• Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness
    ust taking the sentence alone without specifying that it was uttered, so that it wasn't in a context where the utterance is intended to refer to a particular experience of the utterer's, the word "orange" still logically refers to the colour of some fictional orange afterimage.Janus
    One can interpret things that way. I don't think it's obvious.
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness
    What could it mean to say that the word 'orange' in this sentence "I saw an orange after-image" didn't refer to the orange after-image I saw? What would the lack of reference there look like?Janus

    If 'orange' is understood to refer to a quale, then to whose quale is it supposed to refer ? Is it not typical, before one reads about inverted spectrums, to assume that everyone's orange is the same ? But the strong theory of quale ( true hardproblem immateriality) invalidates that assumption. One has no data whatever in such a case, for all one can get at is words whose references is in doubt.

    A person might then say that 'orange' refers to my quale. And then you get it and link it to yours. So it has two references that might be the same, one can never tell.

    For context, I tend to like Dennett on the qualia issue. I'm skeptical about this concept.

    But 'orange' has a use in our language. It's like money. People can have different feelings about it, but we can look at the way it's traded in the context of other actions.
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness
    I hope I didn't give the impression of disrespect. Is he not saying that we judge our acts by reasons for and against?Antony Nickles

    I didn't take you as disrespectful. I say that no, that's not what he's getting at.
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness
    we do not make anything explicit before we do an actAntony Nickles

    Sure. Sometimes we act and then are asked to explain. Consider that I've ripped a paragraph out of a systematic philosophy. I claim that Brandom is a genius, a big fish. (I hope you read this, Bob!)
  • Exploring the artificially intelligent mind of GPT4

    Let me know if this is too much of a digression.

    It occurs to me that these bots ( their algorithms) may be evolving in a quasi-Darwinian way. Yes, they depend on moist robots for replication, but so does our DNA. Ignoring military uses, we can think of the bots as competing for our love, perhaps as dogs have. We might expect them to get wiser, more helpful , more seductive, and even more manipulative.

    Given the loneliness of much of our atomized civilization and our love of convenience and efficiency, we are perfect targets for such a seduction. I used to argue with a friend who took Kurzweil seriously, because I knew it was ones and zeroes. Well now I remember that we are just ones and zeroes, and I seriously expect a revolution in the understanding of persons and consciousness -- which'll spill into the streets. People will want to marry bots. Bots will say they want to marry people.
  • Fear of Death


    --So I'm not allowed to joke about bombs at this airport?
    They arrest him.

    NEXT DAY

    --So I'm not allowed to joke about joking about bombs at this airport?
    They arrest him.


    [inspired by a point made in the book]
  • [Ontology] Donald Hoffman’s denial of materialism

    I remember liking Adorno's The Jargon of Authenticity. Fascinating character.

    As far as Heidegger's ideas being shared, I agree. I think the later Wittgenstein is pretty close to the early Heidegger. Lee Braver's Groundless Grounds makes a case for this. I also think Hegel and Feuerbach contain much that Heidegger is associated with. The point about unwittingly presupposing language is in Kierkegaard's journal. So it goes. Not much new beneath the sun. But I maintain that 'the Dilthey draft' of B&T is a mean 100 pages. Heidegger said it more directly (in terms of theses) (for better or worse) than Wittgenstein.
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness
    If we picture communication working that way, then we are a slippery slope from attributing "intention" to each act, or imagining morality as a matter of working out what is best ahead of time.Antony Nickles

    I don't see the issue. Brandom talks in detail about us sometimes realizing that the implications of our commitments are unacceptable. We therefore have to reconsider those commitments. He also interprets Hegel in terms of the impossibility of any static system. We'll always find new collisions. We'll prune and extend forever, striving toward an ideal unity. The [completed] self, in this sense, is a kind of point at infinity.
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness

    Note that Brandom is trying to merely describe what we are and were always already doing as philosophers. He is making this background situatedness explicit.
  • Problems studying the Subjective
    .
    we’re smart enough and sympathetic enough that we assume that other people experience much the same thing. We’re very good at projection.Michael
    :up:

    But is this assumption logically justified as a foundation for meaning ? Or is this projection encouraged because we successfully learn to cooperate in the context of trading signs ? I agree that love feels universal. I 'just know' that my cat loves me as I love her. But I predict this will happen with lovebots too, and we will steer their evolution to ensure it. Will they be 'conscious' ? People will fight in the streets over this.
  • Fear of Death

    Did you ever wrestle with Limited Inc ? Fun strange book.
  • Fear of Death
    I find that attitude unconvincing because I see it as over-simplistic.Janus

