I think Wittgenstein's Blue Book is a good starting point of investigation of this question, where he begins to address the problem of the location of meaning, and starts to overcome his representationalism by beginning to formulate a negative position towards private language with a more holistic and pragmatic understanding of meaning as use as an irreducible trinity of Intuition, Language and Physical interaction.

- Language isn't reducible to Intuition (contra Intuitionism)
- Intuition isn't reducible to Language (contra Formalism)
- Physics isn't reducible to Language and Intuition (contra Idealism)
- Intuition isn't reducible to Physics and Language (contra Materialism)
- Language isn't reducible to Physics and Intuition (contra Representationalism)

To me, the ontological argument for god is reminiscent of Cantor's "diagonal arguments" for the existence of uncountably large sets. This is because neither arguments are really 'arguments' in the sense of reaching a conclusion analytically via an independent process of logical deduction. Both in logical "proofs of god", and in logical "proofs of uncountable sets", the convention of syntactical deduction does not represent the intended meaning of the arguer, who isn't drawing a conclusion deductively, but is inventing his conclusion and expressing it using novel syntax and inventing additional rules of deduction to relate it to his premises.

Well, you could certainly model "true" yet opposite conclusions using paraconsistent logic, as i imagine might be particularly useful for complex supply chain analysis problems where there is a set of deductive rationales that might potentially lead to conflicting conclusions, or "dialetheia" from a shared set of premises.

Although, for simple problems representing straightforward conflicts, I can't imagine what an advantage such an approach would have over a simple model of the mutual utility of the individual actor's policies.

"It is what it is"

When giving a causal explanation?

Here it looks like an admission of ignorance.

When giving orders or reasons?

Presumably it means that we have reached bedrock when providing a chain of reasons, and that further logical justification of our reasons is nonsensical or forbidden.

mmm... now what is the connection between a nonsensical utterance and a forbidden utterance?

If Wittgenstein says "this string of words is nonsensical" doesn't he only mean to imply that in order to prevent confusion that sequence of words ought to be forbidden?

I suspect that in both of the above cases, "it is was it is" is an imperative disguised as a proposition.

Presumably the question of non-conceptualism starts with the semantic intuition that we each have only a finite number of linguistic categories at our disposal that we must somehow apply to a potentially infinite number of experiences without any public guidance beyond what we have learned crudely through a small number of supervised presentations.

For example, while in a forest a person might experience thousands of shades of green but only have words to communicate a very small number of shades, hues and textures. Yet at the same time, the person might also demonstrate a far richer non-verbal capacity to discriminate hundreds or even thousands of shades of green.

So with respect to any given class of stimulus that has a clear public definition, "non-conceptualism" is presumably the relative extent to which a person's reactive behaviour can discriminate instances of that class of stimulus, compared against their ability to verbally discriminate that class of stimulus.

my understanding of "non-conceptualism" begins and ends with the behaviour I observe of other people. I don't think that it is directly meaningful to apply this term to first-person experience per-se. However, i would guess that Wittgenstein's "picture theory" of language vs "meaning as use" are analogous concepts that are therapeutically applicable to first-person experience .

Note to posters: my opening post was also "modded" ... and some of my intention has been lost. I am not actually asking for help with understanding randomness; I am declaring true randomness to be impossible. Number sequences, such as the digits of root 2, are repatable by recipe, so can't count as truly random. — Jake Tarragon

My contention is, that a proper understanding of the various senses of lawfulness and randomness cannot lead to the conclusion that randomness is "impossible", since both lawfulness and randomness are only relations defined by convention for comparing the descriptions of sub-sequences of an observed sequence of finite length, and that these concepts cannot therefore be applied to a single sequence taken as a whole.

Since the universe cannot by definition be compared to anything outside of it, it is nonsensical to describe the history of the universe as a whole as being either lawful or random, just as it is nonsensical to describe the state of a deck of playing cards as being random or lawfully ordered - except of course in the trivial and uninformative sense that is relative to our card-ordering convention.

According to the Tracatarian or logical notion of objective probability, objective probability is a normalised count of the number of states of affairs that make a proposition true.

So "god doesn't play dice" to me seems to be a grammatical objection to the conflation of the epistemic notion of probability with the objective notion of probability that physics by definition is supposed to describe.

