Let me know if you want me to help you put the toys back in the pram.

What I am getting from this post mainly is that things like "forms of life" lack some kind of inflated metaphysical underpinning or something, but concepts like this and games more or less just refer to our behavior in which we use words. There doesn't need to be anything else unless you want to really get into the neurobiological causes of that. I mean, I think Wittgenstein is much closer to jettisoning the idea of reified meaning rather than trying to establish some rigorous explanatory theory.

I'm presenting this hypothetical scenario to critique Wittgenstein's idea that language use is sufficient as a foundation. The main point is to stress the necessity of a robust foundation for language, especially if we claim it's rooted in community or "Form of Life." — schopenhauer1

I believe brains are the foundation, if I am understanding you correctly. Brains are complicated dynamical systems with self-organizing behaviour. Networks of brains (i.e. social systems) that communicate are also complicated dynamical systems with self-organizing behaviour. You're not going to get some form of justification because its just how Brains happen to behave determined by the physical context in which they exist; being "correct" is irrelevant and it is trivially the case that people are wrong about things all the time. Nonetheless, this is an objective explanation for how language is learned, used, "corrected". You being not "correct" isn't enough to stop the wheels of the universe turning and neuronal messaging being transmitted and societies going on their daily business.

Yes, that's true. I'm a bit inclined to say the W sees that "fuzzy non-linearity" as inherent in all concepts. — Ludwig V

Yes, I would agree with this and agree with it myself. I don't know of there is anything particularly special about logic and am drawn in the direction of logical nihilism or pluralism.

I'm sure there's a lot of quick and dirty solutions and heuristic dodges involved. — Ludwig V

I am not sure I would characterize them all as heuristics or "quick and dirty" solutions since they are just the same processes that underlie everything we do. Its just that the actual statistical structure of much of the world is much more complicated and non-linear than the simpler idealized concepts we like to dealing with in academics.

I think the problem with the answers that brains give though is they are finely contextualized by different personal histories, individual differences in brain structure, noise etc. What people learn and the information they store is probably different for everyone, but in places like academia we want to remove all ambiguity. The side effect of neat clean concepts is they lose all the fuzzy non-linearity which makes them exceptionally good at being used in real life.

Yes. There isn't a way of resolving that without going beyond that way of thinking. W's does that. His appeal to games, practices, forms of life etc. is an attempt to explain it. As a general thesis, it is quite unsatisfactory, (cf. God of the gaps) — Ludwig V

That works in some ways. But the picture of the world out there, waiting to be "carved at the joints", is partial. The world reaches in and prods us, tickles us, attracts us and repels us. We do not start out as passive observers but as engaged actors in the world - which does not always behave in the way that we expect. — Ludwig V

For me, what the point of the impoverishment of language shows is that the way we use words and concepts does not trickle down prescriptively from definitions and meanings that possess some invariant, essential nature. Rather, definitions are idealizations that are constructed or inferred in a bottom up manner from the statistics and dynamics of experience. The kinds of fuzziness, ambiguities, context-dependence, indeterminacy that characterizes Wittgenstein's analyses can be explained by appealing to the nature of how brain processes perform inference, effectively extracting lower-dimensional, more coarse-grained, more generalized underlying patterns (concepts) from complicated observations. These are extremely complicated machines processing an extremely complicated world and so the processing they do does not necessarily reflect very simple, linear, straightforward transformations between observations and the resultant inferred concepts.

Essentially the missing link in Wittgenstein's observations is the fact that we have a brain, one whose processing is extremely complicated yet also totally hidden from us, generating our complicated thoughts and behavior from below on the fly, making it look like we are acting in these kinds of mysterious ways that seem somewhat messy and underdetermined by our concepts and so can only be described as "games, practises, forms of life".

"The world reaches in and prods us, tickles us, attracts us and repels us" as a product of the mechanistic message passing and hebbian timing-dependent learning between neurons that are physical enslaved by the patterns of activation at our sensory boundaries (e.g. retina, inner ear, receptors under the skin), impelling the perceptions forced upon us, complicated behavior we are capable of, the higher-order concepts that we construct, but also the metacognitive insight that such concepts could have been otherwise. The brain completes the picture.

