Anyway, it seems to me that you are saying: .... — boundless

I think this is more or less an acceptable interpretation.

I would think that your position should be called a form of 'realism'. — boundless

Hmm, I think it is compatible with realism and anti-realism, because I am just appealing to our models, claiming that our best models of reality don't point to the mental as fundamental among the things they talk about.

Regarding the 'hard problem', I do believe, however, that it is a very profound problem and, like intelligibility, to me suggest that the 'mental' must be in some sense fundamental. I have found no explanation of the propeerites of consicousness in 'physical' terms that have been satisfying. — boundless

My line on this has always been that I think that there will always be things a brain or mind cannot explain, and so arguments like the knowledge argument or inverted qualia or whatever don't need to be construed as having any ontological import. From my perspective, saying that the mental is fundamental is about as informative as saying that structure is fundamental - I don't think these views are distinguishable, and I would rather lean to the latter rather than the former, if just to have a story to tell about things in reality. But it doesn't really say much.

I don't think saying that the mental is fundamental really solves the hard problem either. All resulting metaphysical views have an issue with the problem that our direct experiences seem to look completely irreducible to descriptions that science says are more fundamental because they seem to occupy a higher scale of reality. Panpsychism doesn't solve that, it just reframes the problem in a different way - the combination problem - which requires also something like a strong emergence of macroscopic experiential phenomena, which imo kind of has the same properties as substance dualism. The problem is for me that there is no scientific evidence of something like this strong emergence, which would result in epiphenomenalism also. So I don't think the problems you have with certain views are not necessarily resolved by panpsychism.

Woops, premature post.

To me, however, it isn't granted. It's a mystery that 'cries' for an explanation (which in turn might 'cries' for another and so on). — boundless

Fair enough. We will just have to agree to disagree.

If that is the case, it seems to me that the 'mental' is somehow fundamental (at least as a fundamental aspect of physical reality as some panpsychist affirm) — boundless

My use of the word physicalism is maybe misleading, but I like using the word because it captures where my side of these arguments leans toward.

I agree with some that the "physical" as a metaphysical category is difficult to make substantial because at the end of the day, we just construct models of things in the world from what we can point out and is plucked out of what we see empirically, which we do through "experience".

Everything we model boils down to (counterfactual) regularities or structures in experience, and I cannot further specify about experience other than the fact that they are informative. I would even say that there is no other property I can draw out of my experiences other than the notion of informativeness - i.e. making distinctions.

But nonetheless, our epistemic activities lead to a hierarchy of models explaining how the world behaves in increasingly general (i.e. fundamental) ways that, in principle, supervene on each other in a way describable in terms of coarse-graining as an epistemic consequence of the resolution of our perceptual / observational / technological apparati. At the end of the day, any models we construct about the world that survive just end up being either subsumed under "physical" or supervening on what is subsumed under "physical", so the physical as a metaphysical category seems vacuous because we just use it to subsume all our successful models.

Obviously, all our epistemic activities and their consequences are embedded and enacted within experience - surely experience is fundamental? But the aforementioned models of the natural world are the only ones we have, and they tell us that experience relates to the events described in those by the same kind of coarse-graining. Experiences are not as fundamental as the things being described by our models of the world at more fine-scaled levels of description, and with more causal generality. There is a kind of dual-nature to this insofar that experiences are structures that both: 1) supervene on brain activity; 2) In virtue of how experiences model the world, we can also say that they are about structures beyond our sensory boundary that supervene on other finer-grained or general structures beyond our sensory boundaries. Structures are just what we can consistently distinguish about the world beyond our boundaries. Perhaps the kind of dual-aspect thing, and other information processing properties elicit the intuition we have for dualism or ontologically separate mental "stuff".

My view of physicalism is more akin to a naturalism that asserts these models as the only ones we have. Because of the hard problem and perhaps other reasons (God? Religion? Spirituality? Supernatural? Parapsychology?), people try to assert additional models. The problem is that reality fails to give persistent indications of these things. But people still assert them, and naturalism (physicalism) is mostly a stance against that.

Human knowledge has not given us models of the mental that do not just relate to more fundamental descriptions through coarse/fine-graining. There is no evidence for mental substance (or similar category) that is separate from what our other physical models describe, and can make a difference to what those things describe. Nothing else is added beyond fine/coarse-graining of information. If the mental and cognitive fits into our hierarchy of scientific models via coarse-fine graining, it is then hard to make sense of them as more fundamental since they are not the most general or fine-grained way of describing what happens in the world. The mental supervenes on interactions at the bio-chemical level. At the same time, bio-chemical models are embedded in and describe or enact structural relations through our "experiences"; all physical models do this and so there is no sense that my physical models are talking about some kind of "substance" inherently incompatible with the nature of experience itself; they just track structural relations through whatever perspectival manifold or space our epistemic activities are furnished on. Experience itself is difficult to articulate anything about other than the property of informativeness or distinguishability (e.g. direct acquaintance), which has structure.

Experience is structure. What physical models pick out about the world is structure. There is no inherent incompatibility when no intrinsic "substance" is attributed to either the experiential or what physical models are about, but we know that the structures of experience cannot be the bottom. And in principle, more elaborate structures (than naive experience) that describe brains, cognition and their relation to the world beyonds their boundaries may be able to better explain why experiential structures are limited in certain ways with regard to information about what they supervene on, and why our own explanations about them are limited. These limitations may be why we seem to have intuitions that there is something more to the mental beyond their place in the hierarchy of models about reality.