In short, quantum probabilities that are not reducible to objective probabilities cannot by definition be part of a physically descriptive theory.

My only concern with physics's obsession with objective probability, is that I can only understand objective probability as an "intra-physical" notion, whereby it only makes sense to refer to "laws" of physics when comparing physical data to other physical data in a manner that is relative to scientific conventions for making data comparisons.

Here is a bit sequence:

A) 101010101010

Taken as a whole, is it meaningful to ask whether A is random or lawful "in itself"?

Here is another bit sequence

B) 101010

Isn't A only "lawful" relative to B?

A question for anyone who either

a) Believes in an afterlife
b) Doesn't believe in an afterlife, or
c) Is undecided about an afterlife

1. What do you imagine an afterlife, or the absence of an afterlife to consist of?

2. What makes you think that your current imagination of the afterlife/absence of afterlife isn't merely your definition of the terms "afterlife" or "negated afterlife"? What makes you think that your imagination in either case has a transcendental meaning beyond your immediate imagination?

Contrast this problem against an ordinary example of imagining something that might or might not have a reference:

For example, I have never been to Egypt (to the best of my knowledge), but I believe that I can currently imagine what the interior of an undiscovered tomb in Egypt might look like. But does it make sense for me ask myself solely on the basis of this image as to whether or not my imagined tomb will be discovered, or for that matter whether or not it is in Egypt?

Change the thought experiment so that a person who's never seen it before and isn't compelled by the assumptions to see only a duck or only a rabbit. Assume they see the duck first, but then they see the rabbit. They will have learned something, namely that the picture can be seen as a duck or a rabbit, but there is no fact about the image which will allow them to distinguish duck from rabbit. If they've learned something, and it's not a fact about the image, what is it? — fdrake

their perceptual response to the image :)

A form of irreducible knowledge subsuming both the subject and object.

But of course, the fact that perception is active does not in general imply that identical data is being judged - at least if by identical data one includes additional contextual information that that the observer surreptitiously obtains or creates during the course of judgement.

For example, in the case of the spinning ballerina illusion one's eye might wriggle in a certain motion to bias perception towards one interpretation.

agreed!

However, if Steve and Sally were invited to look very closely at the duck-rabbit picture they were shown, they may be able to discover certain things they did not know before about how it was drawn. But this is impossible, since no further knowledge of the duck rabbit is attainable! — fdrake

If there are no contextual reasons to classify the duck-rabbit as one thing or another, and if it is also assumed that noticing any additional data features doesn't influence judgement, then no further knowledge of the duck-rabbit is attainable.

So what's the problem?

Whenever someone looks at an ambiguous figure, like the duck-rabbit, their perceptions are in such a state of undecidability:

1) Person sees a duck.
2) Person sees a rabbit.
(Google duck rabbit for images)

Imagine a person - Steve, could see only the duck. Imagine a person, Sally, could see only the rabbit. Steve could gain no more information about the hidden rabbit status of the duck, nor could Sally gain information about the hidden duck status of the rabbit. If you compose and conjoin what they know, there is no more attainable evidence. This is because Steve and Sally together have all information about the duck status and the rabbit status of the duck rabbit; evidence is consistent with the duck and the rabbit status, and so no further knowledge of the duck rabbit is attainable. However, if Steve and Sally were invited to look very closely at the duck-rabbit picture they were shown, they may be able to discover certain things they did not know before about how it was drawn. But this is impossible, since no further knowledge of the duck rabbit is attainable!

Where does this go wrong? I'm not completely sure. — fdrake

i suspect your example conflates the notion of data with the notion of evidence that is only meaningful with respect to a rule of interpretation.

Assuming Sally and Steve both see an identical image, it does not follow that they would interpret the image in the same way, unless they additionally share identical rules of judgement for identifying ducks and rabbits. And even then, they might still differ in their judgements if they each possessed different perceptual objectives, each seeing only what they wanted to see.

To answer that question I would consider the question from a Presentist perspective.

After all,

the presently imagined future isn't the actual future,
just as the presently remembered past isn't the actual past.

And the presently imagined actual future isn't the actual actual future,
just as the presently imagined actual past isn't the actual actual past.

