You guys are making a mess of OLP.

YEA!!!!

I consider ‘awareness’ to be a more general term, with ‘consciousness’ referring to a more complex level of awareness. — Possibility

Me too. To be aware of the possibility of a thing, then to be aware of the thing, proves the thing. To be conscious of the possibility of a thing, then to be conscious of the thing, validates the possibility but does not necessarily prove the thing.

I reserve awareness in reference to sensibility, but consciousness in reference to understanding. To be aware is to sense; to be conscious is to think.

humans didn't begin thinking in the "I" tense. It's hard to understand that we didn't have this. — L'éléphant

I’m ok with that.

Rational thinking of the "I" did not happen before when there was only the "we". — L'éléphant

While I’m hesitant to accept this, I won’t reject it either, without some proper argument to judge it by. I might go for rational thinking of “I” didn’t happen when there was only beings of similar kind, all running around the countryside and stuff, making babies, staying alive, before the advent of systemic pure thought. But when you say “we”, the inception of rational thinking must have occurred, if only as a conception of a discriminating relation between similarly existing things, as determined by one of them.

But I sorta get your point. Maybe I’m over-analyzing.

Actually, I was working from this....

We could not have posited the “self” or the “I” without having the understanding of “we”. — L'éléphant

....from which the deduction of the self must have already been established, insofar as there must already be that to which the understanding of “we” belongs. Hence the presupposed necessary singular subject.

So then the one thing we could deduce from it is that there was no understanding of self prior.... — L'éléphant

Correct. Understanding, in and of itself, does not immediately give the self, but as soon as there is something understood, in this case “we”, a subject to which that something relates, is presupposed. Can’t have an understanding without that which understands. That the self to which understanding belongs, represented as “I”, is only a speculative metaphysical determination of pure reason.

Or so the story goes...
————-

“Freedom is transcendental”, Schopenhauer, 1839;
“There does exist freedom in the transcendental sense”, Kant, 1781.

S thought so, K thought so first. And everybody knows....first rules!!!

Just sayin’.....

Don’t mind me none; just musing.....

Did Descartes actually demonstrate freedom, or did he rather posit that freedom was “...sensed within ourselves...”, and is hence “...self-evident and transparently clear...”?

we’ve somehow achieved freedom of thinking by arriving at the ”I” — L'éléphant

In Descartes, there are two ways of thinking, in which “...will has a wider scope than the intellect...”, so, yes, true enough.

The “I” came about later in our thinking. We could not have posited the “self” or the “I” without having the understanding of “we”. — L'éléphant

Except understanding itself presupposes a necessary singular subject, which couldn’t be any other that an “I”. “We” only indicates a multiplicity of singular subjects, doesn’t it?

Interesting topic, at any rate.

(is physicalism) truly central to philosophical discourse — Kuro

Of course not. It is possible to engage in philosophical discourse that does not have physicalism as its subject. Physicalism is central to a philosophical discourse iff physical objects are contained in its predicates.

Maybe we are our body then. — EugeneW

Under the most serious empirical reduction, we are only our bodies, or, we are nothing other than what our bodies facilitate. Then all the possible questions arising from such a declaration start trippin’ all over each other, and we end up with the gigantic mess that is human reason itself.

”Everything we think, do and refrain from doing is determined by our brain.” — EugeneW

How could it be otherwise? Except for sheer accident or pure reflex, is there anything a human does that isn’t first thought? Does it make any difference to that necessity, that even if he is not conscious of it, it didn’t happen? Does it make any difference, that because, re: Hume, we are habitual creatures, the brain isn’t still in control of those very habits?

Parsimony suggests, and survival mandates, that the brain is in fact both the sole origin for, and the complete arbiter of, human activities, further sustained by logical negation, insofar as without a brain, it is absolutely impossible that a human does anything at all.

Dick Swaab shows that we don't just have brains: we are our brains.