I think the intention is to distinguish between a heuristic which may be useful in some circumstances, but not in all, and how we would settle the question whether the output of the heuristic is correct or not. — Ludwig V

I dunno; I think looking at this way, as I seem to understand what you have said, plays down everything else that Wittgenstein seems t be getting at in philosophical investigations.

Some focus would help — Ludwig V

Well you just put forward your four points without any reference to what you mean by those points. Basically, all these points are lacking a "how".

Well though the math thing you get at is related, its not exactly the same. The rule thing is about definition and description and is just meant to be a single example of a type of issue that is generic to everything. I guess the point is that semantic definitions and descriptions are not intrinsically embedded in the world; instead, we impose labels on the world at out own discretion and there are no fixed set of boundaries for those concepts or force us to impose concepts in a particular way.

A computer with the most advanced algorithms and computations, and even "error checking" mechanisms that are a kind of "self-check", gets nowhere closer to that thing having "meaning" (to itself), because nothing internal made it "meaning-ful". — schopenhauer1

But a brain is just a type of computer working using algorithms in a way that is not qualitatively different to what goes on in machine learning.

I don't even know what "nothing internal made it "meaning-ful"" means when if these machine learning models had the architecture and inputs of a human brain, then they would trivially be capable of doing everything a human brain like you and I could do. They could have this conversation right now like we are about their own concepts of meaning and understanding.

I agree with that. Though Wittgenstein would ask what makes the sign-post point? Again, there's a practice of reading sign-posts, which we all somehow pick up/learn. Perhaps by recognizing a similarity between a pointing finger and the sign-post. — Ludwig V

Yup, and then the issue regresses as to what makes someone recognize a similarity between pointing a finger and sign-posts. This is all what I meant when I said that meanings and definitions are so impoverished that language should not be usable, yet it is.

I like Hume's response - essentially that it is not possible to refute the argument but it has no power to persuade me to believe the conclusion. — Ludwig V

I think for me, its about how such insights might reveal something about how brains and minds work.

There's a nest of complications buried in that. — Ludwig V

Well I am just saying that it is a factual statement regardless of whether there turns out to be or not be a fact of the matter. It straightforwardly makes sense as a factual statement.

In one way, it depends on whether I had that rule in mind when I gave the answer. — Ludwig V

Or perhaps even what it means to have a rule in mind.

But I am learning from this. One result is that I now know how to defuse Goodman's "grue". Another is that it seems that Kripke has made the private language argument superfluous. I need to think about that. A third - minimal - result is that Kripke has added to the stock of examples that pose Wittgenstein's problem. The fourth is that I notice that we have all appealed to the wider context, both of mathematics and of practical life to resolve it. Kripke's case is effective only if we adopt his very narrow view, The wider context makes nonsense of it. (I'm not saying that a narrow focus is always a bad thing, only that it sometimes gets us into unnecessary trouble.) — Ludwig V

Can you elaborate?

I only really see your conceptualization here being tenable in a very sollipsistic way because everyone might have their own different personal meaning. I don't think thats necessarily wrong but maybe describing everything in such a sollipsistic manner seems a bit stunted.

Behaviorist camp where language is a part of an organic system. — Paine

I think behaviorist is quite a bad term imo. What causes behavior? Neurobiology. What are its consequences? On other parts of the physical world. Really, behaviorism is just physicsalism or natural-sciencesism, since an account if behavior and what it is doing is just woefully incomplete without the rest.

My point being is that anyone who is a behaviorist should be incorporating more into their analysis to make it complete (while still consistent with their attitude). If they do thid then they become no different from anyone who advocates for the utility of the natural sciences in explaining the world. Its certainly much easier to do this now when we know much more about neuroscience and related fieldd compared to the early twentieth century.

I think we can agree here. I am not saying we have some a priori definitional understanding per se, just that we need some sort of mental experience for meaning to obtain, period. — schopenhauer1

Well, I wasn't agreeing that experience is required, just that we agree on the mental being experiences.

Before I said that there isn't really anything special about meaning or understanding since it is about "use" and "meaning" is just a specific case of "use" that we have singled out; for instance, saying "the word fish is spelled f-i-s-h" is arguably a use of the word fish which isn't really connected to what we would call the meaning of the word fish. But then the dividing line imo is blurry, constructed, weak. Meaning isn't special, and insofar that it is functional I don't see a reason why experience is required for those things.

