Do I honestly need to point out that even if you're watching a film about neurons, it's still composed entirely of internal images? — neonspectraltoast

You need to explain it, too, I'm afraid. "Internal" thus far has meant intra-cranial. The film was composed of images on a screen several metres away.

Exactly, what is the relationship between the film show and the neurons if not a relationship of representation? — Harry Hindu

Well, sure. That was my point. That's how I learnt about the neurons. And?

If I asked you to draw a picture of neurons, then where would you be getting your image from to duplicate with paper and pencil? — Harry Hindu

I don't store and retrieve images, though. (You're excused for assuming I do, as it was the standard model of brain function before the neural network revolution.) I train myself to select among and produce actual, external images to be appropriate representations of (actual) objects.

It seems like we are saying the same thing - that you are un-afflicted and I am. — Harry Hindu

No. Like you, I'm gifted with symbolic/referential skills, and hence afflicted with the temptation to believe I experience internal illusions and images. We disagree over whether to accept that these internal things exist.

We agree that brain shivers happen. Perhaps we can agree to call them "thoughts". Where we then diverge is on the question how these thoughts relate to images (e.g. visual ones). Tradition and common sense suggest we identify thoughts directly with actual images swimming in some mysterious extra-physical medium called a mind. I identify them with adjustments in the disposition of the organism to select among actual images and objects, these adjustments habitually but not inevitably accompanied by thoughts that maintain the traditional myth. My original post was a suggestion how to begin to form more realistic habits of thought about one's thoughts.

Then this is the result one would expect when a non-p-zombie attempts to communicate the concept of "mind" to a p-zombie. You are a p-zombie and I am not, hence your lack of understanding of what I am talking about. — Harry Hindu

I suppose that is a plausible sci-fi scenario. I think a more realistic one would restrict "p-zombie" to creatures un-afflicted, or un-gifted, with the symbolic, referential skills that create the illusion of an internal illusion.

Your argument is as faulty as saying "I am not writing these words right now". — schopenhauer1

That may be, but is it faulty in the same way? Is something I said false for the same reason your statement (or the token of it you were then writing) is false?

The fact that we "think" we have illusions has to be explained. — schopenhauer1

I want to say I agree with that, but there's a danger we then misunderstand each other. I agree the fact that we think that, or entertain the illusion that, we have mental images does deserve explanation, yes. Hence my attempt at that. On the other hand, I can't agree that it's a fact that we have mental illusions in the form of mental images.

It is a fact that there appears to be mind happening. — schopenhauer1

Again, I agree that there do appear words and brain-shivers preparing words to that effect. I disagree that something called a mind makes an appearance on some scene.

That is the illusion itself. — schopenhauer1

Again, two ways to take this. "That" is the psychological account we are disputing? The hypothesis about some internal illusion or film show? Or is "that" the disputed internal images themselves? You want to conflate the two, and so you think that I'm admitting an internal, mental illusion/film-show, and no wonder you're incredulous when the next moment I deny that. But I wasn't admitting that, at all.

Then nerve firings are a kind of film show? I don't get it. — Harry Hindu

It was a film about nerve firings.

Both of what? — Harry Hindu

Mind and an inner film show, as actual non-fictional things.

Why would you call it a "film show"? — Harry Hindu

If the "it" here refers to the projections onto a screen in the lecture hall I sat in, then "film show" just seems the appropriate description. If the "it" refers to some brain-shivers then we could discuss whether "film show" is an appropriate way to describe them; I would think not. Wasn't me. If the it refers to a thing you call "a mind", or some "mental images", then we have to deal with our disagreement about what we are talking about, because I don't accept the existence of such things. So again, not me, calling that thing a film show.

I should clarify: "inner film show" I did identify with "mental images", but only to explain that I don't accept either of them as actual non-fictional things. Which is to say, again, there are no mental components to describe (appropriately or not) as a film show.

But you only know of nerve firings thanks to your "inner film show". — Harry Hindu

I would have to disagree. I know of them thanks to sitting my actual self in an actual theatre and watching an actual film show.

To even relate the mind to an "inner film show" means that — Harry Hindu

But I'm questioning both, of course.

Everyone recognizes that characters in books are fictional. Trying to convince us that other people are fictional is a different matter. — neonspectraltoast

I wasn't. I only said the alleged film show and theatre and audience are all fictional.

