Professor Chomsky,

To what extent is American political dysfunction a product of structural features of a voting system which inevitably leads to a two party duopoly? Does reform, perhaps in the form of ranked choice voting, offer a ray of hope? Should more activist attention focus here?

That was my whole argument regarding all those "crowning achievement" superlatives early in the thread. I wasn't putting humans down; merely pointing out that better or worse depend entirely on the criteria of comparison. — Vera Mont

But humans, unique among animals, can conceive of something better. This ability to conceive is also the possibility of realizing it, and is what is truly superlative about humanity, above every other animal.

Human beings whilst in one regard are capable of performing completely selfless acts of kindness are equally capable of doing the opposite to such extremes as murder and endless wars. — invicta

This is a direct reflection of man being a cooperative and selfish animal, just as other social animals are. Being purely selfish or purely altruistic is no good, it is evolutionarily optimal to take on a strategy that mixes both. Many good strategies exist, this diversity of strategy, along with cultural diversity, along with our unique ability to conceptualize, is what makes all the confusion and complexity around morality.

Both versions conflate the thought of something and its existence.

In the first version:
2. It is greater to exist in thought and in actuality than to exist just in thought.

Here, "It" slides from the thought of (1) into a being. In some sense (though such arguments seem quaint to modern eyes), the thought of an existent being is "greater" than the thought of that same but nonexistent being. But whether or not the being exists in actuality does not impact the "greatness" of the thought. The thought remains identical across universes where the being exists and doesn't exist.

I think is making this same point, but more clearly.

The upshot of all this is that it is pretty much impossible to set out the structure of the ontological argument in first-order logic. Or if you prefer, that the argument does not make sense.

Hence it is not valid. — Banno

This is not a refutation. So, it requires 2nd order logic. So what?

It is a two party state which suffers the ill effects that two party states are prone to.

One of these is capture. It is far easier to capture two parties than many. In a many partied system, more uncaptured parties can emerge, possibly in response to the capture itself. In a two party system, there is no alternative, and the populace must accept two pseudo alternatives, both of which serve a constituency which is not them.

Another is ideological narrowness. There is a dynamic with two parties that tends towards narrowness, and extremity on one side of the political spectrum. Suppose one party veers to the left or the right. This is seemingly a blunder: the logical response for the other party is to move along with them. After all, the constituents on "their" side of the spectrum have no alternative, while they may acquire new moderate voters who are turned of by the other side's extremity. But then, this moves the ideological spectrum of the whole country towards the direction of the more extreme party, including those contested moderate voters. This leads to ideological narrowness and a veering towards one ideological direction.

Note that nothing explicitly mandates that the US have two parties. It is emergent on the winner takes all electoral system, but that is another topic.

. But in the non-organic realm, what sense does it make to speak of information at all? — Wayfarer

Computers certainly operate on information.

Does a library at night have any information? Do all the books have information, or only the ones currently being read?

I don't know how you define information. If it is state, there is certainly state without interpretation.

It sounds like you guys are conflating information and interpretation. If these were the same information could not be interpreted in multiple ways. Only interpretation cannot occur without an observer, and this can include machines as well as minds.

My guess is that it comes down to the ability to discern between small differences. This is also what instruments do for humans and computers, allow for greater discernablity. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Imagine an oscilloscope attached to an ethernet cable. Properly tuned, the image it displays will be sensitive to the electrical activity of the cable. Now record the oscilloscope with a video camera, and you have a system which is sensitive to minute changes of the cable over time.

But, recording and displaying this video is all it does. As sensitive as it is, the behavior of the system is still causally driven by the physical activity of the cable. You can understand the visual behavior in physical terms, which is why the oscilloscope is useful.

Contrast that with what happens when you plug the cable into the computer. The signal might be interpreted as an image, or a sound. Or logical instructions which when executed implement a set of abstract rules, such as how to play chess.

This is what I mean when I say that computers are not bound by causal reality. Unlike the oscilloscope, there are no laws of physics that correspond with the rules that it implements. There is no physical system that maps to the rules of chess, it is an abstraction realized by the computer. This I think is the key point that distinguishes computation from causality.

