• The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
    ↪J


    Yeah I think there's a trick to that story, that it does mean it's too hard to sight-read.

    But then I also think about the difficulty of notating jazz correctly. And I think about Jimi Hendrix, who seems to add some tiny bend or flutter to almost every damn note -- how do you notate all those micro-decisions? And so it is with any great musician, there are all those millisecond decisions that go into the performance, all those tiny variations that distinguish a good performance from a great one.

    Now, should we say there is no hope of a scientific approach to great musicianship? I actually don't think so. I think the point is that vastly more data is needed than you might at first think, certainly more than you would think if you looked even at a complex score, which is great simplification of what a musician actually does.

    Any of that make sense to you?
  • The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
    So to be clear, are you saying that science has to do with knowing-that, and non-scientific strategies for learning have to do with knowing-how? Even though there is some minor overlap? — Leontiskos

    I'd say people quite often want to learn things that can be known, and when they reflect on how they're going about doing that, you have the beginnings of science. Recognizing that the first method that occurs to you, the natural or intuitive approach, might fail or produce unreliable results, and that taking some care up front, not just jumping in to slurp up facts as if they were just laying around, easily accessible to the laziest procedure, but planning an approach to learn what you want to know, that I would think of as the scientific impulse.

    That can happen anywhere anytime.

    For example, Ornette Coleman once said (I think this was in the liner notes to one of his early albums), it's when I found I could make mistakes that I knew I was onto something. We're talking here about how to play, and how to write, but it is also possible to have knowledge about what you play and what you write. Even if we, rightly, resist the philosopher's instinct to reduce knowing how to knowing that, we ought also resist excluding knowing that from knowing how.

    Further example, John Coltrane was a student of music theory. There are stories of him and Eric Dolphy with books spread out all over the living-room floor around them, discussing and analysing modes and scales for hours. Intense interest in knowing that. There's also a story that a young music student came to visit Trane once to interview him, and brought along a transcription she had made of one his solos. She asked him to play it, and after trying a couple times, he handed it back to her and said, "It's too hard." Knowing how is still its own thing, howsoever informed by knowing that.

    I guess all I'm saying is that "know" is a verb, so we're always talking about a how, whether it's knowing that or knowing how. Those are different things people do, but I think we know they are, and have to be, braided together continually. In science, the intent is to get the hows right so that you can produce thats reliably; in jazz, the intent is to take the thats you can get your hands on to improve your ability to how.
  • The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
    2. All human errors stem from impatience, a premature breaking off of a methodical approach, an ostensible pinning down of an ostensible object. — Kafka, the Zurau aphorisms
  • The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
    I wonder if there are really no true ontological positions, only methodological ones. It's not what is real, it's where and how do we look. — T Clark

    I meant to say earlier, I quite like this idea.
  • The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
    I think we have to actually grapple with the now-common belief that that the natural sciences are more scientific than the social sciences. — Leontiskos

    To the hoi polloi, "science" seems mostly to mean "medicine", which is no doubt an interesting story. For my purposes, medicine is a good example because the human body is complicated and difficult to study, and so progress in learning how it works has been noticeably dependent on developing new technologies. And here we're still talking about natural science.

    When you turn to the social sciences, there are additional impediments to a scientific approach. The sciences of the past (history and archaeology) face unavoidable limitations on what can be observed. If instead you're studying the present, there can be difficulties with observation ― political science has to rely on polling, which presents enormous challenges, and other sources like voting data, which can be difficult to link with other sources of data, and still other sources like economic surveys. No one in the social sciences ever has nearly as much data as they would like, and what they would like is informed by theorizing that is perforce based on the limited data they can get. It's hard. You can design some pretty clever experiments in fields like psychology and linguistics, but economics and sociology are generally forced to make do with "natural experiments" (and in this they are more like astronomy and cosmology).

    In short, I tend to think social scientists are doing the best they can, and if we are right to have less confidence in their results than in the results of physics or chemistry, it's not because their work is less scientific, but a basic issue, first, of statistical power (lack of data), and, second, of the enormous complexity of the phenomena they study.

    Consider the fact that a very common objection to science-pluralism is that it would be unable to distinguish true science from pseudoscience (and the proponents of science-pluralism really do struggle with this objection). A pseudoscience is basically just a "science" which produces uncertain and unreliable "knowledge." — Leontiskos

    I think honestly the similarities are only skin deep, and the processes of knowledge production in the two approaches differ dramatically.

    The pluralism I'm inclined to defend is twofold: one is Goodman's point about the sciences that are not physics getting full faith and credit; the other is the communal self-correction idea. The latter rests upon the simple fact that others are sometimes better positioned to see the flaws in your work than you are. That presents an opportunity: you can systematize and institutionalize scrutiny of your work by others. Two heads are better than one; two hundred or two thousand heads are better than two. There are some practical issues with this, well-known shortcomings in the existing peer-review process, for instance, but the idea is deeply embedded in the practice of science as I understand it, and I think it has proven its worth.

