Good riddance.

Moreover, you did not comment on this:
Wittgenstein might have pointed out that it's not actually necessary for us to agree as to what is the case in order to get by. — Banno

I have zero respect for Wittgenstein, whom I consider a fake philosopher as well as a coward. If you want me to comment on everything you say, you gona have to pay me for it.

We might do well to avoid this trap: inventing a distinction between the thing-in-itself and the thing-as-experienced, only to find that we cannot say anything about the thing-in-itself; and thinking we have found some profound truth when all we have done is played a word game. — Banno

You are talking about the thing in itself right now, so you actually can say something about it. You just did!

I cannot live without the assumption that there's an objective world, independent of my mind and of how I see it. Nor can I dispense of the assumption that my view of the world can be incorrect or biased. Illusions are possible, error is possible, mistakes are made and biases play out. I recognize this fallibility of human knowledge and perception, and I think it is important to recognize it. People who are too sure of themselves make a lot of mistakes.

1 and 2b aren't about philosophy. 2a is, but that's just a starting point. — frank

2a: of, relating to, or being an object, phenomenon, or condition in the realm of sensible experience independent of individual thought and perceptible by all observers : having reality independent of the mind

My own mental map is not independent if my mind, so it cannot fit this definition of objective.

I am afraid that maps are subjective, in that they represent a territory from someone's point of view, and make choices as per what to represent and what not to represent.

I go by the dictionary, usually. Make your pick:

Objective (adj.)
1: expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations
- an objective history of the war
- an objective judgment

2a: of, relating to, or being an object, phenomenon, or condition in the realm of sensible experience independent of individual thought and perceptible by all observers : having reality independent of the mind
- objective reality

b: involving or deriving from sense perception or experience with actual objects, conditions, or phenomena
- objective data

That objective image is yours because it's unique. You have your own little trails marked in it, your own blindspots and errors, your own mythology. — frank

Very much so, but in what sense is this image objective?

An intrusive procedure.

noses are still not private as a consequence. — Isaac

Noses are private on the inside.

replace meaning with use. — Banno

That can't be done. It leads to logical contradictions. Meaning is not disposable.

So what? There's no structure to things? Things are whatever we want them to be? Is that what you and this guy Goodman are saying?

To me, reality is precisely what imposes itself on us, what resists our fancy. What is, irrespective of what you think of it. More often than not, reality is what you don't want it to be.

Popper seems to have at the back of his mind that the stuff we agree on - intersubjectively - is what is real. — Banno

Popper was a realist. He saw intersubjectivity as a tool, as means to an end, which is knowledge.

Right, but I think your personal objective narrative goes unexamined for bias. It's pinned as reality, right? — frank

The way I understand these words, your personal narrative is by definition subjective because your are a subject. Keeping in mind that what you perceive is only a partial and imperfect view is important to be able to hear what others are saying

We do see things as they are - the sugar in the bowl, the tree in the garden. Sure, we don't see it all, but we do see enough to get by. — Banno

Key words: to get by. Which a good way to put it. Our senses have been selected to help us get by, based on their utility to survive and procreate. That 's why we can taste the sugar in the bowl, and see a red apple in the tree.

omniscience is not required for knowledge. We need not know everything in order to know some things. Just because we do not see everything as it is does not mean that we cannot see anything as it is. — creativesoul

It just means our knowledge of it is and forever will be incomplete and perfectible.

If all are ways the object is, then none is the way the object is. — Nelson Goodman: Languages of Art

All of them and more compose what must be a unique reality, with many different facets.

Ok. It's just that real maps really are objective accounts. — frank

Ok. I'm just worried about giving the impression I'm talking literally of real geographical maps. Rather I am speaking of any representation, geographic or not.

This clarification made, real cartographers try to be objective, that's true, but they are only human and they do display biases. Cartographers also work for states, princes, governments, who have strong political and other interests. These interests are often displayed on maps, eg through toponymy (the name of places). In territories that are disputed by several cultures or ethnicities (Palestine, Balkans etc etc), naming a village or a mountain on a map in one language rather than the other is to symbolically appropriate the place. To shape the intersubjective view of the territory.