But to emphasize, all I have been talking about is this notion of structure. So there is an inherent agnosticism (or even rejection) about fundamental metaphysics, and even a skepticism about there being anything to say about it beyond what our intelligible models of reality say. These intelligible models are just the ones I have been talking about all along, with the physical at the core on which other models supervene or relate through coarse/fine-graining.

So there is nothing more to say about the metaphysics of reality beyond our best scientific models that supervene on the physical.

From this, there is no sense in which the mental can be the most fundamental as a model of how the world works, imo.

Then how are you supposed to convince me of what you say with such confidence if it has no demonstrable consequence for anything. If there is no demonstrable consequence for anything, how am I to be convinced that what you are saying actually means something and not just a bunch of words strung together like:

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"

Sure, I understand all the words. Sure, is grammatical. I can read it...

But am I saying anything ... ?

‘I referred to his view qua idealist that, really, there was no world per se before the first perceiver, but also that science is correct in investigating ancient history, i.e. the world before perceivers. How could both of these claims be true? This is a general problem that idealism must address.’ — Wayfarer

Again, with the example of quantum observer-dependence, you can point to actual theoretical, empirical consequences. That is what I want to see. I don't see the same kind of tangible consequence here, just someone choosing to use words in an unnecessarily mysterious way: e.g. "that there was no world per se". Imo, the veracity of time might be doubted when there are contradictions, irresolvable disagreements, false predictions. I get the impression that we don't really have those problems regarding what a clock measures; I don't see what is changed by noting 'time' is a concept. A concept is part of a model, and what is being modelled is a world that behaves independently of us.

we are able to measure time objectively and with minute accuracy, but that doesn't negate the necessity of their being a system of measurement nor a mind to measure it. — Wayfarer

Given that you would agree that the universe had a history before any organism observed it, this is just meaningless. Absolutely no need to conflate one's subjective sense of time and what clocks measure.

I'm talking specifically about your Kantian space and time stuff:

e.g.

What I’m proposing is in line with the Kantian (and later phenomenological) insight that space and time are conditions of appearance—they are the framework within which any object can appear to us at all, not features of things as they exist independently of experience. — Wayfarer

Yes, some.

Honestly, I find this time and space stuff meaningless. I don't understand what you actually mean by it or what implication has for anything at all in any possible way.

Contrast it for instance with the quantum stuff about perspective-dependence. That actually has information in it because quantum theory is telling you that system behavior actually depends on measurement in some way which can be demonstrated mathematically and empirically. So there is an actual concrete implication for this; there is a graspable fact of the matter about what this means, even if someone chooses to interpret these empirical facts differently.

I have absolutely no idea what kind of implication or difference to anything with regard to what you are saying about space and time. I want something that is actually tangible like in the quantum case so I know what you mean by this. And I don't think relativity is relevant.either because that has nothing to do with human cognition. The fact that clocks can read different times due to the effects of gravity after having been put on different plane journeys has nothing to do with human cognition. In one post you talked about people using different units of measurement, but I don't really see how these implications either. Some people use inches, aome use cm; so what? 1 inch = 2.5cm.

I disagree, unless you think that existence involves intelligibility (which is something that classical metaphysics asserts but I'm not sure physicalists generally would say). In any case, if you assume that the world is intelligible and its existence must be intelligible too, then it would be meaningful to ask if the world is contingent or not contingent and discuss the consequences of such statements. — boundless

This is just going in loops I can't follow
A physicalist would say that you can describe how a brain does what it does in understanding the world virtue of physical processes by which it works and interacts with other physical processes.

This is also because it includes things that I would never classify under the term 'prediction'. — boundless

Don't think about it as prediction then. Its just about models or maps that tells you where things are in relation to others. My use of the word "predict" is clearly an idiosyncracy that comes from its appearance in neuroscience where I would give it a slighlty more general meaning.

Well, I believe that it's simply becuase for you it is a fact that needs no explanation. So, you don't see a problem (perhaps I am the one that sees a problem where there is none. But I am not persuaded by that). — boundless

I don't understand what you mean by the idea that structure of the world needs explaining. Its like asking why there is anything at all, which is a question not resolved by any perspective.

Not sure about this. Let's say you encounter the words "one way" in a traffic sign. How is that 'prediction'? It seems to me that here meaning is not predictive. — boundless

Its entirely prediction. You see the words, you infer the kinds of behaviors you expect to see in that context and act appropriately. Words and meaning is about association which is just what anticipates a word, what comes after a word, what juxtaposes words - that is all I mean by prediction. prediction is just having a model of associations or relations between different things. Like a map that tells you how to get between any two points. Fictional stories are included. Everything we do is included.

Ok. The problem for me, however, is to explain from a purely physicalist point of view why there are these 'structures' in the first place. — boundless

I suspect that I don't understand what you mean.

It also means that the 'stuff' behaves in a certain manner and so on. — boundless

Sure, but I don't think that is any novel step from what I just said. To understand that behavior is then effectively just to be able to predict what happens next in some context. There's nothing special about that. A brain can do that in virtur of its physical properties regarding neurons.

Furthermore, it seems to me that intelligibility also conveys meaning. — boundless

Yes, meaning is just more prediction. Nothing different, nothing special.

For instance, the meaning of the word 'word' is difficult to explain just in physical terms. — boundless

The meaning of 'word' just comes from its associations with other aspects of our experiences which become apparent in how we use the word 'word'. Nothing more than prediction.

I guess that the negation of this isn't 'impossible' but it doesn't seem plausible. — boundless

What do you mean?