What is the nature of non-existent fictional characters in a work of fiction?
— bongo fury

Certainly not the basis for all we can see, taste, hear, feel, and imagine. — schopenhauer1

I don't see why actual fictions (such as the actual reporting of non-existent fictional film shows in non-existent fictional theatres with non-existent fictional audiences) can't be the basis for perfectly good inferences about the actual world, and about it's actual inhabitants who do actually report their actual experiences in fictional terms, but actually make the perfectly good inferences. (As well as some wrong ones.)

So what is the nature of this non-existent fictional images and audio and homunculi? — schopenhauer1

What is the nature of non-existent fictional characters in a work of fiction?

If you say you don't have anything like reportable internal events, you would be the first conscious person to do so. — schopenhauer1

I guess my spoken and thought (sub-vocalised) words are evidence of brain events, but you wouldn't say they describe those events? So, no, I don't see how I or anyone can report on their brain events.

So I can only surmise that here...

The theater in the brain is reported. What are they reporting? — schopenhauer1

... you meant specifically reports of a theater in a different place - in a mind?

And then you ask if I dare to deny having reports of this nature to file?

I don't deny having filed such reports most of my life. But I do insist they were all fictional: concerning non-existent images and audio, and too often also non-existent homunculi.

And I must stress: it's not that the visions I reported turned out to be hallucinations, visions with no veracity, it's that I made up having the visions at all.

We don't think, yet here we are thinking. — schopenhauer1

I don't say we don't think. Unless you are saying zombies don't think?

How is it the nerve-firings are these fictions? — schopenhauer1

But the nerve firings actually happen. Your inner film show doesn't. That's what I'm saying, anyway.

Maybe there are "illusionists" who come close to agreeing with you that the inner film show happens in some illusory way. In which case I understand your exasperation, as I say here.

But I'm becoming ever more convinced that it's an illusion in the sense of not happening.

Then why are we even talking of pictures in the head? — schopenhauer1

For my part, I thought they were included among your alleged "mental components"?

"What" is this "fiction we get into the habit of acknowledging"? — schopenhauer1

The picture in the head. It doesn't happen.

The hard question goes beyond this and asks "How are the physical components equivalent to mental components". How is what you are saying addressing that? — schopenhauer1

By saying that mental components are a fiction which we get into the habit of entertaining as a convenient aid to succesful cognition. "What was my previous brain-shiver?... Oh yes, the one selecting picture A or picture B." Obvious how that abbreviates...

To say "consciousness is an illusion" is to not explain the illusion itself — schopenhauer1

It might be. I'll have a go.

I'm looking at the back of my front door, conscious of my consciousness of the colours and patterns: edges, curves, corners, textures, gradients. My dog (if I had one) is looking at roughly the same thing, and I know (haha, might need correcting) from psychology class that neurons in my visual system that are sensitive to certain kinds of edges, gradients etc. have rough counterparts in hers.

Of course, I don't know from class whether she is conscious too, but my crude theory of consciousness would say not. To put it another way, she isn't subject to the illusion, because she, not having linguistic or other symbolic skills, isn't skilled in reading a scene as a picture, and in reading a picture as an array of features, identifiable as kinds (of pattern or object) in a linguistic scheme - verbal or pictorial or both. So she isn't likely to make a habit of confusing, say, the door handle, still less her internal response to the door handle, with pictures of door handles. I don't mean confusing in the obviously pathological way of being likely to mistake any of these for each other, but in the sense of readying a plethora of appropriate responses to, say, movement of the handle, that depend on skill in differentiating and interpreting symbols as representing door handles, as much as they depend on manipulating actual ones. When the physical skill is so soaked through with symbolic and intellectual correlations, we might well - and harmlessly - think of our internal processes in readying to deal with the handle as being composed of pictorial components, like parts of an actual picture.

Whenever you think you have a "mental picture" of something presently or previously perceived, or imagined, and the sense that this creates a hard problem, consider an alternative interpretation to the effect that you have just determined a relatively narrow preference among appropriate actual pictures. How might a zombie assess its own thought process, supposing that the process was one of narrowing its preference (as to the appropriate selection in some symbolic context) among a range of pictures? It would need to associate the process with the narrowed range of actual pictures, of course. And if it were indeed able to so shiver its neurons as to repeat the determination of readiness to select the range of appropriate pictures, it might form the habit of associating, even confusing, the thoughts with the pictures.

In that scenario the creature has reason to recognise its own experience in our descriptions of consciousness. Especially if those descriptions acknowledge, as I think they should, the habitual confusion or at least correlation of thoughts (brain-shivers) with actual pictures.

Disclaimer: these ruminations are inspired by Nelson Goodman's far more careful analyses here and here. However, not only does Goodman expressly warn against reading them as dealing with consciousness (rather than merely "thought"), but I should mention he was also an ardent dog lover, and sponsor of animal welfare.

But this is not ignorance. We do not know the boundaries because none have been drawn". [Wittgenstein on games] — Banno

The annoying thing, without which no threat of paradox, and everything were merely (in the current idiom) "a spectrum", is that clear enough examples of non-game are plentiful enough. (Relative to a discourse or language game, as rightly noted by @StreetlightX.)

With clear enough counter-examples, we continually imply a line, however fuzzy, even though we should admit in those cases that we are some distance from it.

Trying to approach closer to it little by little is what creates the heap paradox. Trying to define it by a formula (apart from technical contexts) is what W rightly criticizes. But acknowledging it (implicitly, behaviourally) from a distance is, I would argue, an important aspect of any game of using "game " (or other noun or adjective): an aspect which, I dare to suggest that W would agree, "never troubled you before when you used the word"(ibid), but is characteristic of that trouble-free usage.

A chair, or not a chair? That was HG Wells' question:

In co-operation with an intelligent joiner I would undertake to defeat any definition of chair or chairishness that you gave me. — First and Last Things

Running with the idea, Max Black imagined an even more ambitious project:

... an exhibition in some unlikely museum of applied logic of a series of "chairs" differing in quality by least noticeable amounts. At one end of a long line, containing perhaps thousands of exhibits, might be a Chippendale chair: at the other, a small nondescript lump of wood. — Vagueness: an exercise in logical analysis

Such is the now familiar approach of fuzzy logic: instead of the either-or question, ask, "whereabouts is this or that object located on the chair spectrum"? And this seems in much the same spirit as when we say, "there is no black and white, only shades of grey".

There is an opposite current of thought: we hear about the dangers of slippery slopes and relativistic thinking, and about the desirability of "zero tolerance" in many areas. But the reality of borderline cases, when faced up to intellectually rather than swept aside dogmatically, tends to leave Black and White looking very much the less well-funded party in its propaganda skirmishes against the Shades of Grey.

I want to support the underdog, and argue that the absolutist intuition that seems, quite often, to separate black from white, in some way that resists deflation of their status and territory to that of extreme greys, is essential to properly understanding human language. The challenge is to be able to look at fuzzy borders head on, but in some way that doesn't result, as is more usual, in us losing our sense of absolutism, and allowing the fuzziness to create a slippery slope from one category (say, black) to another (white). I fancy the way to achieve this is through a technical feature of Nelson Goodman's analysis of 'notationality': a notion closely related to the property known more widely as that of being 'digital'.

"Chair" has no immediate antonym or 'anti-chair': whereas, for example, black has white. Indeed, one suspects that Wells may have chosen it as a case-study precisely for that reason. An adventure of successive expansions for the extension of "chair" doesn't seem headed for any natural denouement. We could perhaps invent a plausible concept of anti-chair: even by that very name, and exemplified by any (distinctly unhelpful) device designed to stop people sitting down. However, to explain my proposed adaptation of Goodman's principle, it will be just as feasible for me to square up to Wells' teasing example of,

chairs that pass into benches, chairs that cross the boundary and become settees

Wells is quite right that he and his joiner might realistically hope to so influence usage that any sense of mutual repulsion between the extensions of "chair" and "bench", or even between those of "chair" and "settee", were significantly reduced. Not that there wouldn't remain enough underlying tension to distinguish the extensions: there might well be examples of each category that were certainly not examples of the other; just that there would be an overlap. Objects that were both.

But we can equally well imagine a usage becoming entrenched, even if only or mostly within the furniture trade, according to which there is reliably no overlap, and being able to call something a chair is sufficient to imply that it isn't a settee, and vice versa. Specifically, and adapting Goodman's notation-based principle, calling something a chair (within the limited specified discourse) then indicates zero probability of it ever (within the discourse) being called a settee. To someone who protests, like Humpty Dumpty, that they can point a word at whatever they like, we simply insist that they are not speaking the specified language: where 'language' is to be glossed as 'discourse' or 'interpreted language' or 'language in use', to clarify that competence with meaning as well as syntax is assumed. In the present example the discourse is relatively circumscribed, and particular to the furniture trade, but the principle scales up: as where we can for example comfortably deny that someone may, within the larger English language as spoken and interpreted literally, succeed in pointing the word "black" at white. (Or point the word "chair" at a device for preventing sitting.)

This way, the borderline examples of "chair" that we, as speakers, actually dispute and agonise over are far from the similarly borderline cases of "settee" but are our present best data about the whereabouts, on a gradual scale like Black's, of the edge of the possible extension of "settee". This is because the borderline cases that we dispute and negotiate are ones that are on or near the border of current data or samples of use, not the border of the background population or theoretical 'support'. However, with antonyms or with discrete categories in a conceptual scheme, as also with any two distinct characters in a syntactic alphabet, being in one means definitely not being in the other. So 'data' about the one limits the theoretical reach of the other. So 'chair' means 'definite non-settee' and 'settee' means 'definite non-chair'.

Assuming that reference (what I've called 'pointing') isn't a matter of fact (is 'inscrutable'), then neither is the background population nor the foreground sample of acts of reference (pointings). But agonising over borderline cases is how we maintain the fiction in such a way that it keeps discrete categories discrete. Agonising and allowing disputes over borderline cases of, say, "chair" (=> "definite non-settee") and of "settee" (=> "definite non-chair") causes the 'actual' extension of each - its 'observed' incidence of usage - to thin out to nothing well clear of that of the other. The fuzzy border where an object may be variously judged "chair" and "non-chair" is kept well away from the fuzzy border where objects are judged both "settee" and "non-settee".

Example.

the context of a thread on this subject on this or some other forum. — Wayfarer

So the OP is... what's that phrase, inauthentic narrative?

Fascinating though it is to see various notions of information displayed in their varyingly mystical colours, I'm surprised no one has questioned the interpretation of Dennett and Wiener in the OP?

Wiener said

The mechanical brain does not secrete thought "as the liver does bile," as the earlier materialists claimed, nor does it put it out in the form of energy, as the muscle puts out its activity. Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.
— Computing Machines and the Nervous System. p. 132. — Wayfarer

Could you share a link or pdf of the context, here? I'm struggling to see this (or even Dennett's "adding information to the list" [of fundamentals]) as problematising or refashioning materialism. Of adding a "meta-physical simple", as you put it. It sounds to me more like the opposite. As contesting the notion of thought as an additional kind of stuff. Like he was referring to a tradition of psychology that wittingly or unwittingly encouraged such an assumption.

the materialist chestnut that 'the brain secretes thought as the liver does bile' — Wayfarer

Materialist chestnut, are you sure??

Information is information, not matter or energy. — Wiener

That could mean we need a third kind of physical quantity, or it could mean we don't, and information is merely patterning, or form. (Whatever that is, sure.)

Information, he's saying, is irreducible. — Wayfarer

Irreducible to patterns in physical stuff? Why shouldn't he be reminding us that is exactly what it (e.g. DNA transfer) reduces to?

I'm genuinely puzzled, and couldn't find the source, so, grateful for more if you have it.

However, that words can carry different meanings depending on how we use it doesn't imply that referents don't exist, does it? — TheMadFool

:ok:

I see that you then got (and seemed all too willing to get) sidetracked, into questions of definition, or fixity or primacy or essence.

:ok:

None of those words - the ones you pointed out - have referents either though. — StreetlightX

Oh, ok.

"Give" us "an" "example" "of" "a" "word" "being" "used" "without" "a" "referent".
— StreetlightX

To be fair, "example", "word", "used" and "referent" also want scratching, here. — bongo fury

To be even fairer, scratch "give", too. Admittedly, how (if) relation-words like verbs refer is where things get tricky, and potentially mixed up in how (if) sentences refer, or correspond or picture or what have you.

Tricky isn't always interesting or worthwhile, so,

even if [reference] were the main game we might well choose to make it not the main game... — Banno

Sure,

to retreat and regroup, or even to give up in the medium term and ask different questions, — bongo fury

Btw, I can be (happily) "in thrall" to reference while at the same time not so obliged to sentences.

"Give" us "an" "example" "of" "a" "word" "being" "used" "without" "a" "referent". — StreetlightX

To be fair, "example", "word", "used" and "referent" also want scratching, here.

I take your point that examples abound.

Give us an example of a word being used without a referent? — TheMadFool

There are of course plenty of examples in most sentences. That doesn't mean reference isn't the main game.

Ok.

Sounds like natural language :wink:

Usually that's a good way to construe it if you are going for a literal construal.

If you mean you are more interested in reference than Wittgensteinians think is cool, then hooray.

Wittgensteinian meaning is an act of referring no? — TheMadFool

Sadly, they think that is a ridiculously narrow approach.

Many people think Wittgenstein repudiated this idea, but I think he merely was saying that language does more than this. — Sam26

I wish people would stop accepting this notion (usually justified with a nod towards PI) of "move along now, nothing to see". How to understand how words and pictures point at things (even pixels) might be the important question. The fact that using our pointing skills to answer it invariably results in pointing-havoc is an excuse to retreat and regroup, or even to give up in the medium term and ask different questions, but not to teach that the question is trivial or narrow.

The notion that "red" refers to something leads to a metaphysics of perceptions, tying one's thinking in knots of phenomenology. — Banno

Not if "something" means "one or more red things", no, it needn't.

Numbers represent potentials, not actuals. Why does dividing things by three, into thirds, create an "infinite" number of threes after the decimal point, as if we can never get to an actual third of something? — Harry Hindu

I've never read much of Harry's stuff (on the suspicion that more is less) but, for the second time this weekend, I do applaud him for going against the flow, and I must say I can't understand how people would so miss the point, and would take the above rhetorical question as anything but a defense of mathematical practice against philosophical over-thinking. He was just saying, see how the fact that we can divide one by 3 despite the potentially infinite recurring decimal (Achilles can catch up) means we don't have to (in this case anyway) take infinity as a thing.

Wasn't he?

Imagine training machines instead of trying to program them. — praxis

:ok:

The price of the neural network revolution was giving up (or at least severely compromising) the model of the brain (or computer) as a processor of stored symbols - internal words and pictures representing external objects. Ironically, it had to revert to Skinner's behaviourist model, a "black box". Training, without necessarily understanding the learning. — bongo fury

(Admittedly off-topic, except possibly as regards the question of internal (or external) words and pictures representing internal processes.)

So... you are asking what I think Pneumenon meant that Wittgenstein meant at — Banno

No! Only whether the word-string "then we can get extensions for it" was a misprint of "then we can get infinite extensions for it"?

A different reading of it (as not a misprint) seemed plausible, so I thought I should check.

And ...?

Did "then we can get extensions from it" mean "then we can get infinite extensions from it"?

↪bongo fury So you want to argue that — Banno

One thing at a time?

If the rule allows to construct a finite extension, then we can get extensions from it, too.
— Pneumenon

This is the bit that I've been unable to find clearly articulated.
— Banno

Just to be clear, are you both dropping (or taking as read) an "infinite"? — bongo fury

To which,

↪bongo fury There are infinities. — Banno

Ought that have clarified for the competent reader that @Pneumenon meant "then we can get infinite extensions from it, too"?

Just hoping not to misunderstand either one of you.

I wouldn't say that any of these expressions point to or are about anything (in the sense of reference). They may indicate something, but that's not quite the same thing – — Michael

But if we reflect that what a word refers to or is pointed at is never a matter of fact anyway, but is one rather of interpretation, theoretical parsimony then strongly argues against the easy option of distinguishing as many varieties of meaning as we might have different words for. Obviously no two of these kinds will ever be quite the same thing.

The argument isn't just about theoretical desiderata and separate from the subject-matter: the behavioural interactions we are discussing depend on agents' anticipations of each others' interpretations, so we are theorising about theorising (about...).

And so I applaud @Harry Hindu's objection here to the habitual distinction of expression and exhortation from description. My attempt here.

To expand a little: since no bolt of energy (nor any more subtle physics) connects uttered word to object, we (interlocutor or foreign linguist or even utterer) are perhaps entitled and perhaps required to interpret the utterance as pointing, in various degrees of plausibility, not only a presently uttered token but also the "word as a whole" at (not only a present object but) some kind as a whole, and then by implication as also pointing not-presently-uttered but semantically related words at related objects and kinds. In other words, any speech act offers a potential adjustment (or entrenchment) of the language in use, so that the extensions of related words are shifted in related ways.

Hence utterances that vent frustration can also offer (directly or indirectly) potential adjustments to the extensions of words ("patient", "skilful" etc.) that might or might not point at Michael.

And hence also Harry's and my other examples as linked above.

haha :ok:

... But no typos?

If the rule allows to construct a finite extension, then we can get extensions from it, too.
— Pneumenon

This is the bit that I've been unable to find clearly articulated. — Banno

Just to be clear, are you both dropping (or taking as read) an "infinite"?

we pretend that integers are real things, and this leads us on to more complex ways of talking about integers, and so a sort of recursion allows us to build mathematics up from... nothing. — Banno

Sure, maths as fiction with a super-coherent plot.

And with illustrations, too. Kind of, Alice in Wonderland.