All forms of pattern recognition involve a priori representational assumptions. Unsupervised learning is no different. In fact machine learning nicely vindicates neo-Kantian ideas of perceptual judgement, even if not in terms of the same fundamental categories, nor from categories derived from introspective transcendental arguments (Kant was after all, targeting philosophical skepticism about the self and the possiblity of knowledge of the external world, and not the scientific problem of how to understand the behavioural aspects of mental functioning that concerns a merely empirical affair)

But yet from this neo-Kantian perspective, consider for example a nearest-neighbour image classifier consisting of nothing more than a disordered collection of images. Without any a priori assumptions it is impossible to even talk about this image collection as containing a pattern by which to classify new images with respect to that pattern.

This was the basic observation of David Hume. Raw observation data by itself cannot justify empirical judgements as claims to knowledge. Kant merely pointed out that raw observations alone cannot even constitute empirical judgements, which as machine learning nicely illustrates, requires innate judgement in the form of synthetic-a priori responses.

Generalisation from experience requires metrics of similarity for perceptual pattern matching, together with categories of perception for filtering the relevant information to be compared. Neural networks don't change this picture, even if perceptual filters are partially empirically influenced. Decisions still need to be made about the neural architecture, its width, depth, the neural activation responses on each layer, the anticipatory patterns of neurons and so on.

All of this constitutes "synthetic a priori" processing.

Thank you fdrake and others!

Just one last thing:
Where does the law of excluded middle fit into all this?
A statement must be either true or false.

So if it is unprovable, within a formal axiomatic system, and you cannot decide it's truth value even by going outside the system, what value do you assign to that statement?
How does this fit within the context of Godel's theorems? — guptanishank

LEM is irrelevant, since Godel's Incompleteness theorems don't use it, that is to say, his proof is entirely constructive and syntactic without invoking ~~P -> P.

Recall that Godels results weren't at all surprising to Intuitionists who rejected LEM twenty years in advance of the publication of his incompleteness theorems precisely because they rejected the the assumption that logic has transcendental significance beyond the step-wise empirical construction of its formulas in accordance with intuition. Why on the basis of this intuition ought it be expected that for any well-formed formula P in the language of an axiomatic system that we must derive P or ~P?

Since it is nonsensical to imagine proving the consistency of an axiomatic system that captures arithmetic, it is equally nonsensical to imagine the existence of true yet un-provable statements.

Godel sentences are not "true but unprovable" for this reason. For to assume that they are true is to beg the question of consistency, an assumption without which it is impossible to assign any meaning to godel sentences, for they are no longer necessarily non-derivable.

When reading popular accounts of Godel's theorem, there is always this whiff of a shady magical trick being pulled before the reader's eyes. And this magical trick is when authors like Douglas Hofstadter attempt to sell mystery to the reader by saying to the effect "forget about this boring and logically impossible-to-verify disclaimer about logical consistency that we cannot meaningfully assert, or the related fact that completed infinity doesn't really exist - *cough* look at this weird "self-referencing" Escher picture!"

I'm not sure I follow your point. You don't see how levels of awareness change between dream states and waking states? Moreover, there is no correspondence between NDEs and lucid dreaming in the sense that they are even close to equivalent. One knows when one is having a lucid dream, at least most of us do, and lucid dreams have a dreamlike quality that's not even close to what we experience on an everyday basis. NDEs, as I'm contending, are as reality like as you can get, in fact people claim that it's more real than real, it's hyper-real. — Sam26

No that is generally false. Lucid Dreams can be appear to be as equally real as reality. I think you are only thinking of spontaneous, low quality lucid dreams that occur when tired in nightly sleep. In contrast, wake-induced lucid dreaming that is deliberately achieved by a fully awake subject in the daytime through deep meditation or falling asleep consciously can indeed seem hyper-real. This explains why occultists have insisted on referring to them as Out-of-Body experiences, or astral projection.

There simply isn't a convincing reason to distinguish dream states from "out of body experiences" on the basis of hallucinatory/sensory phenomena.

If you don't believe me, why not try it???