Here is a demonstration — Count Timothy von Icarus

Another fun version I have thought about before:

A very simple algorithm outputs every possible combination of RGB values in a 1024x1024 pixel image. The program, which can be written in an afternoon by a competent programmer, produces 256^3^1024^2 images. Pretty pedestrian, as far as big numbers go. But this program's output will include:

• Every painting ever painted
• Every painting, with the subjects replaced by anthropomorphic versions of every animal, in every permutation
• Every one of your pages, rendered in every font
• The above, where every character is rendered in every permutation of fonts
• The above, but where every character is also rendered in permutations of every discernable shade
• The above, but where every permutation is rotated from 0 to 360 degrees, to the limits of discernibility
• Every visual experience ever had by every human, awake, asleep, drugged
• And every other animal
• The above, but where the scene is rotated in every discernable degree around all 3 axes
• The above, but where overlaid on top is each and every one of the page images above, with every discernable permutation of transparency, scale, offset
• Every distinct vantage point of every location on earth, at every scale, and every time
• ...and every other planet, and every other visually distinct location in the universe
• ...then overlay the pages
• ...overlaid on top of that, variations where every forum member here is mooning the "camera", at every discernable location, scale, posture, age, skin tone...

...And this only scratches the surface of the surface of the surface of all the discernable images
.,..And yet, the vast, utterly overwhelming majority look like colored dots.

If algorithms are just names, a relatively bare bones symbol shuffling algorithm is almost godlike in it's ability to name almost everything. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It just "names" (or, as we prefer, is another form of) every possible book, which is quite a different thing from any particular book. Selecting a desired book out of this heap is another computational problem, which the algorithms definitely do not solve.

It is actually incredibly difficult to define "computer" in such a way that just our digital and mechanical computers, or things like brains, are computers, but the Earth's atmosphere or a quasar is not,without appealing to subjective semantic meaning or arbitrary criteria not grounded in the physics of those systems. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The question of "what is computation" and "what is a computer" are different. The latter seems straightforward: a computer is a Turing machine, or something that can emulate one. What is wrong with that.

What distinguishes a computer from other physical systems is not that they have states that evolve, but that they can be set up to compute anything computable. You won't find this in any physical systems other than brains and computers.

The mistake I mean to point out is that we generally take 10÷2 to be the same thing as 5. Even adamant mathematical Platonists seem to be nominalists about computation. An algorithm that specifies a given object, say a number, "is just a name for that number." — Count Timothy von Icarus

If not a name, 10/2 is certainly another form of 5. And transforming numbers from one form to another, like the transformation of all information, requires work. This work of transforming information from one form to another is called "computation". Does that sound reasonable?

If the state of a computer C2 follows from a prior state C1, what do we call the process by which C1 becomes C2? Computation. Abstractly, this is also what we call the process of turning something like 10 ÷ 2 into 5.

What do we call the phenomena where by a physical system in state S1 becomes S2 due to physical interactions defined by the laws of physics and their entailments? Causation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This doesn't seem quite right. In the ordinary sense of the word, a broken computer doesn't "compute" anything. And yet it has C2s that follow from C1s. What is special about computers is not that its states evolve, but that it can be set up to implement ad hoc rules that proceed completely independently of their underlying physical implementation.

This is seen already with assembly language. It doesn't matter how an assembly language is implemented, only that it is implemented faithfully to its specification. A steam computer would work the same as a silicon computer that both implement the same assembly language. And on top of these abstract rules, more rules can be implemented, that don't resemble even the assembly language. This tower of increasing abstraction can be incredibly tall, and culminates in distributed systems like the web and cryptocurrencies.

What makes computers special is that they are not bound by physical, causal reality. It is as if, in them, the informational component of reality broke free of the physical component. Brains are especially impressive, in that they are not just computers, but computers which which managed to create computers.

Great OP, and I am still grappling with it. I think where you lose me is the notion that computation and causation are somehow equivalent. There seem to be too many key differences:

• There is no such thing as causation that goes wrong. It does what it does, it is infallible by its nature. Whereas at every step, the possibility of error hovers over computation.
• Causal processes don't inherently require continuous energy input. Strike the cue ball, and the billiards will take care of themselves. Whereas in a computational process, to proceed requires energy at every step. Cut the power, occlude the cerebral artery, and the computation comes to a screeching halt.
• There is no notion of accuracy of causal systems. They are in themselves infinitely accurate. Whereas for many computations, to achieve perfect accuracy requires infinite time and energy.
• Causation is something that stuff does. Whereas computation, however sophisticated, can never achieve stuffhood. You can computationally simulate every feature of a waterfall, down to the most minute detail. But no matter how sophisticated, you can never touch a waterfall simulator and get your fingers wet.

