As you can see, we approach and answer these questions in significantly different ways. What do you think of this? — Esse Quam Videri

Let me push back a little.

A representation is something that can be assessed for correctness, truth or fidelity. Raw sensory qualities are not the kinds of things that can be correct or incorrect; they simply are what they are. — Esse Quam Videri

Compare this with words. "Dog" represents dogs. Yet, the word "dog" in itself, is not correct or incorrect. It simply is what it is. But, when placed in a larger context, for instance, pointing to an animal, and uttering "dog", then the word can correctly indicate the animal pointed to, or not.

Similarly, the smell of ammonia, in and of itself, is neither true or false. Yet, when it is experienced in an environment, the smell can correctly indicate ammonia, or not. Ammonia might be the wrong phenomenal smell, as happens sometimes with long covid. Or it might be hallucinatory.

Ordinary perceptual judgments are about things in the world (“that rag smells of ammonia”), not phenomenal qualities (“there’s a sharp, pungent, acrid scent in my olfactory map”). The former are typically referred to as “perception”, the latter as “introspection”. Introspection is second-order, reflective and derivative with respect to ordinary perception. — Esse Quam Videri

Hmm, this is not how I experience odor. The smell itself is what hits me first, viscerally and immediately. No introspection is needed. If the smell is a familiar one, I might identify it quickly, so quickly that it might even seem immediate. But if I haven't smelled that smell in a long time, it can take significant mental effort to identify it. Occasionally, I won't be able to at all, and I am left frustrated, wondering what that smell reminds me of.

Do you not relate to this?

(The third disagreement seems to follow from the second).

The first is count is the supposition that there is a useful way in which there is a "flower-as-it-really-is" or the "flower-in-itself". This idea relies on it making sense to talk of a flower seperate from our interpretation and construction of the world around us, a flower apart from our comprehension of the world. But our understanding is always, and already, an interpretation, so the "flower-as-it-really-is" or the "flower-in-itself" is already a nonsense. — Banno

Of course every understanding is an interpretation. But this does not obviate the distinction between the world as we perceive it, and (our understanding of) the world as it is. We perceive the flower as looking like this, and smelling like that. We understand the flower to typically take this physical form, to have this life cycle, to grow in this climate , to treat that disease, to attract these insects. The fact that these understandings are interpretations adds nothing. These are our interpretations of how the flower is. But to also understand the phenomenal presentation of the flower as how the flower is, is the misunderstanding at issue.

The second count is the misdirection in thinking that we see the result of the causal chain, and not the flower. We do not see the result of the causal chain, as if we were homunculi; rather, that causal chain just is our seeing the things in our world. — Banno

Yet we discuss both, which is your gold standard. How the flower appears to us, and what the flower is.

No homunculi. An object can phenomenologically appear to us in a certain way, without there being a literal gnome in our heads watching an internal monitor.

And secondly, we do not "experience the world" passively, in the way supposed. We interact with it, we pick up the cup, board the ship, and coordinate all of these activities with others. We do not passively experience the world, we are actively embedded in it. — Banno

Experience is active in that it is an active mental construction, which is indirect realism. But it feels like a passive window to the world, which is the naive realist illusion. All these actions you describe are irrelevant, we are not talking about them, we are talking about perceptions.

Out of curiosity, which of three propositions above would accept, if any? Does the distinction between casual and epistemic mediation as laid out above make sense to you, or would you qualify it in some way? I’d be interested to get your thoughts. — Esse Quam Videri

I think I understand this distinction between causal and epistemic mediation, and I like it. At first blush, I accept all three propositions. Quickly, using the smell of ammonia as a grounding example:

(1) Phenomenal qualities represent aspects of the world. — Esse Quam Videri

The smell of ammonia represents that there is ammonia in the world. The relation smell of ammonia -> ammonia is symbolic, represented with the one way arrow characteristic of symbols. The smell of ammonia points to ammonia, without the smell being a part of the ammonia itself. In the same way, "dog" points to a doggy, without the glyphs "dog" being in any way a part of the doggy itself.

(2) Ordinary perceptual judgments are judgments about phenomenal qualities. — Esse Quam Videri

True.

When I smell ammonia, I am judging that this particular phenomenal quality smells like ammonia to me. NH3 doesn't in itself smell like ammonia, it has no intrinsic smell. It is the way that smell manifests to me phenomenally, that sharp, unpleasant, pungent reek, that I associate with ammonia.

When I say ammonia is stinky, I am complaining specifically about the phenomenal quality of that smell. Not the NH3 itself. It is the phenomenal quality that makes me recoil. If the phenomenal quality were pleasant to me, I would not complain, despite NH3 being identical in either case.

(3) Our knowledge of the world is inferred from such judgments. — Esse Quam Videri

True. The smell of ammonia in itself tells me nothing about the world. I have to had experienced the smell, paired with knowledge of the substance producing it. Only after this learning event has occurred, can I infer, from the smell, the proposition "There is ammonia nearby".

To me this is all fairly straightforward. Where do you object?

That’s why I’m hesitant to say that the “primitives of perception are hallucinations of the brain.” That description already assumes that phenomenal character functions like a photograph—i.e. as the thing perceived instead of the object—whereas both Banno’s point and my own have been that phenomenal character causally constrains perception without being its direct object. — Esse Quam Videri

When you look at a photograph, you really are looking at its subject. And you are looking at the photograph. You are looking at the subject, by way of the photograph. This is indirection. We experience the ship too, by way of its phenomenal character.

Do you dispute that we experience its phenomenal character? We certainly talk about the way the ship looks, the way it sounds, the way it smells, the way it feels, all the time. Not just how it operates.

Do you dispute that looks, sounds, smells, feels belong to the brain? That they are not found on the ship itself, but are properties of the brain, which are causally constrained by properties of the ship?

If you agree with these two, its hard for me to see how this does not map to a photograph. We experience the photograph, and we indirectly experience the subject, which causally constrains its manifestation on the photograph. We experience phenomenal character, and we indirectly experience the world object, which causally constrains how phenomenal character manifests to us.

And causally speaking, there's where we can rest. The difference is not in the causal chain, but where one spreads one's Markov blanket.

So, and here we can reject much of the account Michael has promulgated, since causal mediation does not entail indirect perception. — Banno

Causal chains are not the real claim. As you, @Hanover and others point out, there are innumerable causal steps between an observer and any act of perception. If the claim was just "there are causal steps in between" it would be quite weak. Indirect realism, as @Michael points out, is aimed at naive realism, and so the target it attacks is the illusion of direct perception. The direct/indirect distinction this claim relies on is quite tricky, and the fact that people don't clearly grasp it is why this discussion is interminable. (I'm still working it out myself, which is why the topic is still interesting to me even after that huge thread a few years ago).

The physical world offers ample examples of this illusion. First, what it is not: consider looking at yourself in the mirror. It appears to you that you are directly seeing yourself. That is because you are. The mirror is an extra step in the causal chain the light undergoes, one designed to allow you to see yourself. That extra step doesn't mean you really aren't seeing yourself directly. You see yourself directly, with aid of a mirror.

Now, consider looking at a photograph of yourself. If you were naive to photography, it might be shocking to look directly at yourself, captured in a small flat square. You are not. When you look at the photograph, you are in fact looking at a square of cellulose or plastic, not yourself. But you are still looking at yourself indirectly, because there is still a causal connection between the surface of the photograph and your features.

Hopefully this example brings some clarity to the indirect realist claim. We experience the world through something it is not, phenomenal representation, just as you can experience your appearance through something you are not, a photograph. It only appears to us that all the sights, sounds, smells, shades that comprise the world, are the world. They are not, they don't belong to the larger world, but instead the world of the mind. The primitives of perception: colors, sounds, scents, are constructs of brains, and may manifest differently to different brains, almost certainly so across species. But crucially, these constructs are causally connected to the world. How they appear at any moment is causally connected to the world they are about, just as the photograph is causally connected to your appearance.

The world is real, and we are causally connected to it, through an indirect relationship like the relationship between a photograph and the subject it captured.

...the blanket is only causally isolating. Information flows across it, but that does not lead to epistemic confinement. The organism’s perceptual capacities are attuned to environmental states across the blanket; perception is an interaction spanning the boundary, not an encounter with an inner surrogate. What is perceived is the ship, not a mental image that stands in for it. — Banno

Indirect realists wouldn't generally disagree with this, except for the last sentence. Both are perceived. Indirect realism doesn't deny perception of distal objects, but direct realists seem to want to brush aside perception's mediation.

When you see a flower on TV, you are seeing a flower (in the veridical case). And, at the same time, you are seeing pixels. These two "seeings" are related: you see the flower by way of seeing pixels. The pixels represent how the flower would look if it were physically in front of you.

This same relationship holds for perception itself. You see the flower in front of you, and you are seeing
its mental representation. "See" here is used in two senses to describe two components of the same act of perception. You see the flower by way of seeing its mental representation. The mental representation is how the flower looks, to you.

refusing to accept a Cartesian picture in which perception must either be inner and certain or outer and inferential. — Banno

Perception is both. You don't know if the flower you are seeing on TV is real, but you know you are seeing a pixel image that looks like a flower. You don't know if you are truly hearing your mom's voice, but you do know that you are hearing something from your phone that sounds like her. You don't know if the mental representation you experience is truly of a flower "out there", but you do know you are experiencing the mental representation.

This does not mean we should all run and be radical skeptics. It does mean that perception is always structured as an immediate/mediated relationship, between representation and represented, between what is multiply realizable and what just is. Everyday tech objects that allow indirect perception (TVs, telephones) mirror the built in indirection intrinsic to perception (and so two layers of indirection are involved in their experience).

In contrast, when the bred and rue people draw their lines, aren't they consistent? (They always say true things about bred and rue.) Aren't they saying meaningful things? (We have no trouble understanding what they're getting at.) It seems there's a dimension missing from the art comparison, and it has something to do with "the right sort" of concepts. — J

The bred and rue concept is in one sense perfectly aligned with the world. They drew a line, a feature of the world. The concepts of bred and rue consistently sort the world according to this feature. Everything on one side is bred, everything on the other is rue. But we want to say that they chose the wrong feature. Wrong how? Some words we might use: Useless. Meaningless. Arbitrary.

But these words are subjective, meaning that their truth values are relative to subjects. They refer to properties of subjects (goals, meaning, intention), not of the objective world. What is useful, meaningful, and intentioned to one person, might be useless, meaningless, and arbitrary to another.

Tellingly, these same three complaints are the complaints one might make of bad art. Bad art is Useless, it doesn't do anything, it evokes no emotion or thought. It is Meaningless, it is all surface form, with no deeper message. It is Arbitrary, it does not cohere into a larger whole, rather its components were haphazardly plucked from the grab bag of genre-appropriate parts.

This suggests a significant parallel between the evaluation of art and concepts.

You can't say to an exponent of the theory of entropy, "Well, that's just your opinion. I like my theory better." — J

This is a notion of subjectivity that is empty of content. Lebowski's "Well that's like your opinion, man." Real subjective evaluation involves the sort of judgements l outlined above. If the theory of entropy is just the models expressed by the equations, then that might lack subjectivity. But, what is entropy exactly? Is it a feature of the universe? Is it a consequence of observers with limited information? Is it statistical? There are multiple coherent interpretations. How to choose? I think, in additional to looking a objective alignment (they all can align, in different ways) some subjective, aesthetic criteria must come into play.

Someone who declared, for instance, that all European art (including music, literature, et al.) from 1700 to 2000 was bad art would be told something like, "You must not understand how 'art' is used." — J

This is the same conflation that was endemic in the art thread. I'm perfectly free to call all European art bad art. What I cannot easily do is call it all non-art. To do this, I must be using a bad concept of art, which draws the line between art and non-art using criteria that fail for reasons like arbitrariness, meaninglessness, and uselessness.

We can agree on all this, but remain troubled about where the idea of "mismatch" could even arise. This circles back once again to whether there's a "world" -- our world, not a perspectiveless world -- which exhibits privileged structure. — J

I think privileged structure exists. But concepts don't perfectly capture it.

Coloring books are a good analogy. The numbered regions are not arbitrarily chosen; they align with the structure of the drawing. Yet, they are not intrinsically a part of the line drawing, they are something added on top. They are a tool, helping the user digest a complex picture into discrete, easily managed parts. There is no limit to the choices that could have been made, someone else might have subdivided the line drawing in different ways, and choose different colors. And every set of choices involves compromises, obscuring important differences, grouping things together that shouldn't be. No set of choices are absolute, none capture all the features of the line drawing. That is because colored regions cannot map perfectly with line drawings, they are not the same sorts of things.

Yet two of my favorite philosophers, Peirce and Habermas, insist we should regard communication as in principle converging on truth. — J

Even if this were true (our current hyper-communicative era suggests otherwise), there is not necessarily one truth to converge upon. "Which truth?" can as much a cause for disagreement as "which is true?" Especially since the two questions cannot easily be distinguished in practice.

Writing that book is indeed hopeless. But (and we shouldn't stretch the titular metaphor too far) the book Sider wants to write is a book about our world, which he believes can permit of objectively better and worse ways of being described. — J

Sider wants to nail down the core concepts once and for all. My main argument here is that forming concepts is as much art as it is science. "Existence" is just one example.

This is not to say that anything goes. There are better and worse concepts, as there are better and worse paintings (as we had discussed not long ago!). But this ranking doesn't mean that:

1) There is any limit to the number of "good" paintings, or concepts. And
2) We can ever, even in theory, agree on what the good and bad paintings, or concepts, are and aren't.

Not only the creation, but the ranking of both, in part, is subjective.

Subjectivity implies perspective. And perspective is intrinsically creative. You cannot do what Sider wants with creative subjects. Doing so is obviously absurd for paintings, less obvious for concepts. but I think it is the same problem.

Would you be open to modifying that to say "already contains intrinsically subjective aspects"? I'd be fine with that, especially if we bear in mind Sider's idea that "objective/subjective" may not carve at the joints anyway. — J

Yes, that is better statement. Not subjective all the way down, but a fusion of subjective and objective. I'm curious what Sider has in mind instead of the objective/subjective dichotomy. I suspect the subjective is ignored?

To the extent that a philosopher wants to identify themselves with the scientific project -- and many do -- then they too will try to approach the "view from nowhere." But they needn't. — J

Yeah, I think this approach is very problematic. Not only because subjectivity is a part of life that is of great interest to us sentients, but that as soon as we use concepts (which we always do, inescapably), subjectivity re-enters the picture. Reality is aconceptual. I think biology is a great example, nature doesn't care about our concepts of species, life, etc. It is what it is. We apply concepts onto it, in order to try to make sense of it. But this, the conceptualized world, is no longer reality, but rather a perspective on reality. Reality always escapes our concepts. Reality doesn't live in neat, labeled buckets, the way we want it to. Reality isn't conceptual, our minds are. And so dealing with concepts is dealing, at least in part, in minds, whether acknowledged or not.

So to summarize (I hope I'm not getting too repetitive, I'm fleshing this out as I go):

The world isn't structured in concepts. Our minds structure the world as conceptual. This is perspective, a creative act. Because of the mismatch between world and concept, there is no perfect set of concepts. This is true of "objective reality", but doubly true of "subjective reality". Here, philosophy must construct concepts and perspectives on concepts and perspectives themselves.

The space of "good, aligned" concepts is endless, including the meta-concepts we are discussing now, and we will never stop arguing about them. :wink:

We have no chance of getting to it if we continue to understand naturalism in terms of objectively causal processes which treat subjectivity as something added onto an objective world. — Joshs

I mean, in truth, it was. There was once a time when consciousness didn't exist. Time passed. At some point, reality started experiencing itself. If "added" is not the right term (after all, who or what added it?), consciousness at least arose from an unconscious world.

And so, if consciousness arose from unconscious processes, we can in principle describe how this happened. The trouble is, unconscious reality only has a third person perspective, while consciousness only has a first person perspective. We simply lack the cognitive tools to cross this perspectival gap, as we have never crossed it before.

And BTW, Sider never implies that his joint-carving candidates add up to a single true way of assessing ontology — J

But, does he admit to a mere plurality of ways? If so, then he can still, in principle if not realistically, enumerate them in his hypothetical book. Or, a boundless number of ways? In which case, the project seems hopeless, even in principle.

The question to answer is: the structure of what? When we inquire into what grounds what, in logic or metaphysics, what's the object of our inquiry? Is it first-order ontology understood as naive realism? No, we've rejected that. Rather, we want to understand the structure of our world, the world we encounter as humans. — J

The problem I've been graspng at is, the world we encounter as humans is not the world of stable, mind independent structures. It is the world of subjectivity, of perspectives, of concepts. You said our descriptions should be co-creations of us and the world. The problem is, the object of our description, lived human reality, is already such a co creation. We are describing that. It is a subjective perspective on something that is already intrinsically subjective. Science is a description of the world that subtracts the human, subjective element. Scientific description is the kind of co creation you and perhaps Sider might actually have in mind. Whereas philosophy is perspectives on something that is already intrinsically perspectival.

Not exactly that he mistakes philosophy for science, but that he over-values the parsimony and predictive value of current scientific concepts of the physical world. — J

What I had in mind is more what I mentioned above. The project of finding the best, most ontologically aligned description of the world, is the scientific project, not philosophy. Science is inexhaustible because that best description is forever elusive. Philosophy is inexhaustible because, by its nature, it doesn't even admit to a best description.

I think that puts it very well, as long as we add that these perspectives can be more or less aligned, can carve better or worse at the joints. — J

I absolutely agree there is good and bad philosophy. Some simply misses what it thinks it is describing, losing itself in contradiction, incoherence, and irrelevance. But, at least in principle, science has an end, a perfect description of objective reality. While subjective reality may not allow for this.

Sounds like you know more about biology than I do, so I need a better example! I thought "species" was fairly clear-cut, though sometimes fuzzy at the edges. — J

Biology, being I think the most complicated science, illustrates a parallel problem. Terminology attempts to reduce an immensely complex phenomenon to terms a mind can grasp. But the reality exceeds the minds. And so we are left with compromises and conventions, that only do their best. Speciation does seem to be a pattern. But there doesn't seem to be a way to generalize it across the entire scope of biology. Even though, this is more of what we have been calling first order ontology.

I would define hate as directed, persistent anger, contempt, and Ill will. I'm with you, traits, especially emotions, must serve a purpose.

I hate Trump, aka Ill Douchey, aka Fail Shitler. I despise the subhuman turd. Seeing that asinine face, those plump, pursed lips, those cruel, piggy, dead eyes, makes me sick to my stomach. He is a petty, noxious, malignant buffoon, not fit to run a used car shop, let alone a super power. I wish him the absolute worst, I hope he does us all a favor, strokes out, and dies in the most humiliating, demeaning, and painful fashion possible.

I'm wondering if this hatred, of perhaps the most hated man in history, points us to function: the eviction of toxic members of society. We hate the unjust, the abusers, the takers, the freeloaders, the cruel. Those who levee costs, but don't offer gain in recompense.

Crucially, true hatred endures until it is satisfied by the ruination of the hated. If the hated just injured one victim, that victim's hatred is just a vendetta, which may or may not amount to anything. But as victims grow in number, so does the resulting hatred. In principle, the victimizer can only injure so many people before their haters become impossible to resist, and their social position, or even their life, becomes precarious. Hatred in this view limits evil behavior.

If this is the case, then we can see that hatred is a failure. It is an emotion, and is too vulnerable to manipulation. Those we should hate, instead use hate, nurture it, to their own advantage. The innocent are cast as unjust, abusive, takers, freeloaders, and cruel. And so minorities are hated, migrants are hated, out groups of all kinds are hated, and victimized. Hatred, which should be cleansing, righteous wrath, instead becomes a tool of evil, itself a force which sickens all of us.

Perhaps in small scale society, hatred was ironically a force for good. The abusers, the takers, the exploiters were driven out by people under the sway of the evolutionary instinct of hatred. But today, in mass, hierarchical, multicultural society, the exploiters who should be checked by hatred, instead are able to hack the hatred instinct, twist it toward their own benefit, and compel us to hate the innocent instead.

If, while tripping, I see the usual fanfare of squigglies and trails and pulses, these are not actually "aligned with the world." The bat is doing a far better job at that than a person with chemically altered consciousness. Surely we should be honest and call the LSD experience a distortion of perception, not a mere alteration? — J

You are right, I overstated. Still, it is important to keep the nature of these distortions in mind. They are not a Disney's Fantasia illusory animation of a correct, sober world. Rather they are let you peer through the wizard of Oz's curtains to see phenomenologic reality for what it is. A gnarled old man guessing, predicting, interpolating, desperately trying to hold everything together and keep the illusion good enough. Not a mathematical projection of orderly photon data.

For instance, breathing walls are not an illusory animation. They let you see the brain's guesswork of angle and depth. Normally the brain picks one guess and locks it down, both in space and time. Psychedelics loosen this constraint and lets you see multiple plausible guesses, both in one "frame" and evolving over time.

Back to Sider, perception "carves to the joints", but far from perfectly. Sure, drugs can amplify imperfections, but they reveal a process which is fundamentally imprecise. Optical illusions show just how far from reality perception truly is. Even if we know the illusion, we often still can't correct for it, we still think we are seeing reality, and the illusion is a lie. One example. Maybe some alien can see visual reality truly. But we can't. And so even if you don't accept that there are infinite "perfect" ways of seeing the world, there are surely infinite "good enough" ways.

The same is true of concepts. There might be a perfect concept of a gluon, waiting to be discovered. But species? Forget it. All you can to is try to fail better, or fail in different interesting ways. This is 100x more true of interpretive, subjective, perspectival philosophy.

The result is not only circular but, he says, will always culminate in the notorious “hard problem”: consciousness treated as if it were something that emerges from structural relations in objectively–existing matter, when in reality it is the precondition for identifying those relations in the first place. In that sense, it is prior to the emergence of both objective and subjective, which themselves rely on distinctions that arise within consciousness. — Wayfarer

I think it is not one or the other, it is both. Consciousness does emerge from structural relations of non conscious entities, and consciousness is the precondition for identifying those relationships in the first place. This circularity results in the hard problem, but the hard problem, like all problems, is epistemic. We, as conscious beings, may face an insurmountable barrier in explaining consciousness itself. But from this apparent epistemic barrier it cannot be concluded that consciousness has no naturalistic explanation. Just that we might never get to it.

Not quite sure what you mean here. If we stipulate that each one legitimately occurred to the person concerned, then I guess they're all valid in that sense: You can be mistaken about what an illusion represents, but not about the fact that you're experiencing something. — J

You are missing something important here. Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned LSD, but now that I did, the Hollywood trope that LSD induces hallucinations is wildly inaccurate. Pink elephants are very rare, if they ever truly occur, and would require truly heroic doses. Far more common are alterations in perception, and especially thinking. Not mere illusion. Leaving LSD aside (drugs and philosophy is a huge topic, very worthy of an op), it is clear that the way a bat sees the world is no illusion. It is a way of seeing, coequal with the way we see. And there are infinite valid ways of seeing, as there are infinite potential (and vast actual) neural architectures .

The myriad perceptions (or illusions of perception) that you mention may be valid in the sense I used, but not in the sense that they are "aligned with the world." — J

And so now I hope we can agree, while there are infinite ways of seeing that are misaligned with the world, there are also infinite ways of seeing that are in fact aligned. "One true way" is just naive realism. Once naivhe realism is discarded, one realizes that the way we see the world is a construction, one that is aligned with the world in the relevant ways. But there are boundless ways of building such a construction.

Can we even have gluons without concepts, which we've agreed must be observer-dependent? — J

I think we can. It is fanciful to say that gluons sprang into existence when they were discovered. Of course, we cannot cognitively access gluons without the concept of gluons. And, the concept of gluons can certainly fail to "carve to the joints" of the reality.

I'm beginning to suspect that "thin ontology" is just science. The examples you've shown conform to this. Could Sider be mistaking philosophy for science? I'm thinking of a view where "First order ontology" (not to argue the term, just to suggest the idea) is science: that which can be said independently of any observer. "Second order ontology" is the world of subjectivity, the world we actually inhabit (as @Wayfarer loves to point out): the world of subjective perspectives. This is the world of of inexhaustibly many valid "ways of seeing". The "book of the world" is science. There might be one grand unified theory, one way of describing the objective world that perfectly carves to the joints of the objective world. Whereas, philosophy straddles first and second order ontologies. It is about the real world, but a world that includes subjectivity and perspectives, and itself constructs perspectives upon that subjective-inclusive world. As such, there can never be a single philosophical "book of the world".

Maybe so, in philosophy. But let's not forget the leopard I brought up a while back. Biological taxonomy is a good example of doing precisely this; we have a fixed set of concepts that everyone (who knows the science) agrees on. Where it's fuzzy at the edges, work needs to be done, but the overall shape of the project is accepted, I think. — J

I actually think this is a horrible example, biology is so messy. It completely defines easy categorization. The ones we have are as much convention as anything. They try to carve to the joints, but only as best as they can, the reality is just too complex. What is a species really? Is it a population that can interbreed? Then what about asexual species? Hybridization? Non-transitive breeding? (A <-> B, B <-> C, but not A <-> C). Horizonal gene transfer in bacteria? When you move up from species, it just gets worse and more arbitrary. Even the category of life itself is problematic, and more so than just viruses (prions, mitochondria, artificial life...)

But your list of "relationships, concepts, categories" et al. seems just as much a part of first-order ontology. — J

I don't think so. These are observer dependent, and limitless, while I would take "first order ontology" to be observer independent and finite. It is clear to me they don't exist on the same order of being.

Think of perspectives, relationships between subjects and objects. For instance, a man looks at a rock. There is one man, one rock, yet even geometrically there are infinite geometric perspectives the man can have of the rock. Then, perceptually :he man can see the rock one way sober, one way drunk, one way on LSD. There is no limit on the number of different psychedelic drugs that can be synthesized, each of which offers a unique perspective. There is no limit to the number of ways all the different sentient species, past, present, future, from earth or other planets, might perceive the rock. And all of this still doesn't begin to exhaust the space of every possible perspective that can be taken on the rock. Crucially, each and every of these perspectives is valid , none are garbage, none are privileged.

Concepts too are perspectives. They are the cognitive counterparts to perceptual perspectives. They are also limitless. There is no upper bound to the number of ways to think about, compare, categorize the rock. Even for the example of 'existence', if I were patient and creative enough I might be able to cover up with over a hundred variations. Creating concepts is a creative endeavor. Part of the artistry of it is to create concepts that are somehow aligned with the world, that "carve the joints". "Cow plus electron" doesn't cut it. But unlike butchering an animal there is no upper bound to the number of ways that this can be done.

I hope this demonstrates that concepts and perspectives are not ontologically primary, in the same way a heap of atoms is. And that coming up with a fixed, finite set of these everyone agrees on is hopeless endeavor.

Is this a fair criticism of sider? How might he respond?

Not having read Sider, I have a different question.

Why is 'ontology' even the concern? This seems kind of naive, as if words really just picked out subsets of ontological reality. When in fact, words are as often dealing with relationships, concepts, relationships and categories of concepts, subjective relationships... It seems impossible to find indisputable, singular 'ontological' versions of such words.

Take the first problematic word you mentioned, 'existence'. Especially when you take concepts, relationships, and subjects into account, the number of 'existences' seems to explode.

Atomic existence: Does the thing have a mind independent, physical existence?
Presentist atomic existance: Does the thing have atomic existence, right now?
Eternalist atomic existance: Did the thing ever have an atomic existence?
"Block universe" atomic existence: Will the thing ever have an atomic existence?
Mind-dependent existence: Does the thing exist at all, even if only in a mind?
Recalled existence: Does the thing exist, if only in living memory?
Historical existence: Does the thing exist, if only in written record?
Local existence: Does the thing exist, and have any causal relationship with any subject?
Relative-local existence: Does the thing exist, and have any causal relationship with a particular subject?

And on and on...

Each of these is debatable. Take mind-dependent existence. Does this require for the mental object to be thought, right now, for it to exist? Or does an active potential to think something count as existence? If the thought was thought in the past, does it require a present impact to count? What if the impact is only marginal, say, it contributed slightly to another thought which contributed slightly to another, which became an enduring belief, does that marginal thought exist? Is this existence intrinsically relative, so that thoughts exist from one subjective frame of reference, and do not exist in another? Or is it the totality of human thought that counts?

Each question is a debate. "Ah, but these are not substantive", Sider might say. "There is no singular reference to this term, we have to clearly delineate what we are talking about!". But this means, for each question, we generate another term: one for the positive response, one for the negative. This exercise can be repeated for every of the variations of "existence" above. So ultimately, we wind up with 100s of "ontologese" terms just covering the natural language "existence". Is this progress?

I think the core problem is that language does not, and cannot, map to ontology in a straightforward way. Language doesn't directly deal in ontology. It deals in concepts. These can multiply endlessly, and they can all "carve to the joints". The joints of ontology, or the joints of other concepts.

Yes, but . . . isn't that what happened, more or less, with several logical languages? So it can be done, and done usefully. — J

Logical languages have basic concepts that are very well agreed upon. Ontologese would not. Everyone would have their options on what should and shouldn't be included. And everyone would have their own definitions. This would lead to either the wrangling we are trying to avoid, or an explosion of terms, designating multiple takes for each term.

amazingly enough, at least one (Dasein) has actually stuck. But his way of using those new terms . . . not easy, and often not clear, which was supposed to be the whole point. — J

Dasein is particularly opaque. But this is the general problem. The idea that all of these terms would be transparent, clear, and agreed upon seems highly optimistic.

I don't believe that this can end terminological debates. The best is that it can keep them mostly substantive.

Nice OP.

I like the thinking here, I think it captures why much philosophical discourse is insubstantive. My concern is what is advocating for is a massive jargonization of philosophy. The amount of coinages required would be immense, and ever growing. I also share your skepticism of "joint-carving". At best it is an ideal, not something that will actually be achieved. Any ideal set of terms would more realistically carve joints at the conceptual level, not the metaphysical level. Which of these is actually metaphysically apt would be endlessly debatable (but at least, substantively debatable)..

But really, it seems a fantasy that a singular set of terms, with universally agreed definitions, could ever be achieved. More likely, a sprawling, fragmentary landscape of overlapping , incompatible terminologies would result. It is not obvious at all that this would be an improvement over the current state of affairs.

I don't really see an alternative to what is sometimes done already: for individual philosophers to rigorously define their terms from the outset, as best they are able.

Information is not a metaphysically basic, because it is not ontologically autonomous. — Wayfarer

This is certainly a reasonable position. And yet, the fact that information can remain constant durung radical transformations of matter does seem to suggest a kind of independence.

If it has true independence, it would be as mathematics. At least computationally, any set of information can be represented as a single, potentially enormous, number. And if anything has a platonic existence, independent of the material world, it is math.

I imagine DNA is the first appearance of information. — Patterner

As @Wayfarer points out, what information means is quite context dependent. For the specific meaning you have in mind, symbolic or encoded information, I would say, yes! I think you are right. If life arose on earth first, DNA may indeed mark the emergence of symbolic information.in the universe.

What is interesting is how the seed of DNA birthed the Cambrian explosion of symbolic information. From chemical communication to vocal, to language, to our current lives which seem totally dominated by symbols. All this required the kindling of DNA, which launched and spread all the symbolic regimes in the universe.

The problem with 'information' is that, as a general term, it doesn't mean anything. — Wayfarer

Interesting, it certainly seems to mean something. Definitely in everyday conversation it does. And so does it in the sense we are discussing, as something fundamental in the universe, alongside matter. Of course as with so many things, pinning down exactly what it means is nontrivial.

My experience with AI systems strongly suggests they do not possess this. — Wayfarer

I don't think LLMs could function as they do without understanding in some form (of course, without the sentience connotation the word usually caries). 'Intentionality' is out, and I'm not quite sure what 'normativity' is doing here.

I'll be sure to check out the thread, I like the topic.

Nifty OP. I had pretty much the exact same revelation, though not so artfully told. It led me to a kind of dualist perspective, where the universe consists of matter in all its forms, and information. Although information seems somehow parasitic on matter, in that it needs a material medium in one form or another to exist (not withstanding "it from bit" theories, which I don't understand).

That was part of my point: information does not exist in the absence of (an aspect of) consciousness. Characters on a printed page are not intrinsically information; it's only information to a a conscious mind that interprets it- so it's a relational property. — Relativist

I think you are talking about meaning, not information. Meaning is interpreted information. Also, there is no necessary involvement of consciousness. Machines can interpret information and derive meaning from it.

Ok, what's the plan? How do we understand it as informational? What do you have *ahem* in mind? — Patterner

Principles:
1. Consciousness is informational
2. Consciousness is naturalistic. (No woo!)
3. Consciousness arose due to selective pressure.

Why?
Given our principles, we can make an educated guess why consciousness arose. Consciousness is an extremely efficient means of organizing and processing information. Look at how we phenomenologically experience the information we receive. Sight as spatially organized, painted with color giving surface information. Sound as directionally and positionally co-located in space, but otherwise orthogonal to space. Smell as non-positional, and orthogonal to both. And so on. And then you have bodily awareness its own dimensions of feeling.

We integrate all of this, into a holistic sense of everything that is happening. And crucially, based on conscious and unconscious decision making, we can attend to a narrow band of the overwhelming amount of information we receive. Our slow-brain (aka conscious) processing of this information is experienced as thoughts, themselves phenomenal, but marked as interior. Experiences and thoughts trigger memories, also phenomenal. We integrate all this, make predictions, and ultimately act.

Contrast this with an organism trying to manage all this without consciousness. Just electrical signals, without qualitative feel. Imagine, from an engineering standpoint, the complexity of trying to organize a system that can integrate, analyze, and act on such an immense quantity of information. As the bandwidth and the number of streams of information grow, the task would become totally overwhelming.

TLDR:
Conscious brains DON'T process all information streams directly.
Conscious brians DO convert streams to conscious experiences, then process those.

As informational inputs from the environment and the self grow to a certain point, consciousness becomes mandatory.

Who
Given this, we can gain a better perspective on who we are. In one sense, we are human animals, we are our bodies. But in another sense, we are, specifically, the portion of the brain tasked with decision making. The portion that makes use of conscious information, attends to it, thinks about it, predicts with it, remembers it, and ultimately, acts. Everything that is not processed as phenomenal consciousness, to us, does not exist. It is unconscious.

We, the 'we' that experiences, that imagines a 'self', are the specific part of the brain that connect to the world, and to our own bodies, by phenomenal consciousness, and nothing more. And so at the same time, we are imprisoned by it.

What?
From our perspective, everything is conscious. To be aware of anything is to be conscious of it, definitionally. It is quite easy to mistake consciousness for reality. It is not. It is the result of intensive work by the brain, processing immense amounts of information so we may integrate and ultimately act on it.

Consciousness is unreal, where what is unreal exists in the head, but not outside it.
Consciousness is an illusion, where an illusion is that which presents as something it is not.
Consciousness is virtual, where the virtual exists only in terms of a system which supports it.

I think these facts are crucial to keep in mind. It is easier to explain something unreal, illusory, and virtual, rather than something real and actual. But still, the unreal still exists, as unreal. The illusion still exists, as illusion. Explanation is still required.

How?
This is all really framing for a revised hard problem:

How and why does biology's method of organizing information lead to qualitative states? How could any such method lead to qualitative states?

Of course I cannot answer this. But perhaps the preceding offers some context, and clues. We don't have to explain something that exists. Only something that exists, for us, from our own persepctive. We are already familiar with computers, information processing systems that can support arbitrary virtual worlds. I contend that the brain is the ultimate such system.

Still, there is a lot of mind bending to do. Computers can support virtual worlds. But they cannot support them as something experienced for themselves. Only for the user. I take it as axiomatic that consciousness is naturalistic, it unproblematically fits into the natural world as an informational phenomenon. But how does it work? Can we build such a machine? What are the principles? Can we program a computer so that it experiences? Or is this a kind of information processing that a computer cannot support?

Fundamental conceptual leaps still need to be made. But perhaps less fundamental than prodding pink tissue, and wondering how it could make the feels.

What do you mean by "consciousness is informational"? — Patterner

I mean that consciousness is best understood in terms of information, not physics. Some phenomena should be thought of as material: rocks, gravity, light. But others cannot be understood physically: numbers, ideas, computer programs, novels. I claim that consciousness belongs to the latter category.

Think of a book, Moby Dick. You could try to understand it physically: "Moby Dick" is this specific arrangement of glyphs on paper. But then you look at another edition, or the book in another language, or an ebook edition, and you are totally flummoxed. You will conclude that analyzing Moby Dick as a physical phenomenon is hopeless.

The same is true for consciousness. Analyzing consciousness physically is hopeless, and leads to the hard problem. Because, consciousness is informational. Evidence?

Does consciousness have mass? Does it have a position, or velocity? What material is it made of? None of these seem answerable. In fact, to answer the latter, some want to invent an entirely new substance, with no physical evidence, no evidence at all in fact, other than that consciousness exists, therefore this substance must exist.

On the other hand, what is consciousness, phenomenologically? One thing you can say: each and every conscious moment discloses information. Every of our senses discloses information about the external world, or of our bodies. And every emotion discloses information about our minds.

Consciousness informs, it is informational, not physical. And so to understand it, it must be understood as informational. Only then can we understand how the brain implements it.

Do you think DNA is encoded information, and protein synthesis is an example of information processing? I would ask the same of many other things. Are the electrical signals that arrive at certain parts of the brain carrying information from the retina about a light source?

If you answer Yes to either, how does "You need to first construct an informational narrative" apply? — Patterner

Good follow-up questions, that forced me to clearly think through what I'm trying to say. I would answer 'Yes' to both.

Lets just take DNA for now. When you talk about DNA, your perspective is toward a phenomenon that has already been well explained. This is not where we are at with consciousness.

By the time that there was a search for a molecular mechanism, it was already well understood that the transmission of traits was informational. And, how the logic of genetic recombination functioned was shockingly well understood, all deduced from behavior alone. Here is an illustration of gene crossover, from 1916:



What I was really trying to say, is that for phenomena that are fundamentally informational, there are two sequential questions:

1. How can this phenomenon be understood informationally?
2. How is this informational schema we now understand be instantiated physically?

With DNA, the answer to 1 began with Mendel, and was completed by the time images like the above were made. Crucially, only by answering 1, can 2 be answered. Without answering 1, 2 cannot even be properly posed. This is exactly what we see all the time with consciousness:

1. How can consciousness be instantiated physically?

This is the wrong question. Lacking insight into how consciousness can be realized informationally, we cannot begin to look for that realization physically. We just don't know what we are looking for.

Many people who are leaders in relevant fields - people like Anil Seth, Antonio Damasio, Peter Tse, Brian Greene, Donald Hoffman, and David Eagleman - most of whom think physicalism must be the answer, say we don't have a theory, and don't even have any idea what such a theory would look like. — Patterner

The problem is that consciousness is informational, not physical. Explaining consciousness in physical terms runs into the same problem that explaining any informational process in physical terms does. Imagine starting with the notion of computation, or the notion of War and Peace,
and trying to leap directly to a physical explanation of these. You need to first construct an informational narrative, and only then explain how this narrative is instantiated physically.

Strict omnipotence is not a logically coherent notion. Multiple contradictions follow. One standard one, "can God create a rock so heavy he cannot lift it?" Either he can, and his power is limited in lifting it, or he cannot, and his power is limited in creating it.

You explicitly include a contradictory ability: the ability to create omnipotent beings. You can't have two omnipotent beings. One can always try to strip omnipotence from the other. Either that attempt fails, limiting the power of the first, or it succeeds, limiting the power of the second.

Further, you cannot have two omnipotent and omniscient beings. One can always predict the actions of the other. Either the prediction fails, limiting the omniscience of the first, or it succeeds, limiting the power of the second to act outside of the first's predictions.

So, the rest of your proof is redundant. Your premises are already contradictory.

Moreover, you are arguing with Christian secondary literature, not primary. The idea of God being philosophically perfect, possessing all the "omnis", only arose with the fusion of Christianity and Greek philosophy, really beginning with Augustine.

What criteria do you use to decide if they are normal or not? We're made up of a lot of different parts and behaviors. — Questioner

It depends on what we are talking about. Behavior? Physiology? Ability? Appearance?

What is the purpose of being able to call someone "abnormal?" What is the application of that? — Questioner

To describe. To give context to a description of someone's behavior, physiology, ability, or appearance. Where do these fall within the human spectrum?

To diagnose. Sometimes abnormality indicates a problem that requires correction.

To reward or praise. Where spectrums are value-laden, norms can be exceeded as well as fail to be met.

To exclude. Humans are often excluded based on abnormality, for reasons that are legitimate as well as reasons we would probably object to.

It may lead to suppression or oppression. — Questioner

Indeed, it may. But this belongs in a discussion of the ethics of normality, not the meaning.

This definition requires a judge of what is to be "expected." Who will judge what is to be expected? Who will decide if that fits the definition of "normal?" — Questioner

Of course. That is how the word works. The speaker may have an idea of what "normal" is, the listener may share it, or may not. They talk past each other to the degree that their concepts of "normal" differ. The listener may realize this, or may not have a concept of normal at all, and ask, "What is 'normal' here?"

When we try to apply the concept of "normality" to all human beings - who demonstrate a great deal of variation - the concept kind of breaks down. — Questioner

Why does it break down? Sure they display variation, but this variation is still within pretty tight bands. Human variation is far from pure chaos. There are innumerable patterns that may be used to define normality.

(normalcy) cannot work without marginalizing people who don't fit the parameters of what others "expect." — Questioner

When applied to humans (which is only a fraction of the usage of 'normal'), yes this kind of marginalization happens. What of it? You may think this shouldn't happen; but it does. Maybe we shouldn't use the word with humans at all; but we do.

It is best to describe prescriptive baggage when defining a word, describing how it actually functions.

natural means stemming from nature or following nature's laws. — Copernicus

This definition covers a large chunk of usage, but not all of it.

"Let events follow their natural course". What is "natural" here is not nature's laws, the sentence more likely refers to human events. For events to "follow their natural course" means that they proceed without intervention, where what intervention cons is determined by context. "To rely on your natural ability" mainly means to forego training, not necessarily to forego technological augmentation such as fancy gear or doping.

The most general meaning of "natural" is freedom from intervention, not following natural laws. It is just that human intervention is the sort of intervention often implied when "natural" is used.

what you're describing is natural. — Copernicus

No, @Outlander is describing "normal". Normal is all about expectation. To meet expectation is to be normal .

"Natural" is an entirely different concept. To be "natural" is to be free from influence. "Whose influence?" is context dependent. Usually, but not always, to be natural is to be free from human influence.

This suggests thought is language, words traveling throughout our brain, which is a metaphysical claim, arguing about what the internal thing going on in our head is. That would not be consistent with Wittgenstein, but a better phrasing would be that thinking is shown through use, namely language. — Hanover

Yet, I only paraphrased what you quoted:

"When I think in language, there aren’t ‘meanings’ going through my mind in addition to the verbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle of thought." — PI §329 — Hanover

This points out the problem with ascribing a metaphysical claim to Wittgenstein because here we're now being baited into a conversation about how different people might think. — Hanover

If anyone is "baiting", it is you. Your OP is about the nature of our internal language. Yet now you are demanding all discussion must adhere to some kind of Wittgensteinian ametaphysical purity.

Mentalese is supposed to be pre-linguistic and universal. When you think in your head, that is supposedly a translation from mentalese. And so mentalese, if it is going on, is not necessarily consciously accessible, unlike our verbal thoughts.

I rather agree with Wittgenstein, that language is a vehicle of thought, not a reflection of thoughts happening elsewhere. That said, when I think verbally, I don't think in the compressed manner that you suggest. I think in full sentences. Maybe this just reflects differing cognitive styles. Maybe my dumb brain has to spell everything out. Also remember that verbal thinking is not the only kind of thinking. There is also visual thinking, and other people have claimed more exotic modes (tactile? emotional? logical?).

And so I don't necessarily agree that what is going on in our heads is compression, analogous to how languages compress over time. I wouldn't even call it a language, language is only one component. There is no rigid grammatical requirement for our thoughts to be comprehensible to ourselves.

You do realise, though, that the use of this term 'quale' or 'qualia' is almost entirely unique to a very narrow band of discourse, — Wayfarer

Only if modern analytic discourse on consciousness is a narrow band in its entirety.

allow for the designation of the qualities of conscious experience as a spurious object — Wayfarer

Only grammatically. I don't see the nounification of "objects of consciousness" as carrying any particular ontological commitments.

Like @Banno I don't see how this is deployed against Chalmers, as I recall he makes use of the idea, which predates him by quite a bit.

Should we shoehorn consciousness into a definition, or learn to work with a level of ambiguity? — Banno

What you are describing is not conceptual ambiguity, but rather epistemic ambiguity. We pick and choose our concepts, and I think mine cleanly maps to that which we are talking about when we talk of consciousness. It is an entirely different matter to reliably apply this concept to other beings. Qualia, and therefore consciousness, is private, as third person observers we only have indirect access, through behavior and self report.

Agree that it's very hard to determine what is or isn't sentient at borderline cases such as viruses (presumably not) or jellyfish and so on. — Wayfarer

Viruses are a hard no. They don't even have volition, they make no decisions, they are essentially giant, extraordinarily complex, free floating molecules. Jellyfish seem to be the upper limit of what can be achieved with no central nervous system. Probably not, but as you say it is extremely hard to rule out entirely.

My hunch is that consciousness is the ultimate fulfillment of the engineering principles of modularization and abstraction. It is an extremely efficient strategy for abstracting and organizing information that would otherwise overwhelm the nervous system. We have to integrate all the physical senses, bodily senses, emotions, memories, thoughts. Based on this enormous mass of information, we are supposed to act, moment by moment. If there were no abstraction, if these were all just raw electrical inputs, the brain would be totally overwhelmed. So the brain's strategy is to transform these raw inputs into abstractions, and act based on them. Our lived experience is that of the brain's decision maker. Our world consists in these abstractions, qualia, and from them, we attend to the relevant subset, we predict, and we act.

This strategy has probably coevolved multiple times in different evolutionary branches. To detect consciousness, we would have to understand the principle whereby the brain achieves this kind abstraction, and examine the extraordinarily complex nervous systems of the animals that might be using it.

:lol: I didn't necessarily think I was blowing anyone's doors down! But I don't think I said nothing either.

Just look at all the ways consciousness has been defined in the past. You just said the term was up to us to define. Wayfarer just quoted:

Somewere I once read the aphorism that 'a soul is any being capable of saying "I am"' — Wayfarer

Consciousness has never been a clear, fixed concept. Whereas qualia, your feelings about the term aside, is much more precisely defined. If the unclear term can be defined in terms of the clear term, even seeming tautologously, then that is progress. At least we would know what we are talking about when we talk about consciousness. Does that explain consciousness? Of course not.

Furthermore, I've also noticed that disabled people are portrayed as objects of hate or jokes (in films like "Avatar"). I don't know whether this is truly the norm in society or whether it's a distortion. If this is true, I'd like to point out that the very permissibility of making jokes about people with disabilities was probably perceived differently in earlier times. Furthermore, I think this has become possible due to the secular nature of modern times. — Astorre

There is something going on here, and I'm not at all sure it is cultural. It is not just in films, I noticed growing up that this attitude was very widespread in children. Rather than something that is socialized in us, it is as if this is something that needs to be socialized out of us. This experience made me wonder if there is a dark side to human nature expressing itself here. A drive to exclude based on perceived lack of fitness and lack of ability of the individual to contribute to the group.

One of the gists is that the emergence of organic life is also the emergence of intentional consciousness, even at very rudimentary levels of development. Like, nothing matters to a crystal or a rock formation, but things definitely matter to a bacterium, because it has skin (or a membrane) in the game, so to speak. — Wayfarer

All life has "drives". Viruses have "drives", to infect and reproduce. Roombas have "drives", to clean. This is not enough. What is relevant is whether these drives are experienced as such. We don't just have drives, our drives are sometimes (but crucially, not always) experienced as drives. We have this capacity, this does not remotely mean that to have a drive is intrinsically to experience that drive.

I would like to think that the sentience of beings other than human is not something for us to decide. Whether viruses or archai or plants are sentient may forever remain moot, but that anything we designate with term 'being' is sentient as part of the definition (hence the frequent Buddhist reference to 'all sentient beings'.) — Wayfarer

I thought that 'all sentient beings' was making a distinction between these and insentient beings?

I don't see why it is problematic for us to conceptually mark out what counts as sentience. For me, to be sentient is to have qualitative states. It is quite another thing (maybe impossible) to empirically know whether other species have qualitative states.