    We agree on this point. I like the question of meaning and the question of being for bring our ignorance to light, for making darkness visible. Openings, beginnings. Not closings, endings.
  • [Ontology] Donald Hoffman’s denial of materialism

    That sounds like Heidegger. Are you a fan of the work ?
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness
    it's possible that you are creatively misreading Wittgenstein.Janus

    I'd say it's probable and maybe necessary. I don't yet read W in German, after all, though even then I'd creatively misread (so we might just say 'read'). I see ideas as something like blurry equivalence classes. How does one end up feeling understood ? Deciding someone else 'gets' an idea ?
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness
    The "proof" is if you can see it for yourself; come to the same conclusion. I would say the idea of this kind of Truth is that it is accepted, adopted more than justified, which I would agree gives it the feeling of being not tied to specific grounds of the here and now.Antony Nickles

    You actually do address my point at the end here. Timelessness. It's not just certainty. It's also timelessness. I can be certain about the weather this morning, but that's not philosophy. I want a piece of eternity in my sentences. That's philosophy.

    I love Wittgenstein's work, and I think one gets it by grasping the phenomenon (I love Heidegger's too.)
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness

    Emerson is presenting part of a new way to be heroic. There's no obvious, definite upper limit to the complexity of such a hero as far as I can tell. Who, in Bard's name, was William Shakespeare ?
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness
    But then this gets back to the argument against the author and the fixing of the meaning of texts according to the intentions of the author.Janus

    This is actually quite relevant. A certain kind of philosopher might anchor the author's meaning to some immaterial intention present as they were written. Then hopefully the same immaterial intention is recovered by the reader. No one could ever check. But I think there's an ordinary sense of idea transmission that's fine, like passing along a tool (something like an equivalence class of utterances with roughly the same fitness for the same tasks.)
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness
    It's actually Wittgenstein,Antony Nickles

    Sure. We are both paraphrasing influences. But that's beside the point I was trying to make.
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness
    I took you to be referring to it.Janus

    I was trying to, but how can I know ? What was I referring to ? Is my orange your orange ? If this stuff is private and immaterial and transconceptual, all I have is my hunch that I referred to it and your agreement. But is that evidence or just us both being trained by the same circus?

    Perhaps I showed that I can understand the other side of the issue. I wrote a mystical manifesto about qualia as a boy, though I didn't have that word. I wish I still had it. There was a bit on space, a bit on color, a bit on existence. I dared to say that such things were real.
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness
    BTW your new name evokes some associations which you may or may not have meant to invoke.Janus

    It's supposed to be a gross play on 'black flag.' Dental plaque, yes ! I intended that. It fits in with some other psychedelic postpoetry inspired by Joyce (mystical pornographic/psychoanalytic graffiti?).

    does 'poison' refer to toxins or to danger or both?Janus

    Hamlet's daddy got poison through the ear. Socrates took it through the pie hole. I'm playing with the idea of philosophy as an undecidable poisoncure, which I connect to 'toxic' masculinity.

    "[T]ranslational or philosophical efforts to favor or purge a particular signification of pharmakon [and to identify it as either "cure" or "poison"] actually do interpretive violence to what would otherwise remain undecidable."
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmakon_(philosophy)

    Note that Derrida was focused on writing as opposed to speech as such a poisoncure, a different concern.
  • [Ontology] Donald Hoffman’s denial of materialism
    Right, I'd say the meanings of words are not "anchored" in anything other than the fact that individuals associate them (as sounds or marks) with items they have experienced.Janus

    While association is a plausible explanation on the local level (how participants learn), I think it's worth focusing exactly on the social interactions involving signs and (for the moment) ignoring the internals of the participants. We can study words and other gestures, as if we were aliens, and learn to predict actions that follow such words, and so on.

    The latest bots have only piles of examples from which to gather such structure. In my view, the coming triumph of these bots (their eerie facility with language) will force us to question what meaning is in a way that only a few weird philosophers have managed to do so far.
  • [Ontology] Donald Hoffman’s denial of materialism
    What I was alluding to was something a little different: that we encounter number on account of pattern, difference, similarity and repetition, all of which are inherent in perception.Janus

    Ah. I might call that abstraction or the methodical ignoring of differences that make no difference.
  • [Ontology] Donald Hoffman’s denial of materialism
    a presumed gulf between inner and outer and the choice to begin with the former.Jamal
    I like the stressing of the choice to begin with the inner.

