What would we expect from an explanation? It seems to me the motive of a great deal of the theorising about consciousness is to dispell any lingering notion that it is something mysterious or inexplicable. After all it's right at the centre of your existence, so the suggestion that something this obvious and fundamental might be at the same time irreducible to the categories of the natural sciences can't be allowed to stand. So I suspect that a lot of attempts at explanation are motivated by that itch. — Wayfarer

I do see an itch in some to demystify it, which has its pros and cons. Demystification can be good if it clears the path for inquiry. Mystification can sometimes look like a KEEP OUT sign.

It's worth noting though that Wittgenstein and Heidegger puts this mystery at the center, but in terms of the problem of being, which is arguably a deeper question (less Cartesian baggage which preinterprets beingthere, the being of the there, as a screen.)

All drugs including caffeine, alcohol THC and psychedelics, etc., alter how we see things. — Janus

:up:

To me this also points toward that lack in our lifeworld of 'pure' mentality and its shadow 'pure' materiality.

If you can tell something as complex as how others grasp Wittgenstein's later work the "way you do", should it not be much easier to tell if someone's perception of a colour is the way you perceive it? — Janus

In the ordinary sense, of course. Motte and bailey. We need not introduce internal images, though this is tempting in ordinary contexts, given popular metaphors like the mind is a container.

The point is that 'secret' qualia as referents make for an impossible semantics. It's 'obvious' once one grasps it (switches metaphors?). Such a semantics assumes telepathy without realizing it --- or an equivalent set of immaterial states that are induced in a massproduced model-T ghost haunting pineal glands when afflicted by various electromagnetic waves. This may be a parody, but how wide of the mark is it ?

So the sentence " I saw an orange afterimage", just taken as a bare sentence, isn't abstractly referring to a certain kind of experience? What do you take the sentence to mean? — Janus

We might ask what 'experience' is supposed to mean. It's the motte / bailey thing. In ordinary language, we have mentalistic talk of how things felt to Jack and Jill. No problem. But 'pure' qualia are problematic. Concepts are etymologically grips. Well, we can't get a grip on them. We can just train kids to make reliable reports. In the present of 'this' paint sample, we train them to say 'red' or 'blue.' The qualia crowd tends to insist that no one can see through their eyes, check for an inverted spectrum. This sounds right but it but it's pretty weird. People want to say what they also say can't be said.

then we have more reason to think our perceptions of the orange are similar. — Janus

I don't think so, however admittedly tempting this sounds. If 'true orangeness' is hidden, we have no data whatsoever for supporting such a hypothesis. I don't see logic but only a comfortable and familiar prejudice.

Sense of meaning is an affect, and machines are not sentiently affected. Sense of meaning is an experience, and we have no reason to think that machines experience anything. I think 'immaterial" is a loaded term and so not helpful here. That said sense of meaning is not a physical object that can be publicly observed. We can talk about it; but only imprecisely. — Janus

You claim that meaning can't be observed. I don't see how that claim is justified. Bots have learned to talk with us. I agree that it's difficult to talk about, but how is 'affect' to be understood ? What should machines (Pinocchios) be incapable of affect unless it's immaterial and simply assumed to only come with real boys (human beings) ? If affect isn't 'there' in order doings and dispositions, where is it ? I claim it's more of a dance than a pair of legs. Is there something else, something elusive ? Is there an awareness of the there itself in a real boy ? But what is special about the human brain ? Is it the meat ? Or is it just a structure of a function ? And how does 'affect' get a meaning at all if affects aren't essentially public ? Why should you trust that 'affect' has the same reclusive referent for both of us ?

I doubt you really believe that machines feel or care about anything. Animals are not merely machines in my view, any more than humans are. The two concepts 'machine' and 'animal' are distinct enough. Machines are not self-regulating metabolic organisms, for a start. — Janus

It's true that I don't currently project feelings on or having feelings toward machines. I just don't see why I couldn't in principle --- if those machines were more like my cat or wife with respect to my sense organs. It's not logically impossible that my cat is already a machine made by crafty aliens. What if they used DNA and test tubes to build their machines ?

I have no idea what the "thereness of qualia" could be referring to. Perhaps you mean something like the immediacy of experience? — Janus

I think 'immediacy of experience') hints at the same kind of thing. It's not how but that the world is that is the mystical. It's that there is a world, any kind of world, in the first place. 'Beneath' the concept of red there is redness. Some people speak of pure immaterial pain, or the hurt of the toothache that surpasses as logic and meaning. I think they are touching on the problem of [the meaning of] being in a Cartesian framework.