More or less. My point is that in order to even think to follow and catch a ball, you need some interpretative mental faculties. Same goes for some basic innate concepts (like a basic notion of 'thing', 'change' and so on). — boundless

Alright, sure. I just think those things come from a brain that has evolved able to infer abstract structure in the information it gets from the environment. There is a kind of pluralism in the sense that depending on how the brain relates to the environment, different information appears on its sensory boundary and so different structures are inferred. Like say if you are looking at an object from different angles and it looks different.

Well, yes, but my question is how to understand why the physical world is intelligible in the first place. A physcialist might well aswer as you do. It is just a 'brute fact'. But IMO it would be ironic. The very intelligibility of the world is left unexplained (and perhaps unexplainable). — boundless

For the world to intelligible imo just means that it has structure. To say the world has structureis just to say something like: there is stuff in it and it is different in different places, which is kind of trivial.

that is, we get incredibly good predictions in the absence of an intelligible structure of reality. Weird. — boundless

Yes, this doesn't make sense to me. If we can fit coherent models to reality, even if they turn out to be erroneous after some limit, it would suggest they capture some subset of the intelligible structure (at the very least intelligible empirical structure) of reality. This just happens to be embedded in a model whose wider structure is erroneous.

Aha, no that was a mistaken phrase; I did not mean to imply essentialism for myself!

And yet, on the other hand, probably even in order to 'see' the trajectory, you need to have already some kind of interpretative structure — boundless

I am not sure what this means: the interpretative structure of following a ball and catching it?

And BTW, you are assuming that the 'world' to be structured but you are not explaining how it can be. — boundless

What kind of answer you want? I don't understand why you want me to explain how the world can be structured. It seems self-evident to most people.

So, where 'more or less' comes from? Isn't that evidence, then, that concepts do map 'reality' in some way? How is that so? — boundless

Actually, the history of physics clearly showed us how some 'obscure' mathematical concepts have been used in physical theories. Moreover, I do believe that this property of math as being 'more' than what is actually employed in physics gives more credence to platonism. If math wasn't so 'broad', its truths would be accidental. And, frankly, I am not even sure in a purely physicalist perspective how can we even conceive something that has no relation to '(experienced) reality'. What would even the point of that? — boundless

We have a brain that receives sensory input and abstracts structure that maps onto structure in the world. I can then manipulate that inferred structure. I can then construct a system that describes abstract stuff and discover new implications from it. But this isn't really more interesting than brains doing stuff. I don't need a platonic realm to do this, I just need a brain that can infer quantity in the sensory world and extrapolate.

Not sure how can you understand something without being 'right'. — boundless

You can have an intelligible model that is incorrect. Like people used to have models of the solar system that were intelligible, gave correct predictions and turned out to be completely wrong.

Yes, I think for me this is the kind of view of language that should go there. Itsthe kind of view that speaks to my inclinations and provides important nuances that seem to often be missed by various other essentialists on the philosophy forum.

I was searching for any context where 2+2 might be equal to something other than 4, any reason to not accept 2+2=4 as an absolute truth. — noAxioms

This is the same as what the bit you quoted was describing.

But I say that concepts are not physical - they're the relations of ideas. — Wayfarer

You could say that but then again, many of our concepts are about physical things, many of our abstract concepts are about things that "supervene" on physical stuff, and concepts themselves can be explained in terms of what we do or think which can be explained in terms of a physical brain. The entire universe and everything in it is a physical system.

we must rely on concepts — Wayfarer

But again, concepts can be explained in terms of brains. Now, just because I think the universe is just a physical system doesn't mean I need to explain everything going on all the time in terms of particles or physical stuff. I can still talk about art, literature, aesthetics, anthropology, psychology without mentioning physics or chemistry.

Perhaps more importantly, I don't think one must "know everything in order to know anything." The continued existence of some mystery vis-á-vis a phenomenon does not preclude us having any knowledge about it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure, but if you can't articulate what you mean, then you are just effectively circularly re-asserting how you use words and behaving in response to something you can't elaborate on.

I don't know what you mean by reductionist account or what the alternative is.

But why appeal to the complexity of the brain in particular? Sight also involves light, and the light wave/photon have more than enough mystery to make the same sort of argument. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Its all included.

Anyhow, this still seems to be misunderstanding the concept of form. The form is, in part, the actuality in things that is responsible for their appearance. Being is prior to interaction. Something needs to first exist in order interact so as to appear a certain way. Appearance—perception—is also prior to the development of language. Form is not primarily about explaining language, although it might do that to. It's about what must lie prior to language and perception (else our determinant perceptions would be caused by "nothing in particular," in which case they essentially wouldn't have causes at all). The form of things isn't just their appearances though (which you seem to be suggesting), nor what is said of them, but rather is upstream of each of those, because being (existing) is a prerequisite for interaction and being known. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, I think what I am mainly resisting is the notion of inflating this stuff beyond me saying something like "I see stuff"or "I see a 'round' thing".

In the broadest sense, a thing's form is what makes anything any thing at all, it's particular actuality or "act of existence" by which it is some thing and not "nothing in particular." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I mean, why do I have to unnecessarily flower up the fact that I can see 'round' things like this? I don't even really understand ehat this sentencr is saying.

"what brains perceive and talk about," then "brains" themselves would have no true existence as anything distinct, and so would have no determinant powers, ruling out the very possibility of a "science of brains." Brains themselves would be merely "something brains perceive and talk about." This appears to me to be a rather vicious circle. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well I think there is always going to be a circularity of some sort imo, like my own quote here:

I actually haven't! I just like the phrase in order to describe the inability to get out of a perspectival context - this constant tension between trying to give descriptions of what is the case and the fact that this can effectively be deflated in terms of word-use and enactive cognition, which itself is a description of what is the case, which brings us back to the beginning (in the sense that describing or giving a story about what is the case regarding how cognition works is itself word-use and enactive cognition).