And the presently imagined actual actual future isn't the actual actual actual future ,
just as the presently imagined actual actual past isn't the actual actual actual past.

And the...

So the imagination cannot refer to time but only empty signs of temporal pretence, while the present reduces to whatever one is imagining or looking at.

I'm not sure how evidence for a 'subtle body' could ever imply that consciousness could exist without a body. A contradiction, surely.

Even if NDE reports were universally consistent and produced successful remote viewing, that would only imply that the laws of physics and the body were more complicated than we previously thought them to be.

But how could even that possibility entail a leap to the conclusion that consciousness is now transcendental and independent of the body under it's revised definition?

The definition of a "dead" person would still remain the same, namely a person who doesn't wake up from an NDE to give remote viewing reports. "Dead" people would therefore still fail to produce successful remote viewing accounts as they always have done, while only the "living" who returned from an NDE would share their veridical and consistent accounts of remote viewing.

NDEs whether consistent, inconsistent, "hallucinatory" or "veridical" cannot have metaphysical implication for consciousness to become detached from the body, because behaviourism always revises its definitions so that "consciousness" and "body" coincide.

the problem of course, is that p -> q as axiomatically specified in formal logic does not represent the practical application of modus ponens in practice, where there is always the possibility of inferential disagreement and doubt, due to life being an open system (or a globally uncertain closed system, depending on your cosmic beliefs).

one man's axiom is another man's unprovable formula. We make up our rules of deduction as we go along to suit our current purposes.

As for the status of modus ponens in the physical sciences, Hume already showed that it is not an empirical notion unless p is an observation term whose definition entails immediate observation of q.

i think you should give Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations a thorough read, and complement it with a study of the collapse of the analytic-synthetic distinction.

That ought to debunk or slacken your dogmatic intuitions of mechanistic thought.

But what I mean by an 'internal limit' is simply to say that (trivially) what is thinkable is limited by what is thinkable, and by "thinkable" I don't mean merely a psychological phenomenon, but the limits which are set by our concepts or logic, which define what makes sense to us. — Fafner

We have the same position here, i meant empirical verification only in the internal sense of methodological solipsism - as opposed to epistemological solipsism. In other words what is not cognizable in terms of first-person experiential phenomena is judged to be meaningless and lacking truth-value as opposed to being transcendentally right or wrong but unknowable.

But what I am saying is that what reality is (in the strong metaphysical sense of 'things-being-in-themselve-independently-of-our-minds') is precisely that thing which we imagine ourselves to know if indeed we know it and are not mistaken — Fafner

Unfortunately "mistakes" and "knowledge" in ordinary language are usually interpreted in terms of Truth-By-Correspondence, and this commonly held background assumption in conjunction with your "if" clause makes your paragraph read as if you at least concede to the dream-sceptic that the dream/reality distinction is logically conceivable in terms of T-B-C.

But I understand that isn't what you mean, as I understand you to be a deflationist about mental representation when taken as-a-whole. In other words, Truth-by-correspondence about everything as a whole is neither right or wrong, but meaningless because it is unthinkable, so that neither skepticism nor non-skepticism in this sense is strictly meaningful. Isn't that the case?

As i previously suggested, i suspect that some dream skeptics, possibly most of them, are implicitly defining the "dream vs reality" distinction in terms of the coherence and cohesiveness of their experiences - which is of course an entirely internal notion to experience that is both understandable and doesn't involve any Cartesian notion of transcendental truth-bearers beyond the individual's experience.

It is an interesting fact of accidental experimental psychology that virtual-reality gaming and fantasy-proneness are correlated with increased incidents of lucid dreaming, thus indicative of the importance of experiential structure in our private classification of our own dream states.

Let's reverse the question:

Is "Lawfulness" an objectively meaningful concept in a sense that transcends human psychology, practical decision-making and mathematical convention?

Given that a human being can only make a finite sequence of observations, i don't see what either "objectively lawful" or "objectively random" could add to the description of a human being's life experiences taken as a whole.

The only response i can imagine is

"Lawfulness concerns only the predictability of future observations in relation to past observations".

But how can "lawfulness" refer to observations that haven't happened?

