It's nothing to do with language. A hermit with no language could look at two objects and see them to be the same colour (or different colours). That's colour recognition. — Michael

How would you support your claim about this hermit ? Presumably some public action would be interpreted in terms of a private experience.

Also, how can we speak of color recognition in the singular while insisting it's essentially private and inaccessible ? We can radicalize the inverted spectrum idea. Maybe you see a different palette of colors entirely. Maybe I've never seen any of the colors you've seen. Along these lines, maybe there is no one quale for recognizing color. Instead there is something like a loose complex of public behaviors (including reports involving sensation concepts) that might call recognizing a color.

I think your view implies, for instance, that we can never really know if another person has ever been in love, even if we have a detailed biography...as if being in love is something behind what are therefore mere indicators rather than constituents.

But badger's pickle yellow numbers by night. — Bartricks

What's the end game, if we were to grant you the indivisibility of mind ? Do you turn the crank on your logic machine until God pops out?

I readily agree with Hacker in the text I quoted — Andrew M

Same here. I think the danger is a temptation to mistake reports about proprieties of language use for ontological profundities.

To paraphrase Pie from a nearby thread, Hacker is not trying to be Pepsi to the indirect realist's Coca-Cola. He's showing that there's no need for this bubbly acidic sugar water in the first place. — Andrew M

:up:

Our reason represents our minds to be indivisible things. — Bartricks

As far as I can tell, you are leaping from 'mind' being a singular noun to some dusty ontological thesis. Do you think boats have ovaries? Can rivers smoke cigars ?

That's prima facie evidence that's precisely what they are. — Bartricks

This is depressingly sloppy reasoning.

<< 'Mind' is a singular noun and various philosophers have speculated or argued that the mind is indivisible. Case closed. Mind is indivisible. >>

As if philosophy hasn't made progress. As if this quasi-theological confusion is still somehow state of the art. As if 'mind is indivisible' has a usefully determinate meaning or relevance in the first place. If neither Ryle nor Austin can save you from compulsive circle squaring, I doubt I'll make a dent.

Im arguing that there are many christians that interpret the words as "man was left as caretaker, not master". — Merkwurdichliebe

I don't dispute that. It's a big tent.

The opponents both master nature. — Merkwurdichliebe

To me we'd look not at the common desire to play lord and master but rather to whether or not human beings are understood to be continuous with or radically distinct from the rest of nature. To my knowledge, few conservatives are concerned with the factory farming of pigs, even if we have reason to believe that pigs are more sentient than fetuses. ( One can imagine an intelligent extraterrestrial species making tough decisions so that suffering is minimized, aided by a detailed science of the nervous systems involved. This thought-experiment gives us, I hope, a little distance from a bias toward the human form. )

Web3. however interesting it might be, is not relevant to the current topic. — Bitter Crank

Mostly agreed, but it may become more relevant and therefore apply to the future of the US labor movement and not just its past. If the kids are going to organize, it'll probably be on their phones, and they probably shouldn't trust the 'free' software that makes them easy to spy on and censor.

.

What's your point? — Bartricks

My point is that "the mind is indivisible" is (approximately) not even wrong. It's mostly useless hot air, probably religiously motivated.

The square root of Tuesday is tuna fish sandwiches ! Prove me wrong if you dare.

All you're doing is talking about views in a dismissive tone. That's not how you refute a view. — Bartricks

Some views are not even wrong, or embedded in frameworks of assumptions so rickety that they are not even worth refuting. I don't want to charge at windmills with you, affirming the background assumptions responsible for the confusion as I challenge its mere symptom, this thesis that the mind is a simple or undivided thing. So far you've not assimilated or even really acknowledged any of my criticism of your views. At this point, I don't expect much, but I persist out of curiosity.

Our reason tells us that our minds are immaterial things (that's what a 'soul' is - an immaterial mind). — Bartricks

It's not 'our reason' but merely a piece of the philosophical tradition (centered on Descartes) that tells you (not us) that souls are immaterial minds. As mentioned above, this questionable assumption was probably motivated by a fear of Newtonian physics swallowing the domain of religion and threatening the idea of free will, the supernatural, etc.