And our conceptual networks all run i to places wherr we can't articulate things so well. There are always limits to what we can explain or describe. The biggest tension is that stuff exists in the world clearly independently of us, yet we can only engage with stuff from within a perspective through what a brain does in terms of predictions, word-use, etc. And its the same for the study of our own brains.

But we're not required to know that — Wayfarer

Yes, my point is just that if we don't know that then we are just re-asserting the way we use words in response to what we see without any deeper explanation. If that's all you're saying, fine. My point was more aimed at kinds of inflations of concepts to platonic realms.

Here, you're simply projecting the inherent limitations of materialist philosophy of mind onto the whole issue — Wayfarer

Not at all, and whatever limits there may be here are not transcended by any other purported view.

That's the empiricist argument in a nutshell. The problem is, many animals other than h.sapiens see round things, but they never form a concept of 'round'. LIkewise with my quoted example of 'equals'. 'Equals' is obviously fundamental to rational argument, symbollically denoting 'the same as'. But how is equality discerned? When we say that two objects are of equal weight or length, we must already possess the concept 'equals' to make that judgement. And no amount of sensory experience will convey that to a subject incapable of grasping the concept. Hence the argument that 'equals' (and other universals') are discerned by reason and cannot be derived from experience alone (a point which Kant elaborated at tiresome length in his master work.) — Wayfarer

Well, seeing 'round' things and inferring things about them is mediated by your brain. All concepts are to some extent abstract. A 'stone' or a 'particle' is an abstract concept as much as 'money' or 'health', all inferred through how the brain interacts with the world, but at the very core and central place that makes this universe of stuff tick is physical concepts.

Indeed, that was precisely my point. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure, and I think part of my point is that this kind of thing is already inside the kind of perspectivr related to word-use. So invoking forms doesn't add anything.

"none of us actually know how or why we personally are able to perceive and point out 'roundness' in the world," is simply not one many people — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, I think my claim is not quite what you had in mind. What I was thinking of is more along the lines of how someone performs a skill but the performance is automatic. People very skilled at playing the piano and sight-reading can just play the notes straight off the sheet music of a very complicated song. They will then memorize thr song as second nature and br able to play it almost without thought. I don't think anyone in these moments has conscious understanding or insight into what they are actually doing. They have just learned to do it and do so automatically. Do you think Novak Djokovic actually knoes why he was such a good tennis player? Do you thi k these tennis players actually have a strong understanding of why they were just able to beat all the other kids growing up? Not long ago I saw a video of Magnus Carlson beat someone at chess while blindfolded; do you think he really knows how he is able to do this? I think we can say similar for all skills - reading, facial recognition, any kind of knowledge. Sometimes I recall facts or events in memory and I don't even know how I learned them. They just come.

I think you know about as much about why you can perceive roundness as how much an agnosiac with brain damage would know about why they couldn't perceive or distinguish certain shapes. Sure, a scientist can explain to an agnosiac some information about brains, cognition, the psychology of perception. But at some point, from your first person perspective it boils down to just - you can do some stuff, you can't do some other stuff; you aren't exactly sure why in terms of your own personal insight.

What I am saying here is not a scientific claim about facts related to the brain or cognition. Its a claim about people's personal insight into their own behavior and cognition, which I think most people don't even realize much of the time.

There is no skepticism about science here, just that we cannot realistically get a precise explanation of how these things work without presuming our own use of words. For instance, how a neuroscientist or psychologist cannot study how people see color without relying on people's self-report about color. If you aren't building these things from the ground up, you are to some extent relying on how scientific, empirical facts and models are related to your use of words or perceptual abilities that you may not quite understand. So my point is that if I invoke "forms", I am just re-asserting that fact that I can see stuff without actually explaining what that means. So to me, that's not really interesting, and I know what is happening when my brain perceives stuff is probably a bit more interesting and informative.

These theories might be misguided, but they are not reducible to "word use." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think they are when you view word-use as not in a vacuum. We use words in response to things that are happening in the world, coming from what we see and hear, including from inanimate objects and other people that shape eachother's use of words.

One might indeed criticize a metaphysics of form in any number of ways, but to say that such a broad and well-developed area of philosophy is contentless would seem to simply demonstrate a total lack of familiarity with it ... ... There can be no "neuroscience" if there is nothing determinant that can be said about brains. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This whole section was informative, which just leads me to re-assert the next quote you take from my original post:

Is there actually much difference between my 'structure' and your 'forms' (in the most generic sense of structure)? Maybe I just prefer the former word without the connotations of the latter... other similar words might be 'patterns', 'regularities', etc, etc.

So I guess my conclusion is that appealing to forms and word-use is not meaningfully different. They are only different when trying to inflate stuff unnecessarily — Apustimelogist

Interesting that you mention strange loops. You've read Hofstadter, I presume? — Banno

I actually haven't! I just like the phrase in order to describe the inability to get out of a perspectival context - this constant tension between trying to give descriptions of what is the case and the fact that this can effectively be deflated in terms of word-use and enactive cognition, which itself is a description of what is the case, which brings us back to the beginning (in the sense that describing or giving a story about what is the case regarding how cognition works is itself word-use and enactive cognition).

