Land isn't responding to only Deleuze, although it seems likely given some of his lines that he would say he is doing to Deleuze what Deleuze claims to do to other thinkers: "buggering" them to produce demon offspring. That the demon offspring is recognizably related to the author but a sort of heretical corruption is sort of the point. I don't know how someone who conceives of their philosophy in such a way can be "misread," as it would seem that "misreading," shows proper application of the method that is recommended.

Excellent point. Its worth questioning if the changes in the brain associated with perception could rightly be called "representations," as is often done. It seems like a "representation" is something an agent creates, and neurons would be part of an agent, not an agent. There isn't the sort of external telos that Aristotle identifies in artifacts (like drawings and representations).

Saint Bonneventure has a formulation to the effect of "all effects are signs of their causes," which seems to hold in a certain sense. But this wouldn't seem to make "all effects representations of their causes," unless we want to say that a dry river bed is a "representation of past water flowing," (certainly it is a sign of past water movement). It seems useful to distinguish between the basic correlative facet of physical information or semiotic sign, and representations, where the paradigmatic example is something like a painting or text description. The latter suggests something like a person experiencing by "viewing" mental images, the former is less loaded, just implying a causal chain between perceived and perceiver.

This argument is interminable because folk fail to think about how they are using direct and indirect.

Well that is certainly true. That and we often fail to consider how other people are using the terms "direct" and "indirect."

It has occured to me that neo-Aristotlean and neo-Thomistic theories could variously be described as being "direct" or "indirect." There is a lot of describing the same thing different ways. Do we perceive representations or do we use representations to perceive objects? This seems more like a question of paradigm and framing.

However, on Direct Realism, it is far more surprising that skepticism is a possibility. If what we directly know is the external world, then how could it be that it is possible that what we know and the external world do not correspond, if they are indeed identical?

Direct realism is formulated in many ways, but in general it takes account of the fact that we can be fooled by our senses. It would be odd if it didn't. I would caution against the tendency of authors who write on this topic to bolster your position by showing how "naive realism," the belief that we experience things "just as they are," is wrong. It's very easy to slip into using naive realism as a strawman in these discussions. Most forms of direct realism aren't going to say we experience the world "exactly like it is," that we experience "all" of the properties of objects, etc. The claim is rather that there is a direct relationship between what we experience and the world.

I would also anticipate the common critique of indirect realism, that it falls into the trap of positing a Cartesian theater or humonculus inside the mind, or falls into Ryle's Regress. The positing of "mental representations," as discrete ontological objects that are then "experienced by an internal experiencer," is generally what intentionalists target in indirect realism.

I just wrote a long post on this topic so I will paste it below. I will just note that I think indirect realism is going to have a particularly hard time in a process metaphysics framework. If we think of the world as a universal process, rather than as a collection of discreet objects in a space-time "container," it tends to dissolve a lot of boundary lines. Personally, I think there are quite good reasons for viewing the world this way. But under this view, the mind in the result of a process that is completely (causally) continuous with the surrounding environment. In such a framework, it seems to be harder to pin down where the mental should start, and to argue that parts of the process external to the body (the objects perceived) fail to have a "direct" relationship to the parts of the universal process inside the body that gives rise to subjective experience.

The first part of concepts might be less relevant to you argument BTW.

Concepts - The notion of a "concept" is notoriously muddy. It not obvious that my conceptual understanding of a concept like "Hegelian dialectical," or "Marxism," is the same sort of thing as the way in which my visual cortex organizes sensory input into the experience of "seeing a flower." The first exists (only?) in recursive self-awareness and can be articulated to other people via words. The second seems impossible to even get into recursive self-awareness, let alone communicate. Neuroscience cannot proceed by my describing how it is I use these unconscious processes to turn visual input into the image of a flower, nor can I communicate how I achieve it. I am unaware of these "concepts." Further, the second sort of concept seems "necessary," for the cognitive acts that give rise to the first. I cannot come up with an articulation of what flowers are if my sensory system cannot distinguish them. Lower animals certainly have the second type of concept, but it seems doubtful they have the first.

Indeed, I am only really aware that I am using the second type of concepts when I begin to suffer from agnosia or have a stroke, etc. And even then, the experiences that people who suffer from these ailments describe is one of absence, they are not able to diagnose themselves. Whereas if I forget what "Hegelian dialectical," is, I am aware of this inability to recall or the fuzzyness of the concept. Nor does it seem like I have a "concept" of every particular shade of green, yellow, and brown I see when I look at my lawn in the same way that I have a concept of "the United States." So, to the extent that some forms of indirect realism make their claims about anthropology and perception by conflating these two notions of the word "concept," they seem to be open to attack. And note that the brain areas that appear to be involved in both notions of the term "concept," appear to be quite different as well.

Phenomenological Inseparability - This leads into another problem, that of the defining feature of indirect realism, the claim that "we experience mental representations." The problem here is well summarized in the Routledge Contemporary Introduction to Phenomenology, which comes up with a comical list of excerpts of philosophers and scientists trying to describe phenomenal awareness without reference to the things being experienced. These invariably degenerate into just describing the things being experienced, "the taste of coffee," or "the red of a balloon floating in my room," or else become unintelligible nonsense like "I am perceiving hotly," and "I am smelling bitterly."

The point intentionalists (and some direct realists) make here is that there seems to be absolutely no daylight between the perception and the objects perceived. We seem perfectly able to communicate our experiences to one another in some ways, but it becomes impossible to do so if we focus on the perception side of "perceiving representations," by themselves. It leads to incoherence. And, so they argue, this shows that there is no distinct ontological entity that might be called a "mental representation," that is experienced by a "perceiver who perceives them." Nor is there really good empirical reasons to divorce the two. Where does neuroscience say representation occurs versus the perception of representation? It doesn't say anything about this. It has yet to articulate how this works, but tends to conclude there is no Cartesian theater and that perception and representation are at least not distinct at the level of neuroanatomy (fine grained analysis is indeterminate on this issue).

(This seems like a good argument in favor of intentionalists)

Superveniance Relations - Finally, we can consider direct realists' objection, which I think might be the best one. This relies on notions in superveniance. Superveniance cannot just be defined as "no difference in A (mental phenomena) without a difference in B (physical phenomena)." This turns out to be a wholly inadequate way to frame superveniance.

Such a definition allows, in global superveniance, that a world where Mars has one more molecule of dust can have completely different mental properties from the world without the extra molecule of dust. There is a physical difference between the worlds, so there can be as much mental difference as we like. The same is true for local superveniance. If Sally 2 has one more magnesium atom in her body than Sally 1, she can now have totally different mental properties (we can place the atom in the brain and the same problem remains)

People have tried to fix this with the idea of P-regions and B-minimal properties. P-regions are just those regions of space time that are absolutely essential to the mental phenomena being considered. B-minimal properties are just those physical properties needed to ensure the mental phenomena in question.


If might be thought that these concepts wouldn't cause problems for indirect realism. After all, for any freeze frame microsecond of perception, we can assume that the relevant P Region is entirely in the brain. Does this not support the assertion that perception must just be "of" things in the brain, representations?

The problem comes when you want to analyze any perception that actually takes a meaningful amount of time. All of the sudden, things outside the body become part of the P Region. If we would not have seen the apple but for the apple being on the table, then the apple, or at least part of it or something with similar B-minimal properties, is required to explain the mental state.

So now the direct realist (along with all the externalists) will say: "hey, the superveniance relationship for perception has to involve the object, it is a necessary physical constituent of perception." Which, while not proving their point, still seems to make it more plausible. If the B-minimal properties of the object perceived cannot be changed one iota without changing the mental experience, then it seems like there is a very "direct" connection between the object and the perception. There is, in this case, no change in the mental representation without a change in the B-minimal properties of the object, and it seems that the "directness" of this relationship is exactly the sort of thing the direct realist is talking about.

Recall, Aristotle (and Aquinas) don't have us perceiving the entire form of an object. Nor do they have us perceiving the form "as it is in itself." This would require our heads turning into apples or something when we see an apple. Rather, a part of the substantial form is directly communicated to sensation. And here, the B-minimal properties of the object that precisely specify the part of subjective experience corresponding to that object, seems like a very good candidate for the parts of the object's "form/intelligibility" that are directly communicated. This relation is direct in that there can be no change in A without a change in B, and because B is B-minimal, no change in B without a change in A. This is a one to one relationship between part of sensation and an external object — what Aristotle wants to communicate even though he is certainly no naive realist.

An indirect realist would have to explain how this 1:1 correspondence between external objects and experience fails to be "direct."

I am also a techno-animist, so to me the technology goes beyond being only a tool. More like a gateway.

A gateway to what? And is it always necessarily a gateway to something good? Doors are useful, but so are walls. Sometimes we'd prefer our gates stay closed, it depends on what is outside.

Another way of saying what this thread is all about, is to state that (in my opinion, experience and observation) atheist animism is the default worldview of humanity.