During the European colonization of Africa, to map a place was often enough to claim it as yours. E.g. during the early 20th century, the Italians produced inaccurate maps of the Horn of Africa, showing as theirs places they never had control of. These maps then gave them a diplomatic advantage in their disputes with the Ethiopian Negus, who had no cartographer and could not prove those claims wrong. This is why the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea is disputed to this day, and it has led to several wars.

Likewise any object. — bongo fury

Evidently. Literature presents a few cases of authors who tried to exhaust or at least give some justice to the infinite richness of a specific part of reality (often very 'small'). Robbe-Grillet wrote a full page about a tomato slice. Most famously, the manuscript of the first tome of In Search for Lost Time was rejected by three or four Parisian editors, essentially because, as the Ollendorff edition house wrote back to Proust: «Je ne puis comprendre qu'un monsieur puisse employer trente pages à décrire comment il se tourne et se retourne dans son lit avant de trouver le sommeil.»

Proust was trying to describe, in his introduction to the novel, how it felt to become asleep at night in one's bed, to progressively abandon oneself to sleep. He needed thirty pages for that exploration of a topic he would come back several times later in the novel. He ended up paying for the publication of his novel, which got some critical traction as well as much spite, enough "buzz" to find an editor.

Proust knew of course that reality was inexhaustible, infinitely rich. Hence the role of the artist, which is to explore and share his original, personal, creative but true view of it.

That map is an objective view. So far there is no need to explain this with any interaction between humans. — frank

The map may not necessarily be objective. The "map" here being a metaphor for any representation, model or picture, including mental maps, which I guess are just maps written down on grey matter.

The phrase "the map is not the territory" implies that any representation of anything is but a gross simplification of it. Reality is far too rich and complex for us to be able to describe it exhaustively. So when we represent something, we always only represent an aspect of it, with a certain (limited) precision level.

The quantity of information necessary to "see the world as it is" would be infinite. It is therefore impossible to see the world as it is: there's just too much to see.

the map will never be the territory, for a host of reasons e.g.
— Olivier5

Yes and your point no. 1 is great but then you get carried away, and no. 5 is silliness you probably didn't mean, like — bongo fury

Point 5 is simply that a map with everything to know about the territory on it (an exhaustive map) would be impossibly bulky. For instance, the individual atoms composing any territory are part of it and thus the map would need to map each and every atom of the territory if it was to be exhaustive. But to do so, to map all the atoms in a given place, and to print that map on paper (itself composed of atoms), each territory atom would need to be mapped on a piece of paper composed of several atoms. Therefore the map would be LARGER than the territory. e.g. you would need one square meter of map to describe one square milimeter of reality.

So, we must know something of the territory in order to be able to say that some maps (or models) are more accurate than others? — Janus

Indeed, we can only map what we know, or think we know. Nevertheless, the map will never be the territory, for a host of reasons e.g.

1. A representation of something is by definition not the thing it represents. As Magritte put it, this is not a pipe.

2. The territory keeps changing, so maps are always outdated.

3. No map can be exhaustive of all possible variables and dimensions, and in any case map users are not interested in knowing all there is to know about a territory, only some aspects of the territory would typically interest them.

4. We don’t know everything about the territory, so cannot map everything.

5. Such a map would have the same size as the territory and would be quite useless as a map.

Yes, Popper saw himself as Kantian.

As you see above, I do not think I am red or have a red or a red experience, and I don't believe you do either. I see red things, — unenlightened

You probably are reddish here or there. Most probably your blood is red, for instance.

(Hey, I can nitpick too)

But the map is NEVER the territory.
— Olivier5

Can maps be more or less adequate to the territory? — Janus

Yes of course, some maps are more accurate (or less inaccurate) than others, for a given purpose.

"my experience of red" becomes intrinsically private, because there is no access whatsoever to it by anyone else. It might be 'like' your experience of green, or your experience of conservatism, or your experience of cats. and nobody could ever possibly know. — unenlightened

Okay, or "how it feels to be a bat". Indeed a rather immaterial, speculative question.

I believe your red is my red, because the underlying mechanism to produce those tints is biological and biology is very conservative, it change very very slowly and cannot be parametered at will like, say, a digital computer. We have more or less the same basic metabolism that bacterias, molluscs and bats have. Your and my metabolism are very similar, so chances are that we see colors more or less the same way, because those color are metabolic in nature. (Baring color blindness in one of us)

Of course there's no way to check that empirically, so it remains hypothetical. But I don't lose sleep over that.

Seems to me that every conscious sensation can be made "public" by throwing some words in the public space about it. It doesn't mean we share our real, actual sensations this way, only words for them.

That's because the practice of "sharing" through language is not at all like sharing a meal or sharing a car. I cannot literally put my sensations on the table and share them with you as we would share a meal. Words are not the things they denote but mere tokens for them. So when you express yourself in words, you are of course not sharing the actual things that happened to you, only a symbolic representation of them, more or less precise, more or less faithful, that the listener will decode more or less well, and it will evoke some ideas in his mind hopefully not too dissimilar to what you tried to say.

Both realist in the general sense, that I can and must conceive of a mind-independent reality, that whatever is the case is the case, irrespective of what we may think of it; and sceptic about human beings' capacity to see this reality as it is. We are very good at projecting our mental categories onto the world, and some of that is useful but one has to guard against the tendency.

There IS a territory. But the map is NEVER the territory.

What's your take on reality? Is it a social construct? — frank

Large parts of it are, things like language, the economy, science, or art are evidently of a social nature, and therefore co-constructed. But other things, like planets or stars or other living species, existed before us, I think. In fact they were there long before any Homo sapiens started to name anything, so they can't be depended on human cultures.

If, as you say, there are intrinsically private mental phenomena — Banno

I never said any such thing. Don't even know what intrinsically private means... There are things that are not said, by convention. Speaking about them is not proper, not done, or it hasn't been done yet. There are also things that people would rather not say about themselves, things they would rather keep private. It doesn't mean that it cannot possibly be made public by some absolute logical impossibility.

Good question. There's a thread about it. — Banno

Which brings only confusion.

By definition, private means "not shared". What is "not shared" is not "intersubjective". Intersubjectivity cannot imply it's negation. You're just obfuscating.

implicit in its use is the vague notion of intrinsically private mental goings-on of some unspecified sort. — Banno

May I ask, what does "intrinsically private" mean in this context? Can anyone try and define it? And what is the connection with public discourse? It would seem that something "intrinsinctly private" would be the opposite of intersubjectivity, rather than entailed by it.

Could anyone active in the thread summarize the findings so far in this thread? — Ansiktsburk

Some thread participants like the concept of intersubjectivity, while others are suspicious about it. The latter tend to be the 'non-selfers' ie people who don't actually agree that they are, well, people with minds (they often think of themselves as predetermined puppets instead). The former tend to be folks who are comfortable with the concept of "mind".

Different 'levels' or 'depth' of intersubjectivity have been mentioned. That's where it's interesting to me.

At the simplest level, intersubjectivity was presented as the bridge between subjectivity and objectivity, ie the process by which we progressively build a more and more objective account of events by aggregating, comparing, contrasting different subjective accounts. This is the Popperian view of it: intersubjectivity as a tool for science. It's pretty evident, almost trite at this level.

At a more complex level (call it the Husserlian view), some have pointed out that intersubjectivity also impacts on individual subjectivity. Therefore, it is not just a way to build objectivity from subjectivity, as in the Popperian view: exchanging with others also helps us conceptualise and understand our own subjectivity. There are feedback loops between the subjective self and the social, intersubjective cultural environment. It's a two-way street between them. This is important for a host of reasons, if only because it shows that the Popperian view underestimated the risk of echo chambers: like-minded people agreeing incorrectly about something.

Exactly. If somebody rings, you try to pretend that nobody's at home. Hence your difficulties to express yourself clearly: a self-professed zombie with no mental world cannot be expected to make much sense. If you were to articulate clear positions, it would blow your cover.

That's fine. I had a feeling you wouldn't be able to answer. — frank

Banno is a denier of the mental world. That's where his fear of certain words come from, and he cannot really say it out loud because he knows how ridiculous it may sound. Hence his timid questions and evasive answers.

I vote for indeterministic. The gods do play dice. They bet too, otherwise the game is boring.

You are indeed going around in circles, but only because you don't want to go anywhere. Yet you stumbled on an interesting idea which I shall chew on: that of the mind as a process, or set of.

a neurological process. — khaled

What is the mass of a neurological process?

I meant you can’t remove JUST the mind. — khaled

A brain-dead or brain-damaged person still has a brain. The organ has not been removed; it's still there but not processing.

You can't move things to long term memory without sleeping for one. — khaled

These things you move to long term memory when you sleep, do they have a mass, a volume or a number? I guess not, and hence you are talking of mind stuff, of sleep as a maintenance period for minds.

You see, not everything that exists is breakable into countable units. Take the laws of physics for instance. They have no mass either, so by your criteria the laws of physics are not physical... And yet I think they do exist.

Brain damaged people are an example of removing the mind without changing the brain? — khaled

Who said anything about not changing the brain? You said the mind can't be removed, and I said it can, period.

Don't tell Heidegger. — Banno

I haven't talked to him since he missed my son's bar mitzvah.

Definitely not to rest our minds, but our brains and bodies. — khaled

Our bodies can rest without sleeping, so that can't be it. Our brain, maybe, possibly because sustaining a mind is a very tiring thing.

you can’t remove JUST the mind. — khaled

Comatose people, brain damaged people etc.

can imagine a pebble in space that is still and so far away from anything that it’s effect is negligible.

If such a pebble existed we would know it exists by seeing it. — khaled

And thus this pebble would have had an effect on us, since we saw it.

You can remove a persons nostrils or feet. And they will have a lower chance to survive. But you can’t remove a mind. — khaled

You can lose your mind. You can also temporarily suspend its operations. It's called sleep.

[Minds] don’t have a cost. — khaled

Why do you think people have to sleep? Sleep is quasi universal in the animal kingdom yet nobody knows why... Even insects sleep. It could be that minds suck up a lot of energy, or something else that gets depleted after a while, needing restauration. Sleep may be the price to pay for minds.

Logical? Again, cause and effect is not a logical principle. — khaled

Nit picking. There is no place for causal dead ends in my world view. Any thing that exists can have an effect on other things. Otherwise how do we know it exists???

Something that has no effect on other things ought to be untraceable.

I am not arguing, really, just saying I don't know what the mind is 'made of', what's its composition and mechanisms. I am not ready to call it physical or not physical because this word has no clear meaning to me. I prefer the word 'natural'.

What I believe is that the mind is perfectly natural, and that it exists for a reason. It does things. That's why we have one. Same as for your nostrils, your hair and your feet: you have them for a reason, they serve a purpose.

I believe the purpose of the mind is to integrate information from all sources to support decision making.

I also believe that everything in this universe is connected via cause-and-effect to other things. So to me, the idea of a thing (the mind) having no effect on other things is simply impossible. The mind as you describe it (a dead-end of causality) appears to me a logical impossibility. Not to mention that it'd be totally useless...

When you can’t defend your position your resort to ad Homs as if that accomplishes anything. — khaled

You started the ad hom. Don't cry me a river now. You called my ideas ridiculous and faulty, without any other argument that "minds are not physical", which is itself a pretty ridiculous argument because it assumes you know what the mind is made of...

So stop calling others ridiculous, and start putting your mind at work.