When I interact with people, I don't need to know if they have experience or not to attribute to them understanding and things like meaning. Experience is redundant here, since a person with a functioning brain but hypothetically no experience (i.e. zombie, and i am not saying that this is necessarily possible) would behave in exactly the same way. The properties of their understanding comes from the functional neuronal interactions.

I think ultimately this is a difficult issue where someone like myself would more or less end up having to commit to the additional idea that a putative zombie should be attributed as having experiences / it is impossible for them not to have experiences / they are the same as us. But at face value, just by thinking about my characterization of what meaning and understanding is, experience does not seem necessary, purely because the hypothetical absence of experience has no effect.

Again though, I don't think there is anything special about meaning or understanding beyond "use". In this way, the difference in meaning and understanding between, say, me and one of those large language models is not some special, qualitative difference but rather just the extent of the functional capabilities. Im sure some A.I have better functional capabilities in some areas than us (e.g. how you can train A.I. to be exceptionally good at chess or go), but none of them have the functional capacities for the kinds of capabilities we think of as having true understanding of certain things, certainly not sentience. Obviously though this is a kind of continuous scale and as they get better, the divide between what we might call understanding and non-understanding becomes blurred, which is probably why there have been discussions recently about whether large language models have understanding - they are just getting better and better.

Public is a shared internal understanding of use, which is internal — schopenhauer1

Again, I think this is a bit tenuous if the internal drivers of public behavior are redundant. People can have different internal experiences driving the same public behaviour, which they have obviously partly learned publically.

I think there is different layers to "use" - there is the internal state transitions of experiences accessible to me where there is the meaning of pain to me in terms of how my internal experience of how pain experience relates to my own experiences of other behaviors, contexts, consequences, and is meaningless without them. That might include my personal meaning of the word pain. These have external consequences which are perceived through other persons experiences.

Because the word "pain" is learned and used socially and I cannot experience other people's experiences of pain; they could plausibly be different while generating the same behaviors which I perceive in other people and react to - I might even describe my pain to someone and they imagine it differently because of the unique nature of their own experiences (i guess their conceptualizations and assumptions that they learned aocially may even be different if they learn in a slightly different social context to me, though with some overlap).

The observable aspects then contain the bulk of the meaning in the public sphere and how we as communities or societies use this concept of pain. If its possible people have different experiences of pain then how can the word pain be pointing out or singling out some specific pain experience? Even in a single person this might be fuzzier than it seems since I am sure that different pain experiences induce similar reactions in particular contexts and perhaps similar pain experiences may induce different reactions depending on the context. I don't know if there is a one-to-one mapping between particular contexts and pain experiences; and at some point, there must be some generalization involved since we don't differentiate every slightly different pain experience.

It can be really difficult to read to be fair. Its one of those books where possibly what the book says has not been as influential as what othwrs have said about the book.

Eh, this gets awfully close to the problem of a hidden dualism. The mental quickly gets covered up with behavior or process, trying to hide evidence of the mental — schopenhauer1

I am not denying the mental in the sense I am not denying my own experiences. But I side with Wittgenstein and Thelen in saying that I think the evidence for more than that is tenuous and this way seems a better fit with how I view neuroscience.

Reading more, I guess we agree with the mental in terms of experience. But I am saying that I don't think there is more above that and that the meaning embedded in our experiences is still totally functional... transitions in experience... i experience some context and i experience myself saying a word and then some further experiences follow that etc.

A program that requests and retrieves data. Is that meaning? It makes requests, the requests are used for various outputs. Are these requests actually "meaning-ful? — schopenhauer1

Well what do you mean by meaningful here?

I genuinely don't think I know what meaning can mean outside of the context of use. Even my internal experience of pain has meaning only in a functional sense. If pain was just a sensation that did not elicit any kind of responses in me, not even my attention, then it would be meaningless. I wouldnt even be aware of the pain sensation that I was having. Pain is only meaningful to me in how it elicits my reactions, changes in my attention, changes in thoughts, arousal etc. Obviously I am having a distinct sensation and I can identify that but even idenitification only is meaningful in the context of responses I am making internally in the act of identification; changes to thought, attention, whatever. Sensation is necessary but functional responses are equally necessary. Only through them does the sensation mean something.

