20is%20low%20or%20inscrutable.
The OP raised this in relation to Hoffman's theory too.
That sounds like a statement of metaphysical Materialistic belief*1 . But Kant was a philosopher. He was not talking about the world we "live in" (objective reality), but about the world we "think in" (subjective ideality). Do you think the world we live & breathe in is the same as the world we imagine? If the only "world" was the physical environment, why do we amateur philosophers so often argue about what is real and what is illusion? If we all saw the same world-model, why do we disagree on its properties and qualities? Was Einstein also mistaken in his frame-of-reference theory of Relativity?
Physical Science studies its macro-scale properties, and over centuries has gradually come to a stable understanding of its material structure. But Quantum Science has found that, on the fundamental scale, those classical properties are not so stable and certain. For example, the table you see before you as a solid object, is now defined by quantum science as mostly empty space with a few bits of condensed energy. So which "reality" does Philosophy argue about? Kant's hypothetical ding an sich was not postulated as a "real" physical object, but as an ideal metaphysical concept. Hoffman's theory is not about sensable objective reality, but about our subjective conception of that reality.
Which world do you live in? The scientific world of sight & touch, or the philosophical world of imaginary worldviews? This forum, as indicated by its name, is for the latter. :smile:
*1. Metaphysical Materialism :
The metaphysics of materialism is a belief system held in large swathes of academia in the same manner, and often for the same reasons, that religious beliefs are held in fundamentalist organizations, argues Dr. Quinn, with 30 years of academic experience to substantiate her views.
We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are. Anais Nin (1961)
https://www.essentiafoundation.org/materialism-in-academia-is-a-fundamentalist-belief-system/reading/
Note : Werner Heisenberg said, "We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning."
I think I might deny that there is [s]no[/s] evidence for physicalism. I'm interested in what people think is evidence for physicalism.
EDIT: Confusing typo inverted my meaning. Apologies @T Clark Fixed.
See here.
I read the Wikipedia article you linked. Interesting. After extensive research, reexamination of my understanding of evolution and cognitive science, and hours of contemplation I've come to the conclusion that it's the dumbest fucking philosophical argument I've ever heard. If someone will start a separate thread, I'll explain my thinking.
Physicalism is a metaphysical position. It's a presupposition, an assumption you make to allow you to make sense of what you know about the world. It's not that there is or isn't evidence for it, it's that there can't be. I think that's what Wayfarer meant when he wrote
Quoting Wayfarer
:rofl:
I'd be interested in such a thread as well, but there are so many gaping holes in the EAAN, that it would be hard to pick a best objection to it. However, I do think it brings up matters well worth thinking about.
Yes, well, @Tom Storm did say it's a fun argument.
Yes I agree, sorry I made a typo. Corrected above.
Quite right. :rofl:
Yes, I know about Plantinga's argument, but it would work against Hoffman's position, not for it, since it aims to undercut its very foundations.
The common view that Donald Hoffman seeks to challenge is our belief that objects continue to exist independently of our perception of them when theyre not perceived. He doesnt claim they cease to exist when not perceived - something continues to exist - but they dont possess the identity which we impute to them, which is what the mind has been conditioned by evolutionary biology to recognise in terms of what he calls fitness payoffs. Its in this respect that his findings are similar to Berkeleys and Kants (whom he mentions).
I had also thought Hoffmans arguments could be used against him, on the grounds that they would also undercut scientific reasoning, but he does address these kinds of objections towards the end of Chapter 3 (with references to journal articles articulating those objections in detail.)
I think what Hoffman is really challenging is cognitive realism, the instinctive belief that our sensory perception reveals the world as it really is. I think his book would have been better titled The Case against Cognitive Realism, but of course that title would loose a great deal of zing.
Ive considered writing a comparative analysis of Hoffman, Plantinga, and Thomas Nagels Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion. They are all concerned with the implications of evolutionary biology on the nature of knowledge, but from different perspectives, Hoffman from cognitive science, Plantinga from natural theology, and Nagel on the sovereignty of reason. I often cite Nagels essay, particularly in regard to his analysis of why claims that reason can understood solely in terms of evolutionary biology is self-refuting.
[quote=Thomas Nagel]The only form that genuine reasoning can take consists in seeing the validity of the arguments, in virtue of what they say. As soon as one tries to step outside of such thoughts, one loses contact with their true content. And one cannot be outside and inside them at the same time: If one thinks in logic, one cannot simultaneously regard those thoughts as mere psychological dispositions, however caused or however biologically grounded. If one decides that some of one's psychological dispositions are, as a contingent matter of fact, reliable methods of reaching the truth (as one may with perception, for example), then in doing so one must rely on other thoughts that one actually thinks, without regarding them as mere dispositions. One cannot embed all one's reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory. The epistemological buck must stop somewhere. By this I mean not that there must be some premises that are forever unrevisable but, rather, that in any process of reasoning or argument there must be some thoughts that one simply thinks from the inside--rather than thinking of them as biologically programmed dispositions.[/quote]
I thought that was the point. Maybe I missed something. The idea in the OP that Hoffmans work is self-refuting.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, I think thats fair.
Thinking ones thoughts were purely a matter of biological dispositions would indeed be naive, but who actually thinks that way?
I'd think it more reasonable to say biological dispositions enable "thoughts that one simply thinks from the inside", but of course that isn't a full account of the causality of those thoughts.
I think biological determinism remains a potent force in contemporary thought. The whole of naturalised epistemology would seek to ground reason in terms of evolutionary psychology, would it not? A physicalist theory of mind has to maintain that mental operations can be reduced to physical causes.
This is where Plantinga's argument is relevant. He says that in naturalized epistemology reason and cognitive processes are seen to be grounded in evolutionary psychology and neurobiology. This means that our ability to reason is understood as a product of evolutionary processes that favor adaptive behavior.
Plantinga's argument contends that if our cognitive faculties are the result of evolutionary processes driven purely by survival, then there is no reason to accept that that they produce true beliefs, only that they produce beliefs that are advantageous for survival. (This is where his argument dovetails with Hoffman's.) Therefore, if one accepts both naturalism and evolution, one has a defeater for trusting the reliability of their cognitive faculties, including the belief in naturalism and evolution themselves. This is a self-defeating position.
Reasoning itself is based on 'ground and consequent' relations. Such arguments assert that reasoning involves understanding logical relationships and following principles of validity and soundness, which are not simply reducible to physical processes or evolutionary adaptations. So again if reason were purely the product of physical neurobiological processes, it would lack the normative force of logical inference, where conclusions are drawn based on grounds (premises) and consequents (conclusions). Physical processes operate through causal relations, but logical inference operates through rational justification, which is of a different nature.
The argument here is that reason must in some sense transcend purely naturalistic explanations if we are to trust its conclusions. This implies that reason possesses a normative dimension that cannot be fully accounted for by naturalistic evolutionary processes alone. Reason involves not just causal relationships but also logical relationships, which include principles of validity, soundness, and truth that seem to operate on a different level from mere physical causation.
Plantinga (and others) make this an argument for natural theology, i.e. that the Divine Intellect is the source of reason, however I believe the argument stands on its own two legs, so to speak, without reference to God. That is the thrust of Nagel's paper mentioned above.
I only got as far as "evo" before my search tool told me that I wasn't going to find "evolutionary psychology" in that link. I was unsurprised, in view of evolutionary psychology being a fairly small part of a much bigger scientific picture.
In any case my interest is in a cooperative naturalism perspective:
A lot of what is considered under naturalized epistemology isn't that interesting to me.
Quoting Wayfarer
Accurate enough synopsis, but Plantinga doesn't consider factors which are of great relevance. For example, consider the case of a social species, and whether an ability to convey truths to conspecifics provides a fitness advantage to members of the social group. An ability to recognize and disseminate truths within a social species seems like it could be pretty damn adaptive to me.
Well I suppose, if one accepts Plantinga's naive understanding of the theory of evolution, but surely no one here would do that.
Also "defeater" is a bit much. Perhaps it is not such a binary matter. Perhaps it would be of benefit for members of the aforementioned social species to question the reliability of their cognitive faculties. After all, some of their conspecifics might be smarter or better informed than themselves. Do you think it is a bad thing that people question the reliability of their cognitive faculties. Peer review anyone?
Are you familiar with Plantinga's "Paul"?
Supposing Plantinga's straw man account of evolution results in a self defeating position. It's still merely an argument based on a straw man.
When he published his paper on the evolutionary argument against naturalism, a number of scholars responded critically to it, but, so far as I know, not along the lines that it was a straw man argument. (There's an expensive compendium of critical essays and Plantinga's responses available at Amazon, not that I'm going to go to the trouble or expense.)
The ability to 'disseminate information amongst social species' - for example species that make sounds on the approach of predators, like meerkats, or that of bee dances - is obviously advantageous to survival, but what does that have to do with the issue at hand?
At issue is whether rational inference can be accounted for in purely naturalistic terms - but there's no need for meerkats or bees to demonstrate rational inference. Their behaviours can be described in terms of stimulus and response. (Speaking of straw men....)
There are actually several overlapping issues at stake. Donald Hoffman is concerned with the veracity of perceptual cognition - that we don't see reality as it is. In the context of his book, he doesn't pay much attention to the validity of rational inference, but presumably he must have some confidence in it, else he would, as several have suggested, saw off the branch he's sitting on.
Alvin Plantinga is more concerned with epistemology of reason - that reducing reason to natural causation undermines it. There are plainly many complex and deep issues at hand. I don't defend Plantinga's theistic conclusion, but I maintain there's an element of truth in his criticism.
(There's an intriguing pre-cursor to this style of argumentation in the Phaedo. This is 'the argument from equality'. Here Socrates argues that our ability to perceive that two things as equal, relies on our innate grasp of what equality means, which is a rational insight, not something acquired through empirical means, as we must already have the knowledge of 'equality itself' to judge things as equal or not. ref)
And?
Quoting Wayfarer
Plantinga completely neglects consideration of evolution in a social species, so isn't presenting a seriously considered account of evolution. Ergo he is working with a strawman account.
Probably probably because it's irrelevant.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
If natural causation didn't come up with our reasoning abilities then who ever did did a pretty bad job considering all the people who's reasoning erroneously led them to naturalism.
:wink:
What do you think 'natural causation' comprises, and how might it be related to reason? It's actually quite a deep question, explored in part in this earlier thread. The gist is that causation of the kind that characterises physical and chemical reactions, is of a different order to logical necessity, which is the relationship between ideas.
I know what a straw man argument is, but I think your characterisation of Plantinga's argument in those terms is incorrect, your reference to 'co-operative naturalism' notwithstanding.
Furthermore, if you think it through, Plantinga's argument is quite consistent with the naturalistic axiom that one ought not to hold to certain beliefs, but only entertain fallible hypotheses which are subject to disconfirmation by further discovery. Naturalism in that sense is not a world view as such, but working assumptions in the service of scientific method. It is not co-incidental in this regard that Bishop Berkeley was classified as an empiricist.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14166/ontology-donald-hoffmans-denial-of-materialism/p1
I don't think Plantinga's argument is air tight, but neither is it merely a strawman. It's been taken seriously because, even if it is a simple argument, there is something to it. Hoffman is making a very similar sort of argument and I think he lays out a pretty good case for how some understandings of naturalism and a naturalized epistemology end up being self-refuting. That is, if we assume they are true, they suggest that they are false.
It's a complex issue.
I honestly think both Plantinga and Hoffman bury the lead here in not focusing on the problem of psycho-physical harmony. Physicalism is normally defined in terms of casual closure. Reductionist materialism also assumes causal closure. But if causal closure is true the mental neveron pain of violating the principlehas any effect on behavior. It is just "along for the ride." Everything is determined by particles and how they interact, so no one ever goes and gets a drink "because they feel thirsty" (at least not in the causally efficacious sense of "cause.")
But then, were this true, natural selection can never directly select on how the world is experienced by us. Since the mental doesn't affect behavior, it has no relevance for survival or reproduction. So what is needed is some sort of "just so" story where evolution makes our experiences close enough to reality that they tell us things about how the world really is, even though we don't think our experiences dictate our behavior (because what we do can be entirely explained in terms of particles interacting, and particles lack experiences). Where is the just so story? Well, it doesn't exist. You'd need an answer to the Hard Problem to provide one.
Yet it seems rather implausible that such a story can be found given how well evolutionary psychology predicts how the world is experienced. It certainly seems like "we have sex because it feels good," or that "being cold feels unpleasant so that we will try to find shelter," etc.
I think Plantinga's argument is ultimately just one simplified form of an entire web of arguments that can be made vis-á-vis psychophysical harmony, causal closure, and epistemology. Hoffman is able to flesh this out with some models and empirical results. Is it air tight? No. But then again what they are arguing against is also a position that is not airtight. Yet this position, like reductionism, is one that seems to demand that it be "assumed true until decisively proven otherwise," and I'd venture that there is not good grounds to accept this
Is it required by "naturalism" tout court? No, but it's an assumption often bundled into "naturalism" as the term is commonly employed.
I don't really know what you mean by different order but seems to me from neuroscience and machine learning that any kind of intelligence can be scaled up from very simple prediction algorithms. For instance, it is proven I believe that recurrent artificial neural networks (and no doubt biological neurons) are Turing complete. They can compute anything. Sure, there may not be great pressure for many organisms like bacteria or whelk to be great reasoners but once you have the first step of neurons which can learn then you have the fundamental basic ingredient that allows for reasoning. In any case, I am not entirely sure what we mean when we say that our reasoning is reliable. Is it actually reliable? Problem of induction might say no. Sure, deduction doesn't rely on that but maybe the assumptions used in deduction do. How reliable would a person's reasoning be if they had never had access to learning things as a basis for reasoning? I don't know if there is anything inherently reliable about reasoning. Not because brains aren't good at what they do but because problems like induction transcend that. Maybe it depends on semantics of reliable - pretty vague word.
:up:
The idea there is an underlying "objective reality" is also the product of our cognitive faculties. So is the idea of "truth." So are beliefs, ideas, knowledge, thoughts, emotions, perceptions, the ability to reason... To oversimplify in a provocative manner - we made all this stuff up using evolutionary mechanisms along with other factors, e.g. social interactions with our fellow humans. What does that do to Plantinga's ideas? I don't think it means they're wrong, it means they're meaningless. They're not even metaphysics.
We agree!
Quoting T Clark
Physicalists, specifically functionalists
Quoting T Clark
A robust theory of chemistry will predict which systems are chemical systems. A robust theory of life will predict which systems are alive. (Although there may be an issue about the difference between definition and theory here.) For example, @apokrisis theory is that a system is conscious if and only if it models its environment and makes predictions based on that model (I've probably oversimplified that, apologies apo). So this theory could in principle perhaps be used to create an artificial consciousness, and the theory would predict that the resultant creature would be conscious. It would be hard to test that prediction though, as notoriously no one has yet invented a consciousness-o-meter.
Quoting T Clark
The hard problem is how we get from no consciousness to some consciousness. This problem only exists for emergentists.
The other problem is the problem of explaining how one functional system is reliably correlated with one experience rather than another. This problem exists for every theory of mind.
.
As I said earlier:
Quoting wonderer1
And I'll admit it isn't merely a straw man, but a highly complex straw man brought up by a brilliant though (in this context) poorly informed mind.
There has been scholarly criticism of the argument, on the basis that Plantinga's P(R|N&E) is highly questionable in light of the possibility that what should be under consideration is P(R|N&E*) where:
E is Plantinga's simplistic conceptualization of evolution.
E* is a more thoroughly scientifically informed conceptualization of evolution.
I don't recall the name of the author(s) of that paper, and I lack motivation to track it down, but that paper is out there, and it does amount to strongly suggesting (using more sophisticated language) that the EAAN amounts to a straw man. It also meshes nicely with my objection that Plantinga neglects consideration of evolution occurring in a social species. (I.e. Plantinga's attack on E&N doesn't touch my E*&N.)
In addition to what I addressed earlier, I wanted to point out that there seems to be an implicit dualism behind this comment. It seems to assume that what we refer to as "mental" is something other than physical occurences. Admittedly such a dualism is at least deeply culturally engrained, if not to some degree a matter of biological biasing to our thinking. However, such dualistic thinking needs to be set aside if one wishes to critique physicalism successfully.
Quoting bert1
I don't think physicalists deny the existence of experience nor do they say that experience must accompany cognitive functions. Or have I misunderstood you?
Quoting bert1
According to Chalmers, at least as I understand him, the hard problem is how to get from a physical, biological, neurological explanation of cognitive functions to experience.
Quoting bert1
I think you're right - the issue you raise is about definitions, not theory.
That's only according to the epiphenomenalist view, which Plantinga ended up weaponizing for his argument against naturalism. (His so-called EAAN went through a number of iterations and eventually fizzled out, since epiphenomenalism is its own can of worms, and Plantinga didn't have much to contribute to it.). I don't know whether Hoffman relies on it as well. But epiphenomenalism is not synonymous materialism/naturalism.
Quoting T Clark
It could be said that this simply characterises the outlook of post-modern nihilism. Strawberry Fields, nothing is real, nothing to get hung about. Maybe its just a consequence of our highly fragmented and confusing cultural moment that calls that into question. But the counter to that is that philosophers have always been concerned with capital T Truth. Its a very difficult question to bring into focus, but through comparison of the historical schools of philosophical spirituality, it can be discerned.
For that matter, Donald Hoffman is now associated with The Essentia Foundation. They make the case that the confusion in our culture is in is due to the overwhelming influence of philosophical materialism, the belief that matter is ultimately real and the basis of mind and life. You can read about them here.
Quoting Apustimelogist
What Im referring to is the distinction between physical causation and logical necessity, so theres not much point addressing that issue if you dont understand it.
Quoting Apustimelogist
using reason to try to ascertain a reasonable position.
In pre-modern philosophy, it wasnt objects that were understood as being real independently of any mind, but their Ideas (forms or principles). That was the conviction behind scholastic realism, inherited from Greek metaphysics. Logical realism, which is related, says, for example, that logical laws and principles are real, insofar as theyre the same for all who can perceive them. So theyre mind-independent, on the one hand, as theyre not the product of your mind or mine, but theyre also only perceptible through reason, to be grasped by the intellect (as intelligible objects). But that implies a very different epistemology to objective or cognitive realism which put sensory experience at the centre of judgement about the nature of reality.
The decline of logical realism and the ascendancy of medieval nominalism and empirical realism is the deep historical cause behind the perplexities this question brings up. The pre-modern mind did not live with the sense of separateness that characterises modernity, it dwelled in a very different life-world, quite likely impossible for us to even imagine. Were discussing the tip of a very large iceberg.
@Count Timothy von Icarus - any convergence here with Robert M Wallace on Platonic idealism?
It's not my theory. I just say it is the best available theory. And you missed a vital part of it. That the modelling has a purpose. The purpose in the broadest sense is to build a body. Construct an organismic state. Become a dissipative structure that exists in a modelling relation with its world, an informational relation that has this particular kind of material outcome.
So this is the easy way to tell the difference between an organism and just a machine. The model and the environment are tied into this entropic feedback loop. The better the predictions, the more able the organism is able to repair and reproduce.
Quoting bert1
This theory accounts for why AI and Alife are such overhyped projects. It puts a finger on what is missing. The software doesn't have to earn its own keep. The "AI" is not building and maintaining its own embodied and enactive organismic state.
Some factory in Taiwan made the chips. Some dude in California plugged the server into the wall. Some utility company supplied the electric juice for as long as the bill got paid. The AI did nothing at all to produce or maintain the fabric of its being. There was no actual modelling relation in the biosemiotic sense.
If we get scifi, we can imagine AI being created that then takes over control of the human world and entrains it to its own entropic purpose. It sets the world to work building more chip fabs, datafarms and power stations. Humans would just mindlessly clone AI systems in exponential fashion at the expense of their own social and ecological fabric. Big tech would attract all available human capital to invest in this new global project.
Oh wait ... [Checks stock market. Gulps.]
Are you implying that a brain cannot invent or learn to use logic?
Quoting Wayfarer
Surely a position doesn't have to be true to considered a reasonable inference given available information?
Quoting Wayfarer
I think perhaps one point is that an organism that survives is an organism that is navigating an actual structure to the world, it must act sensitively to that structure and anticipate that structure in order to make sure it's paths keep within the kinds of bounds for it to survive. Surely, fitness payoffs will have objective places within that objective structure, with objective paths between any part of the world and some payoff or reward. Seems to me that even if there may be no kind of access to a single perspective-independent view of the world, an organism benefiting from fitness payoffs will need perceptual faculties that are synchronized to and can differentiate the actual structure of the world.
There maybe gulfs in terms of sophistication and access to structural information when you compare a whelk to a human to something with access to information about even more detailed, perhaps even microscopic, information; but this doesn't seem so radical to most people. Maybe there is a kind of compromise here; fitness payoffs probably are related to the actual structure of the world, but I question whether it even makes sense to say there is only one "veridical" way for an organism to be perceptually coupled to the environment. The questions is then whether there is a fact of the matter about the veridicality of different kinds of perceptuo-motor couplings that are equally effective? At the same time, even though our perceptual systems may be strongly limited, clearly science and technology has allowed us to probe much hidden structure we are not usually privy to.
Feeling thirsty can be considered to be a purely physical process. It's not that mental processes are "along for the ride" if you think of the mental and physical accounts as two ways of looking at the one thing, as Spinoza did. On that account the idea of the mental causing the physical or the physical causing the mental is merely a category error.
Exactly...the reductionists seek to analyze the physical in terms of the mental (idealism) or the mental in terms of the physical (eliminative physicalism). Tendentious thinking prevails on both sides.
I am still not sure what position this is supposed to be. Plantinga's attack is aimed squarely at the "evolutionary naturalist," and Hoffman would be its first victim if it had any merit. What is it that Hoffman is arguing against?
This is not a valid argument. Not really even an argument at all. All you've done is call my idea names (post-modern) and complain how it is causing the end of civilization. And the comment that "philosophers have always been concerned with capital T Truth" is irrelevant. There's nothing substantive for me to respond to.
As I see it, it is reasonable to believe our cognitive functions result from the development of biological/neurological structures resulting from biological evolution. I also believe it is reasonable to call into question the mind-independence of the objects of cognition. I don't see any conflict between these beliefs.
Quoting Wayfarer
Thanks for the history lesson. That's a serious comment.
An interesting thought. I'd never thought of it that way.
This makes sense to me.
Well said.
Quoting Apustimelogist
A biosemiotician would agree that every organism would have its own umwelt. There is as much evolutionary variety right there as we would expect. Some of us are dichromats, and some trichromats. Evolution can decide the better fit over time. And indeed, as troops of stoneage foragers, there is the argument that evolution favoured an active mix as dichromats can detect food sources from a greater distance, while trichomats do a better job at nimbly processing them up close.
But then as to a general rule of coupling, we can argue for the Bayesian Brain and its optimisation principle. The best way to be coupled to an environment is one that minimises information uncertainty about environmental constraints on negentropic action. Or in other words, to be able to see through to the behaviours that ensure the repair and replication of the embodied organism.
What prompted me to start this thread was actually this video:
https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=physics+sabrine+did+science+prove+reality+doesn%27t+exist&mid=1E32ADFE1C5F389044B81E32ADFE1C5F389044B8&FORM=VIRE
It got me thinking about the general subject and I remembered what I had read and discussed about Hoffman in the past. He seems to require noumena in order to have something to interface with.. I hate these computer analogies. They are so divorced from nature and reality. That's my first objection. As to your argument, Hoffman doesn't says "let's ASSUME reality is real" and allow it to lead to a contradiction. He starts where we all start, and where the scientists in the above video also start, with the reality we've known about ever since our minds have been able to cognize. He is really saying, with language, that reality is real and then tries to show "oh but not really". It's clearly a "strange loop" (do you know the book?) that leads to an explosion of logic after which he merely assumes that reality should be treated the same way it was before it was considered non-real. At least that's how I understand his thesis. I apologive if I misunderstand him.
George Berkeley claimed that his book on vision had proven that matter doesn't exist. But you have to start with the eye, looking at an eye with your very eyes. So he is clearly wrong. You would have to try to prove the world doesn't exist from purely speculative methods, and not by starting with empirical data
Interestingly, Hoffman has a video with Deepak on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbYgh1nal5o&list=PLdrUeeBIMbrLHXpDx7Oq-8lSKq5-0qOnS
Learning to use is not quite the same as inventing. Was the law of the excluded middle invented by us, or was it discerned? Would it be something that is true in all possible worlds?
Theres also the mereological fallacy, the attribution to parts that which is an attribute of the whole. Brains dont do anything, rather agents make judgements.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Of course organisms must respond appropriately to their environments but most organisms are able to do that without the exercise of reason. Walruses and whelks have gotten along for millions of years without it. So theres nothing there that is in conflict with what Hoffman is saying. The claim is that our cognition is conditioned by adaptation to see in terms of what is useful from the perspective of evolution, not what is true. So - what is true? What does the word even refer to? Well, thats a question that neither walruses nor whelks can ask. Whereas we can ask it, and the answer matters to us.
Yes, there is a dualism there. Causal closure is defined in terms of a sort of mental/physical dualism where only the physical is causally efficacious. That's one of the things that I think is wrong with it.
Does a dual aspect theory avoid this problem? I am not sure. For one, it seems hard to have dual aspect theories without panpsychism, but even if you have pansychism you have to explain why, if everything experiences, our minds end up being discrete and 'bound to our bodies' in the way they appear to be. And the question of psychophysical harmony remains completely unaddressed.
Sure, but this leaves the problem of psychophysical harmony completely unaddressed. So you have all the same problems.
I asked this in the other thread. How exactly does Spinoza's conception demonstrate why the experiences produced by our bodies should synch up with the evolutionary history of our perceptual organs? If everything has an experiential/mental side to it, why is our phenomenological horizon rooted to our body in the way it seems to be? Shouldn't half my brain and the surrounding air make up its own physical system with a concious dual aspect, or the same for 4 people in a room? If all physical systems have this dual aspect, how does anesthesia or a drop in blood pressure wipe this away for us? Why is the experiential side of this dual aspect "just so" so as to make the experience side match the physical side? What's the relation between the two? How could such a position ever be verified or supported empirically? It seems very "God of the gaps," to me.
I don't think this is a silver bullet at all. All the same problems remain.
Have you read the book? I feel like it sort of gets misrepresented in reviews because the argument really doesn't come into focus until the last chapter. Hoffman's point is an argument about a certain, fairly dominant form of naturalism that imports Kantian dualism into "science." This view is ultimately self-refuting in just the sort of way Plantinga is talking about, although Hoffman provides much more empirical support for his claims. If you've only read his earlier "desktop interface" papers (which have the benefit of being free), I think it's easy to miss how Hoffman's ideas have changed pretty radically, even if he uses the old arguments to prove the new thesis.
Hoffman thinks the only way to avoid this is a sort of objective idealism with agents baked in from the start"agential realism." This solution is not very convincing IMO. The argument that the sort of semi-Kantian representationalist soup dominant in modern cognitive science is self-refuting is, IMHO, quite strong (and plenty of people other than Hoffman have attacked it, for example the enactivist view counters other elements of it).
Nothing wrong with reductionist analysis as such (A is nothing other than B) - that is the most common type of explanation, particularly in science. Where ephiphenomenalism goes disastrously wrong is in a mistaken application of the causal exclusion principle. It is like saying that if you are putting one foot in front of the other, then you cannot also be walking, and if you are walking, then you cannot also be fetching a glass.
Eliminativist positions sometimes succumb to this type of error, but not all eliminativism is necessarily wrongheaded - it just needs to be properly motivated. Merely having an alternative explanation is not enough, you need to show that it is superior in every respect, and that can be a tall order.
:up:
I agree on the type of error involved. I disagree on the track record of reductionism. How many true reductions do we have? Thermodynamics and statistical mechanics is the canonical example, but it is a rare example. 120 or so years on, the basics of molecular structure in chemistry has yet to be reduced to physics. Reductions are not common. Unifications, the explanation of diverse phenomena via an overarching general principle are far more common. For example, complexity studies explains disparate phenomena like earthquakes and heart beats via a similar underlying mathematics. But of course this does not say that heart beats or earthquakes are "nothing but," the math they share in common. Yet it seems to me that unifications are very often misunderstood as reductions.
That and facts about composition is misunderstood as a reduction. To be sure, all cells are made from molecules. All molecules are made from atoms. This isn't a reduction. You can't predict how a molecule works from theory in physics, you need all sorts of ad hoc empirically derived inputs for it to work. The method of reductionism is fine, but it's not the only successful method either. Unification is as successful, if not more. But when reduction becomes an ontological assumption, I think it leads to problems. For one, you get the elevation of parts over wholes, the idea that wholes must be "nothing but" their parts.
Prima facie, there is no reason to believe that smallism, the idea that all facts about large things must be reducible to facts about smaller entities, and that smaller = more fundamental, is true. A sort of bigism where parts are only definable in terms of the wholes of which they are a part actually seems more common in physics by my reckoning.
But I think the error you identify is directly related to smallism and reductionism. The justification for the causal closure principle is normally that minds are "nothing but" brains/bodies, and the brains and bodies are "nothing but" atoms and their constituent particles. Particles are the smallest structure and thus most fundemental. Everything is "nothing but" these, and so everything is describable in terms of their interactions. This makes all other causal explanations duplicative. At best they are a form of data compression. And so this makes motive irrelevant and conciousness epiphenomenal.
