Chalmers (if fdrake's interpretation is correct) wants his inability to 'conceive' a bridge to have metaphysical implications. — Isaac

If that's true, fdrake is wrong. The conceivability of the p-zombie just shifts the burden to functionalists to explain why we talk about having experiences when we don't actually have them.

Please review the context. I think you'll see in this case that Russell is just being difficult. <smile> — plaque flag

You might be right.

Just pretend it's not there. Like I said, close enough. — plaque flag

If you have to advise people not to use certain words, that's a bad sign. There's something you don't want to face.

I just noticed you have a transformer symbol as your avatar. Electronic engineer?

RussellA perceives direct realists only indirectly: the direct realist in his head does not resemble the direct realist as it is in the external world. — Jamal

Nice.

If DeSantis were elected, he'd be the first Italian American to reach that office. Why can't he show some respect for the principle of tolerance that makes his candidacy possible?

Oh dear. You’re annoyed at the arrogance. Excuse me while I cringe. I’m annoyed at the fence-sitting and tone-policing. At any rate, yours or mine feelings on the matter help nothing. — NOS4A2

I didn't mean to police your tone. I feel I benefit from discussing things with you. Your challenges are almost always worthwhile to me.

“Bodily” pertains to the body, you know, the structure and being of a human organism? — NOS4A2

Yes. I had to study that sucker when I was in school. Totally apropos of nothing, I was driving along a highway during a time when I was studying the function of the heart. All at once, an image (of sorts) appeared out of my thoughts: I was seeing the whole operation of the heart at once. It blew my mind and I think it must have been a result of pondering the various aspects separately, knowing that they all fit together. It's called integration, one of those amazing features of consciousness that we would love to understand. We're just not quite there yet.

We’re not brains, Frank. If you don’t want to include the ear in the act of hearing then the fence-sitting charade can no longer be maintained. — NOS4A2

I definitely include the ear in the act of hearing. As I said, I just don't know what the brain is doing to create the experience of hearing. Nobody does right now. It's not a fence-sitting charade. It's just recognizing our present limitations.

By the way, you should think about getting into Forex trading. Spend about three months studying it, about three months on a demo account, then start with a real account trading small amounts until you get better at it. If you want some youtube videos that explain more, I'll pm them to you.

We do know that no sound called a voice is moving the membrane, moving the bones, converting mechanical vibration into electrical signals as you just tried to illustrate, so don’t go spouting off like you don’t know. Yet all of these are involved in the activity of hearing. — NOS4A2

I specified that we don't know how the brain produces the experience of sound (assuming that it does). We're at the bootstrapping stage of theorizing about it. Some reach out to quantum theory, others reveal the magnitude of the problem by just trying to lay out the basic requirements for a theory.

So yes, we know what the ear is doing. A microphone is doing pretty much the same thing as an ear. Of course we know what our recording equipment is doing with those electrical signals. We don't know what the brain is doing with those produced by the ear though.

The point is for both sides: back down from assuming we have knowledge about how experience is produced. But I supposed I'm particularly annoyed by the arrogance of those who lay out the word "bodily" like that's supposed to be describing something.

Like kale, definitions might have a place on the plate, with the right accompaniments and in the right quantity. — Banno

:up:

Didn't mean to offend or be rude or evasive somehow — plaque flag

Not at all! I didn't take it that way. :grin:

But I think we should ignore the internals altogether. Forget pineal gremlins and immaterial private showings. Let's look at how in fact we treat claims for which selves are responsible. Let's look directly at what philosophy itself is doing and what that doing requires or implies. — plaque flag

Ignore the question of the nature of experience if it doesn't interest you.

If the biological act of hearing involves using the body to perceive physical sound waves, it cannot be said that a man is hearing voices in his head, because there is neither the biological activity nor the sound waves required to hear such sounds. The biological activity of hearing and the biological act of hallucinating are two distinct biological activities. — NOS4A2

The field of a sound wave is air. Specifically, what's waving is air pressure. Those waves stimulate membranes and bones in the ear which convey the vibration to hairs in the ear which change the mechanical vibration into electrical signals that travel into the brain.