Programming or designing is an intentional act, so I don't think the analogy holds. — Janus

What exactly is this ghost intention ? I 'know' in the usual way of course. But here again we seem to be invoking the divine spark. We are machines created by evolution, so perhaps 'it' can take credit for our inventions as much as we can.

You can claim we are just being "superstitious" about our natures, and there may be cases of that, but I don't find it convincing as a general explanation for being reluctant to impute consciousness to AIs. — Janus

Let me stress that we are visceral creatures. Wrap up a clever bot in a soft warm android body that purrs and see what happens. We can't find the souls of our cats in this or that location. Where is this divine spark ? Imagine a young man falling in love with woman who treats him wonderfully who then discovers she's an android, a fact which she's concealed for fear of losing him. How does he determine whether she is 'in' there and worthy of love ? Or is she already worthy of love ?

If we zoom in on a living fleshy brain, do we find consciousness under the microscope ? Or just zaps between cells ? Where is it ? Its where is soft, glued to the body somehow as if hovering around it, playing in its/her eyes and across its/her lips, indeterminately.

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

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

I'm sorry, doctor, but that's not it. I think our softwhere is as adversarial as it is cooperative, possibly because we evolved at the level of the tribe (which had other tribes to worry about.) I don't stress the we for sentimental reasons. I started like most with the default 'screen' metaphor of Hume, Locke, Kant, ... but I kept thinking and reading and slowly grasped the deep confusion in such positions, which was made especially explicit in the early 20th century. For the most part I paraphrase well known results, though I reach for fresh metaphors, trying to pass on unexploited representatives from the same blurry equivalence class.

And vice versa. — frank

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

He is apparently saying you should not talk about things that you are not certain about. Which rules out everything. — Andrew4Handel

He's not saying that.

And phenomenological direct (naive) realism says something exactly like this. They don’t just say that we respond to external world objects. They say that external world objects are as they are seen, e.g. that the colour property in the experience is the colour property of the apple. — Michael

I think you are maybe loading your own presuppositions on to the position. Here is a minimal versino : We can directly perceive ordinary objects. To me the point here is that we are not behind a screen. We don't see an image of the apple. We just see the apple. Note that direct realism does not forbid being mistaken. 'I thought that shadow was a possum for a moment !' The point is that one is talking about the world, always our world, in our language. And our language is 'made of' our norms for applying concepts. The 'We' is tacit in the use of that old tribal sign 'I.'

What tempts people to talk as if they see only images ? I suspect the scientific image is being taken as a deeper truer reality than the lifeworld it depends on in order to make sense in the first place. Once this mistake is made, people say things like 'color isn't real.' The internal image (the hidden states of the ghost) becomes not only the given but all that is given in an orgy of methodological solipsism which takes the norms of rational concept use for granted, as if planted in this solipsist by a friendly god.

For the direct realist, the self is not a submarine captain peering through a periscope. It is a member of a community with norms for evaluating and making claims. 'Red' gets its meaning from the inferential relationships between assertions, just as a bishop gets its meaning in the context of trying to checkmate the opposing king. I say zoom out and do not ignore that norms of rationality that every philosopher depends on as philosopher. Don't think of individual concepts as magic labels. Put them in sentences. Put sentences into sets of sentences that a person uses to tell a coherent story. This is after all what we are already doing.

Besides what would it be to 'explain' consciousness? — Wayfarer

One way to approach 'explaining consciousness' is maybe as getting clearer about it, becoming less confused. In my view, progress has been made over the years, though it's hard to imagine us finally being satisfied, especially if one posits that current conceptual norms are necessarily unstable, always falling forward (Brandom's take on Hegel).

The survival of the pattern is its persistence. We reason back from this. What kind of patterns persist ?

They might have indestructible instantiations (if we still wanted to call them patterns), but those would probably be difficult to create in a world like ours.

So instead we get those that replicate. In biological cases, we have variation, and this explains increasing complexity. But we can also think of linguistic memes and computer algorithms. Exact or nearly exact copies could work in some contexts.

Small note : Instantaneous replication is hard to make any sense of. So an instantiation must survive long enough to replicate, even if that is only for a few nanoseconds.