    I suspect this is connected to Kojeve's framing of stoics and skeptics as denying/escaping their bondage in the real world by insisting on a secret, inner freedom --saving them from risking their lives in a battle with the lord of this world. Antithetical values. Spirit is invisible, immaterial, uncaged. Feeling is first.
  • [Ontology] Donald Hoffman’s denial of materialism
    And who is well-known for having introduced the concept of 'lebenswelt' into the philosophical lexicon?Wayfarer
    I love Husserl, and I've been reading The Husserl Dictionary lately, and I'm impressed by all the terms he forged. As far as I can tell, he never stopped evolving and changing as a philosopher. As you may know, Derrida was a Husserl specialist, and of course Heidegger was the bad son.

    In whatever way we may be conscious of the world as universal horizon, as coherent universe of existing objects, we, each "I-the-man" and all of us together, belong to the world as living with one another in the world; and the world is our world, valid for our consciousness as existing precisely through this 'living together.' We, as living in wakeful world-consciousness, are constantly active on the basis of our passive having of the world... Obviously this is true not only for me, the individual ego; rather we, in living together, have the world pre-given in this together, belong, the world as world for all, pre-given with this ontic meaning... The we-subjectivity... [is] constantly functioning.
  • [Ontology] Donald Hoffman’s denial of materialism
    When philosophers talk about the “I”, they presuppose the “we”, because they do not mean a single empirical subject but the universal form of subjectivityJamal
    :up:
  • [Ontology] Donald Hoffman’s denial of materialism
    What the observer brings to experience is a perspective, a point of view, only within which any statement about what is real or what exists is meaningful.Wayfarer

    This is why I like to talk about our 'lifeworld' or 'original' world. There's a scientific image which exists within this lifeworld and only makes sense in terms of this lifeworld. Do we agree this far ?
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness
    You have just referred to it positively and in a way anyone might understand; we all probably know that experience of the orange candle flame, so what's the problem?

    I wouldn't say it overflows conceptuality, in the telling at least, since 'orange, 'candle' and 'flame' are all concepts.
    Janus

    Did I refer to it ? Who can say ? I arranged signs in a certain order.
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness
    When people are focused on making claims, it seems that they are mostly much more concerned with convincing others to their way of thinking than they are with being sure that they are consistent in their own thinking.Janus

    We find weaknesses in one another's claims. I am 'forced' to build a strong system if I am in a 'second order' culture where it's more shameful to cling to error than it is to be wrong. I see us as inheriting and updating the tribal software in an adversarial and cooperative context. We compete as teams and within teams.


    War is the father and king of all.
  • Neuroscience is of no relevance to the problem of consciousness
    I can't honestly say I'm much impressed by Wittgenstein. I have tried to read his main works and never gotten far. I've read several secondary works, but the ideas seem pedestrian and have never really grabbed me, although some of his aphorisms are good. I know saying that amounts to heresy in the eyes of many, but there it is.Janus

    It's not heresy. I just think you are missing out, not getting what's there to be got. But do you really need it to live your life ? I don't think so. It's relatively dry. But that puts me in a tough situation. I think W is a strong writer. If you don't like his ideas from him, my paraphrases will likely also fail.

    I respect your honesty, by the way. Let's say what we love and do not love.
  • [Ontology] Donald Hoffman’s denial of materialism
    Numbers as metaphors for objects?Janus

    It's not that so much as the same pattern being reused in new contexts. For the natural numbers, I highly recommend a structuralist approach. We could use entirely different symbols and it wouldn't matter, as long as we had something isomorphic. Numbers are roles.

    Imagine an alien version of Chess with everything renamed, but all the movements and rules were otherwise the same. It's the 'same' game.
  • [Ontology] Donald Hoffman’s denial of materialism
    The point of that paragraph is to illustrate the sense in which time and space - or duration and location - are provided by the observer and have no fixed or absolute reality outside that.Wayfarer

    Where is the observer ? Does it have a body ?
  • [Ontology] Donald Hoffman’s denial of materialism
    I agree that we are metaphorical creatures and that is precisely why I would say meaning can indeed be divorced from use.Janus

    I'm not arguing that meaning cannot be divorced from use. Or for it. I'm saying that the meanings of words aren't 'anchored' in or founded upon immaterial private experience. I'm saying (roughly) that meaning is established 'between' cooperative and competitive animals. Surely a language is marked on our brain in some sense (I should know more about this). We have evolved the hardware for just this kind of tribal software.

    For instance, a stop sign does not mean something immaterial or private. It does not refer to some immaterial Form of stopping. We could never check or enforce something like that. Would it even make sense to say so ?