This is exactly what RT is not. If there has ever been a god-like perspective then it is that of RT. How else could you explain time dilation and space contraction? Observers in their own frame of reference do not experience it. — Hachem

As i said, my understanding of SR is that it inter-translates local frames of reference that are causally connected within the speed of light of each other. But that doesn't make it a consistent theory of ALL conceivable frames of reference that lie outside of one another's light cones. Indeed SR has nothing to say about causal implications for space-like events.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity#Causality_and_prohibition_of_motion_faster_than_light

Yes it is, strictly speaking, nonsensical to speak of "true empirical contradictions", including the empirical consequences of special or general relativity - but that isn't the sense of "contradiction" to which philosophers appear to be referring to with the theory of relativity.

For what philosophers seem to be implicitly referring to here is an observer-independent transcendental interpretation of the theory of relativity that they are imagining in line with what their common-sense intuition about what science ought to tell us about a gods-eye perspective of nature.

Special relativity in being an empirical theory is, like with any scientific theory, only designed to account for empirical observations obtainable in the first-person. The theory shows that if our common-sense notion of causation is to be consistent without contradictory implications, then nothing can travel faster than the speed of light; SR says that for any two events that cannot physically influence one-another without interacting via faster than light signals, then it is impossible to say in an observer-independent sense which event occurs first or second, let alone whether they occur simultaneously. They have as it were, a "space-like" relation without a specific temporal ordering, a opposed to a "time-like" temporal ordering.

Hence if one interpreted SR transcendentally in the sense of trying to imagine its implications from a "gods-eye" perspective of the universe as whole, it does indeed imply contradictory states of affairs relative to our notion of causality.

Of course, this is a nonsensical interpretation of SR and forgets the fact that SR is a theory that is only supposed to be meaningful *relative* to a given frame of reference and to describe a frame of reference's relation to "nearby" frames of reference for which the ordering of causation remains unchanged.

But then what of General Relativity? Does it improve matters by giving us a god's eye perspective? i think not. For it allows different frames of references for which events are either seen as time-like or space-like. For example:

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/339235/causality-in-general-relativity

I'd like a more astute philosopher of science to chime in here, but I understand that general relativity only avoids 'transcendental contradiction' in the scientifically unimportant sense when it is interpreted either

1) anti-metaphysically, instrumentally and solipsistically as a computational device for describing only a particular individual observer's experiences and hypothetical observers within his conceivable future.

or

2) as a global metaphysics without any interpretation in terms of first-person experience..

I imagine idealists to accept 1, and realists to accept 2.

The anti-metaphysical stance of verificationism suggests that the most logical position on the "afterlife" is that of a soulless immortality that results by judging both "mortality" and "immortality" to be metaphysically inapplicable concepts that are empirically trivial in pertaining only to empirical matters of behaviour decided by convention:

1) Verificationism is anti-realist about time, since the meaning of "past" and "future" reduces to present empirical conditions pertaining to their assertion. Hence all observed change could be said to occur within a non-moving present that can only be said to exist 'in a manner of speaking'.

2) Verificationism is behaviourist concerning "life" and "death" since these concepts are reduced to their empirical criteria of assertion which pertain only to observed biological behaviour in observed persons and other organisms.

Hence for verificationism it would appear impossible in virtue of 1 and 2 to talk meaningfully about the life or death of a literal "first-person" owner of experience, except in the sense of a fictional person that we know of as the "first-person" or "empirical ego" which pertains only to an idea of the imagination that is derived from the publicly verified meaning of "living person" by way of analogy.

So the analogy I'm speaking of is the analogy between dream states and waking states, and waking states and NDEs. We know, for example, that moving into a dream state is moving from a higher level of awareness to a lower level of awareness. — Sam26

This idea of absolute or relative "levels of awareness" sounds highly implausible given the close correspondence of OBEs, NDEs and lucid dreaming and how each supposedly distinct category of experience lacks any essential identifier, with examples of each 'category' spanning the conceivable spectrum of conscious experience, each example emphasising different sensory modalities and parts of volitional agency, language processing, attention and memory , that aren't always amplified or attenuated in the same direction.

It seems my view of the world is grounded in my mind. But I see no way to support the claim that the whole world is grounded in my mind, or in anyone else's mind. I see no way to support the claim that the world disappears when any one animal goes to sleep; nor the claim that the world disappears when any one animal dies. — Cabbage Farmer

Why should the idea that the existence of the world is not independent of first-person experience conflict with the observation that the world continues when other animals sleep?

