What is a sense of materialness? Do explain — Bartricks

It's the sense I have that, for example, the chair I'm sat on is made of solid material.

the representative data the spider has direct access to is not identical to hidden states, as you've been claiming. — Tate

Where have I claimed anything like that?

Then you still have to explain what you mean by one person seeing something as red and another person seeing that same thing as blue. Does each person have different hidden states? — Michael

Same hidden state causes one person to respond in the way we call 'seeing blue' and another person to respond in the way we call 'seeing red'. It is an intrinsic property of the hidden state that it causes this multiple response. The colour of the hidden state is either red (and person B is wrong), or blue (and person A is wrong), or some new colour which causes this odd split reaction which we'd need a new word for. As I say, we've not encountered such hidden states in any quantity. The vast majority cause the same response.

The representation and the prey are distinct. This is basic biology. — Tate

Yep. But it sees the prey. Not the representation.

We have a sensation of presentness. Do keep up. — Bartricks

We have a sensation of externality. We have a sensation of materialness. We have a sensation of mind-independance. We have a sensation of persistence...

By what means are you determining that your belief that events are happening in the present is a 'sensation', but my belief that objects are mind independent is not?

Do they have little labels on them that only you can read?

those signals are representative. Are you denying that? — Tate

No. I'm denying that they're what we 'see'. They're part of 'seeing', they're not what we see.

What's the difference between saying "x causes us to see green" and saying "x causes us to respond in the way described as 'seeing green'" — Michael

One has green as a property of some mental representation, the other as a property of the hidden state.

The former is without warrant.

What? Here are your words: — Michael

Yeah. Look at the words. I was quite careful.

respond in the way we describe as 'seeing green' — Isaac

The electrical signals it receives from the optic nerve are a representation. — Tate

Uh huh. But we don't 'see' the electrical signals. We see the external world object. 'Seeing' involves those electrical signals, they're part of the process of seeing. They're not what we see.

If the same hidden state causes you to see the colour on the left and me to see the colour on the right then we are seeing different colours. — Michael

An impossible situation from the outset. Hidden states cannot cause us to see colours. There's no mechanism by which that can happen. Seeing a colour is a process which starts with the property of a hidden state and ends with a series of responses (one of which might be to reach for a colour word).

You're imagining that 'seeing a colour' is some internal process, but you've given no reason why you'd imagine such a thing.

The lenses, the photo-receptors, the optic nerves delivering electrical signals. — Tate

You're just naming parts of the optic system. Your claim was that they give us reason to believe that a spider's brain is receiving a representation of its environment.

If both "red" and "blue" refer to hidden state X then red and blue are the same colour — Michael

Not at all. If I think the person in the doorway is called Jim and you think he's called Jack, we're still both referring to the same person. That doesn't make Jim the same name as Jack. It makes one of us wrong, or it makes the person in the doorway possessed of two names, or it makes the name of the person in the doorway ambiguous, or unresolved.

Likewise with a hidden state which causes you to reach for the word 'blue' and me to reach for the word 'red' doesn't make red and blue the same thing, it makes one of us wrong, or the colour of the hidden state ambiguous, or unresolved.

The schematic of the nervous system gives us ample reason to believe that a spider's brain is receiving a representation of its environment. — Tate

Does it? In what way?

Hidden state X causes me to see red and you to see blue. What does "red" and "blue" refer to? — Michael

The colour of hidden state X.

It doesn't refer to hidden state X, otherwise we would both be seeing red or both be seeing blue (or both be seeing some other colour). — Michael

Why? Why must hidden state X have a colour such that it causes the same response in you as it does in me? In this case, its colour is 'red or blue'. We might, if we were to keep finding such hidden states, come up with a new word for such a colour, but since such states are exceedingly rare, we haven't the need. Most of the time the same state will cause the same (or similar) response in normally sighted people.

We just don't know how the brain creates a holistic experience out of that. — Tate

Well. We know quite a lot about how the brain creates a holistic experience out of that. Not a complete picture. I'm not sure what your point is.