Assuming we aren't fortune tellers or psychics whose minds literally peer into the future, this must be another way of saying

"lawfulness describes the similarity of one previously observed pattern to another previously observed pattern that are for practical purposes considered to be comparable via the invention of some convention for human purposes whereby the positions on one pattern are said to be 'equivalent' to positions on the other pattern".

In which case "lawfulness" merely describes how similar a sub-sequence of observations is to another sub-sequence of observations within the super-sequence of observations it is part of, relative to a convention that defines a notion of 'similarity' to allow for sub-sequence comparisons.

None of this leads to any impression that "lawfulness" is is in any sense objective or diametrically opposed to the converse convention of 'chance' or non-repeatability.

I would say that my criteria for distinguishing reality from fantasy are only local criteria that are tailored for making specific distinctions, such as determining whether or not harry potter is real or not. All distinctions must rest upon a process of empirical validation that lies outside of the distinction one is trying to make.

I'm therefore tempted to say that it is meaningless to regard everything as being either real or fictitious in an absolute sense, since there isn't in that instance any room left for an independent process of empirical verification that is needed to make the distinction.

Therefore refuting the non-skeptic as well as the skeptic.

However, as regular lucid dreamers well know, present psychological judgements of what is real or not is largely a function of how coherent one's present experiences are to one's remembered past.

When a certain class of skeptics insist that everything could be a dream, I believe they are referring only to the possibility that the future renders their present memories and perceptual judgements as incoherent. Since this definition of "unreality" is only in terms of the mental state of the individual it is obviously a very different form of epistemic uncertainty to that related to truth-by-correspondence.

Sorry, im confused by the original post

Does one's working definitions of Waking and Dreaming reduce to immediate empirical contents, to non-immediate empirical implications, to both or to neither?

Do the sets of experiences referred to by one's working definition of waking and dreaming overlap, or do waking and dreaming refer to disjoint sets of experiences?

But what if it's a simulation of a human society and not just a brain? Would all those 1s and 0s written out on paper over a century have experiences then? — Marchesk

Over the years i have noticed that my personal and pre-theoretic recognition of other minds on an emotional level is skin-deep, analogous to "if it speaks and acts like a duck, then it is a duck *by definition*".

I would have to say that any simulation of humans that I naturally empathise with, regardless of the medium of instantiation, is conscious for me by definition, and to an extent that is dependant on the overall context.

I guess this suggests that, for me at least, the bit representation of 'other minds i recognize' is meaningful to the context-specific extent that it produces the recognized conscious-behaviour.

So, just as with complied software, a mere string of 1s and 0s is meaningless in and of itself and does not relate to conscious behaviour, unless running as a program within a specific architectural medium that produces the necessary behaviour. So in a holistic sense, i would say it is partially relevant, but not in any mind-independent sense.

Well, the Wittgensteinian answer would be to say that the environmental and cultural context that is normally present when asserting that "China Brain" is conscious, is lacking, in the same way that the normal context required for the same assertion is also lacking when considering the abstract operations of a human brain divorced from it's environmental and inter-personal context.

In my opinion the "other mind" realist is only bemused because he insists on imagining a vast graph of interacting neurons, ants or chinese people and thinks to himself "i can't relate to this mechanism, because i cannot imagine facial expressions, eyes and a mouth and intelligent interaction with it" and he then proceeds to mistake his lack of empathy for the mechanism for an absence of an intrinsic property within the mechanism.

Since first-person experience is the basis of clarifying and verifying the meaning of all assertions relating to third person perception, to science and to counterfactual possibility then I cannot envisage any meaningful starting point of investigation other than the Cartesian standpoint of the individual who understands his own utterances in terms of his immediate experiences that provoke or correspond to his own utterances.

Let's take a predicate from the first and third person perspective:

a. "I see red"
b. "He sees red"

I presume that everyone is in agreement that the conditions of assertion of a and b are not generally inter-translatable. Wittgenstein mentioned in PI that the experiential criteria for (b) are "what he says and does", but that (a) cannot be given experiential criteria in terms of other words.

Since the meaning of a. and b. are irreconcilable (at least to Wittgenstein), then how did our language manage to trick us into thinking that a and b are in some way transcendentally equivalent or inter-translatable?

What if our language had merged the subject, verb and object so that a and b were represented with the single words "Iseered" and "heseesred" respectively?

Could such a language remain as competitive as our actual language?