Anyhow, how does one figure out how to "apply a rule for the word round," if there are not first round things? The form is, first and foremost, called in to explain the existence of round things, second our perceptions of them, and then language. It is not primarily about language because language was never considered "first philosophy" before the advent of analytic philosophy (i.e., "being and thought are prior to speaking.") People must be able to identify roundness to use to words to refer to — Count Timothy von Icarus

But anyone using the word 'round' is using it because they are engaging with the world around them and they see 'round' things.

Imo, if we want to explain the actual reasons why we use the word 'round', you have to talk about an immensely complicated brain and how it interacts with the rest of a very complicated world in an intractable manner - from the perspective of our own intelligibility - to infer something about how it represents or embodies structure out in the world.

We can't actually do that, and for any intelligible investigation of that we must presuppose our own concepts to know what we are looking for.

So when someone says that you need 'roundness' to explain why we use the word 'round'. What are you actually saying? Because none of us actually know how or why we personally are able to perceive and point out 'roundness' in the world, all you have really done is re-assert your own word use. You haven't actually explained anything and so your perspective ends up being vacuously the same as the word-use one which additionally wants us to say stuff like 'oranges are round iff oranges are round' which is asserting that 'roundness' is the case in conjunction with what is seen in the world - which we can point at, also communicating what we are pointing at to other people who use the word in the same way.

So by invoking forms have you meaningfully added anything? Not really - nothing that has not already been asserted by someone capable of using sentences like 'oranges are round iff oranges are round'. I can asser that round things exist without dressing it up in "forms" or "universals". Fine, we can call it that if you want, but I don't know if there is anything more interesting to say about that which wouldn't end up on someone falling back on and taking for granted their own exceptional abilities to make distinctions in the world and use words without really knowing how they do it.

And my own views - about what we might see as 'real' in the world or engagement with a world that 'real-ly' exists independent of us - fully acknowledges this, because the most generic way I think we can talk about the world is in terms of structure...
But what does that word actually mean? Because it is so generic, its very difficult to describe and elaborate on what that word actually means. Nonetheless, I have learned to use this word effectively in virtue of a brain that can make abstract inferences and predictions about my sensory world, and can use the word intelligibly to tell a story about the world which I think has less caveats than certain other stories. But in telling this story, I am still somewhat taking for granted the fact that I don't really know the specific details of how I am doing this. No matter how hard I try, I cannot elevate the kind of metaphysical meat of my word-use of 'structure' here into something which is actually explanatorily useful beyond being a kind of component of my story that relates to other parts of the story.

Neither can I elevate various other concepts like, say, "red" or "being", "same" or perhaps even something like "plus"... I am sure, many others. To me, simply re-asserting these latter examples as if there is something else additional to say isn't interesting (even if these are all useful words about stuff), especially when clearly what makes the world tick is to be found in our physical theories that predict what we see - and in theory, an understanding of brains that might give us some understanding into how we see those what we see, and make use of what we see in intelligent ways. Again, the useful way of talking about our theories of the world, with the least caveats, may be in terms of structure and brains' inferences about structure - useful words for my story without needing to elaborate those words in some additional, excessive way. Is there actually much difference between my 'structure' and your 'forms' (in the most generic sense of structure)? Maybe I just prefer the former word without the connotations of the latter... other similar words might be 'patterns', 'regularities', etc, etc.

There is necessarily a strange loop here of sorts in the sense that: understanding and using theories is also something we do. But I do not need to redundantly inflate ontologies that are explantorily useful beyond just how my brain works, resulting in word use. Sure, I will say there are 'round' things, but there are things much more interesting that make 'round' things and everything else tick. Again, even with "what makes the world tick" has limits in the sense that I cannot give you an interesting elaboration on what structure means. I don't need to arbitrarily and redundantly lay out a list of all the of these "forms" that "exist" and try to elevate them in some way, even though I don't really have anything interesting to say about them other than I see stuff with these properties. And because that is all I can say, I am effectively just re-asserting my own word use which renders any attempt to point out something salient about "forms" vacuous and effectively no different than re-asserting the notion that word-use is what is fundamental about concepts.

So I guess my conclusion is that appealing to forms and word-use is not meaningfully different. They are only different when trying to inflate stuff unnecessarily, which cannot be done in an interesting, intelligible way imo. The explanatory importance of concepts is how they relate to other concepts, and I think a theory of "forms" would place some overly abstract concepts or "universals" in a central role amongst our ontological concepts about the world where they have no business being. At the core and center is our best scientific theories, not the patterns that "supervene" at a higher level of description. "Roundness" exists, but lets not make it out to be something more important than it really is.

Apparently Apustimelogist finds your statement completely ambiguous. — noAxioms

Ironically, the original point I was making there is that you are the one finding such things ambiguous hence why you conflate 2+2 referring to completely different things.

Except it is 2+2 being discussed, and not the label nor any of the symbols or concepts of them, nor how anything is spelled. — noAxioms

So its like discussing spelling: m-i-n-u-t-e.

My point is that the 'story' you're telling presupposes intelligibility in order to be 'right'. If you admit that the physical world - at least in some features - is intelligible (apparently enought intelligible to be certain of these things), then, at least the most basic concepts that ground describe the order of the physical world, which seem to imply that they are actually also part of the order of physical reality itself. — boundless

I don't think so, because I don't explicitly need concepts for the world to be intelligible. I can see the trajectory of a thrown ball, predict where it will end up and catch it without overt need for any concepts. We apply concepts after the fact, mapping them to what we see. Much of the time they are wrong and make false predictions. The ones that happen to be empirically adequate may survive, generally.