I can see the difference between red and blue. It's immediately apparent. Therefore red and blue aren't hidden states. — Michael

Hidden states cause effects in us. Them being hidden refers to their being outside of the Markov blanket, not to their having no effect. So you distinguishing red from blue is easy. Red has a different effect on you to blue.

we're shown a bunch of things that share the same colour-appearance — Michael

How is it that things all share the same colour experience if they've no intrinsic properties relating to colour? How is it that I can point to a post box, a rose, a bus, a traffic light...to teach my son how to use the word 'red' if all of those things have no intrinsic property called 'red'? Is it just luck that he has the same response to each such that he can see the similarity I'm getting at?

if colour is a hidden state then how can we learn to use colour words? — Michael

Because hidden states have fairly consistent and similar effects on us.

we have a memory and can remember how things appeared in the past and how they appear now — Michael

How could you possibly know that? Why would you even think that? I mean, I'm not going to rehash Wittgenstein's private language argument, you probably know it, but without some external reference you'd have no default reason to even think your 'black' of today was the same experience as your 'black' of yesterday.

So when I see a white and gold dress and you see a black and blue dress we're seeing different hidden states? — Michael

No. Same hidden states. I don't understand why you're having so much trouble with the idea of a hidden state having a different effect on different people or in different contexts. Did you not understand the example I gave earlier of the constellation Orion? The stars of Orion are arranged in the form of a man with a bow. The fact that they could also be seen as several other things doesn't mean they're not in the form of a man with a bow, it's just that they're also in other forms.

They're definitely not in the form of next week's winning lottery numbers. There's something intrinsic about them which constrains what pattern we can see. A man with a bow is one such option.

In the case of the dress, its colour is either white and gold or black and blue. It's not pink and green. There's something intrinsic about the hidden states which constrains our range of normal responses. That something is its colour.

When I see the dress as white and gold and you see the dress as black and blue, what do the words "white", "gold", "black", and "blue" refer to? — Michael

The properties of hidden states.

They don't refer to some hidden state. — Michael

Why not?

the words "black" and "blue" refer to features present in your experience that aren't present in my experience. — Michael

Then how did we learn to use the words? If they describe private experiences, how is it I ever learnt their use. How do we even know that what I call 'black' today is the same thing I called 'black' yesterday?

Some object is red1 if it causes most humans to see red2 — Michael

Herein is the problem. There's no reason at all to consider the existence of red2. We respond to red1. We reach for the word 'red', we imagine other things which are red...

What there's no evidence at all for is some entity called red2 which we 'see'. The process of 'seeing' does not, in any way, consult an internal colour chart. There's no entity matching your description of red2.

Yes, I think pretty much sums up the state of the arguments. He's resorted to talking about pixies.

We see them as teacups, because our culture drinks tea. — Wayfarer

But we can't just see them as teacups because our culture drinks tea. Why don't I see the table as a teacup? There must be some properties that particular hidden state has that makes it amenable to being 'seen as a teacup', whereas the other hidden state has properties which make it more amenable to being 'seen as a table'. Those properties are intrinsic, not imbued by us. Our imbuing practices must use some properties to decide what gestalt to imbue, otherwise we'd have one amorphous homogeneous mass.

The results are somewhat constrained, but not completely. And that is why the question of the interpretation of physics is still very much an unsolved issue. — Wayfarer

Absolutely. Those 'constraints' are intrinsic properties. Hidden states which are intrinsically constrained in such-and-such a way are called 'teacups'. Hidden states which are intrinsically constrained in this other way are called 'tables'.

By the 'constituents of rational thought' I'm referring to such things as the rules of logic and arithmetic, and so on. Not just any random thought that pops into your head. — Wayfarer

The difference being? Is it consistency? Universality? What?

The "green" in "seeing green" doesn't mean the same thing as your suggested "green" as a property of a hidden state. The former is what most people understand colour to be. — Michael

So the expression "the post box is red" wouldn't make sense to most people? They'd say "the post box causes me to see red"?