Could beliefs in realism still get off the ground?

I am under the impression that realists interpret imagined counterfactual possibilities of perception as being evidence for the existence of mind independent objects.

Conversely, I understand idealists as interpreting imagined counterfactual possibilities of perception as being the definition of "mind-independent" objects.

[re

What's idealism got to do with biosemiotic mechanism exactly? — apokrisis

nothing whatsoever if this was a science thread purely concerned with the language-game of biology. But i thought this was a philosophy discussion concerning consciousness and hence representationalism.

Life begins when there is the first semiotic step - a membrane pump protein dedicated to maintaining a metabolism sustaining flow by kicking out enough sodium ions, using the energy being released by the consequent redox reaction — apokrisis

Unless the factual content of biology is distinguished from it's unnecessary interpretation as involving objective intra-physical representations, i predict this thread will go nowhere.

What is first needed is a discussion as to why semiotics doesn't collapse into subjective idealism or solipsistic verificationism, a discussion which could potentially benefit from a close comparison of pierce's semiotic pan-psychism to both standard materialism and Berkley's idealism.

I give up, why? Seriously, I don't understand the question. — Galuchat

I'm only saying that questions about "life" and "death" and of the existence or non-existence of "other minds" are skin-deep without metaphysical significance, because the definitions of these concepts reduce to society's emotional responses to observed behaviour, and were only invented for the social needs of society.

An abortion advocate doesn't feel empathy towards a fetus, hence by definition the fetus isn't conscious for the abortion advocate.

A pro-lifer feels empathy towards the fetus, hence by definition the fetus is conscious for the pro-lifer.

If there aren't any community-independent criteria to settle the matter one way or the other, then why should we think that there is a mind-independent fact of the matter about whether a fetus is or is not conscious?

In resolving conceptual questions, fact should be the starting point for Philosophy. It is the remit of Science, not Philosophy, to establish fact. The remit of Philosophy is to determine concept coherence. — Galuchat

In that case, if a perfectly content panpsychist imagines everything to be alive, and a perfectly content behaviourist imagines everything to be dead, and a perfectly content dualist imagines a duplication of entities, why should a third-party philosopher assume that there is a transcendental fact-of-the-matter that determines who is 'correct'?

I think the average Platonist subjectively identifies Infinity with the feeling of exhilaration they experience when imagining the beginning of a sequence of successively larger sets without an apparent limit.

This explains their resentment when a finitist says that infinity isn't real because it isn't constructable via counting. They interpret the finitist as denying them a rush.

Suppose a panpsychist argues that his pet rock is conscious and that it should be handled with great care

"Human's cannot be in possession of emergent spiritual qualities that aren't already present in someway in so-called 'inanimate' matter"

A materialist smashes the rock and replies

"This rock wasn't conscious since it lacked sensory receptors, a nervous system and wasn't self preserving"

Is this really a dispute over objective facts, or is it merely a rhetorical exchange of subjective behavioural preferences?

How are metaphysical disagreements different from disputes over the best flavour of ice-cream?

Another good question. Answer: No.

But since it doesn't cost much to establish the fact that not only conscious, but also semi-conscious and non-conscious human mind-body conditions exist, anyone is free to conduct their own empirical investigation: simply observe that people can be awake, asleep, or in a coma. — Galuchat

But if the answer is No, in virtue of consciousness being reducible to a cognitive-behavioural definition, then "consciousness" is nothing more than a linguistic convention.

Hence the sentence "a functioning brain is aware" is analytic, and therefore meaningless, and everyone is free to invent their own definition of "awareness", irrespective of observed matters of fact.

Good question. Given the following tentative definitions:

1) Conscious: fully responsive and fully aware.
2) Responsive: receptive and/or reactive.
3) Aware: sensitive and perceptive.
4) Sensation: the mental experience of interoception.
5) Perception: the mental experience of sensory stimulation.
6) Interoception: the reception of a physiological stimulus by an internal organ which transmits neural signals to the brain, resulting in sensation.
7) Sensory Stimulation: the reception of a physical stimulus from the environment by a sense organ, which transmits neural signals to the brain, resulting in perception.