On the otherhand, I have said all our concepts are anchored to some extent to sensory reality, just some are far more abstract than others. I think maybe then you could argue that math does capture something about the empirical structure of reality - quantity. It is self-evident quantities exist, and we can identify them; but this isn't really interesting like an independently existing platonic realm. Its almost trivial to observe the world around you and be able to identify that there can be more of something or less of something, bigger things and smaller things.

Also about predictions: unless one adopts a quite skeptical approach (for instance the one about 'perspective' I mentioned earlier), these extremely accurate predictions seem to imply that, indeed, mathematics does describe the 'structure' of reality. But if that is true, mathematics isn't invented (at least, the part that describes the structure of the world). — boundless

I am not presuming some exclusive dichotomy of invented or discovered. Something can be both. You can invent a system of rules and then discover implications of following those rules that you did not know before.

Again, you don't need any special explanation for the effectiveness of maths. It is just extremely flexible and broad. If math was an extremely small field that entirely described physics exclusively then I would say you have a point but math can describe thing that are physically impossible or physically don't make sense. It describes stuff that have nothing to do with the empirical, physical world. It just explores the logical limits of manipulating quantities, perhaps in some counterfactual sense.

No, the world is intelligible because it is intelligible (if it is indeed intelligible). — boundless

I don't think it contradict the idea that the world is intelligible to us because we have a brain that allows us to understand it - i.e. it captures the structure of the world in a way that we can predict what happens next.

On the other hand, I can't exclude the possibility that it isn't really intelligible, in which case we evolved in a quite 'lucky' way that enables us to make useful predictions by using models that are in fact wrong. — boundless

Even if your models are wrong beyond some limit, the fact that you can construct models that give correct predictions suggests that there is an intelligible structure to that part of reality which is being captured. If reality wasn't intelligible, you wouldn't be able to do that.

Intelligibility is about understanding and comprehension, it isn't about being right or wrong. I would say something is unintelligible when you cannot create any model that gives correct predictions; even then, I am skeptical that such a thing even exists except for say... complete randomness... even paradoxes and contradictions are intelligible and understandable... even the concept of randomness itself to some extent.

The very fact that we speak of evolution - which is indeed intelligible as a concept - to explain why we can have knowledge presupposes that the world is intelligible in some sense (unless, as I said, one wants to embrace skepticism). — boundless

I think the core issue here is that I just don't agree with how you think intelligibility has some kind of importance here. Like, intelligibility to me seems to just say that the world has structure and we have brains that can capture that. Neither do I need some platonic realm of maths to understand why math can be used to describe that structure. I guess at the most abstract level of description, anything we perceive through our senses can be related to quantities. But again, its just a trivial observation of the world that can be captured abstractly by a sophisticated brain. Why do I need aome special explanation for the fact that I can count things that I see in the world (under the assumption of identifying those counted things as the same)?

What is being given the same representation here? — noAxioms

Its all different things blanketly labelled as 2+2 when really that doesn't actually describe the specifics of each thing and why they are like that.

Its like taking the words minute (time) and minute (size) and trying to call them the same thing because they are spelt the same, and then doing an analysis showing that that isn't really the case and are subjective.

and a context requirement seems like an awful big asterisk to the claim of the objectiveness of its truth. — noAxioms

But this is just because you are giving completely differernt things the same representation.

In other words, physicalism would like to have a 'physical' explanation of everything and, yet, if it were true there would be no explanation that assumes the very thing it wants to explain as its starting point.

It's seems to me, then, that if one doesn't assume that logic and (at least some part of) math are irreducible, one can't assume that any kind of rational knowledge is possible. If they were simply 'inventions', nothing would be truly intelligible. So, instead of a 'physicalism' we would have an extreme form of skepticism of some sorts. — boundless

I don' really follow what you're saying. Knowledge is just predicting things that we see in the world. We then apply a self-consistent description that gives those predictions. We can then apply this to our own brains and minds (cognitive science, neuroscience) interacting with the world and in principle describe how we do this, how we come up with physical models, math and logic as a part of how we make inferences about sensory inputs.

From this standpoint, I don't really see the problem you raise. I don't need to assume rational knowledge for my brain to do stuff... it just does stuff in virtue of how it evolved and developed. And none of what the brain does os strictly arbitrary because it depends on its interactions with the outside world.

But note that basic notions like 'oneness', 'plurality', 'same', 'different' seem to be innate and do not seem to be 'fabricated' by us as mere abstractions. They do seem to mirror the 'structure' of the world 'external to us' as far as we can know. So, while we can't 'prove' it (and, therefore, we can't have certainty about it), the physical world seems to be (in part) intelligible and, therefore, knowable.
Furthermore, these 'basic concepts' seem to be the very categories that we use to interpret our perceptions even before we are aware of that. We distinguish different things, we distinguish change, we discern sameness, regularities and so on. If we had not these 'innate categories', how could we be able to make any sense of out experience at all? And, everything suggests that, while they maybe not 'without error', they still give us an approximate picture of reality. Which would then mean that the world is intelligible, which would mean that its structure is like that of our reasoning...

The antinomy I was talking about is this: while it does seem to us that the world is intelligible, we can't verify it from the 'outside' of our perspective. So, we might presume that the structure of our thought mirrors (in part) the structure of the 'external world' but we can't just prove that. — boundless

Look at it this way; our brain is just networks of neuronal connectivity and activity. All our knowledge comes about in the same way and we learn by calibraiting neural connectivity in response to sensory inputs that reverberate through the system. The system as a whole is performing inference on sensory states. Abstract concepts like "same" are just very abstract inferences about sensory information, and they seem trivial because it is an inevitable fact that percepts have overlaps of difference and similarity in how the brain reacts to them. All systems do this... arguably a thermometer does this... but then it takes a more omplicated system to have a higher order awareness of the similarities and differences in its percepts and utilize them to make more abstract predictions. One might call this innate in the sense that every human ends up having this ability. But these abilities come from the same reason we have any abilities, related to neuronal activity and learning.