    Do you think there are non-scientific strategies for learning? — Leontiskos

    Surely. Given the distinction between knowing that and knowing how, it stands to reason there's a difference between learning that and learning how. Acquiring a skill is a kind of learning that might here and there overlap with a scientific approach ― experimenting is what I'm thinking of ― but we would expect plenty of differences too, and the intended "result" is quite different.

    I think I'm okay with restricting science to a strategy for learning what can be known, and I also want to say it is something like the distillation of everything we have learned about how to learn what can be known. Science itself is a how, not a what. And that also means that we can learn more about how to learn things, so there's no reason to think the methodology of science is fixed.

    We're kind of going in every direction at this point, and I didn't even try to get to the "essence of science".
  • The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
    science is not one method, nor is it a fundamentally different way of thinking from other forms of disciplined inquiry. — Tom Storm

    I tend to think what matters most is that the enterprise is self-correcting, and it achieves that by being plural. The replication crisis is a great example of the scientific community's capacity to discover and address its own shortcomings.

    you seem to be saying that the natural sciences check more of our "science" boxes than the social sciences — Leontiskos

    I was trying not to say that, in fact, because any such list, with the intent of creating a scale of "scientificity", would be tendentious. Maybe it's silly, but it seems to me in some ways physics is easier than biology, which is easier than sociology. There are all sorts of issues of complexity and scale and accessibility (comparative ability to observe and measure). The story of physics itself moves from easy-to-make observations and measurements and relatively simple theories to very-hard-to-make observations and theories that are so complex their interpretation is open to debate.

    Roughly, I'm trying to say that I think it's a mistake to identify science with the methods that worked for the low-hanging fruit.

    the reason we approach different things differently is because they are different things. The reason we approach physics differently than mathematics is because of the difference between physics and mathematics. — Leontiskos

    That's quite interesting. Mathematics is particularly troublesome, but I want to defend the view that there are approaches to the study of atoms and mountains and lungs and whale pods and nation states that are all recognizably scientific and scientific because of some genuine commonality, despite the differences which are unavoidable given the differences among these phenomena. That commonality might be more "family resemblance" than "necessary and sufficient conditions," but I lean strongly toward the mechanism of communal self-correction being required. I guess we could talk a lot more about all this.

    I'm going to hold off talking about pedagogy, but I'm glad you brought it up, because I think "learning" (as a concept at least) should be far more central to philosophy. This is my 30,000-foot view of science, and why I mentioned the importance of specifiable plans for further investigation above: science is a strategy for learning. That's the core of it, in my view, and everything else serves that, and anything that contributes to or refines or improves the process is welcome.
  • The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
    us working hard to make sense — Tom Storm

    That's a lovely point.
  • The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
    I'm just asking if you think some disciplines are more paradigmatically scientific than other disciplines — Leontiskos

    What if we left out "paradigmatically" in your question: are some disciplines "more scientific" than others? If you take "discipline" reasonably broadly, the obvious answer is "yes": writing poetry, for instance, is a discipline that, for the most part, does not even aspire to be scientific. Are you asking if some sciences are "more scientific" than others? Is physics more scientific than biology? Is biology more scientific than sociology?

    I'm having trouble imagining a reason to ask. It's clearly possible to make up an answer, to make a long list of characteristics of "science" and then count how many boxes each discipline checks. I think most of the natural sciences check whatever boxes you might come up with, and it wouldn't be surprising if the social sciences checked fewer, but it doesn't seem like a helpful exercise. It suggests that there is a difference due to the domain, when it's the approach that matters.

    Will one discipline provide a better starting point than another discipline, or not? — Leontiskos

    I think not in principle ― not on account of something "especially scientific" about any given field ― but for pedagogical reasons, probably so. What would the students already have some familiarity with? What would most engage their attention? What would give them opportunities to participate and see for themselves ― to, in a fundamental sense, do science themselves?

    Maybe this is a variation on your question: isn't it the case that some domains are simply less suited to scientific study than others? Suppose you wanted to teach science and chose to begin with "the science of beauty", for instance ― how far would you get? I expect most of us would agree, not very far, but I don't think we have to dismiss the idea out-of-hand: why not explore and see if the process itself reveals the limits of what we can do here? ― Maybe this is the right point to mention that Goodman, in particular, insists that literature and the arts are not competing with the sciences and are not failing to meet a standard that is set by the natural sciences, but offer alternative frameworks for knowledge. (The word "knowledge" looks slightly odd there, but he would probably be fine with it.)

    I don't know ― is any of this in the ballpark of what your were looking for?
  • The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
    Do you think it is appropriate to treat certain disciplines as paradigmatic sciences, such as physics or geometry? — Leontiskos

    I don't really understand the question. "Appropriate" in what sense?

    Along the same lines, would the pedagogue be equally justified in starting with any discipline they like, if they wish to teach their pupil about scientific reasoning? — Leontiskos

    I don't understand this question either. "Justified" in what sense?