This is nonsense, in the sense that it makes no sense. — EugeneW

The problem is “we”. That the human being is his brain is nonsense, meant to indicate that all a human being can ever be is his brain, which is, of course, nonsense. To reconcile the nonsense, it must be granted, first, that a human being is a rational intellect, second, that rational intellect is predicated on logical relations, and third, that all the terms in a logical relation are mere representations of brain function. Granting those conditions, “we” arises as a logical representation of brain function across the range of human beings, as opposed to “I” for each human being, and the nonsense disappears.

But then, the rabid materialist will insist the disappearance of that nonsense just instills another, albeit different, one, and we arrive right back to that gigantic mess of human reason.

Same as it ever was.....

I still don't understand the unity they talk about. — EugeneW

“....For the empirical consciousness which accompanies different representations is in itself fragmentary and disunited, and without relation to the identity of the subject. This relation, then, does not exist because I accompany every representation with consciousness, but because I join one representation to another, and am conscious of the synthesis of them. Consequently, only because I can connect a variety of given representations in one consciousness, is it possible that I can represent to myself the identity of consciousness in these representations. The thought, "These representations given in intuition belong all of them to me," is accordingly just the same as, "I unite them in one self-consciousness, or can at least so unite them"; and although this thought is not itself the consciousness of the synthesis of representations, it presupposes the possibility of it; that is to say, for the reason alone that I can comprehend the variety of my representations in one consciousness, do I call them my representations, for otherwise I must have as many-coloured and various a self as are the representations of which I am conscious....”

Unity here is the identity of the thinking subject in time, in juxtaposition to that of which the subject is conscious over all times. The problem is, psychology wants the subject to change because of his experiences, and cognitive neurosciences wants to deny there even is one, but pure metaphysics wants the subject to remain despite his experiences. In other words, it matters not what I think or what I know, I am still, and always, me and me alone.

Reification is the only reason for the hard problem; when treated metaphysically as a qualitative condition and not a thing, both the hard and the problem disappear. But then, metaphysics has its own problems, so there is that......

Anyway....one iteration of the unity they talk about, and perhaps the ground of all subsequent iterations.

I saying no more than "it is what it is" (...) seems unimpeachable. — Janus

That, and its negation, “it couldn’t be anything other than what it is”. Both unimpeachable, in that they are tautologically true. Which makes them pretty much worthless.

Equally useless, I might add, is the worthless sophism in the form, “that there is a reality is itself an assumption”. But that’s a ‘nuther whole ball of wax, right there, best left to waste away.

so if consciousness is thought as fundamental then the brain and its sensual body is a structure of consciousness, designed by consciousness to focus itself in order to experience otherness. — Janus

Yep, under the presupposition of universal consciousness, re: Anaxagoras, or universal will, re: Schopenhauer. And others, probably.

It's assumption all the way down, when it comes to (traditional) metaphysics, that is any absolutized claim about the nature of reality. — Janus

Depending on the chronology of “traditional”. Some metaphysics doesn’t make absolutized claims about the nature of reality, i.e., that there is one necessarily, isn’t a claim about its nature.

Nevertheless, I would agree metaphysics as a rational doctrine predicated on pure logic, is assumptions all the way down. The premises are assumed, or at least subjectively given, and hopefully the employment of empirical conditions for justifying the conclusions, doesn’t bite us in our smarty-pants.

Physicalism and idealism are two such claims. — Janus

Plain ol’ idealism. Idealism in and of itself, re: Berkeley. Ok, sure. Surely not though.....er....you-know-who.

My point was only that a scientist could start either from the presupposition that the brain produces consciousness, or that it receives consciousness, and perform exactly all the same experiments as are being done in neuroscience. — Janus

Actually.....having thought about it overnight......if consciousness is external, then it affects the brain. If consciousness is internal, the brain is its cause but at the same time, only affects itself........

......which makes the brain affected either way, and affects being that upon which experiments are presupposed.....

(Enter silly little lightbulb thingy here)

.....speculatively projected metaphysical or ontological implications of empirically grounded cognitive science are another matter altogether..... — Janus

Ahhhh....I see. What you meant by grounding presupposition? I was going there myself, with “the philosophical admissions of the cognitive scientist himself”.