This kind of conversion of energy is well known to us. It's very clear that a transformation has taken place. Since it's all pretty predictable, it would appear that the electrical signals "represent" the audio waves.

What we don't know is what the brain is doing with those electrical signals to produce the experience of hearing sound. We are at the very beginning stages of even imagining how to theorize about it.

So the moral of the story is there for all sides of the issue: we don't know how it works, so leave off spouting off as if you know. And I will comment, that just about everybody contributing to this thread has done that at one time or another.

All true. There are two egos. One appears in reflection only. As far as it has responsibility, this means it's being identified as a causal agent. It can also be helpless, so it's not just a matter of having power.
— frank

We can maybe call this the empirical-normative ego. — plaque flag

OK. But clearly the normativity is partly a priori (as per the Transcendental Aesthetic).

In its radical purity, I think it's best called just being and not consciousness. We realize upon reflection, dragging in the heavy machinery of public concepts, — plaque flag

Yep.

In principle, informal proofs can be translated into extremely pedantic formal proofs and checked by computers. So it's possible to think of all as a generalization of chess. I'm a big fan of Chaitin's Metamath. A FAS (formal axiomatic system) is an idealized program (one could create concrete examples in many ways) that cranks out all theorems implied by a set of axioms but enumerating all finite strings of symbols and seeing if they are proofs. It's all 'dead' symbol crunching. — plaque flag

Ok. Math as we know it originated in tandem with the concept of money. Everywhere the idea of money as value in the abstract went, the development of math soon followed. Zero was originally part of the technology of Babylonian accounting.

Nothing dead about trade. (I'm all into Forex trading at the moment, so I'm seeing everything through that lens).

It's about roles rather than 'positive elements.' And that gets us back to equivalence classes of tools that pretty much do the same thing. — plaque flag

Start with what you can't do without, then ponder the ontology. Otherwise the tail is wagging the dog.

By and large phil-of-math people have recognized that we can't do without abstract objects due to some basic logic. Now if you want to dispense with logic, that's another matter.

To me Brandom is the beautiful collision of AP clarity and continental insight. FWIW, an equivalence class is still abstract in some sense, what exactly do we mean by 'abstract' ? — plaque flag

The typical abstract object are things like numbers and sets. They aren't mental objects because one can be wrong about them, but they aren't physical like golf balls. They're a sort of third category.

I think this is where Hegel and Heidegger pour into Brandom who puts their ideas in a more AP and less freaky vocabulary. A person is like something like a dance rather than a pair of legs — plaque flag

I've long thought of a person as a kind of music with a range of frequencies and recurring themes which harmonize or jangle. :starstruck:

. 'I' am held accountable for what I've said and done. An 'I' is the kind of the thing that ought not disagree with itself. This also applies to claims. I can't say I love animals and kick dogs for pissing in my yard. — plaque flag

All true. There are two egos. One appears in reflection only. As far as it has responsibility, this means it's being identified as a causal agent. It can also be helpless, so it's not just a matter of having power.

The other is that thing Kierkegaard talked about: quality of being. The here and now. The view out the windows of your eyeballs. The two egos are inextricable. They constantly play off of each other. That's a scenario one could ponder anyway.

Have you considered equivalence classes ? You seem to be using the container metaphor. Different wrappers can contain the same candy. We can also think of different expressions having the roughly the same use. For this reason they have the same [enough] meaning / use. — plaque flag

Sounds like another thread. I think it would end up being a collision of analytical philosophy and continental. For AP, a sentence is an abstract object. You and I can be thinking of the same sentence. We aren't here worried about what the sentence means. The sentence itself is just an entity that adheres to certain rules. What you do with the entity is another issue. In other words, analytical philosophy will analyze (pull apart) the pieces of living language use and lay them out on a table. If that burns your brain to accept that we can do that, well, we wouldn't bother starting that thread. Also if you're just not interested in AP, that would be another reason. I got into AP specifically wanting to know how they look at things as opposed to kicking over their house of cards.