It's simply not necessary to take any position on issues that now seem dated and pointless. Nor must we adopt dichotomies like mental/material as profound laws of the cosmos or human cognition. In other words :

It is worth bearing in mind…the general rule that we must not expect to find simple labels for complicated cases…however well-equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all possible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer than diction.
...
We say, for example, that a certain statement is exaggerated or vague or bold, a description somewhat rough or misleading or not very good, an account rather general or too concise. In cases like these it is pointless to insist on deciding in simple terms whether the statement is “true or false”. Is it true or false that Belfast is north of London? That the galaxy is the shape of a fried egg? That Beethoven was a drunkard? That Wellington won the battle of Waterloo? There are various degrees and dimensions of success in making statements: the statements fit the facts always more or less loosely, in different ways on different occasions for different intents and purposes.
...
First, words are our tools, and, as a minimum, we should use clean tools: we should know what we mean and what we do not, and we must forearm ourselves against the traps that language sets us. Secondly, words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can re-look at the world without blinkers. Thirdly, and more hopefully, our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have found worth making, in the lifetimes of many generations: these surely are likely to be more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon—the most favoured alternative method. — Austin

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/austin-jl/#LangTrut

For instance, 'material' and 'mental' work well enough in practical contexts, but wringing them metaphysically for eternal knowledge juice might not get us anywhere.

I guess I'm saying that the intellect will feel stymied by being unable to specify a cause for everything. — Tate

I agree. It's as if we are programmed to understand more more more. Enlarge the causal nexus, enlarge the domain of familiarity and mastery. Can't remember who (Sartre maybe?), but someone made the point that brute fact reveals our finitude as knowers, because it's something that happened to us, which makes no sense. Surely actual gods are spared that kind of embarrassment...

Algebriac geometry, however, is genius though — 180 Proof

:up:

It's exciting stuff. By the way, the fire pic is great.

Our performances enact normative pattens just as other living self-organizing systems assimilate their environment to their own normative functioning in relation to their constructed world , while accommodating those norms to the changing circumstances that their own behavior produces in their niche. — Joshs

This seems to get things right enough. Far more than beavers, we create the world we study as our study gives us more and more power to shape that world. We also create and edit our own norms, but only in the light of the norms we have so far. It's like Neurath's boat. We can never question all of them at once, but only some of them in terms of a majority of others necessarily left unquestioned.

That is not what I see with Christian culture, with all its anti-science shit. If any demographic views itself as master of nature, it would be atheistic-leftist types with all their science shit. Maybe you can elaborate. — Merkwurdichliebe

Perhaps we should distinguish between a sense of human entitlement (lords and masters, gifted this garden by god) from the adoption of norms governing claims (we ought to be rational).

Conservatives are (in my experience) less likely to care about the treatment of pigs and chickens. That's anecdotal, and I'm willing to adjust my prejudice. I connect this more generally to a conservative reluctance to see the human species as continuous with the rest of the animal kingdom. In practical terms, this might manifest as a resentment of protections of an endangered species, if they interfere with profit.

The way I see it it is the rise of capitalism-enabling technology which has brought us to this culmination of the largely Christian notion of humanity as masters of nature, which is beginning to look like an ironic caricature and now we find ourselves in a situation wherein we will be shown just how delusional that notion is. — Janus

This reminds me of Feuerbach's interpretation. God is above and distinct from nature, hence the prohibition of (nature-referencing) images of the divine. While a demiurge might shape what's already there, the God of the Christians creates from nothing, revealing the essence of nature as nothingness. As Stirner put it, who linked such nature-denying Christians to a type of sceptic, "all things are nothing to me."

For Rouse, normativity is a property of systems of material nature rather than a mind split off from nature. — Joshs

I think that's how Sellars sees it too, and I think I agree. But it's convenient to talk about this or that piece or aspect of nature. 'Rational' humans are just acting in certain ways, caught up in a fragile but potent tradition, more complex perhaps than the culture appearing here and there among other animals, but no more magical or unnatural.

I think the key term here is ‘imagine’. Without some implicit normative overview transcendent to the phenomena being described we can’t get from ‘chaotic soup’ to ‘self-replicating pattern’. — Joshs

I think I know what you mean, and I agree. It's only after evolution has happened that its story can be told. But is this more problematic than theories of the cooing of the earth, of a time before such theories were possible ? Must the concept of a supernova exist before actual supernovas occur ? I can understand arguing either side, but I'd butter this bread on the third side, on the brown loop of the crust.

What's that? — Tate

It's a cluster of ideas, but let me give you one, which is not so off-topic. At the moment, the internet lives on giant servers owned by the rich, so the owners of this capital can track, adslam, and censor us as they please. Yet it's technically possible for us to host the/an internet on our own devices, with security and privacy and the impossibility of censorship built in. From a 'class war' perspective, I don't want oligarchs supervising and controlling what the proles can say another (including the use of algorithms that addict us to echo chambers and outrage.)

