I’ve been going over this in my head for awhile now and I came to the conclusion that there has to be something necessarily. — Paul Michael

One way to look at this: you’ve rediscovered the cogito. The ‘necessity’ comes from asking the question at all — if there were nothing, there would be no question.

's all good, man

Not what I was saying and missing the point of this discussion.

You're just saying that you don't agree with what gets marked as right and wrong in the Bible, and I'd largely agree with you, but so what?

The issue we were addressing was the afterlife story about heaven and hell, eternal reward and punishment. What you're rewarded or punished for is a separate issue.

The need to engage in such a process speaks loudly to the poverty of those scriptures. — Banno

I don't think it's anything special about the Abrahamic religions. Wisdom literatures always accumulate interpretations and theories of interpretation. Even Zen, which you might think would be immune. We still have knockdown drag-out fights here about our preferred ancients.

It seems you mean something else. — Banno

I think Genesis is an indication of what I mean. Many many Christians take the story in Genesis to be, well, a story, just a picturesque way of conveying the idea of a creator. Only certain sorts of believers take it literally. A lot of the interpretation of scripture relies on various sorts of symbolic analysis. It's normal. I'm suggesting that it's open to a believer to take a lot as just storytelling to convey some pretty abstract stuff. Hellfire needn't be taken literally, nor torment. All that stuff could reasonably be taken as storytelling to convey ideas about one's spiritual state. (Didn't Kierkegaard somewhere say you could replace the whole New Testament with "There was a man among us whom we believe was God"?)

How does one determine the difference between the extraneous 'fairy tale' and the significant 'spiritual life'? How do you know what's in and what's out? — Tom Storm

Dunno. Biblical interpretation can get pretty sophisticated. It's clear enough that Christians do this, as the Genesis example shows. Must you believe Moses literally parted the Red Sea to be a Jew or a Christian? Obviously not. And theologians have often taken much, much more to be fairy tale than normal believers.

I grew up Catholic, so I've never even read the Bible. ;-)

It remains difficult to see how a finite number of transgressions merits a non-finite punishment — Banno

Agreed, that's an unsolvable problem with the fairy tale.

I was trying to find a way to take 'eternity' as a way of conveying that our actions have inconceivably high moral stakes, rather than something to do with duration. (Nietzsche uses eternity to convey stakes, in a way. Thoreau had that line, "As if you could kill time without injuring eternity," and he doesn't seem to be talking about 'lots of time' either.)

I don't really see the point in arguing against what I'm calling the "fairy tale". You always have the option of taking lots of scripture as illustrative storytelling. (Hardly anyone doesn't take Genesis that way.) What the stories are meant to convey is a certain way of living a spiritual life, so if you focus on the fairy tale, religious folks will always feel like you don't really get it. Every time you say "evidence", for instance, believers yawn.

God predestines no one to go to hell; for this, a willful turning away from God (a mortal sin) is necessary, and persistence in it until the end. — the catechism

Hell isn't God's problem, it's ours. If that's where we end up, it's our fault. And okay, maybe there's some fire there, but the real punishment is "eternal separation from God" so the fire can't be that bad. — Ciceronianus

As I understand it, some theologians these days take the talk of fire and torment to be “picturesque” or “metaphorical”, and take hell to be the state of being turned away from god. The torturous language would be an attempt to capture the magnitude of the difference between union with god and whatever else you might get up to.

The part I never understood was why there’s a deadline — right up until your last breath on earth, you can do the right thing, but after that forget it.

That doesn’t make sense to me theologically, but it makes sense if your religion is not about eternity at all — no matter what it says — but is about how one ought to live. Of course, you could also adjust your understanding of eternity to something besides “a whole lot of time, in fact all of it, or all the rest of it”. For instance, you could take the idea of eternity itself a somewhat picturesque way of claiming that history is real. If you hurt someone, that moment of you hurting them never goes away, is permanent in itself, lasts forever as the moment you hurt them.

To see how you relate to eternity (in some TBD sense) as the essence of how you live, to have turned toward or away from god (in some TBD sense), that’s a whole different thing from the fairy tale Lewis is talking about.

Not completely laughable. People died. Mostly laughable.

But not a riot. They weren't just expressing themselves destructively. They were there to stop Congress from certifying electors. They were there, as they themselves said, to take back their government. That's not a riot.