    Truly don't know what you're getting at here.
  • The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
    multiple realities, each intelligible through particular conceptual frameworks or perspectives — Tom Storm

    It's the view Nelson Goodman defends in Ways of Worldmaking, and one consequence I found particularly appealing is that it puts you in a position to take seriously sciences which are not physics. Goodman argues that "reduction" is basically a myth, with no known exemplars. (It is true that physics constrains chemistry, which constrains biology, which constrains ethology, which constrains anthropology, but no one really thinks ― and there's no reason to think ― you could "explain" traditional religious practices in West Africa in terms of physics.) There is, on the contrary, no real reason for treating other sciences as "second class citizens" that might someday qualify as the real deal if you can show how they are consequences of physics.

    The alternative is to believe that there is only ever one thing to say, and anyone not saying that is wrong. But rather than see divergence as disagreement, it's possible in many cases to realize that it's only another perspective being offered. "But look at it this way ..." doesn't have to imply disagreement. Knowledge production is a communal enterprise.
  • The Phenomenological Origins of Materialism
    The former reflects a pragmatic stance, informed by an awareness of the limits of what can be known — Tom Storm

    Agreed, but I would have thought "the limits of what we know how to investigate". At least that's how I think of naturalism; it's a program for further investigation that can actually be carried out. It may not get you everything that could be known -- how could anyone know that? -- but at least it's a definable plan for encroaching on the unknown.
  • How do we recognize a memory?
    Here I worry that bringing in "your mind" is one entity too many. Is this the picture?: An image occurs, my mind says it is a memory, and then some other item called "I" identifies it as a memory? Or when you say, "My mind said it was," does this just mean that I said it was?

    This kind of question does help us see how hard it is to work with a term like "mind". Do I want to identify "mind" with some psychological account of how images et al. get generated? Or would it be better to make "mind" equivalent to the "I", the self? Or is it this third activity that can mediate between the first two conceptions?     — J

    The intent of putting it this way was just to suggest that you might not ever be aware of entirely decontextualized (let alone "raw") bits of content. There's always some story to go along with it, however vague or incomplete or even inapposite that story might be. I really could have said "brain" where I said "mind', but I liked the sound of pitching it more at the level of function than mechanism.

    ― I will add that I have no idea how to talk about most of this coherently because I don't know what the purpose, even what the use of consciousness is, why we become aware of some of what the brain is getting up to.

    Here's a tiny example that just occurred to me in the last day or so, a phenomenon I was familiar with that I hadn't ever bothered connecting to my desultory reading about psychology. You're doing something which goes awry, say, closing a door awkwardly and it looks like you're about to pinch your fingers in it, and you just barely miss getting hurt but you say "Ow!' anyway. I've seen people do this in front of me, and everyone I've talked to about it has had this experience, the needless "ouch!"

    It's perfectly clear why this happens, psychologically speaking. Your brain is busy predicting future states of your body and preparing to respond to them, and forming and emitting words takes a little time so it doesn't wait until they're needed but prepares them a little ahead of time based on predicted or expected need. (Every human conversation shows signs of this.) When the moment of truth arrives, the needed "ouch!" is already on its way to being ejaculated, even if it turns out not to be needed.

    That means this "ouch!" is not quite the same as the automatic and involuntary scream of surprise pain. So what's "ouch!" for? I don't know, but my suspicion is that it is vaguely narrative supporting, either for your own consumption or others present, if there are any. "And then he pinched his finger in the door, and it hurt." It's a little label on the experience that drags along a little context, probably adds some little tabs that allow it to be in turn slotted into other, larger, probably narrative, contexts. It tells you what that moment means or could mean by telling you what it is or could be. Something like that.

    My suspicion was that these glimpsed images that flash through your mind arrive similarly with a suggested meaning or context and prepared a little to be taken up by other uses and contexts. So indeed tagged as a memory, but maybe weaker than that, offered as possibly a memory, and then we'll see if that holds when you (that is, your brain) do whatever you do with it. If it just goes on by, its status is left somewhat indeterminate, but if you do indeed treat it as a memory, next time it comes up it'll be more strongly suggested that this is a memory. (We know for a fact that this happens; Paul McCartney reports that he, like everyone else, had come to believe over the years that he broke up the Beatles, but that watching Peter Jackson's documentary brought back to him what it was really like, and everything that was going on then, and that it wasn't entirely his fault.)

    The experience of seeing image X and recognizing image X as, say, a memory, is simultaneous, and thus makes the experience different from recognizing image Y as a fancy. I'm not adding anything to some unlabeled or unrecognized image; it's all of a piece. — J

    Right, I'm saying I doubt anything arrives unlabeled, whether that label is large and clear or small and hard to read, but that's not because the world itself is labeled but because your brain has a labeling process and you don't see anything until it's been through that process. You get them in consciousness at the same time, but I think they are still distinguishable because you can question their accuracy or usefulness separately.