If bacteria do not have a brain and sense organs, is there any point in trying to devise an experiment to test the hypothesis? — Galuchat

What about the reverse question:

Since a living human has a functional brain and sensory organs, is there any point in trying to devise an experiment to test the hypothesis that a human is conscious, given the fact a human is *by definition* said to be conscious in virtue of possessing a functioning brain and sensory organs?

Suppose someone said "Bacteria are unconscious because in lacking a nervous system they lack the capacity for certain stimulus-response behavioural dispositions"

What is the role of "because" in the above sentence?

Does Is it refer to empirical implication or to linguistic definition?

One of the best presidents in the last 20 or so years.

He's doing what a President should do, which is not being a slave to the media and to what other people think of him, and standing up for what he believes in, even when it's unpopular. — Agustino

lol. So you would presumably have no objection in the unlikely event that Trump said he had converted to being a diplomatic moderate who was sensitive to the perception of the international community as represented by the media and would seek the endorsement of Obama on every issue.

After all, he should only stand up for what he believes in, even if its unpopular.

Observation can move to nothing (as it does while asleep and not dreaming) — Rich

Are states of "unconsciousness" hypotheses about the past, or are states of unconsciousness empirical observations concerning the present, and hence a contradiction?

Let's first discard the irrelevant case: If one is able to remember vague details of being asleep upon waking, then presumably one wouldn't want to assert being unconscious in a qualitative sense. Instead, one might speak of recalling a diminished state of consciousness, which is only to speak of recalling a diminished state of attention as evidenced by (or perhaps, defined by) a presently vague recollection of having slept.

Only if one cannot recall anything about being asleep upon waking, might one say that they were truly and qualitatively "unconscious" then. But how does one differentiate an assertion of being unconscious in the past, from being in a present state of amnesia?

The temporal realist will want to insist that they were truly unconscious in the past, perhaps by saying "I recall being unconscious". But the temporal anti-realist will then respond "how do you 'know' you were unconscious in the past? To which the realist can only respond "because i presently experience having no recollection" - which is really only to assert that their current experiences do not involve memories of sleeping.

If one abandons the idea of time as a mind-independent substance, then what could "continuity of the self" mean from the perspective of Presentism?

Must the first-person perspective be moving, or just everything it observes?

From a strictly empirical perspective, "reincarnation", or perhaps rather "immortality", seems to be nothing more than the assumption of perpetually observed change.

What do you imagine knowing all of the answers feels like?
Why not just skip all the philosophising and enter that state directly?

I used to have the same feelings of being overwhelmed when studying mathematics. I felt the need to continually study complex proofs, as opposed to just simply accepting results at face value.

Nowadays I can't remember many proofs. I just drink alcohol and quote Wikipedia.

My view now is: the ordinary logical form does not and cannot accurately reproduce the sentence-meaning. It makes an entirely different statement. That in a way is the point of Wittgenstein's shift from the Tractatus view to the Investigations view: most 'propositions' are judgments, not statements of fact. — mcdoodle

But if the meaning of future-contingent propositions are their use, then before the future has arrived they are reducible to the assertion or denial of present behavioural dispositions.

Only upon expiry of the future-contingent state of affairs that they are, post-hoc, associated with, can those propositions be retrospectively interpreted as being of the associated state of affairs they "pretended" to be about at the original time of their assertion.

hence those sentences are surely truth apt, both now and in the future, albeit for different reasons, and propositional logic should capture that relationship succinctly.

To my understanding, pragmatism isn't generally considered to be a cohesive body of agreed upon thought that is acceptable to all of its adherents. And in identifying oneself to be a pragmatist there is always the paradoxical danger of misinterpreting pragmatism non-pragmatically in the spirit of metaphysical dogmatism.

For sake of argument, let's assume there is no such thing as retro-causality, such that a person's entire behaviour is explainable as being caused by events of the past.

Then whenever a person plans on, predicts, or discusses the future, what is it that justifies our interpretation of his behaviour as being of the actual future?

Suppose it is Monday and that he predicts the Sun will rise tomorrow on Tuesday. Given that it is currently Monday, can his prediction currently refer to Tuesday, before Tuesday has actually happened?

Or does it only make sense retrospectively, in a post hoc fashion, after having witnessing the following morning of Tuesday, to identify his earlier prediction as referring to the dawn of Tuesday?