I'm not really sure what that's supposed to mean. Both animism and religion are ubiquitous in early human cultures.

What is a techno-animist? You think technology develops because the technology wants this to happen? An axe chops because it wants to chop? A car drives because it wants to drive in the same way an animist will say a cloud is dark because 'the sky is sad?'"

I could certainly see the merits of an information theory/Hegelian informed approach where the development of technology is part of larger historical processes that guide human civilization, but not one where individual instances of technology are in any way animate, or even possessing internal purposes. I think Aristotle is right to identify artifacts as unique in that their telos/purpose lies external to them. It is the man who makes the axe who decides that "an axe is for chopping."

If Land subverts the establishment’s norms because he truly believes in rigid boundaries of gender, racial, class or whatever, and their strict hierarchization , then this places him by my reckoning on the philosophical right. If , on the other hand, his aim is to anarchically tear down all extant hierarchies and stratifications , with no desire to replace them with new ones,( I’m reminded of Zizek endorsing Trump in order to blow up the whole political order in preparation for his Marxist utopia), then I’d place him on the philosophical left regardless of how violent and disruptive the results.

He's a radical libertarian in key respects, so it's much more the latter. However, I would still place him squarely on the far, reactionary right.

Land is concerned with freedom and sees democracy and liberalism as incompatible with it. We can consider the Alt-Right racist who asks: "how can the leftist claim to be concerned with freedom? Why can't like minded individuals like me live in our own 'whites-only' communities? Why are we not 'free' to do this? They say they are for freedom, but then they want to enforce a hegemonic value system on us. Sure, they might allow the Amish their own small communities (although even there they interfer with gender politics), but they won't let us do as we please."

Perhaps a bit more sympathetically, the Silicon Valley start up captain asks: "why am I not free to hire and promote people based solely on my own judgement? Why must my actions be forced or prodded into conforming to the goals of the leftists re "diversity?" Why must diversity be defined how they define it and why must I be coerced into acting according to their standards?"

For Land, the ideal is something of a cross between the ancient city-state polis and the Silicon Valley start up. The CEO is the philosopher king and no outside moralizing agent has the right to tell him or her what the good is. If people don't like living in an Alt-Right City State they can flee. But the merit and the greatness of the CEO philosopher king will make some city states better than others, and so people will be free to also subject themselves to the "great men" (or women) who produce the most vibrant polis.

Is this not more free than the leftist vision where an overarching moralizing set of norms is applied universally, using state coercion whenever it is necessary? And isn't saying "thou shalt not have hierarchies," itself an absolutist decree being made from on high? Why aren't we free to generate the neo-facist, neo-feudal aesthetic we find interesting? Isn't this more true to the goal of exploring "the infinite plurality of creative spaces?" How committed to this infinite creativity are you really if your response to some forms of it are "no, you cannot be creative like that!"

"But you have to be creative while allowing creativity for all, without dominating them," can be met with, "why? Why must I subscribe to your dogmatic declaration of the appropriate scale for considering the actualization of freedom? Why must it be for the individual and not the fascist collective?"

IDK, reading Land, it's hard to deny that his style, verbage, analysis, and influences are deeply rooted in Continental Philosophy (the overlap with POMO is of course strong, but hardly absolute). His right wing turn certainly seems more like an internal type of critique rather than a rejection of the system he started in.

And I think Land's critique is particularly difficult for his former school to deal with (which might explain why the rebuttal attempts tend to involve a lot of moralizing and ad hominems). The Thomist or Platonist has no problem dismissing Land as a man child with a defective sense of freedom as largely limited to negative freedom from restraint, and a deficient understanding of the virtues. Rule in accordance with the Logos is not equivalent with rule in accordance with desire. When a parent sends their child down for a nap despite their tears they are not engaged in the arbitrary elevation of their will over their child's or acting "dogmatically," but in an way informed by what is truly good for the other.

I am not sure what a good POMO rebuttal to Land would be. I've certainly yet to see one.

My essential point is that advances in technology are inherently good.

That's what I thought. But what makes this good? Is something or someone's "being good" identical with "advances technology?" If so, then can we say that a human life is worthwhile and that a person is a "good person" to the extent that they contribute towards advancing technology?

Or would it be more appropriate to say that advancing technology is good in virtue of something else? It's obviously much more common to argue the latter here, and the most common argument is that "technological progress is good because it allows for greater productivity and higher levels of consumption."

Yet this just leads to a regress. Are productivity and consumption equivalent with the good? Is a person a good person living a worthwhile and meaningful life to the extent they are productive and consume much? This does not seem to be the case. We look to productivity and consumption largely because these are easy to quantity and welfare economics argues that these are good proxies for "utility," i.e. subjective well-being.

This brings out another question. First, are productivity and consumption perfect proxies for utility or do they only tend to go with it? It seems it could be the latter as self-reported happiness and well being is tanking in the US even as that nation crushes all other developed countries in consumption growth and productivity gains. It is not clear that technology always increases utility.

The assumption that it does has led to absolutely massive inequality between generations in the West generally, and the US in particular, such that Baby Boomers and those older hold a phenomenal amount of total wealth and political offices while also passing on a $33 trillion debt to their children and representing another $80+ trillion in entitlement liabilities that were not funded during their working years. We tend to discount investment in children and young adults because we are techno optimists. We assume that because the life of the average American in 1950 was much better than that of one in 1850, that the lives of Americans in 2050 must be vastly more comfortable than one living in 1950. This seems like an increasingly hard assumption to defend. Life expectancy and subjective well-being are declining year over year, and have been for a while. It has been over half a century since median real wages stagnated and productivity growth became totally divorced from median income growth (something true across the West, productivity gains only track with real wage growth for the bottom 90% in developing nations; this trend is almost 60 years old now).

Second, it begs the question, "is utility good in itself?" Is being a good person and living a worthwhile life equivalent with levels of subjective well being? This is not automatically clear. It would seem to imply that wealthy hedonists live far more worthwhile lives than martyrs and saints. I would tend to agree with MacIntyre's assessment that moderns have a hard time even deciding what makes a life good because the concepts of practices and the virtues have been eroded.


My point is that all these questions should call into question why exactly we think it is that technological progress is good and if it is always good. If it isn't always good, how do we engage in the sort of progress that is good?

We can, in seconds, accomplish what would have otherwise taken countless hours. Such as analyzing 86,000+ lines of text about Norse Paganism. Which a simple Python script that I wrote can do.

Sure. I used to focus on technical skills for my staff because one analyst who knew SQL, M, and DAX could do the work on 10 analysts with only basic Excel knowledge. But in virtue of what is making a word map about Norse Paganism good? It doesn't seem to be the case that doing all things more efficiently is good. We can produce car batteries with far fewer man hours today, but it hardly seems like it would be a good thing to produce 10 times as many batteries if we don't need 10 times as many cars, or if we're going to hurl those batteries into our rivers and poison our water table. The goodness stands outside the production function.

I think it's interesting that you've decided to frame this in terms of productivity. What exactly are we producing and why is it worthwhile to produce?

I generally agree that advances in technology are important for human flourishing. In an important way, technology enhances our causal powers, makes us "free to do," things we could not before. So to, the attainment of knowledge presupposes a sort of transcendence, a move to go beyond current beliefs and desires into that which lies beyond us.

In The Republic, Plato leaves most of society in the cave precisely because ancient society required that most people spend most of their time laboring to produce the prerequisites for life. Technology at least opens up the possibility of more people being free to ascend out of the cave.

However, we can consider if the futurist vision of A Brave New World is a utopia or a dystopia. It seems that by technocratic standards that focus solely on consumption, production, and the ability of the individual to "do what they desire," it must be the former.

Most people in that world are happy. They are free to fulfill their desires. They are bred for their roles, their cognitive abilities intentionally impaired if they are to be menial laborers. There is ubiquitous soma, a drug producing pleasure, mass media entertainment, always enough to eat and drink, and organized sexual release. When there are those who don't fit into this scheme, those with the souls of scientists and artists, they get secreted off to their own version of Gault's Gulch where all the creative and intellectual people can pursue their own ends, consuming as much as they want.

What exactly is lost here? The world of A Brave New World seems like a technocratic paradise. Here is the vision of unity found in Plato's Republic and Hegel's Philosophy of Right, but it ends up coming out looking all wrong, malignant.

What seems wrong to me is the total tyranny of the universal over the particular. People are made content, but not free; they consume, but don't flourish. There is an important distinction to be made between freedom to fulfill desire and freedom over desire. Self-determination requires knowing why one acts, what moves one. It is a relative mastery over desire, instinct, and circumstance, not merely the ability to sate desire.

We never get a good view of the leaders of A Brave New World. We must assume they are ascended philosopher kings since they don't seem to abuse their power, and work unerringly towards the unity of the system. But their relationship to the rest of humanity seems like that between a dog trainer and the dogs. They might make the dogs happy and teach them how to get on in role they have dictated for them, but that's it.