The failure of the mechanistic model, he points to gravity, means the failure of intelligibility. We do not know what is going on, how it all works together. — Fooloso4

Perhaps. But do we really understand pushing and pulling ? Or is it just something so familiar we are numb to it ? And isn't making a telephone call action at a distance ? My wife asks me to swing by the store on the way home for some potatoes. I do that. Magical ! And it is. And it isn't. That there is a here here at all is 'magical' and yet the statement is devoid of content.

But there's no reason why another, intelligent being somewhere else in the universe would have any problem understanding how matter thinks or have any issues contemplating gigantic distances. — Manuel

To me there's a semantic issue here. What can we mean by saying Neptunians understand something like "how matter thinks" unless we also understand ? It's like God knows.

Like the dog never being able to use a laptop, there will be things we will never be able to do or understand. — Manuel

This is plausible but somewhat useless ? Who can say ahead of time what we can manage ? How many times must the 'impossible' be achieved to make us doubt our doubt of ourselves ? Wittgenstein used going to the moon as an example of the impossible once. It was 'obviously' impossible, right ?

A Russian guy once told me: "You know what your problem is? You don't have enough problems." — frank

Nice quote !

Wait a sec ! I wasn't calling a foul. I was asking epistemologically. I was pointing out what I thought was an incoherence in your position. We are just 'playing poker' here. It's all in the pursuit of being less wrong. No personal bad feels intended.

Good comments.

Even those who are agnostic/atheists probably retain some odd fears and ritualistic prohibitions from just being exposed to it in youth. — schopenhauer1

Some might, but I would not say all. Meet Nucky.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5XNSETB5MY

'You don't know me, James. You never did. I. am not. seeking. forgiveness.'

Becker and Sartre have what I take as a deeper view of (existential) guilt. The shame of having a body, inasmuch as it can fail, is the shame of not being a god, the shame of being vulnerable. As hunger steers us toward food, so does this shame steer us toward defensible positions. Consider adversarial dialogue, tarrying with the negative, incorporating death and devastation, as the path to being less wrong. War, the father of all things, does not exclude cooperation. Indeed we are supreme is just this, we hosts of a graveleaping software which gathers the trial and error of the generations, which we are now compressing into images of our own divinity, possibly our spiritual heirs.

I agree with most of what you say.

I tend to view gods in terms of group egos, a tribal egoideal. As you mention, a local god can be developed into a global, universal god. This seems to include (as god is a mirror and target) the idea of a global, universal human being. Secular humanism (Feuerbach's kind, basically) offers this kind of 'god' (our own perfected or at least improved selves waiting for us in the future.) One can read Hegel and Strauss as transforming pessimistic Christianity (by analogy) into a worldly, optimistic humanism (a religion of technical and moral progress.) 'History is a machine that feeds on brave young men and shits freedom.'

.

So, "faulty" or not, an indirect perception of the world is all the reality we can have. A subjective one. — Alkis Piskas

Respectfully, if you are trapped in a subjective perception of the world, how can you so boldly assert that others are in the same position ? How can you see their means of perception ? Is it safe to assume that your logic is valid for others ? Is there just one logic ? Is there even just one world ? How could one check ? Am I possibly just a figment of your imagination ?

My point is that subjectivist assumptions, laudably cautious in their intentions, still end up assuming the world without realizing it. Moreover there is the assumption of similar nervous systems, a universally authoritative logic, a shared space that one can still somehow comment on: "All the reality we can have is a subjective one." How can you use we here ? Why not the more careful and modest "I can only have a subjective perception of the world." But that's just grammar ?

The Direct Realist agrees that pain doesn't exist external to the senses of any perceiver, but argues that the colour red does. — RussellA

I might be more in the direct realist camp, so I'll try to answer this. We need not assume in the first place that we are trapped behind a wall of sensations. This methodological solipsism is unjustified, in my view. Concepts are public. They exists within a system of norms for their application. This is why bots can talk sensibly about pain and color. How long, if not already, will it be impossible to sort flesh from silicon in a text conversation ? They have internalized the norms of concept application by reading more than any human has ever been able too. There is structure in the record of what we've said.

Just because we need our eyes to see doesn't mean that we are trapped behind them, looking at a screen. We are also not down in a submarine, peeking through a periscope. The 'I' that makes claims is not some tiny man in the pineal gland but rather a 'virtual', normative entity in a social space.