Of course, were this true, it would make conciousness a sort of bizarre physical phenomena. Where else in nature would such epiphenomna exist? You'd have a physical property of a system (conciousness) that only has causation going in one direction. Everywhere else all properties are causally efficacious. This explanation still seems to rely on a sort of sui generis conciousness and dualism of sorts.
I don't think you've misunderstood me, but you may have misunderstood physicalism. A theory of consciousness should ideally be able to specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for a thing to be conscious, and explain why those conditions result in/constitute/realise consciousness. A physicalist theory, if it is to have any force, must specify the sufficient conditions, that is, what conditions necessitate consciousness, and explain why. Otherwise it's more of a speculative possibility than a theory with persuasive force.
To question the mind-independence of a thing, is to suppose the possibility of that thing without a mind.
To even state an affirmative belief presupposes the validity of each and every conception, and their non-contradictory relation to each other, which constitutes the judgement such belief represents.
If the major function of a mind is pure thought, and the major contribution of pure thought is cognition, and the product of any cognition is an object, albeit of a particular kind, how can it be reasonable to believe objects of cognition may be possible without a mind?
Perhaps the stated belief is intended to indicate an affirmative questioning of mind-independence in general, of which objects of cognition are merely a part. But there is nothing in that form of belief that is sufficient to suggest contingently on the one hand, or prove necessarily on the other, that the belief is not itself a mind-dependent object of cognition.
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It is reasonable to question mind-independence in any degree, with respect to any supposed mind-related function, iff it is possible to question mind itself outside and apart from the glaring self-contradiction of having to use mind in order to deny the very possibility of whatever functionality is supposed as belonging to it.
In the interest of fair play, I can still ask how it is that you think it reasonable to question the mind-independence of objects of cognition, given the mutually agreeable presupposition that objects of Nature are not what is meant by objects of cognition.
Yes, either by a theory or by redefining these things as experiential.
Yes, I agree with this description!
I don't think this is true, although I admit I'm not sure what it means. What does it mean for a theory to specify what conditions necessitate consciousness or any other phenomenon? What does it mean that a theory has force or is robust? Why must a theory specify what conditions are necessary for a phenomenon rather than just sufficient?
No, the opposite. Or did I say it wrong? Or did I misunderstand what you wrote? To clarify what I'm trying to say, I think reality is the result of the interaction between the physical world and our minds.
Quoting Mww
I don't think the major function of a mind is pure thought and I don't think cognition is produced primarily by pure thought. For that matter, I don't really think pure thought exists. Or maybe I just don't understand what it is.
Quoting Mww
Is belief a mind-dependent object of cognition?... Yes, I guess it is.
Quoting Mww
I don't see any contradiction. Are you saying a mind cannot think about itself? I can use a camera to take a picture of itself if I have a mirror.
Quoting Mww
Ah, now I see the problem. When I quoted Wayfarer I misunderstood "objects of cognition" as "objects of nature." Now that we've straightened that out, I do think objects of cognition are objects of cognition. After all, objects of cognition are also objects of nature.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, I would say that such rules and understandings are directly enacted within our experience. And so, just as we are unable to present a perspective-independent view of objects beyond our immediate experience, there is no perspective-independent view of such matters like the law of excluded middle. What can be ascertained is that we learn to enact these notions in various ways in our experience. Are possible worlds much more than a way of making sense of how the mind can generate imaginings we think of as counterfactuals?
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, agents abilities of doing anything corresponds to the brain's ability to do anything. You may say that what we call the brain is something like a model constructed in experience; but nonetheless, an objective world exists, and we can think of this objective reality as having the kinds of degrees of freedom we consider to be the case in the structure of the brains we observe, down to the level of ions crossing membrane barriers.
An agent can't make judgements without a brain, and messing with an agent's brain will mess with ita judgements.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't see the relevance. You wouldn't consider a damage in someone's reasoning (e.g. due to non-perception-related brain damage) changing the status of how veridical their perceptions are, would you?
Quoting Wayfarer
I think my position is not to argue about some single notion of veridicality, or objective truth - If, there is in principle no perspective-independent way that organisms can view and interact with the world perceptually, then such a notion is undermined in the sense that organisms simply cannot pick out such single "veridical" perspective even if there is an actual objective way the world is independently of our perception in principle (very difficult to see how this isnt the case from my perspective).
We are just directly aquainted with experiences, our cognitive faculties and abilities enacted within the flow of experiences. "Truth" is just a word used in conjunction with our abilities and faculties within experience, the ability to (fallibly) use the word then also related to assumptions or contingencies within the perspective. This is not relativism because I am just talking about the use of the word and related abilities. No fact of the matter about reference being assumed here.
However, I guess what gripes me about Hoffman is statements like this:
"Just as the color and shape of an icon for a text file do not entail that the text file itself has a color or shape, so also our perceptions of space-time and objects do not entail (by the Invention of Space-Time Theorem) that objective reality has the structure of space-time and objects."
Seems to imply to me that what I perceive is radically different in structure to the actual objective world. But in my story about the actual objective world, if coherent perception is to work effectively by mapping consistently to actual structures of the world so that we can get payoffs, then in some sense it must be the case that our perceptions are still mapping to an embedded subset of the objective of the world with that structure. At the same time, we can manifest synchrony to other parts of the actual world via extending our perceptual abilities with scientific technology and build scientific models.
Still, there may be no single perspective-independent way for an organism to map states or draw boundaries onto the world or particular subset - a compromise, as said before (And can we actually ascertain an objective fact of the matter about perceptual reference from within our perspectives? An even deeper question perhaps). Is there more to successful perception than how our effective our sensory-motor loops seem to be (predicting which perceptions come next or acting appropriately)?
I'll see if I can explain with a simple example (it has to be simple because I don't know much science):
To what temperature do I have to heat this water to get it to boil? Prediction: it will boil at 100 degrees provided the following necessary conditions are met:
- sea level atmospheric pressure
- and all the obvious ones like having a heat source and a container that conducts heat etc
...when all these necessary conditions are met they will be jointly sufficient for the water to boil at 100 degrees. That is to say that even if one of the necessary conditions are not met then the water will not boil, and if all the necessary condition are met, they are jointly sufficient, which means the water MUST boil at 100 degrees. It can't not.
Further, a theory which tells a story about pressure and temperature of different materials and states of matter and so on will then explain why we get the result we do, and will be flexibly able to predict the phase changes of different materials under different circumstances, and that's how we test it: we make a bunch of predictions and then do the experiments. The theory will spit out the necessary and sufficient conditions for each phase change.
Applied to consciousness, a well-fleshed out theory will tell us the necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness to arise at all, and perhaps even go further and tell us what particular experiences a conscious thing will feel under what circumstances. So to take @apokrisis preferred theory, the necessary conditions for x to be conscious are:
- models environment
- makes predictions based on that model
- for the purpose of building and maintaining itself as an organism (sorry if I got that wrong)
...and I presume these are taken to be jointly sufficient for consciousness. That is to say, if they are all met, x is most definitely conscious, it can't not be. (It wouldn't be much of a theory if they weren't jointly sufficient. That would be like saying "Water needs to be at atmospheric pressure at sea level before it will boil at 100 degree, but sometimes it just doesn't, even when those conditions are met. Water is weird like that." That's an incomplete theory, no? It fails to predict.")
So @apokrisis preferred theory makes a great reasonably clear prediction, because it specifies the necessary and sufficient conditions. The trouble it shares with all theories of consciousness is that we can't test it. We can use it to predict a human being is capable of being conscious, and predict a rock isn't. But we can't check, because we don't have a consciousness-o-meter. And if we use the theory to check, (i.e. we look to see if the organism models the world to make predictions in order to create and maintain itself as an organism) then we have just assumed the thing we are trying to show.
EDIT: this is why I keep asking variations of "So why can't that happen without consciousness?" The analogy with water is "Why can't water just stay unboiled at 100 degrees at sea level pressure?" And of course the theory answers that, it says why the jointly sufficient conditions necessitate that the water be boiling. It's not enough for a good theory to merely observe that water does in fact always boil at 100 degrees. There needs to be an explanation. And the situation with consciousness is even worse, we can't even agree on what to observe to detect the presence of consciousness - we don't even have an undisputed regularity of nature to explain. If we did have a consciousness-o-meter, that would give us a huge head start in developing a theory. We do have reports of human beings and the inference to other minds by abduction, that's a start, but it only tells us other humans are likely conscious, it tells us nothing about rocks (not without making a bunch of assumptions anyway).
There is certainly a relation to Plato, Hegel, and Wallace, but they are also very different from Hoffman's ideas in a lot of ways (particularly his "interface theory" stuff, which is very representationalist and Kantian). The idea of the mind "constructing reality" isn't one I find in the Plato, or the classical tradition more broadly for the most part. To be sure, "[I]quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur,[/I]"whatever is received is received according to the manner of the receiver,"but this doesn't have the Kantian implications that Hoffman's descriptions of the interface theory of perception do. Mind is never separated from nature. Rather, the two are part of a nuptial whole. Being and being known are two sides of the same coin (this might come through most clearly in Plotinus).
Hoffman's agential realism can't get away from the modern tendency towards reductionism and smallism. So ultimately he has the world of experience composed from very many less complex, part-like agential atoms. It's pretty far from Plato or Hegel, who have the idea that ideas/concepts are "more fully real," in that there is necessity behind their being what they are, whereas something like a rock, while obviously real in a sense, is just a bundle of external causes.
To quote Eric Perl's Thinking Being on the distinction:
* The quote here is from Robert Sokolowski's Introduction to Phenomenology.
So I think Hoffman helps us by making a good case for why a certain sort of thinking is self-refuting, but then he can't really get himself away from the bad elements of this way of thinking himself.
It probably deserves its own thread, but different ideas of "mind-independence," matter here.
For the classical tradition, there is no "mind-independent being," and I think they have a strong case for this based on the way they define "mind-independence." The paradigmatic formulation here is Parmenides' "the same is for thinking as for being." So the argument goes, even if there was truly "mind-independent being," one could not philosophize about it or speak of it. By the very act of speaking of it or thinking about it one has already given lie to its "mind-independence." If it can be thought of then a relationship between it and mind exists. This does not exclude what is super-intelligible, infinite being, but it does include the unintelligible.
Now, when moderns talk about "mind-independent" being they are generally bringing in a whole load of metaphysical assumptions alien to the earlier period. The "mind-independence" here is sometimes framed as a causal one. "The mind doesn't create the world; looking at things doesn't make them spring into existence." This point is made a lot, but it's a little strange because I know of no one who ever argued that looking at things makes them exist. But I think we end up here because of the modern division between subject and object, and the division between primary qualities that exist "out there" "in objects themselves," and secondary qualities (e.g. color or taste) that are said to only emerge in interactions between objects and minds. And this is also where "mind's constructing/generating" the world comes in. Now that we have assumed subject/object dualism, we find ourselves having to assign parts of reality to either one or the other (and this is the road to C.S. Lewis' "bloated subject," the sui generis source of all truth, goodness, and beauty).
Well, I don't think this distinction is a very good one. The fact is, to be epistemologically accessible and to make any difference at all, [I]any[/I] property has to involve interaction. The positing of "properties 'in-themselves'" as set against "properties that exist in interaction," seems like a bad move. To be sure, apples only "look red," when someone sees them, but they also only "reflect wave lengths of light associated with red," when they are in the light. Likewise salt only dissolves in water when placed in water, and when photons do anything at all they can be said to be interacting, etc. All properties involve some sort of interaction, some sort of relationship, so relationships involving minds are hardly unique in this.
For much of ancient and medieval philosophy, created things only exist within a web of relations. They are, in some sense, defined by how they relate to everything else. Part of what makes a key a key is the context of a lock for example. Something can only reflect yellow light because there is light in our world, etc. And this is crucial for the differences in how mind-independence is approached.
Common modern examples of "mind independent realities," might be "the early galaxies before life formed." But clearly these are not mind independent in the ancient sense. We think about these things. We can see evidence of them. We think the formation of the galaxies and even the state of the earliest moments of the universe are causally connected to our own surroundings and our own being. So they aren't mind-independent at all. To get the "mind-independence" of modern thought you need to have already, perhaps unknowingly, started with some metaphysical assumptions about relationships, reductionism, the subject/object distinction, etc.
Or, I misunderstood what you wrote. I took ..
Quoting T Clark
..as characterizing objects of cognition as already being mind-independent, which is possible if objects of cognition and objects of Nature are treated alike. If one thinks they cannot be treated alike, then questioning the mind-independence of objects of cognition is perfectly reasonable, insofar as it is impossible they are, while the questioning the mind-independence of objects of Nature, is not reasonable insofar as it is impossible they are not.
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Quoting T Clark
Theres a movie, 2011, The Sunset Limited, where the entire cast consisting of only these two rather excellent actors Jones and Jackson, engage in a pure Socratic dialectic, involving all sorts of one-idea/proposition-leads-to another kinda stuff, attempts by the one to get the other to concede a point, using premises without mutually granted relevance.
Surely you see where Im going with this.
Anyway .hopefully the original confusion is cleared.
The boiling point of water was determined empirically. I'm not sure if it can be determined by theory. I looked on the web and couldn't find a definitive answer.
Quoting bert1
This isn't a theory, it's a definition.
Quoting bert1
As I noted, this is not a theory, it's a standard you apply to an existing phenomenon to decide if it is living.
When I said "objects of cognition", I was quoting Wayfarer incorrectly. He meant it the way you do.
Quoting Mww
I'd never head of it. I'll take a look.
You won't find @apokrisis theory in a dictionary. It's not what we mean by 'consciousness'.
And yet in practice, there are procedures developed by neurologists to determine brain death in hospital situations.
Brain scans can tell if you are thinking about tools or animals. Whether you are day dreaming or focused. Happy or in pain. Not yet an exact science and may never be, but further along than you seem to suggest.
Also you arent allowing for how theory would actually be structured to account for consciousness.
The Bayesian Brain is a high level theory of biosemiosis. It covers life and mind in a general fashion as enactive modelling relations. If correct, the story would have to apply to any life or mind that appears anywhere in the universe.
To then look inside your head as a human, with a modelling relation that has an architecture shaped by both its neurobiological and sociocultural habits, is then a very low level exercise. There is the particular way mammalian brains are structured into modules that specialise in different aspects of the world model. There is the everyday random way that what you had for breakfast might be playing on your mind as your belly grumbles.
A scientist might have a theory about whether you had a typical brain architecture - and make predictions about your possible neurodiversity based on that - but a theory about random thoughts that might arise is not really what you ought to expect. The measuring process to achieve that - the control over your life and experiences up to that date - might be considered a little too intrusive for that to be a desirable exercise.
So you are coming at what science can be expected to do in a simple-minded fashion. Your demands are epistemically naive. Science isnt magic. Theories are themselves woven into hierarchical frameworks that serve pragmatic interests. Knowledge is knowledge when it is organised to cope with the general to the degree that generality is useful, and the particular to the degree that can matter as well.
That is why - to understand the mind from a neurocognitive viewpoint - there is first so much to learn. There is no one answer to the question you have - give me a theory that tells me both what consciousness is and also why I am experiencing exactly what I am experiencing right now. A theory that collapses the general and the particular, and which is somehow then useful to anyone.
But notice here the assumed perspective that our perception is limited to that of being an organism. Its inherently reductionist, as if a biological analysis of the relation between organism and environment is the only meaningful perspective on the question of truth. But I question that h.sapiens is simply an organism, in fact I wonder if this is one of the prejudices introduced into modern culture by popular Darwinism.
For example, in Aristotle reason (logos) was more than just a tool for survival; it was the capacity to grasp rational truths and to understand the fundamental principles of logic, ethics, and metaphysics. For Aristotle, reason is a fundamental aspect of the human soul (psyche), specifically the rational soul, which is what distinguishes humans from other animals. (I might also add that it introduces the existential plight of the awareness of death and loss although thats not made explicit in Aristotle.)
Aristotle posited that reason has an intrinsic orientation towards truth - man desires to know. It is through the faculty of reason that we can discern the forms (in the Aristotelian sense as the essence of things). In this context, reason is not merely a byproduct of evolution geared towards survival, but a natural capacity aimed at understanding the world as it truly is. Now, of course many aspects of Aristotelian philosophy such as his physics have been superseded but I believe the doctrine of the rational soul is not among them.
Quoting Apustimelogist
In Chapter Three of Hoffman's book he discusses a dialogue he had with Francis Crick about the Kantian distinction between appearance and things in themselves, but I think he's suggesting that Crick misconstrues the nature of his distinction. Crick believed that the object 'as it is in itself' is simply the same object that our perceptions represent but existing unperceived. However, I think that is nearer to what Kant refers to as 'transcendental realism'. I don't think it correctly grasps the somewhat radical nature of what Kant was claiming. You have in mind the world (or object) that you think is there anyway irrespective of whether you consider it or not. Its not so simple.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Capital T Truth. Its the provenance of the sages who were at the origin of the Western philosophical tradition, such as Parmenides. Google the book Timothy mention above Eric D Perl, Thinking Being - some kindly soul has posted a PDF copy online.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Right, exactly correct. The formulation of idealism that Ive explained in mind-created world discusses this misapprehension of idealism as things springing into and out of existence, nevertheless it is exactly what Im accused of suggesting whenever I raise it. But I think the over-arching issue of objects, subjects and their relations is unique to the modern period. And it comes from the attempt to treat the whole of existence as an object of scientific scrutiny. As phenomenology points out, and this was its unique insight, reality itself is not something were outside of or apart from (an insight shared with non-dualism.) Whereas the modern period is marked by a new sense of self-consciousness, the Cartesian ego who can only be certain of his own existence, the intelligent subject confronting a world of dumb matter.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Exactly, because the world was the expression of a will, not simply dumb matter being acted upon by physical forces. Existence was participatory in that through religious mythology and ritual we re-enact and participate in creation. We had yet to see ourselves as pieces of flotsam thrown up by what basically amounts to a highly sophisticated chemical reaction, Stephen Hawkings chemical scum.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
You articulate exactly the themes Ive been exploring ever since joining this forum and its predecessor. Whiteheads unconscious metaphysics in science.
I havent got to the final chapter of Hoffmans book yet, but Ill keep going with it.
This is no doubt part of it, but it seems to me that the issue goes down to the very basics of metaphysics, with two ideas. The first is the idea of things' properties emerging from arelational properties that exist and subsist "in-themselves," making the world reducible to "building blocks" with things simply "being what they are made of." This view has been attacked from a number of perspectives and I think Hegelians, Thomists, and contemporary process philosophers all give good reasons to reject it. The other view is representationalism, the idea that all we know is our own ideas or experiences, and I think this idea also has very strong points against it. The first idea is still going strong. The second is finally showing signs of breaking down. Perhaps I am too optimistic, but representationalism finally seems to be losing credibility in the philosophy and science of perception, and this will trickle down into the mainstream if the trend continues.
I don't think these positions even necessarily go hand in hand with a "disenchanted naturalism," and certainly they don't go hand in hand with science. Rather, the first is just a bad inference from the assignment of values to "objects themselves" in early modern mathematical physics, with people mistaking the shape of their mathematical model for the structure reality, and the second is due to early modern philosophers being rather poor students of the scholastics and missing their careful distinctions vis-á-vis the role ideas play in sign relations (in part because the late nominalists got very sloppy about this distinction at times and these were the folks more likely to be read in the early modern period, in part due to sectarian prejudices).
I sort of see this more as a historical accident than any necessary connection between technological progress and the methods of science and this particular (bad) brand of metaphysics. The other factor I see at work is the "anti-metaphysical movement," which has slowed the reappraisal of "primary versus secondary property" distinctions and smallism/building block ontologies. This sort of metaphysics has been allowed to remain part of a "default view," largely because of the intentional and dogmatic push to sideline metaphysics and discredit it more generally, which is of course itself just a particularly pernicious brand of metaphysics and philosophy of science (at least as I see it).
Sorry, I don't really understand the question. That said, even in the absence of understanding the question I can ask why they should not "sync up". Also, Spinoza as I read him does not claim that "everything has an experiential side to it". If you want to explore that thought take a look at Whitehead's Process and Reality.
So for example, the epiphenomenalist might say consciousness does no work, just "goes along for the ride", so to speak, but that would be an illegitimate elimination of one reasonable way of explaining human behavior. I think what puzzles people is that we cannot combine the two explanations or achieve any absolute perspective which would eliminate one and retain the other. 'Either/ or' thinking seems to generally dominate the human mind.
Well this is all just so antithetical to my viewpoint that I don't even have a response, ha.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, I am not suggesting that - we cannot conceive things in a way that steps out of our own perspectives. But I am suggesting a story about an actual objective world and how it would relate to the organism, and it seems less radical than what I interpret Hoffman as saying. Maybe though on some ways its more radical. Hoffman's seems to be saying that the structure of space-time and objects can be different to what we perceive. But if there is not one way for an organism to latch onto structure in the world, to draw distinctions, then is there a fact of the matter that the structure we perceive is different to actual structure? If we are latching onto the world in consistent ways that allow us to navigate it effectively then is there much difference? Seems to me Hoffman would have to show that there is some preferential absolute perspective in which one can view the world in order to show that our perceptions are radically different from it.
Maybe though, all he means is different in the sense of how a whelks perceptions would be radically different from a humans because it lacks sophisticated perceptual faculties. But this doesn't seem as radical as his ideas are made out to be. And obviously, science can always extend those faculties.
Is that the definition of "definition" - what is included in a dictionary? Would definition of "definition" be included in a dictionary? Apokrisis theory might be found in a technical dictionary of psychology. So, anyway, let's change "definition" to "description." Is that better?
Quoting bert1
It's not what is meant by "consciousness" in everyday speech, maybe. Is this what we mean by "life?"
Quoting Wikipedia - Life
As far as I can see, that's the same level of description we're talking about.
Is " a system is conscious if and only if it models its environment and makes predictions based on that model" a robust theory of consciousness? This theory could no more be used to create an artificial consciousness than the Wikipedia description could be used to create artificial life. I don't see how this would be any more capable of telling us how experience arises than one based on biology and neurology. I also don't see why this could not develop by naturalistic evolution.
Sorry, I was really asking about the neutral monism and dual aspect theories in general; I was only thinking of Spinoza in the first question. A common problem I've seen for dual aspect theories in particular is they have no explanation for why panpsychism shouldn't be the case given the starting presuppositions.
The reply: "why shouldn't it work just so?" is essentially defaulting on an explanation, no? One could give the same sort of explanation for all manner of competing theories as well. We have a contingent fact supported by no sufficient reason.
For example, you could use the same sort of explanation to support Integrated Information Theory instead. Why do some sorts of information processing feel a certain way? Why do some forms of information processing result in first person perspective and other's don't? Why do these result in a phenomenological horizon centered on a specific body? "Why shouldn't it?" or "it just does," is not a compelling answer. If there is no "why should it?" answer for a contingent fact, then isn't "why shouldn't it be false or some other way?" is just as strong of a position as "why shouldn't it be true?"
I think the mental explanation is usually downgraded because it is assumed that the physical can be predicted with mathematical certainty, whereas "thirst" and such cannot be represented mathematically in a direct fashion. The mental explanation becomes completely superfluous because the physical explanation explains everything, at least in terms of predicting behavior.
The explanatory power only goes in one direction, the physical explaining the mental. All behavior can be explained and predicted in terms of physics (according to the reductionists). But a purely mental explanation doesn't tell us about the physical with any great degree of accuracy, nor does it have the same predictive power. If mental states are multiply realizable, which seems quite possible, then the physical is undetermined by the mental, whereas the mental is uniquely determined by the physical.
I only brought it up, cuz I flashed on that being us, if your, After all, objects of cognition are also objects of nature., happened to occassion an argument, because ..a-HEM, obvious to the most casual observer ..they are not.
All in the good spirit of my ol buddy Renes method for rightly conducting reason and seeking truth in the sciences, donchaknow.
Have you seen "My Dinner with Andre?" Two guys talking for an hour and a half. It's a movie I enjoyed, although the philosophy discussed is a little goofy.
:up:
Right.
"Truly see reality" is the legacy of naive r realism. You can reject naive realism while maintaining this concept as an impossible standard. That is how we don't "truly see reality". If naive realism is thoroughly abandoned, then "truly seeing reality" is visions and heuristics, when they reasonably correlate with real features. Anything beyond this is a naive realist fantasy.
Does it though? For a perception to be fit, it must correlate to truth in some way. Pure hallucination cannot do an organism any good
Though the same cannot be said of ideas. Some ideas might be perfectly false, and yet have fitness value.
This conflates reduction and prediction. No one can or will predict the steady state behavior of Conway's Game of Life from it's initial state. Yet no one denys the reduction of that behavior to the very simple rules.
No, I'd heard of Hoffman's "interface theory," but was discouraged by the largely dismissive reaction of the professional community and didn't invest more time in him. The point to which you are referring remains obscure to me.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I wasn't talking about some grand inter-theoretical Reductionist programme, but of the general form of reductive explanation, which is prevalent in science and elsewhere. The idea is to explain something in terms of something else - reduce it to something else. This could mean identifying the principal causes of a concrete event or a mechanism behind a class of observations.
When Newton proposed a theory that explained a large class of dynamical observations, he thereby gave them a reductive explanation. The motion of a cannonball as it accelerates towards the earth is nothing but the action of the gravitational force in Newton's dynamics. He also reduced Kepler's theory of planetary motion to his own theory - that is an example of unification via reduction. (The example that you give is not unification, as there is no common theory - just a structural similarity across unrelated domains. Such mathematical similarities are commonplace - after all, we don't usually have to invent new math for every new problem.)
But the above is a singular example. I was thinking more of reductive explanations that we make all the time: A happened because of B or A functions by way of B. Even if we are talking specifically about inter-theoretic reductions, on a smaller scale, they are commonplace in science. For example, mechanical properties of materials that are taken as data in dynamics and statics are being explained in (reduced to) materials science, chemistry and solid-state physics.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Identifying composition can be a crucial step towards a reductive explanation. Because we know generic properties of many materials, knowing what something is made from can tell us a lot about that thing, reducing some of its properties to those of the materials that compose it. We are not talking about a complete reduction though, except in trivial instances.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Causal closure does not imply epiphenomenalism, unless you interpret it too broadly (i.e., not the way it is usually understood). One could believe that the world is closed under fundamental physics, but that does not automatically imply that everything else, such as consciousness (or chemistry), is causally inert. It just doesn't have a place in the explanatory framework of fundamental physics, and if you put it there by hand, then you would have causal overdetermination. But alternative explanatory frameworks can coexist without conflict. Consciousness (and chemistry) could still take place in a world that is closed under fundamental physics, but you would need other means than physics to identify and describe mental (chemical) phenomena qua mental (chemical) phenomena.
He doesnt say that perceptions are hallucinations per se. See this interview. As Ive said above, Hoffmans is really an argument against cognitive realism, but calling the book The Case Against Reality is more dramatic.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Chapter 6 of the book is called Spacetime is Doomed. There are many interviews with Hoffman arguing this. Of course many think hes entirely mistaken.
My interpretation is that space and time are real, but they rely on an irreducibly subjective element. Why? Because, what can space be without scale? and time without duration? Both of these entail perspective, and perspective is what the observer brings. (I think this is also consistent with Kants analysis.)
Ive mentioned a controversial paper by another scientist, Andre Linde, whos a heavy hitter in the physics community, as the principle author of inflationary theory. He annoys a lot of his colleagues by saying things like:
Again, I think dead is overly dramatic. I think formless and meaningless would be closer to the mark.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Excellent analysis as always. This passage from an essay on Whitehead makes the same point:
My view is that Descartes rendering of substance as thinking thing was a fundamental mistake in modern philosophy, as it objectifies the subject, as a kind of ethereal essence. That is the mistake that phenomenology sought to rectify
I also wonder whether there might be a resemblance between Hoffmans conscious agents all the way down and Whiteheads actual occasions of experience, but Ive never really understood that aspect of Whiteheads philosophy.
How about the following?
Because some forms of information processing occur in embodied systems with sensorimotor interaction with the environment. This results in the development of intuitions (deep learning) 'centered' on that specific body.
This seems backwards.
Of course you can predict Life, or anything similar. You could do it with a pencil and paper, just apply the rules and go step by step. You can predict any instance of Life by inputting the starting conditions and running it forward, computation works as well here as for calculating orbits of billiard balls bouncing off one another.
But an instance of Life isn't just the rules of the game. It isn't even the rules plus the initial conditions. It's the entire process of the instance run forwardcomputation is inheritly processual.
Something like this seems plausible, but it doesn't seem to me to do much as an actual explanation. Why are some systems conscious? Well, it isn't just that they are adaptive or respond to the environment. A thermostat ticks those boxes. So we say it is because they have "sensorimotor" interactions. Well, here the term we are using for an explanation contains "sensory." We've explained which systems experience in terms of those systems having a sensory (i.e., experiential) component. "It experiences because it has experiential interactions."
Wouldn't this be a bit like the old "opium causes sleep because it has a hypnotic (sleep causing) property?"