And this is why I find no reason to be optimistic about the advances of technology in and of themselves. If all sense of virtue is hollowed out, if freedom is cheapened into a concept of mere "freedom from external constraint," and productivity and wealth becomes the metric by which the good is judged, it's unclear how much technology does for us. It seems capable of merely fostering a high level equilibrium trap of high consumption and low development.

If someone produces a set of ideas and they are grotesquely misread, should we blame them for that, or should we blame the one who completely misses their point?

I don't see where "blaming" comes into it, just the sense in which one is influenced by/comes out of the other. I do also find it worthwhile to distinguish between "misreadings," i.e., "this is obviously not what x passage says," and "readings the author would disagree with." Sometimes, author's premises and reasoning seem to lead directly to conclusions they would like to avoid. For example, it seems like there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Kant was aware that his work could be taken as promoting a sort of subjective idealism, and that he sought to rectify this. But I don't think people who read Kant as a subjective idealist are necessarily "misreading" him so much as pointing out ways in which is work supports conclusions he may have disliked.

Reading Kant as saying something like "ethics should be determined on a case by case basis, based on pragmatic concerns and utilitarian calculus," would be an obvious misreading. Differences between these two are not always very clear cut.

Then we also have "selective readings." I would place "deflationary" versions of Hegel, Marxist readings, etc. in here. They don't misread so much as pick and choose, but they do sometimes misrepresent to the extent that they claim that the original author's reading is their own (e.g., Marxists turning Hegel into a boring libertarian Marxist.)

Where does Land fit in here? IDK, it seems pretty hard to argue he wasn't rooted in to core of continental and post-modern philosophy early in his career. He got his PhD and then taught at an English-language hub of the general movement and published extensively drawing on Deleuze, Guattari, Bataille, Lyotard, and Lacan, was a PhD advisor in this setting, and led a cybernetic/cyberfeminist collective. The younger Land who gets described "Deleuzo-Marxist," and was able to have a successful career in this setting at a prestigious university totally misreading his peers seems like a hard claim to make. He was certainly able to keep up with the discourse, and had he never made his swing over to the right, I don't think anyone would question his falling in squarely into the POMO label.

Which is funny since it's hard to see what could be more "challenging the foundations of power and dogma," in these settings than being right wing. I recall reading an article recently that back in the 80s academics skewed 2:1 in favor of the left. Now it's closer to 10:1, and in the Harvard Crimson's review of that university's faculty it was 26:1. In Land's setting, it would probably be closer to 100%. He's living into transvaluation and norm challenging — birthing the "demon child" if you will — of course that means overthrowing core assumptions in your culture!

Costin Alamariu, or Bronze Age Pervert, is a more obvious example since he is largely drawing on a single source, Nietzsche. Certainly, his work is abhorrent, and I think it gets framed as a "misreading," because of this. There is a definite tendencies towards "No True Nietzschean," arguments when someone transvalues values the wrong way, towards the wrong politics. I couldn't make my way through more than a small amount of his stupid book, but nothing I saw screamed "misreading," to me, and apparently his advisors at Yale agreed.

I am not super familiar with Land, but what I've seen from him wouldn't place him outside the scope of post-modernism, but for the political slant.

Funny enough, the Anti-Defamation League has a whole article on "accelerationism," and claims the term, largely through Land, has lost all connection with its original use in leftist circles. This just seems like a hollow claim. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s pitch about "accelerating the process," by which capitalism undermines itself is still the core concept when the term is employed by neo-fascists, they just see a different sort of future as resulting from this.

It doesn't help that it happened again in 2018 with significantly more ridiculous articles:

Included among the articles that were published were arguments that dogs engage in rape culture and that men could reduce their transphobia by anally penetrating themselves with sex toys, as well as a part of a chapter of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf rewritten in feminist language.[3][5] The first of these had won special recognition from the journal that published it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair

Anyhow, it occured to me that the demonstrative nature of mathematics might make it harder for POMO to take root.

Core ideas in POMO show up in the pre-Socratics but never really take hold as a significant factor in philosophy. Why is this?

One big reason might be ancient philosophy's focus on techne over gnosis as a paradigmatic form of knowledge, e.g. "knowing how to repair a boat," versus "knowing why boats float." Techne is demonstrative in a very apparent way. If you claim you know how to fix a car and then can't get it to start, it is clear that you don't know how to fix that particular car. Success is definable in a prephilosophical way.

Modern philosophy is much more concerned with how we know the truth values of propositions. However, it seems like Plato or Aristotle fairly often consider "knowing," in terms of "knowing how to do something."

I would not say that math is demonstrative in the way that patching a flat tire is, but it certainly has many demonstrative elements. We generally talk about "learning biology," but it would be a bit uncommon to say "I know how to do biology," or "I am doing political science." We'd be much more likely to say "I am learning about political science," than "I am learning to do political science." But with mathematics, "doing" seems to have a much more central role. "I know how to do mathematics," rolls out a lot more often than "I know how to do linguistics." We "calculate" and "compute" as verbs distinct from "knowing about."

There is, of course, still "knowing about mathematics" as well. But part of mathematics seems very much to be performative. "I know how to do long division," isn't as much a claim about knowledge of the properties of division with larger numbers as it is a claim to be able to carry out a certain sort of activity.

Someone can be said to be "good at math," in the way we say someone is "good at gymnastics," or "good at painting." That is, in general, to be "good at biology," means to be highly knowledgeable about it, but being "good at math," is often a statement about performance of tasks as much as, or even more than, being knowledgeable about mathematics.

And maybe this is why so many people who stop at high school level math tend to think of it in such objective terms. It seems like higher level mathematics moves more into "knowing about," while introductory math focuses heavily on "knowing how to."

That certainly describes part of the "far-right". And it would be fair to say that POMO is often used selectively. Arguments against the institutions of science can be pulled out of their original context and still employed effectively.

However, I wouldn't characterize the entire Far-Right as hewing to realism or an "objective" view of truth or morality. The intellectual base of the "Alt-Right," is almost the opposite. You could consider Nick Land, Gavin Yarvin, the whole "Dark Enlightenment Movement," the Hestia Society, etc. These figures are often anti-realist re history, and quite relativist vis-á-vis morality. For BAP's brand of Nietzscheanism, it seems morality is quite relative, defined by the heroic individual.

History doesn't exist as a truth to be discovered but is all narrative, a battlefield. Aesthetics (for them, those of the Dark Age or Middle Ages) not truth should ground political judgements. Virtually everything is a "psyop" because what is important about events is the way people use them to shape the "perceived truth" of the world and the Zeitgeist, not the "objective truth" of events.

Consider Nick Lands "core" influences: Gilles Deleuze, Curtis Yarvin, Georges Bataille, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant, etc. or his focus on cybernetics, hyper-reality (and his hyper-racism), nihilism. His biggest impact can be seen in the widespread cries for "accelerationism" (originally Lenin's idea) you see in Right Wing spaces online, and which now even seem to be bleeding into Republican policy in the House ("make it worse, fix nothing, so as to accelerate the collapse.")These people are on the Right because they are anti-egalitatian, reactionary, often pro-eugenics, etc., but they also seem born of POMO in many key respects. They grew up reading and in some cases teaching Deleuze and Derrida, but then remained/became reactionary neo-fascists.

This sort of seems inevitable to me. What kept POMO on the left in the first place? The relativism it allows for allows it to be reformulated in right wing terms quite easily.

Consider a painting of a :flower:. It shouldn't be controversial that the :flower: is supervienant on the brush strokes that compose it. You cannot change the :flower: without changing the brush strokes. But, you can change the brush strokes without changing the :flower: .

If you are defining superveniance with B-minimal properties or P Regions this is not the case. Any change in P, the (relevant) brush strokes (or their properties) would, by definition, be a change in the experience/aesthetic qualities of the painting. Multiple realizability is sacrificed by using these methods to define superveniance.

Without multiple realizability though, is there any reason to say the physical supervenes on the mental, but that the mental doesn't supervene on the physical, or vice versa?The relationship is completely bidirectional. "There is not A difference without B difference," becomes "neither A nor B can differ without both differing."

Under the standard definition of local superveniance what you say is true. However, we can consider if this does the job of being able to explain what exactly supervenes on what. Should adding a single atom to the back of a painting allow it to have entirely different aesthetic properties or completely change a subject's experience of it? Well, with this sort of loose local superveniance, this is possible. Any difference in P allows for any difference in M.

This sort of case, e.g., physically identical worlds, but for one extra molecule on Mars, being able to have entirely different mental properties, has widely been seen as a problem for superveniance.

But maybe B-minimal properties don't even save us from this sort of difficulty. After all, consider what happens if we have two physically identical versions of Sally watching a movie. They are physically identical in every way except that, for Sally-2, the B-minimal properties corresponding to Sally-1's experiencing a small smudge on her glasses have been slightly, but discernibly altered. Now it seems that Sally -2 can have had a completely different perceptual experience of the film because there is some variance in B-minimal properties, which allows for any variance in mental properties. A similar issue exists for P-Regions.