Here is perhaps Kant’s deepest and most original idea, the axis around which I see all of his thought as revolving. What distinguishes judging and intentional doing from the activities of non-sapient creatures is not that they involve some special sort of mental processes, but that they are things knowers and agents are in a distinctive way responsible for. Judging and acting involve commitments. They are endorsements, exercises of authority. Responsibility, commitment, endorsement, authority—these are all normative notions. Judgments and actions make knowers and agents liable to characteristic kinds of normative assessment. Kant’s most basic idea is that minded creatures are to be distinguished from un-minded ones not by a matter-of-fact ontological distinction (the presence of mind-stuff), but by a normative deontological one. This is his normative characterization of the mental.

...

This master idea has some of Kant’s most characteristic innovations as relatively immediate consequences. The logical tradition that understood judging as predicating did so as part of an order of semantic explanation that starts with concepts or terms, particular and general, advances on that basis to an understanding of judgements (judgeables) as applications of general to particular terms, and builds on that basis an account of inferences or consequences, construed syllogistically in terms of the sort of predication or classification exhibited by the judgments that appear as premises and conclusions. In a radical break with this tradition, Kant takes the whole judgment to be the conceptually and explanatorily basic unit at once of meaning, cognition, awareness, and experience. Concepts and their contents are to be understood only in terms of the contribution they make to judgments: concepts are functions of judgment. Kant adopts this semantic order of explanation because judgments are the minimal units of responsibility—the smallest semantic items that can express commitments. The semantic primacy of the propositional is a consequence of the central role he accords to the normative significance of our conceptually articulated doings. In Frege this thought shows up as the claim that judgeable contents are the smallest units to which pragmatic force can attach: paradigmatically, assertional force. In the later Wittgenstein, it shows up as the claim that sentences are the smallest linguistic units with which one can make a move in the language game. — Brandom

So we should think of 'red' and 'pain' as not meaningful in themselves but only as part of claims made by selves conceived as responsible agents with a community that keeps score.

Observation is important to science, but it's a social process which produces knowledge rather than a methodology. The methods get developed along with the knowledge — Moliere

:up:

What does it mean to be divine? — Fooloso4

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

https://genius.com/Philip-larkin-dayss-annotated

As an extremely wise man once said, theology itself is god. But seriously we could spend centuries on this, which is why we already have, we who are our past in the mode of no longer exactly having to be it. The big questions are theological in a generalized sense of the word. 'God' [ Das Heilige ] is that to which we defer and aspire, possibly proclaiming our atheism or ironism along the path. The divine predicates are human virtues. But what is human ? What is virtue ?

Once I saw a Devil in a flame of fire, who arose before an Angel that sat on a cloud, and the Devil uttered these words: “The worship of God is, honouring His gifts in other men each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best. Those who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God.”

It is not because angels are holier than men or devils that makes them angels, but because they do not expect holiness from one another, but from God only.

In Hell, all is self-righteousness; there is no such thing there as forgiveness of sin. He who does forgive sin is crucified as an abettor of criminals, and he who performs works of mercy, in any shape whatever, is punished and, if possible, destroyed—not through envy, or hatred, or malice, but through self-righteousness, that thinks it does God service, which god is Satan.
...
The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
...
The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of Eternity too great for the eye of man.

The fox condemns the trap, not himself.
...
The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship. — Blake

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Life_of_William_Blake_(1880),_Volume_2/Prose_writings/A_Vision_of_the_Last_Judgment

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45315/45315-h/45315-h.htm

Reacting to some quotes from the text here : http://www.ditext.com/bunge/crisis.html

In philosophy, obscure writing is sometimes just a cloak to pass off platitude or nonsense for depth. This is how Heidegger won his reputation as a deep thinker: by writing such sentences as "Time is the ripening of temporality." Had he not been a German professor and the star pupil of another professor famous for his hermetism -- namely Husserl -- Heidegger might have been taken for a madman or an impostor.

This is Cantorcrankish and implies that all the scholars who have spent years on Heidegger's work are deluded and caught up in a fad. Bunge is wiser and brighter than all of them. Specialist who spend years developing a proper and precise set of concepts are supposed to immediately understandable in terms of the day's typical jabber.

If they restrict their attention to language, they are bound to irritate linguists and bore everyone else. In this way they will enrich neither linguistics nor philosophy... In sum, glossocentrism is mistaken and barren. But it is easy, since it only requires familiarity with one language. This explains its popularity.

This is embarrassingly crude, especially the explanation for the linguistic turn.