Call it....close enough?

I think that all accounts, all kinds of accounts, are reliant for their coherence on their contexts and the grounding presuppositions..... — Janus

Couldn’t be any other way, could it.

I would even go so far as to declare, saying that philosophy, and he who merely poses as a philosopher, rejects empirically grounded cognitive science with respect to brain operation and demonstrable functionality, is a case of pathological stupidity.

No one denies that the absolute necessity of the brain has been established, yet everyone acknowledges an irreducible sufficiency in its manifestations, has not. Questioning the completeness of scientific investigations is very far from rejecting that which is antecedently proven from it. While the cognitive philosopher can say, “if this, then this, from which that is given”, the cognitive scientist can only say, “because of this, then this, but that is not given”.

At the same time, the utter completeness and internal self-consistency of purely logical cognitive metaphysics, mediately denies to empirical cognitive science the possibility of attaining such complete certainty, merely from the sheer quantitative and qualitative complexity of the system being empirically investigated. In fact, the philosophical admissions of the cognitive scientist himself, may propose that his science may even get in its own way, when the irreducible certainty it seeks may reside in a domain impossible for it to investigate, a difficulty not met in cognitive metaphysics, which has the system it investigates immediately presented to it in its entirety.

The pathologically stupid don’t recognize that science is more apt to reject metaphysics simply because its tenets do not lend themselves to observation, yet metaphysics cannot reject the tenets of empirical science, insofar as those tenets provide the necessary causality for the paradigm in which metaphysics operates.

Science builds and maintains the road, metaphysics uses it. Simple as that.

Rhetorically speaking.....

What I have found missing from your account and from the papers you've linked is any coherent and convincing account of how to make a principled ontological distinction between an inexorably unfolding neural process and any other causal process. — Janus

Well said.

An unfolding neural process would be an experience of the brain, by one who does brain experiments, which relates to Einstein, 1934, “....All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it....”,

A human intellect, in its pursuits, does not experience its own empirical causality, which relates to Kant, 1781, “....That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. (...) But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience...”

While it is the case that brain functionality is a physically causal process, and its operation can be known empirically to a second-party, re: Einstein, such causal process, in the immediate first-party use of it, is not an experience, re: Kant.

Not sure there can ever be a convincing account, when the disparity between what the brain is doing (physics) is on one hand, and what the brain has done (metaphysics), is on the other.

when people aren't informed by what the empirical observations have to reveal on the subject. — Garrett Travers

You know how that would go, even if they were informed of such reveals: they would still want to know what the observations alone can’t tell them. Which is.....how exactly does that work? I see this stimulus, then I see this display corresponding to it. What happened in between?

the science that is present needs to be assessed by philosophers. — Garrett Travers

Wonder what the scientists think about that. Is the philosopher qualified to assess the reveals of empirical science, or merely the credibility of the logic presupposed by them?

Machine ghosts being one more in a long list of conceptualizations the brain foists on the unsuspecting and unprepared human?

Not to over-nitpick a casual truth, but Ryle, 1949, is responsible for machine ghosts, not poor ol’ Rene.

Yep, nice concundrum! — Janus

It is. The human brain is a fascinating contraption, even so.

Ethics perhaps? — Merkwurdichliebe

Maybe. I was going for pure rational thought, as that which everybody does, or the manifest appearance of a purely rational thinking subject, as that which everybody seems to be, and that having ethical decision-making subsumed under it, so.....

You guys just keep (....) saying I'm wrong — Garrett Travers

I’m not. Nothing wrong with the science, which is why I’m not arguing about it.

I mean....how can “we hypothesize....” be argued?

O, the tragedy of a brain that doesn't understand itself... — Janus

Ya know....and I know you do....it was said many moons ago, that human reason is very good at contradicting itself. So if brain machinations are the be-all-end-all, and human reason is the conscious manifestation of the be-all-end-all of brain machinations, then it is the case that the brain both adheres to the absolute necessity of natural law, and at the same time, ensures the inevitability of contradicting itself. Which would seem pretty hard to explain, methinks.