. if we take away the subject or even the subjective constitution of our senses in general, then not only the nature and relations of objects in space and time, but even space and time themselves disappear. (A42/B59)
But only in theory, on the subset of starting conditions that can actually be solved. Some may only reach a steady state after trillions of iterations. Some may never. But the only way to know is to actually do the simulation. No law can predict it in the absence of simulation.
Maybe a cleaner example is the halting problem. There is no way to predict wherever a program will eventually halt. But this in no way implies that the behavior of a program is not reducable to it's instructions.
I think (weak) emergence is the concept here.
I'd suggest that some systems are conscious because they are in an ongoing process of melding incoming sensory information with what arises from deep learning, into a model of whatever aspect of the world the system is conscious of as a result of such modeling and model monitoring. Yes, we are talking about something vastly more complex than a thermostat.
:up:
Yes, although this would also hold true for all sorts of deterministic physical systems or chaotic functions, so long as they don't enter any sort of cycle or steady state. Likewise , if you get enough billiard balls bouncing around and you need a lot of computational power to predict how they will interact. You can't predict Life without doing the computations, but that's also true for all sorts of things.
But I think the more interesting question is if Life, or computation more generally, is reducible to anything else. I don't think it is. Certainly programs can be decomposable, but that doesn't seem like the same thing.
It's sort of like Zeno's paradoxes. There seem to be issues with reducing motion to a series of frozen instants, and the issues Zeno highlights seem applicable to how we think of process more generally.
What makes some information "sensory information?" Doesn't "sensory information" imply conciousness anyhow? Likewise there is the issue of what makes a physical process an "information processing" process and what makes a physical relationship a "modeling relationship?"
One of the challenges for CTM is that [I]all[/I] physical processes can be described as computations or information processing.
The fact that it is information arising from the processing in a neural network which has inputs which are largely the outputs of sensory nerves. (E.g. the optic nerves for vision, the olfactory bulb for smell, whatever nerves carry signals away from the cochleas for hearing.)
Ehhhhh ..not my problem. No one will ever find space by the bucketful, and if you ask a guy for a minute of his time, that is exactly what you wont get.
I've skimmed more of the book, and am reading the concluding chapter. But at this point, I must say I don't really understand it, nor do I like it much. What he's saying seems to be compatible with the idealist type of philosophy that I favour. But I'm really not clear on a lot of it, like what conscious agents are (I no more understand that than Whitehead's 'actual occasions of experience'. )
:up:
I am not sure that epiphenomenalism is all that common in our thinking. Historically, the term itself was coined in the context of mental vs physical, and that is where you will generally encounter it. It was always puzzling to me that those who bring up epiphenomenalism tend to be narrowly focused on the mental/physical divide and don't seem to realize that the same reasoning applies (or fails) across a wide range of theories and explanations.
I don't think @apokrisis meant it as a definition or criterion of demarcation, but of he did then it's of little relevance as an explanation of consciousness.
Perhaps he'll come and set me straight.
While of considerable practical utility, this does not help us with developing a theory of consciousness.
Quoting apokrisis
I have actually heard of that. But these are observations of correlations. There's no theory that explains the relationship in a principled way as far as I am aware.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm not expecting anything of a disembodied 'science'. I'm expecting an explanation of consciousness from people who claim to have one, like you for instance!
Quoting apokrisis
I don't especially require a single theory for both these questions.
What distinguishes brains and computers from the rest of the universe is their universality. Unlike anything else we know, brains and computers can enact the informational processing part of other physical processes, without the physical part. Computers can even enact the information processing of different computers. Or, they can enact purely imaginary informational processes, which have no physical correspondence. They are of course limited by time and energy (computational power), space(memory), and reliability especially in the case of brains, but given those limitations, they are universal. (That said, they are wildly different, specialized for totally different kinds of problems.)
Quoting wonderer1
And yet modern AI does such modelling, presumably without consciousness. I think what makes brains conscious is that they are general informational processors whose interface to the world is the result of the modelling of sensory information you are talking. To brains, as far as they/we are concerned, such models are the subjective plentitudes we experience, they/we are wired to interface with the world in this way. Just as computers run on symbolic logic, our wet "computers" "run" on sensory experiences: we perceive, feel, imagine, and think to ourselves, all of which are fundamentally sensorial. It is these and only these sensations, externally and internally derived, that we are aware of, every other brain process is unconscious to us.
As if you have the expertise to judge.
:up:
I think my criticism of your criticism is that you assume that consciousness is like a discrete thing that just pops up and then disappears under certain circumstances. I don't think there's any evidence for this. What differs non-conscious from conscious things is how they behave as dynamical systems and it doesn't seem to make sense to say that consciousness is some additional thing that pops up on top of that, under pains of a kind of epiphenomenal redundancy (see sections 4.4, 5.3, 7 of Chalmer's Conscious mind for details, full pdf available on internet).
Nice quote from
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=7909771384315425233&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5:
I don't think we can have a theory of consciousness in the way you want, not only because there is no fine line between conscious and non-conscious, but we are simply limited to describing what living things do (or what things we deem as being alive do) and nothing more.
It's a mistake to say that brains do anything - that is what is described in Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience as the 'mereological fallacy', attributing to the part what only a whole is capable of.
Quoting Apustimelogist
That is true, if the scope of knowledge is defined in purely objective terms. But then, you tend to naturally look at philosophical questions through a scientific perspective, don't you? Isn't that why you find Aristotle 'diametrically opposed' to your way of thinking when I've mentioned him? (That link above returns a 404 by the way, due to the inclusion of the ending colon in the URL.)
While this is true, it is not really the point. Recall Hoffman is a cognitive scientist and there are many pages devoted to the question of the neural correlates of consciousness and what is involved in mapping sensory experiences against neural activity. He discusses the split-brain procedures and various neurological anomalies and the nature of optical illusions. But the nub of the issue is this:
[quote=Donald Hoffman, The Case Against Reality]We have no scientific theories that explain how brain activityor computer activity, or any other kind of physical activitycould cause, or be, or somehow give rise to, conscious experience. We dont have even one idea thats remotely plausible. If we consider not just brain activity, but also the complex interactions among brains, bodies, and the environment, we still strike out. Were stuck. Our utter failure leads some to call this the hard problem of consciousness, or simply a mystery. We know far more neuroscience than Huxley did in 1869*. Yet each scientific theory that tries to conjure consciousness from the complexity of interactions among brain, body, and environment always invokes a miracleat precisely that critical point where experience blossoms from complexity. The theories are Rube Goldberg devices that lack a critical domino and need a sneak push to complete the trick.
What do we want in a scientific theory of consciousness? Consider the case of tasting basil versus hearing a siren. For a theory that proposes that brain activity causes conscious experiences, we want mathematical laws or principles that state precisely which brain activities cause the conscious experience of tasting basil, precisely why this activity[ ]
If we propose that brain activity is identical to, or gives rise to, conscious experiences, then we want the same kind of precise laws or principlesthat link each specific conscious experience, such as the taste of basil, with the specific brain activities that it is identical to, or with the specific brain activiies that give rise to it. No such laws or principles have been offered [footnote reference to Integrated Information Theory].
If we propose that conscious experience is identical, say, to certain processes of the brain that monitor other processes, then we need to write down laws or principles that precisely specify these processes and the conscious experiences with which they are identical. If we propose that conscious experience is an illusion arising from some brain processes attending to, monitoring, and describing other brain processes, then we must state laws or principles that precisely specify these processes and the illusions they generate. And if we propose that conscious experiences emerge from brain processes, then we must give the laws or principles that describe precisely when, and how, each specific experience emerges. Until then, these ideas arent even wrong. Hand waves about identity, emergence, or attentional processes that describe other brain processes are no substitute for precise laws or principles that make quantitative predictions.
We have scientific laws that predict black holes, the dynamics of quarks, and the evolution of the universe. Yet we have no clue how to formulate laws, principles, or mechanisms that predict our quotidian experiences of tasting herbs and hearing street noise.[/quote]
______
Quoting Wayfarer
I actually agree with much here albeit probably in a weaker sense than the authors. Sometimes these "fallacies" may be genuinely due to the way people think about these things, sometimes it may just be out of expediency. I guess also how someone views these analyses might depend on their philosophy of mind somewhat.
Quoting Wayfarer
Hopefully fixed now.
Quoting Wayfarer
What are the alternatives? I genuinely can't conceive of any off the top of my head.
This is miracle exactly what my quote from above was arguing against.
Such a thing is impossible imo. What is the limit on experience? I don't see how there is one. You could conceive of infinite kinds of beings that detect different things and are structured in different ways. Surely, you would expect that there is no limit on the kinds of alien experiences things could have if they were structured in the appropriate way to have them. I don't see how mathematical laws could explain this when experiences would scale with the complexity of brute perceptual abilities for some system. A question is whether an information processing system could in principle "explain" to itself its own perceptual abilities introspectively - I highly doubt this.
Right - my point exactly. I think the assumption that objectivity defines the scope of knowledge is what is at issue. I'm not taking a shot at you in particular, I think this is very much the assumed background of the culture we live in. But I also think it's philosophy's task to be critical of that.
Sure. But he has a book to sell, a name to make. There is a social incentive for him to angle his story so as to attract the audience he does.
And it is certainly correct that the neural correlates approach flounders to the degree it represents Cartesian representationalism the story that the brain is somehow generating a "display" of reality.
That way of thinking about the problem of consciousness just bakes in the Hard Problem. It begins with the unbridgeable divide as its premise. A display needs someone looking at it. Experiencing it. Homuncular regress is the only option once you trap yourself into a neuroscience of "mental display".
Which is why enactive and Bayesian approaches are rooted in the notion of semiotic interpretance or an embodied relation, not in Cartesian display.
Do you see the difference? Especially now from the biosemiotic view the one that makes good on Pattee's epistemic cut as an actual level of biological machinery we can see that it ain't all about the "information processing taking place in the firing neurons". Our theory of consciousness has to incorporate the action taking place across the epistemic cut the action at the mechanical interface between "ourselves" and "the world".
At some point the point where the Hard Problem dissolves as some kind of fundamental causal issue you have sensory receptors and muscle effectors coming into the picture.
The neurons of the central nervous system terminate in mechanical switches that are regulating entropic or metabolic flows. The energies of the world are being transduced into information news about the degree to which the world is proving predictable or surprising in terms of the general brain model. The intentions of the mind are likewise being given effect as mechanical actions. Muscles are twitching in coordinated fashion, driven by that same self~world model.
This is the way that cognition is actually embodied. This is how it penetrates the whole body and lives in intimate contact with the actual world. Sure there is all this neural information processing. But then just as real is that there is all this mechanical interfacing going on. And that is where the rubber meets the road.
And who has that theory?
I mean we all know there are motor neurons and sensory receptors. But start looking for the neuroscientists who are getting into the detail of that mechanical interface that epistemic cut in the same fashion that biologists are now getting into the (staggeringly complex and hierarchically organised) interface between the body's genetic information and its frontline molecular machines.
Despite the appeals to semiosis, signs and meaning, C S Peirce, you default to physicalism where it counts. Who or what presses these buttons, and to what end? That is a philosophical problem, not a question of bio-engineering.
His account often mentions, and is compatible with, QBism, which is not the realist theory in the sense that you insist on.
Quoting apokrisis
And that's a blatant ad hom, he's just a shabby opportunist. There are a lot of things I question about his account, but that's not one.
The model does. You have your embodied self-world relation and I have mine.
At a neurobiological level that means you push your buttons and I push mine. But then at a sociocultural level of semiotic order, we get to push each others buttons as we argue over the acceptable community model of our collective reality. :grin:
Quoting Wayfarer
So much the worse then. If he were more focused on the nervous system in terms of its actual mechanical interface with reality, he might instead say something more interesting about how the new discoveries in quantum biology explain stuff like how noses can read scents off chemical structures.
Quoting Wayfarer
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck then likely it is a duck. Or in this case, another ducking quack.
Even as cognitive science moves itself towards that precise middle ground between the two, folk seem still able to slither away down their preferred side and proclaim victory for their chosen lumpen view.
So enactivism is being misused as the gateway drug to idealism now. And QBism apparently too.
I know an oxymoron when I see it.
You should look into Pinter's book. The reason I say it will be unsung, is because it was a labour of love on his part, he's a mathematics emeritus - now deceased - who in the last part of his very long life devoted considerable energy to cognitive science. But as he's not published in that field - all his previous books were on algebra and the like, JGill knows them - nobody in the field paid much attention to his Mind and the Cosmic Order, which I think is a shame. He doesn't push an idealist barrow, although I think his book provides some grounds for it. I don't think you would see it as incompatible with your biosemiotic philosophy.
It's not even in the university library system and I doubt I will learn anything new for the $82 price tag.
You would have to summarise what he adds to a biosemiotic approach that would seem useful and new.
Link?
(Never mind; found it)
Is it a mistake to say that hearts pump blood? Only a whole organism is capable of sustaining blood circulation, not an isolated heart. Yet that is the function of the heart within the whole organism.
Not in the context of physiology and anatomy, but its not an apt comparison with cognition and judgement. It appeals to the supposed authority of neuroscience to make philosophical claims about the mind - very different thing to the circulation of blood.
I honestly don't see inherent differences in any kind of knowledge whether scientific or everyday, just some choose to use vaguer words or reify vague, nebulous hunches. For many of the things I am interested in, that's not interesting. Maybe if I want to analyse music, film or art that is how I would do it. For me, philosophy is a product of the mind and ultimately brain. And insofar as we want clarity in models of how the mind and brain works, I want philosophy - which sits on the shoulders of a functioning brain / mind - to adhere to that. I feel like when going in the opposite direction, its more about clinging onto some kind of spirituality and humanism rather than as clear a view of things as possible... perhaps because deconstructing the mind is perceived as a threat to humanism. People want to hold onto words like "agency" and "rationality" and "subjectivity" without analyzing what they mean because they fear it deconstructs their humanity.
I'm not sure what the philosophical claims are supposed to be. That the brain integrates sensory information and acts upon it seems to be no less an empirical claim than that the heart pumps blood. Nor was I aware there was a special authority required to make philosophical claims. Maybe we should be verifying everyone's philosopher cards here.
I agree there with wayfarer there is a difference in these examples. In the heart example, what is being talked about is a single anatomical context or perspective within which heart and blood co-exist and interact directly.
But various claims in the mereological fallacy link talk about things like "decision", "belief", etc. which cannot be defined directly in terms of brain content. Infact, they surely would exist if people didn't know about brains and are learned from experiences of what we do as people as a whole. In a complementary way, I guess, it is difficult talk about what brains do in a complete way without referring to their consequences on the outside world and inputs going in.
I think interpreting these "mereological fallacies" depends on your philosophy of mind, and much of it is possibly about expediency to avoid pedantry. But maybe this just reflects the difference between a cognitive neuroscientists more interested in experimental studies relating brain variables and behavior, as opposed to a philosopher more interested in conceptual clarity.
An important part of philosophy is criticism, especially of poor analogies and misapplied categories.
Quoting Apustimelogist
And I see you as reflexively hanging on to something like scientism, the belief that philosophy must always defer to the white lab coat of scientific authority. To deconstruct the mind is to analyse it in terms of something else, or of its constituent elements - the impossibility of which is precisely the point of Chalmers facing up to the problem of consciousness article. I dont want to thrash all that out again, but nothing youre saying indicates that you are facing up to that problem.
As you know, many of us don't think there is any problem to face up to.
Solving a problem that isn't there is always going to look abysmal, but equally would ignoring one that is.
Not seeing a problem does not amount to grounds for dismissing it.
But neural networks run on PCs are not concious, right? So being a neural network and processing outputs and inputs isn't enough, even if these outputs come from the environment via photoreceptors, microphones, etc.
So again the appeal to the data/organ being of a "sensory" sort seems to do all the explaining. Why is an eye a sensory organ but the camera on a self-driving car isn't? It seems to me that the difference is that the former involves sensation. But then it looks like all we have done is explain what has conciousness by appeal to a term that implies something is concious.
I think something very much like this might be true, but the appeal to "sensory" information seems to be doing the explanatory lifting here. Yet what makes something "sensory" information? A combat drone uses video, IR, radar, etc. inputs to get information about the world. It puts this information into a model. But presumably this isn't "sensory" information because it doesn't involve sensation.
If the term "sensory" does the heavy lifting in our explanation of conciousness it seems like we need to describe how to identify "sensory information" without reference to sensation itself. Otherwise we end up saying something like "experiencing entities experience because they receive experiential information from the enviornment or have an experiential relationship to it."
"Modeling relationships," might be another tricky term here. Does a dry river bed model past flow of rainwater? We probably wouldn't want to say that, but it certainly does contain information about past rainfall.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think its more about trying to be as clear as possible. I think its about the idea that there is an objective way the world is and the mind is embedded within that. It is a slave to other partsof the objective world that undergird it, not independent from those things; the evidence relating our minds to neurons and physics is overwhelming. There is no harm trying to clarify that relationship as precisely as possible.
Quoting Wayfarer
Not necessarily, because I think you can analyze the mind from a completely experiential perspective by the same kind of paradigm.
Quoting Wayfarer
For me, not solving the hard problem doesn't mean that the mind is not still embedded in an objective world and in someways enslaved by the smaller scales of that objective reality.
We may just be limited in the questions we can ask and the answers we can get. All our explanations, scientific or not, are models enacted within the limits of our experiences, the limits of what brains can do. In sympathy with the illusionist, I think there may just be an inability for a mind or brain to explain certain things about itself in a substantial way. Similarly, science cannot tell us anything about the fundamental "intrinsic nature" of things beyond experience.
I think this is true - but then whence comes:
Quoting Apustimelogist
These seem to run into each other quite violently...
Quoting AmadeusD
I disagree. For instance, I don't need to know what is happening on the slopes of Mount Everest right now to believe there are some definite events happening on the slopes of Mount Everest right now.
Right. I expect anyone working on an embodied AI, which is structured to learn from embodied experience, is in an at least somewhat secretive lab. (Likely with military funding.) I don't think the hardware is there, to make this a reality real soon, but of course having a jump on the research when a new generation of hardware platforms arrives could provide a big strategic advantage.
(And if I disappear soon, and am never heard from again, you will know I was right.) :wink:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I'm simply coming into the discussion thinking of eyes, cochleas, and olfactory bulbs as sensors. So I think it makes sense to consider the subset of neural networks in the brain, which primarily take input that is the output of sensors, to be neural networks that output sensory information. Sensation would be the result of further information processing by later stage neural networks which meld the sensory data with deep learning from other neural networks to yield sensations.
All well and good - but that also embodies a perspective, somewhere outside both the mind and the world. A mental picture, if you like, or image of the self-and-world.
What Hoffman et al are doing is actually de-constructing that sense - which is what you yourself said in an earlier post! I'm slogging through his book, and there's a lot of data from cognitive science and evolutionary biology. But through that he's arriving at the counter-intuitive insight that the brain/mind in essence constructs the world which we reflexively believe is 'out there'. And there's a lot of pushback on that point, because it undermines our instinctive sense of what's real. Hoffman himself says in an interview that he finds it difficult to really accept the implications of his own theory!
Quoting Apustimelogist
But is it? Who are the case studies for that view? I know of a clique of academic philosophers who are customarily associated with pretty hard-edged materialist theories of mind: they are P & P Churchland, a married couple who are both academics, Alex Rosenberg, and the late Daniel Dennett are frequently mentioned in this regard. They were very much the target of David Chalmer's argument, and I think the argument succeeds. (There are also naturalist philosophers of mind, like John Searle, who are critical of the materialists, it was Searle who dubbed Dennett's book Consciousness Explained as 'Consciousness Explained Away'.)
But going back to the point I made above, brains and neurons and physics are themselves mental constructs, in some fundamental sense. It doesn't mean they're 'all in the mind' in an obvious or gross kind of way, but that the mind (or the observer) imputes meaning and value to the terminology and principles of those sciences. So there is a fundamentally mental or subjective element to those theories, which is never disclosed, because they're not critically aware of them. They impute to the objective and external what is really being generated by the mind. So there's a vicious circle at back of it, the attempt for science to explain itself. Kant was aware of that in a way the above philosophers can never be.
Quoting Apustimelogist
But it's a question philosophy must grapple with. So if we continue to operate within the boundaries of empiricism it's fair to question whether we really are engaging with philosophy.
Quoting Apustimelogist
By bringing them to mind! You can't say anything about them, unless you do that.
I'm not quite seeing where this relates to the contradiction noted? (response to bold below this all)
If we literally cannot know anything about hte intrinsic nature of things, what you think or believe has precisely zero bearing on the potential question: How could you possible confirm that:
Quoting Apustimelogist
If:
Quoting Apustimelogist
These are directly in opposition, as best I can tell. The example you gave doesn't seem to approach the problem in any way... Premeptively, if i've missed something key, apologies.
Response to the bolded: That's true - but to be correct you'd have to solve the above. And given you're making a pretty absolute claim here for science establishing a mind-independent, objective world outthere beyond experience.
The philosophers who are currently growing up amidst the development of AI, and noticing the relevance of what is going on in AI to the way our minds work, will be the ones to watch. The philosophers you mention above developed their idea during the infancy of neuroscience rather than the explosion of neuroscientific understanding, which will be coming due to the use of AI.
Of course, I don't expect you to be other than analogous to a flat earther when it comes to this subject.
Quoting wonderer1
If only there was an emoji to represent eyes being in the back of one's head.
I'm afraid I don't have any idea what you are trying to say.
Further to this point. The idea I keep coming back to is that we instinctively accept that mind is 'the product of' matter. The causal chain which supports this contention is ostensibly that of the neo-darwinian synthesis, which proposes that the brain evolved through the aeons to the point where it is able to generate the mind-states that comprise experience. So, mind as a product of matter - the essential contention of materialist theory of mind.
But what we understand as physical facts are in reality dependent on the mind. That doesn't mean we can generate our own facts gratuitously or casually - I often quote the maxim, 'everyone has a right to their own opinions, but not to their own facts'. And I think that's true. There is a massive and ever-growing body of objective facts. But again, I argue that objective facts are invariably surrounded and supported by an irreducibly subjective or inter-subjective framework of ideas, within which they are meaningful, and one which the empiricist understanding of 'mind-indendent nature' doesn't acknowledge.
Hence this graphic from physicist John Wheeler:
The caption reads, what we consider to be reality, symbolised by the letter R in the diagram, consists of an elaborate paper maché construction of imagination and theory fitted between a few iron posts of observation (from his paper Law without Law.)
This is also suggested by a paper on a physics experiment known as Wigner's Friend which creates an experimental setup that calls into question that subjects all see different perspectives on the same thing. This experiment shows that two subjects can see different results that are both supposedly 'objectively true'. So it's touted as 'calling objective reality into question' although that needs to be carefully interpreted. It doesn't mean 'anything goes' or that total relativism reigns. As noted, there's indubitably an enormous range of objective facts about which you or I can be right or wrong. But there is also a subjective element which is generally overlooked by 'objectivising' tendencies of today's scientific culture.
Chapter 6 in Hoffman's book deals with a lot of this kind of material.
I think both sides of the discussion think their position is self-evident and dismiss the other argument.
As I wrote in my response to Wayfarer - both sides of the discussion think their position is self-evident and dismiss the other argument.
Philosophy in a nutshell. :wink:
Searle, on the other hand, just doesn't do his job in several areas based on vibe. He literally handwaves away serious issues. That, I think, is a worse outcome. Not enquiring, worse than erroneously enquiring.
Quoting Tom Storm
Yeeeeah boi. LOL. Except maybe Graham Oppy.
I have made what I think are reasonable objections to the hard problem many times here on the forum. I never convince anyone and no one ever convinces me or those who agree with me. At this point I usually say the whole thing is just metaphysics, but I'm not sure that's true in this case.
Another problem with this particular issue - different people use different definitions of "consciousness" without clarification. The hard problem refers specifically to the difficulty of explaining how biological/neurological processes are expressed as experience. It doesn't necessarily apply just to humans or even our near relatives.
Yes sirr. Huge problem in conversation. But, with enough good faith, I've not found this to be an obstacle as such. At least if you work out that you're talking about two different things, two conversations can be had. Apt here, as one could mean the description you've given (which, I think the problem adheres to, as stated by Chalmers) or the state of being aware of something. The second is useless for this arena, so it's hard to talk at cross-purpsoes once that's established.
Quoting T Clark
For sure. Chalmers thoroughly treats this and eventually has to go to that weird proto-panpsychism type of thinking to get a 'by degrees' system that would account for 'consciousness' we see in the world.
I think it's a simple question without a current answer - do deer see pictures and hear sounds in their head in a similar manner to how humans do?
I'm not sure what you mean here.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't think I have anything additional to say about Hoffman for this paragraph that isn't in recent previous posts on him.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, but I am talking about studies on the brain, not philosophers: e.g., studies where the brain is stimulated or examining damaged brains and associating it with changes in experience and behavior. Obviously imaging studies too.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yeah, I don't deny that all our explanations and knowledge are models enacted and embedded within our perspectives, experiences, whatever other relevant contexts to us, etc. But these stories are supposedly about something... They are stories about the world; and through observation, we glean consistent structure to the world, even if through many different means, tools, perspectives. There is an inherent connection between the experiences we have and what is observed as activity in the brain.
I guess though the deeper nature of the connection may not obvious but if our scientific constructs regarding neurons, brains, physics... are just that... constructs, there is no need imo to reify a stark separation between experience and what those constructs are purportedly accessing or about or what we are interacting with when we probe them empirically.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
I disagree, such statements presuppose a kind of dualism I do not agree with.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, this is not something I disagree with; yet, I seem to have a completely different view to you regarding this matter as a whole.
Quoting Wayfarer
My preferred interpretation of quantum mechanics does not interpret Wigner's Friend scenarios in this way (at least not in the way I believe that you are implying).
Quoting AmadeusD
Science does not tell us about the intrinsic nature of things, but vicariously through our experiences and other technological extensions of our senses, we can still glean something about the structure of reality and the way it behaves. That is what physics is about. We make inferences from our senses, technology and science that there is an objective world out there when we aren't looking, that was here before we were born and shall be around after we die. You can't definitively confirm anything, let alone in a perspective-independent way but I personally don't see strong reasons to believe otherwise.
I will try and explain again. You said:
Quoting Apustimelogist
All well and good, but I'm referring to the sense in which even this realist view is itself a mental construction. To form that picture, you have to adopt a perspective that is outside of both and that contains an image or concept of both 'the world' and 'the mind'. I think we're in agreement on that.
I suppose I should acknowledge my agenda, so to speak. I'm resistant to the kind of realist view which subordinates the mind to the scientific perspective itself, which seeks to explain philosophical issues through a scientific perspective. And why? Because philosophy has an inextricably qualitative dimension which eludes a strictly objective analysis, but which is nevertheless fundamental to our well-being. The scientific image of man often tends to deprecate or belittle that.
As for this somewhat mysterious issue of 'seeing things as they are' - I believe that that is what is conveyed by the faculty of 'sagacity'. The archetypical sage is able to arrive at a holistic understanding of nature of being, not necessarily in conflict with the scientific image, but also not necessarily disclosed by science itself, although scientists do describe moments of insight which correspond with that.
And speaking of sages, here I'm reminded of several passages from Erwin Schrodinger's 'Nature and the Greeks':
>>Consciousness is the capacity for experience<<
What do we think?
I think it deeper than that: consciousness is the unity of all my representations.
What about 'consciousness is the activity of having an experiece' or 'consciousness is the activity of having experiences'?
Dunno quite where you want to go with this, but I wonder if positing rational consciousness implies a variety, but on the other hand, youre trying for a bare-bones definition, which shouldnt allow any.
Still, I grant the notion of rational consciousness, insofar as I hold there to be no other kind. Consciousness of empirical conditions, which is exemplified by your definition predicated on experience, is still a rational construct.
Were paddling in the same philosophical canoe here, whatever our respective particulars be.
You can IMO say that 'sentient being' are those beings that can be conscious even if they are not in a given moment (for instance, if one consider someone in a state of general anesthesia...). Of course, the term 'sentient' taken literally would imply that someone unconscious is not sentient, even if alive. But IMO, we can take the liberty to use the phrases 'conscious beings' or 'sentient beings' to indicate all those beings that are conscious or can be conscious.
Quoting boundless
To be conscious is to unite conceptions in thought, an activity with a vast plurality of representations; consciousness is that by which conceptions can be so united, all under one singular, irreducible representation.
The first represents the activity I think, the second represents the capacity of the I that thinks.
Or not ..speculative metaphysics and all that.
I think this is somewhat too specific. IMO, I would more or less equate 'being conscious' as 'having a subjective/private experience', without necessarily being aware of that (this would rather be 'self-consciousness', a specific kind of consciousness).
But maybe even 'having a (subjective/private) experience' is too much. Maybe 'consciousness is experiencing' or even only 'consciosness is a synonym of (subjective/private) experience' is better (and maybe we can drop the qualifier subjective/private...after all, I am not sure it makes sense to speak of an experience which is not private).
Sorry for the 'maybes' but it is notoriously difficult to define what is most immediate to us, after all.
It's not at all clear who you are arguing with here, either on this forum or elsewhere. It's very generic. Names?