When I say "the colour that I see isn't the colour that you see" — Michael

I seriously don't know anyone who speaks that way in normal conversation. People might say "I see the dress as green, you see it as blue". They're still talking about the colour of the dress (the hidden state we're modelling), they're not talking about the content of their minds.

If colour was the property of a hidden state then how do you make sense of two people seeing different colours when looking at the same thing? — Michael

I've answered that already. The label we apply to hidden states is based on the response those states normally produce in most contexts. The process doesn't require that such states always produce that response in all contexts.

This is the problem when you try to use the same labels that we use to refer to features of experience to also refer to the external world causes of those experiences. It leads us susceptible to equivocation. — Michael

That seems to me to be a problem caused by this odd manner of speaking about 'colours of experiences' which no one uses in normal conversations.

there's a very big difference between saying that the cup that I see (in the context of "seeing a cup") is some external world thing and saying that some external world things cause most humans to see a cup. — Michael

OK, so you agree that there exists some external world thing which causes most humans to have the response we call 'seeing a cup'.

What should we call that?

I propose we should call it 'a cup'.

But in my community it means ice cream. So the murderer's death was his just ice cream? That makes no sense at all. — Bartricks

Then how did you learn how to use the word 'desert' as you use it in the OP?

In my community desert means ice cream. — Bartricks

Weird. You've never heard people use the word 'desert' in contexts like "that murderer's death was his just desert"?

What an odd community you must have been brought up in. Still, you use the word that way now, so you must have learnt how to use it somehow. From where did you learn how to use the word 'desert' as you use it in the OP?

how do we know anything? — Bartricks

Something's turning out to be as I expected it to be using some theory and others in my community seeming to have the same experience is a pretty good measure of my knowing that theory. Why do you ask?

and language. What does 'desert' mean anyway? — Bartricks

It means that which is it used for in my language community. Again, not sure why you're asking.

Whether that external sensible world is independent of all minds is not something one can see. How would you 'see' that? — Bartricks

You can't 'see' presentness either. So being able to 'see' that which is assumed doesn't seem to distinguish the two propositions.

I would further argue that they don't deserve anything -- beyond what human beings think they deserve (or don't deserve). And the answer to that question (What do human beings deserve?) is so personal that to try to find a general, abstract principle about it -- that is, one that applies in all or even most situations -- is a fool's errand. — Xtrix

Interesting. Have you read Anscombe on what we 'ought' to do? I'm somewhat persuaded by a bastardised version of her argument. 'Deserve' is just a word, and like any other word is has a meaning which is carried by its use. So if we say "John deserved a punch in the face" when John has done absolutely nothing wrong, we've not made an error in ethical judgement, we've made an error in language, that's simply not how the word 'deserve' is used, it's not used to describe punching someone in the face when they've done nothing wrong, it's used to describe the sorts of things we all commonly associated with "John deserved X".

This leaves the meaning very fuzzy, very contextual, but still not without meaning entirely. We can still say punching old ladies for no reason is morally wrong because that's the sort of activity the term 'morally wrong' is used to describe, just like the tall branching thing with leaves on it over there is the sort of thing the term 'tree' is used to describe.

So yes, a fabrication of humans, but like any linguistic practice, definitely has its fuzzy boundaries.

The interesting question for me is why they have that belief to begin with. Why is the expectation an unobtainable one? It's like asking for a square with three sides. If living a pain-free existence is the only just existence, then sure: existence is unjust. But that's a rigged game, so to speak -- rigged to draw the same conclusion over and over again. Why? Because life includes pain -- it's part of the phenomenon of being alive. — Xtrix

Yes. That is the most interesting question. It dogs all antinatalist arguments. Why are we reducing harm when there's no one around to benefit from the lack of harm? Harm is something to reduce so that someone can enjoy the lack of it, not something to reduce just because. I was talking in another thread, coincidentally, about the fetishisation of philosophical questions. I think this universal harm-reduction is just such a fetishisation. It's not a feeling anyone actually has, it's a principle it is possible to have and so people, of a certain ilk, will try it on, so to speak, like dressing up in Cowboy costume, just to see how it feels.