And I'll bet that brain will never produce an argument here. — Garrett Travers

You won’t get an argument from me, for that which I know nothing about, on the one hand, and on the other, that your scientific be-all-end-all domain is utterly irrelevant to the guy wondering what to do about his neighbor’s dog digging up the carrot patch.

I grant the science, and acknowledge the authority of brain machinations. But I am, at the end of the day, just a regular ol’ human being, and as such, philosophy has much more impact on me, than your science, of which I have no conscious need in my intellectual performance.

You actually might be better off, if you acknowledged the fact that everybody thinks, but not a single human ever, is aware of their phosphorus ion count, activation potentials, nor the span of his synaptic clefts for the color “blue”.

So if everybody does this, but nobody does that....where should the productive emphasis reside?

You betcha. And not only that, but anywhere but right here, the-brain-referred-to-as-Mww......isn’t.

What can I say. My brain made me do it.

Odd, innit? The brain does everything, neuroscience does the work to say what the brain is doing when it does everything, then, at the same time, one of the things the brain does, is be sufficient cause for some of us to say.....it makes not the least bit of difference to me, all else being equal, what the HELL my brain is doing. Sure, I got one, but I am never, as Everydayman, conscious of the one I got.

‘Nutha thing. Funny that the human in possession of the brain he investigates, came up with the parameters under which he proves how the brain he possesses works, but the brain never ever presents itself in accordance with the very parameters attributed to its functionality. So really, we didn’t find out how the brain works, but rather, the brain told us how it works.

And then makes it so we can ignore it.

Which is indeed an unequivocal triumph. Just....not of neuroscience.

Ehhhh....dunno what to tell ya, man. It’s your thread, so I guess you’re kinda stuck with what you get.

Didn't mean to leave you hanging. — Garrett Travers

You didn’t, so no worries.

I was commenting....editorializing.....on page 7 here, as a spectator.

That page was pretty unimpressive, considering the norm.

Page 7.

The good....
Far and away the easiest page to read since I’ve been onboard;

The bad.....
Easiest to read because there was nothing to think about;

The ugly....
Nothing to think about because instead of steelman argument, there is Abbott and Costello.

So if matter is representation, or a way of representing the world, then isn't it just another belief? — John McMannis

Matter as representation is perhaps more an understanding than a belief. Materialism, a way of representing the world based on the concept of matter, on the other hand, is a doctrine, and would be a relative judgement of truth, or, a belief, but in the doctrine alone, not the concept, which is given.

If matter is all that exists, then what about the person or thing that says/thinks it's all that exists? — John McMannis

This questions a given concept, by involving a hinge proposition sufficient to ground the possibility of a separate doctrine with its own relative judgements.

So, yes, these are both interpretations, or at least the beginnings of them, the means for them as ends representing the world. But at the same time, the possibility of mutual exclusion, the possibility of self-contradiction....all sorts of mean, ugly, nasty stuff.....comes about.

The onus is on the thinker, then, to pick one, run with it, and try not to confuse himself.

Thanks for the fair point, but nevertheless, synthetic a priori judgements are the very ground of transcendental philosophy. They are the prime refutation of Hume-ian empiricism.....that which should NOT be committed to the flames for its abstract reasoning.....and tacit support for Descartes’ rational, albeit problematic, subject/object duality.

For whatever that’s worth......

this particular problem has been done and dusted for some time, in accordance with the fact that all geometry is indeed analytical. — Garrett Travers

“....Just as little is any principle of pure geometry analytical.....”
(CPR, B16)

Proper steelmanning, and even Socratic dialectics, needs to show how geometry/mathematics in Kant was not proof of the possibility of synthetic a priori judgements. That all geometry is analytical is beside the point, insofar as not all synthetic a priori cognitions are mathematical.

You are correct with respect to the advent of a non-Euclidean axiomatic system. I misspoke by asking about spherical geometry, the determinant axioms of which Kant would not have known, when I should have been more calculating, by addressing spherical trigonometry, the distinguishing logical conditions of which he would. My fault....the subject was triangles, so I just figured, you know....spherical triangles. I find it absurd to think Kant didn’t comprehend a necessary difference between the two shapes.

It is reasonable to suppose he used planar figures and predications, without actually saying so, merely for simplicity, it being tacitly understood that any triangle, including those with spherical predicates known about since Greek mathematicians wrote of them, will still have but three sides and three interior angles, two sides together will be longer than the remaining side, and none of those conceptions alone will give a triangle as a constructed figure. Hence, synthetic apriority holds no matter the axiomatic set, and it becomes clear it makes no difference whatsoever that he didn't know non-Euclidean geometry.

It is worth remembering that Kantian transcendental philosophy has to do with objects in general, and not the specific empirical examples which only follow from them. In Kant, then, synthetic a priori is a condition in itself, respecting the connection of different conceptions to each other in judgements, for which an empirical example is nothing but a possible consequent.

So.....while it is true non-Euclidean geometry falsifies some Euclidean axioms, it is not true non-Euclidean geometry falsifies Kantian synthetic a priori judgements. Or, I must say, a more complete demonstration that it does, would be appreciated.

Do you really think Kant didn’t know about spherical geometry? And didn’t take care to qualify his postulates accordingly?

Isn't this what Kant is getting at? — John McMannis

Gotta be pretty careful about “what Kant is getting at”.

If matter is all that exists, what about the fact that we conceive of the world this way? — John McMannis

We conceive of the world.....what way? Conceive of the world in a material way?

Care to elaborate on what you’re asking about conceiving the world and what Kant was getting at?

how we can know if something is unknowable in perpetuity? — Tom Storm

I think, once again, that this can only be a logical claim, which would stand insofar as if something is impossible to know, it will be unknowable for all time. Stuff like....can we know of an effect that has no cause, can we know a conception that does not immediately include its own negation....weird stuff like that, predicated merely on the kind of intellect in play.

On the other hand, and maybe even weirder, is “Rumsfeld’s Ditty”, which implies that of which we don’t know we don’t know, is already unknowable in any time. Technically, though, this reflects on the Kantian category of possibility, which states that a thing must be possible in order to be known, so if there is a thing for which we don’t know the possibility, that is exactly the thing for which there can never be any knowledge.

But still, to think any object is to presuppose its possibility, insofar as it is impossible to think an impossible object. Or, which is the same thing, to think an impossible object is a contradiction. It follows that an unknowable object is an impossible object, but we cannot think an impossible object, so how in the HELL did we ever come up with asking if we can know of something the thought of which can never happen?

Hence, the critique of pure reason. Humans do this kinda stuff all the time, but there's no answers in the doing, or, the answers are in conflict with the questions, rather than satisfying them.

“....Now the transcendental (subjective) reality at least of the pure conceptions of reason rests upon the fact that we are led to such ideas by a necessary procedure of reason. There must therefore be syllogisms which contain no empirical premisses, and by means of which we conclude from something that we do know, to something of which we do not even possess a conception, to which we, nevertheless, by an unavoidable illusion, ascribe objective reality. Such arguments are, as regards their result, rather to be termed sophisms than syllogisms, although indeed, as regards their origin, they are very well entitled to the latter name, inasmuch as they are not fictions or accidental products of reason, but are necessitated by its very nature. They are sophisms, not of men, but of pure reason herself, from which the Wisest cannot free himself. After long labour he may be able to guard against the error, but he can never be thoroughly rid of the illusion which continually mocks and misleads him....”

It’s fun to think about human thinking, but it’s soooooo much more fun, to think about how hay-wire it can go.

have you heard this simple principle before? — Joe Mello

Not in those exact words, no, but as I said....close enough. Seems to me any intelligent design argument arises from similar iterations of your personally derived metaphysical principle, and your comments subsequent to your response to me lends support.

The dismissal of this principle under the auspices of what it sounds like is not a philosophical accomplishment. — Joe Mello

If your principe sounds like it has similar internal truth value to principles that sound just like it, but are on the record chronologically prior to it, yours can be dismissed as merely repetitious, being no more or less interesting than its predecessors. And that judgement, in the form of dismissal from repetition, while mere opinion, albeit with empirical support, is nonetheless a purely philosophical accomplishment.

You’ve got three pages of responses in a scant twenty hours, so you’ve been successful in drawing attention to yourself. But the principle, so vigorously propounded herein, cannot be said to enjoy any such success at all, having been established, at least in kind, close to 400 years ago, and that only so far as I know.

That you have been introduced is certainly true; that something else has been introduced, is not. No reflection on you, of course; you apparently weren’t aware.

Carry on, with best wishes of course.

remain unclear or incomplete.... - the nature of the noumenal world for one (which by definition is unknowable but is this an acceptable position?) — Tom Storm

It is unknowable, and that position is acceptable, iff considered by Kant’s standards. To say the way Kant talks about it is misleading or wrong is fine, but to show how it is those, requires a different set of standards.

It is still the case, though, that in Kant, there is no noumenal world, from a human perspective, so to even talk about in connection with him, is technically inappropriate.

Dunno, but it seems your metaphysical principle is similar to Rousseau, 1762, or maybe Paley, 1802.

Close enough, methinks.

the problem with idealism in general is that it is an incomplete model — Tom Storm

“....For pure speculative reason has this peculiarity, that, in choosing the various objects of thought, it is able to define the limits of its own faculties, and even to give a complete enumeration of the possible modes of proposing problems to itself, and thus to sketch out the entire system of metaphysics...”

Idealism in general...perhaps. This particular idealism, according to its author, is at least a logically complete model of a human cognitive system.

“....common logic presents me with a complete and systematic catalogue of all the simple operations of reason...”

That which arises from itself must be complete, and exchanging the completeness of that, for the language used to represent it, explains why the books that tells us about it, are hundreds of pages long.

“...Hence, too, metaphysics has this singular advantage—an advantage which falls to the lot of no other science which has to do with objects—that, if once it is conducted into the sure path of science, it can then take in the whole sphere of its cognitions, and can thus complete its work, and leave it for the use of posterity, as a capital which can never receive fresh accessions. For metaphysics has to deal only with principles and with the limitations of its own employment as determined by these principles. To this perfection it is, therefore, bound, as the fundamental science, to attain...”

It isn’t a question of being a complete model, but rather, whether it is accepted as such. So it is that either the model is complete but wrong insofar as it begins from the wrong path, or it is incomplete insofar as it disregards that which doesn’t belong to it, but should.

As are sensations disregarded, as having nothing whatsoever to do with metaphysics proper, and a logical model for it, other than their mere physical presence for its initiation.

Schopenhauer’s criticism is abysmally inept as well, with respect to Kant’s neglect of his cherished principle of sufficient reason, in that the metaphysical principles of pure reason have to do with principles of universality and absolute necessity, which, when logically given, are themselves immediately sufficient for that which follows from them.

do you think any knowledge of objects with infinite properties is possible at all..... — Janus

Personally, I don’t think objects with infinite properties are even possible. Given that an object is the sum of its parts describable by properties, then an object of infinite parts is immediately impossible because the sum of them is impossible. It follows that knowledge of impossible objects is itself impossible. But then....how do we know the objects we experience don’t have properties we can’t describe? And, if we don’t know how many of those there may be, we don’t know there aren’t an infinite series of them.

......or are we confined to examining the logical implications (the a priori) — Janus

That, if anything, I think. If the infinite is a logical premise, then it seems only logical conclusions can be possible from it.

Leave it to a human, to wish to know everything, and then come up with something, all by himself, he can’t know anything about. Sometimes I think we got away from throwing rocks at each other, by sheer accident.

I think you are misreading Kant. — Michael Sol

I’m more than happy to be corrected.

Direct references from relevant texts mandatory, of course.