    We can also go backwards now and note that to lay down a durable memory it has to makes sense. People have trouble remembering random bits of stuff, but stuff in sensible patterns they can. That suggests that there might always be some minimal gesture toward making sense of what's in your mind, in case you want to remember it, if it turns out to be important in some way, for instance. (An interesting variation on this is the Columbo method, in which you pay particular attention to details that seem out of place or inexplicable, to be missing part of the context in which they would make sense.)

    This is all just psychology, and, what's worse, psychology I'm mostly making up.
  • How do we recognize a memory?
    It's a question about my relation to, my experience of, how the mind works. — J

    That's close to where I'd find room for philosophy, but it's tricky.

    Consider emotions. The average person is under the impression that an emotion wells up from within them more-or-less fully formed, and that it's a definite thing. What's interesting is that people in the post-Freud world also accept that they might misunderstand or misread or misinterpret their own emotions ― hence the sitcom joke of angrily shouting "I'm not angry!" But the assumption here is that there is a fact of the matter, in the sense that your emotion is something definite itself.

    Thing is, it probably isn't. We have whatever feelings we have for whatever reasons (that is, causes) and then "we" ― our minds ― construct for us a story in which we are angry or happy or whatever. The inputs for those stories are manifold, notably including social as well as internal elements, but there's no pure internal emotional state to be represented. Emotions are thoughts and constructed like all thoughts.

    Roughly speaking, my expectation is that what we're talking about is similar: along with the content of your awareness there's a little story, often quite vaguely sketched, about this being a memory or a fancy.

    So I think in a way there is an answer to "Why do I think this particular thought I was just having is a memory?" and the answer is because your mind said it was, or some perhaps much more subtle and noncommittal equivalent ― maybe your mind tested the waters a bit in suggesting this is a memory to see if you'd bite, if that characterization of the thought got any traction and we should carry on with that, or if not we should start hedging a bit, maybe eventually admit it wasn't memory at all.

    I think the story is probably very similar to emotion, because ordinary people have unearned certainty about both. We all know that memory is pretty much always confabulation, but most people are still convinced that when they remember something their memory is trustworthy; in the same way they are quite certain that their emotions are from deep inside, from their very essence as individuals, and not, for example, shaped to fit the social situation.

    So ― coming at last to it, I think ― when you talk about our relationship to our thoughts, I'm afraid a lot of that is already stuff the mind is getting up to. Always busily rewriting the story.

    You could, of course, give up talking about our experience of our thoughts and instead spend your time on our concepts of memory and imagination, but I think there's a middle way.

    It does, after all, often matter to us a great deal whether we really remember something. That's pretty interesting, that we should care so much about a distinction that isn't all that trustworthy. When we insist that we remember something, we are fundamentally making that up ― a thought just isn't definitely a memory or not, even if your mind strongly encourages you to think that it is. So why do we do that?

    So maybe your reason for posting was somewhere near here. We feel one way about a thought if we think of it as a memory, and another if we think of it as fancy. Even though those two toys came out of the same bin.

    So yes I would be up for examining what "memory" means to us, why it's so important to us to determine whether a thought is a memory (yours or mine), the role all these reflections and commitments play in our mental lives. But I doubt there's anything worth chasing that would turn out to be the "genuine experience" of memory rather than imagination, because I doubt there's any such thing. Still, we behave as if there is, and that feeds back into our mental lives quite powerfully.
  • How do we recognize a memory?
    When it happens, are you instantaneously aware, as best you can tell, that the thought/image is a purported memory? And if so, how? — J

    The first question is, fundamentally, empirical ― not just about me, but in general: is this an experience people have? The second question is still empirical, because it falls squarely within the domain of (cognitive) psychology.

    ― ― If you want my take on the psychology, it's worth as much as you're paying for it: I would expect that thoughts are "categorized" on the fly, as needed, and only as much as needed, and that overwhelmingly this process of categorization is not something you do consciously. "At bottom" there's whatever makes it into your awareness, and that's just some bit of content, probably itself underspecified, and then there's what it gets taken as ― memory, fancy, perception, whatever. The content present might not get characterized to any particularly sharp degree, if it doesn't matter for the rest of what your mind is up to; if it matters, there might be some effort put into it. In short, I'd expect that the difference between memory and imagination is "constructed"; I'd say the same for perception, and I think there's reason to, but I suspect it's a slightly different process since there's enormous specialization for perception in the brain, which might make a difference. It is nevertheless true that people believe they see things that they are in fact imagining, and vice versa, so clearly the same applies here: the difference is negotiable, how something is categorized is not "what it is".

    And that's what I am gesturing at when I say that we don't consciously decide whether the content in our awareness is remembered or imagined; in some sense, yes, there's a decision being made about what it is, very much so, but I think that "decision" is mostly made without your conscious involvement. Obviously there will be exceptions.

    That's all just blather, though, my guesses based on my reading and that's all. ― ―

    Roughly speaking, I think none of this is any of philosophy's business. In the 18th century, before we could do the sort of research we can do now, it may have been acceptable to speculate about how the mind works and how we distinguish perceptions from memories and so on, but it's rather foolish in the 21st century.

    There are still some things for philosophy to talk about, I think, just not this, at least not in this way.
  • How do we recognize a memory?
    But the "Why?" of "Why do I identify an image as a (purported) memory?" is different -- unless we are thoroughgoing physicalists. We believe, generally, that an explanation here is going to involve some reference to reasons, to conscious activity. — J

    This is the main thing I find so puzzling about your approach. (You seem to think it's phenomenology, and I think it's rather the opposite.)

    Remembering is much like breathing; we do it on purpose, some of the time, and automatically, almost all the time, and we never stop.

    That's "remembering", not "becoming aware of a thought and labeling it a memory". If that happens at all, it's probably rare, unusual at least. A thought, if it's a memory, comes to us as a memory, period.

    (And I think it must. Consider the alternative: what reasons could you muster to judge a thought to be a memory? What could you possibly rely upon as you worked out the inference that this indeed is a memory? It is the fundamental form of knowledge; you are already relying on memory when it occurs to you to do a bit of conscious reasoning. You've no hope of hauling memory before the tribunal of reason.

    Of course an individual memory is open to criticism, as being inaccurate or incomplete, whatever. But not only is there an obvious difficulty in establishing that a given thought is a memory, any steps you take will be entirely reliant on memory, so memory as such simply must escape judgment.)

    Now, if you want to ask, what's that like, for something to be present to the mind as a memory? Fine, and that's headed back toward phenomenology. (What we do, rather than how, as my deleted post had it.)

    But what we can't do is go looking for criteria that we consciously use to identify memories or distinguish them from other thoughts. There had better not be such criteria, because we couldn't know it and never apply them without already allowing memory to have its way.
  • How do we recognize a memory?
    here I am, here comes the mental item, here's me identifying it (seemingly instantly) as a purported memory. — J

    Convince me that's either (a) not already a theory about how mental life works, or (b) it's a good theory, a reasonable theory.

    What has happened, or what have I caused to happen, to me? (Not so much "What has happened to cause this mental event?") — J

    Yes, yes, but you seem to have the idea that the "mental item" might have causes, and those fall within the purview of psychology, but your identifying the mental item as a memory (or a fancy or a perception) does not, is not itself another sort of mental item, and does not fall within the purview of psychology. I can't imagine why you would think that. Surely identifying a thought as a memory is as much a psychological event as the thought so identified.
  • How do we recognize a memory?
    ↪Leontiskos


    Oh I don't think so. There have been several interesting points raised (by you, @Dawnstorm, et al).

    No, my post was really just about methodology, because here's the thing: as posed, the question is about psychology. @J wanted to get away from that, but then you should really be asking different questions.

    And that would be worth doing, because memory is a very deep thing, it is the substrate of our mental lives, the medium within which thoughts grow, the object and enabler of perception and imagination, ... There's obviously a lot for psychology to say about all that.

    But what I find particularly interesting is the way memory can suddenly rise up and take control of the whole show, shouldering aside perception and imagination, all the mental work of keeping you alive. Memory refuses to stay in its place as the dependable foot soldier of thought. When the conditions are right (temperature and so on), a certain sort of breeze can throw me right back to my childhood.

    It is noteworthy how unbeholden to time our mental lives can be.
  • How do we recognize a memory?
    .
  • What is faith
    My guess is that ... — Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion, Thomas

    And you ask me for evidence!

    A lot of empty chin-stroking. How you can take this seriously --
  • What is faith
    ↪Wayfarer


    The evidence for what? For your assertion not applying to me?
  • What is faith
    The deeper dynamic of that is that secular philosophy is antagostic to the possibility of the transcendent because it is fearful that it might be real after all (compare Thomas Nagel's 'fear of religion'). Better to leave the whole question sealed. — Wayfarer

    I expect I'll do as a representative secularist, and I have never in my entire life been afraid that one or another religion might turn out to be true.

    You (and Nagel, I guess) are just making this up.
  • What is faith
    My point is that the ought-claims of complete strangers have force for us — Leontiskos

    What do you mean "us", kemosabe?
  • What is faith
    You might say, "I and everyone else on Earth share the value of wanting to avoid poisonous water, but that value is still arbitrary. Everyone on Earth may share the value, but that does not make it non-arbitrary."

    I don't see a need to enter into the debate on universal vs. objective. My point is that at least some values are shared by all humans, and this is all that is required for morality to exist. If this were not true then the complete stranger's warning would have no force for you. But it does have force for you, and therefore it is true that there are fundamentally shared values.     — Leontiskos

    I'm sympathetic, but this is patently false.

    If I want to die, I might very well seek out poisonous beverages.

    I have elsewhere argued at some length about the reasonableness of assuming that anyone you come across desires to continue living, absent evidence to the contrary. But it's still an assumption. I wouldn't call it an "arbitrary" assumption, anymore than I would call the desire to continue living "arbitrary". But neither would I call either of them universal, because they plainly are not.
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    Congratulations. You are the first person to use "cromulent" on The Philosophy Forum. — BC

    This is demonstrably false. (I suspect you were misled by the mobile version having search in two different menus.)

    Either you had never run across the word here before or had forgotten that you had; then ― perhaps ― you checked your memory using a faulty procedure.

    Either your experience of the forum was idiosyncratic, or you misunderstood and mischaracterized that experience yourself, and then ― whichever was the case ― you projected your understanding of your experience onto the forum as such, and everyone's experience of it.

    But I'm sure that's completely irrelevant to the thread topic ...
  • How do you know the Earth is round?
    I watched that second video and cannot see anything like that. — flannel jesus

    It does work better as a companion to the first video.

    The basic idea is that he has his camera mounted on a jib so that he can raise and lower it. At maximum height, you can see the far shore of the lake, which is like 7 km away, I think; when you lower it closer to the water, the far shore disappears. It disappears because it is now below the horizon. That's the math he explains in the second video.

    I don't know what else to tell you.
  • How do you know the Earth is round?
    ↪flannel jesus


    For the second video I posted, the first five minutes goes over his camera setup and the math he is going to be checking. He explains exactly what measurements he will confirm or disconfirm in the video. The entire rest of the video is just a whole bunch of the footage he shot for the first video.

    If you watch for a few minutes, you can see the curvature of the earth perfectly clearly.
  • How do you know the Earth is round?
    this video is more a general reply to the op — flannel jesus

    And a reply to things "looking pretty flat."

    Dan Olson happens to live not too far from a perfect spot to test whether the earth is curved or flat, a very long straight lake. He's just an ordinary guy who makes videos and is capable of being careful and thorough. More or less exactly what you said you wanted.

    He looked. The earth is not flat. Case closed.
  • How do you know the Earth is round?
    ↪flannel jesus


    That covers the whole flat earth cultural thing. He made a companion piece just about the experiment:

  • How do you know the Earth is round?
    The earth's curvature is visible wherever there's a visible horizon — jkop


    That's not my experience. Go to the beach, look out to sea, it looks pretty flat to me. Take a photo, I'm pretty sure it's not visibly curved.     — flannel jesus

    Dan Olson has done the test for you:

  • Behavior and being
    And the pragmatist isn't shielded from truth. If he wants his combustion engine to run he will need combustible fuel. Gasoline is either combustible or it isn't, and we don't ask norms, frames, or models whether it is combustible. We ask reality. The only use of norms, frames, and models is in mediating reality. — Leontiskos

    Take another look at this argument. Anything odd about it? Anything at all?
  • p and "I think p"
    Is it reasonably clear? — J

    It is, though I wouldn't lean too heavily on the niceties of phrasing. There are just too many possibilities and too many shades of meaning.

    Also, I'm not sure the first-person is all that important to the distinction being drawn. We talk about other people's mental events, just as we talk about other people's affirmations and claims and all that. "Judy thought you had gone home." "Judy thinks you should go home."

    I guess the biggest question is how you intend to handle the mental events side. Space of reasons or space of causes?

    "Judy thought you had left because she heard the front door" as causal: "If Judy had not heard the front door, she wouldn't have thought you had left"; or as not: "If Judy had not heard the front door, she would have had no reason to think you'd left." ― The trouble with the second is that it should really have "and so she didn't" at the end, but it's pretty hard to justify. People think all kinds of stuff, or fail to.

    Does any of that matter for the theory?
  • Behavior and being
    I think that there is an important sense in which "things are what they do," can be affirmed without having to jettison the intuition that "things do what they do because of what they are." Where I believe we get into trouble is when we end up with something like: "things are what they do and what they do is unintelligible brute fact, i.e. they do what they do "for no reason at all." — Count Timothy von Icarus

    But we all, I presume, want to avoid saying that a potion makes you sleepy because of its virtus dormitiva. The "because" in "because of what they are" feels a little thin. Are we sure that talk about how something behaves and talk about what it is aren't just equivalent vocabularies?

    As for the second sentence I've quoted, I'm not sure "things do what they do because of what they are" will be much of an advance over "no reason at all." Why do ducks quack? Because it's in their nature? Is that different from saying a duck is a thing that quacks? No one is going to be excited to learn either that ducks quack because they're ducks or that ducks quack because ducks quack.

    (Why do ducks quack rather than chirp or croak or bark or meow -- different kind of question, I think. Similarly, why do ducks quack on particular sorts of occasions and not others. There are lots of questions about quacking we can expect substantive answers to.)
  • Behavior and being
    a thing and its behaviors are one and the same — NOS4A2

    Well, that's a question.

    The thing is, models are sort of inherently hypothetical. They tell you what the world would be like if a duck were right there, what patterns you would see, what connections to other loci of behavior there would be, how the world system would work if it included that duck node.

    But what about there actually being a duck there? Do you model that by embedding your model into a larger model, and in the larger model the duck existing sort of switches on the model you had before? But that's another kind of behavior, that switching on a model. So how do you model switching on a model? Do you keep going? Can you get actuality by making your model somehow recursive (or maybe reflective)?

    It feels to me like actuality is something that always just escapes the model.

    Am I wrong about that?
  • p and "I think p"
    3. The “I think” is not experienced at all. It is a condition of thought, a form of thought, in the same way that space and time are conditions of cognition. Self-consciousness, in Rödl’s sense, is built in to every thought, but not as a content that must be experienced. — J

    I'd be reluctant to call this self-consciousness, but maybe ...

    Imagine a slightly more schematic version: there's the tree, leaves falling from it, a great light on the far side of it. Until that light strikes another surface, there is no shadow. When it does strike another surface, the shadow is formed not just by the tree and the leaves falling; it also takes on the shape of the surface that hosts the shadow. If that surface is angled or curved or bumpy or fractured, so will the shadow be.

    In this case, the thought that the oak tree is shedding its leaves is me-shaped. There was no thought until something passed from the tree to me, and if it had not found me, it would not be thought. Thoughts have such shapes, as shadows do. If you consider a shadow, and imaginatively remove it from its host, in the shape of the shadow there would be an impression of that host, just as there is an impression of the scene projecting the shadow. Since you are similar to me, a thought that fits me would come pretty close to fitting you.

    But at the moment, it's me. So I would say I am implicated in the thought; it has my shape, after all. But is Rödl saying I am implicitly "aware" of this? Or is he only saying something like I've said, that besides the "content" of the thought ― like the projected shadow ― there is something like a form of the thought, and that form is of me?
  • Behavior and being
    if there is nothing at all stable — Count Timothy von Icarus

    At the very beginning of this thread, I suggested that if you asked a "deflationist" "What is the being of a duck?", he would find the question incomprehensible, and if you asked it of a "model-builder", he would describe various duck behaviors, in a very broad sense, including how duck tastes. If you insisted you didn't mean any of that, he would stare blankly at you.

    I think, @Count Timothy von Icarus, you've landed in a similar place. When it is suggested that the world may only exhibit relative and local stability, you find this unimaginable, incomprehensible. Yes, you're giving arguments in support of your view, but the point of those arguments is only that something else you find unimaginable and incomprehensible would be the case.

    Now, if no one could imagine such a thing, we might feel ourselves on safer ground claiming, this just doesn't make sense, or this is against all reason. But in this case, you are disputing @fdrake's view, things he is actually saying. That might give you pause. Your position would have to be that @fdrake does not actually understand the position he claims to and claims to advocate, but not by arguing from a position of superior knowledge, that is, that this is something you understand and that's how you know he doesn't ― you don't have direct knowledge that he doesn't; you believe no one can, from which you infer that @fdrake can't, and finally that he doesn't. Okay. But how will you manage the inference from "I haven't made sense of this" to "No one can make sense of this"?
  • Behavior and being
    ↪fdrake


    Near as I can tell, the point of all of this is to be able to say that everything is an assemblage; that is, to flatten the ontology of the world. Why do that?

    The measure of success is evidently saving the appearances. Clouds and ducks don't look much alike, so you have to show how they can both be accounted for ("generated" perhaps), how using the same underlying mechanisms can produce endless forms most beautiful.

    But as @frank noted, science is already pretty hard at work doing this. In biology, that's evo-devo, genetics, epigenetics, and all the rest. Clouds don't have generic material as such, but they are natural aggregations of the sort that abiogenesis looks to for the origins of genetic material, and there are common chemical mechanisms.

    I think what you really want is something like a large set of dials: set them to a certain position, you get a duck, slightly different a mallard duck, quite different a cloud, more different again a nation-state. I'm sure it's an interesting project, but I don't know why you'd want to do that.

    In particular, if you're committed to saving the appearances, what makes this an explanatory framework like science (which it really seems to want to be), rather than just a change in vocabulary?
  • Behavior and being
    Some quick hits, substance later. I guess.

    I think this impulse is the one that I have — fdrake

    Hey, so do I!

    functionalist — fdrake

    Right.

    old discussions on the site about related issues with Isaac — fdrake

    Yes, exactly. I've just now bothered to find that old exchange. Turns out I even used the phrase "bundle of behaviors" two years ago. Totally forgot I had shoehorned in a rant about sortals in that post.

    And sortals were my logico-linguistic way of getting at

    being/essence — Leontiskos

    The word "essence" was very much in my mind writing the OP. Knew I could count on you to get it, @Leontiskos.

    We don't talk this way much anymore. There was a time when "essence" was tidied up as "necessary and sufficient conditions" for ― for what? For truthfully applying a predicate, mostly. Being is scrunched down into the copula, and all that's left is being a value of a bound variable.

    Where do Quine's bound variables live? In models. That was the whole point. If your model quantifies over ducks, you're committed to ducks as entities, no cheating. But the anti-metaphysics comes by flipping that around: ducks are entities just means you have a model in which you quantify over them. That implies "duck" has what amounts to a functionalist definition: what role ducks play in the model, how the duck nodes behave, interact with other nodes, and so on.

    And the world is already such a place, a sort of real-life model ― as young Wittgenstein noticed about propositions.

    And if that's the case, it provides a kind of justification for functionalist philosophy: we know this will work because we're just doing the same sort of thing the world is already doing. Sometimes there's a detour through neuroscience; we know our brains are already doing this sort of thing, and in philosophy we do more of that, for reasons that are a bit unclear.

    Nevertheless, it's not exactly the relation "A is a model of B" that I was interested in. It's that functionalist "metaphysics". Now maybe this is a species of

    process metaphysics — Count Timothy von Icarus

    but those aren't waters I've swum in.

    Either there is no being to speak of, or being is entirely unknowable. — Count Timothy von Icarus

    Yes, the deflationist view is that there's just nothing to say about the being of things, so don't bother. You can however talk a lot about their behavior, and in fact that's all there is to talk about.

    if we stretch the word "behavior" quite far — Leontiskos

    Oh yeah, really far. Most ordinary people aren't going to notice that the only consistent way to do this is, like @Isaac, to treat the universe as behavior all the way down, never bottoming out at some thing it's the behavior of. Which is why you might be right, @Count Timothy von Icarus, that this falls into the tradition of process philosophy.


    It makes it hard, if not impossible, to find a counterexample in the functionalist approach's own terms. Which means the only way around that is a table flip - reframe the discussion. — fdrake

    Exactly. Functionalism, the universal solvent. You and @Isaac and I had exactly this discussion I think ― in a thread about gender, was it?

    So, yes, to understand this thread, the first thing is to understand that there will never be anything anyone can come up with that will force the functionalist to say "I can't model that." Never anything that has to be acknowledged as substance rather than behavior.

    But precisely because there can, in some very real sense, be no counterargument to functionalism, no counterexample, there ought to be a niggling doubt, such as I have nursed for a long time. Ralph and Sam, striding through philosophy with their functionalist hammers for years, and one day Ralph says, "Hey Sam. You ever notice that the world is full of nails? That there's nothing but nails? That's funny, isn't it?"

    That's the sentiment behind this thread.
  • Mathematical platonism
    all other numbers — frank

    Hmmm.

    All other natural numbers? Integers? Rationals? Reals? Complex numbers?
  • Is the distinction between metaphysical realism & anti realism useless and/or wrong
    Sellars. He has a unique combination of nominalism and naturalism, which I really like. — fdrake

    Which I think he also considered as falling somewhere within the pragmatist tradition, much as Quine thought of himself. And he was deeply engaged, as they say, with Kant. So everything @Leontiskos finds suspicious in one package.

    "Counts as" is a pragmatist move. I think he revived James's talk of the "cash value" of an idea, for similar reasons. Though I might have the history wrong there.

    But there is a little problem. Remember that Sellars argued in EPM that you can't reduce all talk of phenomena to talk of "looks" because it makes no sense to say that something looks green unless you know what it means for something to be green. That's his Kantian move. It's about conceptual priority.

    Maybe this is different, but you have to wonder: does it make sense to talk about something counting as a duck, if you don't know what it means for something to be a duck?

    It's conceptual priority again. It's not obvious that our concepts can be "counts as" all the way down. As a general matter, taking x as y requires that you know what y is, else the gesture is empty.

    Unless of course all this talk of what "counts as" what is a suggestive way of talking about what is what.

    One of my first lessons in philosophy to my children was the old joke: how many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg? And the answer is: four, because calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.

    The thing about "counts as" is that we always have to clarify whether we are distinguishing it from "is". When we pretend, assume, suppose, hypothesize, and so on, we agree to treat something as something knowing that it isn't. But sometimes we do it differently: a win by forfeit counts as a win; we all know it's not the same as winning by the usual process of defeating your opponent, but for the sake of competitive standings it's the same as winning.

    So to make our understanding "counts as" all the way down, we first smuggle in our pre-theoretical understanding of "is", and then to recover the usefulness of things "counting as" something, we'll have to tack on some distinction in types of counting as anyway.

    Yuck.
  • Is the distinction between metaphysical realism & anti realism useless and/or wrong
    @fdrake

    Here's one more note ― not a direct commentary on this exchange, but another spanner I can't resist throwing in the works.

    There's an interview where Orson Welles says this: "You have to distinguish between realism and truth. Look at Cagney: no one actually behaves like that, but every moment he's on screen is TRUE!"
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