The interesting part of the day to me is the couple hours of radio silence from Trump. I think he hoped, perhaps even believed, that people in uniform would stand with him, so he was waiting to see what the cops did. There were off-duty cops in the mob, after all. But then it became clear that those in uniform were not siding with Trump's mob, and tanks didn't roll in to support him, nothing like that, so he finally told everyone to go home. But I believe he was waiting to see what happened, and would have been perfectly happy to stay in power at gunpoint.

As it turns out, it was just violent LARPing, but it wasn't clear early on that's all it would be, and those involved had bigger ambitions.

1. If there is no grass, how can I have a belief “about the grass”? What would such a belief be about?
— Srap Tasmaner

Whatever it is I'm modelling as 'the grass'. — Isaac

As you mean it, that's incoherent. You want to say there’s no grass ‘out there’, that ‘grass’ is only a term of your model, but then it’s meaningless to say you’re modeling anything as grass. It’s not the “whatever it is” that’s the problem; it’s the “as grass”. You have to pay your semantic debts at some point, and if ‘grass’ doesn’t square your accounts, something else will have to.

Philosophy (in the past at least, and it seems for some now) cherished certainty and perfection. Philosophers sought immutable truth, beauty and goodness. They treated the "real world" and ordinary day-to-day life as imperfect and consequently inferior, unhelpful in seeking the absolute. — Ciceronianus

I get that, and I get wanting to call that a “retreat from life” or something, but of course it’s not — there’s no such thing. It’s just another way of living. What you can do is point out how this way of living works, and how it differs from other ways, what enables it, and so on. But don’t take them at their word.

Maybe an example would be clearer. Suppose you know someone who believes in an afterlife, and they explain to you that they give no thought to their temporary stay here on earth but only to the eternal life to come. Now you could, as someone who does not believe in an afterlife, tell them that they are giving up earthly rewards for nothing, since nothing is waiting for them in the afterlife. Or you could point out that believing in an afterlife is a particular way of living here on earth, that it’s simply not true that they give no thought to this life but only to the eternal life to come: they give it enough thought to arrange this life in a particular way, as a preparation for the eternal life, and we can see them living that sort of life, in accordance with that idea, right here, right now.

Imagine "the grass is green" is false, then imagine it's true. Describe the difference between the two states you're imagining. — Isaac

That the grass is not green, is the case when, for instance, it’s brown.

I think you wanted: what’s the difference between ‘Today is Wednesday’ and ‘It’s true that today is Wednesday’?

When I say "the grass is green" I'm attempting to refer to the grass, I'm actually referring to my belief about the grass (there might be no grass, yet I still refer). — Isaac

1. If there is no grass, how can I have a belief “about the grass”? What would such a belief be about?
2. If I am referring not to the grass but to my belief, then am I predicating, of my belief not the grass, that it is green? My beliefs can be green?

as long as rules are not broken, anything goes. Even fascism. — StreetlightX

Well, no, it’s just that there’s no point in striving for just laws in a lawless nation. Rule of law alone is certainly not enough, but it’s a requirement — so we believe. We also tend to support civil disobedience and jury nullification when we have failed to make the law just. But we are trying to build something better than the war of all against all. So are you, aren’t you? You think the state is no solution, and you may be right — I think you’re wrong, but I don’t consider you my enemy. The mob that attempted to stop the peaceful transfer of power are my enemy and yours as well, because they believe power should only and forever be in the hands of ‘the right sort of people’.

A bunch of Plutocrat-enabling grifters felt uneasy for a bit - the horror. — StreetlightX

They may be scumbags one and all — that’s not the issue. They were not targeted as scumbags but as elected representatives carrying out their constitutional duty. It’s not the attack on Pence that bothers us — not mainly, I mean, he’s a dangerous Christian dominionist, but also a human being who ought not be pummeled to death by a mob — it was the attack on the rule of law itself that was unsettling. That bothers us whether it’s done by a mob or by current and former government officials ignoring Congressional subpoenas and court orders, or by Reagan funding a secret foreign policy through arms sales. The rule of law itself is not up for negotiation, so we liberals believe.

Animals' environments are as replete with meanings for them as ours are for us. Our meanings are no doubt more elaborate, on account of our ability to symbolize, but perhaps they are less vital, more attenuated, for that. — Janus

There must be something different about us, and the smart money says it’s to do with language or something about us that shows itself most clearly in language. It would also make sense for our world or worlds to be different from the worlds of non-linguistic animals (again, whether that’s because of language itself, or because of whatever underwrites language), but I’m inclined to agree that the difference will not be that only in ours do things mean something, only in ours do things matter.

Margaret Wise Brown was a fine phenomenologist:

The important thing about rain is
that it is wet.
It falls out of the sky,
and it sounds like rain,
and makes things shiny,
and it does not taste like anything,
and is the color of air.
But the important thing about rain is
that it is wet. — The Important Book

I merely think it was a pretense. — Ciceronianus

I get the impulse to say that Descartes was conjuring a pseudo-problem, and ‘solving’ this so-called problem is offered to the over-educated as a pointless game they can play in their ivory tower. I’ve had such feelings about philosophy, and I’d guess most have.

But I find myself wanting to defend Descartes, because this was a bold act of imagination on his part, was it not? And as such, yes, something like playing — but play is serious business.

For instance, when you say

traditional philosophical discussion ... sometimes distances itself too greatly from life and the world and becomes pretense — Ciceronianus

I wonder about that. For Descartes to respond imaginatively to his experience as he did — is that “distancing” himself from life, rather than another possibility of life? Is there no imagination in the life and in the world you suggest are our proper study?

And more than that: by imagining other possibilities, he can, as science fiction writers do, show us how the world we do live in works — not by saying it works like the world he imagines, not because his imagined world is some explanation of ours, but because he can show us, perhaps more clearly in imagination, how a world works. You have to conjure, imaginatively, a way of bringing out what is most taken for granted, what you can’t see because it’s too close. You have to, as Pound said, “make it new!”

None of this is judgment on the success of Descartes’s experiment, but I’m inclined to applaud the attempt, and his use of imagination.

Are you offended that Descartes had thoughts that he didn’t have to?

Overwhelmingly agree.

Language: there is a temptation to look at computers and say, that's just syntax without semantics, which leads to a further temptation to say that our ability to "attach" meaning to symbols is what makes us special -- but now we're distinguishing ourselves not just from machines but from animals that don't have language. Lacking our higher mental capacities, their behavior is, insofar as it is instinctive, mechanical.

But I think that's wrong. I think Chomsky might have been right to focus on recursive, generative grammar as what's special about language, because I think maybe you find semantics anywhere you find life -- and that's why you don't find it in computers.

What I mean is something like this: a living thing is something things matter to. Nothing matters to a machine. But nutrients matter even to a bacterium, and this is not a question of how the bacterium 'conceptualizes' or 'categorizes' bits of its environment. For everything living, food matters, threats, shelter, offspring, and thus these things have meaning, and there is the potential for their environment to be a meaningful world, something that could be understood. (I remember reading years ago that wolves are sometimes clearly puzzled by cattle, because they don't behave like wild prey.)

There's plainly an 'affinity' between natural science and the mechanical, as an object of knowledge, which might not quite define the limits of possible science. Don't care. I think there's a similar 'affinity' between philosophy and the meaningful. Whether it's possible for them to meet in the middle is not my concern; I'll be arriving from the meaning side.

I think this raises a question as to what the analytic tradition consists in if not some kind of introspection and synthetic a priori analysis, that is some kind of phenomenology. I mean it doesn't seem to be doing empirical science. — Janus

Yes, I think the idea is quite simply that if it’s introspection then it’s not science, and there’s an optional detour through philosophy. (If introspection, then philosophy, and if that then not science.)

There is still a part of world in which introspection is considered a good thing, a praiseworthy thing, perhaps even a thing one ought to do or one must do to lead a rich and fulfilling life. (We get threads about it here.) Still, it’s not science, which makes it — from a point-of-view I’ll cheerfully admit is made of straw — something like a ‘hobby’, all well and good but not something ‘serious’.

I don’t think this puts only the “analytic tradition” in question. What was Aristotle up to? Or Kant?

Anyway, what you (not you, @Janus) call ‘introspection’ I might just call ‘thinking’ and some people might call ‘reason’. Or ‘reflection’.

I almost feel tempted to let science win whatever argument it wants to have with philosophy. If science wants to claim it’s the only sound or reliable way of producing knowledge systematically — sure, you can have that; philosophy can produce something else, understanding maybe.

(In this context, I always thought it odd that the new biologically sophisticated version of psychology ends up being called “cognitive science”, as if knowledge is the only mental phenomenon that matters.)

mere introspection — Janus

I keep wondering what the force of this 'accusation' is supposed to be.

Why does it sound so much like saying phenomenology is "merely philosophy"?

Could be made a better inference with a theory of content determination — fdrake

I’ve been wondering where “aboutness” is in these causal chains, and how @Isaac proposes to infer 9 is about 8 from 9 was caused by 8. Since the model is not supposed to be descriptive but predictive, you might think intentionality could be captured by saying that 9 points to 1 — which is around the corner from your point about priors. That makes it at least as tempting to say that 9 is about 1 as it is to say 9 is about 8 (or 7 or 6 or ...). Why look back in the chain for meaning, instead of forward? It might also make sense to think of the logging at 9 being something like “Cycle finishing, coming back to 1 now,” or “Now connecting 8 to 1,” or “Got from 1 to 8, headed back to 1.” Don’t we expect to find not a bare, descriptive report logged to consciousness but one with some kind of directedness embedded in it?

I think human will necessitates little leaps of faith all the time — Kenosha Kid

Well, the phrase has two elements: the leap, and the faith. Leaping is not like walking, a steady, methodical progress from one place to another. Leaping is taking the distance covered by many steps at once; we cannot make our steps bigger, so to pull off such a feat we must actually leave the reassuring solidity of the ground and take to the air, at least for a moment.

It is a choice sometimes forced upon us. When our walk brings us to a ditch or a small stream, there are three ways forward: there is an imaginary way straight on from this side to the other, as it would be if the ditch were not there; there is a way under, down into the ditch or stream and then up the other bank; and there is a similar way over, through the air, above where we would walk if only we could.

If we generalize this situation, the ways under and over are not always available. We can imagine thinking as traversing an obstacle course. (In everyday life, there is often a timer ticking, but not in philosophy and only for external reasons in science.) An obstacle blocks the methodical progress forward; it may offer a simple way over (a small ditch to be leaped over), a methodical way over (like a climbing wall) or under (you may have to crawl under something), and so on. Some obstacles may offer a choice — slog through the water or swing across on a rope. Some may offer a false choice — attempt to slog through a deep mud hole, which you will not be able to do, or jump over.

This is one way of situating leaping: it is a solution to some obstacles but not others, when it was not our preferred way forward. If, on the other hand, you already preferred leaping, because it is faster, and chain leaps together one after another, we don’t call that ‘leaping’ but ‘running’.

But are we sure it’s leaping-over-an-obstacle we’re interested in? There’s another idiom that seems similar, which is ‘jumping to a conclusion’. If you compare them, it’s clear that we disapprove of jumping to conclusions because it is not a response to an obstacle; you had the option of continuing to make steady, methodical progress but, out of impatience, gave up traveling methodically, selected a destination and simply teleported there.

No one feels any compunction about leaping when it is called for. But when we are thinking, how do we know when our leaps are a solution to a genuine obstacle — the intuitive leaps of a Copernicus or an Einstein — and when we have simply become impatient and jumped to a conclusion?

To know, then, whether we should leap, we need to know whether we face a genuine obstacle. That leaping “works”, that it moves us quickly from one place to another, is not in question, but if we did not have to leap, where we land might not be where we wanted. But how do we know where we want to land? Because this is in the nature of an obstacle: an obstacle is something you are one side of or the other. You do not need to see the whole course; you do not need to know what destination you are headed for; you only need to know that it is on the other side of each obstacle you face.

And here is at least one place where we might see a role for the second part of the phrase, for faith. How do you know the destination is on the other side? Perhaps you don’t; perhaps you only have faith that it is. And I think this is just how people tend to use the phrase “leap of faith” (whether it has anything to do with Kierkegaard or not). That it is precisely a leap to an unknown place. It will be some place, but whether it is is the place we hope for is unknown — as, in the simple case, you might hope each obstacle on the course is the last.

(That some destination worth reaching is on the other side of a series of obstacles, of problems to be solved, has become an article of faith in philosophy. Even Wittgenstein, who makes noises about there being no genuine philosophical problems, implies that he has such a faith in PI 107, the “rough ground” speech.)

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. To put all this rambling back into context, before abandoning it again, the question is whether there is a genuine obstacle to taking our everyday experience at face value. There is a long history of philosophical objections to such naivety, and a considerable body of recent scientific objection. But related though they may be, there are two different issues here: one about the facts on the ground, that is, about how we get along in the world; and one about how we are to theorize how we get along in the world. If you object that we have no ‘direct access’ to things — whatever that means — that is a claim of theory, but it is a claim about how we get along, and implies that there is an obstacle between ‘us’ and ‘the world’. Whether you, or your mind, or your brain, know anything about this obstacle, it’s there to be responded to somehow. On the other hand, if you find the claim that there is such an obstacle compelling, that becomes a different sort of obstacle — how can I take my experience at face value, given everything I know about how, say, perception works? You can then say that the theoretical objection is no obstacle at all, but the end of the line; if you leap over it, you'll leap to nowhere. But at the same time, you can acknowledge that this is not the same obstacle that you (or your mind or your brain) face all the time, and *that* one *must* be leapt over. I take it this is close to your position; maybe there's nothing answering to "perception" or "knowledge" as traditionally understood, but we must behave as if there is to get along in the world, and we'll call that a kind of "pragmatism".

What we need next is a better understanding of what an obstacle is. I wouldn't jump right to "how we recognize something is an obstacle", how we have a certain sort of knowledge, though that's in some sense what we want, so we can say whether there's an obstacle between us and the world that needs to be leapt over. Hopefully we can get to something like that later.

The call to commit to the objective reality of what you see is a mere leap of faith. — Kenosha Kid

I won’t disagree, but only ask: why should this be so? But that’s too much, too fast. What does it mean to take a leap of faith? Do you know what it means? How? Again, too much. We feel this compulsion to take such a leap, or feel we have already taken it and want to understand what we have done, or we feel that we should above all avoid taking any such leap and are worried that we may already have done so, without noticing. This is all worth thinking about, and I haven’t even gotten to the word “faith” yet, and there’s surely something to be said about that.

2. All human errors stem from impatience, a premature breaking off of a methodical approach, an ostensible pinning down of an ostensible object. — Kafka, Zürau Aphorisms

The true commitment to reality involves actively eliminating possible causes of our observations, not just only considering one (falsificationism). — Kenosha Kid

So you have a method in mind that will protect you from an impatient leap of faith. How did you arrive at this method, the method of elimination? If you’re going to talk of causes — of possible causes — of our observations, haven’t you already committed to quite a lot?

I don’t think we’re in a position yet to say what method can solve this problem — that before us is the possibility of a leap of faith and we are resistant, perhaps with good reason, to taking it. I don’t know how to solve such a problem. I don’t even understand why this is the problem we face, but it absolutely is. Before announcing how it is to be solved, I would spend some time trying to understand what sort of predicament this is, why it makes us uneasy, and see if we can learn, from the situation we are in, if it is possible to get out of it, and if it is, how.

If there are other sources of our experiences (and there are, not just dreams and hallucinations, but biases, errors, and features of processing), and those sources aren't separable after the fact (and they're not), then there's always an unknown about whether we're seeing an object, some feature of processing data about it, or something else entirely. — Kenosha Kid

This is a helpful summary.

All we know is the river. We have reason to believe the river itself has tributaries, smaller streams that feed into the river. There are stories, but no one can reach the place where you could to see these tributaries first flowing on their own and then mixing themselves with the river. We believe that when we scoop up a handful of water, the waters of many tributaries drip from our hands, but we cannot name the source of even one drop, so it is all, for us, only part of the river.

Well, I’m of two minds about this.

On the one hand, the sorts of things you refer to, you can refer to them because they have known effects and conditions. Mirages are interesting but they don’t cause you to underestimate the population of African countries; priming bias is interesting but does not cause the Georgia blacktop to shimmer in August. It’s not all water, but a stew we’re dealing with: some ingredients, like the seasoning, are so thoroughly mixed and have so affected others that they cannot be separated, but you can still spot a bit of carrot and identify it as stew-flavored but still recognizably carrot. If we could not point out optical illusions, biases, and the like, and distinguish them from normal perception and inference, your argument couldn’t even get off the ground.

On the other hand, I am convinced by arguments from many quarters that we begin our questioning in the river of experience; we cannot step out of the river and observe it as it flows by, study what goes into it and where it comes from. We can identify some things as they go by, and we can make a science of that, but it is not the science of what flows by that tells you you’re in a river, and it is not that science that could tell you what the nature of that river is.

I was going to say something else: the casting of everything as uncertain has a sort of methodological modesty about it — like finding a room a mess and cutting off arguments about who left that plate on the table, and who was supposed to have put the LEGOs away, and saying: it’s a mess now, however it got that way; everyone contributed (we assume, but perhaps falsely) so it’s simplest for us to ignore all that and clean it up together. That’s a pragmatic decision, and it will work — maybe! — but it’s an assignment of responsibility rather than determining responsibility, and it’s a mistake to think that because we can assign responsibility that’s all there is to it, and especially to think that when we effectively don’t assign responsibility — by assigning it to everyone — that no one was in fact responsible.

We can't say that any particular game is the home, so it's rather meaningless to say that every game in which it appears is a "home" for it. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don’t think so. I think there are strong objections to the single home theory, but they don’t touch the idea of a word being at home in a language-game, having a role or a function. It’s easier to see in the negative: if you’re working on a bit of carpentry and you have the wood, hammer, nails, screws, drill, ruler, sandpaper, and so on, then the soldering iron doesn’t belong here.

With words, it’s a little harder to be that simplistic because there’s a chance almost any word might find some use in a given language-game, but there are telltale signs that it doesn’t already have a use — one being that it is only allowed in as metaphor. Still, you can say that when discussing politics you’ll have ‘rights’, ‘elections’, ‘freedom’, ‘policy’, ‘legitimacy’, all sorts of words, but probably not ‘chlorophyll’ or ‘aubade’. And within a particular sort of discussion, say, a nitty-gritty-detail policy discussion, people may see a phrase like ‘the public good’ as so vague in this context as to be useless and thus unwelcome.

The homonym business — eh, it’s almost semantics. The one argument against it would be that in introducing a word into a language-game it does not already have a role in, you’re relying to some degree on people’s understanding of how the word is used elsewhere — either for the metaphor, or by making a case that there’s a strong analogy between the known use and the new one. It would be hard to pitch a known word as an empty vessel you can add a new meaning to at will. (A somewhat outlandish metaphor can do the trick. Timothy Williamson got mainstream philosophers to talk about “luminosity”.)

One point from the other direction doesn’t seem to be brought up much: must a word have a single use in a language-game? Why couldn’t a word have multiple uses in the same language-game?

we see different things, when we look at the same thing. — Tom Storm

I think that's exactly the right thing to say. Full endorsement from me.

We see different things. — Tom Storm

Then what would you mean when you said "we see the same objects (differently)"?

Do you also think the external world and all the objects in it are an hypothesis instantiated in your individual brain?

different people see the same objects in different ways. — Kenosha Kid

And I don't see how you can say that with a straight face.

Our perceptions aren't functions of objects from which we can prove the existence of those objects. — Kenosha Kid

That's a really interesting thing to say.

So does that mean that if there were a 1-to-1 mapping, we could *prove* not just what something is, but that it is? (Not just a function, but a function whose inverse is also a function.)

If the fake scotch tastes to me, at the moment, like real scotch -- we have to fudge a lot here, previous tastings of credible scotch? an average of those? what? --- then my tasting fails to discriminate the real from the fake, and thus fails to provide conclusive evidence that my drink is scotch. But that's all 'what'. How do we get to 'that' this way? Can I similarly not discriminate between drinking purported scotch and not drinking at all? I don't think dreams and hallucinations get you there; there have to be some genuine experiences for those to be possible.

Anyhow, is this how we would get to 'that the scotch exists (and is really scotch)'? If there were a 1-to-1 mapping, it would leave no room for mislabeling my experience? And thus no room to think I saw or drank or tasted something I did not?

That doesn't mean that one whiskey tastes the same as another, that your first whiskey tastes the same as your second, that whiskey tastes the same to you now as it did when you started drinking it aged 11, or that it tastes the same irrespective of whether you brushed your teeth. — Kenosha Kid

Yes, these are all possibilities, and they are the sort of thing you're interested in, as I understand it, because you're interested in how that works. And it is interesting. But it's also interesting that bathtub gin + iodine + hair tonic tastes a bit like scotch, and we'll talk about this concoction, itself, tasting like scotch. When we say, "It does taste a bit like scotch," we take ourselves to be talking about that thing, and we're not simply and obviously wrong to do so.

I'm just trying, a little, to hold you back from, in a stroky-beard moment of your own, correcting people -- "Actually, you mean that to you, at this moment, it tastes a bit like scotch." Whether you're inclined to say that sort of thing isn't altogether clear to me.

One might search forever, trying to confirm the word's "home" never really being sure which game is the word's "home", therefore never really being sure of the word's meaning. — Metaphysician Undercover

I’m sympathetic to your thinking in this post, but this is backwards. That is, you’re talking here about reflecting on the meaning of a word, analysing it, theorizing it, rather than using it. When it comes to use, either a word will do for your purpose or it won’t — or it can be made to work the way you want or it can’t. Think first of cases of trying to use a word for some purpose rather than of scrutinizing the word; the point of a tool is to use it when it will get the job done, not to contemplate it.

Perhaps the idea that there is one "home" game is just wrong, and the word has a home in each different game which it is used. Then shouldn't we say that these are distinct words, like homonyms, each with its own home in its own game? On what principle then do we say that it is "the same word" used in different games? Oughtn't we say that a word is homeless, and is free to go and find a place wherever one wants it to be? — Metaphysician Undercover

I think at the end here your view has something in common with @Joshs’s: he talks about each use of a word as something like inventing a new use for that word on the fly, extending or redefining its meaning with each new ‘application’.

But doesn’t the ‘words are homeless’ line of argument contradict the ‘homonym’ argument? It is the same hammer you use to drive this nail and that, to remove the pin from a hinge, to knock a dent out of your wheelbarrow. So what do we want to say? That it’s a poor tool, or maybe no tool at all, that has only a single use-case? Or that all of these uses are in some (analyzable, theorizable) sense ‘the same’ — maybe, striking an object so as to cause it to move? (But of course you can do more than that with a hammer.)

I think we do better to take in more rather than less of what’s going on, so that we can see the hammer being a part of — being ‘at home’ in — each ensemble of tools and practices where it is useful (cabinetmaking, house framing, tractor maintenance, surveying, etc.), but not part of others where it is not. I’d lean toward multiple homes, with both hammers and words. Someone used to using a hammer in only one way for one sort of job might be surprised to find other people think of it quite differently, and the same thing happens with words sometimes. (Someone might use a chisel as a doorstop for years without the slightest idea what it’s ‘really’ for.)

Cakes do have properties that reliably produce specific taste experiences when eaten by the sorts of creatures they were made for.
— Srap Tasmaner

Except they don't. It is precisely because there isn't a 1-to-1 map between the chemical constitution of a glass of wine or piece of cake and how it tastes that it's interesting. — Kenosha Kid

I’m not sure what you’re saying here, but my claim is that — plausible or not, convincing or not — the following is not simply incomprehensible:

As I understand it, the point of talking of qualia is in part to make room for our (affective) reactions to our perceptions. If there is something it is like to see this particular instance of red, then I don’t just have the experience of seeing the thing which is this particular red color, I also experience myself experiencing it, am aware of having the underlying experience, and thus can thematize my experience reflectively or respond to it affectively. So there must be an intermediary, a quale, which is not just an artifact of the process of my experiencing things — not just some ephemeral, intermediate step — but an object that I can be conscious of, the end product of at least some phase of the process of experiencing things.

The need for such a thing arises because the way people ordinarily talk about things seems, in some circles, sometimes, to be plain wrong: we are inclined to say things like, “Oh my god! This cake tastes amazing! Here, have a bite!” In everyday conversation, we attribute to objects properties that, we have it on good authority, they do not have ‘on their own’ — coloration, taste, scent, all the exciting stuff in life. We know that taste ‘occurs’ only in the interaction of the cake and someone eating it, so if it is possible to experience a taste at all, this interaction must yield a product that can itself be experienced by the taster, a taste quale.

But we were right the first time. Cakes do have properties that reliably produce specific taste experiences when eaten by the sorts of creatures they were made for. It’s the whole point of making a cake in a particular way, the whole point of treating baking as art or science, as you prefer, of working at it and taking it seriously. (That people have variations in how things taste to them makes no difference at all.) When people marvel at the colors of a sunset, it’s the sunset that is the source of their remarkable visual experience, even if that particular experience is only likely available to creatures who see like us. In short, it is remarkable things that cause remarkable sensory experiences (and pedestrian things that cause pedestrian experiences) and there’s something perverse about ignoring that, and elevating the importance of where (in our brains) and how (via our senses) we become aware of the unique things we find in the world, whether extraordinary or pedestrian.

And people know perfectly well that, having had a range of experiences, sometimes their affective response is ‘colored’ by other factors: “Is it me, or is this coffee amazing?” “You’re in love, asshole, everything’s amazing, and the rest of us are tired of hearing it.” But there has to be groundwork laid for such displacement, experiences of things, just as there has to be for dreams and hallucinations.

It’s just really not clear to me how neuroscience has changed the philosophical landscape here.

For instance, the SEP quote @fdrake posted — we already knew that was wrong, at least since Sellars, long before the advent of modern neuroscience. And Sellars is to some degree filling out Quine’s argument in “Two Dogmas”. All of this is either the shadow of Kant cast over analytic philosophy or re-invention of Kant. People just didn’t want to believe that Empiricism had died, so it had to be killed over and over and over again. (Point number one: this attachment to the idea of empiricism is worth thinking about.) If the neuroscientists tell us that we have no conscious access to any such ‘data’ and that by the time there’s something we can be aware of, it’s been scrubbed, munged, filtered, processed and modeled — yeah, we knew that already.

We are told that we have a mental model of — unclear. Not of the world exactly, or things in it, because we are told that everything “out there” is hypothetical. If that means we have only degrees of belief — not knowledge — so be it. But Hume already figured out that reasoning concerning matters of fact is only probable, and he had also recognized that this meant he was flirting with (if not marrying) scepticism. Sorry, but I’m still not seeing anything new here.

What is new is the word ‘model’. I haven’t read the literature, but around here it seems to be considered self-evident what a model is. (Excepting @apokrisis, who believes he has to account for how it is possible for the universe to have such critters in it as ‘models’.) Within the practice of science, in my limited understanding, ‘model’ might as well be short for ‘mathematical model’. (And that’s true even if you’re not doing statistics.)

If that’s the paradigm upon which the psychological term “model” is based, it has a curious side-effect: the traditional candidate (among benighted philosophers of the past) for direct, unmediated perception is mathematical objects. We do not perceive them with our senses but know them directly. Insofar as the models in our brains are modeled on the models of scientific theory, they ought to be — it turns out — made of stuff that is not hypothetical and that (thank goodness!) we need no sensory apparatus at all to understand. But I can’t imagine any of the neuroscience enthusiasts around here talking about mathematical objects this way... (Ha! cross-posting with @Mww!)

It seems the distinction wanted is not between 'direct' and 'indirect', but between 'inferential' and 'non-inferential' -- only those are terms more appropriate to knowledge than perception. And that suggests we're still circling around the problematic nature of empiricism, as a theory of knowledge.

we don't have direct perception of objects — Kenosha Kid

What would that be that we don’t have? I’m seriously asking: what do you have in mind when you say there is a type of perception, direct perception, that human beings happen not to — well, “have” seems an odd way to put — so let’s make it: what would it be to perceive “directly” rather than “indirectly”?

There's nothing more to John being a bachelor than my felicitously using the term 'bachelor'. — Isaac

Felicity here seems to be a matter of the spell you have cast, by speaking the word ‘bachelor’, coming off.

I'd be open to using a somewhat more "magical" vocabulary to talk about the role of our thoughts in the world.

For instance, to think of someone as your enemy is to make them your enemy, though it might be news to them. I've flirted with defining away this sort of thing, taking "thinking" here as a sort of shorthand for how we are disposed to act.

But there is precedent for going the other way. "The mind is its own place, and can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." (In a somewhat Miltonic mood, Geoffrey Hill said a poem is a "fortress of the imagination".)

This way seems to imply a pretty heavy commitment to free will; the other way is more flexible.

I suppose I'd like to say, there is something special about thought that isn't really captured in the somewhat mechanical model I used to entertain. Magic talk seems to go a bit overboard with that, but maybe it's worth thinking about what they're trying to capture.

Blech.

‘Will’ and ‘action’ look like pretty crufty categories so I won’t take sides there.

Insofar as the idea of ‘magick’ is just a souped-up ‘will’, I’m even less interested.

It’s plain enough what Crowley, as quoted, is getting at — that if willing it makes it so, that’s magick. (Feels like that lets in some other class of somethings, but they might be just as wonky. Contrition — that might be one.)

I don’t understand the regulation question. The only Crowley quote I had ever heard was “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”