Anyway, I am not sure I understand your point here. The world is intelligible to us because we have a brain that is designed to model the world.

Just because the numerical value is the same it doesn't at all imply that it's a tautology. — boundless

We are not interested in the overall concept of four, only the numerical values and operations on those values.

Two times two is two twos. Thats just two plus two. Its the same. If you are using the notion "equals", you are giving a numerical equivalence, a numerical tautology.

That's just geometry. — noAxioms

Yes, which causes changes to what clocks read in an unambiguous way!

But before that demonstration, the predicate was already there. Predication does not depend on it being observed. — noAxioms

Yes, exactly!

Outside the awareness and measurement of duration, there is no time. — Wayfarer

Strongly disagree.

The same goes for a theory of experience. — David Chalmers, Facing Up...

The problem is that there is no theory of experience; I believe its impossible and you can't access experience empirically. If there is no theory of experience and how it relates to other parts of the world, its propping up an ontology on nothing. That basically leaves it in the exact same place as any kind of framework like physicalism or naturalism or structuralism that doesn't explicitly incorporate phenomena.

indicate a kind of absence of curiosity or insight into specifically philosophical questions. Rather a kind of sanguine acceptance of the scientific worldview. Would that be fair? — Wayfarer

Not at all, its the conclusions I come ro exploring those questions.

In all cases the experimenter is providing the perspective within which the observations are meaningful. — Wayfarer

Sure, observations can be interpreted differently, but these are not intended as subjective interpretations, they are speculations about an actual event. You can perceive an observation event or measure it in different ways, but ultimately what you are latching on to is the fact that an event happened, that clocks can run differently due to time dilation. Even if you interpret the observation as having a different cause, you are postulating that you believe an objective event happened. Even if there are different ways of looking at an event, science wants those different ways to agree and be coherent; for instance, different methodlogies of measurement, different mathematical formulations that predict the same things. Obviously, things may not practically gel ideally or even very well, but imo, these kinds of things (e.g. arguments about the irreducibility of chemistry) don't point to some kind of conspiratorial aspect of reality that inherently prevents reducibility ontologically - its about the limits of us as human beings to observe and make sense of things.

Clocks don’t measure time; we do. — Bergson-Einstein Debate

Tell that to your gps.

That's because neuroscience is not philosophy. 'Facing up to the problem of consciousness' was about the fact that the neuroscientific accounts cannot, as a matter of principle, provide an account of the first-person nature of experience. That's where the explanatory gap is found. — Wayfarer

No, but I don't think an explanatory gap entails some kind of fundamental metaphysical dualism or revisionism. Imo, neuroscience and physics attests to that because there is no evidence for mental substance, afterlife, the supernatural, etc etc. And when people start offering a kind of non-physicalism without any scientific revisionism, its more-or-less like physicalism imo

Interesting; yes, I think this part:

Indirect realism says we see mental models assembled form sense data and that we don't see objects as they are. — Janus

Is where I get ambiguous or perhaps ambivalent over indirect or direct realism. I can see arguments in both directions. From my perspective which is less object-centered, I think the color thing you talk about would be less of an issue for direct realism if it still is mapping to actual physical behavior or structure in the world.

Maybe we don't experience the world "as it is", out of perspective, but I would say that all that characterizes a perspective is the incompleteness or partiality of the information that is being seen. So I would say we can keep Kant's phenomenal perspectives but that they don't have any interesting ontological meaning because from my perspective, what I see is just structural information in my sensory inputs that map to causes in the external world, a mapping that in principle can be probed in the functional structure of networks of neuronal activity. So to me the fact that we seee the world frok a perspective can be valid without implying anything fundamentslly mysterious.

Without a subject, there is no point of reference for spatial extension or temporal duration — Wayfarer

But what about relativity!? You can do experiments which show the effects of things like time dilation related to clocks without requiring observers or perspectives or anything like that.

without acknowledging that the meaning and coherence we attribute to neural data are not in the data; they are read into it by the observing scientist ('this means that', 'from this, we can infer that....'). In other words, it is the mind that interprets the brain, not the brain that explains the mind. — Wayfarer

Sure, but this is the natural foibles of science and difficulties studying a complex system. But nonetheless we might produce a coherent story and use models to reproduce the empirical behavior we see to gain some kind of understanding of what brains do. And ofcourse, its difficult to have anywhere near the desired amount of information from the brain to do thid, and people often have different, contrary ideas about how or why certain things happen or what they do.

This reveals a circularity at the heart of the physicalist account: it presumes that mind is reducible to brain, while relying on the mind’s interpretive capacities to make sense of the brain in the first place. — Wayfarer

But its not just interpretive because there is empirical data, whether neurobiological or behavioral you can compare models to. And the hard problem of consciousness doesn't factor into most neuroscience. You don't need to assume the mind is descriptively reducible to a brain - but what people have found is that there is an unmistakable causal relationship between experiences and behaviors, and brains - whether you infer that through brain injury, stimulation, neuroimaging, all sorts of things.

Can I ask what characterizes the difference between your direct realism, indirect realism and naive realism?

'2+2=4', however, IMO isn't a tautology — boundless

Count two fingers, then another two fingers.

Now count four fingers.