Patterns emerge and are reinforced or altered in actual
contexts of interaction, rather than in rules or properties that supposedly exist before or outside of actual contexts — Joshs

So why would those patterns emerge variable? What causes the variance?

Do you remember the dress that some people see as black and blue and others as white and gold? Same stimulus, different colours experienced.

Your account of colour would make this, and things like Locke's inverted spectrum hypothesis, incomprehensible. — Michael

I don't see how. I'm saying that 'green' is a property of a hidden state which cause most humans in most situations to respond in the way we describe as 'seeing green'. It doesn't require that these hidden states have this effect on everyone, nor does it require that they have this effect at all times in all contexts.

Doesn't physicalism/materialism say that objects possess inherent reality, that they're real irrespective of your or my observation? And isn't that assertion central to the gist of the whole debate? — Wayfarer

Yes, but I'm not clear what you mean by it in talking about idealism.

The atoms of a teacup do not collude together to form a teacup

This is what I'm saying is simply wrong. The atoms do collude together to form a teacup. That's why we can all see them as a teacup. That's why one of the available gestalts is that of a teacup. Because the atoms do indeed form the shape of a teacup. They also form the shape of dozens of other things which we ignore, choosing, instead, to focus on the teacup option. But it's wrong to say they're not in the form of a teacup just because they're also in the form of many other options.

Einstein was compelled to say this by what was happening in physics during the 1920's, which threw his kind of scientific realism into doubt. That was essentially the background of the Einstein-Bohr debates which occupied many later decades (see Manjit Kumar 'Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality'. Within that milieu, Heisenberg functions as a kind of modern representative of Platonism.) — Wayfarer

And yet I couldn't just walk into a physics department and propose my own version of what's happening at a quantum scale, could I? Why not? Because the range of possibilities is constrained. It's constrained by actual measurements (such as those from the large hadron collider). Measurements I'm unaware of but which constrain the choices of physicists about the nature of reality. The reason why only learned physicists can speculate on such matters. So there are intrinsic properties of reality, it's just that they are insufficiently specific to distinguish between the competing theories.

they're not material in nature, nor derived from or supervening on the physical. but they're real as the constituents of rational thought. It is not quite the same as conceptualism, which holds that all such things are in individual minds, because I believe that they are the properties of any and all minds. — Wayfarer

So...any closer to an idea of what isn't "real as the constituents of rational thought"?

There are no intrinsic properties because the heterogeneity the world produces is not based on static facts of the matter but continually changing patterns of relationship. — Joshs

How can there be any pattern of relationship (continually changing or not) without intrinsic properties? If the hidden states are absent of any properties at all then there'd be no pattern. All would be one homogeneous mass.

Patterns (even ephemeral ones) require variation and variation requires properties over which there can be variance.

What I'm claiming is that when we partake in our naming practices, what we're naming are hidden states. We name them by a complex, interactive and collaborative process of agreement as to the best model of the effects those states have on us (humans). The process might be fiendishly complicated, but it doesn't change the 'what' we're naming...which is a hidden state.

A 'cup' is a hidden state which we generally agree causes us to model it as something to drink out of. That's just what a 'cup' is.

It can't be an internal model I'm referring to...

I can be wrong about whether the thing I'm naming is a cup. I couldn't possibly be wrong if what I'm naming is my internal model of that hidden state.

When I say "put that cup away" I'm expecting that instruction to effect the external hidden state. I'm expecting to later model that state as being one with a cup previously on a table now away in a cupboard. I'm not expecting my instructee to act upon my model. I'm expecting him to act on the external hidden state.

The fact that we can only infer hidden states doesn't prevent us from naming them because we can come to an agreement about what it is we infer from them.