That's not my view, but that is exactly the view of emergentists. Emergentism just is the view that consciousness arises in some circumstances and not others. Emergentists also typically endorse the vagueness of the concept of consciousness to allow for gradual emergence, they don't generally think of consciousness as all-or-nothing.
I think there is evidence of this on other senses of the word 'consciousness', but not in the sense we mean here. For example, waking up from sleep happens gradually under some circumstances. But we're talking about any phenomenal state at all, not the difference between waking and sleeping.
I disagree. How do we derive, conceptually, consciousness from behaviour?
I agree epiphenomenalism is wrong. I think consciousness is likely causal, possibly even uniquely so. And then the causal closure of the physical is an idea we have to tackle. If panpsychism is the case, we might be able to replace the concept of law with that of will, perhaps, honouring both phychological causation AND the causal closure of the physical.
It's emergentists who are implicitly dualistic, in my view, and create the hard problem by saying that consciousness was a late arrival in the universe. Ironically I think this is what @apokrisis does. Panpsychism is one way of undermining the physical/phenomenal divide. There must still be conceptual distinctions of course, having the capacity to feel is not the same thing as having physical extension in space, but both these properties can be in everything, perhaps, so there is no need to derive one from the other.
I don't especially want a theory of consciousness, I don't think consciousness needs explaining. But when people disagree with me and say consciousness emerged, I'm interested. How exactly? The emergence of consciousness is very much in need of an explanation.
On the question of the difference between consciousness and non-consciousness being sharp or fuzzy, I think it's clearly sharp. I'm with Goff, Antony and Schwitzgebel (and not doubt many others)on that.
Odd, innit. That with which we are most familiar .our own inner workings, whatever they may be . is the very thing we know the least about.
With respect to specificity, I rather think, assuming an interest in such matters despite the absence of sufficient empirical facts from the scientific method proper, little remains but to fall back on logical constructions, the certainty, hence the explanatory value, of which is our own responsibility.
Yes, I see no conflict with the idea that - all our knowledge is perspective-dependent yet we can make statements like "there is an objective way the world is". If you think about it, a statement like that doesn't even really have any content, yet it is still completely intelligible. We understand what it means without having to specify something as totally precise and veridical, not because we don't want to - we cannot; but just because we cannot, doesn't mean we cannot make the word convey something. At the end of the day, all meaning regresses into something ineffable on pains of circularity - For instance, I cannot define for you what it means "to do something", you just have an ineffable, intuitive understanding of that phrase and can identify what accords with "doing something" coherently. Imo, all word-use and all knowledge is enaction within experience, and that enaction is totally primitive from our immediate experiential perspective - just a flow of experiences.
Quoting Wayfarer
I just simply disagree, I guess. Science may not tell us about ethics or aesthetics but that doesn't mean it isn't in conflict with that. Neither does it mean that fields like ethics or other parts of philosophy don't use similar critical faculties to a science. At the same time, I just don't see God or teleology in reality.
You can't. But from our knowledge of the natural world, what is it that differs sentient creatures from non-sentient things? The activity of complicated dynamical systems. The differences between death, coma, sleep, wakefulness and psychedelia are the activities of a complicated dynamical system. I don't need to know what it is like to be such systems to make this observation.
Quoting bert1
I think issues of causal closure only come about when you take models of the physical too literally as more than models - because we are capable of describing reality pluralistically and at different scales. People then get the idea that we need to accomodate causation at different levels when these are just descriptions that model at different scales from different perspectives; there isn't a necessity that it is about some intrinsic causality.
We then don't need to "honour(ing) both phychological causation AND the causal closure of the physical." because they aren't two inherently, fundamentally different categories. One very generic description of "things" I like is the following (https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=10954599080507512058&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5):
We just have recursively nested "things" in reality and as you expand the scale, or zoom out, the fast, random, precise details get coarse-grained over by the slower regularities. This seems an intuitive way to me of characterizing say the difference between conscious experiences and microscopic "physical" structures nested within them. The difference is only a difference of scale and how information is lost as you zoom out, as written in the bold above. Seems to me that the structure of our experiences reflects this loss of information from smaller scales.
Quoting bert1
I disagree. I don't think there is even any fact of the matter you could use to demonstrate the difference between conscious experience and the absence of conscious experience.
This is the way I've been using the word in this discussion and, as I understand it, this is the issue Chalmers is talking about when he says "hard problem."
After making my previous post I went on to read the following responses. It's pretty clear people here generally define "consciousness" differently. This is what has lead to much of the disagreement here. It's hard to separate those disagreement from more substantive ones.
I'm not complaining about criticism, but about the weird appeal to authority. You didn't actually say why my analogy was poor.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Heart and blood don't just co-exist and interact directly. They both interact with the circulatory system, lungs, metabolic system, etc. Without any of these, the heart wouldn't function, it functions only in the context of a whole organism. Yet, we say without issue, "Hearts pump blood".
I would say that "modelling" refers to informational processes, where one system maps or reflects the relevant informational process of another, without actually reproducing the physical system.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
We are wired to interface with the world via sensations, whereas fundamentally a combat drone isn't: it translates sensory input into logical symbols, performs symbolic transformations on those symbols, and acts according to those transformations. There is a symbolic reduction that happens with drones, that doesn't with us. That same reduction that makes engineering possible might preclude conscious experience.
I think we will only truly understand the sensations we experience when we figure out, at least in principle, how to engineer them in a machine. Of course, we just don't.
No, and that's fair but not quite relevant. My point is the clear contradiction in the two quotes i put forward. If the above is your position, then the second of those quotes needs to hold while the first needs to be let go. We cannot know anything about hte intrinsic nature of things = we cannot know there is an objective world out there. I take no position, for the sake of this discussion, just point out the break in the line of thinking there. You can't have both, basically.
I think that's a pretty good definition. It leaves open the conceptual possibility of consciousness with no content, which some find absurd, but I'm OK with.
I didn't mean to annoy you. I included a link to a book review which was earlier shown to me on this forum. It's Bennett and Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, which talks about the 'mereological fallacy':
Quoting hypericin
I wouldn't say the heart pumping blood is any different to saying that my hand is splashing water if I flap my hand in a filled up sink. You can put a heart in a sink of blood and have it contract and say it is pumping blood. I'm not sure saying a brain is "thinking" is as straightforward given the usual criteria we use to denote thinking for ourselves.
No, because the inability to know the intrinsic nature of things doesn't mean we cannot interact with their extrinsic consequences and make an inference that the outside world exists in an objective way.
At the same time, knowing that there exists a certain thing in the world doesn't mean one has to know the intrinsic nature of that thing, in the same way that someone might know fire exists but not know what fire is.
Something like they (the philosophers who disagree with him) don't understand how science works, because we accept the best theories as true or good approximations to truth.
I'm forgetting his exact wording on this, but I don't find his rebuttal forceful. He accepts that evolutionary theory says something (true) about the world, ergo some of our theories are true.
But then there's the whole issue of evolved to discover what kind of truths? Truths about the constitution of the universe? Very unlikely. That must be some kind of lucky accident that we are able to form theories that apply to the universe.
Of course, there's also "folk psychological truths": if I kick a stone, it will move a bit until it stops. It's just that the theory is incomplete as an account of the universe, but perfectly fine for day-to-day affairs.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Hmmm, I'm not sure I can accept this position.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Non sequitur with the fire part. That's because the underlined is not true. To claim that you know that something exists does entail knowing something about it's intrinsic nature (i.e non-illusory for instance) as best i can tell.
Yes, there seems to be a bit of the common move of setting up the "view from nowhere," as a strawman foil here. You see the same thing in deflationary thinkers like Rorty as well. The old "we cannot achieve 'the one true ahistorical, perspectiveless view of truth,' thus truth is inaccessible," as if there is no middle ground. Yet it's not like my brother and I cannot both know our parents simply because each of our knowledge of them differs.
Or no luck is required. It has become common to think of logic and reason as being the sui generis products of mind, something "constructed" or something like that. But if there is a certain logic to the world, a Logos, then it should not be surprising if minds correspond to it. Rather it would be impossible for it to be otherwise. And the world certainly appears to have an intelligible order.
Phenomenologicaly, the intelligibility of the world is given. One needs to make some advances in philosophy before one starts holding apart the world and its intelligibility.
Hoffman's interface theory is ultimately guilty of the same old Cartesian/representationalist error that haunts a good deal of contemporary philosophy. Saying "we don't know the world, we just know our experiences of it," is a bit like claiming no one can drive a car because "they can only push pedals and turn a steering wheel," or that writing is impossible because "we can only move muscles in our fingers." What is "being" supposed to mean if it's not what is thought, experienced, known or talked about?
Quoting AmadeusD
Why not?
Quoting AmadeusD
So how do people know that fire exists?
That made me laugh. I appreciate the analogies.
Exactly.
Rorty once called it (according to Dennett) the "vegetarian version of truth". Okay...so? truth is truth, vegetarian or omnivore. Maybe, and likely, there is more out there than we know, sure, but what we know is not false for that reason.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
That's a bit hard to say. I can imagine an intelligent species with reason, that can't find such a logos, so they could settle for a creation myth, as we used to do back in the day.
But, it could be that given reason, we should be able to find some kind of order. Maybe. I'm more skeptical of this, but it's possible.
Yes, at the very least, our experiences are part of the world.
Perhaps you missed the aim with that quoteset - I'm sorry if it was insufficiently clear. I was trying to clever lol. I'll remove the quotes and just assert the position I think you're committed to, so the response is 'direct'.
"An inference which you've made about the world based on repeated experience can directly translate to a conception of the world in an objective way"
To me, this is plainly untrue (I think the problem in 'the thinking' is the same in the below example, which obvs ill get to lol). You cannot "objectively" infer anything, from anything. All you can say is "this is the best assumption available". No apodicticity or veridicality in it (although, I understand that by accident, you might still be 'correct').
If you have a mere inference about some proposition about 'the world' out there, you do not have any objective way to ascertain the accuracy of your inference. This is where Science is supposed to step in - but lets not open that can. But two examples I've raised for different reasons elsewhere are tides/waves and shadows. You can't accurately infer the shape of the object which caused a shadow from the shadow. You can accidentally be right, but the angles of light, the angle of hte object, the shape of hte surface, any intermediary issues like bright light or coloured light will affect the image you receive
If the tide near you has gone out, you might be about to drown. You couldn't know by inference. You'd naturally infer "Oh, the tide's gone out" or perhaps "Oh, the tide's gone out at a weird time" but that gives you no objectivity as to whether a Tsunami is coming.
As to the second comment, it really does depend what you're asking. It could be more like "Why do people take fire to exist?" Which is easily answerable (im sure I don't even need to do it for you).
Or, you could be asking why people are certain that fire exists. That one is more awkward, but probably because the benchmark for certainty is not the benchmark for apodicticity. Being certain means "beyond a reasonable doubt" not "beyond a logical possibility" and it is entirely logically possible fire does not exist (at least not in the form we take it to, let's say). Certainty just means you aren't questoning your position. Apodicticity means your position cannot be questioned on logical grounds (think law of identity).
I don't hold that Fire doesn't exist, but i am very, very much open to it not actually being in the form we perceive. It may be that fire is colourless to many animals, for instance, and only our perceptual apparatus allows us to essentially go "BIG HOT RED BAD LEAVE NOW". We have plenty of evolutionary ways to explain why we are how we are - including why we perceive colours, shapes and difference in general the way we do: Survival. There's nothing objective in this and I think Hoffman is at the very least, thinking about hte right things in this area. Pretending we know apodictically what's going on leads to dictators lol (that is genuinely jest, but i suppose there's something in it).
Well, this is not what I said or meant.
What I meant basically amounts to: you cannot know the intrinsic nature of the world but you can infer that the world indeed does exist when you are not looking at it.
Anyway - perceptive review of the book by a physicist can be found here https://4gravitons.com/2024/02/23/book-review-the-case-against-reality/
I meant that you described a type of consciousness. For instance, if I can be just 'be aware' without having thoughts, I would be conscious without any kind of conscious interpretative activity. But maybe I misunderstood you.
If you meant that consciousness is an 'unifying' activity, in a sense yes, I agree.
BTW, there are some psychiatrists that try to apply pheonomenological concepts in their practice. For instance, the concept of 'self-disorder'/ipseity disturbance employs the distinction of 'narrative self' (any kind of conceptual description about ourselves) and the 'basic self/ipseity' (the sense that experiences are our own). They argue that some psychotic experiences (like the experiences where one feels that his thoughts are inserted by some other agent) are actually a strong expression of a disturbed 'basic self', i.e. that the content of the experiences are not one's own (but a lower level of 'privateness' remains, after all...if a content of our experience doesn't feel 'ours', after all, we still have the sense of 'privateness').
The reason I brought about this is because I think that these kinds of study might be useful to study the structure of our experience. For instance, these kind of studies suggests to me that these kind of disorders can only happen in sentient beings that are 'self-conscious', i.e. beings that are conscious to be conscious.
Maybe also @Wayfarer finds this kind of thing interesting.
Quoting Wayfarer
More or less I had the same impression. I found his 'interface theory of perception' (a form of epistemic idealism) fascinating and also the basic idea that we might not know 'external reality as it is' because, after all, our perceptive and cognitive system is at the service of fitness, i.e. our own survival and the survival of our species. And a 'non-literal' respresentation of external reality might be far more useful than a 'faithful portrait' of it.
I actually didn't like his excursus in speculative idea of contemporary physics. After all, when he did that he was trying to argue for his speculative idea using other speculative ideas (so that chapter was IMO unhelpful). Also, the final chapter about 'conscious realism', where he tries to define what a 'conscious agent' might in general be and concludes that the external reality might only be other conscious agents, might be an interesting speculation but leads to a confusion between it and the interface theoty (to his credit, however, he is clear that the two theories are separate).
Finally, regarding the theorem, well, I think that he uses a weird definition of 'reality'. So, I think that it is a good book, has interesting and provocative ideas, but also I get the frustration and in some cases, his 'wilder' speculations, so to speak, might obscure his more 'reasonable', 'down to earth' ideas.
Thanks for the link, I'll read it.
Me neither. Didnt really understand it either. Although I can see the connection with QBism.
Quoting boundless
Meta-conscious awareness is the term, I believe.
I believe consciousness has to be of something, I believe it has to be intentional in its most basal form, but "content" is controversial issue of course and it's a key controversy in philosophy of mind ATM as well - how do we get from simple minds or non-minds to contentful mental states of which we can predicate True or False?
Might it be the case that content does not necessarily need to be semantic content?
So, on that far extreme of the possibility of a "brain in a vat," or "the Matrix," etc., there would be instances of P, the set of possible physical states consistent with some mental state, that vary very far from our assumptions about what the mental state says about P. But more realistically we have problems like Hoffman's, questions of inverted qualia, etc. and the overarching problem of psycho-physical harmony.
I didnt mean that; I said consciousness is a capacity, understood, in accordance with a particular methodological system, as a necessary condition of intelligent agency. That being given, it can be deduced consciousness doesnt unify; it is that under which unity occurs.
Not claiming a truth here, only a logic validated in a theoretical procedure.
Yes, I actually have had correspondence with Hoffman over this. I actually was interested in his work as a possible way to bridge the ecological psychology paradigms with underlying work in philosophy of phsyics.
On that front, I think his work is very good. I especially like the idea of decoherence as underpinning the co-emergence of the world and agent (ultimately, one system informing itself about itself).
Thr Kantian divide between noumena and phenomena is less appealing, though. Hoffman is not too far from a vast improvement though when he describes the environment as iconic and space as fundamentally semiotic - like a users manual for perpetuating your fitness and existence. Cogntition as an interface is a solid idea, but we need a relational theory of cognition in this vein and not a Kantian one. Thankfully, the philosophy of signs naturally complements Hoffman's idea and it's a non-dual since it involves triadic relations between the sign, object and interpretant. The interface isn't hiding reality, it is reality as co-constructed by agent and world, between realism and idealism.
Yes, I agree. There is at least a structural analogy between his 'interface theory of perception' (ITP) and QBism.
But, on the other hand, the main prolem is that he not only notes the analogy. But (1) he insists that he is basically saying the same thing as some contemporary research in quantum gravity (!) for instance say and that (2) as the review remarked his own theory of 'conscious realism' contradicts his IPT, if the latter is followed to the end.
ITP after all doesn't make ontological commitments about the 'reality as it is' and, therefore, strictly speaking isn't compatible with any kind of ontological theory. It's a form of epistemic idealism which also tries to explain why we more or less 'see' the same 'interface'.
(regarding the review, I found it ok, but some objections are IMO questionable... for instance, in the chapter where Hoffman evokes contemporary phisical theories, the main comparison is with ITP, not conscious realism. So when he says that 'non-realist' theories are incompatible with conscious realism, it should be noted that Hoffman discussed them when he was speaking about ITP, if I recall correctly)
Quoting Wayfarer
Ah, ok, thanks. But I think that also 'self-consciousness' is valid for that.
Ah, sorry. Thanks for the clarification. I think I am ok with that!
Quoting Apustimelogist
That the world exists in an objective way just means it exists when nobody is looking.
I see no contradiction in what you quoted of me in this post. Its no different from people making an inference that when you see fire, it exist out in the world even when nobody is looking at it. Even though they have no idea what the intrinsic nature of fire is, they can infer that something exists out in the world beyond their perceptions, and it is causing their perception of the fire.
Isn't this a bit loose? What exactly does an 'objective way' entail? Even Hoffman and most idealists would say there is an objective world. Isn't the key issue what is the nature of the world we have access to and think we know?
The existence of an objective reality is a presupposition we make in order to allow ourselves to make our way in this more or less existent world.
We can firm it up. There are true statements about unobserved things. "The cup is in the dishwasher" is true, even though we can't see the cup.
So if asked where the cup is, I'll say "It's in the dishwasher" rather then "I last saw it when I closed the door on the dishwasher, but I've no idea where it is now, or even if it still exists. You might try looking inside the dishwasher to see if it reappears".
Albert Einstein famously asked one of his friends whilst on an afternoon walk does the moon cease to exist when nobodys looking at it? If you read the account of the conversation, it was clear Einstein was asking the question ironically or rhetorically. But he was nevertheless compelled to ask! And why? It grew out of the discussions prompted by the famous 1927 Solvay Conference which unveiled the basics of quantum physics. It was at this time that the elusive nature of sub-atomic particles became obvious.
Now you might say so what? We all know that subatomic particles are spooky, but that doesnt apply to the objects of day to day experience. But the issue is, day to day objects are supposed to be composed of these same particles and forces which were supposed to be fundamental. This was to become the subject of the Bohr-Einstein debates that were to run on until Einsteins death decades later.
Bohr and Heisenbergs attitude (although differing in some respects) constituted the basis of what comes to be called the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics. Its not a scientific theory but commentary on the implications of quantum mechanics.
Copenhagen posits that quantum systems dont have definite properties until they are measured or observed. Prior to observation, particles exist in a state of superposition, where they can hold multiple potential states at once. It is only upon interaction with an observer or measurement device that one of these possibilities becomes reality. Bohr said that it was impossible to say whether said objects were 'really' waves or 'really' particles, because the answer to that depended on the way the question was asked.
This leads to the key role of the observer: the act of observation itself plays a fundamental role in collapsing the quantum wave function, determining the specific outcome of a particles state. In other words, in quantum mechanics, reality at the subatomic level isnt fixed until its observed, blurring the line between objective existence and subjective experience.
This view clashes with classical physics, which assumes an objective world that exists independently of observation, as Einstein famously advocated with his rhetorical question about the moon. For Copenhagen proponents, the observer is essential in the transition from potentiality to actuality.
This suggests that, at least at the quantum level, the observer is integral to how the world takes form, raising deep questions about the nature of reality. And despite much water under the bridge, the question about the moon remains an open one. That is the distant background to much of the discussion about physics in Hoffman's book.
But there's another layer of argument altogether, that from cognitivism. Cognitive science has shown how much of what we instinctively take to be the objective world is really constructed by the brain/mind 'on the fly', so to speak. There is unceasing neural activity which creates and maintains our stable world-picture based on a combination of sensory experience, autonomic reaction, and judgement. This is going on every second. A lot of Hoffman's argument is based on analysis of those cognitive processes and what conditions them.
In my view, a philosophical precursor to that can clearly be traced back to Kant, who likewise understood the sense in which the mind creates the world - this is his famous 'copernican revolution in philosophy'.
On the basis of all of this, I generally argue for the fact that, while the objective domain is independent of any particular observer - you or me - the objective world nevertheless is grounded in the irreducibly subjective process of world-construction. And that because of the over-valuation of science and objectivity, this constructive process is generally invisible to us. That is the subject of the book, The Blind Spot of Science, by Frank, Gleiser and Thompson. And also Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles S. Pinter.
That's a shame. The two phrases are in direct contradiction.
This isn't anythign to do with truth, but practicality. Taking those words as true is helpful.
Quoting Tom Storm
I literally just mean something like: the world exists when no one is looking. It was here before we were born and will be there after we die. It exists mind-independently.
Quoting Tom Storm
So do you think I am contradicting myself when I say that the world exists objectively (mind-independently / when no one is looking) yet we cannot have knowledge of its intrinsic nature?
Of course it is to do with truth. But you can't say that because it undermines your antirealism.
The cup is in the dishwasher.
So we agree on this?
Johnson kicks stone.
Dunno about most, but the ones that write books I own just say there are objects, the rest is either given through inference, or superfluous.
Quoting Tom Storm
KEY issue? I dont think the nature of the world is key; it is the nature of particular things, that is, insofar as they are the constituency of our empirical knowledge. And I should hope no one thinks he knows the world, it being just some general concept used to denote the containment of all things, the nature of which, other than the schemata subsumed under it, is irrelevant to us.
If you wish to discuss it, at least make some reference to that post I entered on the previous page, the book the thread is about, or the video which features Donald Hoffman, author of the book that this thread is about.
Johnson's is most satisfactory argument.
Yes, I take the point that many people do believe that quantum mechanics suggests that the world is observer relative in a radical way but I strongly believe in my preferred stochastic interpretation which does not take this view at all and has particles in definite positions all the time while the wavefunction is not a real object and there is no collapse due to observers. So from my perspective, this phenomena you are talking about doesn't actually exist.
Quoting Wayfarer
But what is being constructed here? Seems to me we are talking about statistical correlations latent in the structure of the world, lifted out of the noisy, non-linearities of sensory input. However, that structural information will differ depending on the perspective, its manner of receiving information, the structure of its neuronal architecture and obviously its poverty or imprecision of these sensory interactions, etc, etc. There could plausibly be infinite ways of synching up to and perceive the world in ways that are structurally consistent - i.e. in ways that you can consistently detect the same part of the world (in principle) and navigate to other parts.
I guess the fact we cannot directly detect precise details of the structure of the world like the structure of molecules might in some ways satisfy the Hofmann criteria of the world being very different to how we perceive it (same with probably the impoverished perceptual faculties of a worm or jellyfish). At the same time we have constructed alternative ways to interact with the world at better precision and get more information.
The world, to all practical intents and purposes. I think the sense that 'the world exists independently of observers' is fallacious, because of the meaning of the word 'exists'. Whenever we say of something that 'it exists', we already impose on it a structure and form that we bring to bear on it. We can't think outside that. The prestige of science tends to privilege the idea of objectivity, such that we accept that the world described by science is 'the real world'. But that world is actually an abstraction constructed from the extraction of quantifiable data from patterns of experience. Hence my recent reference to Schrodinger:
[quote=Erwin Schrodinger, Nature and the Greeks]The scientific world-picture vouchsafes a very complete understanding of all that happens it makes it just a little too understandable. It allows you to imagine the total display as that of a mechanical clockwork which, for all that science knows, could go on just the same as it does, without there being consciousness, will, endeavor, pain and delight and responsibility connected with it though they actually are. And the reason for this disconcerting situation is just this: that for the purpose of constructing the picture of the external world, we have used the greatly simplifying device of cutting our own personality out, removing it; hence it is gone, it has evaporated, it is ostensibly not needed.[/quote]
Then having removed it, we wonder where it's gone, and try and work out ways to reconstruct it or explain it. And that is philosophical question, not a scientific question.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I looked at the article on stochastic quantum mechanics, but I can't read the math. But in any case, it surely torpedoes LaPlace's daemon.
Again, a bare assertion.
It has nothing to do with truth. You have described why not consistently questioning our apprehensions is helpful for washing cups. All good my friend.
I'm not sure. Then again, we can't really disprove hard solipsism either. The real quesion is what does it matter either way?
Agree. I'll take that.
Quoting Mww
I agree. My language is probably sloppy - when I said nature of the world I meant the nature of things in it.
The point of Massimiliano Proietti's confirmation of the Wigner's Friend paradox is that the two apparently-contradictory results were actually observed, so whatever interpretation is chosen has to accomodate that, the nub of the issue being the observer-dependency of the outcome.
I ran this through ChatGPT to see what it had to say about how the stochastic interpretation would deal with this paradox. The conclusion it came up with was:
As always with ChatGPT it could be mistaken, but it seems intuitively correct to me.
I can agree if I don't take your words too literally; after all, I have said always that there is no perspective-independent view. I am just keen to hang onto the notion that experiences are structures which are themselves tied to structure out in the world in some sense. It just may be very cheap structure as opposed to the one and only structure. I see your point about 'exists' in the sense that you cannot conceive of something outside of your own perspective. But at the same time, I don't think there is any contradiction in using words to convey something about what is in principle outside of one's perspective and cannot perceive or even conceive; after all, we can talk about these kind of things intelligibly. Maybe that this something must also be very abstract means it must always be very highly idealized though (when we speak about it); intelligib(ility) isn't perspective-independent. At the same time, what does it even mean to convey something intelligibly? What does exist even mean? At some point I just have to accept that I am just acting out words. That's all I am really doing. I kind of like the idea that even if words and meaning we are just like scientific instrumentalists when it really comes down to it.
Edits: in ( )
Quoting Apustimelogist
I know, many big questions here. We'll keep mulling it over, no doubt!
I can see how this is one obvious answer to the question, but philosophy certainly allows for different solutions. I know where you sit on this, but I don't know whether realism or anti-realism or idealism or constructivism are tenable. I'm not sure how many people on the forum have the capacity to arrive at an informed assessment.
I actually see this as irrelevant regarding the 'independent reality' of cups and other physical objects. Even if an observer is a generic 'physical object' as the relational interpretation of QM says, how can we be certain that another physical object has a definite position (e.g. being in a dishwasher) outside of the 'interaction/observation'?
IMO assuming that the observers are not necessrily conscious beings doesn't really change much about this issue.
My take on the 'observer problem' is not very complicated. The answer to the question 'does an electron exist prior to being measured?' is that it just is the wave-function, which is a distribution of possibilities, right? So it doesn't definitely exist, or exist as a definite object - there really is just a pattern of probabilites. It is the observation that reduces all the possibilities to zero (collapsing the wave function.) What's 'spooky' about it is mainly that the act of measurement is not itself part of the equation. And also the ontology of the purportedly fundamental particles of physics. A realist would rather hope there was a definitely-existing point-particle somewhere along the line. It's like the measurement 'makes manifest' something that was previously only potentially existing. (This is something that Heisenberg said, referring to Aristotle's 'potentia' (source).
That ties in with the role that I see in 'the observer' generally. As that video Is Reality Real? says 'of course there's an external world. We just don't see it as it is.' Our brain/mind is constructing reality on the fly at every moment.
To .one?
Quoting Wayfarer
Indeed. If that were not the case, it might actually be impossible to explain how we make mistakes, insofar as given that we did in fact all see ..sense, understand, cognize, experience, and whatnot ..the external world as it really is, there shouldnt even be any.
Yeah, I sort of agree, but maybe with a qualification. If one interprets the wave-function epistemically, i.e. as a quantitative measurement of knowledge/degrees of beliefs (i.e. probabilities as interpreted in a Bayesian way), then the 'collapse' is simply an update of knowlege/degrees of beliefs. However, if one wants to interpret the wave-function epistemically, then such an approach should be followed to the end, in a consistent way: QM doens't allow us to make any ontological commitments.
Unfortunately, sometimes what is presented is a 'mixed' approach. For instance, my problem with saying that "the 'measurement' makes manifest something that was only 'potentially existent'" is that it can be misleading: if one attributes some kind of 'reality' to those 'potentialities', wehave a 'realist' view. After all, if it is supposed to describe 'what is really happening' when a measurement is done, then how is not a 'realist' interpretation?
If it is interpreted as a 'convenient way of speaking that should not be taken literally, then one remains faithful to an epistemic approach.
Of course, a truly consistent epistemic approach doens't deny that there is 'something' before a measurement/observation (or whetever word one might prefer) takes place. However, that 'something' cannot be described/known and is not an object of the theory. Indeed, an epistemic interpretation is actually like saying 'there is a limit of what I can know and what I can represent mathematically'. That's why instead of 'non-realist interpretations' I prefer 'non-representationalist interpretations'.
When one understands this IMO, all the talk about 'what is an observer' becomes irrelevant. The theory should be silent about such a question. But, of course, I can say that 'I' can be an observer - this and only this is self-evident apparently - and since I am a conscious being, every other conscious being might be an observer. Maybe only conscious beings are observers, maybe something else can also be. But how can I know that? How can I know that a computer might be an 'observer'? What can I have are speculations, maybe reasonable speculations. But real knowledge? IMO the best if we follow an epistemic/'non-representationalist' interpretation, we should admit that QM itself simply doesn't tell us what an 'observer' really is. It's silent.
