But in another and more important sense, our knowledge of it is dependent on our mind and on the capacities of the human cognitive apparatus and the categories of the understanding. Insofar as we know the world, that world - the world as it appears to us - is all that we ever know. — Wayfarer

That should be uncontroversial.

I mean, what other option is there? Unless we attribute actual cognition to the world.

I would tend to agree, idealism or physicalism, to me, are essentially a terminological quibble in terms of the actual state of affairs.

A whole different can of worms would be, say, realism (of any kind) vs. eliminitavism, I think that much has substance.

I see your point, and acknowledge that the question is not decidable (that of the mind-independence of things), but I'm obsessed with it, particularly the variant of "things in themselves", but the onus would be on me to show why this matters or should matter.

I agree that phenomenology can be very useful. And although Husserl is frequently referred to (likely correctly) here, I think Sellar's distinction between "Manifest" and "Scientific" images is actually quite important.

But I see your point, I'm not arguing against it, I guess its related to temperament.

Yeah, the problem would be in knowing how much mind-dependence to attribute to different aspects of the world, as in, obviously other animals would exist and have to be so "minded", but when we get to lower organisms or rocks, there are significant problems here in terms of what sense it makes to say that such things have an independent existence. I'm not saying they don't, I'm agnostic here, I think there's something there, but it's nature is unknown.

I see your point about performative contradiction. It's an extremely obscure territory to me.

In any case, thanks for sharing, interesting thoughts.

This isn't an attack or anything, but, since I'm roughly a Schopenhauerian, can you tell me or if not, share a post in which you say why you think he's wrong or in what parts?

I'd be interested.

Chalmers' says a lot of things, but I wouldn't be surprised if he accepted this formulation.

It may be abandoned in terms of being called the "hard problem", much like gravity's (or motion more generally) non-mechanistic effects had to be accepted: we'll have to accept the fact that matter thinks, without knowing why.

That's not to say that gravity or consciousness aren't "hard problems", they are. On this view, there are many hard problems in science and human understanding more generally.

Correct. That was poorly phrased, we can say that Newton's laws work on certain scales,

Einstein's "happiest thought" was essentially a thought experiment that helped him begin to develop a new theory, I doubt he had Newton is mind.

https://www.sjsu.edu/people/anand.vaidya/courses/c2/s0/Realistic-Monism---Why-Physicalism-Entails-Panpsychism-Galen-Strawson.pdf

pp.20-24 is the part you'd be interested in, top 3rd of pp.20: "What about the emergence of life?"

To save you much terminological hassle: E means "experiential", NE means "non-experiential".

Experiential is basically consciousness.

Non-experiential is everything that doesn't have experience: a table, a rock, wood (maybe), dry paint, particles, etc.

The topic of the bacterium is very interesting, my intuition doesn't reach that far, but I could imagine a very elementary reaction that could be an extremely rudimentary experience.

Sure! If you are interested, I can see if I can find you an article - or a part of an article - in which Strawson talks about the problem of life in relation to panpsychism.

The gist of it was (if I remember correctly) that all of "life" could be explained by our physics, chemistry and biology, but this still does not touch on the topic of experience at all.



Very astute concision.

Maybe I'm not as well versed on this topic matter; still, I don't find a necessary conflict between the idea of panpsychism and the idea of radical emergence: e.g., even if panpsychism, there would yet be a radical enough emergence of life from nonlife. Any idea of why the two would need to be contradictory? — javra

Strawson postulates panpsychism as necessary because emergence cannot be brute or "radical": there must be something in the phenomena by which new properties arise as they do (in this case consciousness or experience), otherwise it would be a miracle every time a new property arises in nature.

Since Strawson takes experience to be the most obvious physical fact of existence (Strawson's materialism makes him say that everything that exists is physical, he means everything), the basic building blocks of nature (he calls them "ultimates": maybe they are strings, or quantum fields, whatever they may be), must either constitute or realize experience.

There must be something, proto-experiential or experiential at bottom, or else experience is a miracle.