Whoever writes hermetic texts like Heidegger's Sein und Zeit perpetrates a philosophical imposture. He incurs the same sin as someone who, writing clearly, tackles pseudoproblems or digresses without contributing anything new, as is the case with Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Authentic philosophizing contributes new knowledge, however modest.

Now he's taking down Wittgenstein too. Now I'll grant that some of Sein und Zeit is terribly written, but there are at least 200 pages of low hanging fruit. Philosophical Investigations can seem dry and meandering to those who don't feel it's issues, but it's great. This idea that one just licks up Knowledge from some carton of InstaMeal is maybe the problem. Give us this day our delay productivity, as we squeeze those around us for theirs.

All good philosophies are radical: that is, they look for the roots of things and the presuppositions (tacit assumptions) behind the explicit assumptions.

I agree with him here, but he elsewhere implies that this can be done in terms of the usual jabber and the usual style. Heid and Witt did just this and our 'obscure.'

Any doctrine that degrades the human condition and discourages attempts at enhancing human dignity deserves being called vile. Examples: racism and the dogmas of original sin, predestination, and the noble lie; Freud's dogma that infancy is destiny: that no one can fully recover from infantile traumas; the theses that poverty is the punishment for sins incurred in an earlier life, or the price for inferior genetic endowment; that humans are only sophisticated automata; that individuals are like leaves swept by the hurricane of history; that social progress is impossible: that "the poor will always be with us"; that we live mainly to die (Heidegger's Sein zum Tode); that the masses are herds that deserve being led by inscrutable and unaccountable supermen; that the truth is or ought to be accessible only to a social elite; that reason is useless or pernicious; and that we need two morals: one for the rulers and another for the ruled. By contrast, a noble philosophy is one that helps improve the human condition. It does so by promoting research, rational debate, grounded valuation, generous action, good will, liberty, equality, and solidarity.

Bunge has done the hard work for us of determining what kind of nontriggering Knowledge Product such pass quality control. The idea that we might be Darwinian androids is as bad as racism. The idea that the way infants are treated could limit their future achievement is equated with a shameless irrationalism. Any recognition of that 'time and chance happeneth to the them all,' or that individuals are caught up in history is forbidden. Are we to blame those killed systematically by governments for being insufficiently alert ? Child victims of the plague for bad taste in their place and time of birth ?

The sentimental platitude at the end in the context of everything else is botspeak fit for cynical politicians, for an aspiring member of the Inner Party. After limiting what kind of debate counts as noble (and therefore rational?), we get the spiel on liberty and research.

Many thanks to Captain Goodthink.

Which is just to say: More philosophers should be like me. The oldest philosophical prejudice of all :D — Moliere

:up:

In general we seem to be thrown into a way of saying and doing things that we mostly don't even notice enough to begin to question. Descartes took the meanings of his words and the unity of his voice for granted. Fine, right ? But if one makes a certain kind of philosophy a relatively serious project, it's not fine. Why is the voice unified ? What the fuck is a self ? Who decided on one ghost per machine ? If meanings are anchored or founded on immateriality, how are bots so good at it ? And so on. To be sure, almost no one in my practical life cares that I care. But I don't care that they don't care. It's a good way (?) to pass the time that would have passed in any case.

Calling something 'red' or complaining of 'pain' only makes sense within a larger system. Who cares that something is labelled 'red' if nothing follows from that ? What does it mean to claim to be in 'pain' if this claim is unrelated to other claims and actions ? Mentalistic talk is part of a larger system. 'Mental entities and 'physical' entities function in the same inferential nexus. 'He had a headache because they were out of coffee at work.' 'She stopped feeling nauseous because the dramamine kicked in.'

From the same source.
********************************
Here is perhaps Kant’s deepest and most original idea, the axis around which I see all of his thought as
revolving. What distinguishes judging and intentional doing from the activities of non-sapient creatures is not that they involve some special sort of mental processes, but that they are things knowers and agents are in a distinctive way responsible for. Judging and acting involve commitments. They are endorsements, exercises of authority. Responsibility, commitment, endorsement, authority—these are all normative notions. Judgments and actions make knowers and agents liable to characteristic kinds of normative assessment. Kant’s most basic idea is that minded creatures are to be distinguished from un-minded ones not by a matter-of-fact ontological distinction (the presence of mind-stuff), but by a normative deontological one. This is his normative characterization of the mental.