Also, this 'epistemic interpretation' is not really restricted to QM. It can IMO be used also for other physical theories (after all, as I said in an another thread, nobody takes the 'forces' in newtonian mechanics as literally existent physical entities... they are useful fictions).
If on the other hand, one prefers a 'realist/representationalist' view one apparently is forced to accept non-locality (a weird kind of non-locality where non-local effects are 'hidden'*), many-worlds or something else (and weirdly enough, even if one accept a 'realist' interpretation, the epistemic interpretations can be still be used to make correct predictions...).
*non-local effects are hidden because in an experiment with, say, two entangled particles, Alice can discover that the 'non-local' effects have taken place only when she gets access to Bob's data on his particle.
Yep. Even if the permanent substance of an object remains, the experience of it, which for us is the same as knowledge about it, in separate times and conditions, is merely possible.
Simply put, the permanence of substance can never justify the permanence of knowledge. From which follows as a matter of logical necessity ..that I put some thing someplace at a time is not in itself sufficient for my knowledge of it at any other time.
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Added later ..cuz Im old and sometimes forget what I meant to do:
Can possibilities really be reduced to zero? Seems like that would be the same as there being zero possibilities, which kinda makes experimental results rather suspicious.
It is realist, but I think he really does say there are degrees of existence:
Isn't that something like possibility space? It's governed by constraints but is still a field of possibilities. I think due to that idea, much of modern technological culture is reliant. The Greeks allowed us to peer into the domain of the possible and realise some of them.
But I am also impressed with QBism. But it can still be epistemic, as all of the 'permanent possibilities of experience' are themselves described by the laws of physics, with strong attractors emergent patterns and so on, but now interlaced with observation. But they still remain essentially grounded in subjective experience insofar as they're disclosed to us.
(The other recent great book I read on this is Nature Loves to Hide, Shimon Malin).
If you're interested, Hoffman has released a paper which assumes more ontological commitments WRT to his ITP: https://constructivist.info/12/3/265.fields
He has a physicist for a co-author here, and I really recommend following up Chris Field's own publications.
The paper takes a decoherence interpretation of quantum physics to explain how the world and agent co-construct or co-emerge in a new metaphysics which doesn't assume the ready made world. There is still work to be done on the notion of observation of course, but I think the implications take the theory a satisfying distance away from Kantianism.
I myself adopt a cybernetic metaphysic in the Von Foerster vein in my own stuff.
I don't see the contradiction and I think if you say there is one then maybe you should make it explicit through something like syllogism, where all ambiguities are removed.
I still think that maybe you have misinterpreted my position. You said you think I mean is:
[(1)] "An inference which you've made about the world based on repeated experience can directly translate to a conception of the world in an objective way"
What I said I mean is:
[(2)] "The world exists mind-independently when no one is looking."
["Mind-independently when no one is looking"] is all I mean by "objective". The world and things [in the world when I am not looking] are general concepts not picking out any specific perspective-independent nor perspective-dependent description - they just convey the idea that something, its exact nature unspecified, is happening when I am not looking.
[The two quoted statements (1) and (2) above] seem like two completely different statements to me. Furthermore, the fact that the latter does not seek to pick out some specific perspective-dependent nor perspective-independent description seems compatible with the idea that we cannot have access to the intrinsic nature of the world ["intrinsic" too is a vague concept not picking out anything in particular, is it not].
In fact, I can re-formulate the statement about "not being able to access the intrinsic nature of the world" in terms of the idea that I simply cannot access information about the world without looking at it, and looking at it consitutes some perspective.
Maybe now I can reformulate my thought that the world exists objectively (when I am not looking) yet I cannot access its intrinsic nature simply as follows:
I can only access information from the world by looking at it through my perspective, yet when I am not looking at it, the external causes of those percepts (of my perspective) continue to exist even when I am not looking and even despite the fact I cannot actually characterize them independently of my perceptions - but something is there, without needing to specify too much about that something.
This inference is based on regularities in my cognitive maps of the world when I look at it then turn away then turn back again, or based on reports from other people. My inferences are not infallible (there could be a Cartesian demon), my inferences are all based on prediction and empirical adequacy - but my experiences are not consistent with the idea that things disappear when I don't look at them.
I can emphasize that when I do look at them, I view a percept through my own perspective; however, this percept is being caused by something which exists beyond my experience even when I am not looking. When people disagree, we can explain that away in terms of brain mechanisms and perceptual differences.
Edit: some clarifying, [ ]
(2017)
.Implications: Our results contribute to an understanding of the world in which neither objects nor spacetime are observer-independent .
(1787)
.It is therefore from the human point of view only that we can speak of space, extended objects, etc. If we depart from the subjective condition, under which alone we can obtain external intuition, or, in other words, by means of which we are affected by objects, the representation of space has no meaning whatsoever.
. in general, ( ) space is not a form which belongs as a property to things; but that objects in space are quite unknown to us, and what we call outward objects**, are nothing else but mere representations of our sensibility, whose form is space, but whose real correlate, the thing in itself, is not known by means of these representations, nor ever can be, but respecting which, in experience, no inquiry is ever made.
(**re: immediately aforementioned objects in space)
Now, granting that cherry-picking in general is beneath the dignity of proper philosophy, a valid counterargument is still possible for any given stated position. So it is that a satisfying distance proposed by one, can be judged as no meaningful distance at all, judged by another.
If youd said the means by which Hoffman, et al arrives at the conclusions supporting their theory is a satisfying distance from Kantianism, youd have been quite right.
Just sayin, and of no particular import.
I have probably misapprehended you then, but this seems like more a comforting thought than something which can be 'objectively known'. Banno's cups notwithstanding.
To be sure, what I object to is stuff such as:
Quoting Wayfarer
It seems to me odd that Wayfarer accepts this, since it is implicitly a scientistic notion - that there is a proper way to describe how the world is, given by physics, and other ways of describing the world are wrong. That the only true description of the world is that given by physics.
It now looks like Wayfarer wants to buy in to scientism.
Not what I said, and not what the source said. I maintain that world described by physics is an abstraction based on the measurable attributes of objects and their relations, which is why I mentioned this quote:
[quote=Erwin Schrodinger, Nature and the Greeks]The scientific world-picture vouchsafes a very complete understanding of all that happens it makes it just a little too understandable. It allows you to imagine the total display as that of a mechanical clockwork which, for all that science knows, could go on just the same as it does, without there being consciousness, will, endeavor, pain and delight and responsibility connected with it though they actually are. And the reason for this disconcerting situation is just this: that for the purpose of constructing the picture of the external world, we have used the greatly simplifying device of cutting our own personality out, removing it; hence it is gone, it has evaporated, it is ostensibly not needed.[/quote]
'Scientism' is the problem of believing that the world independent of any observers is what is real, that science really does give us a kind of total objectivity. Which is why I also mentioned 'The Blind Spot of Science', as that is its subject matter.
I really don't know why you have so much trouble understanding what I write. I was a technical writer for 20 years and I write in plain English. Yet you consistently construe me to be saying things that I don't say, or are even the opposite of what I say.
The journal in which that article is published is Constructivist.info. And what is 'constructivism'?
It's clearly descended from Kantian philosophy. The 'actively constructed by' gives that away.
Well, it's the quote you used. There is a tendency to take the argument just that bit further than is valid.
I think that's near to what Kant describes as 'transcendental realism'.
There are two crucial paragraphs in his Critique to wit:
Having carefully distinguished between transcendental idealism and transcendental realism, Kant then goes on to introduce the concept of empirical realism:
Time and space are 'in us' i.e. they're supplied by the mind. And Donald Hoffman says something similar - there's a video interview of called Space Time is a VR Headset (which I haven't yet reviewed). So empirical realism enables us to act as if the world is real in itself.
What you're doing with 'something' is imagining the world with no observers in it as a kind of placeholder for 'what is really there' - but that is still a projection, a mental operation.
Quoting Mww
I take it what it means is that prior to measurement there is the superposition described in terms of the wave function but the moment a measurement is registered then all possibilities other than the one describing that specific outcome are now zero.
Quoting Banno
Here's the paragraph from which you cherry-picked a couple of words:
I really doubt chatgpt is going to give you a good interpretation from the stochastic interpretation. I doubt it is discussed in nearly enough for chatgpt to give a coherent answer. I have not even seen a single paper that looks at Wigner's friend scenarios specifically through this interpretation so it doesn't really have anything to go off of. This chatgpt answer is definitely wrong.
The Wigner's Friend scenarios are formally not really fundamentally that different from other kinds of contextual scenarios in QM; much of their claims - at the highest generality - come from the non-existence of joint probability distributions regarding measurements of different observers. (e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.16220)
Different measurement contexts regarding observers are statistically incompatible; but rather than meaning that observers have equally valid views of the same thing at the same time, it just means that different measurements change the statistics of a system. When observers disagree, they are actually sampling from different statistical contexts of the world that can never co-exist at the same time; for example, (https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.07213):
Another allusion to these incompatible contexts but in an experimental set-up (https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.09905):
The stochastic interpretation says that the wave-function is not a real object. The real objects are actual particle properties which are hidden-variables and they always have a definite outcome at any time so there is always ever only one way the physical world is at any one time. Those definite outcomes, however, may come from statistical contexts which are incompatible or cannot be represented on a single, unique probability space.
I think it really depends on what you mean by all these terms which I often find confusing. Yes, realistic in terms of there are particles in definite configurations all the time. But it will also have all the statistical properties in the wavefunction that are responsible for violating contextual realism generally in quantum mechanics. However, the wavefunction isn't a real physical object in this interpretation.
Also, to be more specific, the hidden variables shouldn't be seen in terms of a single particle but ensembles of particles - i.e. many, many repetitions of an experiment.
So even though there's a single, unique probablity space, it won't ever be captured the same way by two observers. There's a good get-out-of-jail card, right there. I'll take your point that ChatGPT could be wrong but I still don't see it defusing the observer problem.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Which falls under the title of 'transcendental realism' - the real world exists external to us, even though we can never capture what it is.
Summary table on different interpretations. (Says I'm wrong about the 'stochastic intepretation' not defusing the 'observer problem'.)
Quoting AmadeusD
Sure, perhaps, but this would apply to everything you can ever think or say. I wasn't necessarily arguing for 'objective knowing' in some perspective-independent sense. I don't think that should stop one creating theories or stories about how the world works and about the things they should expect if they do x, y or z. At the end of the day, 'objectivity' is neither necessary or sufficient for people selecting their preferred theories, hypotheses, viewpoints. People pick theories that seem to work for them.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Ain't that the truth/s :P
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, yes, more or less. So are you when you use "you" communicating with me. The question is: do I exist outside of your mind, Wayfarer?
You and I are different individuals, no question about that. In the mind-created world thread, I do try and address the objection that 'idealism says that "the world is all in the mind"' as I think that's what you believe I am arguing (@Banno most certainly believes that.)
So: You have your mind, and I mine. But we are instances of a more general phenomenonhuman consciousness, or the human mind. This isn't something just to be studied 'from the outside' as object, but is the ground or basis of all experience and knowledge. While theres no question that the objectively-existing elements of the world, as analyzed by science, are real, they always appear to us as patterns within experience. In that sense, mind is the irreducible basis of existencenot as a constituent of objects, but as the condition through which anything can be said to exist at all.
I understand that at the time of my death there is a world that will continue to exist, although obviously the world as I see it no longer will. But then I don't think that the type of idealism I'm defending must necessarily deny any of that. What I'm driving at is that we're instances of 'mind' in a more general sense than that of the individual consciousness. I'm talking about human consciousness, or better, the human mind, not as something to be studied 'from the outside' so to speak, but as the ground or basis of any and all experience, knowledge, and theorisation. Hence the requirement for a perspectival approach.
The consensus in the scientific mainstream is that the mind, or human consciousness, is an emergent or epiphenomenal construct arising from the objectively-existent elements identified and understood by the natural sciences. That is naturalism or physicalism. What I take analytical idealism to be arguing, on the contrary, can be paraphrased as: whatever these objectively-existing elements analysed by the sciences are, and there's no question that they exist, they appear to us as patterns in experience. Everything occurs within experience, or in mind in that general sense (Hoffman says somewhere that 'experience is the coin of the realm'). Mind is the irreducible basis of existence in that sense - not in the sense of being an objective constituent of objects, but in the sense that to say of anything that it exists, that it exists for a mind (per Schopenhauer.)
This approach can also draw from phenomenology, which asserts that the world is always given to us through experience, or "intentionality." We don't simply observe a pre-existing world from a distance; rather, the world appears to us through the lens of consciousness, shaped by our perceptions, language, and understanding. Phenomenology doesn't deny the existence of an external world, but it emphasizes that this world is always inseparable from how it is experienced. In this way, the form of idealism I'm arguing for doesnt reject the reality of the world but insists that mind is the condition of its intelligibility and experience. We can't 'get outside' that.
Think about how deeply-entrenched the idea of 'apart from' or 'separate to' is embedded in our usual world-picture. When the question is asked about 'what exists', that mental construct is already underpinning it. So hence the 'phenomnological epoch?' which is learning to see those automatic assumptions that so pervade what we consider to be normal and real. It's different from 'scientific objectivity' - not in conflict with it, where it is necessary, as it so often is, but it operates in a far wider context.
Quoting Wayfarer
Hey, careful - you cherry-picked those words, not me. Here:
Quoting Wayfarer
Ahhh yes, got it. (Kinda figured thats what you meant): All OTHER possibilities reduce to zero. If all possibilities reduce to zero there is no outcome, hence nothing to describe, which is a contradiction to the act of measurement.
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Quoting Wayfarer
Agreed, clearly. But still, just as I favor probability over possibility, so too I favor determined over created. To say we create, especially with respect to that which is regulated by empirical principles, suggests more power in us than we possess.
Well, maybe create is a strong word. But look at the way science has managed to peer into the realm of possibility and pluck things out of it that actually work. Like this magic little iPad I sit here and type this on. I sometimes wonder if an experimental outcome in physics is like a special case of that. So, maybe making manifest would be better than creating.
If we can never see the world "as it really is," then how shall we explain things like mistakes? For instance, if I mistake my car for one that looks like it in the parking lot. In the case I was not experiencing things as they "really were." But on the view that all sensation is somehow illusory, it's also the case that when I later properly identify my car I have also failed to see things as they really are.
The same holds for illusions. When I look at the famous checkerboard illusion and I see the square in the shadow labeled A as darker than the square outside the shadow labeled B, I am "not seeing things as they are." Actually, the two shades of gray are identical. But then when I put them side by side, and see that they are the same exact gray, it seems I would [I]still[/I] not be seeing them as they are.
Are there gradations of illusion here? Do we rank perceptions by their approximation of truth? But if getting a view of truth is impossible (as it must be if the truth of things is "how things are conceived of without a mind") then how do we ever make a proper comparison by which to rank approximations of truth? It seems quite impossible. This is the difficulty with a correspondence theory of truth, particularly if paired with subject/object dualism. And then it also seems like the intelligibility of the world ends up coming down on the subject side of our ledger, since we are "constructing" the quiddity of the objects of experience.
It's a thorny issue. I think it is possible to maintain the old scholastic mantra that "everything is received in the manner of the receiver," without setting up such issues, but it's difficult. The term "objective" is particularly thorny because it has become a sort of chimera of Lockean objectivity (properties that exist 'in-themselves') and Kant's "noumenal," with the less loaded definition of "the view with relevant subjective biases removed" lumped in with these. I do think philosophy could benefit from using C.S Pierce's terminology re "objective," as being placed in the umwelt (and for man the lebenswelt) but it's fairly technical and has the problem that "subject" and "subjective" used to mean pretty much the opposite of what it is used for now (in the scholastics Pierce is relying heavily upon).
But maybe a start would be to say that "men see things as many sees things," rather than "man sees things not as they really are." The issue of models and theories is also put into better focus if these are seen as tools for knowing rather than the subjects of knowledge. The idea of "constructing" seems unobjectionable if it is kept in mind that the intelligibility of things is not being constructed out of the unintelligible, but of course the exact opposite is true for Kant's usage.
A common argument against Bishop Berkeley. But he does consider it in his dialogues.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
There are gradations of reality, so I guess that is like the inverse of that. But the deep, underlying issue is one which I think you, in particular, will grasp, more so than others.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
What was the historical context of Berkeley's idealism? It was a reaction to the emerging materialism which had started to creep into the 'new' philosophies of Hobbes and Locke. That the objects of sense have a reality independent of our perception, which our ideas represent - representative realism, in fact. This is the genesis of much modern materialism. Berkeley's arguments were a protest against that, aiming to undercut the idea of a 'mind-independent empirical reality'. But by this stage, empiricism had already dispensed with the residue of Platonism and Aristotelian realism that still animated scholastic philosophy, dessicated though it might have become. Part of the sweeping changes to do with the decline of scholastic realism (Theological Origins of Modernity by Gillespie is mainly about this.)
My theory is that Aquinas' insight that you mention, 'everything received in the manner of the knower', is precisely what had become lost in the transition to the empiricism and nominalism of early modern period. This is why that terms such as 'idealism' and indeed 'objective' only start to enter the lexicon in the early modern period. It signifies the transition to a new form of consciousness - that of modern individualism, as distinct from the 'participatory' or 'I-thou' form of consciousness that characterised the earlier epoch. It corresponds with the loss of that connectedness with being, articulated in Aquinas' epistemology as the union of the knower with the known (ref). That retains an element of the idea of union which was severed by empiricism. Again, the origin of that is clearly given in Perl's book (which incidentally I learned about from John Vervaeke.)
The emergence of Berkeley's idealism and the notion of 'objective knowledge' are both characteristics of that underlying historical trend. And one hallmark of empiricism is the insistence on the mind-independence of the objects of science and (from Descartes) the supposed soveriegnty of the individual 'I'. Starting with Kant, continuing through phenomenology, we see the critical phase of showing that 'mind-independence' in the sense posited by materialism can't be maintained (even if in rather different ways.) That I see as the background to these debates, at a very high level. (See What's Wrong with Ockham: Reassessing the Role of Nominalism in the Dissolution of the West, Joshua Hochschild (.pdf))
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
In Buddhist Studies, I learned there is a Sanskrit term, yath?bh?ta?, which means exactly 'to see things as they truly are'. Naturally, that is an attribute of the Buddha, but it can be extended by analogy to other philosophical and spiritual traditions. Like the Latin 'Veritas'. I think it conveys the idea of 'sagacity', or 'sapience' - what is required of sound judgement at a very holistic level. Which of course seems an impossible ideal in fragmented and hyper-specialsed world we now inhabit. But surely a major part of that has always been self-knowledge, still as elusive as always. We are entangled and bound up with false conceptions. Philosophy was intended as a therapy for that.
There is not one, unique probability space. Measurements alter the statistical behavior of stochastic system, inducing different statistical contexts mutually-exclusively.
There is no particular observer problem in stochastic mechanics because collapse isn't rea but measurements do disturb systems. This is just because measurement of a system by a device can just be seen as the coupling of two stochastic systems together and the coupling causes the disturbance. This can be linked to the uncertainty principle which show up naturally in stationary stochastic systems of any kind.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't think its meant in that sense, after all, these hidden particles are what is directly measured. Its just hidden under the quantum formalism.
Quoting Wayfarer
Its confusing but the statistical/ensemble/minimalist interpretation is not actually the same as the stochastic interpretation even though I did use the notion of ensembles before.
It has a separate wikipedia page to the stochastic quantum mechanics page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensemble_interpretation
e.g. [quote=Donald Hoffman, Case against Reality]Most of us believe deeply in a physical reality, consisting of objects in spacetime that existed prior to life and observers; no observer is needed, we believe, to endow any object with a position, spin, or any other physical property. But as the implications of quantum theory are better understood and tested by experiments, this belief can survive only by clinging to possible gaps in the experiments, and those gaps are closing.[/quote]
Logically, there must have been something for life to come in to. So, his position seems to be that without perceivers we couldn't know anything. Sure, but that doesn't entail a lack of anything, does it? The activity we call ESR for instance, doesn't need an observer. But, we are te observer, so we're just stuck - I don't know that we can draw conclusions from that, though, positive or negative.
Though, I found Kastrup convincing for a few days after finding his work more accessible than most idealists (and related theorists). Perhaps I just don't find Hoffman as accessible.
The way I put it is that 'existence' is not an on/off, is/isn't concept. Saying that 'the object doesn't exist without an observer' isn't necessarily the same as saying that it vanishes or becomes non-existent in the absence of one. But outside any conception of its existence, what can we possibly be talking about? The way I put it is that the mind provides the frame within which anything we think or say about existence takes place. Granted though, that is my way of putting it, not necessarily his. Also - see if you can find a copy of the book, or other of his materials. He does anticipate many of the apparently obvious gotchas that people point at him.
(The Essentia Foundation interview with Hoffman might be a good source. At least it's free!)
This could be straight from the Kant's mouth. Nice.
Fair enough - I've been following the thread, but admittedly haven't read much mroe than what's been provided here. Will do.
Ok, I see. The wave-function is interpreted as an 'useful' fiction but at the same time the theory also adopts Counterfactual definiteness. How is non-locality handled in this interpretation?
Quoting Wayfarer
I can see the appeal but IMO this view leads to some problems (some serious, some not).
First, if the wave-function is given any kind of reality, then non-locality is inescapable. If I make a position measurement, then QM literally says that the wave-function can contract instantaneously from a 'very large space region' to a 'point-like space region'. Of course, you can say that it has a 'different' degree of reality, but I'm not sure how a truly physical non-local effect can be avoided. This is not per se a 'damning'* problem (after all, I know that even the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation can be formulated in a way that is consistent with special relativity) but it is still IMO a problem for one who wants to present it as 'local'. BTW, I know that Kastner argued that the interpretation is local because the measurement only 'destroys' possibilities, not actualities but at the same time the 'actualities' do, well, become actual and if they do not come 'from nothing', something 'real' must be there before.
Second, the wavefunction itself can be changed before the measurement. In fact, the wave-function contains the information of the experimental set-up, which can be modified by the experimenter. In some ways, then, if the wavefunction is interpreted as having some kind of reality, it somehow interacts
(in some cases nonlocally) with the experimental setup and/or the experimenter.
Third, in a Wigner-friend type of scenario, some actualities seem to have become 'actual' only to an observer and not to the other. If one wants a realist interpretation, this IMO leads to an inconsistency.
I believe that this shows that the wavefunction does indeed represent 'potentialities' but only epistemic ones, i.e. gives probabilities that some experiences or observations occur.
*Regarding non-locality, Einstein (probably influenced by the 'principium individuationis' of Schopenhauer) thought that undermines physical realism by itself (and this is the reason why he didn't like Bohm's interpretation, which is realistic). As he said to Born in a letter written in 1948:
(source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/einstein-philscience/#ReaSep)
Edit: by this I don't mean that those who think that 'non-local realism' is possible are wrong. But it would be still a quite strange form of realism where we cannot 'separate' the elements of reality by using a spatio-temporal separation.
I think that you are raising here a very good objection, but it is not 'decisive' IMO.
I believe that a 'mistake' or an 'illusion' can be interpreted as an interpretation of a given experience that is inconsistent with his inconsistent with other related experiences.
For instance, consider the case where you see a circular table from a certain distance and angolation. It doesn't appear as circular but as elliptical. And as I move around, its apparent shape is still elliptical but different and it continues to change. So, I conclude that the 'elliptical shape' is a mere appearance, an illusion if you like, because the fact that the 'apparent shape' changes as I change my position means that it is not an intrinsic property of the table and assuming naively that it is makes my judgment mistaken.
On the other hand, saying that the table is 'really circular' does accomodate all these observations and, therefore, it is 'more correct' than saying that a particular elliptical shape that I saw was the 'real one'. But of course, we know that the 'circular shape' itself when examined more closely is not true either etc.
BTW, I used the example of the physicist David Bohm (see e.g. this video).
So, I think that you can't detect a mistake even if the 'world as it really is' is inaccessible to us.
Also IMO this doens't imply that the world is not intelligible or our experience is not intelligible. In fact, at least up to a certain point we can say that there is intelligibility.
As that article suggests, Heisenbergs analogy between Aristotles potentia and the wave function highlights an important metaphysical insight. Heisenberg refers to quantum objects as existing in a strange kind of reality somewhere between existence and non-existence, which introduces the idea that there may be degrees of reality. This contrasts with the modern view that existence is a binary conceptsomething either exists or it doesnt (known as the univocity of being). But Heisenbergs interpretation suggests a more nuanced understanding, where entities like quantum objects have a form of potential existence that becomes fully real only through observation. This idea of gradations of being allows for a richer metaphysical framework, one that resonates with pre-modern views like Aristotles, where being is understood in terms of potentiality and actuality. So the answer to the question does the object exist prior to being observed is neither yes or no - the answer actually *is* the wave-function. The observation manifests or is actualised in a particular outcome. I cant help but feel that it is at least a pregnant metaphor.
You know, Heisenberg was a lifelong Platonist. In that book I mentioned, Nature Loves to Hide, the author says that Heisenberg was known to carry with him the Timaues when a university student. I have a reprint of his essay, The Debate between Plato and Democritus. He comes out in favour of Plato.
As I interpret it, Hoffman et al don't seem to be claiming that space is just a mode of apperception ala Kant, but it really exist but not in a Newtonian, objective sense, either. I think Hoffman has become Peircean in all but name.
As you will see, he describes environment and organism co-emerging and co-creating. Icons and eigenforms really exist since they're holographically encoded as space. I think this is what he is saying: This is what space is. It's icons and eigenforms encoded holographically and we interpret and act on them.
Space isn't wholly "out there" nor is it just our mode of apperception. It's a semiotic phenomena which we interpret to perpetuate our existence, and it exists in the relational in-between.
To be fair, I do not, in principle have a problem with this understanding. Problem is, however, that the 'collapse' of the wavefunction is observer-dependent, i.e. it takes place in the perspective of a given observer (whatever an 'observer' might be). In this view, the collapse is a process of actualization, so actualization is observer-dependent.
So in other to be consistent, I think that this kind of understanding has to treat both the potentialities and the actualities as observer-dependent. No matter how Heisenberg saw these these things, I really doubt that Aristotle or Plato would have liked that potentiality-actuality is something that is perspectival.
Quoting Wayfarer
With this I agree.
So the idea of construction in Kants usage becomes objectionable because the intelligibility of things is constructed out of the unintelligible?
Is it your intention that your readers should understand you to mean Kantian speculative metaphysics in general, and transcendental idealism in particular, is unintelligible, thereby making his idea of constructing objectionable, insofar as Kants idea of constructing is predicated on both of those philosophies?
I wouldn't toss this in except I know you are sympathetic to a Taoist way of seeing things. I think Lao Tzu is saying something similar to what you are. These are from Stephen Mitchell's version of the Tao Te Ching.
Verse 1 (excerpt)
The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.
[u]The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.[/u]
Verse 40
Return is the movement of the Tao.
Yielding is the way of the Tao.
[u]All things are born of being.
Being is born of non-being.[/u]
Well, on the error point, I don't think someone like Berkeley has the same problem here. For Berkeley, we see the world as it is under normal conditions, although of course we see it from our individual perspective. Error is its own category.
The problem comes up only when it is assumed that it is impossible to see the world as it "really is," because such knowledge would require "knowing the world without a mind." The problem is not only that both experience under normal conditions and conditions of error share in unreality, but that we have no means of saying which is closer to "what things are really like." If the way things "really are" is inaccessible, if even space and time are the unique products of the mind, then there is no possible comparison of experience and reality. Correspondence is out. Nor will an identity theory work. We can't say that there is an identity shared by experience and realitythat, as Aristotle says in De Anima, the "mind (potentially) becomes all things," because this possibility is also excluded.
An ancillary issue might be the justification for proposing "properties in-themselves," since properties that don't involve interaction are not only epistemically inaccessible, but also make no difference to the world. They might as well be locked away in their own sui generis sort of being.
Now, if the intelligibility of things and the intelligibility of our experiences and our knowledge of things is the same, there is no problem. Reason is perhaps the glue that holds things together (rather than a sort of "bridge between them" that we must build). On this view, we are never separated. But on this view it isn't true that we don't see things as they are. To be sure, we don't see things perfectly. There is a difference between discursive human reason and simple divine apprehension of all truths. Truth, with being, is inherently bound up in intelligibility though (e.g. St. Thomas' disputed questions on truth).
Well, I see two distinct problems. On the one hand is the focus on arelational "in-itselfness" that Kant inherited from Locke and Co. I don't think this makes sense.
The other problem is that of the "construction" of intelligibility, if this is to mean something like "construction ex nihilo," where what is contained in the construction cannot be said to be present in what it is constructed from. There are other problems here. For example, might we not be locked in our own worlds? What's to say all minds don't construct radically different worlds? Because we understand each other? But we are supposedly constructing all understanding, and we construct our experience of other people communicating with us just as much as we construct our sensory perceptions of nature. Maybe natural selection and biology explain why our minds are similar? But these are phenomena and can say nothing of the noumenal.