I think there's value in that approach. We can talk about the tree as a unity of shapes, as atoms, as a piece of the ecosystem. The key though is that we are still talking about the tree, 'our' tree, the tree we can be wrong or right about.

I agree that 'it's all ideas out there' in the sense that 'language is the house of being,' that the lifeworld's structure is largely linguistic. I don't think it's something we can peel off, though we sometimes ignore a few layers of sediment for this or that purpose. — plaque flag

So our perspectives are pretty close. What do you do about the fact that you can't really exit this "house of being" in order to photograph it and talk about it? It's an uroboros type situation, isn't it? And that was the trajectory of the OP.

I think we are finding common ground and learning to interpret one another. — plaque flag

I think so, yep.

The 'I' that sees the tree exists within the space of reasons. — plaque flag

Apparently, so is the tree. The epiphany comes from looking at the tree the way an artist would. Just see the shapes and shades. When you realize that "tree" is an idea that organizes the data in the visual field in certain way, you begin to see that it's all ideas out there, this contrasted with that, foreground against background.

This isn't opposed to realism, it's just a particular way of understanding what it is that we call reality. It's a kind of projection, although that isn't right either. That's just a way of putting it phenomenologically.

BTW, I like talking to you because you're so poetic, it invites the same. Somethings come out better as poetry than as a recipe. See? More poetry.

What's the difference?

Any views on this, or am I full of shit? — Tom Storm

I saw a documentary on atheism once. The documentarian said a world without religion seemed "thin" to him. He was an atheist, but he appreciated the full bodied mythology, art, and community associated with religion.

It wasn't a reason to believe. Maybe more of a reason for tolerance.

Sweet!

What program are you using?

If someone asks for a definition and/or questions how a term is being used then it is on the author to attempt to offer a different line to bring the reader in or for them to judge the worth of bothering to do so — I like sushi

I think this might be one reason we draw philosophers into a discussion. If I mention "reference" and then nod toward Quine, I'm giving you the basis for my use of the term.

The problem is, if you help me out in this way, I'm prone to ignoring you and creating a wicker man version of you to whom I address all my thoughts on this subject because I've been thinking about it for a long time and I want to put it into words and I hope you don't mind if I'm not even giving any hint that I notice that there's a real person behind your posts.

Bold of you to assume that they're the same sentence — Moliere

I'm just a super bold guy, you know. :strong:

For the most part language is a collection of abstract objects. The bodily part is utterances (sounds and marks, reading and listening). But words and sentences are something else. The fact that the same sentence can be expressed by multiple utterances (a text engraved in stone vs a professor's quotation,) shows this.

I'm just saying that if your goal was to stick to a materialist base, using language as an organ won't work. You'll have to adopt a behaviorist, inscrutable reference, sort of outlook.

An adolescent style of rigidity and dogmatism. Thought everything fit nicely into a flowchart. Constantly uncharitable, frequently insulting. — Mikie

:chin:

Perhaps you can find those that call themselves 'direct realists' that do this, but to me this is the wrong way to go and misses what's good in 'my' take on direct realism.
— plaque flag

What's your take on Direct Realism ? — RussellA

I was thinking about this while making coffee this morning. The OP touches on something that comes down to who you are rather than empirical or logical foundations.

This is why a scientific approach, or even adhering to standard viewpoints from philosophy of mind (like multiple realizability issues) are ignored in favor of presenting hypotheses.

As if the question in the OP was really: Could Direct Realism be Conceived in Such a Way that it Works? It's speculative philosophy driven by identity. I am this, so that needs to work.

Apparently Socrates got a lot of mileage out of being picky about the definition of justice. You could think of philosophy as an exercise gym and trying to pin down definitions is one of the machines.