Drawing on a jurisprudential tradition that includes Grotius, Pufendorf, and Crusius, Kant talks about norms in the form of rules. Judging and acting—endorsing claims and maxims, committing ourselves as to what is or shall be true—is binding ourselves by norms. It is making ourselves subject to assessment according to rules that articulate the contents of those commitments. Those norms, those rules, he calls ‘concepts’. In a strict sense, all a Kantian subject can do is apply concepts, either theoretically, in judging, or practically, in acting. Discursive, that is to say, concept-mongering creatures, are normative creatures—creatures who live, and move, and have their being in a normative space.
It follows that the most urgent philosophical task is to understand the nature of this normativity, the bindingness or validity (Verbindlichkeit, Gültigkeit) of conceptual norms. For Descartes, the question was how to think about our grip on our concepts, thoughts, or ideas (Is it clear? Is it distinct?). For Kant the question is rather how to understand their grip on us: the conditions of the intelligibility of our being bound by conceptual norms.

This master idea has some of Kant’s most characteristic innovations as relatively immediate consequences. The logical tradition that understood judging as predicating did so as part of an order of semantic explanation that starts with concepts or terms, particular and general, advances on that basis to an understanding of judgements (judgeables) as applications of general to particular terms, and builds on that basis an account of inferences or consequences, construed syllogistically in terms of the sort of predication or classification exhibited by the judgments that appear as premises and conclusions. In a radical break with this tradition, Kant takes the whole judgment to be the conceptually and explanatorily basic unit at once of meaning, cognition, awareness, and experience. Concepts and their contents are to be understood only in terms of the contribution they make to judgments: concepts are functions of judgment. Kant adopts this semantic order of explanation because judgments are the minimal units of responsibility—the smallest semantic items that can express commitments. The semantic primacy of the propositional is a consequence of the central role he accords to the normative significance of our conceptually articulated doings. In Frege this thought shows up as the claim that judgeable contents are the smallest units to which pragmatic force can attach: paradigmatically, assertional force. In the later Wittgenstein, it shows up as the claim that sentences are the smallest linguistic units with which one can make a move in the language game.

...
Kant’s idea is that his normative characterization of mental activity—understanding judging and acting as endorsing, taking responsibility for, committing oneself to, some content— is the place to start in understanding and explaining the nature of the representational, objectpresenting judgeable contents of those judgings. This explanatory strategy is Kant’s pragmatic turn.

It is this order of explanation that is responsible for the most general features of Kant’s account of the form of judgment. The subjective form of judgment is the ‘I think” that can accompany all our judgings, and so, in its pure formality, is the emptiest of all representations. Thought of in terms of the normative pragmatics of judgment, it is the mark of who is responsible for the judgment. (A corresponding point applies to the endorsement of practical maxims.) The transcendental unity of apperception is ‘transcendental’ because the sorting of endorsements into co-responsibility classes is a basic condition of the normative significance of commitments.

Committing myself to the animal being a fox, or to driving you to the airport tomorrow morning normatively preclude me from committing myself to its being a rabbit, or to my sleeping in
tomorrow, but they do not in the same way constrain the commitments others might undertake.

The objective form of judgment is “the object=X” to which judgments always, by their very form as judgments, make implicit reference. Thought of in terms of the normative pragmatics of judgment, it is the mark of what one has made oneself responsible to by making a judgment. It expresses the objectivity of judgments, in the sense of their having intentional objects: what they purport to represent. The understanding of the intentional directedness of judgments—the fact that they are about something—is through-and-through a normative one. What the judgment is about is the object that determines the correctness of the commitment one has undertaken by endorsing it. (On the practical side, it is normative assessments of the success of an action for which the object to which one has made oneself responsible by endorsing a maxim must be addressed.) In endorsing a judgment one has made oneself liable to distinctive kinds of normative assessment. What one is thinking and talking about is what plays a special role, exercises a special sort of authority in such assessments. Representing something, talking about or thinking of it, is acknowledging its semantic authority over the correctness of the commitments one is making in judging. Representational purport is a normative phenomenon.
Representational content is to be understood in terms of it.
*****************************

I experience pain. As I said, I don't need to dredge any metaphysical swamps to know that. — frank

Personally I don't mind if you think Wittgenstein is boring. It's dry stuff. But to me, on this particular issue, you might as well be a chat bot. There's no question that Everybody knows that Everybody definitely 'experiences pain.' To me, this is not a discovery (you checked in your immaterial secret interior and found the Form of Pain there) but just the coughing up of training. One says that one experiences pain. Please note that I do not mean this to sound rude. I'm just looking for vivid words, trying to build a bridge between us. Can we see around our botlike training ? That there's strangeness in all this ? What if you say 'pain' 12 times in the dark ?