And then in Kant's case the noumena becomes the solution to that pesky "free will and determinism problem" at the end of the Prolegomena, but it seems to me that this move is totally unjustified (this is I suppose an ancillary problem).
This seems untrue. Maps are never their territory; if a map was, it would just be the territory. Yet, we can clearly distinguish maps that faithfully correspond to their territory, and those that do not. The non-identity of bad maps with their territory is not the same as the non-identity of all maps with their territories. We distinguish the two kinds of non-identity conceptually and in practice.
Quoting boundless
Counterfactual definiteness? Yes, I guess; but again, when people talk about counterfactual definiteness, they are usually talking about the wavefunction and perhaps things like collapse. Stochastic interpretation would be talking about definiteness in regard to something else, so the concept has arguably changed.
Regarding non-locality? In the most up to date formulations of the stochastic interpretation, it should be as non-local/local as orthodox quantum theory. There should be no statistical signalling statistically, there is no collapse and measurements do not have any causal influence on each other across space or time. Obviously, there must be non-local correlations and stochastic laws between separated particles but it doesn't seem to me that this implies some kind of causal signalling. At the end of the day, stochastic systems are capable of producing non-local correlations from some unremarkable assumptions regardless of whether the stochastic interpretation is correct or not.
Sure, you can do that [I]if[/I] you can compare the territory with the map. But now what is to be done when the territory is unobservable by definition?
This is precisely why Fichte and Hegel take Kant in a radically new direction.
This is a world map from 1892. This perspective of the world was unobservable in a time without spaceships and satellites. While there are obvious distortions, I think they managed to do a pretty good job of inferring the major features and their relationships from the evidence they had.
I think this is a pretty good analogy with our relationship with the external world, which is unobservable as it is (as the concept is incoherent), but about which we can know quite a bit inferentially from evidence and conceptual modelling.
This is fair! A kind of dualist then?
I agree with your sentiment. It makes sense on the view that the "external" world is intelligible in itself. It does not, however, make sense on the view that the external world is unintelligible.
I mean, re your example, per Kant space is a creation of the mind. So you can't make maps of the noumena in this way. Obviously Kantians aren't going to argue against your point, that we can make accurate phenomenally accessible maps of phenomenally accessible territories. Consider that there were very, very many ways to confirm that maps corresponded to the world before the first satellites. Now how exactly do you check that experience corresponds to what is outside experience? Can you step outside experience to check?
No, CFD (counterfactual definiteness) simply implies that physical quantities have definite values at all times. de Broglie Bohm's interpertation is a perfect example of an interpetation which has CFD. MWI violates CFD because it assigns multiple values to hypothetical measurements, so it can be realistic and 'local' (although in a weird sense... after all, what is more nonlocal than a 'universal wavefunction' split at each measurement?).
If your stochastic interpretation accepts that there is a definite configuration of particles at all times, then how can you explain Bell's experiments without non-locality? In de Broglie-Bohm's interpretation, in the case of entangled particles, the velocity of each entangled particle (which always has a definite value) depends instantaneously on the positions (which always have a definite value) of the other entangled particles. That's how the interpretation 'explains' (or at least 'gives a description of') Bell's experiments.
But this implies that you need some kind of 'simultaneity' (a long time ago, I read of some versions of this interpretation which are Lorentz invariant. So, I guess that this kind of 'simultaneity' doesn't necessarily imply a rejection of special relativity. I don't remember however the details)
So, in your view, if the particle configuration is definite at all times, how can you describe non-local correlations without a non-local dynamics/kinematics which involves some notion of simultaneity?
Ok, Berkeley was an ontological idealist, so yeah, I agree with this. After all, ontological idealism is actually more similar to realism than some forms epistemic and transcendental idealism, skepticism, phenomenologies etc. After all, ontological idealism is, well, a metaphysical theory of 'how things really are'.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
But note that if one accepts that experience is the starting point of knowledge and if one accepts that experience is also the way we 'validate' our judgments, then corrispondence is difficult to maintain.
I can infer something about the 'external world' from my experiences but how can I 'prove' that my inferences are correct? How can I have a certain/true knoledge** of them?
Induction is not compelling. Even if all my experiences were to be consistent with some of my inferences about 'how the world out there should be', then I would still not have a certain, true knowledge. All I can have is a 'best guess'.
But I can still detect errors in judgments. I can still determine that some of my inferences are incorrect if they contradict some of my experience. In other words, while I cannot determine 'truth', I can determine (at least some) 'falsity'. Induction might not be a solid foundation for truth but it is still able to determine the falsity of some judgments.
But of course, this validation that we get from experience doesn't give us true knowledge and so it is not enough for truth (I reject 'coherence theory of truth', because a judgment that is coherent with all experiences is not enough to be called 'true'). So what? I think that, at least philosophically, we should 'suspend judgment' about the 'external world', i.e. the world outside experience. There is no denial here about the 'external world', or how it might be.
For instance, if I cling to the expression 'the sun rises and sets' as some truth about 'how the world is' I would be in error. Still, in a sense, is a 'valid' statement: it correctly describes some experiences (but not all) and has some practical utility. The same goes for, say, newtonian mechanics.
On the other hand, I believe if you actually think that we can have true knowledge about 'how the world is' that we can discover by inference from our experience, we need some other assumption which is IMO unprovable.
Personally, I think I am closer to Pyrrhonism than Kantianism in epistemology.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
If you say that 'we can get true knowledge, at least in principle, from inferences from our experiences because the world is intelligible' this is IMO an assumption. It might be correct but we cannot prove it.
Quoting boundless
To expand on this...
I believe that 'the sun rises and sets' might be called a 'provisional truth'. It is valid in some contexts but if we cling at is it were a 'true description of the world', what we might call an 'ultimate truth' about the 'external world', we would be in error.
So, in a sense, yes, we can make 'true judgments' in the sense they are coherent, at least in some contexts.
But at the same time, 'experiences and inferences from experiences' alone cannot give us true knowledge. Provisional, pragmatic 'truths' yes, but these 'truths' are not truths in the 'classical' philosophical sense. Accepting these 'provisional truths' is not really the problem, the problem seems to be clinging about them.
Without additional assumptions we are not justified that we can know 'truths' which are 'higher' than 'provisional truths'. And IMO it is up to who upholds these additional assumptions to give a justification of them. BTW, I am not saying that such assumptions cannot be 'reasonable', so to speak, but 'reasonableness' might not be enough to be a philosophical justification, in the sense that of a rationally compelling justification. And, also, as our progress in science revealed to us is that even the most 'reasonable' ideas human beings have had about the world turned out to be incorrect, incoherent with observations (which ultimately are experiences, after all, if one thinks about it). And these 'reasonable ideas' were supported by equally 'reasonable assumptions', which themselves were found incorrect.
Note that I am not saying that all our reasonable assumptions are necessary false and will necessarily be found false but simply that we seem not to be able to justify them in a 'rationally compelling' sense and also that clinging about them have been a source of mistakes.
BTW, actually more than Pyrrhonism, my view of knowledge is mostly inspired by some versions of the 'theory of two truths' that I encountered in some schools of Indian philosophies/religions (especially some Buddhist schools). At the same time, similar ideas are also present in some western thinkers and philosophical schools, e.g. Pyrrhonism, which maybe is actually close to my own views on epistemology as I don't make any claim about 'ultimate truth' (after all, even in Indian philosophies/religions, positive claims about the 'ultimate truth' were made in a religious context and often had a religious 'justification', not a philosophical one, at least not completely philosophical one. But I am digressing...).
Yeah, I suppose thats my problem here: the idea of constructing intelligibility, that intelligibility is something constructed. I find nothing to suggest Kants philosophy, or, indeed anyone elses, is about that, and in particular following from it, this notion of constructing the intelligibility of things.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Nothing at all; sometimes a mind does create .determine .a radically different world. Subsequently, if enough other minds come to the same judgement, that radically different world comes to be. Like .stop using leeches in medicine; lets wipe out indigenous cultures in order to satisfy some conceived greater need.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Understanding is a merely speculative faculty of human intelligence, which is itself that which constructs. The use of personal pronouns helps to facilitate whatever conversations arise from intelligence, but intelligence in and of itself, in its natural activity, has no use for them.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Correct. From a philosophical point of view, human intelligence is a speculative procedural system, in that the end (that which is contained in the construction, re: experience/knowledge) is not present in the means, or, that which the ends are constructed from (phenomenal and conceptual representations).
-
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, such an assumption would be more than a problem; it would be an irrational venture into absurdity. Thankfully, no one of sufficient reason has ever been guilty of it.
It remains conclusive, that is impossible to see .sense, intuit, comprehend, cognize, judge, experience .the world as it really is, but not because of the absence of a mind, but merely because that which does all that stuff, re: theoretical reason, is not part of what that stuff is done to, re: existential Nature.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
That isnt how it works. The checking, which is not the construction but presupposes it necessarily, is done by the congruency of one experience with another antecedent to it.
Fun stuff, donchathink?
You are making the common mistake of equating knowledge with certainty. Certainty has no place in empirical knowledge, only in math and logic. Your over restrictive "true knowledge" limits knowledge to the latter. I suggest you abandon the obsession with certainty.
This is how Fichte interpreted Kant. Kant's book on the metaphysical foundations of science has him constructing nature from intelligence in link with the noumena. There has to be something "out there" that wasn't phenomenal or spiritual from which intelligence can bounce its intuitions off of. Fichte has us creating ourselves (and probably even the noumena, although he went back and forth on this and probably on purpose) the same way Schopenhauer has it. The "I" posits itself. Why? For the reason that it can. It's a strange loop. (A strange loop has its place outside the world but makes less sense within the world, as does creation from nothing) A human would be responsible even for his birth for Fichte and Schopenhauer, as Buddhism had for so many years before proposed
I would not say that this kind of certainty is the same as the one found in math and logic, but yes I would say that in order to be 'true knowledge' (and not a 'provisional', 'pragmatic', 'transactional' or even an 'approximate' one) it must be unmistaken. Do you think that a false (but reasonable) belief can be said to be knowledge?
If we grant a 'fallible knowledge' the status of a 'true, unmistaken knowledge', then our ancestors that believed that the Sun and the stars revolved around Earth would correctly claim 'I know, based on observation, that the Sun and the stars revolve around Earth and they move from east to west'. If this is taken as a statement of 'knowing how the world really is', then we know that is mistaken.
But of course the same statement 'I know, based on observation, that the Sun and the stars revolve around Earth and they move from east to west' can also be considered correct, if it describes the apparent motion of these celestial objects. Also, it is correct if it is taken to be a claim of provisional or pragmatic knowledge. The problem arises when one clings to such a statement as an affirmation of 'how the external world really is'.
To conclude, I am not sure I disagree with you, actually. If 'knowledge' is taken to mean as a reasonable belief then I think we agree. If 'knowledge' is taken as meaning an unmistaken belief, then no.
IMO the distinction between 'provisional truth' and 'ultimate truth' that I made in my previous posts doesn't by itself denote an obsession for certainty. It can also denote an 'open minded perspective' that doesn't consider our beliefs based on empirical evidence and inference from such evidence as unmistaken beliefs.
Also, it's possible to consider the issue in another way.
The statement 'the Sun and the stars revolve around Earth and they move from east to west' is, if taken literally (i.e. as an accurate description of 'what really happens in the external world'), false.
But at the same time if we interpret the same statement in a non-literal way, in some sense is true.
Clearly, the truth of this statement is provisional, pragmatic - not 'ultimate'. The mistake of those who believed in the accuracy of the statement was that they took it literally. You can take these statements seriously (i.e. as statements of provisional, pragmatic truths) even if you don't take them literally (for instance, I can say 'I want to have the sunlight in my room in the morning, so I should have windows that face the east because the Sun moves from east to west during the day' is a valid inference even if my reasoning is based on a geocentric model, which is used in a practical way. I can use such a model even if I do not take it literally).
So, we can say that it is a 'pragmatic, provisional knowledge' but not a 'true knowledge'. IMO the distinction between these two concepts is important.
He constructs an understanding of Nature in accordance with a specific kind of intelligence. I dont understand that project as constructing intelligibility, when such must already be given in order for an intelligence of any kind to fathom anything at all from that to which it is directed.
Quoting Gregory
Agree, and from that arises the notion that, no matter what that something out there happens to be, its intelligibility must given in order for a judgement to be determinable with respect to it. If a thing is intelligible in us as this or that thing, its intelligibility as becoming this or that must already inhere in the thing as a condition of it. That it is a thing is conditioned by its extension in space; that it is this or that thing is conditioned by its intelligibility.
Quoting Gregory
Yeah, I suppose. Strange loop a euphemism for the intrinsic circularity of pure reason herself, insofar as it is necessarily the clandestine use of reason by which reason becomes comprehensible enough to express as a speculative intellectual system. That there is that which thinks, is itself a thought.
Thanks for bringing up Fichte in juxtaposition to Kant, but I still dont see the constructing of intelligibility in either of them. Not that there it isnt there, just that Im not familiar with it as such.
The statement 'the Sun and the stars revolve around Earth and they move from east to west' is, if taken literally, perfectly true, as anyone can attest*. What is unclear is the honorific 'what really happens in the external world'.
* Unless you are dead-set on some privileged reference frame, in which case you must be going through life in chronic confusion, unable to understand simple directions like "left" or "east".
"Unmistaken" is not "certain". To be knowledge, a belief must be true. That means for empirical beliefs we can never be totally sure that our beliefs are knowledge or not. And that is ok.
Quoting boundless
I feel you are muddling things here. Statements are only true or false wrt an interpretation. Given the same statement, some interpretations may be true, others may be false. This just demonstrates that uninterpreted statements, "statements in themselves", don't have truth values.
Only interpretations do.
Here is my commentary on the Stanford Encyclopedia's article on Fichte.
First to note, Fichte famously did away with the thing-in-itself early in his career. He wanted to establish a very fact upon which all philosophy could be based. Was this just the cogito?
*The published presentation of the first principles of the Jena Wissenschaftslehre commences with the proposition, the I posits itself; more specifically, the I posits itself as an I. Since this activity of self-positing is taken to be the fundamental feature of I-hood in general, the first principle asserts that the I posits itself as self-positing.*
So the I is in some sense prior to itself, hence the strange loop.
*Unfortunately, this starting point is somewhat obscured in Part I of the Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre by a difficult and somewhat forced attempt on Fichtes part to connect this starting point to the logical law of identity, as well as by the introduction of two additional first principles, corresponding to the logical laws of non-contradiction and sufficient reason...*
I think this is more important that it seems. The I is necessary AS intelligent. The law of identity, non contradiction, and sufficient reason are part of the fabric of the "I posit" as if the I flows logically from it's own nature. The I can only posit an intelligent self that thinks
*"To posit (setzen) means simply to be aware of, to reflect upon, or to be conscious of; this term does not imply that the I must simply create its objects of consciousness.*
Not "simply create" but create in a sense that there is no thing in itself. But the empirical I does not do this. The I of the body is IN the world as born and living
"The principle in question simply states that the essence of I-hood lies in the assertion of ones own self-identity, i.e., that consciousness presupposes self-consciousness (the Kantian I think, which must, at least in principle, be able to accompany all our representations). Such immediate self-identify, however, cannot be understood as a psychological fact, no matter how privileged, nor as an action or accident of some previously existing substance or being. To be sure, it is an action of the I, but one that is identical with the very existence of the same.*
Fichte was in a pickle. He didn't want to "say" we create the world or ourselves, but he puts himself in between saying we do and we don't in such a carefully balanced act that his philosophy must fall to one side. Everyone seems to agree he was an idealist. The encyclopedia is pointing out his hesitation on this
*In Fichtes technical terminology, the original unity of self-consciousness is to be understood as both an action and as the product of the same: as a Tathandlung or fact/act, a unity that is presupposed by and contained within every fact and every act of empirical consciousness, though it never appears as such therein.
This same identity in difference of original self-consciousness might also be described as an intellectual intuition, inasmuch as it involves the immediate presence of the I to itself, prior to and independently of any sensory content.*
The difference between the empirical I and the transcendental I!
*To be sure, such an intellectual intuition never occurs, as such, within empirical consciousness; instead, it must simply be presupposed (that is, posited) in order to explain the possibility of actual consciousness, within which subject and object are always already distinguished. The occurrence of such an original intellectual intuition is itself inferred, not intuited...*
As bodies we are not aware of our source of consciousness directly
*A fundamental corollary of Fichtes understanding of I-hood (Ichheit) as a kind of fact/act is his denial that the I is originally any sort of thing or substance. Instead, the I is simply what it posits itself to be, and thus its being is, so to speak, a consequence of its self-positing, or rather, is co-terminus with the same*
If it was a substance it could not create itself in any sense whatsoever. It would just "be". As an act which establishes itself, it can "be" prior to itself. Being prior to itself, it can be self conscious by reflecting on the I it is prior to
Not sure if you are disagreeing with me or not. If by 'taken literally' one means that it correctly describes the appearances then, yes, I agree that it can be said to be 'literally true'.
On the other hand, the 'geocentrists' believed that our experience was totally veridical: the Earth was at the center of the universe and didn't move and the Sun revolved around it. It wasn't a mere 'it appears as if' but 'it appears because it is so'. In other words, they were extremely naive realists.
The 'honorific' simply means that it was taken as 'a correct description of (external) reality as it is'
Quoting hypericin
Well, by 'unmistaken' I meant without error, i.e. correct. To me this is 'certain', unless by 'certainty' we mean the certainty of, say, a logical deduction or a mathematical proof. I think we agree.
However, if by 'knowledge' we mean a 'true belief' we need to understand what 'true' means. IMO, believing that 'Sun moves from east to west' can be considered a kind of provisional/pragmatic knowledge. But of course if the same statement is interpreted, as you correctly point out, as a 'correct description of external reality' is false.
Quoting hypericin
Ok, point taken. We need to establish some kind of criteria before be able to assign a truth value to a statement. I think that a 'doctrine of two truth' is able to do that.
To use the same example:
So, I would say that I agree that the truth value of a statement is dependent on the interpretation. This also means that there are different types of knowledge.
.and quite well done, I must say. I dont feel it is my place to argue your position, even while I wouldnt have any problem at all arguing Kant against Fichte. Which isnt that big a deal; each successor wants more from his own philosophy than on whomevers it is based, and a third-party arbiter can pick out the differences.
Quoting Gregory
Kant, positing the I that thinks as a transcendental idea, contradicts himself by attempting to make the cogito a fact; thus, it must remain a mere logically necessary condition in a speculative metaphysical philosophy.
Do you think Fichte was successful in making the cogito a fact?
Yes because the "act/fact" for Fichte is freedom. Descartes and Kant had a priori structures and innate ideas as the source of consciousness while Fichte had yourself as the source of consciousness. This is how freedom comes about. Freedom is the being responsible for the ones' being(s) and acts. As pointed out, Buddhism seems to imply this same position as well. Schopenhauer kept the Platonic realm as after the will (to act/exist) and it seems this realm is where Descartes and Kant got stuck. I don't think they went as deep as he did
Trying to put Kant, Fitche, Spinoza, Einstein and Schopenhauer together, i recently made this progression of how human consciousness emerges:
1) nothingness > 2) emptiness > 3) imagination > 4) will > 5) personhood > 6) collective unconsciouss > 7) consciousness as intellect
I don't know if i'd swear by it but it feels accurate to me. However, if you think Kant coukd have refuted Fichte, it would be interesting to see how. It's also interesting to ask why Kant didn't do this while alive; maybe he was just getting old
I can't see the * comment, but this is plainly a misuse of 'literally'. If taken 'literally' it is, after investigation, entirely false. If taken as a description of appearances (i.e not to be taken literally) then it goes through.
I didnt say anything about refutation; I said I could argue one against the other, which is easy because they go in different directions from a common transcendental origin.
Im not a fan of emergent consciousness. It is enough, that consciousness is nothing more than the qualitative state of the human subject. Parsimony: be as simple as possible without being so simple further explanation invites self-contradiction.
Hmm. It seems to me consciousness is not a quality and cannot be conceptualised as a quality (so, in turn, a "qualitative state" is also inapt. It is the basis for quality to enter into experience). Consciousness is a quantity which instantiates qualities (it seems), so while your approach is logically pragmatic it seems to both not capture what we understand about htese phrases for ourselves, and doesn't deliver us any clarity.
I wasn't talking about geocentrists, I was commenting on the plain facts about the rising and setting of the sun and the stars. This is the stuff of astronomy textbooks, not to mention thousands of years of observations by people all around the world. I don't know what is not veridical about that. Yes, this is a description of appearances. Are implying that there is a world beyond appearances that can somehow be known? Is that what you are referring to by the honorific 'a correct description of (external) reality as it is'?
A "world beyond appearances" in this case, is just the world. It is not veridical to claim the stars and Sun orbit the Earth. It is a cheap and cheerful heuristic - probably to ensure correct directionality when reading stars. We now have telescopes, and better thinking. Does this mean it was true then, but not now?
Never said it was; qualitative measure belongs to or describes the state of the subject, and represents not that he is conscious of uniting all his representations under one conception, but that the unity is possible in him. In effect, in Kant, consciousness is the precursor to the synthesis of conceptions in a judgement; in order for that synthesis to be possible, there must be that by which synthesis itself is possible, and that resides in the self, as opposed to judgement which belongs to understanding, as unity between the self and all representations of which the self is conscious. And it is quality not quantity, because the number of representations is irrelevant with respect to the conjunction of any one of them with any other, hence the selfs consciousness of it, which just is the quality of his state.
Or not. Take your pick.
Quoting Mww
This is a circle my guy. Not uncommon in Kant, it seems. Onward..
Are you saying the self is a substance or not?
You seem to be taking the self in a more than pragmatic self but the the world in simply a pragmatic sense. Could it be that both have more than "meets the eye"?
Certainly could., and I personally don't quite have positions on those. "The self" to me needs to align with identity, which i essentially do not think is coherent (in terms of 'persons'). Tricky to say...
Emergent consciousness is certainly a fact psychologically. We develope in stages thru life. The philosophical aspect is different for me. The self is certainly a substance in that the human body is a substance. The world is real beyond peripheral vision, the body is an organic whole: these are facts. Philosophy is in the Other-realm. Think of something existing in the multiverse. Then think of something existing in no universe, in a different dimension of possibility. That is the moving space of pure philosophy. It is not unknown but it is unknowable. Calling it nothing is the best because it is that, although the word nothing even says to much. In that "place" there is no substance, but just act. It parallels this world of bodies and brains. Where did the universe come from? Try the No Boundary Proposal. Where did the spiritual come from? Nowhere, emerging to be parallel with the bodies of the universe, which started whenever motion started, when matter or energy started to have activity. What causes this? Maybe gravity. So what am I? A body. Who am I? Anatman. Does the brain generate consciousness? Yes. Does the brain generate consciousness? No. Both
Yes, I think this is a fairly clear take on how the difference obtains - your underlined doesn't relate to the philosophical issues much. But in practical terms, this is what we're trying to explain.
I think these other ideas are fertile, but incomplete (as to concepts) the way you've put them forward. An eg:
Quoting Gregory
This seems to require mind-body dualism, or a solution to the interaction problem immediately. So, to get around this, I would say lets be a bit more careful:
The body is an object. The 'self' is a being (ontologically) but consists in something over-and-above the body. Again, I don't accept this theory - But i think this formulation gives you room to clarify what you are taking to be "the self" aside from the physical body - acknowledging we are more than the body. (that's a thinly veiled question to you! LOL).
Since I'm not afraid to put ideas out there as my own, I would say that Absoluteness is nothing and there is nothing more final than nothing. So philosophy is about concepts relating to no thing at all, although it orients the brain to think in interesting and hopefully fruitful ways. Speaking with words such as "God" can have a lot of baggage, nor does the word "soul fair any better (although i am partial to both, especially the latter). The fact that the body is an organic unity is proved by sexual attraction. We notice the parts of the person as aspects of a whole. And the will moves the whole body through space. It's not as if I leave a part of me in another room when I roam the house, right?? There is the physical and the spiritual. Putting them together in non-duality is very difficult. Maybe i can do it someday
Fair enough. I think this might have been what I teasing out. I'm unsure, as I didn't expect anything particular LOL.
Thank you.
Well, yes, I fully agree with this. Probably, I wasn't clear enough.
"The Sun and the stars move from east to west" is a good descriptions of appareances. In this sense, it is 'true' and 'valid', yes.
The problem is the interpretation that we give to that statement. The ancient and medieval geocentrists clearly implied that such a statement described the 'external world as it is': the apparent motion of the celestial objects, to them, wasn't a mere appearance but the 'real motion' of the celestial objects.
They clearly didn't consider their model as a mere 'predictive model' but as an accurate description of the 'external world as it is'.
BTW, clearly we still use a 'geocentric model' in our daily lives, for practical purposes. As you say, it correctly describes the appearances. But we recognize, on reflection, that these appearances are mere appearances, so to speak.
So that's why I said that the statement "The Sun and the stars move from east to west" is provisionally/pragmatically true. But if it's interpreted in the way the ancient and medieval geocentrists did, it's false. Their mistake was an incorrect interpretation of appearances.
Do you agree with my analysis? If not, how do you explain the fact that those people were mistaken?
Quoting SophistiCat
Actually, no, my epistemic position is neutral about that. Still, I recognize that the 'existence' of a such a 'world' would explain better intersubjective agreement, the fact that we observe some regularities in phenomena and not others and so on. But at the same time, I recognize that empirical knowledge cannot give us a knowledge of such a 'world'. Nor we can be sure of its 'existence'.
Quoting SophistiCat
Yes and no. I think that the ancient and medieval geocentrists incorrectly believed that 'the world as it appears to me' is 'the world as it is in itself', i.e. their mistake was that they assumed a naive realist view (or at least a particular version of it). If one is a realist, but not a naive realist, I believe that yes the 'honorific' is correct.
Of course, some deny that there is a 'reality' beyond appearances. But IMO such a view does suffer to some serious problems (maybe not necessarily fatal, but they are serious).
Have it your way.
Quoting Gregory
Not. The schema of substance is the permanence of the real in time, and it is only by it that the succession and/or coexistence of phenomena can be determined. On the other hand, while it is possible to think self, it is not and can never be phenomenon, and merely represents the permanence of the unchangeable in all our conceptions, rather than the relation in time of those, to each other, which is called cognition.
Descartes went to relatively great lengths to describe what kind of substance mind was, initial premise being, matter is definitely substance so if mind is very different from the matter of the body, it must be that mind a very different substance**. Those who came later made it clear that if substance is this it cannot be that, and while ol Rene was close enough in what mind does, he never quite let it be known how it does what it does, which, obviously, relates precisely to what it is, or at the very least, to what it is conceived as being.
(** F.P., 1., #51- 64, 1644)
Well he did have his Passions of the Mind which tries to work out how the mind works. But that it is a substance, well yes i've read the Meditations and Replies. I would agree with you and Kant that someone can't prove the soul is a substance, but I don't believe it is a substance either apart from biology. Descartes in the Third Meditation argues that a Supreme God exists by insisting that his thoughts were akin to Platonic realities and reality must mirror their substance. Since the thoughts point to a totality of Being, God must exist. The archetypes would be empty and incapable of being thought if they did not indicate what the thoughts were of. What do you think of that argument?
Yes, insofar as substance is that which requires nothing for its existence (F. P., #51), of which there is but one, re: God, hence all substance to humans then being that which depends on nothing for its existence in us, but still nonetheless requires dependence on God in order to even be in us in the first place.
But we cannot know of substance merely from its existential dependence, which I take you to mean by your archetypes would be empty, but only from an irreducible attribute by which at least the presence of a substance is known. He goes on to say thought is the irreducible attribute by which mind substance is known, extension the irreducible attribute that makes thing substance known (ibid, #53).
I favor this argument, or at least the ideas it provokes, insofar as it serves as the fundamental ground of subsequent transcendental idealist methodology, by which mind/body dualism in general became the established standard for epistemological metaphysics, and the ontology relative to existential dependence of substances being God, is logically negated within that standard, without contradicting its establishment.
(Logically negated here indicating not that it is impossible for God to be a causal condition of substance, but only that such causality is not necessarily the case. From here is developed the notion of pure practical reason, which in Kant is conditioned by freedom, and from THERE, is developed Fichtes notion of freedom attributable over a much wider scale than mere thought, or substance of mind. And that development, finds no favor in me.)
Oh. Its Passions of the Soul, 1649. Maybe a liberty taken by a translator, that labels it as passions of the mind?
Every species of living creature has its own mental segmentation of the world, that is, its own way of cutting up the perceived world into varied and separate things. Humans, no less than other animals, carve up the world in a certain way into objects, features, categories, natural forces, all of which constitute their reality*. The way we divide our environment into objects and other things circumscribes and determines our way of life as well as the way we see reality. Such a segmentation of reality is formed gradually over evolutionary time and is part of every species genotype.
A scheme of segmentation is a way that the world is carved up into component parts. However, segmenting reality is more than merely cutting it up into pieces. The most significant part of segmenting the world is picking out those objects that are important and relevant to us**. Such objects are individuated, that is, made to exist in our world model. The same is true in other species: The objects that have been individuated are then recognized by members of the species, who learn how to act appropriately toward them.