Why the single-standard assumption that what is true to say of the third-person must also be true to say of the first-person?

Why the prejudice against solipsism?

We have compassion for another because we are ultimately of the same essence. However, I don't think he really means that in compassion we actually feel another's suffering inside another persons body — jancanc

Yes in a sense and No in a sense.

This type of mind-body-problem is caused by the surface grammar of our language suggesting to us the idea of there being an 'owner' of first-person experience.

This is caused by the fact that as children we learned sensation words in inter-subjective contexts in which our carers point to the behaviour of themselves and to other people while saying a pain word, and then they repeat exactly the same word to ourselves when we behave similarly. From this process we arrive at the idea of a literal first-person who isn't merely equivalent to experience itself, but is rather a distinct yet hidden entity who 'owns' their experience.

One way to interrogate this idea is to replace the word "pain" with two separate words. For example, call pain "i-pain" if it is pain which I experience and call it "b-pain" when I am referring to somebody else's pain behaviour.

Your question is then translated into questions concerning the relationship of how these two words fit-together, such as whether learning the meaning of 'i-pain' is dependent on learning the meaning of 'b-pain'

A question probably best left as a forum exercise :)

If i say "now and here" for no apparent reason while pointing at a tree, what information have i conveyed?

Haven't I at best, merely named the tree "now and here"?

I think

Eternalists are temporal realists who believe that our physical notion of time is fundamental and represents mind-independent and psychologically timeless entities that in some metaphysically independent way gives rise to our psychological notion of time.

Presentists are temporal idealists who see our psychological notion of time as fundamental and consisting of private definitions of temporal signification which relate directly to first-person experience, and believe that physical time is conceptually reducible to talk of psychological time.

All stated rules are given their sense only by our application of them and not by their syntactical definition, since a stated definition is in itself a rule whose meaning must also be shown by application.

Sign signification, in being a rule, likewise only makes sense when considered as a human reaction that connects sign to signified. And that is true for both mathematical rules and physical laws. For in both of these cases if we entirely ignored how humans use equations, we would lose the ability to show that the equations represent or imply anything.

And we cannot eliminate ourselves as the meaning-mediators of rules via simply introducing additional rules to describe our meaning-making, since we immediately arrive at a similar problem as before, namely we would need to demonstrate our rules of 'self' description for them to signify anything. .

A trivial corollary of this is that the "free will vs determinism" debate is utterly nonsensical.

Now i have never read any Peirce except for his SEP entry, and I don't have a good grasp of his notion of an interpretant, particularly in my recollection of his earlier problem of an endless of chain of signification, but my reasoning tells me that his semiotic philosophy can only make sense if it reduces to a pre-theoretic foundation of meaning grounded in human perception or action that cannot be stated but can only be shown.

Similarly, I would strongly argue that Berkeley's notion of an 'idea' wasn't a theoretical concept of the mind, but a gesture towards a pre-theoretical basis of relating to the world that also can only be shown, since it is only by interpreting Berkeley in this way that his subjective-idealism can defeat his intended target of epistemological scepticism that results from representational materialism.

So basically I am led by the force of logic to conclude, at least on the basis of my possibly incorrect understanding of these two philosophers, that Berkeley and Peirce must share the same idealism. Indeed i cannot even see how idealism can be theoretical without being self-refuting, and hence i cannot see room for more than one idealism.

I'm simply saying that how I cannot see how the finite syntax of mathematical statements can represent a super-task so i cannot see why mathematics should recognise zeno's paradox. Surely the mathematical answer isn't to 'solve' the paradox but to reject it, by showing that it cannot be derived or represented unless there is an equivocation of

"A line is infinitely divisible" which is a finitely describable definition of a rule

with

"A line has an infinite number of segments" which cannot be represented in our syntax.

Of course, set theory invented the "axiom of infinity" to express the idea of "countable infinite sets". But there is a big difference between expressing the syntax of an idea vs the representing the semantics of the idea. And I cannot think of a compelling reason to see the axiom of infinity is anything other than a meaningless syntactical rule for manipulating finite syntax that represents nothing and lacks real world application , with the possible exception of representing things that are not infinite.

So to my thinking, we can colloquially talk about the probability of infinite sequences as 'names' for our syntax and we can point to associated syntactical expressions of limits and mutter words like "measure zero". But philosophers shouldn't take those words literally.

es we can say that induction is bad, mathematics is bad, we know nothing about the real world, or that the world doesnt even exist. We can disagree in a lot of things. But I still stick to math and science. And I say that Zeno's paradox is mathematically conceivable. Is the mathematical interpretation the absolute and ultimate interpretation? Probably not. Can concieve the structures of Mathematics? No. Does it matter? No. Because Mathematics seem to work.
The mathematical interpretation of the paradox is the only one logically consistent with Newtonian mechanics. So "logically" I dont know why should I deny the possibility of an infinite chain of events. Of course we will never know what the ultimate truth about matter is. But still Maths provides the best answers. — Meta

I'm not doubting what we can "know", I'm only doubting what we can mean to ourselves mathematically.

I don't see how Zeno's paradox can be represented in mathematics, since neither calculus nor logic can literally represent a super-task.

In calculus we might write part of a geometric series:

{0, 1/2, 3/4, ..., 1}

But what could it mean to say that the dots "..." represent an "infinite" number of steps?

Is it really the case that "..." is an abbreviation for missing numbers here? Or was it just a sign we invented, along with a rule that if we write "..." then we can allow ourselves to write the limit of the geometric series?

Likewise the rule of induction tells us "given any line divided into finite segments, and given a rule which we grant ourselves to break line segments in smaller segments , then we can permit ourselves to say "the line is infinitely divisible ". But how do we jump from here to the conclusion that "the line really has an infinite number of segments"? For the rule of induction has only given us a definition for what "the line is infinitely divisible" means. And it means nothing else than to say "i have a line of finite segments, and a rule for further subdividing them"

Zeno's paradox was needed to show we can't state for sure that an infinite chain of events is impossible. In fact the only solution I know to Zeno's paradox uses infinite sums and that an infinite number of events can happen in finite time. I dont want to talk more about the paradox since the message of my comment is crystal clear. — Meta

again, in line with my previous post, one can question whether zeno's paradox is actually conceivable, for it assumes that it is meaningful to talk about infinite and arbitrarily small divisions of a substance, and yet we have never constructed such a thing either on paper, nor with a machine, nor have we ever made arbitrarily small perceptual discriminations.

One cannot say, "yes but zeno's paradox is mathematically conceivable", because again, our mathematical accounts are finite and cannot necessitate the infallible and infinite interpretation required of it.

All we are doing with Zenos paradox is brainwashing ourselves by using the principle of induction.

"I have shown i can keep slicing a cake" means nothing more "I sliced a piece of cake several times until I contented myself with the idea that i can slice the cake again"

Another way of thinking about the probability of infinite sequences is to reject the assertion that it is meaningful or even possible to linguistically refer to a single infinite sequence. For why should we assume that our finite use of language actually 'picks-out' any single infinite sequence when we appear to talk about it, given that we have not constructed it?

In other words, rather than interpret {H,T,...} to denote a particular yet unspecified infinite sequence of coin tosses beginning with the prefix Head-Tail, lets interpret it to directly represent the entire set of infinite coin toss sequences beginning with H,T.

The advantage of this way of thinking to my mind, is it that it resolves the paradox of our standard theory of probability without us having to change it. We can say that we assign probability one to the entire set of infinite binary sequences simply because our problem is binary and sequential, and yet we can defend our assignment of probability zero to any finite set of infinite sequences simply because we are not interested in these unobservable sets in practice and because they are unthinkable.

This interpretation of classical probability is entirely in line with how it is used in practice, for example when predicting the stock market, where {H,T,...} might represent all of the information a trader might have a time t=2 but where there is no purpose for applying probability to finite sets of infinite sequences that require infinite information.

Even if we extend the rules of probability to assign infinitesimally small probabilities to individual sequences, it turns out, at least on some forms of non-standard analysis, that we will end up describing more than we bargained for. For example we will end up describing sequences of coin tosses that are *even longer* than mere countable infinity, and our original problem resurfaces on an even larger level.

your intuition is correct, or should i say, formalised to be correct by definition in classical probability, as, informally speaking, as you imply, the probability of getting at least one tail for an unbiased coin in N trials converges to 1 as N -> inf, yet there still remains an infinitesimally small probability of flipping all heads, a result which cannot be directly represented in classical probability due to it defining probability values as lying in the space of real numbers which forbids infinitesimals. This is the likely source of confusion.

Formally speaking, Probabilities are *measures*, which is to say they are functions defined upon sets of outcomes which obey our intuitions of what a probability function should look like. If the set of possible outcomes contains an unlimited number of possibilities the calculus allows us to consistently assign a value of "one" for the entire collection and "zero" for subsets of that set which contain only a finite number of possible outcomes. Such subsets of possibility, although not empty, are said to be of "measure zero" and to never occur "almost surely".

***** doesn't re-present the number five. The number five is present (immanent) in *****. It doesn't matter if you don't know that it is there or don't know how to count. It also wouldn't matter if there were no sentient beings in existence. The number five is there as a consequence of the asterixes being there. — Andrew M

Is five immanent in ****** ?

i'm not sure what can be drawn from these experiments to understand human psychology in the medium or long term, since the moral choices of those experiments were not iterated. For example, perhaps initial instincts to torture in a consequence free environment are driven more by curiosity and a desire for norm-breaking rather than malice or sadism, and perhaps these instincts lessen in favour of empathy on repeated trials.

Perhaps a better place to look where there is iteration of moral choices in a truly private and consequence-free environment is in video games that simulate suffering where there are opportunities to imprison and torture. Games such as Dungeon Keeper, Dwarf Fortress and Crusader Kings 2 come to mind. I suspect that most gamers get bored of playing tyrannical torturers pretty quickly, and that once they are in psychological equilibrium with the game they tend to only torture and imprison a perpetrator in direct proportion to their sense of injustice and grievance due to the actions of the perpetrator.

Floridi defines information as well-formed data which is meaningful. Are your viewpoints amenable to this definition? — Galuchat

yes, and of course the general question of what meaning is then needs dissolving into its vast family of uses without veering into the rocks of any particular global theory, picture, ism or formalism.

Wittgenstein of course, was in some sense a thorough-going nominalist, finitist and like Quine rejected the analytic-synthetic distinction and the closely related idea that logic could be true by convention. From this perspective it is much easier to see that data, together with rules they are often said to stand for, are merely a finite bunch of signs we use for a purpose, without us possessing a precise definition of what our signs represent, or for that matter what our finite "rules of inference" justify us to conclude.

Once of the central idea of the Philosophical Investigations was that rules are only rough-cut normative principles relating to human culture and understanding, and that they are not hidden and infinitely precise transcendental platonic entities operating at a distance in the background outside of the mind and of human culture.

I believe it was for that reason that Wittgenstein used Chess in the Philosophical Investigations as his example for explaining the normative social dimension of rules, as opposed to the example of computing machines where the temptation towards mind-independent and context-free Platonism about rule-following is much stronger.

As for the latter example, Wittgenstein elsewhere summed up the Church-Turing Thesis as

"Turing machines, these machines are humans who calculate"

For example, it would make sense to attribute conscious rule-following to a robot or a chimpanzee if the robot or chimpanzee could gesture to us a justification of their behaviour in terms of a rule that they give as a normative-principle pertaining to their action, in the same way we would attribute conscious rule-following to a mathematics pupil only if he could explain to us why he continued the series the way he did.

But for Wittgenstein it would be nonsensical to attribute consciousness or rather, "intrinsic meaning" to a simulation of the human brain on belief that the simulation was intrinsically implementing the same rules as the brain, for the same reason as before; that for Wittgenstein rules are an essentially normative notion rather than a mechanical notion. For Human brains aren't really "following rules mechanically" except in the sense of a narrative we conjure up for the descriptive purposes of heuristic and approximate empirical understanding of their behaviour, for computer simulation of them, for causal explanation and so on.

Perhaps we could say: we can judge a system to be mechanically following a rule if we can accurately predict its behaviour on the basis of a rule that we have consciously *invented* which describes it's behaviour. But we cannot say that we *discover* pre-existing rules that are lurking within "essentially mechanical" systems of nature, for that leads to a viciously circular regress about what "mechanically following a rule" means.

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.