Chomsky takes the case that "radical emergence" is a common thing, such as when molecules combine to give rise to liquids. He says that liquid obviously emerges, but we don't know why. We have a theory for it, but we don't intuitively understand it.

So in the case of experience, Chomsky cites Priestley and says:

"Priestley rejects the conclusion that consciousness “cannot be annexed to the whole brain as a system, while the individual particles of which it consists are separately unconscious.” That “A certain
quantity of nervous system is necessary to such complex ideas and affections as belong to the human mind; and the idea of self, or the feeling that corresponds to the pronoun I,” he argues, “is not essentially different from other complex ideas, that of our country for example.”

p. 193

So there is something about physical stuff that leads, in very specific configurations, to experience, but we don't know what it is. Strawson thinks there's experience at bottom.

But what about relativity? Isn't it built on thought experiments that were later verified? At least some of our native reason works? — frank

Yeah. Einstein understood that Newton's laws could only go so far, it had problems it could not account for, such as the orbit or Mercury.

So Einstein's theory is better for many aspects of astronomy, including say, GPS. Though Newton's laws work pretty well for objects here on Earth.

That is correct. Chomsky, in this and other articles, thinks that Strawson's construction of materialism is one of the few that makes sense, given the definition and the claims made by the philosophy.

Stoljar too, to a lesser extent.

But, Chomsky doesn't agree with Panpsychism, because he believes "radical emergence" to be part of normal science.

Yes. Failing him and Hume, Locke, Priestley even, much later, Russell and many others.

Our common sense understanding doesn't reach into the depths of nature, but it was assumed to be true in some form, until it was proven false.

Now it may be easy for us to say "that's obvious", well, I don't share that. I don't think many of us (or any) would have come up with his equations and theory.

That the world doesn't make sense to us - in principle - was a big deal. But you still hear people talking about "materialism" and Newton's "mechanistic understanding" that was only disproven with QM.

That's the opposite of what happened, Newton overthrew materialism, and it has only gotten stranger since - further removed from common sense.

These are from the essay.

Yes and no.

Yes in so far as scientists don't worry about a theory making intuitive sense, for example QM and Feynman's quote about it. Of course, we can argue about which interpretation is more reasonable: Many Worlds, Copenhagen, Relational, etc.

No in so far as common sense understanding (folk understanding) is innate as linked in the post directly above yours.

A bit more on intuitive understanding:

https://cprtrust.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/COMPLETE-REPORT-Goswami-Childrens-Cognitive-Development-and-Learning.pdf

"Naïve or intuitive physics, rooted in the perception of objects and events, in general yields
reliable information about the structure and action of physical systems. However, in some
cases naïve physics gives rise to misleading models of the physical causal structure of the
world. For example, most children (and adults) employ a pre-Newtonian, ‘impetus’ theory
of projectile motion (for example Viennot 1979). Each motion must have a cause, and so we
think that if a ball is dropped from a moving train, it will fall downwards in a straight line.
In fact, it will fall forwards in a parabolic arc (Kaiser et al. 1985), as the moving train imparts
a force (Newtonian physics). "

- p.6

On Mysteries:

"Newton largely agreed with his scientific contemporaries. He wrote that the notion of action at a distance is “inconceivable.” It is “so great an Absurdity, that I believe no Man who has in philosophical matters a competent Faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.” By invoking it, we concede that we do not understand the phenomena of the material world. As McMullin observes, “By ‘understand’ Newton still meant what his critics meant: ‘understand in mechanical terms of contact action’.”To take a contemporary analogue, the absurd notion of action at a distance is as inconceivable as the idea that “mental states are states of the brain,” a proposal “we do not really understand [because] we are still unable to form a conception of how consciousness arises in matter, even if we are certain that it does.” Similarly,Newton was unable to form a conception of how the simplest phenomena of nature could arise in matter—and they did not, given his conception of matter, the natural theoretical version of common-sense understanding. Locke and others agreed, and Hume carried that failure of conceivability a long step beyond by concluding that Newton had restored these ultimate secrets of nature “to that obscurity, in which they ever did and ever will remain”—a stand that we may interpret, naturalistically, as a speculation about the limits of human cognitive capacities."