To individuate a chunk of the world is to grant it recognition as an existing thing. It is not only material objects that are individuated, but also categories of objects, kinds of events, things people do, and so on. These become parts of our version of reality, and are inserted into our world model. There are countless different ways that reality can be divided up into parts, and the one selected for us is our scheme of individuation, or scheme of segmentation.[/quote]
*This is what is referred to as the 'umwelt' or 'lebenswelt' of phenomenology and embodied cognition.
**This is what John Vervaeke refers to as 'relevance realisation' and 'the salience landscape'.
The book this is quoted from is considerably clearer than Hoffman, while also grounded in cognitive science. It makes the sense in which the brain constructs the cognitive arena we call 'the world' much clearer.
Yes a comparison between Kant and Descartes provokes many thoughts. What comes to mind for me is that the argument of the Third Meditation could, or may HAVE been, used by Kant in defense of noumena's existence. The thing-in-itself lives in twilight but it has to be there or else the world is made of plastic. I've never read Critique of Pure Reason in it's entirety. I think I've read 3 fourths of it, having skipped certain parts. The Meditations I've read many times but Hegel is the philosopher I've spent the most time with (maybe I can find where in the Greater Logic he comments on Kant's noumena!)
No, I still don't know what you mean by 'external world as it is,' in general and specifically in this context. You say that the description is good, but it is not true to the 'external world as it is'. How can we know that? Apparently, not from appearances, since that is what is being described, and the description is good.
Quoting AmadeusD
Although no one claimed this, this would not be wrong either, just a little misleading, since the statement suggests more than it actually says. The stars and the Sun do orbit the Earth in the earthbound frame, just not quite the way in which the ancients imagined it when they made similar statements.
Quoting SophistiCat
They do not. This is what 'taking it literally" precludes. This is not actually happening, no matter how it may appear so. Literally, the Earth turns and gives an appearance (which is not a true appearance) of other bodies orbiting the Earth (though, I've never understood this one. It seems clear to me the Earth turns on bare observation.. no matter). So, if it wasn't your intention, that's fine, but including the "literally" aspect means that the claim is false.
Quoting SophistiCat
Not - at all - the way they ancients thought of it, which was a mistake. They described what appeared to be happening. It was not, and is not, 'literally' happening no matter the 'frame'. The frame is irrelevant to a literal reading.
By titling the thread, "Donald Hoffman," not only should that attract those who KNOW of his works, ideas, and concepts which is beneficial to YOU, looking for with more intel by sharing your own, that helps you. BUT also, the discussion introduces a name to people off the top. A name to remember, a name to research and a thing to read and a chance to change someones mind. A name in the title is going to be leaving an impression on peoples minds, I think.
Applauding this threads entirety and your bold voice, Gregory, as you share thoughts with an unapologetic approach. I enjoy reading the ideas from such forward thinking minds and people, thanks for sharing. The effort of your interest and passion is always going to be a helpful aid!
Thanks for the support and kind words. I enjoy the discussions on this forum very much and although I don't always know where they are leading, there seems to be a pattern working behind the whole project, and I hope everyone gets a lot of enlightenment from it
Quoting Gregory Me too, I love it all! I'm online reading along quite often :eyes:
So impressed and always learning something. :clap:
In fact, we can from appearances. After all, the model makes predictions that are in constrast with observations in some contexts. As I said here, actually (here you can substitute the word 'experience' with 'appearance'):
Quoting boundless
In other words, we can 'falsify' a theory or a model if we discover that it makes erroneous predictions in some contexts, i.e. we find an incoherence between what the theory predicts and what we actually observe. This is enough to falsify the theory as a valid 'picture of physical reality'.
Still, however, this doesn't mean that 'falsified models' cannot be useful and correctly describe appearances in some contexts. So even if the 'picture of the physical reality' that they give is wrong, we can still use them in some contexts and for some applications - hence, they are pragmatically true (in some contexts).
BTW, why do you think that the geocentrists in ancient times and middle ages were wrong? What was their mistake?
Quoting Wayfarer
Thanks for the reference. BTW, I actually read and enjoyed Pinter's book and as you say IMO it is clearer than Hoffman's.
Anyway, what I was getting at is possibly more 'general', in a way, that Pinter's point. My point was that we can make a distinction between 'provisional' and 'ultimate' truths without any kind of 'explanation' on the reason why we tend to perceive the way we perceive. For the sake of the discussion above, I think that before giving such an explanation, it is important to make clearly the distinction between those kinds of truth and why it should be important.
Of course I agree with you, but then that is a distinction that we both discovered through Buddhist philosophy, whereas most folks on this forum (and I know this from experience!) will treat that with utmost suspicion. I think Im going to try and write up something on this topic.
Yeah.
Anyway, while I believe that in Buddhist schools the formulation is more clear (after all, in their view it also had a salvific importance), the distinction is also present even in pre-socratic greek philosophers. Parmenides, for instance, developed a version of the 'two truths' doctrine similar to Advaita Vedanta. But even someone like Democritus developed one for his own philosophy. It is IMO a very useful framework to discuss any epistemological theory.
(As an aside, I believe that 'conventional truth', the translation that we give to the 'lower' truth in Buddhist/Indian philosophies can be misleading to us. We in it read a 'social convention', but it is more like a 'provisional truth' IMO I am not disagreeing with the translation but the point is not that the 'conventional truth' is a social convention...)
Half-agreed, yes. Meditations 3, #14 and #15 forward a good, albeit generic, rendition of the subsequently infamous transcendental ding an sich. But it remains to be said, that has nothing whatsoever to do with the even more infamous transcendental noumena, for which, within Descartes notion of ideas and their relations to existent objects, and Kants of understanding and its relation to conceptions, there never was nor ever could be, any existence whatsoever.
Kant defended noumena as a valid conception in us, but that is not to defend the existence of any noumenal things for us. And for Kant, such existence cannot be defended, insofar as to do so contradicts the criteria by which existence of things is given.
Now, to be fair, he did say noumenal things cannot be said to be impossible, so maybe that can be considered a quasi-defense for an existence which was, for all intents and purposes, a mere conception. But to grant such existence in concreto destroys transcendental philosophy itself, which just might be why some folks go through the motions of attempting to prove it.
I am under the impression that Kant believed thing in itself or noumena was required for phenomena to appear. Remember, it was Gottlob Schulze who wrote that Kant contradicted himself in saying noumena causes the appearances in us even though causality is a law of phenomena. Schulze's argument is that of a rationalist and i certainly don't buy it
No need to remind you the tread subject is Hoffman. With that out of the way, and admitting I know very little of Hoffmans philosophy, Ill just say this:
.Kants thought is the thing-in-itself was required for the things that appear;
.the thing of the thing-in-itself just is the thing that appears;
.phenomena are not that which appears, but are intuitive representations of things that appear.
.noumena are never even in the conversation, they do nothing, are nothing, and cannot ever be anything, to us. They were never meant to be the same, never meant to be understood as similar or identical, as the thing-in-itself, but were only ever to be treated in the same way, re: as some complete, whole yet entirely unknowable something, by the cognitive system from which they both arise.
..Kant says things-in-themselves are real existent objects (Bxx), but never once says noumena are anything more than a thing which must be cogitated not as an object of sense, but solely through the pure understanding . (B310).
Gottlob Schulze was wrong.
We may need to chat about this one day. Not too too long in the future. But not right now, I Kant.
It's been a lot of work. :cry:
:cool:
I look forward to it, and the opportunity to be shown how something in what I wrote can be understood at least differently, and perhaps better.
While I find this quite interesting, I wonder to what extent we should care about the second truth or the reality beyond our own. There may well be a Paramarthika Satya or ultimate realm beyond the empirical, but what of it? Can a good case be made that we should care about this and to what end? Asking for a friend...
No doubt the quest for enlightenment or spiritual relaxation seems attractive to some but how likely is it you will arrive there? I often think that this quest is just a spiritual equivalent of consumer culture and status seeking. Thoughts?
Cool Kant mini-primer... :wink:
Thanks, and hopefully I got it right enough. I got s attention, so ..well see.
Sorry, very late reply. Will be long post.
Quoting boundless
Alright, fair enough!
Quoting boundless
I had trouble formulating a reply to this. I don't have enough insight inside these theories to make strong statements I would like; nor are these theories and surrounding literature really complete in a desired way. I will just offer different perspectives which are incomplete whether from lack of literature or my own ignorance.
Perspective 1:
The original stochastic mechanics by Nelson has an explicit non-locality issue where marginal probabilities of particles depend on velocity potentials related to other spatially separated particles. I believe this is thought to be similar to the Bohmian issue.
In the non-locality section of his book, quantum fluctuations, Nelson explicitly shows that in principle a non-Markovian as opposed to Markovian diffusions resolve this issue (pdf for book can be found on webpage below) :
https://web.math.princeton.edu/~nelson/papers.html
And there is at least one variation of stochastic mechanics where non-Markovianity is explicitly used and this eliminates that non-locality issue that was identified (clicking the link below is a direct download to the pdf of the paper: Stochastic mechanics of reciprocal diffusions by Krener and Levy)
https://math.ucdavis.edu/~krener/51-75/68.JMP96.pdf
Again, I don't have access to any real deeper insights into these theories here and their further implications within the theories. All I know is that Nelson saw this non-local problem and it seems to be solvable in principle, especially via dropping non-Markovianity.
I guess I might as well note that Nelsonian stochastic mechanic has two other major issues - incorrect multi-time correlations and something called the Wallstrom problem but I think both issues can be regarded as more or less resolved or resolvable based on recent formulations and papers.
Perspective 2:
This is not stochastic mechanics but still a stochastic interpretation based on showing mathematically a very general correspondence between unitary quantum systems and indivisible stochastic ones:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.10778
https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.03085
In the following paper:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.16935
They argue their theory is causally local - analyzing with Bayesian causal models they find that measurements of observers do not causally influence each other (Sections VII-VIII near end). Entangled stochastic systems do causally influence each other but this is because their non-factorizable transition matrices have encoded their initial local interaction. It is just the nature of these systems they will fail to factorize until a 'division event' because statistical information is encoded cumulatively in the transition matrix (in the words of the author). I have no idea how this perspective relates to the first because they are just different stochastic formulations of quantum mechanics. Perspective 2 is actually explicitly non-Markovian; but again, there is no explicit connection that can I can see that would relate it to the issues in the first perspective or vice versa.
Perspective 3:
This not specific to the stochastic interpretation but an attempt to explain away non-local correlations in a way I find appealing. Has roots in various authors (e.g. Pitowsky will be mentioned momentarily) but perhaps best exemplified by the 1982 papers by philosopher Arthur Fine:
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=arthur+fine+1982&btnG=
It establishes equivalence of Bell violations to the absence of a unique joint probability distribution. Recent generalization by Abramsky:
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=12086196826892314859&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5
In following paper Abramsky talks about contributions of Pitowsky:
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=17313080888273101986&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1
Who noticed that Bell inequalities are actually a special case of Boole inequalities which have roots in the work of George Boole in the 1800s:
The force of this perspective basically is that what Bell violating correlations may have a formal cause not a physical one. The bizarre correlations could be formally entailed when certain statistical conditions are fulfilled, regardless of what system is being talked about. No information is actually being communicated across space between particles.
The question is then about what causes these joint probability absences? According to Fine, it is from non-commutativity.
Now there are many sources that attest to the fact that non-commutativity and associated uncertainty relations can be generically derived within generic stochastic systems, at least under certain conditions. In fact, this can be seen in the Path integral formulation where non-commutativity in that formulation comes from the non-differentiability (because of stochasticity) of the paths. Normally people see these paths as computational tools (purely out of incredulity). In the stochastic interpretation they represent actual definite trajectories particles may take.
Given that they are entailed formally, such correlations may occur in other areas with similar structures. Infact, it has been suggested that such non-local correlations are in principle possible in classical light: e.g.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01615
Note, that classical entanglement is well-established in classical optics but it is usually only formulated in local "intrasystem" scenarios as opposed to the non-local "intersystem" scenario proposed by the paper. Given the setting is purely classical, the formal presence of non-commutativity or joint probability absences may be sufficient to provide the central mechanism for Bell violating correlations in that scenario or any other kind (e.g. social sciences they occur for probabilistic reasons albeit not as relevant because not about locality/nonlocality).
Whats most interesting is perhaps you don't need remarkably strange assumptions to get non-commutativity or virtually all quantum predictions our of stochastic systems.
For instance, the gist of the major Nelsonian stochastic mechanical assumptions are basically as follows - 1) particles follow paths by Newtons law had they been perturbed randomly; 2) the diffusion is time-reversible - which can be derived in kinds of equilibrium contexts where entropy regarding trajectories is maximized; and 3) the diffusion coefficient is inversely proportional to particle mass. And from that you can even reproduce the perfect spin (anti)correlations and Bell violations like in following dissertation and paper published from it (assumptions listed in dissertation).
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?oi=bibs&hl=en&cluster=16239473886028239443
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=15973777865898642687&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5
Despite the fact many would say it produces unphysical non-local correlations (obviously I have tried to argue via Fine's theorem that these may be in some sense a formal entailment that transcends physics), I think its definitely relevant to ask why it is even possible for virtually all quantum predictions to be derived from some very pedestrian assumptions in the first place. Why is it that indivisible stochastic systems with definite outcomes reproduce entanglement, decoherence and interference? Its kind of miraculous - if such non-locality should be impossible for particles in definite positions, why is this behavior even derivable?
Point 4:
My last point will be about your point about simultaneity of relativity and preferred reference frames. I think my point would be that such issues are no reason to discount a stochastic interpretation because these issues seem to be quite general. They occur in hydrodynamics, they occur for relativistic brownian motion, for thermodynamics. Markovian diffusions in general are known to not respect relativity and have superluminal propagation (mentioned in second link below too). It seems that when you start talking about things like probability and randomness, their relation to relativity just is never straightforward, and so areas outside of quantum mechanics have been or will be grappling with this same kind of issue also: e.g.
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=17685845957935258058&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_ylo=2023
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=16512488009491179103&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5
Quoting boundless
Hmm; just to be short, I feel like the issue is very up in the air and not simple. Skepticism isn't quite unwarranted imo. Certainly there seem to be stochastic field theories that can fulfil relativistic predictions but apparently have preferred frame plus some of the Markovian superluminality.
Edit: Just re-phrasing / clean up. Shouldn't change content but additional point:
Paper with interesting suggestion if non-locality appears in classical optics, it suggests that it should be compatible with Lorentz invariance:
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=13776304742041840922&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1
Can't comment on what math says at all but I am guessing the logic is that classical electrodynamics is already in some sense compatible with Lorentz invariance/covariance.
My brain is fried. I dunno how I am typing right now. Yeah there's some stuff in what you quoted from which is potentially problematic from my perspective. But not today.
You will not bait me..... :halo:
Well, different people and different traditions would give you different answers. This will be a long post but of course not exhaustive about what how much these 'different' answer are among them, despite sharing a structural similarity. Clearly it doens't go into much 'depth' in this analysis, but I hope it should give the 'right' 'gist'.
Anyway, the reason why I 'introduced' the concept of the 'two truths' is that, IMO, it gives a general framework for evaluating the validity of some claims about empirical knowledge. The 'version' of this 'two truths doctrine' that I 'proposed' had the purpose to be as general as possible, i.e. someting that should be accepted by many people as possible. For instance, the phrase 'The Sun and stars move from east to west' if taken to denote a description of 'what appears' to an observer on the Earth's surface is clearly 'true'. But if it is interpreted the way the geocentrists did, of course, we know that is 'false' (because the 'literal' interpretation of the geocentric model implies some predictions that were discovered to be erroneous). Still, both a geocentrist and a modern scientist would agree about the fact that that phrase is a valid descriptor of what 'we observe'. Note, however, that I made absolutely no claim about the 'ultimate truth', which in the present contest is an 'ontological theory' of 'what external reality really is', 'how the external reality really behaves' or whatever.
Following, this premise, since you seem interested, I now make a long digression about how the 'two truths' doctrine/framework has been present in some 'Eastern' and 'Western' ancient models. Let's start by making a distinction, between what I would call 'gnostic theories', i.e. doctrines that say that indeed knowing the 'ultimate' is something that, at least in principle, at least some people can do (by spiritual practice, philosophical reasoning or whatever) and 'skeptical theories', i.e. doctrines that deny this possibility. Let's start by four examples about the first.
Epicurus clearly believed that, following Democritus, the 'ultimate truth' was that there are only '(indestructible and eternal) atoms and the void'. This belief led him to adopt the view that 'trees', 'rocks' but also 'humans' are derivative realities and also that something like 'consciousness', the 'soul' is an emergent propery, which disappears when the atoms change a determinate configuration. Hence, according to him, 'whatever happens after death' would not something to fear or to hope.
Parmenides, on the other hand, believed that there were two levels of 'truths'. At the 'higher level' of understanding, there was really one Being, eternal, indestructible and so on. How we get to 'realize' such a 'truth' and the supposed effects of such a 'realization' are unfortunately unclear, due to the fragmentary nature of the reamaining writing. But maybe it would have some positive effects.
In the East, I can cite the 'traditional Abhidharma schools' of Buddhism which, as far as I understand, held that 'trees', 'mountains', but also 'peoples', 'sentient beings' were only 'concepts' (prajnapti*) which didn't represent something 'really' real (they were merely useful 'fictions' for pragmatic purposes, that the 'unenlightened' mistake for something 'really real') - the reason being that such 'things' and 'beings' are composite and for them only waht is simple would be truly 'real' (these useful concepts made up the 'samvrti satya'*, usually translated as 'conventional truth'). On the other hand, the 'ultimate truth', 'paramartha satya*', is given by a collection of 'simple, irreducible things(dharmas*)' which are either 'conditioned' or 'unconditioned', like Nirvana*. The experiential realization of the ultimate truth was said to have salvific effects, i.e. the 'attainment' of Nirvana.
The Madhyamaka school, associated with Mahayana Buddhism, agrees with the distinction between 'samvriti satya*' and 'paramartha satya*'. But, this school (or maybe 'schools'), as far as I understand, denied that we can make any kind of 'conceptual representation' of the 'ultimate'. For them, both the composite objects and the 'dharmas*' proposed by the 'Abhidharma schools' were to be regarded as part of the 'samvrti satya'. The 'ultimate truth' is totally indescrivable. Again, the experiential realization of this ultimate truth was said to have salvific effects. However, it should be said that in Mahayana, the 'lower' versions of the 'doctrine of the two truths' found in the Abhidharma system could be still salvific because it still regard the 'self' as an 'illusion'/'illusion-like'.
On the other hand, there are skeptic schools. For instance, the Pyrrhonists believed that we should suspend judgments about metaphysical theories, while eomploying something like 'conventional truths' in order to function. This 'suspension of judgment' would give us some kind of 'peace of mind' or 'ataraxia'.
Christians too are somewhat 'skeptics' in this matter, as far as I understand. After all, the existence of the 'living God' and other spiritual truths were thought to be revelead truths (of course, some Christians believed that they could made 'proofs' for the existence of God, but I doube that they really believed that such proofs proved the existence of the 'God who revelaed himself in the Bible'). Also, St. Paul believed that in this life our knowledge is imperfect, confused (like he says in 1 Cor 13:12) and theerfore we should relie on faith according to them.
I could go on with more recent examples like Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer etc. But I'll stop.
To give a conclusion of this rather long post, I believe that these philosophers/religious figures etc believed that either the realization or the the faith or even the absolute denial of the possibility of knowledge of the 'ultimate truth' had serious positive consequences. Clearly, it wasn't for them a matter of 'idle' speculation and IMO the 'search' of any kind of 'correct version' of the 'two truths' was seen as something of the highest importance, certainly like a 'status seeking' or 'consumistic'. It also required probably less 'skepticism' that there is nowadays (even, ironically, for the Pyrrhonist in their ability to 'prove' the impossibility to find the 'ultimate truth'). So even if they might agree with you that it is 'unlikely' to arrive to such a 'correct doctrine', they still regarded it as extremely important or 'the most important thing to do'.
Of course, I am not saying that this 'ancient perspective' is unfindable nowadays or that in those time no one approached this kind of things for 'status seeking' or in a 'consumistic way'.
*these words are from Sanskrit terms.
Wow, thank you for the informative answer. I need some time to reflect to answer back. TBH, however, I feel that many things are above my 'level'. So, I'm not sure how useful will be my answer.
Anyway, forgive me for asking you another question, more a curiosity actually. But, how would you answer to Einstein's claim that a 'nonlocal' theory can never be 'realistic' in a meaningful way?
Quoting boundless
I wouldnt dare such a thing.
Only if it brings joy. Those thoughts are pointless if they don't make you happy
With regard to why believe in spirituality, it's important to know that the universe is not necessarily fair. It is just, but that' different. Err, i take that back because I have no idea if the universe also is merciful, and to what extent. It might be in an unfair way. I have a twin brother Matthew and I don't care what he does i would never damn him, and i have a pretty strong commitment to morals. He would be standing there, the murderer of himself, and if i could i would still take him to heaven becausr it is that consciousness that i love. It's not just or fair, but love is the meaning of spirituality
I mean, there is no alternative. There are extreme nonlocal correlations in quantum mechanics; you cannot get rid of the strangeness.
I re-read your very informative post and, well, I don't think that I am capable to make a counter-argument about the consistency of stochastic models. So, I'll accept that one can make a CFD stochastic model without violating relativity. After all, the non-locality that violats special relativity is a faster than light causal influence*, i.e. a specific kind of non-locality.
Just for curiosity, has been treated the 'Wigner friend' scenario in stochastic realistic models?
*As I said previously, there are also propoents of deterministic non-local realist models that say that their models are not in contrast with relativity. Other than some de Broglie-Bohm proponents, the thermal interpretation of Arnold Neumaier (I am not sure if it is accepted as among the 'viable' interpretations of QM, as it is new and it seems to have a single proponent. It has, however, produced a quite number of discussion among experts on Physics Forums for instance.).
Quoting Apustimelogist
Agreed, we have to accept some kind of strangeness. But my question was: do you think that 'physical realism' is undermined by the fact that the 'fundamental building blocks' of 'physical reality' are not spatially separable? I think that Einstein made an interesting point here about 'realism'. I do believe that we have to reject the idea of 'fundamental building blocks' altogether BTW.
I see, thanks for the clarification. I am sorry for your bad experiences.
Anyway, I do believe that it is a case of 'abusus non tollit usum', i.e. even if the bad practicioners, teachers etc were the majority, this doesn't a priori negate the validity of a particular tradition.
BTW, in my previous posts I was however arguing for sonething else: if one rejects naive realism (and here I mean the unsophisticated kind which is IMO the true naive realism, not more 'refined' ones that are actually not naive realism), then one accepts automatically some kind of notion of 'two truths'. Naive realism errs in interpreting pragmatic 'truths' as ontological ones. But this insight is shared by practically everyone that is not a naive realist (even by skeptics). We can interpret what the naive realist take as 'ultimate truths' as 'pragmatic truths', eventualmente if we do not have a position about what the 'ultimate truth' might be.
The people were 'bad' but I regret nothing.
Quoting boundless
Of course - and if I argued that I'd be making a fallacy. I make no claim about higher consciousness as an idea, I was referring to who the subject seems to attract and the innate difficulty (perhaps impossibility) of persuing it a useful way. But I'll leave this to others who are more interested.
Quoting boundless
I think phenomenology may do away with the need to pars the world into realism or indirect realism or idealism models, but I am not sufficiently versed in the thinking to articulate an argument.
Quoting boundless
That's fair. I'm skeptical that we can access ontological truths, or that we should we be overly concerned to identify them. I'm content with tentative models of the world, which is all science can provide. But even an idealist becomes a naive realist when he leaves the house to go to work. That's paraphrasing Simon Blackburn. Which comes back to my take on all this. None of it much matters since the world we inhabit can't be denied in practice and for the most part it makes no difference to how we live if we believe that all is an illusion.
Ok!
Quoting Tom Storm
Fair enough. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Quoting Tom Storm
Well, neither do I. I tried to study phenomenology and I enjoyed some ideas I found. But, unfortunately, I found the language and the exposition too taxing and unclear, so to speak.
BTW, Husserl's 'epoche' I think is quite close to what I was getting at, i.e. 'suspension of judgment' (at least for a transitory phase).
Quoting Tom Storm
Ok! Well, I agree up to a point. The fact that the 'model' of the 'two truths' is so prevalent (either explicitly or implicitly) suggests to me that there is something very important about it. But at the same time, one cannot ignore the extreme diversity of how that distinction is conceptualized and this can be taken as a suggestion that we can't have a 'true knowledge'.
Personally, I think that even if we are unable to 'discover for ourselves', the distinction between the 'provisional' and the 'ultimate' is important, it's hard to deny how widespread this 'theme' is (as I said with Epicurus and Pyrrho, in ancient times even materialists and skeptics endorsed some version of it), so you can't agree with what Simon Blackburn* says if it is taken as a conclusive criticism. For my part, I try to be as open-minded as possible and go on with the 'search'.
*But on the other hand, it somewhat makes my point. Yes, we tend to be naive realists when 'we leave the house to go to work' and when we are in a dangerous sistuation (and this is useful for our survival and the survival of our species as Hoffman might say) but at the same time we tend to be naive realists even with respect to the apparent movement of the Sun in most our daily life even if such a take is erroneous. But naive realism being 'useful' doesn't imply it being 'truthful'. And we instictively also seek truth.
Quoting Tom Storm
As my favorite psychologist, George Kelly, said:
To put in another way, in order to function, we are usually 'forced' to live assuming naive realism is true. However, on reflexion, we recognize that we live as if naive realism was true but we generally recognize that it is false.
How much importance we give to this awareness is another matter.
Quoting boundless
Essentially, there are always definite, objective outcomes but the statistics of the world are oberserver-dependent. This contextuality isn't specifically about observation but the statistical constraints when stochastic systems are coupled (e.g. a measurement device and system bring measured or any other kind of system-environment interaction perhaps).
Quoting boundless
No, if there is a reasonable explanation. Obviously explanations may seem reasonable or unreasonable to different people.
Quoting boundless
In what sense? I may agree in some sense and have thought about that, motivated by the hsrd problem of consciousness. But may not have been in the same sense you mean.
Out of fear of forgetting to do what I wanted to, let's just go straight into it. I don't know if it is appropriate to this thread or no.
So, Kant speaks about "things in themselves" and these are the ground of appearances. We do not know how this grounding relation works, only that it must be so, otherwise objects would relations all the way down, and that's incoherent for us.
On the other hand, Kant speaks of noumena. He is quite clear on noumena in the positive meaning of the term, these are the things traditional metaphysics was discussing and never managed to advance.
Positive noumena could including things like Leibnizian monads or Cartesian souls - maybe even Platonic Ideas. We have no idea if this knowledge is possible and how it could possibly be like.
Since this is so, we best leave noumena in the positive sense behind, it's like arguing over words.
The issue, as I see it, is Kant's description of noumena in the negative sense. He says it may exist, but we can't be sure, it's a kind of limit to speculation.
But yet: 1) He shows no such hesitation when speaking about "things in themselves" and 2) in the practical domain, he has recourse to speaking about noumena to account for freedom!
Why not do this to things-in-themselves? Or rather, why would he even bother saying there are things in themselves, but there may or may not be noumena in a negative sense?
In short, I don't see why Kant couldn't have merely said there are things in themselves and noumena in a positive sense and put aside noumena in a negative sense. It seems excessive to me.
These are my impressions, and I probably misread many things.
Geocentrism can be viewed as a matter of perspective, and as such it is neither right nor wrong - it is apt in some contexts and not others. But if you are referring to ancient cosmologies viewed (somewhat ahistorically) as scientific theories, they posited things that proved to be untenable when more and better observations (appearances) became available, and our analytical tools improved as well.
Quoting SophistiCat
Quoting AmadeusD
I see that you need a refresher in relative motion. Start with linear motion - boats and trains and all that. Rotating frames are a little trickier, but riding a carousel can give you an intuitive feel for them (or a motion sickness).
Interesting, thanks.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Agreed!
Quoting Apustimelogist
Well, I wasn't thinking about consciousness, actually, but simply about what physical theories tell us.
Consider the case of a system of two interacting particles in newtonian mechanics. In this case, the interaction causes a temporal variation of the momentum in both particles. The temporal variation of the momentum of each particle, however, is exactly the opposite of the temporal variation of the second one, which means that the temporal variation of the total momentum is zero, i.e. the total momentum of the isolated two-particle system is zero. Of course, this can be proved by using the three newtonian laws. But the third law seems ad 'hoc', doesn't seem to have any kind of justification whatsoever if the particles themselves are considered the 'fundamental entity' here.
On the other hand, consider the reverse perspective. The conservation law of the total momentum says that the total momentum of any isolated system is constant, i.e. the temporal variation of the total momentum of the system is zero. But if this is true and if the interaction between the two particles changes their momentum, then these two assumptions imply that the variation of their momentum must be opposite. This perspective is clearly 'holistic': a property of the 'whole system' (the conservation law of the total momentum) 'dictates' how the properties of the subsystems (the particles) behave.