Digestion is an activity. Something does it.
Thinking is an activity. Something does it. And the thing that does thinking is called 'a mind'. — Bartricks

We might say that a person thinks with their mind. But whatever we decide, we should (again) be wary of whether we are just teaching some useless idiolect of English to one another.

In other words, is your claim synthetic or analytic? It's all too easy to make grand 'discoveries' that end up about as informative as 'bachelors are unmarried males.'

Materialists think minds are material things and immaterialists and dualists think they are immaterial things. That's what the debate is over. — Bartricks

The debate is over whether this is what the debate is over. The deeper issue is your fixation on an obsolete dichotomy. How much phlogiston's in an angel's fart ?

Yes, and this kind of delusional thinking is what has led us to the situation we find ourselves in today. — Janus

I'm ambivalent about the 'lords and masters' idea. I think we want access to nutritious food, effective medicine, protection from storms, etc., but we end up with side-effects like polution, global warming, the possibility of a panopticonic dystopia, etc.

agree that would be a motivation for this kind of thinking; the desire to separate us from nature in order to justify the rectitude of the idea of free will and accountability, as I recall Nietzsche points out in Twilight of the Idols. — Janus

Indeed. And that reminds me that Fichte and Kant were quite concerned with this. I suspect it was one of 'the' problems of the day, somehow embracing Newton and Christianity at the same time.

This approach rids us the the gap between normative claims ( manifest image) and the empirical world it addresses (scientific image). — Joshs

I think that's Sellars' explicit goal. If we imagine a species evolving a second-order tradition of norms for establishing beliefs (a way of talking and acting the world), then we are half way there? Or more?

“Orthodox and liberal naturalists identify “the scientific image” as a position within the space of reasons, a body of claims that have been justified and accepted scientifically, or as I earlier quoted Price, “the sum of all we take to be the case.”
[\quote]
To me it makes sense to speak roughly of the scientific understanding of a place and time, 'the sum of what we [the scientifically educated] take to be the case.'

— Joshs

Scientific understanding in practice is instead an ongoing reconfiguration of the space of reasons, of what can count as intelligible and significant projects, defensible positions, reasons for or against them, and possible ways of extending or revising them. Science offers not a single “image” of the world, but a conceptual space of research opportunities and intelligible disagreements.” (Beyond Realism and Anti-Realism At Last) — Joshs

This sounds right, but I don't really see the conflict. We can choose to use 'scientific image' to refer to a set of relatively settled beliefs while insisting that the process for generating such beliefs is far messier, including at the least lots of unsettled candidate beliefs.

Power corrupts. Per legend, union stewards were usually the scum of the earth. — Tate

Power corrupts. That's the problem. How can we make power fragile and responsive to the people? But we need also worry about the madness of mobs. Let's just say it's not an easy problem, and I hope humans will figure something out without really expecting it much. I've been looking into web3 ideas which may be a bit utopian at this point but which seem better to me than complacence.

Descartes who first thought of the body as a machine animated by a ghostly, incorporeal substance; the mind. — Janus

Actually just really read Descartes lately. Of course I was aware of his ideas, but it was useful to see them in context. As you may remember, he also wanted us to be 'lords and masters and nature' and fantasized about great advances in medicine, very Baconian. His analysis of light and its effect on the eye and the mind was brilliant.

Descartes has much to answer for in the tradition of thought that understands animals to be unfeeling machines, on account of the idea that they do not possess the faculty of rationality, which distinguishes the crown of creation, man, from them and justifies using them in whatever ways satisfy our need or desire. — Janus

Indeed. This is maybe the worst part of his thinking, perhaps a byproduct of what I think was a typical evasion of the time...namely rescuing the soul from a Newtonian determinism. I respect Spinoza and Hobbes for just accepting the deterministic implications and, in their own ways, avoiding the gulf between body and mind.

Unionising is a way to counter that bias by grouping those disadvantaged individuals together to increase their resources and decrease their liability. — Banno

:up:

The rich don't want to the poor to follow their example (it's the spectre of communism when the poor attain class consciousness.)

As others have commented, unions were always a two edged sword, not nearly as romantic as we'd like to think. — Tate

Hoffa and mob stuff comes to mind, but then I think we just need unions that are harder to corrupt. We need to keep trying to find corruption-resistant social structures.