It depends on what we both mean by think. What I meant here was just the internal vocalization of the word which we nonetheless still experience. To me, thinking is just another instance of "use" and state transitions, whether in ongoing vocalizations or those moments where you stop and "think" where in fact its all blank for a second and then suddenly pops another internal vocalization or some form of reaction in accordance to a eureka moment of some sort.. or intensely attending to an equation. To me, these are all the same kind of state transition/ "use" kind of thing.

I found the parts of PI on understanding and reading quite convincing in this regard. For a while, a lot of these kinds of thinking as kind of mysterious mental processes didn't make sense to me, but this kind of enactive / situated approach just makes much more sense to me. I think of Wittgenstein as a the godfather of enactive cognition and that kind of stuff. I have a nice quote actually from important late developmental psychologist Esther Thelen who utilized an enactive dynamic systems approach which is reminiscient of the Wittgenstein view imo:

"Knowing is the process of dynamic assembly across multileveled systems in the service of a task. We do not need to invoke represented constructs such as “object” or “extended in space and time” outside the moment of knowing. Knowing, just like action, is the momentary product of a dynamic system, not a dissociable cause of action" ... "We think to act. Thus, knowing may begin as and always be an inherently sensorimotor act."

But surely there cannot really be a notion of shared meaning based on someones personal pain independently of observable pain-related behaviors. infact it is conditionally independent. the exact nature of the pain is virtually redundant compared to the functional implications.

my point, or RussellA rather, is that Witts premise about “use” cannot be solely what picks out meaning. — schopenhauer1

I actually do agree on this because I don't think all uses of words are what we would normally think of in terms of meaning. But I also think the boundary is arbitrary, maybe not in terms of meaning, but in the sense that it still uses the same mechanisms. In other words, there is nothing particularly special or unique about meaning other than another kind of "use" in terms of state transitions, which we just happen to highlight and add special signifcance to. But I don't think there is like some specific clear cut.

But whatever you want to call it, that is an internal mental phenomenon that has to take place. Not only that, there has to be a sort of internal “understanding” in order to use the word. — schopenhauer1

If you mean internal as in experiences then I would agree but I dont agree on any kind of "hidden" internal mental stuff, at least thats what im calling it, I hope you get what i am getting at there. We don't need internal understanding, only hebbian learning and neural activity which drives the state transitions, and these cannot be cached out in terms of semantic meaning or understanding because they are just mechanistic physical mechanisms. "Meaning" is just how the word is used in terms of the context in which we say the word or think it. Nothing more is necessary.

Not sure about Kripke but Wittgenstein definitely mentions stuff l like that in philosophical investigations. rules and explicit definitions are more like signposts than prescriptions on how to behave. in fact, i think a major point in PI is that meanings and definitions in language are effectively so impoverished that it should render language un-usable, but it doesn't. A repeated theme it seems to be this underlying inscrutable, implicit underlying behavior where there is room for the kind of indeterminacy, fuzzyness or perhaps plurality about how people accomplish things.

Excerpt from PI:

"232. Let us imagine a rule intimating to me which way I am to obey it; that is, as my eye travels along the line, a voice within me says: "This way!"—What is the difference between this process of obeying a kind of inspiration and that of obeying a rule? For they are surely not the same. In the case of inspiration I await direction. I shall not be able to teach anyone else my 'technique' of following the line. Unless, indeed, I teach him some way of hearkening, some kind of receptivity. But then, of course, I cannot require him to follow the line in the same way as I do.
These are not my experiences of acting from inspiration and according to a rule; they are grammatical notes.

235. It would also be possible to imagine such a training in a sort of arithmetic. Children could calculate, each in his own way—as long as they listened to their inner voice and obeyed it. Calculating in this way would be like a sort of composing.

234. Would it not be possible for us, however, to calculate as we actually do (all agreeing, and so on), and still at every step to have a feeling of being guided by the rules as by a spell, feeling astonishment at the fact that we agreed? (We might give thanks to the Deity for our agreement.)

235. This merely shews what goes to make up what we call "obeying a rule" in everyday life.

236. Calculating prodigies who get the right answer but cannot say how. Are we to say that they do not calculate? (A family of cases.)