If you stand at the door to the gym and claim that defining things is stupid, you probably don't need to go in and work out. Just go home and work in your garden or something.

(e.g. Schopenhauer), — 180 Proof

yep

Heh. That's not a thought I want to dissolve. I'm admitting it's the weak point in my thinking! :) -- it's something I see as a serious problem if I were to take my posited categories as the real. I'm making up another set of categories to offer to solve one set of problems, but admitting that these are provisional [EDIT:and] are for a particular line of thinking rather than universal. — Moliere

Gotcha. :smile:

I'm not sure how direct perception of other minds works -- it's a bit odd. There are prima facie reasons to believe it, but it's definitely against usual way of thinking of things and a hard case. — Moliere

I don't think we can have direct perception of other minds. We need representations. The people from SETI (search for extra-terrestrial intelligence) spend time wondering about it.

Sounds about right to me. So no need for a mind at all to hold them, right? — Moliere

Yea. I don't think they're the type of thing that can be held.

Is that any wonder that what we like to call the mind would respond to the molecules of the world? — Moliere

I think we've known this for millennia, wine, and all that. My only point was that those who are claiming that thoughts reduce to bodily activities that can be read by others is wrong. Thoughts and feelings are there even while there are no voluntary muscle movements.

But you still have a body, yes? So no need for a mind to hold the thoughts? — Moliere

I don't think a thought is like a blob that dwells somewhere. Thoughts come and go, like little moments of reflection. Parcels of awareness or recognition. I think this is the conventional view.

Whatever they are, they exist even though the body of the thinker is paralyzed. We know this because we regularly give neuromuscular blockade drugs that stop everything except autonomic activities. If we don't also give sedatives to put the mind asleep, the patient will hear everything that's said, and worse, feel everything that might be happening, like surgery.

So the notion that thinking is something the body does is just wrong. Brain, maybe. Body, no.

We know how thoughts work because our bodies have thoughts all the time, — Moliere

You can still have thoughts while your body is paralyzed, though.

because reality, as far as it could logically be open to us, is knowable through direct perception, experience, mathematics, and science. — Jamal

Rationalists like Leibniz and Descartes would have agreed whole heartedly. The Empiricists would caution that a fair portion of our logic is grounded in absolutely nothing, so let's not depend heavily on that to let us know what the world is. Let's take the fragments of appearance which are available to us and make do without the divinities the Rationalists require in order to assure that we're not all lost in dreams.

:up:

Of course. And I'm an ambitious fucker. I'm trying to drop some memes. I'm not preaching against the softwhere but making it a theme within which to show off and gather prestige coins. — plaque flag

Why?

Presumably more intelligent and creative (and aggressive?) groups dominate other groups in the long run, which would seem to require a relatively more intense but still controlled expression of individuality — plaque flag

The Jews have the oldest known living culture. Opinions vary about what their secret might be.

Sure. You can't really dispense with the self though. Unless you want to become a homeless lunatic living under a bridge babbling and being hit in the head by rocks thrown by kids.

do understand of course that claims about the we are attributed to the I that makes them. This is as common as any discussion about the rules of a situation. — plaque flag

No, it's that "we" means a group of individuals. Yes, the ego is an idea. It's a kind of construction. Monotheistic divinity reinforces the primacy of the ego. The burning bush told Moses that its name was "I am.". Genesis 3:13.

However you come to realize that the ego is a kind of fixture of the mind, it's startling, yes. Where does it leave you though? For me, the landing place is Schopenhauer.

Not so sure. 'I' seems to be the sign for a 'virtual' bearer of social responsibility, a 'player' on the 'stage,' which is associated with a particular living body. It exists within the tradition at the root perhaps (any exceptions?) all traditions, that of the unified voice, the ego, the individual.A body learns to be an 'I' [singular]. One ghost per machine. — plaque flag

I sense some hatred of the ego here. What's that related to?