Seems like you’re falling victim to the exact equivocation I warned against. — Michael

Here...?

if you want to say that something is red if it causes most humans to see red then we have two different meanings for "red" (red as the colour in the experience and red as reflecting light at a certain wavelength) leaving us susceptible to equivocation. — Michael

I don't see it. I don't know of anyone who seriously talks about the redness of their experiences. Post boxes are red, roses are red, traffic lights are red. Experiences aren't coloured, they're mental events.

I would argue with Putnam , who is a semantic relativist , that the world has no intrinsic properties — Joshs

Does that imply homogeneity of the external world? If so, then what causes the heterogeneity we experience?

if that were the case then when you say that there is an external world red cup you're just saying that there's some external world stuff that causes most humans to see a red cup. — Michael

Yes. And that's what a cup is.

I don't start with a worldview. I do philosophy. I follow reason. — Bartricks

So perhaps you can explain here then what the difference is between these two propositions...

"there appears to be a present in which events are occurring"

"there appears to be an external world made of mind-independent material objects"

Why is one labelled a 'worldview' and bad philosophy to start with, but the other is labelled an 'instinct' and is good philosophy to start with. How do they differ in form such that you can identify such a significant difference between the two?

The colour that I see and the colour that the bird sees aren't part of the external world — Michael

Why not?

Why can it not be that 'red' just is a category of wave particles which cause humans, in normal light conditions with normal eyesight to have the response we call 'seeing red'. What's wrong with categorising collections of external world particles by the effect they tend to have on humans?

You seem to have "bracketed", as they say, the issue of whether a classification, or a classificatory scheme, is "correct", in any sense. — Srap Tasmaner

Mainly because I've no idea what 'correct' might constitute. I can see 'useless' (in book terms, a classification system based on paper thickness, for example, would be next to useless compared to one based on subject matter). But actually correct? There doesn't seem to be any clear criteria by which to judge.

You also imply that a classification is, shall we say, "external", "imposed" on the set: — Srap Tasmaner

Oddly concurrent with my discussion on realism... I don't mean to imply that it's entirely imposed, but partly so. Like the image of a man with a bow is partly imposed on the constellation Orion. It is definitely in the shape of a man with a bow. It's just that its also in the shape of lots of other things too. We've chosen to ignore those other possibilities and focus on the man with the bow, so in that sense it's imposed. But it's definitely not in the shape of next week's winning lottery numbers, so our choice to ignore that arrangement was intrinsic to the actual pattern of the stars, not imposed.

I'd see philosophical classification like that. Imposed, but from a constrained set of choices. Which I think might be what you're getting at with...

The librarian has discovered that the book contains instructions for cooking; the predicate "... is a cookbook" is true of it, while many other predicates are not. It doesn't completely determine your final decision on how to classify the book (because there are many predicates you can use to partition your set, and many combinations of them), but it's now available. — Srap Tasmaner

...? Only I'd say that the classification isn't the discovery. the librarian discovered the book was about cookery by reading it. The decision to then classify as a cookery book is not a discovery but a declaration (maybe it was also 'about' travel but the librarian decided it was more cookery than travel).

I think you're right to say much of this is then cognitive psychology, but that's the equivalent of reading the book. The aspect I was trying to get at was the declarative act of classification, which is slightly different to the investigative act of discovering the properties on which one might base a classification decision.

Which is not to say that there aren't psychological explanations for my spider-watching available. Of course there are. But they don't count as reasons for me. (We are still very close to the prompting thread after all.) — Srap Tasmaner

I think this is key to (my understanding of) what you're saying. What counts as a reason and what is sufficient cause are not the same, but what counts as a reason is personal, subjective, and yet seems to want to elbow its way into discussions which have the flavour of technical discussions, right/wrong. We can't have a technical discussion about the rightness or wrongness of what feels to me to be a reason... because (getting into the psychology of it), what you feel constitutes a reason is a post hoc construction which serves purposes usually quite apart from the matter at hand.

curiosity is a clue, a retroactive experience of recognizing that you have already not understood something. It is a valorization of that failure as the proper starting point. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, I can agree on that, but I think where I might diverge is that there can be a fetishisation of such curiosity. One can over do it. Adding "...yeah but what is it really?" to the end of every answer is a commoditisation of curiosity, not curiosity proper, and I really get the feeling that some substantial portion of philosophy is of that latter sort.

when one set interacts with a certain kind of light the "human vision" experience above is elicited, and when the other set interacts with that same kind of light the "bird vision" experience above is elicited. — Michael

Yes, but where's the error in labelling the set which (when they interact with a certain kind of light) cause the "human vision" experience of a red cup, a 'red cup'?