237. Imagine someone using a line as a rule in the following way: he holds a pair of compasses, and carries one of its points along the line that is the 'rule', while the other one draws the line that follows the rule. And while he moves along the ruling line he alters the opening of the compasses, apparently with great precision, looking at the rule the whole time as if it determined what he did. And watching him we see no kind of regularity in this opening and shutting of the compasses. We cannot learn his way of following the line from it. Here perhaps one really would say: "The original seems to intimate to him which way he is to go. But it is not a rule." "

See, evrn in this reply you don't make a constructive point which makes it difficult for me to have an answer or even know what I am supposed to be defending.

And the intersubjectivity part, requires the mental aspect, exactly which supposedly doesn't matter in the beetle-box. But it does, sir. — schopenhauer1

I think that Wittgenstein seems to apply his skepticism to mental states in a way which I find just as convincing. I think it is possible to deflate the mental aspects so that really it is just all "use". Or to be more specific, "use" is entirely about states and transitions between states, or in other words: if i am in some experientisl state, what will the next state be? and these experiential states will include all of our linguistic interactions, social behaviors and even "internal" thought processes. The question of why or what causes state transitions is hidden from us, caused by the underlying neural interactions to which we have no access or are "blind" to.

I don't know, I would have to think about it, I am neithere here or there.

How can they be consistent if they don't yield the same results. — Janus

Because I can construct a rule just like quus which is consistent with all of the additions you have done so far in your life and would yield the same results as all sums you have ever done, analogous to how someone may have never done sums with larger than 57 will have been doing an operation totally consistent with both quus and plus. Now the question is whether there is an empirical difference that differentiates the rule you have been using so far as either addition or this other rule? The answer is no, because so far every answer for addition is the same as this new rule. And remember there will be a multitude of these rules; for all your past behavior, this will be underdetermined and this will continue to be the case for t+1, t+2... t+n ad infinitum for every new sum you do.

No, I wasn't referring to gibberish. — Janus

The point is that you have defined what you mean by the fact that addition is diffetent to quudition, but the words in this description are susceptible to the same kinds of skepticism, and further attempts to elucidate what you mean will bring a regress of these definitions on which skepticism can be applied.

All that seems irrelevant. — Janus

well you seemed to be appealing to the extrapolatability or generalizability of addition as to why it is more true but I don't see why this is a fact in making a description more true or not. why should it be that a description that extends to more cases than another be somehow more true?

I don't think that's a particularly interesting result. Rules are instructions, so they aren't either true or false. That is, the rules of chess are not true or false; but they do yield statements that are true or false, such as "Your king is in check". — Ludwig V

Buy "you are following x rule" is factual. What do you think is the interesting result of this story then?

Yes, but that doesn't mean that we cannot have ways of responding to, and dealing with, problems as they come up - if necessary, we can invent them - as we do when we discover irrational numbers, etc. or find reasons to change the status of 0 or 1. In the case of 0, we have to modify the rules of arithmetical calculation. — Ludwig V

I don't think this problem has anything to do with practical problems. The quus issue has no bearing on someones ability to perform math.

What other "strange rule" have I been using? — Janus

other rules like quus. there are probably a multitude of them which are consistent with all of the addition you have ever done so far in your life and you can't rule them out.

Basic arithmetical procedures are simply the infinite iterability — Janus

uhhh don't you mean quu-nfinite quu-terability?

I agree that many rules have been extrapolated out of these basics, but the extrapolations are not arbitrary in the kind of way quaddition is — Janus

why should it be that just because a description is general or extrapolatable means it is any more or less true than a description which is specific. Is the fact you are using addition any less true than the more general description of using an operator? is the more general description of being a mammal somehow more true than the more specific description of being a human?

Arbitrary rules like quaddition do not yield reliably workable results, or at least I haven't seen anyone showing that they can — Janus

Its logically valid so I don't see the issue. Also, don't forget that quus is only one example of many other possible rules so actually you have been using some other strange rule since you started learning math and you have been using it fine. In fact you have been using many rules at the same time. Its all totally workable. Again, the point is underdetermination so its not about whether one rule is workable or not, any time you use addition it has an underdetermined characterization, and your ability to use it and practise it has little to do with that.

Yes, but if you care to think about it, the behavior is consistent with other rules. Your selection of a single rule is based on intuition not on some evidence that contradicts the alternatives. There is nothing stopping someone from saying that they are following the other rules, but supposedly you would just disregard their testimony straight off.

I don't know what you mean when you talk about a rule being objectively true. — Janus

That there is a fact of the matter about what rule is being followed.