Something like "Computation is to information as causation is to matter" seems more accurate, but even then I am not sure.

In many respects, it is impossible to distinguish communication from computation in contemporary theories. I think they are different and that this shows a weakness in the theories. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Communication would seem to require encoding, transmission, and decoding. A causal process sandwiched between two computational ones?

..

That only I can imagine the music in my head. It's not 'an appearance' for anyone, not even me.

'Phenomenon:1. a fact or situation that is observed to exist or happen, especially one whose cause or explanation is in question. "glaciers are interesting natural phenomena".' — Wayfarer

But the word is "Phenomenal":
2.perceptible by the senses or through immediate experience.

We have immediate experience of internal imaginings as much as we do the external world.

Lets not get caught up in vocabulary. My claim is that thinking is the voluntary generation of immediate experience, and that this is the foundation of the sense of self. The blog post looks interesting and very relevant, I will read it when I have more time.

My eyes do not point inward so I am unable to verify what goes on behind them. — NOS4A2

I'm not asking about your eyes, but about your visual experiences.

No. Phenomena are 'what appears' - sensory input. — Wayfarer

Apart from internality and accuracy, what is qualitatively different about the song you hear and the song you play in your head?

Phenomena' is a hugely overused word nowadays, because it's come to mean, basically, 'everything' - which makes it meaningless, as it doesn't differentiate anything. — Wayfarer

It means the appearance or experience of things, that which has a "what it is like". This applies to internal experiences as much as external.

The stream of consciousness is just that, a stream of consciousness. — Wayfarer

Which of course says nothing at all.

I don't think of internal mentation as being phenomenal. — Wayfarer

No? I think of it as entirely phenomenal. When you visualize, or play a song in your head, is that not phenomenal?

I'm wondering why you speak in terms of "generating" phenomenal experience. — Janus

Well, first, I'm not at all certain what 'generating your own phenomenal experience' means. Do you mean, hallucinating? — Wayfarer

No, I mean thinking. When you think to yourself, "I'm having a nice day", you are generating the phenomenal experience of a voice in your head saying "I'm having a nice day". Or, you might think visually, and generate the visual phenomenal experience of you sitting outside in a sunny day.

They don’t have the predicament of selfhood. — Wayfarer

I'm not sure of this. Selfhood (in my perhaps idiosyncratic view) consists in the organism voluntarily generating its own phenomenal experience. This is thinking. When we think, we typically generate the phenomenal experience of a voice, or of images. This cleaves the phenomenal world in two: some phenomenal experience comes from the outside, some comes involuntarily from the inside (pains, emotions), some come from, and are initiated by, the inside. This latter duo, the initiator of its own internal experiences, coupled with those internal experiences themselves, is what we call the self.

While animals do not speak, nothing stops them from generating their own phenomenal experiences, and thus having at least a rudimentary sense of self.

I cannot say I see them. — NOS4A2

Then what can you say you do with the visual components of your dreams? With the auditory components?

we are talking about the single act of looking at a tree

is any of what a neurology textbook describes about vision visually perceptable?

t’s direct because there is nothing between perceiver and perceived. The transformation and interpretation of “nervous activity” is indistinguishable from the perceiver and the act of perceiving, so is therefor not in between perceiver and perceived. — NOS4A2

There is absolutely something in between: all the neural machinery that, however it does, produces perception. This is readily distinguishable from the perceiver by it being imperceptible. You are not aware of the vast effort your brain undergoes to give you a nice clean visual representation.

So your table is broken, split in two. On one half is the tree, on the other half is the perception of the tree, as experienced by the perceiver. Both halves are completely different in their properties. In between them lies a chasm of unconscious neural activity, which is neither the perceiver, as it is imperceptible, nor is it the perceived (obviously).

Yes. I am not denying seeing trees, I'm describing what seeing trees is.

A recent thread has me wondering how far the community here differs from the general community of philosophers. It seems, from the noise, that there are more folk hereabouts who reject realism than in the wider philosophical community. — Banno

Who in that tread was rejecting realism?

you claim to doubt the reality of trees. — Isaac

Except I make no such claim. The tree is real, and the tree as represented experientially is not the "way the tree really is". It is likely a faithful mapping of real properties of the tree, but it is a mapping, not a "true representation". A "true representation" is a fiction, a contradiction.