So maybe a more acute problem for B-Minimal Properties and P Regions is that they fail to fix the problem they are brought in to explain, i.e., how some slight variance in P can lead to any variance in M.

If such be that, then how isn't that idealism, pray tell?

I slogged my way though a lot of Kant asking this question. So I found it amusing to find out that there are a significant number of Kantians who say "he was a subjective idealists, mystery solved" although some add to that "he just didn't know it/want to be one."

But I don't feel like I have the expertise to say how credible these claims are.

What I find neat is where 19th century phenominalist take this. They claim there is only phenomena. But what about the external world? Well this is just potential phenomena that may or may not be actualized. Historically, this view was very influenced by Kant, but the idea of external "matter" as potential informing the actualities that we perceived actually comes back around to start sounding a lot like Aristotle. Full circle I guess.

The doctrine I am speaking about is your defense that words are responsible for a person’s actions. If the words are responsible, how can the officer be responsible? If the words cause him to act, how can he be responsible for acting?

Ok, so since Hitler never murdered anyone, and wasn't even in the room when anyone was murdered, he cannot be a criminal. All he did was speak words. If we cannot ever make speech illegal, because speech has no power to cause harm, then leaders are rarely if ever war criminals. Except you have stated that you do sometimes want people punished for speaking certain words...

It's that or we do make some speech illegal, for instance giving orders to carry out war crimes, while simultaneously maintaining that speech can never cause war crimes to be carried out. Thus, in one breath we declare the harmlessness of the crime, it's absolute inability to have led to any deaths, and with the other we condemn for speaking then.

It is either/or.

Tell me, when a plant grows, is it the rain that causes the growth, or the sun? When a solar panel charges an RV, is it the sun's light that causes the charging, or the person who put the solar panel out, or the solar panel itself?

I'm curious, can a dog's master calling its name cause a dog to come to him? Or are animals also causally uneffected by words?

If you're unable consider that events have multiple causal elements, or to distinguish between necessary and sufficient causes, you're going to end up with an extremely confused concept of causation.

We shouldn’t. They are different people. The question is, given the doctrine that words are responsible for a person’s actions, why would they respond so differently to the same cause, the words? Did the word come at their ear drums of at a different angle?

I can't help your confusion here. It seems like it should be obvious that doing the same thing to different objects doesn't result in the same effects. Are you equally confused by how you can throw the same baseball (cause) at both a wall and a window and only the window responds by breaking? Why does the same cause have disparate effects?

But you seem to be saying that for words to play any causal role in people's actions the same words should have the same effect on all people. This is like stating that a baseball, if it breaks a window, should shatter everything it is thrown at. Different objects respond to the same causes in different ways.

Now perhaps we could have a thread on postmodernism and science, differently from postmodernism and mathematics, there is looots of content around that :razz:

A bitterly ironic area to consider considering that most POMO thinkers tended to be far to the left side of the political spectrum. For decades they sharpened and refined their critiques of the sciences, and no one really paid attention to them. Then, finally, a huge swath of the public did start taking their critiques seriously, but it tended to largely be the far-right of the political spectrum who did this. "Who funds this research? Who stands to gain financially? What are the power relations in the field? What are the socio-historical factors influencing theory?"

These finally became areas of core focus, but ironically the goal of the critiques became things like denying climate change and denying that vaccines were beneficial.

I'm not sure what he is referring to but if collapse/decoherence is real (not a limit in possible observation, but an ontic change) then the Schrodinger Equation, while describing deterministic evolution, is describing part of a phenomenon that is stochastic. Some people do indeed interpret collapse as an actual ontic event, and this would have major implications for both the symmetry of time down to the smallest scales and how we think about what the Schrodinger Equation describes.

A common complaint against this position is that collapse is "ad hoc," that it doesn't follow from the Schrodinger Equation, but this seems like a pretty weak argument. The one was developed to explain empirical observations and the other is an empirical observation that the explanatory model simply fails to explain.

An example might be helpful.

Consider the experience of seeing an apple. It seems plausible that physical constituents of the apple could vary dramatically without there being any discernible differences in the experience of the apple. For example, suppose we could generate an identical experience with a fake apple made of largely different chemical constituents, but which is indiscernible in appearance from the viewer's current position.

So M remains the same, while P could vary widely. Only parts of P that uniquely specify M are B-minimal, so the chemical composition of the apple can vary, likely significantly, but not any property of it that contributes to experience (e.g. it must reflect wavelengths that are not discernibly different).

What is one of these "properties" supposed to be, anyway, if it isn't defined by its location in space-time?

It's just those properties that would result in exactly the same mental experience.

One might think that the B-minimal properties will always be located solely in the brain for this reason, but this is not the case. For one frozen instant of perception, this might hold, but if you are analyzing a duration where someone turns their head to see an apple, then it seems like there has to be something external to the brain that causes the apple to be seen in part of the total physical properties that account for the mental phenomena. It's possible to abstract a model where there is only "brain states," but then how one brain state progresses to the next will be unexplainable in terms of just the brain states themselves, since external factors play a role (even for the brain in the vat).

I don't think the one to one relationship would be as much of an issue if P uniquely specified future evolutions of M, while M did not uniquely specify future states of P, but this is not the case. P cannot uniquely specify evolutions of M because the relevant P Region or B Minimal properties are always changing.

I guess this gets at a larger problem in superveniance re demarcation. There is a similar question that comes up when we ask about superveniance in terms of a candle flame or "the edge of the forest."

Ha, not to go back on my OP, but I am now thinking that B-Minimal Properties do not rule out multiple realizability in an important sense. If we consider the experience of a person taking a stroll outside and a "brain in a vat," having an identical experience, it would simply be the case that the B-minimal properties of both physical systems are identical. But identical B-minimal properties do not entail identical P-Regions (or physical constituents). The B-minimal properties are abstracted from the physical system.

The P-Region approach still rules out multiple realizability though.

Perhaps by merging them it's possible to get the best of both worlds?

I would very much like for B-Minimal properties to be a solid concept because it seems possible to use them to articulate a form of direct realism vis-á-vis the objects of perception. There is a one to one correspondence between B-minimal properties and what is experienced, and this seems like exactly the sort of "direct" connection a direct realist is looking for. Moreover, it seems to truck well with Aristotlean and Thomistic explanations of perception, which have already been well developed.

So, sure, to describe Kantian terms in modern understandings is just to have a newer theory. People been doing that since forever, right?

Certainly.

He had a conception of the “unconscious”, and for “unconscious processes” nothing could be said anyway, so….

Yes, but I don't think it's exactly the same. We can, in a roundabout, absential way, observe these processes. If you look at how people describe their experiences of agnosia, having major strokes, etc. they point to an absence of "innate" features of consciousness, but it's like trying to "see your own blind spot."

The careful studies of different sorts of brain injuries and neurological disorders that has occurred since Kant's time has led to a different sort of conception of how these "innate" faculties are in some ways conditional on proper development and function. That doesn't negate the crucial insight that these lie posterior to any theorizing, but I don't actually think the whole modern focus on "beginning at the beginning" is actually helpful, which means an analysis of them shouldn't attempt to be totally presuppositionless or critical the way the German Idealists tended to go about things. This seems like a Cartesian foundationalist hangover.

That's a fair point. I suppose it's also worth considering that while B-Minimal properties remove the possibility of multiple realizability, perhaps they also obviate the need for it? But I still think they do so in a way that is circular enough that it warrants questioning. As in, "wouldn't it be nice if we could avoid that circularity?"

I edited to clarify.

In general, we want to use superveniance to explain in some way how the mental is in some way dependant on the physical, whereas the physical is not dependant on the mental in this same way — but here it seems like the two are mutually dependent such that changes in M entail changes in P AND neither current states of M nor P determine future states of M or P. You could argue that this is a purely epistemic problem, that the relationship only seems to go both ways because our only way to define P is in terms of M, but that the ontological dependence only goes one way. However, superveniance famously fails to ground such ontological dependence and is already a sort of halfway house that exists due to the problems in defining this dependence. Thus, this still seems to be "the cart driving the horse." P is P iff P → M.

We'd like to say that (given determinism) the physical determines all future mental states, and yet it doesn't seem to work that way using these definitions of superveniance. However, if we dispense with P-Regions and B-Minimal Properties, we now have the problems they were brought in to fix returning.

For Hoffman, the core mistake would be the presupposition that experiences must necessarily be of objects "out there," which in turn leads to the concept of the noumenal and thus the significant problems understanding the world around us that follow from this being being posited axiomatically. And this would probably be the biggest problem more direct theories of perception have as well. The relationship between man and "external objects," flows from axioms that might be questioned on grounds of their validity (or on charges of dogmatism). Plus, if you think there now exist better answers to Hume's challenges and you are unhappy with where Kant ends up (or different readings on Kant), going back to the drawing board for a new paradigm only makes sense.