I would say that the only intuitively self-evident truths are logical or mathematical, and I don't see that as being merely a subjective matter. — Janus

It is a subjective matter because you are appealing to your intuition subjectively and you cannot rule out the other possible rules you can use.

The truth of scientific theories is not intuitively self-evident in any way analogous to the truth of basic arithmetical results — Janus

So what, some truths are intuitive and some are unintuitive. Their intuitiveness has nothing to do with objective truth. Intuition is a product of your subjective inclinations. Saying that something is more truthful because it is intuitive is like saying your subjective inclinations has something to do with objective truth.

So, scientific theories are never proven. That the math involved in thermodynamics is sound may be self-evident, but that doesn't guarantee that it has anything to do with some putatively objective reality — Janus

And just because a rule is unintuitive doesn't refute it being objectively true.

Well I think I have somewhat of a reply to that in my initial post.



Yes, its computing solutions for equations of motion in physics.



Yes, I still think even in these cases its still just a stream of experience and this kind of thing can be accounted for in terms of attention and access conscious.

I am sorry, I don't feel there is much fruitful to be gained in continuing this specific conversation. I find it very difficult to engage with your way of writing, it all seems very vague

How can a child successfully use the word "mwanasesere" if they don't know what is means? — RussellA

You know what, I think I must have misread this. I was thinking about we don't have to know explicit definitions to use words and children don't learn using explicit definitions.

But the problem leads to my personal concepts of "pen" and "Eiffel Tower", both of which are unique to me, as they have developed over a lifetime of experiences that only I have had. — RussellA

This seems a bit trivial to me because I would say it applies to a lot if not all words.

We have to learn the meaning of a word before we can use it successfully. — RussellA

This is obviously not true especially when you consider how a child learns.

My concept of "peffel" is inaccessible to others as my concept of violet is inaccessible to others. Can you describe in words your personal experience of the colour violet to a colour blind person? — RussellA

I don't see how these are inaccessible in the same way. Violet is inaccessible because experiential qualities are inherently indescribable. Peffel is inaccessible presumably only because its an unusual concept but I see it as no different from a concept like a liger or mule or any other kind of hybrid thing that actually exists in reality and so is therefore an accessible concept.

Tbh I don't think Wittgenstein's private language is about inaccessibility apart from the trivial notion that all my immediate experiences are inaccessible. The point, as I interpret it (maybe I am wrong), is not the inaccessibility but that of I am the only one using the language, the language becomes totally redundant.

Can you demonstrate how quus is dealt with by the approaches you have said?

Girard's Ludics is a formalisation of this pragmatic idea of meaning as interaction — sime

Well, on the face of it, this sounds not disimilar to Wittgenstein's meaning as use.

I'm suggesting such knowledge is not out of reach. To show that it is out of reach would require ignoring all the people who claim to have such knowledge, or proving they do not. . . — FrancisRay

Who actually has a suggestion though? I don't think a fundamental ontology can be characterized because all explanations are functional and rely on our stream of experience. What does anything actually mean independently of the dynamics of experiences? What is the utility of any factual statement except in how that statement predicts further experiences? We might then want to characterize experience as the fundamental ontology but I resist that because I don't think there is a coherent account of what experience is or means and it seems impossible to characterize publicly or in scientific paradigms due to the nature of the hard problem.

Ah. I didn't say this and would argue against it. You're conflating consciousness and experience, but I;m suggesting that the former is prior to the latter. — FrancisRay

Well this is confusing; you seemed to say it since you replied to the quote that you agreed. I have only been referring to experience the whole time. I am not sure what you mean by consciousness here. When I say experience is primitive, I just mean in a kind of epistemic sense - experiences are immediately apparent and intuitive to us and they don't have an explicit characterization... I just see blue, I cannot tell you what it is.

My whole experience (tentatively I would say consciousness) is just a stream of these things. They cannot be reduced further... they are the bottom and foundation for everything I know and perceive. That is to say nothing about reality but just that experiences are the primitive, irreducible foundation of what I know and perceive.

Bear in mind that experience-experiencer is a duality that must be reduced in order to overcome dualism. . . — FrancisRay

Not sure what you mean by experience-experiencer duality beyond conventional dualism. I am not sure what "experiencer" means.

There are no primitive concepts or experiences. This was shown by Kant. — FrancisRay

Again, my notion of primitiveness just relates to the immediate, irreducible apprehension of experiences after which there is nothing more basic epistemically.

For a solution one would have to assume a state or level of consciousness free of all concepts and prior to information. — FrancisRay

I don't think you can have consciousness free of information nor do I understand wht you think this is required for a solution.

and information theory requires an information space, and the space comes before the information. . — FrancisRay

I don't think there is priority here. If there is information, it exists on an information space; n information space is defined by the information in it. One doesnt come before the other.

If you believe this you will never have a fundamental theory and will will have to live with the 'hard' problem. forever. I wonder what leads you to believe this when it is just a speculation. If you believe this then much of what I'm saying will make no sense to you. I would advise against making such assumptions, or indeed any assumptions at all. , . — FrancisRay

I don't see what your alternative suggestion could possibly be if you don't believe dualism is true. Regardless of what you think the fundamental reality is, the evidence is overwhelming about how consciousness relates to or can be characterized in terms of brains in a functional sense (I hope you understand what I mean when I say functionally). What is your alternative characterization?

I am starting to think you haven't understood anything I have said at all. Its hard to believe now that you could have said my previous post was perceptive and a good summary if you really understood it. Neither have I been trying to think about some fundamental theory that resolves the hard problem. My initial post said that I didn't think the so called hard problem could be solved at all.

Yes, that's part of W's point. We can apply the rule to imaginary or possible cases, but we have to formulate them first. We cannot apply a rule to infinity. Hence mathematical induction. — Ludwig V

Yes, obviously induction is one of the big parts of this, but I wasn't intentionally referring to that. I was referring to the idea of starting with some repertoire of rules and using it to generate some behavior (e.g. the behaviors people acceptably think of as addition). Very true, the induction problem applies even to this issue which just emphasizes Wittgenstein's points, and I have been an advocating for my interpretation him this whole time, even if inarticulately.

I think it is arguable that nearly all humans find counting and the basic arithmetical operations intuitive, so it's not arbitrary, Mathematicians have specialized skills that enable them to find things intuitive that the layperson cannot even comprehend because they don't have the requisite training or ability.

It looks like we are going to continue to disagree, but that's OK with me. I believe I would change my mind if given good reason to, but I haven't seen anything approaching such a reason thus far. — Janus

I genuinely think we agree on more than you think but i think you have a different understanding or interpretation of the issue that is put forward.

The question of intuition is arbitrary because this is about the notion of objective rules or meanings. Why does intuition matter for objectivity? A putatively objective scientific theory should be true regardless of intuition. The truth of thermodynamics doesnt depend on my cats ability to find it intuitive. Intuition doesn't stop behaviour being describable in a certain way, and if you want to appeal to intuition then I will have to ask you to define what you mean further, which you haven't tried to do so far because I think you will know that will be very difficult (even if you could, I think its always possible to provide some quus-like alternative, or continue the regress of definitions or perhaps point to counterexamples like Moliere did in terms of how your counting example cannot be identical to addition semantically); however, without such definitions, how can I know you mean what you mean and rule out alternatives. It points to how vacuous the explicit semantics of these things become as opposed to implicitly based demonstrations of our ability to follow rules (but then its hard to explicitly characterize when and why these rules are broken). You have appealed to implicit ability as a defence several times which is why I think we agree more than you think. But the problem isnt about skepticism towards whether we can perform certain behaviors, its about objective semantic characterizations. Appealing to your intuitive ability to perform a behavior that you cannot even define properly is not an explicit semantic characterization!

Intuition really doesn't matter because its arbitrary. What is intuitive to a human may not be intuitive to an animal or an artificial machine. What a mathematician finds intuitive might be different from a layman.

I think you can. If you can make up arbitrary rules like quaddition then you can think up infinite many rules which give describe all the same processing ability.

Even if you could come up with something, that wouldn't change the fact that addition is intuitively gettable, while the alternative is just some arbitrary set of rules that happened to work, and which would be parasitic on the gettability of addition in any case. — Janus

To you maybe. It might be totally unintuitive to a different kind of being. Addition might be arbitrary or unintuitive to someone else just like how you might find the notion of some operator that subsumes division, addition etc etc unintuitive.

If they don't make any difference, how are they alternative?