They are just a common sense way to deal with your employer. — ssu

Socialism is a commonsense way for the wee folk to deal with the oligarchs ? (OK, maybe I just mean I'd the US to be more like Denmark.)

semiosis appears out of nowhere in living systems — Joshs

What's wrong with this view? Why couldn't chance invent something that thereafter defies chance as much as it can manage the job ? Self-sustaining, durable patterns are what we'd expect to find even.

do we say that the non-arbitrary order of the algorithm emerges somehow out of a process that does not have its order? — Joshs

Maybe it's best to talk more concretely. Imagine a chaotic soup of items which are capable of being arranged in self-replicating structures. Perhaps such arrangements are relatively rare, but once they appear they'll tend to say, precisely because they replicate themselves. If such replication is not perfect and includes mutations, it may be that some mutants are more effective self-replicators than others (perhaps most mutations prevent replication.) The essence seems to be that 'progress' is 'saved' or cumulative. We tend to find patterns that are good at hanging around hanging around.

Witness in Christianity is exactly like witness of beauty given by artists: their witness doesn’t prove anything, because art is a subjective experience. — Angelo Cannata

For some perhaps, and this might sketch an ideal witnessing, but I can't help but think of the evangelists I tend to see in the world these days...aggressive types who want to argue about atheism, embarrassingly combative, conspicuously unenlightened. Recently I was handed a pamphlet with all the symbols of world religions and caption that they can't all be right. True, sir, true. But they can all be wrong.

"faculties of perception, reason and so on" can reasonably be understood to be faculties or functions of the body, which all together make up the overall faculty or function of the body we call "mind". — Janus

:up:

Today a young paraplegic requiring medical help has been thrown out of the hospital with a sleeping bag and he will be sleeping on the streets somewhere. Good luck sucker. This is America the wealthiest country in the world and we are great. The marginalized people do not count. — Athena

Sad but true. "Sorry about your luck."

In the past, bureaucratic problems could be resolved by reasoning with the bureaucrat. We were all basically on the same page with the same human reasoning. That is no longer the reality for the technological world we are in now. As the old retire and die we are losing the human consciousness that once defined our democracy. Like we shifted from analog to digital electronics, there is a serious shift in our reasoning. It is no longer the humanities forming our reasoning, but the laws and requirements of math and science. — Athena

This is a good description of us fitting ourselves to our own machines, become their obedient robots. It's easy to imagine AI playing larger and larger role. It's my understanding that banks already loan or not according to algorithmic decisions, and someone might joke about the replacement of juries (trained on transcripts of previous trials and associated verdicts.)

How is this cultivated? Replace the humanities with education for technology. How we think depends 100% on how we are taught to organize our logical thinking and the conceptual thinking we learn. — Athena

It seems we agree on the important of the humanities. A good citizen needs critical thinking and historical awareness. A mere cog in the machine, however, needs only a set of a skills. I've been reading Howard Zinn's history lately, and the presence or absence of class consciousness looks central to me. Am I to be merely a monkey pulling levers as directed ? Or an enlightened, autonomous being working with others to build a just and happy society? Certain politicians and oligarchs would rather me be the former, surely.

Concepts like evolution , order and beauty are ‘higher-order’ products of these primary processes, but how are they any more justified than any other concepts associated with the intentional stance? We can talk ‘as if’ there really is an evolution of order but the meaning of such a notion vanishes within the physical stance. — Joshs

As I see it, it is the claims that apply concepts like evolution which are more or less justified in terms of the usual scientific/rational norms. This is what Brandom calls the primacy of the propositional, and he credits Kant for foregrounding it. We don't build claims from concepts. We understand concepts in terms of the role they play in claims (the inferences they license, etc.)

As I understand 'the physical stance,' it's to be expected that such notions vanish, but the stance is self-consciously reductive. It's a lens that's more or less useful and appropriate in this or that context.

In case it's helpful, I'm happy to grant that Dennett does not know the quiet secret of the universe. We find ourselves here in the mess together (the nightmare of history), and we slowly and painfully work toward being less ignorant and confused, largely by thinking about thinking.

Take the ubiquitous example of a count of apples. It's obvious and natural to us what it means for me to have a positive number of apples, it's something we can count. It's less obvious what it might mean for there to be an amount which is less than nothing. — Jerry

Think of 2 representing the height of a mound of dirt and -2 representing the depth of a hole beside it. Perhaps the unit of length is a stick used to dig the hole in the first place.

An early geometer might find irrational numbers easier or more 'real' than negative numbers, because surely the diagonal of the unit square has a length and a negative length is absurd.

Mind is to body much like what digestion is to stomach. — jorndoe

:up:

"Is the office of President of the USA a single thing, or does it have parts? If it has parts, what are they? Are its parts tied to the person of the President?" It may be that the OP questions make as much or as little sense as that. — Cuthbert

:up: