None.

What's missing is the riding of the bike.

That was my point way back on page one. — Banno

Maybe this foolish claim needed to be nipped in the bud back on page one.

What's missing is not "the riding of the bike". What's missing is learning, learning to ride the bike.


More unnipped gems from p1:

And the same goes for "You have to learn on your own". Of course you do, since anyone else learning would not count as you learning.

But that makes "You have to learn on your own" just another grammatical point. — Banno

Someone else learning history does not count as you learning history. Yet, you don't have to learn history on your own. It is not "just another grammatical point".

"knowing how to ride a bike" and "riding a bike"; we don't have two things here, one being bike riding and the other being knowing how to ride a bike. — Banno

Yet here I am sitting on my ass, knowing how to ride a bike yet not riding a bike.

It's only ironic when the outcome is opposite to the intention because of the intention. — Vera Mont

By astutely contributing to this thread you have ironically ended it.

it’s entirely doable for someone else to twiddle ones knob satisfactorily, perhaps with instruction. — Banno

A truly worthy first entry to my "Favorite Quotations"!

And after pages of discussion, if that's the case, then I'm thinking you don't understand your question either. — Banno

Yet from my vantage he understands his own question just fine, it is you that are missing it.

if tacit knowledge is effable, then why is it not included in the explicit instructions in the first place? — Luke

How exactly does a description of some knobs you are considering fiddling with answer this question?

Sounds more like a lack of knowledge than any tacit knowledge. :roll: — Luke

Perhaps @Banno could be persuaded to record a performance of "the lick" for us as a fitting capstone to this effing thread. I have a feeling the performance would be "ineffable" :rofl:

You're seriously suggesting that all the countries America have fucked over haven't even thought about America's massive nuclear arsenal when considering whether they 'let them get away with it'? — Isaac

Yeah, that's exactly what I am suggesting. These are all countries that faced an adversary with overwhelming conventional force, nuclear was the last of their worries. How exactly are you suggesting they would otherwise have not 'let them get away with it'? Whereas the invasion of Ukraine would be impossible without nuclear weapons, since it would otherwise almost certainly trigger engagement with NATO.

Whatever.

Since the ;deadly' we'd be avoiding by concession is also war, I can't see much in it either way. at least war later can be mitigated, war now is killing people right away. — Isaac

Like "mitigation" is working out for "war now"?
Concession would mean strategic victory for an aggressor who used nuclear weapons to achieve their aim. Nuclear weapons already have excellent utility as a deterrent; if they are proven useful by Russia as a weapon of aggression, everyone will take note. Nuclear powers will all see new opportunities to settle regional scores, and non-nuclear powers will be further incentivized to join the club. At some point an aggressive nuclear power will have to be confronted. Does the west do it now, following the first such use of nuclear weapons, when the enemy is already reeling, or later, in the context of a new, terrifying global nuclear arms race? Hell, we (the USA) may be that aggressive nuclear power. Either way, your ".000001%" chance is a pure fiction.

The west is already walking the tightrope, unwilling to fall one way into possible Armageddon, or the other into handing an aggressively nuclear Russia victory. It's a poor position, and it is not clear what the alternative is.

Why not? — Isaac

Domestically, it is a show of extreme weakness by the leadership. It makes people feel humiliated and insecure, as they may be next. Opposition parties will seize on this. An administration which passively cedes its land will be replaced by one which does not, one way or another.

Regionally, if the aggressor is not contested and punished, they or others will seize more, threatening the existence of the state itself. In fact exactly this happened, Russia was hardly chastised in 2014, and look where we are now.

But the difference is that Betty can play the guitar.

You explained exactly what that difference is, you put it in words, and hence it is not ineffable. The difference is that betty can play guitar. — Banno

The difference, KGI, is a knowledge difference. It comprises a vast amount of information, all encoded in Betty's brain, which is the goal and the end result of her practice. That is not "Betty can play guitar". That is just 4 words, almost no information at all.

Can you see the difference there? That one is trivially expressible, the other not at all?

There is a difference in kind between chalk and democracy, and a difference in kind between guitar instruction books and playing guitar. — Banno

But there is no difference in kind between the knowledge in guitar instruction books and the knowledge in Betty's head that lets her play guitar. They are both knowledge.

EDIT:

Before you reply: "a vast amount of information, all encoded in Betty's brain" is not a vast amount of information, encoded in Betty's brain. It is a mere description, and a trivial amount of information on your screen. One is perfectly effable, the other, not at all.

The fact the 3 comes after 2 doesn't seem to prevent either from being constructed. — Isaac

If 3 comes after 2, how is 2 constructed from 3?

Then why don't you have a go at explaining it to us. — Banno

Suppose Betty, an aspiring guitarist, reads "How to Play the Guitar". She diligently reads and re-reads every word. We agree that Betty does not know how to play the guitar yet. Call her guitar knowledge at this point KG1.

She then practices her instrument 8 hours a day, for 15 years, until she is a master guitarist. Call her knowledge at this point KG2.

At KG1 she does not know how to play the guitar at all:
KG1 ~= 0

The difference between KG1 and KG2 is huge: it is the difference between tyro and master.
KG2 >> KG1

Call it KGI:
KG2 - KG1 = KGI

KGI is the Ineffable part of KG2. Betty could only gain it by practice. Even if she had read every book on playing the guitar, she would still be more or less at KG1. Now, at KG2, she can write her own books. Unfortunately her readers will only thereby attain roughly KG1. All books can really teach is how to practice, not how to play. The bulk of Betty's knowledge, KGI, can only be learned by practice, not by reading, as it cannot be put into words: it is ineffable.

Your argument is quite clear to me. I feel your frustration reading through the discussion, you might call it "The @Banno Experience".

Perhaps the missing keyword is "practice"? In order to learn to ride a bike, which I think we agree is a kind of knowledge (one "knows" or "doesn't know" how to ride a bike), one has to practice. The knowledge gained from practice is always ineffable knowledge, otherwise you wouldn't have to practice, you could just read.

Which part of this do you disagree with Banno? Or perhaps you could respond with misdirection, mischaracterization, insults, or some more of that clever "irony" of yours?

Yep. Moreover, he seems to think that dodging the argument, or telling us to "eff off", is his argument. — Luke

Here I thought that was his (ungracious, but what can you expect) way of conceding the point.

Yep — Isaac

And yet.. 3 comes after 2.

@Luke
Your argument applies to any kinesthetic skill: who would claim to know how to play the guitar after reading "How To Play the Guitar", even if the last instruction were: "Now, go play the guitar!"
The problem is that even when you have the skill, you don't know how you do it, you just do it. Or rather, you don't know how to verbalize it.

Dodging the argument again. — Luke

He has a talent!

Now fuck off, both of you. :razz: — Banno

"eff off" is the preferred usage in this thread.

Neither Banno or me are saying those are the same. If I'm reading @Banno correctly at least. — Moliere

ep. So for you adding "ride the bike" to the instructions is just a way of completing them. — Banno

If they are not the same (which they are obviously not), the words "ride the bike" won't complete anything, when what is needed is riding the bike.

It's not ineffable. It's "ride the bike". — Banno

As if "ride the bike" were the same as riding the bike. :roll:

Reading "ride the bike", the effable part, will not add an iota of knowledge of how to ride the bike. One has to ride the bike.

Without such grounds there's no reason we ought take even a 0.000001% risk of nuclear war to help them get it back. — Isaac

The war in Ukraine perhaps represents the most significant offensive use of nuclear weapons since WW2. Not in their hot use, but in the terroristic threat of their use, in support of an unprovoked war of aggression. This is the world we now live in. Russia may have blundered themselves into a position where their terrorist threats of nuclear war is the only reason they should get to keep Crimea and the Donbass. How to put that genie back in the bottle? There are no easy answers, but submitting to the threat would set a deadly precedent.

Moreover, no state can afford to let the seizure of their territory go uncontested. Unless one side is defeated decisively, the war might continue indefinitely.

constructed from words and the concepts they define. — Isaac

Sure sounds like:

3. (if necessary) - abstraction of 'red', 'ball' and 'threw' from that experience (2) according to the social rules around identifying those components — Isaac

You are almost there. You almost grasped the circularity of defining red as the sensation of red. — Banno

You are almost there. You almost made a substantive reply.

Kidding, not close.

What is it that you suppose is named here? — Banno

The sensation of red, of course.

If it, or anything, is ineffable, then you would expect circularity: "Which sensation? The red one. What is a red sensation? Redness. What is X? X-ness." Once the ineffable is reached, description stops, and its name can only be recited.

I concede I may be interacting with an automation or a p-zombie, with no notion of sensations, and so all this will be incomprehensible. If so, you can rest assured (whatever that may mean for you) that this incomprehension is a result of sensation's ineffability.

For a start, my insults are funnier. — Banno

The problem with your insults is that you use them in lieu of arguments. They are not particularly clever either, but to each his own.

And if a textbook explanation suggests the blind have visual experiences... what does that suggest for your belief that the blind can't talk of red? — Moliere

Sure, if they have the experience. The real world medical condition of blindness is a red herring. What I was going for was "An individual who has no experience of color".

I think what you're asking is how does dialogue communicate experience? -- which I'd agree is a good question I don't quite know the answer to. — Moliere

The words for sensory experiences like color can only be learned by pointing, which links the experience with the associated word. You can then happily use these words with others who have learned these same associations, avoiding the impossible task of actually describing what it is like to have these experiences.

It goes...

1. {some collection of neural firing events} ->
2. "I threw a red ball" experience ->
3. (if necessary) - abstraction of 'red', 'ball' and 'threw' from that experience (2) according to the social rules around identifying those components — Isaac

So you have moved from "experience is a social construct" to "the conceptualization and verbalization of experience is a social construct"? (Which we all knew.)

Do you now agree that the sensory experiences of 2 are ineffable, and are only communicable at all to those who have had the same experience?

Now you're saying there's no 'the'. So which sensation did you learn to associate with the word red as a child? — Isaac

There is not one single red sensation, it is a family. I learned to associate a spectrum of color sensations corresponding to a spectrum of light centered around 700nm or so as "red".

The linguistic association between this set of sensations and a word is of course socially mediated, that is no great insight. But this is not to say that the sensation itself is somehow socially mediated, or somehow doesn't exist.

So 'red' is a social construct.

From where do we learn that the wine and the post box are of similar enough colour for the experience they produce to be the same 'red experience'? Language. Culture. — Isaac

The concept of red, as in a grouping of similar colors under the rubric of a single word, is a social construct. But this is trivial, this is just how language works, there are only so many words. Other cultures divide the colors among their limited allotment of color words differently. So what. None of this has bearing on your radical and unsupported claim that the phenomenal experience of red is an illusory social construct.

No one can describe such an experience, no-one can pin down such an experience — Isaac

It's ineffable.

there's no mechanism in the brain which could account for it, there's no cortex in the brain which could process it — Isaac

You must possess a preternatural understanding of what the brain can and can't do.

there are no tests for it... and every test that's ever been done to try and identify such a thing has failed utterly. — Isaac

No tests and all the tests fail, things are looking grim for team experience.

There's absolutely no evidence for it. — Isaac

Don't believe your lying eyes.

Which one? The one you experienced with the red post box, or the one from the red wine, or the red rose, or the red car...which of them is the 'red' one? — Isaac

No "the", these are all "red experiences". Is this going somewhere?

Consciousness is a mystery, to which sticking your head in the sand and pretending it doesn't exist is not a solution.

Have you guys discussed this article yet? It argues that the war in Ukraine amounts to genocide. I am hard pressed to disagree. Yet it doesn't even go into the destruction of power infrastructure, which I am worried will lead to mass civilian casualties.

a private sensation is nicely pummelled by Isaac's asking which private sensation...

...why, the red ones, of course...

It's a quite vicious circularity. — Banno

Cool, that is exactly what one would expect of something that cannot be described, only named.

@Isaac @Joshs

Babies begin to see red after a few weeks... long before any of this social construction guff might have had time to take hold. And certainly long before they learn to correctly use the word, despite @Banno's ludicrous insistince.

What say you?

Which sensation? — Isaac

Redness, the visual sensation I experience when an object or light source designated "red" enters my visual field .

When was the last time you had an experience of red and how did you know that that's what you were having at the time? — Isaac

Maybe I last experienced it when I was looking at a bottle of hot sauce. How did I know? When I was a small child I learned to associate this sensation with "color", and this variety of color sensation with "red".

A blind person could, of course -- because they have that experience. — Moliere

I don't know a blind person to ask. In fact this suggests they do indeed have visual experiences.

But my point is, how would you determine what they experience by asking them? They may describe their experiences using sight words, but they may or may not be referring to something totally other than what we know as sight experiences. Similarly, our own inner experiences may be identical or totally dissimilar from one another's, and we would never know it. When we hear sensory words we map them to our own inner experiences, without ever knowing how others map those same words. Because we can never express inner experiences without using sensory words that map in totally unknown ways in the listener, inner experiences are ineffable.

So if you want to make a case that such a thing exists, make that case. — Isaac

I have experiences of red, therefore I have knowledge of what it can be like to experience red, therefore such knowledge exists. As a human with functional eyes and occipital lobes, you may consider me to be a domain expert.

I have experiences of pain, therefore I have knowledge of what it can be like to experience pain, therefore such knowledge exists. As a human with functional peripheral and central nervous system, you may consider me to be a domain expert.

If you want to tell me that I don't experience red or pain, that's some heavy lifting, but go for it. Thus far you have done none of it.

A computer can learn how to use the words correctly yet know nothing of what it's talking about.
— hypericin
A quick shift of the goal post in order to avoid falsification.
But this is now kicking a puppy. — Banno

Arrogant bluster aside, you really aren't very good at this. Perhaps you have forgotten already?

That's the sort of grammatical problem that comes from supposing that seeing red is some sort of private experience, as opposed to learning to use the word "red" — Banno

Yet computers have learned to use the word red without seeing it. I guess lacking any response, one can only yap and whine about goalposts.

Isaac, here we have the illusion, encouraged by phenomenology, that there is a clear distinction to be had between red and the-sensation-of-red or the-experience-of-red. And we find folk making claims that relate to Stove's Gem, such as that we really never see red, but only see experience-of-red or sensation-of-red. — Banno

"Red" can refer to many things. A word, a range of wavelengths of light, a class of pigments with absorptive properties, and a set of subjective sensations. Are you unable to discern these differences?

You have evidence of something more? — Isaac

Yes. A blind person would understand all those words and yet know nothing of the sensation of red.

Banno has already disabused you of this misunderstanding. You could and would know exactly what I'm talking about by learning how to use the words correctly. — Isaac

He certainly has not. A computer can learn how to use the words correctly yet know nothing of what it's talking about.

Take pain as a less loaded example. Suppose someone was born with no sensation of pain. They can certainly learn to use "pain", "ouch!", Etc correctly, yet have no knowledge of what pain is like.

This tells me a quality of the sensation (vibrancy), another color sensation it reminded you of(blood), and how it later made you feel(calmer). But nothing about the sensation itself. I can understand your account only because I experience the same color sensations. If I did not, if I were blind, or an alien, I wouldn't know what you were talking about, no matter how immersed I was in your culture.

What you're calling your 'experience of red' is a socially mediated construction. Therefore it is bound up with the language your culture uses and so can be reiterated in that language. — Isaac

Then please, demonstrate so. Unless you claim you have none?

How can I close my eyes and easily imagine the color red and green, divorced from any object? You will have to point me to the research that is informing you. But the question of whether color can be considered in isolation from objects seems tangential to this thread, and for it's purpose I am not committed either way. Both the experience of red in the abstract and red as a property of an object are equally incommunicable.

Redness is always experienced as an attribute of a particular. Voilà, I said something about the experience of redness. — Heracloitus

And yet our blind friend is none the wiser to it.

No one can say anything about the experience of red, not because it's ineffable, but because it doesn't exist. Experiences are constructed by the brain post hoc, way, way after any processing associated with the wavelength of light reflected off an object. — Isaac

Even if it were true that conscious experiences are epiphenomenal, this is not to say they don't exist.

We experience a red postbox, a red car, a red rose. No one experiences just 'red'. — Isaac

What is the difference between experiencing a red apple and the identical but green apple? The experience of redness and greenness, about which we can say no more.