Of course, newtonian mechanics doesn't tell us which 'perspective' is right. But the second has the advantage of being more intelligible. It also implies that a 'physical object' can be quite extended, composite and yet 'holistic' not reducible. And, of course, the same can be said for more advanced theories. In fact, possibly the single truly isolated system is the whole universe. It seems that ontological primacy is given to the whole universe rather than to its 'components' (or in any case, this is true for the 'isolated system').
In 'realistic' interpretations of QM, ultimately it seems the 'universe' is seen as a single quantum object (at least, this is true in de Broglie-Bohm, MWI and the thermal interpretation).
Not only that: in the case of entangled quantum systems, there is a clear indication that what is 'more fundamental' is, in fact, the whole system of entangled objects, and this is not reducible to the subsystems.
This suggests to me that, if I were to choose an ontological interpretation of 'what physics seems to tell me', I would pick a fundamentally holistic perspective. The 'whole universe' is the fundamental object and its 'components' are secondary. Also, in some cases, some composite objects cannot be reduced.
BTW, at the same time, as I said before, I lean towards an epistemic interpretation of QM, because I think epistemic theories, i.e. theories that do not make ontological commitments, better represent 'what I know'. But, if I allow myself to speculate, I think that physics is fundamentally 'ontologically holistic' (of course, in many cases an analytical, reductionistic approach is the right one)
Well, I agree with that. 'Neither right or wrong' is a good way to put it.
What is common to all geocentric models was the view that the Earth was at the center of the universe and it didn't move. The apparent motion of the Sun in the sky that we see in our perspective (the one we see with our own eyes at least) can be 'explained' by this kind of models. But at a certain point, with different observations showed that in some cases these kinds of models gave wrong predictions. So, the geocentric models were discarded.
But strictly speaking what was 'discarded' was the ontological interpretation of them.
Anyway, while I would phrase differently, I think we are in agreement.
.
The things-in-themselves are not the ground of appearances; if they were they would not be in-themselves. Things are the ground of appearances, hence the grounding relation of appearances is known to us. Cause and effect: for every sensation as effect there is necessarily a thing which appears, sufficient as a cause of it.
Quoting Manuel
Objects are relations all the way down, insofar as they remain intelligible for us. Given from the principle of cause and effect, it is only incoherent for us when we look for one of those without the other connected to it. So dont look there.
Quoting Manuel
Yes, he speaks of it, but only from pure understandings perspective .
.the understanding ( ) takes for granted that an object considered as a thing in itself must be capable of being thought ( ) and is thereby led to hold the perfectly undetermined conception of an intelligible existence ( ) for a determinate conception of an existence, which we can cognize in some way or other by means of the understanding .
.this isnt to say understanding is in the act of thinking an object, but is comparable to what we would simple call something just popped into my mind. This cannot be the ding an sich from which are given the things that appear to sensibility, it is a thing in itself because it comes to understanding as a singular whole thought. Obviously, if something (in or as itself) pops into your mind, it must be capable of being in your mind (in or as itself), which is the same as it must be capable of being a thought (in or as itself). So whatever happens to pop into your mind is at that exact point, being nothing more a perfectly undetermined conception which exists nowhere but in your own intelligence, but it is there, which kinda suckers understanding into thinking it can do something constructive with it. But .as we all know .understanding cant cognize a damn thing on its own. So it is that understanding takes for granted it can think objects, which it can, and can do something with them, which it cannot. Those things are the intelligible existences, the undetermined conceptions, called waaaiiiitt for itttttttt ..noumena.
Positive or negative noumena dont matter; each is noumena as far as understanding is concerned, and since understanding is the problem-child here, the exposition of its flawed or illegitimate functionality is paramount. Besides, positive or negative noumena have to do with intuition anyway, in which either there is a kind of it we dont have, re: that kind which can develop its representations given merely intelligible existences, or, there is that kind we do have, re: that kind which develops its representations only because there are real existences.
These are my impressions and I might have misread many things myself.
Well, I may have been either tainted or mislead, but for better or worse I have taken in Lucy Allais interpretation of Kant so if I removed this aspect for my interpretation then my understanding of Kant would almost entirely collapse. Which is quite plausible.
In any case, this is the section which I find interesting:
"Accordingly the understanding limits sensibility, but without therefore expanding its own realm. And inasmuch as the understanding warns sensibility not to claim to deal with things in themselves but solely with appearances, it does think of an object in itself. But the understanding thinks it only as transcendental object. This object is the cause of appearance (hence is not itself appearance) and can be thought neither as magnitude nor as reality nor as substance Hence concerning this object we are completely ignorant as to whether it is to be found in us-or, for that matter, outside us If we want to call this object noumenon, because the presentation of it is not sensible we are free to do so [it only serves] to mark the bound of our sensible cognition
(A 288-A 289, B 344- B 345)
When he says this object is the cause of appearance (transcendental object) I take it that he does so because he thinks that, if an object as appearance consisted of relations all the way down, things make no sense. In a previous page he says:
"It is startling, to be sure, to hear that a thing is supposed to consist altogether of relations. Such a thing, however, also is mere appearance and cannot be thought at all through pure categories..." (A 286. B 341-342)
I mean, then we also can't understand an object consisting entirely of relations either. Ugh.
It is more intelligible (to me) to say a thing (as appearance) consists of relations. But the ultimate ground of these relations we do not know. They must play some kind of grounding role, which we cannot know.
As you can see, I don't know how to cite him properly.
Quoting Mww
Hmmm.
But he says
"If, on the other hand, by merely intelligible objects we mean merely objects of nonsensible intuition - objects for which, to be sure, our categories do not hold and of which therefore we can never have any cognition at all (neither intuition nor concept) - then noumenon in the negative signification must indeed be admitted..."
(B 343)
Then he goes on to say this is the "problematic" concept of the noumena. And now I have trouble finding his comments on "positive noumena". But he quite likely has in mind Leibniz and his monads.
This is quite more laborious that I thought, though I should have known...
In any case, let me try to zone it in.
Quoting Mww
I see a green tree. The cause of it is photons hitting my eye, then my brain does something we-don't-know-what then I see a tree.
But, what causes the photons? And then we keep going down and down.
So, what we are doing is describing relational structures at a certain level of complexity. Mind you, even describing photons and eyes, we still are entirely ignorant as how could photons lead to any phenomenon.
Anyway, have at it. I suppose the best we can hope for is some kind of agreement on like two topics. Wild.
I thought context might help. Or not.
You may know Kant considers the I that thinks to be the ground of consciousness, just meant to provide that .all my representations belong to me alone ., such that theres no chance for a varied and many-sided self as there are representations ..
I bring this up because a distinction is required between the understanding that thinks, which is the same as taking for granted it can consider objects as things in themselves, and the I that thinks. Conceptions belong to understanding, they arise through spontaneity with respect to phenomena, and they also arise spontaneously even without the synthesis with phenomena, hence the intelligible object, and this is what it means for the understanding to think, the spontaneity of conceptions.
The I, on the other hand, that thinks, indicates only the synthesis of representations in consciousness, which means the conceptions represented are already given, which means understanding has already thought. This makes sense when we say, I understand, which makes explicit I as the transcendental ego representing the self, is not the same as the faculty of understanding, which is merely a logical functionary.
Here, too, when he says, I can think whatever I please provided only that I do not contradict myself , it happens that when understanding considers the objects it thinks as intelligible existences, understanding is contradicting itself, by trying to apply a category, existence, to that which isnt even available for it to be applied to, insofar as such availability requires sensibility, not mere thought.
Another way to think about it ..time. When we say, it just popped into my head, were talking about a sheer instant, that time when there was no considered object, and the next when there was. At that point of there was, there is no other cognitive constituency at work, there just hasnt been any time for it.
Ok, so now let it be given the human cognitive system doesnt stop working, there are no blank spots while conscious and otherwise naturally functional. So we got this time of a considered object, and if the system keeps on rolling along as it should, it will do what it supposed to do, which is to form a cognition of the thing it just took for granted as a considered object. So now let it also be given that the means for cognizing anything at all has certain requirements, and one of these requirements is synthesis of representations ..and we find there just arent any representations present in the system to be synthesized, at the time understanding merely considers an object in itself.
Yes, good. If I understand correctly or roughly, sure we can think what we please and face no contradictions (save logical ones) and we could go on thinking we are grasping something which is not, noumena for instance. Of course, for us, and our mode of thinking, if we leave this out of the picture, then something seems to be missing intellectually.
This of course does not guarantee we are (or are not) getting at something and then there is the point you raise in your last sentence that we can't find a representation which consists of an object in itself.
I think your interpretation of Kant would be called a "deflationary" one? Maybe.
Edit: this is for my indulgence. The explicit Kant discussions stops here.
Alright. Maybe we are leaving Kant maybe not or maybe we are talking about S. now, it doesn't matter much, the topic is what's interesting to me:
We have representations. All our knowledge is representational. This necessarily implies that what we experience is an interaction between a subject and an object. Knowledge is relational. No relations, no representations, no knowledge. But we don't want to say (at least I don't) "no things" remain.
Objects exist and have a way of existing. We only know how objects exist as representations. Objects must have a way of existing that is not reducible to us alone. They must have a way of being, independent of us, in virtue of which they exist independently of us.
If this is false, then we have to deny astronomy, paleontology, geology, etc.
My final twist here is that, astronomy, geology, still do not tell us about noumena. Nothing can, outside this intellectual feeling we have that something like that ought to exist in some manner.
What is wrong here?
I'm sort of thinking that regardless of what you perceive, you can't experience my self-awareness, for example.
You'll find it a wee bit easier to perceive the ground you walk on (I assume).
Nonetheless, I hope you think I'm just another self/aware homo sapiens and forum denizen, though. :)
The statement "jorndoe is self/aware" is true, so truth and perceived reality aren't the same at least.
Epistemic endeavors have truth in mind, if you will, whatever it all may be.
Yes, when I was thinking about fundamentalness in a different way in terms of how physics doesn't seem to paint a picture where there is a constant, fundamental set of objects at the bottom of the universe which just change arrangement over time. And then thinking about whether this helps some aspects of the hard problem.
Quoting boundless
Not sure I agree. Its a property of the interaction so I wouldn't say it is necessarily holistic, though I would say the two different descriptions were equivalent.
Quoting boundless
I think this is interpretation-dependent imo but I know many people do believe something like this.
Quoting Manuel
Quoting Manuel
The entire raison detre of the first Critique, is to prove those two statements are contradictory.
Quoting Manuel
Im ok with that, if deflationary means getting to the bottom of why those two statements are contradictory.
"The other side, in contrast, is the independence of the thinking that grasps itself, the principle of freedom, which this philosophy has in common with the metaphysics of older tradition; but it empties all the content out of it, and is unable to put anything back into it. Being robbed of all determinations, this thinking, now called 'reason', is set free from all authority. The main effect of Kant's philosophy has been has been that it has revived the consciousness of this absolute inwardness. In that, because of its abstraction, this inwardness cannot develop into anything, and cannot produce by its own mean any determinations, either cognitions or moral laws, it refuses all together to allow something that has the character of outwardness to have full play in it, and to be valid for it. From now on the principle of the independence of reason, of its absolute inward autonomy, has to be regarded as the universal principle of philosophy, and as one of the assumptions of our times." The Lesser Logic
For Hegel, Kant made the world into a lie, something that deceives, and did not allow reason access to the intellect in order that it could circumvent the traps of the understanding. Kant merely gives an inventory of the understanding instead of uniting freedom with thought. Why the understanding is how it is is never explained by Kant. It is truly the outside world provides the "shock" which the unconscious needs into order to become conscious. The non-Ego is as important to Ego as Ego is to itself. Our bodies are, in a sense, non-Ego. We are a part of this world and so Kant thought we could not solve the mystery of existence because we were part of the mystery. Whether he suceeded or not, Hegel's philosophy was an attempt to deduce the essence of existence itself
Yep, Melbourne. They used to be in a really coool 1920's building which was sadly demolished a couple of years ago. Now they're around the corner in Flinders Lane. In the 1980's I used to almost live in that bookshop.
Yeah, I agree. Regarding the 'hard problem', I am not sure. The problem is that it seems that there are no properties present in the insentient matter (that we are aware of) that might be able to explain in an intelligible way the arising of consciousness.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I actually agree with this. The 'holistic' interpretation is not forced, but I think it is the most reasonable.
Yes, you can say that 'conservation laws' might arise from the properties of interactions. But 'why'? It seems that if we take this position, then it seems an 'ad hoc' assumption. Why these interactions behave in the precise way that ensures the conservation laws is left unexplained.
On the other hand, if we take the view that conservation laws are properties (or related to properties) of the whole isolated system, then we understand why the interactions behave the way they behave: they are determined by the properties of the 'whole systems'. Also, Noether theorem, as I understand it, supports the 'holistic' view: conservations laws are related to symmetries. Of course, one might ask "but why there are such 'holistic' properties, then?". Well, an holistic framework doens't explain that, probably, but at least it explains something.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Agreed. However note that non-locality in entangled systems is due to the fact that we cannot analyse them in separated 'parts', they are at least formally irreducible. Does this 'formal irreducibility' imply an 'ontological irriducibility'? Well, this is an interpretation-dependent question.
Anyway, as I said before, I generally prefer 'epistemic interpertations' as interpretations that inform me about what I know.
On the other hand, the study of 'ontic interpretations' might help us to have a 'glimpse' to what might be 'beyond' empirical knowledge, so to speak. I believe that quantum nonlocality and conservations laws are best understood in a holistic framework. But I would not claim that this amounts to a scientific knowledge.
I don't think this can be a deductive conclusion.
Running with the phenomena-noumena thing, you can know how something interacts with you at least, yes?
Say, you may interact with an apple-an-sich, which might at least tell you something about the apple, namely about your interaction therewith. Or, you may interact with a neighbor-an-sich, which might tell you something about the neighbor, namely how the neighbor interacts at least.
(As far as I can tell, the "might" part would have to be disproven for the quote to be deductive, but maybe I'm wrong; actually I might have misunderstood entirely. :smile:)
If we expect apple-omniscience/certainty, then we're over-demanding.
In terms of (phenomena-noumena) epistemics, what would be required (perhaps expected) to know a ding-an-sich (without interaction)? Becoming das-ding...?
I think that's an oxymoron, no?
Yes, I don't think so either. My desire to just get rid of an inherent conflict between our direct aquaintance of experience and our descriptions of ontologies in physics. I think there is much less conflict by getting rid of this notion of a bottom to the universe with a fixed set of objects just arranged in different ways. Already, the conflict is weakened somewhat imo if it is emphasized the way that physics can be seen as models or tools that describe or trace functional aspects of the universe rather than intrinsic things.
Ultimately, I do not think it is actually possible to give an informative, coherent characterization of fundamental ontology or intrinsic nature of reality. I would even go as far as saying that ontology and 'being' are empty concepts in regards to characterizing fundamental ontologies.
Quoting boundless
It's unexplained either way imo. I just am not compelled to commit to the idea that its brute nature requires appeal to anything beyond local dynamics. I don't need to appeal to the whole universe (the only isolated system that exists) to observe examples of conserved quantities from interactions, as implied by conservation laws, in local systems. And I imagine you could say the same thing if the local system was further decomposable so one could focus on what is happening at a single component of it.
Quoting boundless
Yes, it especialliy depends if you interpret the wave-function as a physical object I think.
Yes, I believe it does, but we don't know how. As in, once you remove all senses from our experience of an object, I think something remains, which itself is not only our unification of properties to create a phenomenal object.
Some have tried to read it this way, say Cristoph Koch, he says something like there was the "sun-in-itself" the "planets in themselves" etc., but that is problematic, imo.
For you are already presupposing a great deal about an object by saying it's an apple (in-itself), that suggests that no matter what creature would arise, an apple as an entity in the world. Different creatures might well pick up different properties.
Quoting jorndoe
Ah. There are different views here.
Kant doesn't think there are any - with a somewhat problematic (but very interesting) exception: free will. It's due to a kind of causality which is not solely a naturalistic one.
Schopenhauer would say the thing in itself is will, roughly energy, which we feel when we move an arm or a leg and pay attention to what we are doing. He would say that this is akin to what other objects in themselves would probably feel like too, if we could feel them. But we are still removed from it due to our cognitive apparatus.
Plotinus, much older, speaks of the One, which we can only speak in an "as if" manner, very interesting and quite reasonable.
There are other options, but none that come to mind that straight out say this is how we know a thing in itself. Of course, there are probably exceptions I am missing.
Could be. The phenomena-noumena thing is the context or background presumption here, though.
Let me just add, I don't think becoming das-ding makes much sense here. Anything other than you is not you. And whatever other than you may not perceive at all, or at least not like you which would be unwarranted anthropomorphization, incidentally perhaps converging on panpsychism/animism. In other words, becoming das-ding is a dead end; some other requirement will have to be employed (if any).
We may interact similarly with a Moon rock, whereas (what we identify as) hydrochloric acid interacts differently with the Moon rock. In principle, you could interact with something in whatever ways (typically by proxy), and we may find new ways of interacting with things, or discover interaction previously unknown to us. Do we have an alternative to interaction, by which to attain knowledge of something otherwise unknown (or scantily known)? I suppose the hyper-skeptical parsimonist might reduce everything to interaction. (? I have already ditched solipsism and the like here)
I mean, I don't think we can become the thing in itself either, at best we can perhaps say some negative things about it, or we can use "as if" (or "like a") language to speak about it, as Plotinus does.
But I don't think we will ever get more insight than that and furthermore, I fully understand why some may think this may a complete waste of time or effort (not that you are saying this.) But I find myself and always have been, extremely attracted to and fascinated by this idea.
Panpsychism could be a solution, but animism less so, though as you point out they can be similar. The issue as I see it is that panpsychism only considers the (conscious) mental aspects of reality, either explicitly denying or overlooking the non-mental aspects of reality, which by far outnumber those things we consider "mental".
If you believe knowledge is inherently relational (as I do), then I don't see an alternative interaction. At least none that I can detect using our human intelligence.
Maybe God or angels - or, if you want to be less poetic and more naturalistic, an extremely intelligent alien species - could have an intelligence utterly above ours, which may include other ways of knowing.
Or maybe it's impossible. Hard to say.
I sort of agree. If we let go the position that physical theories give us a complete description of the 'universe', things change. IMO, we can say that there are 'regularities' in physical phenomena but to 'reify' our descriptions and interpreting them as a 'faithful portrait' of reality is wrong. I think that 'non-representationalist' interpretations of QM have the merit to question this assumption - one can see that merit even if disagrees with them
Quoting Apustimelogist
Well, I think I can see what you mean. But IMO the 'reductionistic' picture takes conservation laws as accidental properties of interactions, whereas the 'holistic' one explains why the interactions behave in a certain way via the conservation laws themselves. In both cases there is no 'full explanation', but IMO the second ontological 'picture' is better.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Well, I would say that this is true in a more general sense, i.e. if the quantum formalism gives us a 'glimpse' of how physical objects are.
In the thermal interpretation, as I understand it, the wave-function is a pure fiction. As the 'summary' (found here) says:
I still have to find an ontological interpretation of QM that doesn't have some kind of 'holism', BTW.
Quoting boundless
I wouldn't say that its not like the portait cannot possibly in principle be faithful (where it does not have wrong predictions); but that it cannot tell us anything about reality intrinsically beyond tools that are used by us to essentially anticipate what comes next or came before or what could happen in some scenario.
Quoting boundless
I feel like my point should be interpretation-independent.
Quoting boundless
I disagree. They would still be an inherent part of the descriptions of those interactions, it just doesn't have to be anything more than local to that picture.
Quoting boundless
Not entirely sure this is the case. Hard to tell. Imo, the 'holism' can be explained away given that the wave-function isn't real and entanglement depends on local entangling interactions ans locally incompatible observables.
Ok, I see. Yeah, even if the portrait is faithful, it is still a portrait, after all. But IMO the 'weirdness' of modern theories suggests to me that they do not even 'portray' reality. But YMMV.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Agreed. I meant that in a way non-representationalist interpretations might agree with that.
Quoting Apustimelogist
In a sense, yes, they would describe the behavior of the interactions. But whereas the 'bottom-up' perspective says that conservations law are 'contingent consequences' of the behavior of interactions, the 'top-down' picture (i.e. interactions are more fundamental) says the reverse.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I don't see how this isn't some kind of 'non-realism', thought. It seems to imply this rejection of 'unicity', as the article on SEP on Consistent histories uses the term:
Not sure I agree. I've only started to think more deeply into this after a conversation I am having in another thread and it is beginning to dawn on me there are potentially a number of ways to view this kind of thing. Maybe too off point to go into those thoughts though; so, to skip to the point:
The kind of "behavior of interactions" I had in mind would be effectively equivalent to the conservation principles. Just alternative descriptions of the same thing though this I imagine depends on the nature of specific statements, formulations, descriptions. An example special case could be:
https://www.engineering.com/whats-the-similarities-between-these-principles-1-dalemberts-principle-2-law-of-conservation-of-energy/
It seems to me that whatever is conserved is always implied in the described behavior of the interactions. Obviously you might be able to apply these principles as a blanket description of various systems of different sizes and claim holism in virtue of the fact you could be talking about large spatially separated systems. Thinking about it then; for me, I would accept a holistic explanation if say, the forces and displacements in the above link were non-local. But if they are solely local or mediated locally, then I don't see the need for a holistic description. Sure I may not be able to directly explain why these descriptions apply, but if everything interacts only locally then I don't see the need for holistic descriptions. The blanket description for the system would not be distinct from compatible descriptions applied to all the sub-components of a system.
Obviously, you this may seem to not apply for quantum non-locality and so holism seems the case there. My reply again would be that quantum non-locality is not a real example of the exertion of forces over space and time, but a correlation whose origin is local.
Quoting boundless
Based on the Stanford article, I would say the stochastic interpretation manages to fulfil unicity in the sense of: "a single point represents the exact state of a system at any given time" ehich applies to particles but not the wave-function.
Ok, I think I can get what you are sayinh. However, to be fair, it seems to me even in this kind of 'bottom-up' model, conservation laws, symmetries seem like something that happens due to some kind of 'happy chance'. On the other hand, if one considers that, say, the 'universe' as a single 'system' with some kind of properties and derives the behavior of interactions from them the picture is both simpler and less 'fortuitous'. Again, I get that one can say that even those 'properties of the whole' remain unexplained but IMO the picture is simpler. And simplicity seems important.
Regarding the principle of locality (outside quantum non-locality), I get what you mean but I see it as some kind of 'differentiation' principle, so to speak, that itself derives from some kind of global property. I mean, I don't see it as necessarily as a fatal argument.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Ok, interesting. Just for curiosity, but in this interpretation do the 'real' momenta of particles coincide with the 'observed' ones? In de Broglie-Bohm, while the observed position coincides with the 'real' position, this isn't true for momentum/velocity.
Animism is actually very misunderstood by modern academia since animism is read through a very Cartesian lens, which is really mistaken. Of course it's going to sound silly if you make animism into panpsychism, as if everything had some sort of little cartesian soul and consciousness was wholly subjective.
Animism bears much more in common with American pragmatism and their ideas of metaphysics rather than panpsychism/Cartesianism. There are worlds in the plural, and personhood of whatever- rocks, trees, people etc. arises in pragmatic contexts of action.
The proper term to describe animism is really ontological pluralism, reality is many, not One. But not solipsism, since worlds are partially overlapping but partially autonomous yet other worlds can be entered into/assumed.
It's context sensitive metaphysics and I've argued earlier on Hoffman's views imply this too, once we understand the physics underlying it.
Quoting boundless
Imo it would only be 'happy chance' if one of the equivalent descriptions could be the case while the other (e.g. conservation laws) failed, but clearly that isn't the case if one follows from the other formally.
Quoting boundless
I don't think it is simpler imo; because, if these conservation behaviors are properties of individual interactions, and individual interactions can only propagate locally, then there is no reason for me to attribute this as a holistic property of the whole system. The principle applied to the system would be rendered redundant if it holds for subsystems, subsystems of subsystems... right down to local interactions. It would be explanatorily simpler to say that the conservation property holds for the whole system in virtue of the fact it holds at any interaction propagating in some local part of the system.
Quoting boundless
Not sure exactly what you mean but stochastically behaving particles (whether classical or quantum) do not have well-defined velocity / momentum in general so in stochastic mechanics velocity fields are constructed using averages regarding particle motion.
This would depend on what type of panpsychism one envisions. The panpsychism I am familiar, Galen Strawson's, does include incomprehensible (to us) subjects of experience, but it's not to be viewed in terms of something that thinks or wills- it's a very, very, basic type of phenomenon, quite rudimentary.
Other forms of panpsychism many be more extreme, but I don't know them in depth.
You are right, I don't understand a lot of animism well, and I will take your word that it mirrors say, something like what William James argues for. Which is fine. It's not my persuasion, but it's a legitimate view.
As for Hoffman himself, it's somewhat hard to say, since he says we don't evolve to capture truth at all. That's seems to me more excessive than the current science indicates, including the science Hoffman uses to defend his views.
Fair enough. Here I disagree but I understand why you can argue for that.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Ok. But what about uniformity/universality of physical laws?
Why, say, do electromagnetic interaction and gravitation seem to behave the same everywhere?
If there weren't any kind of 'top-down' constraints, how can one explain this universality?
Quoting Apustimelogist
I meant that in de Broglie Bohm (dBB), the velocities/momenta that one computes in the 'standard way' are not the same as the actual velocities/momenta that the particle have (and when we measure velocities we find the value predicted by QM without contraction with dBB). IIRC, this kind of pecularity of dBB have lead to the objection that 'Bohmian trajectories' are 'surreal' but oddly enough 'weak measurements' displayed them (I remember that about 10 years ago these experiments were taken by some as an evidence against 'standard QM'. But this isn't true...). This objection is of course not a problem for dBB as far as predictions go but it would be certainly strange that when we measure velocities, the 'real' velocity is something else.
It seems that stochastic interpretations do not share this conceptual pecularity. Interesting.
I don't think of the fact that laws may behave the same everywhere as holism.
With regard to explanation, you could equally ask why should there not be universality without reason?
Quoting boundless
The Bohmian formulation is very closely related to the stochastic one. Effectively The stochastic mechanics momentum / velocities are equivalent to the standard quantum ones. Bohmian mechanics includes very similar kinds of momentum /velocity to the stochastic ones abd then essentially adds extra deterministic particle trajectories on top of it. The way I personally see it, the main difference between Bohm and stochastic mechanics is that the latter eschews this last assumption of additional deterministic trajectories. Without that, the natural way to viee trajectories is stochastic and we see this directly in the path integral formulation of standard mechanics because the paths in this formulation that are used to calculate ptobabilities are the same as the stochastic mechanics particle trajectories. Because quantum mechanics is so bizarre though, it is always assumed these paths in the path integral formulation are not real but purely computational tools. Stochastic mechanics just takes them at face value.
Well that's a good question. I don't have an answer for that (I do however think that regularities in nature can be taken as 'clues' for some kind of 'transcendent Reason'... but I won't digress)
Regardless of that, I think however that universality is better explained in some kind of 'holistic' picture than a 'bottom-up' one. But YMMV. After all, none of these two pictures can be 'proved'.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Thanks for this. So, the trajectories themselves are determined probabilistically, rather than deterministically. Interesting, thanks.
That's fair enough then! :up:
Thank you very much for the discussion!
And you!
I thought Bohm's idea was just an inelegant and superfluous attempt to retain discrete particles and a purely objective pre or no-collapse reality. But what is the motivation for retaining this idea given what we know now?
Isn't it the case we now have significant experimental refutation of hidden variables, such as Bell's Theory, Legget-Garg inequalities, and Kochen-Specker theorem?
IMO, this takes us some way beyond the traditional positions of monism, dualism, reductionism etc. to some sort of metaphysics which needs a new vocabulary, like the kind of constructivist pluralism I've been talking about here.
Well, the main motivation remains the same, I think, i.e. retaining the idea that physics is about describing the world 'as it is' also when measurements are not made. Not only for de Broglie-Bohm interpretation(s) (dBB) but for all 'realist' ones.
Anyway, I read of one dBB proponent who give an additional reasoning: for him, dBB has the advantage of making QM visualizable. And visualization has been an extremely useful tool for physicists.
As I said, personally I prefer an epistemic approach but I repsect 'realists'. Even if their interpretations are wrong, I still think that they can give us insights.
Quoting Bodhy
dBB gives the same preidictions as 'usual' QM. No result you mentioned here falsify it. There are more technical difficulties when QFT is taken into account but some proponents insist that a dBB version of QFT is acheavable. Others disagree.
Quoting Bodhy
Well, the fact that 'taken literally' modern physical theories give us 'pictures of realities' which seem getting progressively weird is a good clue that there is a limitation of our ability to arrive at a conceptual and mathematical description of 'how physical reality is in itself'. This also suggests to me that physical theories shouldn't be taken as 'literal portraits' of the 'external, physical world'.
Hence, physical theories use useful conceptual fictions that can be used to make predictions, applications and so on. These conceptualizations are, therefore, very useful for understanding the regularities of phenomena of the empirical reality. We cannot, however, get 'true knowledge' of the 'external world as it is in itself' (see my references about the 'two truths' and skepticism).
On the other hand, I also do not 'forbid' speculations about the ontology of 'external world'. But I don't think that scientific knowledge can enlighten us about which speculative ontology is the 'right' one.