p.171

On Explanations:

Newton’s famous phrase “I frame no hypotheses” appears in this context: recognizing that he had been unable to discover the physical cause of gravity, he left the question open. He adds that “to us it is
enough that gravity does really exist, and act according to the laws which we have explained, and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies, and of our sea.” But while agreeing that his proposals were so absurd that no serious scientist could accept them, he defended himself from the charge that he was reverting to the mysticism of the Aristotelians.His principles, he argued, were not occult: “their causes only are occult”; or, he hoped, were yet to be discovered in physical terms, meaning mechanical terms. To derive general principles inductively from phenomena, he continued, “and afterwards to tell us how the properties of actions of all corporeal things follow from those manifest principles, would be a very great step in philosophy, though the causes of these principles were not yet discovered.”

p.172

That's about as far as I'll go, if you are interested then read on, if not, don't.

Sure. I mean most organisms that ever existed and still exist are very simple structures, lacking perception and reason. It seems as if intelligence, on the whole, is not good for survival, mammals tend to do much worse than bacteria.

I didn't mean faith in God. Having discovered that our ideas can be insufficient (as with gravity), we have to live with the possibility that out present common sense ideas are limiting our ability to know the truth. I don't know what to call that state of mind. You're right, faith isn't the word. — frank

I'm guessing that our intuitions do not go beyond what is needed for survival, so we can make sense of a prey chasing us or seeing an apple fall or guessing how far one would need to throw an item to hit a predator, etc.

Luckily, we managed to develop a science forming faculty, which allows us to create theories, which differ from common intuitions.

It's connected to the idea that the world can be fully known - completely, "in itself". It's not mentioned in this article, but one can point to Leibniz and others, who thought we could exhaust the truths about the world by paying careful attention to the phenomena we see.

I don't think it has much to do with faith, anymore, God doesn't figure in modern science. We try to put forth the best model we can, and when we create a model, we obviously have to set aside many phenomena that don't fit into this model.

Of course, it's remarkable that mere creatures like us could have any theories at all. There's nothing in evolutionary theory which would predict that we should be able to do any science at all. So it's amazing that we can do some of it, with significant depth.

Different people have different ways of approaching science. I think the issue here is one of having different takes on intuition. If you say General Relativity is more intuitive than mechanistic materialism, then we slightly differ in common sense understanding.

the world is the world. The modern version of this nonsense is asking whether "if the universe is a simulation" — Saphsin

It's very obvious know, with 300 years of accumulated knowledge.

I can only give you what I understand his view to entail. The point of this thread is to discuss the text.

Not for me to explain it in his words - for that you should read the text.

If you're not convinced by the outline, and think these are ramblings, then skip it.



Thanks. I spend a lot of time on it, part of my thesis after all. Also many emails and even a meeting.

But regardless, he is pretty straightforward. Some people don't like the idea, for some reason, that there are things we can't understand.

Oh well.

Exactly. The point is simple. We are biological creatures, like all other biological creatures, we have a nature. Dogs have a nature, birds have a nature, humans too.

Many things birds do, dogs cannot and vice versa.

Our mental capacities are also a product of natural evolution and biology. So there's two options:

Either we are capacitated with certain scopes and limits (this is needed to have a nature - if we had none, we would be a structureless "creature") which include our mental powers.

Or, we have the capacity, through hard work, to understand everything - because apparently the mind is not subject to biological constraints.

As he says somewhere, we have to distinguish "infinite" from "limitless". English is infinite. But it is not Greek. We can picture or imagine infinite things, it does not follow that we can imagine everything that there is in nature.

In any case, I'm off for the night. Thanks for posting that.

As I read him, his approach tends to be straight forward, he's always called it "common sense", and thought the term can be misleading, it's a good way to approach him generally. Understanding and explanation are related.

For him, as a scientist/philosopher, understanding is approached via "methodological naturalism": one studies all aspects of nature the same way, as a biologist studies digestion, so a cognitive scientist studies the mind.

The goal of scientific enquiry is to be able to provide a theoretical account or principle, usually as simple as possible but no less, from which predictions and observed phenomena can be accounted for - under the theory.

On this view, an explanation would be what is predicted from the theory. If the theory of General Relativity predicts that light will bend a certain way given how the sun interacts with a planet, then if the light bends in the predicted way, this counts as an explanation and is understood to follow from the theory.

How, with straight faces, can 'mysterians' even feign any confidence in – let alone understand – their own 'mysterianism — 180 Proof

He cites Hume, Locke and Priestley (among many others) who were wrestling with Newton's discovery of gravity. Prior to Newton, roughly from Descartes until Newton, understanding was taken to mean intuitive understanding: if a billiard ball hits another billiard ball, the cause was a direct contact.

On the old view of understanding, direct contact was how the world worked. It makes sense "folk psychologically" - to use that term.

Under this view, the material world, was understood as being a big machine, not unlike a clock which could be built by an artisan. The problem was that this manner of intuitive explanation, did not reach the domain of mind, specifically the creative aspect of language use which Descartes thought could not be recreated through an automaton.

Newton essentially believed this view, that the world was a clock-like machine. Only that when he discovered gravity he realized that the universe did not work like a machine, there is no direct contact. As Newton says:

"It is inconceivable, that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact.... is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it."

By "philosophical", Newton meant what we today call "scientific."

The world does not follow our intuitions. We now strive to get explanatory theories that explain aspects of the world, we no longer seek to understand the world itself, as Chomsky points out in the article.

So by "mysterian" (not a term he likes for himself), or "common sense", he simply means that there are aspects about the world we don't understand, given the creatures we are. Our intuitions mislead us into the nature of the world.

The mischievious thought that occurs to me is that perhaps what's being shown here is that matter is basically unintelligible — Wayfarer

That's actually not far from being the case, in fact it's a plausible reading of this paper.

About the world being unintelligible, in some sense yes: Chomsky mentions Wheeler's "It from Bit", which is a kind of idealist position. So it's an option for him.

I would agree with you that Chomsky at times is focuses on science for many philosophical positions, I'm more liberal and like ordered speculation so...

Getting through it but it's a dense paper. I'll read some more later. — Wayfarer

Your thoughts are always welcome.

I don't think he's advocating for "mysterianism" or mysticism. He's simply saying we have limits in our capacities to understand the world, and while we may not know exactly what they are, there are many hints. We seem to progress in some domains and hit brick walls in others, historically. — Xtrix

You're right to point that out. He always calls it "common sense", which is perhaps the one thing I'd disagree with him. Not because what he's saying is crazy, it's just that it to me it seems that such a designation can cause others to think that they're not being common sensical.

I think he should say he a "rationalistic idealist", as he labels Cudworth. Or a modern Cartesian.

The thing is that the name "mysterianism" has stuck, so, might as well use it.

So qualia is just like gravity in that we know about it, but can't explain it. For gravity, a paradigm shift was required to begin explaining it, but Newton didn't realize that. — frank

Hmmm. In a certain sense, though qualia wasn't a problem for them, in terms of how it is a problem for us in so far as it figures in the "hard problem".

Locke and Hume take them as properties of objects, given properties, obvious properties, forming part of our simple ideas or simple impressions.

Priesteley concludes, in essence, that we don't know enough about matter to say that matter could not be said to have mind, in certain configurations: any arguments to the effect that mind must be immaterial or non-physical is made out of ignorance, because we don't know enough about matter to say otherwise. That includes qualia, clearly.

If we transport Newton to our time, would he say rational people would reject qualia for lack of a physical explanation? — frank

I've read Priestley, Locke, Hume's Treatise and some Reid. The very clear impression I get from all of them, without doubt, is that qualia exist and are as obvious as anything we can know.

Locke very clearly says that we don't know how objects' powers could possibly cause us to see yellow or have taste.

They wouldn't reject qualia at all, they fully and obviously accept them, but admit that we don't know the explanation for them, it was obvious to those mentioned, perhaps with a slight qualification from Reid, though nothing big.

Thanks for this. There are many people who dislike Chomsky and perhaps will not engage with this in good faith. For my money, Chomsky is likely to be better informed and smarter than possibly everyone on this forum. We can't readily ignore what he says. I have seen his talks on this subject several times and subscribe low-rent mysterianism myself. When I get some time, I will attempt to read this and understand it, which may be somewhat more challenging. — Tom Storm

I think so too.

His views should be taken quite seriously as his breadth of knowledge is considerable.

Having said that, of course one if free to disagree and argue. So, no worries about the reading, give it a try, ask about any doubts - if they arise - and just enjoy.

No time pressure for this type of thread.

I should say, I appreciate the feedback and thought put into your answers, even if I disagree with some of it, you certainly posing good questions. Just wanted to say that.

Chomsky sees knowledge of what’s “really there” as grasping the deep principles at the fundamental baseline, what you call intuitive knowledge. — Saphsin

Well, towards the end of the essay, he ends up by quoting Wheeler's "It from Bit" doctrine, but doesn't signal if he accepts or rejects it.

but I have a hard time seeing if Newton was brought to the future, that he would not see it as a closer clarifying answer to what confounded him about Action at a Distance, it became less mysterious so to speak. It helped narrow our view about the nature of phenomenon, and that counts as an improvement of our knowledge of what’s “really there” as far as I can tell, and on the way it continuously redefines what we understand as physical/material. — Saphsin

Arguably, one can say that General Relativity is more "intuitive". One example would be that, we all feel time differently. What for me seems like forever as I'm in pain, for you passes in seconds as you stroll in the park - and yet only a minute passed for both of us.

In other respects, GR is not intuitive. I don't have the intuition that a body "shapes" the space time around it, it seems to me as if a body is simply there and space and time are around it. Which is strictly speaking false.

The intuition here, the one Descartes and Newton believed in (and the one which seems to be innate in us), is mechanistic materialism, the view that the world functions like a giant clock. The idea was that if someone could build something, that thing was understood.

Crucially, contact is needed from one body to move another body. This direct contact doesn't exist in nature. And in QM, you have people even questioning if causality exists.

The world is not continuous, we’re made of discrete atoms, spacetime is an entity and not just a construct of the mind as Kant thought. That this doesn’t count as knowledge of physical mechanisms if we don’t grasp causation all the way down strikes me as a rather extreme reductionist view of Chomsky’s. — Saphsin

The important part, I think, is that he's quoting Newton, Locke, Priestley and Hume and seems to agree with them in so far as the world not making sense in relation to our common sense, mechanistic intuitions.

I don't see him arguing for reduction, though he talks about the case of chemistry and QM.

Absolutely, it is knowledge of phenomena. The argument would be that we don't grasp causation in a simple case of a body moving (Newton didn't as quoted), never mind deeper principles.

Our intuition seems to be that of constant conjunction, as Hume pointed out, there's probably more than this to causation, but we can't prove it.

but to suggest that answering more and more of these small subquestions doesn’t give you a new perspective of those big questions, even redefining the big questions, is a claim that’s really odd to me. — Saphsin

That's not particularly relevant to the bigger picture.

You're right that we can get a bunch of data from all these fields and learn a lot, but we no longer have any intuitions about how the world works. Action at a distance was inconvenible to Newton because it wasn't materialistic, but now General Relativity and QM is even less materialistic in this sense, as it's much further removed from common sense understanding.

Yes these are technically examples of our limits of knowledge, but I don’t think that says much about our cognitive constraints, and definitely not generalizable to extent that it tells us lessons on where to pinpoint our limitations on answering some completely different question. — Saphsin

Sure, much of evolutionary evidence we just can't get given the paucity of the fossil record, so in this regard we can't answer certain questions, though this doesn't speak directly about constraint.

The example Chomsky uses in this article is about the "creative aspects" of language use, which interested Descartes and his followers, which don't appear to be within reach of scientific enquiry.

I can't speak of the technical aspects of linguistics, but I'm sure there are other, useful approaches not covered here.

In this essay, he points out that Newton himself realized that the way gravity worked was an "absurdity" and that no person who was of right "philosophical" mind could ever "fall into it".

The conclusion here being that the world does not work according to our common sense intuition and that the goal of scientific enquiry was henceforth lowered, from understanding the world to understanding theories of the world, which is quite different.

The case was that we thought we knew almost everything about the way matter worked, and were proven wrong.

There's also a reference to a paper by Lewontin, near the end, which also gives strong arguments as to what we cannot know about cognition, for instance. I could share the link, but I'd prefer to stick to this essay for a bit before branching out.

If we're not angels and have cognitive limits, there's no way to know and pinpoint how distant the gap actually is — Saphsin

I'm not sure I understood this. Angels refers to the beings people believed in back then, who had infinite knowledge, perhaps thinking of God or gods would be less confusing.

No... we are part of nature. That doesn't mean that the things we experience aren't a product of our cognitive capacities.

I'd be very conservative in what I'd attribute mind independence to.

Simply that a keyboard is also something which we construct in our cognition, there are no keyboards in nature. It's also an idea. Nothing beyond that.

We don't really understand why most animals (if not all) need to sleep. There are guesses having to do with repairing or optimizing neuronal activity, to save on energy use, etc. It certainly feels quite normal, and is rather great when waking up feeling well rested.

I think it may have been @180 Proof who pointed this out, but, Thanatos and Hypnos in Ancient Greek Mythology are brothers, suggesting that at least one culture suspected them to be similar.

One could hypothesize that being in a state of dreamless sleep "feels" - if this word can be used in this occasion - not unlike it "felt" prior to be born: nothing, so far as I can tell.

Of course, I betray everything when analyzing "nothing" using (human) experience. But, there's no way around this problem.

If sleep were "acceptance" of death, one would think people would not be afraid of death at all. That's not the case, as far as I can see.

Aren't you merely using the keyboard to state your thoughts? Are you merely expressing your thoughts about thought here via common language use? — creativesoul

The "keyboard" is a construction of the mind on the occasion of sense. I use it to try to approximate my thoughts via word use, such that what I'm thinking now can be evoked in your own mind when reading these words. It's not an exact science, far from it.

They've yet to have taken into proper account the differences between thinking about thought and thought — creativesoul

Could well be. It's already hard to talk about what thinking is. Thinking about thinking is ever more complex, but we seem to do it.

Well, I am a firm believer in a causal universe, so strictly speaking if by "random" we mean spontaneously formed completely devoid of prior influence, then I would say that there are no such thoughts. — creativesoul

Interesting. So on your view, most (if not all) our thoughts follow a causal process?

I can give examples that more or less follow. Suppose that right now, I have in mind an idea I'd like to convey. I have a computer at my disposal, obviously a keyboard, and some ideas in my head as to what I'd like to say.

In this situation, in which I'm in front of an object, with a goal in mind, I can find a connection between the ideas of transmitting these thoughts, via a keyboard, being careful as to avoid a typo and so on. I see individual letters in my keyboard, which I can use to form words that convey an impression from my head into yours.

This can be accounted for by the circumstances I'm in now. The ideas of a computer, a keyboard, letters and what example to use can be pointed to concretely to account for the connection of my thoughts.

In another circumstance, say I'm walking around in my neighborhood listening to music, I can be thinking of, the war in Yemen in one instance, onto the favorite part of the song that is playing, then thinking about Hume, my dinner with my friends and what I should do tomorrow.

In this latter circumstance, it's less clear to me how to account for how the ideas I have when walking and thinking form a connection or follow. It could be totally random. I'm a bit skeptical on this conclusion, but it's possible.