I actually believe that, often, physicalists equivocate the meaning of 'physical', in order to explain consciousness, abstract objects and so on. If by 'physicalism', we mean that the physical is fundamental and everything else is derived from it, we would like to find a reasonable definition of 'what is physical'. — boundless

Yes, physicalism is arguably vacuous as a metaphysical category precisely because all of these fundamental metaphysical categories are somewheat vacuous. All knowledge is functional and structural. Physics, chemistry, biology all effrctively are about describing behavior. Intrinsicness doesn't come into it.

Why is physicalism so intuitive to some? I have thought about this and I think when people are saying physicalist they are effectively upholding the scientific status quo in opposition to scientifically unsubstantiated ideas likethe supernatural, parapsychology, substance dualism, woo-ism and platonic realms. Maybe in some ways it is more of a reactive stance than a proactive stance.

we have to explain how the apparent eternity and necessity of mathematical and logical truth can be explained by such a system, without falling into equivocity. — boundless

From my perspective there is no prpblem because all knowledge is just applying labels and makimg predictions about what happens next. All labels are abstract, all knowledge is abstract; there are no concrete objects of knowledge, only abstract ones. A stone is an abstract object, a particle is an abstract object, a dinosaur is an abstract object, "two" is an abstract object, "truth" is an abstract object. They all share abstractness on some level and we all infer them in the same way from sensory inputs; however, labels can be so abstract they transcend typical "concrete" objects (e.g. "this rock"), but that doesn't mean that they aren't abstracted from the same sensory data. For instance, we might have the concept of identity or sameness coming from indistinguishable perceptual responses or experiences - we just have a label for that called "sameness". You can have multiple iterations of the "same" "thing (another abstract label about our ability to make distinctions)" which is pretty self-evident in the natural world with recurrent structure and where we have perceptual abilities that can pick out and distinguish those structures ... you have quantity... the rest is just tautology; math is talking about how different descriptions are equivalent extrapolating from the idea of identity and quantity. Logic seems actually very much the same but not talking about quantity - we are talking about in what sense different descriptions are equivalent to each other - the premises to the conclusions.

I have no problem with people being skeptical with this description because its obviously not rigorous and comes a lot from my intuition. But I don't feel the need for anything added to explain things about how math or logic works. Once we pre-stipulate conditions for things to be the same or different, we are just extrapolating those properties in tautologous ways. These things can be gotten straight out of reality, or describe reality very well in suspicious ways, purely because reality has structure in which different parts of the reality act in the same way! And so there is nothing special about maths relation to reality if these are just tautologies.

Now based on this, I suppose you could give ontological status to math and logic but not on any kind of mysterious way, *even though they aren't spatially and temporally constrained in our models of the world*, beyond how a sentence like "things exist" is a truth that uses abstract words but a physicalist wouldn't find problematic. I think though, ultimately in this kind of view one has to explicitly acknowledge the use of labels our cognitive apparatus in constructing knowledge - so it is thinner than a more naively realistic conception. At the same time, one could arguably still uphold a kind of realism in regard to the mapping of these constructs to reality in such a way that they can still affirm that "this is the case" in a way that describes what we see in reality in a consistent way. Importantly, none of our knowledge is something that *developed* independently of *our* sensory *history*. *Our sensory inputs* describe a reality that when you zoom in more and more you see is entirely built on microscopic particles (at least the stuff in everyday life we see) and when you unentangle its complicated knots, is ultimately scaffolded on and follows entirely by very general fundamental physical descriptions. *Logic and math imo are still outgrowths of, and play out, our models of the external world beyond our sensory inputs. Our models can just be highly abstract.*

Edited: **

And what makes you think that's a philosophical argument? :brow: Your philosophical position is so baked-in that you can't comprehend how it can be questioned. I mean, no offence intended, but that's how you come across. — Wayfarer

I mean, I offered a description of what happens. You haven't offered an argument for why that explanation isn't adequate.

But they're also simple, in that a single organism is a simple whole, which subordinates and synthesises all that complexity against the ends required to survive and procreate. — Wayfarer

So, what? None of this is threatening to someone who has a kind of physicalist world view or the notion that a brain can learn to do math just in virtue of its components behave.

The question is whether describing them physically is sufficient to explain how thought, reason, or consciousness arise. That’s not a scientific question—it’s a philosophical one. Which you continually assume has a physical answer, but for which you're presenting no argument whatever. — Wayfarer

Well we give computational descriptions of what neurons do that are nonetheless instantiated physically, its just that the physical functional structure happens to correspond to or be amenable to a computational description. There is no profound mystery.

but they instantiate principles which could never be predicted on the basis of physics alone — Wayfarer

But so what? This is an epistemic or explanatory point. Its just about complexity. No one you're arguing against finds this an interesting point, it doesn't conflict with anyone with a physicalist viewpoint. Why does it matter the level at whoch you choose to describe these things when at the end of the day they are all undergirded by the behavior of particles in physics. The fact that you need different explanations on different levels is due to human limitations, it doesn't change the fact that a brain which is basically a bunch of synchronous electro-chemical events can do math just in virtue of how its components.

When you study neuroscience, how much physics are you required to understand? — Wayfarer

Well a Hodgkin-Huxley neuron is basically just physics.


People make up new theories which often make predictions about things that haven't been observed yet. Many fail, some succeed. I don't understand what is special

I mean, weak realism just means a realism weaker than strong realism, and a naive realism would be a strong realism.

Do you think anyone who had done even a little intelligent reflection and critical thinking would hold such a view? There is a reason it is called naive realism. — Janus

Oh, so you are saying people tend to be weak realists instead? What a coincidence, chimes right in with my thoughts just there, thank you!