Why are we wrong to apply the label 'red cup' to those particular wave particles with those particular properties?

I don't see how the fact that they elicit different properties in birds makes our labelling process incorrect. We're just not labelling them by the effect they have on birds. There's nothing wrong with that. I don't see why our labelling practices should accommodate the effect the object of our labelling has on birds.

Wave-particles holding wave-particles? That's a category error — Michael

How so? Can some wave particles not be considered 'inside' others?

The external world is just a mass of wave-particles all interacting with each other. This then causes us to see a red cup filled with water. — Michael

Why?

Why do those wave particles there cause us to see a red cup filled with water, and not, say, a bus, or a circus clown?

They have some specific properties which cause us to see red cups filled with water.

What is in error in labelling those wave particles with those particular properties a 'red cup'?

We can say that's what a red cup is. It's a particular collection of wave particles which have the property of causing humans to 'see' a red cup.

I think that it would be like saying that there's a person on the TV, when really it's just a bunch of pixels on the screen being lit up a certain way. — Michael

Well no, because 'a person' is a label we have for an object which has properties like being made of cells, being autonomous etc. Properties which the pixels on the screen clearly lack.

This is not true of the wave particle arrangement which is our 'red cup'. Those wave particles have exactly the properties we expect of red cups. They reflect the right wavelengths, they hold liquids (other wave particles we call 'liquids'). There's no made up properties.

I would say that our current understanding of physics, e.g. the Standard Model, would show that it is a mistake to reduce the objects of perception to the external world causes of experience. — Michael

How so? Our current understanding of physics doesn't seem to be incompatible with the notion that some particular collection of those wave-particles are arranged in a stable, mind-independant manner to which we can apply the label 'red cup'.

You seem to be thinking that the fact that they could also be interpreted as some other arrangement means the arrangement we've chosen isn't real (in a mind-independant manner), but I don't see how that follows.

If I choose to see the duck-rabbit as a duck, the possibility of seeing it as a rabbit doesn't render the 'duck' arrangement of pixels unreal. The pixels are genuinely still arranged in the shape of a duck. They're just also arranged in the shape of a rabbit.

My view is close to idealism but I don't understand that to mean that objects don't exist, but that they are lacking inherent or intrinsic reality. — Wayfarer

OK. I'm still unclear on what you mean by 'inherent or intrinsic reality'. Can you give an example of something which isn't inherently/intrinsically real and say what features deny it that status?

I asked thst way round because I'm already aware of things you think are inherently/intrinsically real (numbers, lass of logic) but I still can't see from those examples alone where you're drawing the line between real and not-real.

To deserve something does not mean others are obliged to give it to you, as I have explained numerous times. — Bartricks

So? What has that got to do with the matter at hand? Which is that it is taken, in this actual case, to imply just such an obligation.

It is a flaw in your argument that you assume the lack of desert of harm implies an obligation to actually cause a state of non-harm. It doesn't. When deserts imply obligations (note when they do, not that they always do), they do not typically also imply an obligation to avoid the opposite of that which is deserved.

Thus, to claim an innocent does not deserve harm does not (as you incorrectly conclude) imply that there is a duty on anyone to bring about the opposite (a state of non-harm).

Alternatively, if you want to claim that, in this case,...

To deserve something does not mean others are obliged to give it to you — Bartricks

...then your argument fails as I pointed out before. An innocent may deserve non-harm, but no one is under any obligation to provide it, so procreation is morally acceptable.