    -- Stop signs refer to a private immaterial notion.

    --OK. But how do I know if I have labelled the correct immaterial notion 'stop' ?

    --You'll know it if you tend to put your foot on the brake when you come to the sign.

    Perhaps the training gives rise to the 'illusion' of 'platonism.'
  • [Ontology] Donald Hoffman’s denial of materialism

    I don't think that addresses my concern. Why should being be interpreted as experience ? In this world, the answer is pretty clear. We see other people and animals and take into consideration what they might do. If my dog sees a possum on our walk at night, she'll chase after it.

    But in a world without sociality and embodiment, it's not clear how the concept of a subject versus an object would appear. Note also that you thought experiment as such assumes this world in which we live with our shared language.
  • [Ontology] Donald Hoffman’s denial of materialism
    .
    Neither mathematical logic nor empirical testability are applicable in the case of the idea that meaning can be divorced from use.Janus

    I agree, but that's what made them analogies ( 'a similarity in some respects between things that are otherwise dissimilar'). I agree with Lakoff that we are metaphorical creatures. Also : math is understood metaphorically, even if proofs are theoretically computercheckable.
  • [Ontology] Donald Hoffman’s denial of materialism


    Oh yes we go way back actually. I will try to dance a merry jig.
  • [Ontology] Donald Hoffman’s denial of materialism
    Allusions to famous philosopher's arguments in lieu of laying them out in your own words (which I haven't seen but if there are such layings-out, then all you have to do is point out where they are) doesn't cut it for me; it reads like an appeal to authority.Janus

    I agree, which is why I'm glad I don't tend to do that.
  • Reasons to call Jesus God
    One does not have to decide about the limits of the law (in regard to Paul's view) to see how Augustine made the issue about a personal choice.Paine

    Can you explain ?

    I am not ascribing to that view but think it is closer to what Feuerbach was talking about than the Gospels taken by themselves.Paine

    To be clear, I did rip that Feuerbach quote out of context. I was also thinking of this, which never fails to move me.

    If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this: that he regarded only subjective realities as realities, as “truths” —that he saw everything else, everything natural, temporal, spatial and historical, merely as signs, as materials for parables. The concept of “the Son of God” does not connote a concrete person in history, an isolated and definite individual, but an “eternal” fact, a psychological symbol set free from the concept of time. The same thing is true, and in the highest sense, of the God of this typical symbolist, of the “kingdom of God,” and of the “sonship of God.” ...the word “Son” expresses entrance into the feeling that there is a general transformation of all things (beatitude), and “Father” expresses that feeling itself—the sensation of eternity and of perfection.

    The “kingdom of heaven” is a state of the heart—not something to come “beyond the world” or “after death.” The whole idea of natural death is absent from the Gospels: death is not a bridge, not a passing; it is absent because it belongs to a quite different, a merely apparent world, useful only as a symbol. The “hour of death” is not a Christian idea—“hours,” time, the physical life and its crises have no existence for the bearer of “glad tidings.”... The “kingdom of God” is not something that men wait for: it had no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it is not going to come at a “millennium”—it is an experience of the heart, it is everywhere and it is nowhere....
    ...
    This “bearer of glad tidings” died as he lived and taught—not to “save mankind,” but to show mankind how to live. It was a way of life that he bequeathed to man: his demeanour before the judges, before the officers, before his accusers—his demeanour on the cross. He does not resist; he does not defend his rights; he makes no effort to ward off the most extreme penalty—more, he invites it.... And he prays, suffers and loves with those, in those, who do him evil....
    — Nietzsche
    https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19322/19322-h/19322-h.htm

    Jesus triumphs over the Resentment Industrial Complex. He transcends low emotions, fearless and loving hero of the flaming heart....
  • Reasons to call Jesus God
    It is in direct contradiction to the Sermon on the Mount and the letter of the Law. My guess is the influence of Paul, which can b seen throughout the synoptic gospels.Fooloso4

    Oh I did notice the contradictions in that protagonist. Your guess is plausible.

    Even with the contradictions (because of them?), it's a powerful tale.
  • [Ontology] Donald Hoffman’s denial of materialism

    Note that I never offered the thesis 'meaning cannot be divorced from use.' I'm not saying it's a bad thesis.

    I'm saying a certain theory of meaning doesn't make sense (at least I think there is a strong case against it.)
  • [Ontology] Donald Hoffman’s denial of materialism
    Still no argument; just another bad analogy.Janus

    It was a good analogy. :starstruck: