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So asserting the Kuhnian proposition that empirical knowledge has a paradigmatic structure which makes Popperian progress incoherent is just a kind of temper tantrum designed to lay waste to every position? — Joshs

I don't see temper tantrums as particularly relevant. However, I do see what I infer to be your interpretation of Kuhn's and Popper's thinking to be a bit simplistic. Popper recognized the importance of falsification to recognizing faults in one's naive hypotheses/intuitions. Kuhn recognized the importance of new paradigms arising in the aftermath of naive hypotheses/intuitions being falsified.

I gather Stephen Law is more sympathetic to Popperian realism than to Kuhnian relativism, but perhaps one can counter his ‘Going Nuclear’ model with one that posits someone named Stephen who, in getting over their head in a philosophical discussion, decides to impugn the motives of their interlocutor rather than attempt to revise their own construction — Joshs

I don't know enough about Law's thinking to speculate on his interpretations of Popper and Kuhn, and I don't think it is particularly relevant. I do think there is value in recognizing the use of rhetorical tactics pointed out by Law, regardless of speculation as to what is motivating the use of such rhetorical tactics.

Given that the link I provided was an excerpted chapter from Law's book Believing Bullshit, I think Stephen's concern might have more to do with people believing and defending bullshit, than with analyzing people's motivations for believing and defending bullshit in any sort of comprehensive way. It can be way too easy to jump to wrong conclusions about people's motivations.

This is more mythic than scientific lol. But what about this scene with Luke and Obi-Wan?
Luck? Chance? Unconscious? Animal instinct? Intuition? Or… ? :sparkle: — 0 thru 9

It. conveys a difference between having well trained intuitions and not having well trained intuitions although it frames it in magical terms of using the force.

That said, I've learned some Jedi mind tricks over the years. :wink:

I suspect we are thinking of intuition differently. — Tom Storm

Interesting. I see you and as both talking about intuition as it has developed for each of you. Could you elaborate on what key differences might be?

There's no way to improve your intuitions apart from learning about something, and even then it's not a guarantee. — Darkneos

Right, learning is required and the consequences of that learning are not fully predictable. However, I'm not talking in black and white terms, of intuitions either being perfectly accurate or totally unreliable. I'm just suggesting that intuitions can be improved to a significant degree.

And which culture did you inherit your scientific realism from? — Joshs

That's a long twisty story that might be said to have begun with my being born a few months after JFK's moon speech. I'm not sure what you are looking for in an answer, or whether you really are looking for an answer.

So while I'm waiting for an explanation as to what you might consider a reasonable answer, I have another question for you. Are you familiar with Stephen Law's notion of Going Nuclear?

Suppose Mike is involved in a debate about the truth of his own particular New Age belief system. Things are not going well for him. Mike’s arguments are being picked apart, and, worse still, his opponents have come up with several devastating objections that he can’t deal with. How might Mike get himself out of this bind?

One possibility is to adopt the strategy I call Going Nuclear. Going Nuclear is an attempt to unleash an argument that lays waste to every position, bringing them all down to the same level of “reasonableness”. Mike might try to force a draw by detonating a philosophical argument that achieves what during the Cold War was called “mutually assured destruction”, in which both sides in the conflict are annihilated.

IOW, doubting and logically evaluating intuitions can lead to having very reliable intuitions in the future. There is a synergy that can arise from the interaction of slow thinking and fast thinking.
— wonderer1

Not exactly no, intuition is more just playing off what you already know hence why it’s reliable with an expert. Logically evaluating them won’t take you anywhere. — Darkneos

Do you speak from experience? Have you tried improving your intuitions, and always failed?

I've said often enough that I can drive in busy traffic without taking in the world as anything more than a vague unremembered flow. Society would be aghast to hear that admitted. — apokrisis

You think highway hypnosis is something unique about you?

Have you arrived home after a drive and not remembered the details of the drive? Almost everyone who drives has had this common experience, a phenomenon that has come to be called highway hypnosis...

However research finds that if someone is an experience in a field then their intuition about something regarding that field is reliable. — Darkneos

This gets at something I found highly questionable about the way you originally described the research results. Intuitions within certain domains can have very good reliability, when the neural nets underlying those intuitions have had a high degree of training on the way things in those domains work in reality.

Someone who understands the way development of reliable intuitions works, can then make relatively accurate judgements about the reliability of his own intuitions in relation to whatever the present situation happens to be. Furthermore, the reliability of one's intuitions can sometimes be tested to increase or decrease the confidence one has in the reliability of one's intuitions before deciding whether to commit to going with intuitions. Over time one can develop good intuitions about the reliability of one's intuitions.

IOW, doubting and logically evaluating intuitions can lead to having very reliable intuitions in the future. There is a synergy that can arise from the interaction of slow thinking and fast thinking.

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As for its accuracy, tests show intuition seems to right about 50% of the time, so you’d have better odds through guessing — Darkneos

Can you provide a link to the testing you are referring to?

...aren’t biologistic and physicalist terms like blood sugar, calories and oxygen contestable concepts that shift their sense along with revolutionary changes in the scientific and cultural epistemes that make them intelligible — Joshs

Not really. That is just unrealistic thinking about science that you seem to have inherited from your culture.

Your simultaneous red and green scenario demonstrates how easily intuitons can be misleading.

Suppose you have a white piece of paper in a totally dark room. You have the ability to shine a monochromatic red light on the paper, or a monochromatic green light on the paper, or both lights on the paper simultaneously. What do you see in these three different cases of illuminating the paper?

You can play around with a fairly analogous situation at https://www.rapidtables.com/web/color/RGB_Color.html, where you can choose a color to be displayed in terms of levels of red, green, and blue by selecting integers between 0 and 255 specifying the intensity of your display's emissions of each RGB element. For example, when I put in 255 for red and green and 0 for blue I see a bright yellow. Assuming your color vision is normal I expect you will see bright yellow as well.

The situation is a bit different when we are talking about the color of an object when illuminated by white light. In the situations discussed above we are talking about emission spectrums. When we talk of the color of an object we are talking about absorption spectrums. The absorption spectrum of an object is an indication of what wavelengths of light are absorbed by the object and what wavelengths are reflected by the object. However, the principles involved are related. We might have a chemist design a pigment or combination of pigments such that when white light shines on the pigmented object only a narrow band of red wavelengths and a narrow band of green wavelengths is reflected into our eyes, and no yellow wavelength light is reflected into our eyes. I expect we would see the object as yellow, even though it is reflecting red and green at the same time.

Now about intuition... I've been talking a lot about it recently. I think intuitions are a matter of deep learning in the neural networks constituting our brains, and the reliability of our intuitions is situational and a function of what the training inputs to those neural nets has been in the past.

However, I don't know if you are really interested in a naturalistic understanding of intuition, so I'll leave it there for now.

Edit: IIRC the pigment example may yield the experience of seeing brown. (which in a sense is a 'dim yellow')

Edit 2: If you use the website I linked and enter R=120, G=120, and B=0 I predict you will see a brown square.

Yes, this is another good point. Since we all have somewhat different subjective experiences of "the present", this is a very good reason why there cannot be an objective, and to use Luke's word, "distinct", separation between present, past, and future. There are no objective points of distinction within time, those distinctions are subjective and somewhat arbitrary — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm curious about your theory, as to how it is we are communicating with each other. However, I can tell you, that you can't understand much about the answer without a more accurate theory of time than you currently have. I suspect you haven't subjected your theory of time to the many falsifying tests which could be done. Thus you haven't seen the need for a more accurate paradigm.

Think about what you said earlier:

But if the present consists of a duration of time, then some of that duration must be before, the other part which is after. So if the present separates future from past, and it consists of a duration of time, then part of the present must be in the future, and part of it in the past. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are correct that we can't think thoughts without a period of time elapsing but look at the inability to clearly distinguish between past and future that comes with your perspective. Do you think it is your thought processes which determine what is past and what is future?

But I can pick out lions, and other things. How do I do this? — NotAristotle

Because you have trained neural networks. (Although it seems likely that we have some innate programming to recognize animals as being animals in general.)

See this video to get a sense of how it works.

Is it not possible to perceive, except in an object-oriented way? — NotAristotle

I would say it is not possible for humans to perceive visually, except in an object-oriented way. A couple of points.

1. Our visual perception is neural network based, and our brain does what amounts to fast data compression so that what reaches consciousness is a gestalt of an object, with knowledge of fine details requiring conscious attention.

2. Our ancestors needed very fast recognition of lions as being lions, without spending excessive time consciously assessing what it is they were looking at.

I don't see any alternative for science than the Galilean approach. Bracketing out the conscious observer is analogous to, and the reverse of, the Epoché in phenomenology. It is a methodological necessity. — Janus

When considering much of what is scientifically investigated, I don't think there is any need to actively bracket out the observer. One is just considering relatively simple systems where observers aren't playing any significant causal role.

Things get messier at the quantum level, and at the classical level when what is being studied (say an animal) might well have its behavior influenced as a result of sensing the observer.

Different areas of scientific investigation do have to be handled differently depending on what is being investigated, but I think this has been well understood for quite awhile now, and I doubt Galileo did much to impede scientists' understanding of this. However, I'm not a science historian, so maybe Galileo did retard humanity's development of science in some regard despite the intuitive implausibility of that to me.

In any case, I still think attributing such a large causal role (in the development of neuroscience) to Galileo, sounds kind of ridiculous in light of the other factors i brought up, having to do with the difficulty of neuroscience.

It is hard to see how a seamless causal model from something third person observable (neural activity) to something that is not (conscious experience) could be achieved. — Janus

I agree, but mostly for technical feasibility reasons. Even now, with consciousness itself not being an issue, knowing what is going on in a trained neural network is highly problematic. See The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI.

Frankly, it’s all a little weird for me to suspect that following one’s own conscience has the effect of encouraging and discouraging others, as if we’re training animals. It sounds to me more of an admission of guilt than a statement of fact. — NOS4A2

We are training animals. Evolution resulted in us having instinctive reactions to things, which result in us training each other.

Do you think it would make sense to distinguish between the nature of our subjective experiences of 'the present' and the nature of time in the larger reality we are a part of?
— wonderer1

I don't think that this would be possible at this point. The only thing we have to go on is our subjective experiences. So I think it's necessary to get a good understanding of our subjective experiences of time before we can proceed toward speculating about the nature of time in a larger reality. This is because our subjective experiences of time have a very significant impact on our speculations concerning any larger reality... — Metaphysician Undercover

Well, we have different subjective experiences, and based on my subjective experiences it is not only possible, but extremely valuable to recognize difference in our subjective experiences of a present, and happenings in time in the world.

One of my subjective experiences involves watching basketball games and recognizing that I'm not processing visual data at the rate that neurotypical people do, and therefore miss details of the action that other people catch. But even neurotypical people don't have visual processing speeds all that much faster than mine, and that is why slow motion replay is common with televised sporting events, to allow people to catch details of action which they would otherwise miss.

Along similar lines, scientists, studying how baby birds learn to sing an attractive song, realized that because birds have higher flicker-fusion (visual processing) rate than humans, the scientists might need slow motion video of birds to find out what is going on. I posted a link in the shoutbox recently, but if you are interested I can look it up again.

Another factor in my subjective experience is looking at signals captured by oscilloscopes that represent things at time resolutions down to around a nanosecond. I have very good reasons for thinking events really are happening on extremely small time scales regardless of the fact that my unaided perceptions don't reveal things on such small time scales.

Might it be the case that there is a relevant lack of diversity to the sort of subjective experiences you have had?

Ahem. Sign on the door says “philosophy forum’. — Wayfarer

Does it need to be changed to say "philosophy silo"?

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It sounds like you subscribe to a traditional ( and outdated) notion of emotion as a physiological mechanism peripheral to cognition. — Joshs

Not at all. Of course our cognition can be affected by emotions in a great many ways. The brain has a quite interconnected structure. Certainly my desire to understand the weirdness of my brain played a huge role in me studying relevant science, resulting in me being quite confident that I have a more up to date perspective on the subject than you do.

Do you think there is any significance to whether a person has looked into the relevant science or not?

This is typically because subtle changes in sense and relevance are considered as peripheral to the meaning of the objects being compared. They are dismissed as just subjective colorations which can be ignored when doing logic and ascertaining empirical truth. — Joshs

Do you think your emotions determine what is true?

The most common explanations make reference to "what Turing Machines do," because that's the easiest way to describe computation, but then Turing Machines are themselves an attempt to define what human beings do when carrying out instructions to compute things. But then human consciousness is also explained in terms of computation, making the whole explanation somewhat circular. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Do you have a citation supporting "Turing Machines are themselves an attempt to define what human beings do"?

I've been under the impression that Turing conceived of the TM as a sort of minimalist CPU, and I wonder whether Turing himself would have thought of TMs as more than a conceptual tool for use in thinking about what human beings do, rather than an attempt at defining what human being's do.

Anyway, I think computationalism has a large element of looking for the keys under the street lamp because that's where the light is. Computation is a human invention that is as it is, because it is relatively easy for us to think in such terms.

Connectionism is much closer to where it's at when considering the way human thought really works. Perhaps it is harder for most people to think in connectionist terms though.

Points in time are not consistent with our conscious experience of duration. As I said, the duration of the present is indefinite. I said the present consist of "duration", not "a duration", and if I sometimes mentioned "a duration", I meant an indefinite duration. — Metaphysician Undercover

Do you think it would make sense to distinguish between the nature of our subjective experiences of 'the present' and the nature of time in the larger reality we are a part of?

It seems to me that you and Luke are both right in ways, but this discussion seems a muddled mess due to not making such a distinction.

I thought suggesting Galileo is to blame for the state of neuroscience was a bit bizarre.

“Those sensory qualities have come back to bite us,” Goff writes. “Galileo’s error was to commit us to a theory of nature which entailed that consciousness was essentially and inevitably mysterious.”

In other words, Galileo’s scientific method required walling off the study of consciousness itself, which is why it’s perhaps not surprising that even centuries later, his method’s inheritors still struggle to explain it.

Human brains are enormously complex, the technological challenges of gathering sufficient data to learn much are huge, and the ethical restrictions on how science can make progress in the field mean we should expect progress to be relatively slow. (Not saying I disapprove of the ethical restrictions.)

Galileo is hardly to blame for any of this.

The secrets of existence - the answer to “why anything?” - is to be found in the immanence of semiosis... — apokrisis

Don't you think that might be a tad bit grandiose?

It is denying that knowing is direct correspondence , representing or mirroring between knower and world. Scientific and other forms of knowing, far from being the epistemological representing of a reality independent of the knower, is the evolving construction of a niche. We are worldmakers rather than world-mirrorers, whose constructions are performances that pragmatically intervene in the world that we co-invent , changing it in ways that then talk back to us in a language responsive to how we have formulated our questions. — Joshs

One question I have is, how much nuance is allowed from this point of view? I mean sure, to believe in some sort of perfect correspondence between our perceptions and things as they are in reality would be quite naive. However, is there a good reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater? Does it make sense to you, that although we can't have perfect correspondence we can pick out salient aspects of the way things are in an external reality? If not, what is this "world" that you speak of?

I think people on that forum as a whole don’t know enough about science to really cite it. The amount of misuses of quantum physics is already too many. — Darkneos

Well, to be fair, there is an enormous amount of study involved in becoming conversant in sciences, and we are all born ignorant and are going to die only somewhat less ignorant. So it doesn't make sense to me to expect anyone to know everything. Why does it matter so much to you, what the people on that forum think?

Though what did you mean by skin deep though? — Darkneos

Superficial.

It is far from unusual to encounter philosophy focused people with a superficial understanding of sciences. Many learn little about sciences beyond what they find useful for rhetoric in support of their philosophical views. Such superficial views are what I refer to as skin deep.

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We share about half our genes with those trees, and more than half with the squirrels and deer. Is that not extraordinary enough? — Srap Tasmaner

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wonderer1 is that what you think is going on in the links? — Darkneos

I hadn't looked at the link before I said that. That just struck me as possibly of relevance based on what you had said. I've read some of that thread now, and what I see is someone who knows enough science to probably keep some people off balance, but someone with a skin deep understanding of science that he uses to play the social status games that he likes to play on that forum.

That guy(?) is gaslighting, and gaslighting is pretty strongly associated with narcissism. (Consider Donald Trump.)

How about the idea that our individual hypotheses designed to anticipate events are validated or invalidated by the way those events transpire, with the catch being that the events we compare our hypotheses with are themselves derived from our constructions? — Joshs

That sounds like denying there is a territory being mapped by our minds/brains, and to me it would seem a little silly to believe there is no territory being mapped, and yet also believe that you are something other than a figment of my imagination.

Thanks.

I probably haven't quite answered your question, about the "light touch." Maybe I have. — Srap Tasmaner

I think you've conveyed a lot of what I was interested in. My question arose from wondering whether this game of human chess on an internet forum exemplifies a light touch. I'm not sure how to count the number of moves to mate, and I suspect you will agree it was a much longer game than it should have been, and I don't expect you to read any further than you find it interesting.

Why not then just say what you mean rather than ask dumb questions and expect me to take them seriously.

On your actual argument, the simple reply is think more carefully about what I said. Black and white are useful to the degree they bound all the possibilities that constitute grey.

As absolute values connected by a reciprocal relation, they would in fact make all shades of grey measurable as specified mixtures.

So science is founded on this analytical move. It is how the dynamics of nature can be measured in terms of precisely articulated theories.

This is how we “map language and reason onto the world”! — apokrisis

My question was about you and your beliefs. I haven't been participating on this forum long, so I'm not sure why you would expect me to know your perspective in detail.

I have, however, learned somewhat about your perspective in the time I've been reading the forum with regularity. What I have learned led me to the question about how black and white your thinking is.

And sonny, I don't think that you are in much of a position to try to teach me about "how the dynamics of nature can be measured". I've been heavily involved in the design of hardware, firmware, and software of a device that NIST and other national metrology institutes pass back and forth in order to compare the primary reference standards of different nations against each other. Just to give you a chance to avoid making yourself look silly. I'll bet you really really hate that.

I don't have a wonderful alternative, but I'm not comfortable with this sort of "reality is whatever we agree it is." I get the impulse, and I think there's a kernel of truth there, but I also think that kind of formulation is probably incoherent. — Srap Tasmaner

Seems like a rather fatalistic view to think we can't know anything about reality independent of agreement with other people. Not to mention a little silly in light of the history of humans learning things, that we can to some degree look back and see.

↪wonderer1 Why are you pretending not to understand? — apokrisis

Why are you asking a loaded question?

I'm not pretending I don't understand. I simply don't tend to see things in such black and white terms as it seems you advocate. In fact, if I recognised that I was thinking in such black and white terms I would hope that I would seriously consider the possibility that I was looking at things much too simplistically.

It may very well be that there are activities complex enough that no human is ever able to give an analytical account of their actions while so engaged -- just too many variables, too many feedback loops, and so on. — Srap Tasmaner

Indeed. I'm inclined to think it is necessarily the case, that human minds can't fully grasp the physical activity occuring in human brains. Yes we can understand aspects of what occurs, in metaphorical terms of the sort I used in thinking about and discussing aspects of my logic design process, and communicating about it to my boss.

But there's another category where people believe there is a kind of judgment that cannot be reduced to analysis even in principle. — Srap Tasmaner

Very interesting food for thought, and let me say now that I found the entirety of your post very interesting to think about, despite leaving much of it unresponded to.

Regarding criticism, it seems to me a similar sort of situation to that of knowing knowing the phenomenal experience of another person. Supposing we are talking about criticism of literature. There are bound to be many idiosyncrasies to how the literature interacted with the brain of the critic. Of course, if the critic is any good she will have a lot to say that people will find insightful as well, but a degree of idiosyncracy is to be expected as well, from my perspective.

Finally, a question I had, that came from looking into Capablanca a bit... Wikipedia says, '...Bobby Fischer described him as possessing a "real light touch".'

I'd like to hear your perspective, as speculative as it may be, on what Bobby Fischer might have meant by that.