We all die and vanish, so that's not the issue. — Metaphysician Undercover

Just to be clear, we are 'instances.' We are relay runners for our DNA. Some of us don't pass the torch. Enough do though, so far anyway.

The problem though, is that what is real, and present to us, is the feeling of pain. — Metaphysician Undercover

Personally I reject the thesis that signs have private immaterial referents. I also reject the assumption of some immaterial Given from which an image of the forever otherwise hidden world is constructed.

Surviving and reproducing are two very different purposes. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't think so. We should probably look at what survival (persistence) of the pattern requires and work backwards. Instances of the pattern will only need to survive long enough to replicate. Of course we can make this model more complex. The point is that instances can perish once they've replicated but not in general before.

This may or may not help.
https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts/Panoramas_of_Mind_and_Meaning%20(1).pdf
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Descartes worries about responding to the threat of epistemological skepticism: things may not in fact be at all as we take them to be. Or at least, we can’t show that they are. Kant worries about responding to the threat of a deeper and more radical semantic skepticism. This is the claim that the very idea of our mental states purporting to specify how things are is unintelligible. Kant’s most basic transcendental question does not, as his own characterization of his project suggests, concern the condition of the possibility of synthetic knowledge a priori, but the conditions of the intelligibility of representational objectivity: of states or episodes that answer for their correctness to how it is with the objects they represent.

In asking this question, Kant moves to an issue that is clearly conceptually prior to the one that is central for Descartes. And this move is not of merely historical interest. The principal argument of Sellars’s masterwork Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind is that the soft underbelly of both traditional and logical empiricism is their implicit semantics. Broadly Cartesian foundationalism depends on there being a semantically autonomous stratum of thought—what is ‘given’, both semantically and epistemologically. It is this semantic givenness that Sellars ultimately takes issue with. So Sellars offers Kantian semantic arguments against the epistemological Myth of the Given. More specifically, Sellars argues that there cannot be an autonomous language game—one that can be played though no other is—that consists entirely of making non-inferential reports. Unless some claims (endorsements) can be made as the conclusions of inferences, none of them can count as conceptually contentful, in the sense required for them even potentially to offer evidence or justification for further conclusions. That is, nothing that cannot serve as the conclusion of inference can serve as the premise for one.

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A 'language' in which you can 'call' something 'pain' or 'blue' lacks content. These labels would have no grip, no relation to reasoning or justifying actions.

You know exactly what sensations are ?

Did you discover their exact nature ? Or is it a tautology ? Synthetic or analytic ?

I'm guessing it's analytic, just the 'grammar' of the word, which is to say the role it plays in claims and explanations. Tomorrow's bots will make the same claim perhaps.

This seems like a strange way to go about it. I don't need any metaphysical issues laid to rest before I decide whether or not I have sensations. — frank

Strange. I thought you were describing pretty well why 'private language' doesn't make much sense.




Maybe this will help :

Words don't mean whatever you or I want them to mean or think they mean.

Money isn't worth whatever you or I want it to be worth or think it's worth.

Do you both agree / disagree ?

Does it cause confusion for you? — frank

Motte and bailey. Ordinary mentalistic talk is fine, but the metaphysical dualistic radicalization of this mentalistic talk (private immaterial referents) is confused. It's a pretty dry issue though. Bad metaphysical theses are mostly harmless and therefore widely available.

Part of what seems to make them, irreducibly private is that language is not adequate to represent them. — Andrew4Handel

:up:

I claim that irreducibly private basically means or implies nonconceptual.

It's like money. We can discuss the idea that each of us has our own 'immaterial feelings' toward 500 euros, but it makes more sense to me, in discussing what euros mean, to see how those euros are traded out in the open.

a correlation between them and physical mechanisms can be made. — Andrew4Handel

A correlation between sign use and brain states makes sense, but I can't imagine any investigation of all of elusive and paradoxical immaterial private states, for these seem to be strategically defined as exactly whatever sneaks through every discursive or technical net. (I think this is related to 'the forgetfulness of being.' It's a strange issue.)