On the other hand, it is perfectly possible for two or more of us to get along quite well for a long time with different interpretations of the same concept or rule. The differences will not show themselves until a differentiating case turns up. This could happen with quaddition or any other of the many possibilities. Then we have to argue it out. The law, of course, is the arena where this most often becomes an actual problem. — Ludwig V

Well you can use sets of concepts with different meanings to refer to the same thing, enables by the natural underdetermination.

There is a forward problem of mapping rules to behavior in which case, I can use any number of multitude of different concepts and combinations of concepts in order to produce the same behavior as you might get from addition.

There is also the inverse problem of mapping behavior to rules in which case, even under some single case of differentiation, there is always a multitude of alternatives that underdetermine what the successful rule actually is at any given time.

What is fundamental to understanding concepts is not their definition, but knowing how to apply the definition. That is a practice, which is taught. Learning to count and measure defines number and quantity. — Ludwig V

Well that suggests you have a definition in the first place. Neither would I say that you can define these concepts by the behavior itself. But yes, part of my view all along is the distinction between explicit definitions which are chronically underdetermined and the implicit behavior which we have a mastery of but is difficult to give explicit descriptions.

As stipulated the rules of quaddition do provide different outcomes: — Janus

My point here is the forward problem as described earlier. Even though quaddition has particular outcomes, someone can generate all of the behavior of addition and define it, have definitions, without using addition, even if they require a plethora of other concepts to make it work. And again, this all depends on people agreeing with all the necessary concepts which are required to make something like quaddition work. My understanding of all concepts is scaffolded on prior concepts and prior implicit understanding or abilities that have been learned by practise without definitions.

unnecessarily pessimistic — FrancisRay

In what way? I don't see it as pessimistic at all or that anything is lost. What does a solution to the hard problem look like? I don't think there is a good one I can think of which doesn't imply some sort of dualism which I fundamentally disagree with.

This would be a hopeless approach for for the reasons you give. A fundamental theory must look beyond computation and intellection. — FrancisRay

I am not suggesting looking for a fundamental ontology based on computation but an explanation for why knowing about fundamental ontologies are out of reach.

I think the explanation is actually already there, it just has to be articulated and demonstrated. Like you said, experiences are primitive. We know experiences are related to the functional architecture of our brains. We can transfer or demonstrate the concept of this kind of primitiveness into the architectures and functional repertoires of A.I. We use A.I. to demonstrate the limits of what kinds of information is transferable from the environment, what kinds of concepts are created and what information they don't or can't include, and then see what kind of metacognitive consequences this has. Does a. A.I. come up with primitive phenomenal concepts on a purely functional basis that it cannot explain, similarly to our hard problem? This is a totally plausible research program even if it may not be possible right at this moment.

But if you think human beings are are intelligent machines or one of Chalmers' zombies then I'm afraid you're stuck with the hard problem for all eternity. This assumption renders the problem impossible. . — FrancisRay

Not sure what you mean here but functionally, yes we are just intelligent machines. We are just brains.

Quaddition seems to arbitrarily countermand the natural logic of counting and addition; the logic that says there is neither hiatus nor terminus. — Janus

There would only be a logic to countermand if there was a sensible definition of these things in the first place which specified the correct behavior without requiring prior understanding... and if rules like quaddition provided different outcomes to addition. Sure, only considering quaddition on its own doesn't provide the right answers but considrr that there are an infinite number of possible alternative characterizations which you can even use in any number of combinations.

It is therefore possible to use alternative concepts without any difference in behaviour. How is that countermanding logic? It cannot be. This is in the same vein as Quine's indeterminacy of translation also.

Again, the only recourse you have is "Naturalness" and given that I don't think you can give me a satisfying definition of counting or quantity, that to me is almost like begging the question without being able to tell me what you are even begging, so to speak. The only reason I know what you are saying is that I have an implicit undrrstanding of what you are talking about. Not necessarily an explicit one.

You've already said that you think this stuff is implicit so I think it must mean we agree more or less but you are failing to distinguish that there is the explicit notion of these rules and then the implicit "blind" notion. This is maybe why we are talking at cross purposes because you agree about the implicit thing, so do I. The whole debate however is about the explicit characterization.

I think some people would assume that means I end up a behaviorist — frank

If we want a complete description of behavior then I believe that a better term would be a neurobiological-ist which I think many people would find totally reasonable perspective!