Our experiences of a tree stand in the same relation to a physical tree as the phrase "a tree" does. "A tree" maps faithfully to a tree, if there is one, but it is not a tree, and there is no "true phrase" among all the possible translations.

"hysterical"? "Pathologically certain"? Myself, I would ascribe these to the monomaniacal author of the 100s of posts long antivax crusade. But that's just me.

Anyways I don't know why you think I have "trouble with trees". I have none.

We can also perceive it through other senses as well, including touching it. — NOS4A2

With touch, your body is directly interacting with the perceived object. But touch is not special. Like other senses, touch, via sensory receptors, must induce nervous activity. And then this nervous activity must be somehow transformed to, or interpreted as, experiential content. You know what it is like to touch an object by way of this experiential content.

In what sense is this sequence "direct"? Certainly, a transformation or interpretation of nervous activity is not the same as the touched object.

It is apparently easy enough to be sure about world events that one can quite hysterically object to alternative interpretations of them, and yet strangely, they can never be sure they're really seeing the tree as it is. — Isaac

On the contrary, I'm quite certian I'm not "seeing the tree as it really is", as this is nonsensical, an oxymoron. To perceive is necessarily to translate the sensory information into experiential terms, which cannot somehow be coincident with "the tree itself".

I'll try one more time to show how this is a mischaracterisation of realism. — Banno

I'm afraid this bears little relation to anything I've written.

In particular, for you, "the tree has leaves" is not about the light reflected from the tree. — Banno

Great, I never said it was. My point, again, is that what is *directly* interacted with, by the body, (on one side of the table, in terms of the OP's metaphor), is something totally other than the tree: its imprint on light which has interacted with it. This is just one of the gaps I've described between perceiver and perceived which makes nonsense of the "direct" in direct realism.

The pretence is that our only choice is between a direct realism that does not recognise a causal chain involved in prception - a view that no one here actually holds — Banno

Not just a casual chain, a series of fundamental transformations, between which there is nothing "direct".

It’s when people are explicitly and politely told that what they are attacking is a position that nobody holds, and they ignore the information completely. — Jamal

If I were attacking a position nobody holds no one would disagree with me.

I think it’s more that he is reacting to the equally incoherent claim that we don’t perceive things “as they (really) are”. — Jamal

Reacting to who's claim? His mental strawman he points at and shouts "Bad Argument! Stove's Gem!"

The idea that we perceive things "as they are' seems incoherent to me. — Janus

Exactly, it is incoherent.

Naive realists like Banno don't seem to be able to let go of this primal picture. — Janus

And yet they strut and prance as if their naivete were in fact sharp insight. That is what is most objectionable.

is oddly passive — Banno

Not at all, experience is actively constructed, it is not a passive process. It's the direct realist that believe experiences are passively received from the outside.

Do you think philosophy, in the sense that it is being "practiced" here is anything more than an amusing pastime? — Janus

Are we directly affected by the light reflected off of objects? What would it mean to say we are indirectly affected by light? — Janus

Our eyes are directly affected.

The central claim of direct or naive realism is that we perceive things "as the are". Apples look red because that's really how apples look. This is called naive because I think we all start from there, we intuitively take this for granted as children. In some people this perspective is never abandoned, and they try to buttress this unchallenged intuition with philosophical arguments.

Do you think philosophy, in the sense that it is being "practiced" here is anything more than an amusing pastime? — Janus

Not really.

Experientially considered perception seems direct, but scientific analysis of the organs of seeing show that it is a process. Does that mean it is indirect? — Janus

Yes.

And further, what difference would it make as to what view one holds? — Janus

This is a question you can ask of all philosophy.

But we do not see the reflected light. — Banno

Then we do what with it?

What is at stake is not vocabulary debates over how "see" shall or shall not be used, but rather how perception should be understood.

Pray tell what is my fundamental misunderstanding?

nothing more significant than playing with words is going on here. — Janus

What is at stake is the nature of perception. Claims like

For the direct realist, the man directly perceives a tree. X directly perceives Y. — NOS4A2

Are contradictory and fundamentally misunderstand perception.

Reflected light is what the eye directly interacts with, not the tree. Only in this sense do we "only see" the reflected light.

To see something *is* to experience it via its reflected light, so yes you see the tree. The argument is not that you don't see it, but that you see it via layers of indirection.

Rather, you do not *directly* see the tree. To see is to indirectly experience something visually.