But aside from that, there seems plenty to pick over in Kant's cognitive anthropology even if we agree with some of his core intuitions. Might it be valid to say that what is often labeled in Kant as "a priori" might be better described using modern concepts of "unconscious" processes, a concept unavailable to Kant? There is an important distinction between "unrelated to the experience/environment" and "prior to recursive self-awareness," that didn't really exist prior to a better understanding of biology, and this distinction seems to have follow-on implications. It's sort of like how you might be sympathetic to Aristotle but think that our current understanding of the world requires that the foundational definition of essence needs to be reworked, and this will change a lot of things because much follows from/is built upon the foundational concept.

This, or maybe a Bohm-de Broglie guy, retrocausal, or one of the new "super determinism" types (who I've never quite wrapped my mind around)?

The problem I see with claims that QM actually is deterministic is that it's like saying it is computable. These are completely open questions.

Lately I've considered that it is retrocausality that most keeps our image of the classical world down to micro scales. You get locality, realism, basically classical mechanics, just at the cost of future events being involved in the actualization of past ones. Not bad if the alternative is a pleroma of infinite worlds.

This recognizes the issues at the foundations of math but also fixes "math as math" in itself, as a long-form tautology. Or maybe the culture is that of universe, and its history is all time, and the society is the society of minds. Only such influences will produce a math, and because these influences are so simple (universe, mind, all time) that math is so simple and need never change - we've fixed it that way in its own axioms.

It's not this, my comment was just about the context in which math is consistent within assumed axioms. Saying "if these are the rules of the game, these are the legal moves," doesn't need to suppose that the rules aren't influenced by culture, history, language, etc., that there might not be different or better rules, or that the rules themselves are tautologically true. It's to say something more like "here are Jim's rules for Chess and if you play Chess according to Jim's rules x follows." So, it's more like a sample space of possible tautologies. Saying "here is how Jim plays Chess," isn't to say anything about the cultural or historical influences on why Jim plays Chess that way.

Maybe there is a post-modern argument to be made that these social or historical factors shouldn't be ignored as much as they are (that said, historical analysis of mathematical concepts seems quite common in mathematics books I've read). But we aren't fixing anything with its own axioms, we are studying what happens, given we provisionally accept some axioms. This to me seems like a distinct difference.

Actually, having written that, I wonder if it might be more accurate to say that mathematics is one of the origin points of the POMO perspective and that it just seems to not be an area of focus today because the relevant critique has already incorporated.

Does your language here suggest that you take post modernism to be a posturing deceit?

By no means. It's just that a lot of people into POMO are very open and vocal about wanting their work to achieve some sort of positive "social change." If this is your goal, the very small and isolated world of mathematical foundations is probably not the place to focus.

Just taking as the starting point anti foundationalism and the notion that all human knowledge is radically contingent. What does this mean for maths and how do post modernist theorists assess it's reliability and, presumably, its lack of grounding?

Challenging mathematics lack of grounding is already a major issue in mathematics. It was the defining historical trend in the field over the 20th century. The deflationary theories of truth that came out of undecidablity, incompleteness, and undefinablity seem in the same wheelhouse (more an inspiration for POMO, or ammunition for it, than possible targets). So, attacking the grounding would be nothing new, whereas attacking the reliability seems extremely difficult if we're not talking about applied mathematics (and if we're talking application then we're generally talking about something else outside mathematics). I mean, is any one going to argue that "given we assume Euclid's axioms, parallel lines never meet," is unreliable? That sort of statement is all about what else is true if the axioms are true (not that the axioms are actually "true"). How could a tautology be unreliable?

Certainly there are lots of critiques about how mathematics is used or appealed to in the sciences, social discourse, and philosophy, but that seems less directly related to mathematics itself.

The way in which mathematics would seem to be most open to attack for being unreliable would be in terms of foundations or application. Application is dealt with vis-á-vis other fields, and foundations is already an open question.

There is already a lot of pluralism and "questioning all assumptions," in the foundations of mathematics/philosophy of mathematics, so it's hard to see what a post-modern critique of mathematics would find worth critiquing. I've never seen one, and I've certainly looked in places where they might show up.

That said, there are lots of post-modernist critiques of how mathematics is taught. This makes sense as "mathematical foundations," is simply not something most people care or even know about, and so it's not a good place to "challenge power dynamics," at least not for any sort of social effect. Math classes, however, are an entirely different story.

Post-modern critiques of pedagogy on mathematics run the gambit from the readily apparent ("we should get kids interested in the philosophically and theoretically interesting areas of math and not teach it as 'arbitrary calculations that must be performed to pass tests'"), to the plausible ("math would be more interesting if it applied to real world questions, particularly questions of epistemology and statistics, or probability") to the dubious ("allowing some public school kids to take advanced mathematics perpetuates oppression and hurts society because Asian and European-decended kids currently make up a disproportionate number of students in these classes and colleges and employers like to see math credentials,") to the batshit insane ("we should push the limits of student's creativity by introducing elementary school students to category theory and grounding equality relations in that versus set theory so that they realize the many layered meanings of even the most seemingly self-evident of relations.")

No, I'm aware of that. I think there are good issues to raise there. For example, Donald Hoffman does a good job bringing these issues to the fore in his "The Case Against Reality." However, his elucidation of these issues would seem to cast greater doubt on Kant's suppositions.

Our cognitive architecture might lie posterior to our sciences, but then, as Hoffman shows, there is good reason to doubt if our cognitive architecture represents truth as opposed to biological fitness. One of his key points is on the evidence that "3D space" is simply a "hallucination" of sorts. Of course, Hoffman thinks these problems are more acute than I do, and he ultimately uses them as a springboard for a sort of idealism with phenominalist flavors.

I don't think foundationalism works. If anything, the greatest mistake of modern philosophy has been to put the epistemological cart before the horse. Kant wants us to buy his demonstration before any other considerations and I just don't think this is a good way to vet theories (and even if I did, I'd tend to agree with Hegel on Kant having his own dogmatic presuppositions, and the whole "oh look, I just happen to have discovered Aristotle's exact categories," thing).

I haven't read Brewer's paper so I cannot speak to it. If that's how the phrase is intended, then it seems like a silly position to advance, and I would not agree with a sentence that seems to claim that this position is held by "direct realists," generally.

However, I would take "unmediated" to refer to only "the relation that exists between perception and perceived object," not between say light waves and neurons firing in the optical nerve. That is, the relationship is not decomposable, it is a property of the whole that cannot be built up from the parts.

There is definitely a dilemma there. But I think it's the other way about. Many war criminals have used your defense, for instance at the Nuremberg trials, that they were just following orders. They weren’t partners to the crime, they were subordinate to the words of another, and therefor innocent. Your doctrine implies people can get away with war crimes, and in fact it was used as such a defense numerous times.

I have not expressed a "doctrine." I have expressed what follows from your claim that "words cannot cause people to act."

This is not an either/or distinction, either the person who pulls the trigger is responsible for the executions OR the person who ordered them is. You can have an account where both are culpable and culpable in varrying degrees, and such an account seems eminently reasonable here. We should not be forced into claiming that either Hitler is a war criminal or the SS officer who butchered Jewish civilians is, but not both. Both can be war criminals in virtue of the same atrocity, just as no individual player/coach is ever responsible for winning a basketball game.

You could just say the superiors were guilty for what they had done, which was ordering the liquidation of all Polish officers at the camp.

But in virtue of what is giving an order a crime? If giving verbal commands can never cause someone else to carry out an execution, because verbal commands can never cause anyone to carry out any act, I don't see how you can justify making "giving verbal commands," a crime.

I have no problem calling it a crime because I believe it's completely reasonable to claim that the ordering of the executions and their being carried out are causally connected. But per your claim that words can never cause action, there is no way in which giving a verbal order could cause a person hearing the order to carry out an execution.

This makes verbal orders completely harmless, and if something is completely harmless, why is it a crime? Further, it would seem to go against the total prohibition on censorship you claimed followed as a result of the fact that words were harmless. Now you're down with trying people for war crimes provided they've made certain utterances to certain people. It certainly seems like you can no longer maintain that words are always harmless.

That's when the biology takes over. Whatever energy is left over is fully under the direction and operation of the biology, and the biology is the sole determining factor in the entire interaction.

And biology isn't consistent with physics?

We can't just throw it aside and say it provides no determining factor in the lifespan of a soundwave.

No one ever said we should throw it aside. You seem stuck on a sort of binary thinking here. Either a given input, say hearing an utterance, absolutely determines the output (behavior) or else hearing an utterance can have absolutely no causal input on behavior.

The point you raised before about different people responding different ways to words doesn't demonstrate that "words have no influence on behavior." Even in the physics of balls bouncing into one another, the properties of the ball being hit by another ball determines how it behaves in response. All people are different. Why should we expect that they all respond to words in identical fashion?

If an action is self-caused it would eliminate the possibility of determinism because the genesis of an action cannot be shown to begin elsewhere.

Yes, it would eliminate determinism. Free will and determinism are not binaries. An absence of determinism does not imply the presence of free will. Where is free will in a random universe?

Further, causes that are based on nothing, the spring spontaneously into being, are arbitrary and random. If our actions are arbitrary and random, they are not "ours" and so we lack free will. Certainly, our bodies act non-deterministically, but it cannot be we who determine what they do if the causes of our actions depend on nothing that exists before the act occurs.

I then take the highlighted portion of this text to imply that the yellow flower's uniformity of hew as seen by humans is (for emphasis) the one true reality of the object - this such that a bee's experience of the flower as having a pattern of different hews is then incorrect / bad / illusory ... if not also somehow hallucinatory.

I would agree that this would be a very difficult problem if this is what is being implied in the bolded text, but I don't see how that is the case. It would be bizarre for a professional philosopher to advance such a claim, given how much of our daily experience and work in the empirical sciences would appear to falsify it.

The point the text mentions seems to be that perceptions are not decomposable. They exist as relations between the perceiver and perceived. They cannot be further decomposed without losing something. This does not entail that we cannot refer to the eye or visual cortex in giving an account of vision, it just means that we cannot build up an accurate account of perception with just a combination of these parts. In this way, it might be appropriate to think of experiences as "strongly emergent," although that term has difficulties as well, and it doesn't totally fit here because what is being said does not preclude a reductionist account of perception, but rather a reductionist account of perception that excludes the objects being perceived.

The part above about how adverbial and intentional theories are actually just indirect realism seems to simply read these theories through and indirect realist lens and in so doing beg the question.

This seems to fall into the trap of thinking "direct realism," = "naive realism."

There's plenty of scientific evidence that some of them do.

Perhaps I should have been more precise. It seems unlikely that all animals that experience sense perception would have concepts of the first sort. The one can exist without the other. Flies perceive, but I don't think they have "concepts" in the way we have a concept of "communism," etc. But if the two notions of the term can exist separately from one another, differ dramatically in traits and how they are experienced, and seem to require quite different neurological explanations, then I still think there is a risk when conflating them. This of course, only effects some theories, and some of their claims at any rate.

My use of the term "confirmed" was likely inappropriate. I meant in the sense of "strengthened" rather than of of "having an assured accuracy". That mentioned, contingent on the issue of what "direct realism" entails, as previously expressed, our scientific knowledge does contradict our human perceptions being the be-all and end-all to what the objective world consists of. In this sense, I then yet find our scientific knowledge to evidence, hence support, the view that direct realism as just described in this post is erroneous. Be it "quasi-" or otherwise, this then results in science supporting an indirect realism.

That makes sense. But like I said, the literature on this topic tends to make a bad habit of taking evidence that "naive realism is wrong," as providing strong support for "my particular theory is right." This is done by direct realists too. "Look, naive realism is nonsense, so my account is preferable." IMO, the comparison case for all these theories should be the best/most popular theories in other camps, not naive realism, which is more a strawman than a real position.

We are dealing with an infinite regress if something exists eternally. Infinite regress is not acceptable. Therefore something cannot exist eternally.

No, we are dealing with an infinite regress in cases where we have to posit an infinite number of past causes for something. E.g., X began because of Y and Y began because of Z and Z began because of... etc. The statement that "X exists without begining or end," does not require an infinite regress because X never begins to exist. There is nothing to regress to.

This is precisely why Aristotle decides that the world must be eternal, and why so many cosmologists, even those embracing versions of the "Big Bang," theory nonetheless claim that elements of the universe must be eternal.

You might attack to coherence of something existing "without begining or end," but it doesn't require a regress of explanations.

For example, you might consider the following proposition: Given we accept Euclid's axioms, it follows that all triangles will have angles that sum to two right angles (180 degrees).

Did this fact have a begining in time? Did it start to exist when Euclid developed his postulates? Or did it not exist until he had completed a proof for this proposition for each type of triangle? If the latter, and Euclid completed the proof of right triangles first, is it a true statement that at that time "given Euclid's axioms, it is the case that right triangles, but not other triangles have angles that sum to two right angles."?

Or, prior to Euclid, when earlier mathematicians empirically observed this fact about triangles, did the fact begin to exist then, even though Euclid's axioms has never been written down?

The problem here is that it seems like it will always be true that, given Euclid's axioms, this fact holds. It never begins to be true and under no conditions does it seem to become false.

Maybe we might think Euclid's axioms are rubbish, but it won't change the status of facts of the sort of "If A and I → B," where A is a set of axioms and I are inference rules, and B is a conclusion that follows from A and I.

Things like "if A = B and B = C, then A = C," do not seem to require any sort of infinite causal regress. Being logical truths, they do not require an infinite series of deductions either. Circularity is not infinite regress, we are not always going back to new reasons, but looping.

Right, but my point is that multiple entities experiences don't need to be identical or even particularly similar to share a direct relationship with the objects being perceived.

As to the second part, I think advances in developmental biology seriously call into question prior understandings of the nature of essences and "a priori," capabilities.

A human body thrown into a vacuum produces no consciousness. An embryo only develops into a human being under an extremely precise and shockingly rare range of environmental conditions. Tweak an animal embryo's gestational enviornment and the same genes will produce nothing but liver tissue, nothing but heart tissue, etc. This is where I think a process philosophy understanding is helpful. The notion of a priori capabilities seems wed to concepts of discrete "things" existing to possess such capabilities. But if we have strong evidence to suggest the world is the result of one universal process, then we have a reason to doubt these metaphysical assumptions.

A human being cut off from all sensory inputs doesn't develop a sense of space because they will be dead. What is physically required to stop an embryo from receiving any sensory input is also going to kill it, and even just drastically reducing sensory input (but by no means eliminating it) leads to death or severe mental retardation after birth. The divorcing of elements of the human person from their enviornment just seems wrong to me. We can speak of commonalities in cetaris parabus scenarios, for sure, and this might even give us a modified conception of "essence," but it won't lead to any thought that exists without reference to the environment.

So, Kant's analysis might very well be relevant to some "essential nature," of human experience, provided we narrowly defined what constitutes the actualization of such an essence. However, it can't be prior to sensory perception. If anything, developmental biology would suggest that such regularities only come to exist provided a narrow range of environmental inputs. Sensory system inputs play a crucial role in the developing body long before we would think a fetus might be concious. I'd imagine that blocking all inputs from these organs through some physical means would almost certainly kill the developing human.

If you look at the part of my post above under the heading "Supervenience Relations," perhaps that might be helpful in elucidating such a "bridge." It shows how a "direct relationship," i.e. one to one correspondence, might be said to exist between objects and elements of our perception of them.

Contemporary formulations of direct realism do not argue that we see things "as they are." Indeed, pace mentions of "naive realism," I would maintain that even neolithic farmers must have had some sort of understanding of how it is that they could look at something that seems solid, pick it up, and discover that it was hollow. No theory of perception would seem to entail that when we experience an object we experience all of its properties.

Nor does it seem like any theory actually posits that experiences of objects are equivalent with objects. What distinguishes the direct realist's claims is simply the claim that some elements of perception have a direct correspondence to the objects perceived such that variance in one cannot exist without variance in the other. This does not entail that we necessarily know which elements of perception correspond to which elements of the world. This is clearly something that must be discovered.

But the upshot of such a correspondence is that we do not need to rely solely on "divine reason," to have access to external objects, as their intelligibility directly corresponds to elements of experience. This is in part the difference between saying that "we experience ideas of objects," and that we "experience objects using ideas." It is saying that the sign in the semiotic object/sign/interpretant relation is a bridge between objects and interpretant, not a barrier, because there is something, namely the intelligibility/form corresponding to the Kim's B-minimal superveniance properties, that comes to be in/a part of the object, sign, and interpretant during the transmission process.

and do not necessarily provide consistent representations of the noumena, as in a bat might see things differently from us, but we clear up the evil genius' deceptions with the clarity of our reasoning, then we're neither deceived about reality nor are our subjective limitations ultimately limiting.

What constitutes a "consistent representation of the noumenal?" If it needs to be that all entities experience objects in the same way at all times, then yes, we seem to have a problem. If consistent "representation," (I would use the term "experience" here) merely requires that some elements of experience are consistently in a one to one correspondence relationship with the object being perceived, then I do not see a problem. That bats and humans might experience a rock differently does not entail that no part of their experience might be tied to the properties of the rock in a direct manner.

We might still have a problem if our ability to access these intelligibilities is extremely constrained or varies completely from individual to individual. For example, if the elements of experience produced in one person's looking at a rock that conform to properties of that rock are "entirely different," from that of another person who looks at the same rock from the same vantage. But I'd argue that we have no grounds for claiming this is the case, that each instance of human experience is completely sui generis in how it corresponds to objects either moment to moment or between different people.


Consistency does not require absolute consistency or one to one correspondence, it merely requires an intelligible pattern.


Edit: a way of summarizing this might be that we experience B-minimal properties located in external objects in a direct way, and that this represents the Thomistic intelligibility of the object. This does not entail that all experience of an object corresponds to B-minimal properties located in that object. The relevant B-minimal properties of the physical system resulting in an experience will reside in the brain as well. This, for any experience of an object, only elements of that experience will correspond to B-minimal properties located in the object itself.

Of course, you can keep everything in the brain, but only if you chop experience up into picosecond blocks. Any experience extending over seconds will start to require an accounting parts of the world outside the body. But of course, we experience "over time."

I don't disagree with anything you wrote. However, contemporary versions of direct realism, intentionality theories, and phenomenological theories all explain the same phenomena. Each of these have their own problems, but it doesn't seem readily apparent that some have significantly worse problems than others. The result is that I would tend to say that "indirect realism can be made consistent with the empirical sciences," rather than "the empirical sciences confirm indirect realism," which would seem to imply that we can eliminate competing theories based on the empirical sciences.

Obviously, not all formulations of indirect realism are consistent with the empirical sciences. Older versions tend to work on the assumption of substance dualism, fall into Ryle's regress, and involve Cartesian humonculi or Cartesian theaters. The formulations of indirect realism that are consistent with the sciences are just those that have been tweaked and edited until they conform to the empirical sciences, which is the same thing that can be said for direct realism and other theories.

Unfortunately, a great deal of the literature on the objects of perception spends its time attacking the strawman of "naive realism." Yet showing that this naive realism cannot be the case doesn't really show that one's favored theory is more plausible than any other contemporary competing theory. Plus, it's unclear if such "naive realism," was ever embraced. The pre-Socratics already have formulations akin to indirect realism, direct realism, and phenominalism in key respects, so the "naive" position seems to be more a phantasm than something that must be torn down.

It still seems to me that significant critiques can be leveled at indirect realism as well. There are the adverbial critiques. There are the accusations of falling into a form of (crypto)-substance dualism with "mental representations" acting as ontological entities and "agents," only being able to view mental representations.

Here are the big problems:

Concepts - The notion of a "concept" is notoriously muddy. It not obvious that my conceptual understanding of a concept like "Hegelian dialectical," or "Marxism," is the same sort of thing as the way in which my visual cortex organizes sensory input into the experience of "seeing a flower." The first exists (only?) in recursive self-awareness and can be articulated to other people via words. The second seems impossible to even get into recursive self-awareness, let alone communicate. Neuroscience cannot proceed by my describing how it is I use these unconscious processes to turn visual input into the image of a flower, nor can I communicate how I achieve it. I am unaware of these "concepts." Further, the second sort of concept seems "necessary," for the cognitive acts that give rise to the first. I cannot come up with an articulation of what flowers are if my sensory system cannot distinguish them. Lower animals certainly have the second type of concept, but it seems doubtful they have the first.

Indeed, I am only really aware that I am using the second type of concepts when I begin to suffer from agnosia or have a stroke, etc. And even then, the experiences that people who suffer from these ailments describe is one of absence, they are not able to diagnose themselves. Whereas if I forget what "Hegelian dialectical," is, I am aware of this inability to recall or the fuzzyness of the concept. Nor does it seem like I have a "concept" of every particular shade of green, yellow, and brown I see when I look at my lawn in the same way that I have a concept of "the United States." So, to the extent that some forms of indirect realism make their claims about anthropology and perception by conflating these two notions of the word "concept," they seem to be open to attack. And note that the brain areas that appear to be involved in both notions of the term "concept," appear to be quite different as well.

Phenomenological Inseparability - This leads into another problem, that of the defining feature of indirect realism, the claim that "we experience mental representations." The problem here is well summarized in the Routledge Contemporary Introduction to Phenomenology, which comes up with a comical list of excerpts of philosophers and scientists trying to describe phenomenal awareness without reference to the things being experienced. These invariably degenerate into just describing the things being experienced, "the taste of coffee," or "the red of a balloon floating in my room," or else become unintelligible nonsense like "I am perceiving hotly," and "I am smelling bitterly."

The point intentionalists (and some direct realists) make here is that there seems to be absolutely no daylight between the perception and the objects perceived. We seem perfectly able to communicate our experiences to one another in some ways, but it becomes impossible to do so if we focus on the perception side of "perceiving representations," by themselves. It leads to incoherence. And, so they argue, this shows that there is no distinct ontological entity that might be called a "mental representation," that is experienced by a "perceiver who perceives them." Nor is there really good empirical reasons to divorce the two. Where does neuroscience say representation occurs versus the perception of representation? It doesn't say anything about this. It has yet to articulate how this works, but tends to conclude there is no Cartesian theater and that perception and representation are at least not distinct at the level of neuroanatomy (fine grained analysis is indeterminate on this issue).

(This seems like a good argument in favor of intentionalists)

Superveniance Relations - Finally, we can consider direct realists' objection, which I think might be the best one. This relies on notions in superveniance. Superveniance cannot just be defined as "no difference in A (mental phenomena) without a difference in B (physical phenomena)." This turns out to be a wholly inadequate way to frame superveniance.

Such a definition allows, in global superveniance, that a world where Mars has one more molecule of dust can have completely different mental properties from the world without the extra molecule of dust. There is a physical difference between the worlds, so there can be as much mental difference as we like. The same is true for local superveniance. If Sally 2 has one more magnesium atom in her body than Sally 1, she can now have totally different mental properties (we can place the atom in the brain and the same problem remains)

People have tried to fix this with the idea of P-regions and B-minimal properties. P-regions are just those regions of space time that are absolutely essential to the mental phenomena being considered. B-minimal properties are just those physical properties needed to ensure the mental phenomena in question.

If might be thought that these concepts wouldn't cause problems for indirect realism. After all, for any freeze frame microsecond of perception, we can assume that the relevant P Region is entirely in the brain. Does this not support the assertion that perception must just be "of" things in the brain, representations?

The problem comes when you want to analyze any perception that actually takes a meaningful amount of time. All of the sudden, things outside the body become part of the P Region. If we would not have seen the apple but for the apple being on the table, then the apple, or at least part of it or something with similar B-minimal properties, is required to explain the mental state.

So now the direct realist (along with all the externalists) will say: "hey, the superveniance relationship for perception has to involve the object, it is a necessary physical constituent of perception." Which, while not proving their point, still seems to make it more plausible. If the B-minimal properties of the object perceived cannot be changed one iota without changing the mental experience, then it seems like there is a very "direct" connection between the object and the perception. There is, in this case, no change in the mental representation without a change in the B-minimal properties of the object, and it seems that the "directness" of this relationship is exactly the sort of thing the direct realist is talking about.

Recall, Aristotle (and Aquinas) don't have us perceiving the entire form of an object. Nor do they have us perceiving the form "as it is in itself." This would require our heads turning into apples or something when we see an apple. Rather, a part of the substantial form is directly communicated to sensation. And here, the B-minimal properties of the object that precisely specify the part of subjective experience corresponding to that object, seems like a very good candidate for the parts of the object's "form/intelligibility" that are directly communicated. This relation is direct in that there can be no change in A without a change in B, and because B is B-minimal, no change in B without a change in A. This is a one to one relationship between part of sensation and an external object — what Aristotle wants to communicate even though he is certainly no naive realist. A lot of Catholic philosophers work with this sort of realism, and have enhanced it with semiotic explanations but unfortunately they reside in a bit of a bubble.

(Note, I would think this was a KILLER argument for direct realism BUT for the fact that P Regions and B-minimal properties actually seem to destroy superveniance by making what is considered a relevant physical element dependant on the qualities of mental experience - but that's a whole different thread lol)

Of course, there are similar problems with the other theories. I just wanted to illustrate that theories all have significant problems AND can be made consistent enough with empirical evidence that none of particularly "confirmed" above others

The state is composed of and run by individuals. So it’s not impossible. And those that censor according to law do so because they believe in the law and seek to enforce it. One can be confident that they will enforce it because they are employed to do so, not because the words and laws are running things in their brains.

But how do they know what they are being employed to do without words and laws? How do they know what their job entails? It can't be because they read a law or were told something by a superior, right? Because if they do X because they think X is their job, and they only think that X is part of their job because of Y, a verbal communication, it's unclear to me how Y plays no causal role in their acts. It also seems strange that words can't cause human action while an abstract concept like employment can.

So how do people learn what their jobs entail or what their superiors want them to do?

Given your explanations, it still seems like only individuals, not states can be held responsible for actions. If the teller can have any response to being threatened, how is it not the case that citizens might have any response to a state decree? If state decrees cannot cause actions, how can states be responsible for citizens' actions?

The whole, "words cannot play a causal role in other's actions," bit would imply that most war criminals are completely innocent. After all, most high Soviet and Nazi officials never shot a single person. In general, they weren't even speaking to the people who actually carried out the atrocities. They told a subordinate, "liquidate all the Polish officers in the camps," and that person told someone else, who commanded a fourth person to carry out the executions.

If words have no causal force though, how is the initiator of the mass executions responsible? It would seem that if words are, as you say, inefficacious, then Hitler, who never killed a single Jew with his own hands, must be absolved of responsibility for the Holocaust.

Likewise, fraud cannot be a crime. Fraud and deception involve getting people to do things they would not have done otherwise but for your words. But fraud seems quite impossible in most of its forms. How does a fraudster cause a senior to send them money by posing as a family member in distress? They can't, their only contact with the victim is via causally inefficacious words sent over a phone!

The actual physical and biological effects, such as a sound vibration hitting the cochlea and its subsequent movements throughout the anatomy, do not match the presumed effects, like the incitement of a behavior or emotion. Moreover, the presumed effects vary wildly according to who listens to the words and rarely (if ever) according to what is said.”

Would you agree that sound waves propagate deterministically such that one part in the process can be said to cause later ones?

Does the skin of the ear drum vibrate deterministically in accordance with the laws of classical physics that predict the behavior of classical scale objects?

But if these all function deterministically, with a clear causal chain, where in "the brain," does determinism stop? If it doesn't stop, if the brain responds deterministically like the rest of the physical world, if it is not a sui generis substance, then it would seem that causal chains can absolutely be traced from sound waves to actions.

That you think this is impossible, that the same physical input can lead to myriad outputs vis-á-vis the brain, would seem to be the magical thinking here. If the causes determining acts in the brain only begin with the individual, then it seems we have a sui generis causal power attached to brains that exists nowhere else in nature (and which has yet to be observed in brains either).

Further, the genesis of human action, if it springs into existence inside the brain with no reference to prior physical states, would seem to eliminate the possibility of free will. After all, if the genesis of human action is determined by nothing that exists prior to that genesis, then it can have nothing to do with who we are, our memories, preferences, desires, etc., since those pre-exist our actions.

It sure can - but on my view it’s not caused by the question. The response is caused by something the person responding. I Can’t grok the causal relationship. Putting someone in mind of something shouldn’t considered causal imo.

If you don't want to call is causal it still seems like you'd need to explain the counterfactual. How does B fail to occur without A, and when A occurs, B follows from it through a chain of consequences, but A cannot be said to cause B?

Even if you want to allow for some form of libertarian free will, it seems like it simply cannot be the case that other people's words or other communicative acts never "put things in mind," or motivate action. If you want to call this special case something other than cause, fine, but in virtue of what is it special? More to the point, even if words don't "cause" acts, it seems like their relationship to acts still has to fulfill pretty much all the characteristics of naive conceptions of cause (i.e., counter factual analysis, no B without A; A leads to a chain of events that causes B, etc.). Else, people leaving a crowded theater after someone screams "fire" is incomprehensible.

If people's words can never "put things in mind," for others, then communication seems completely impossible and doing philosophy is pointless. We are all hermetically sealed in our own minds and no matter what we do we cannot "put things from our mind, into others." But clearly there has to be some sense in which this is not the case, and at least parts of the process, sound waves propagation, ear drum vibration, etc. would appear to follow all normal causal laws. The question would be, when do we hit the sui generis "cause-like-but-not-cause" phenomena and why is it different?

Might just be a bad example as that doesn’t change the premise of what you’re arguing.

It is. The dictator who only orders executions indirectly is a better example, since they not only simply speak these orders, but they don't even speak them to the people who carry them out. Are they free from blame?

Coercion only has a mitigating effect on sentencing for those types or crime. “Under duress” doesn’t remove the charge and responsibility for the act.
The coercive party did not commit the act. The actus Reus differs.

I'll allow that the law might not be a good reflection of true responsibility, but it is certainly the case that:

A. In the US, if you coerce or negotiate in order to get someone else to commit a murder, you can be found guilty of murder. People who are the "buyer" in "murder-for-hire," plots are often convicted of murder in the first degree (as are the murderers, both are responsible). I think this gets the blame mostly right, as without the plotter there is no murder.

B. Coercion or deception can be partially mitigating or completely mitigating, and it depends on the prosecution or jury to determine guilt. I would maintain that even a Texas jury is not going to find a three year old who shot their mother guilty if it is the case that the father manipulated the three year old and told them to point the gun at the mother and pull the trigger. In this case, the father's act is not limited to criminal negligence in handing a child a loaded firearm, but something far worse in using words to instruct them to fire the weapon at the other parent, whereas the child lacks the capability to adequately think through the consequences of actions "put into their mind," by the father.

Likewise, someone who tricks someone into poisoning someone else by telling them cyanide is medicine, etc. is responsible for the murder, not the person who thinks they are mixing up some harmless medicine for their patient to take.

If deception can't shift responsibility then most instances of fraud could never be crimes because they only involve persuasion and not coercion. If words cannot cause people to act, then I don't see how we can prosecute fraudsters for tricking senior citizens into sending them cash by posing as their family members. After all, the fraudsters words, sent over the phone, could never cause the deceived to send the money. But this seems unreasonable.

Tricky but my understanding is they are guilty of genocide which is intention-informed and not act-informed. It isn’t murder, basically.

It can't be just intent. If this was the case, some random basement dwelling Chud posting on the Internet about the need to "exterminate the Jews," would be as guilty of "genocide" as top Nazi officials. I would maintain that one cannot have a genocide without murders. We might agree with states that have harsher hate speech laws, that the Internet troll has committed a crime, but it hardly seems that they have committed the same crime. Even the harshest hate crime law advocates do not say we should hang people for urging genocide, and yet even people who don't want any hate crime laws see hanging Nazi officials who oversaw the Holocaust as completely justified.

Social context matters. Screaming fire in your home with no one around differs from screaming fire in a crowded theater, and the difference lies precisely in what could reasonably be expected to be the causal fall out from the same act placed in different contexts. Muttering "someone should kill X," as a person no one takes seriously is different from being King Henry III and declaring: "will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"

cause may have actually been their knowledge of the correct answer.

It can't involve both? It seems prima facie unreasonable to me to assume that someone who responds to the question "what is the capital of Florida," with any city name was in any way likely to have just blurted out the name of a city if you were both sitting in silence. If this seems dubious to you, feel free to test this with an experiment and see how often people blurt out random cities' names unbidden, and then try asking them about a few state capitals. That questions can elicit responses that are incorrect answers seems trivial.

the B&E example, the assault consists in their act

So if the victim refuses to perform a sex act in response to the threats and no sex act occurs the assailant has still committed a sexual assault? I will allow that they will have certainly still committed a crime in both cases, but this doesn't appear to be the case. This would be like saying that if one person threatens another, telling them they will kill them if they don't murder a third person, then that person has committed a murder, even if the person doesn't give in to threat. But there cannot be a murder without a dead body, and I don't think you can have a sexual assault without a sex act. Yet if the murder or sex act does occur, it seems perfectly reasonable to find the person engaged in coercion responsible, and this is because one person's statements can certainly play a causal role in other's actions.

If asking someone to do something cannot cause them to perform an act, there would be no reason why war criminals who order mass executions should be considered criminals in the first place, so long as they don't pull any triggers. Ordering executions would be harmless. "Words don't kill people, people kill people," could be the slogan of the International War Criminal's Association.

But the genesis of all his acts occur within him.

So the genesis — begining — of the process that ends up with the bank teller giving the robber the money begins with the teller, not the robber? This seems implausible on the face of it if the teller would never have given the robber the money but for being threatened.

So while the state is not responsible for my taking their threat seriously (or not), it is responsible for the threats, for letting us know it will punish us should it not like what we say, and any subsequent acts it makes towards those ends.

According to your own statements this is impossible. The state can never be responsible for anything. With what arms does the state beat a protestor? How can a state tie anyone to a stake?

If all actions have their begining and end with the individual agent as you say, it is impossible for a state to be responsible for any such actions. Individual executioners might kill, but not states. Laws might mandate death, but they are words and thus cannot cause any human action. Thus, even if we allow that some forms of censorship are bad, laws mandating execution for speaking of certain things can only be neutral as they can never cause anyone to die. Plus, to preclude such laws from being proclaimed would itself be a form of censorship, which is never justifiable because words can never cause anything.

but the state cannot be forgiven for issuing these threats.

It doesn't seem that, by your reasoning, a state even can issue threats. Only people issue threats, right? With what mouth would a state proclaim threats? With what hands might it write them?

Nor can states wage war. Only individuals wage war right? And all the causes of individuals waging war begin and end with the individual. Very strange then that they should all come to begin waging war at once though. One might wonder, from whence comes this coordination?

In any event, it seems we must allow that if the managers of any state want to pass a law proclaiming that all schools shall teach the supremacy of the Aryan race and the need to subjugate or destroy all other peoples, they should be allowed to do so. After all, such laws cannot cause anything to be taught or not taught by teachers, and to preclude such laws from being promulgated would be to "steal" them from their audience and posterity.

Kinetic force is not in doubt here.

You might want to consider how sound waves propagate. As it stands, your reasoning seems absolutely riddled with contradictions.