In any case, I'm off to sleep.

Here's the thing, I've repeated this too many times here, I don't want to bore people. Very briefly "materialism"/physicalism made sense back in the time of Descartes, it was mechanistic materialism, the world - heck the universe - worked like a gigantic clock.

But Descartes could not account for the creative aspects of language use, nor thinking in general, based on materialism, which is why he postulated the res extensa. This was believed by many, including Newton, until, to Newton's own dismay, he discovered that materialism is false, the world does not work according to mechanistic principles:

"It is inconceivable, that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact. That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance, through a vacuum... is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it."

With that, "materialism" collapsed. And hasn't been restated in an intelligible manner. Chomsky details this very lucidly.

You can say physicalism is whatever physics says. That narrows outlook not focusing on physics.

All thought consists entirely of correlations drawn between directly and/or indirectly perceptible things. Memory is but a repeat of correlations previously drawn. — creativesoul

Sure, this follows when dealing with "ordinary objects", what about between thoughts? How do we account for correlation here?

I work from a strong methodological naturalist bent. Dennett's work is impressive, however, I do not think that everything is physical. I would, however, readily agree that everything - including thought - depends on the physical. I also reject many another historical dichotomy, on the same grounds of inadequate explanatory power. For example, the subject/object dichotomy, the internal/external dichotomy, the mind/body dichotomy, the physical/immaterial, the physical/mental, etc. — creativesoul

It's terminological at this point. I think being a naturalist monist would be liable to least offense, depending on how you think of "the natural". If by the natural, you have in mind, everything that is, then fine, no problem. If by natural you mean, everything discovered by the sciences, then I think we restrict naturalism unnecessarily.

I believe I can understand, to an extent, that everything "depends on the physical" to mean that, the stuff that science describes, is fundamental and often provides the basis for which to proceed: neuroscientists study brains, cognitive scientists study photons hitting the eye, everything is made of the stuff physics describes.

Very very roughly put:Our thoughts connect us to that which is not as well as ourselves, by virtue of leading up to an initial understanding of the world and ourselves("worldview" is more palpable to me). — creativesoul

Replying very roughly too, I'd think we could say that we are frequently thinking, sometimes what we call "ideas" follow each other. If I'm thinking of fixing a wall, the ideas I may have of a hammer, a tile and glue, follow from this situation. Is this order necessary, in some manner? I think so, but it's hard to provide an explanation for this.

Other times, in ordinary life, I find that ideas simply "flow", thinking about say, Palestine, followed by thinking about perception and then thinking about my phone that just ringed, etc. There seems to be no order here.

I agree that thoughts connect us to ourselves and to the world. The problem is how to account for the thoughts I have and how do they connect to "me" and the world. On occasions an "physical objects" prompts an idea. The "me" is never too far off, in my experience.

That's my initial approximation.

To be more precise, I should've said what "principle" connects our thoughts, or even hazard to say what law. Of course, there's something in the brain that does this, but it seems to me we are in the dark here, because very little is understood about the mind/brain relation, outside of a dependency relation.

Who do you have in mind or what school of thought or theory do you have in mind when discussing these topics?

Sure, one need not agree with Hume's account of perception or the mind, to find merit in his thinking.

What he could not do, given his philosophy, is to find a "real connection" between thoughts, it was beyond him, unless he postulated what he calls a "fiction", meaning, more than is warranted by empirical evidence.

But putting aside his empiricism, he could not find a way to connect thoughts, he had to assume a connection. Sure, we can say that Kant might have solved this, or that connections are innate.

But his powers of reasoning was extremely sophisticated.

Point being, I don't see that we've improved on his reasoning in this topic, we don't know what it is that connects our thoughts.

I haven't heard Russell or Chomsky speak well of IQ tests, if that counts for anything. I consider both of them to be among the most intelligent of people in terms of scope and depth of knowledge and understanding.

My response was made to point out that no subject has an inherent level of complexity, and any subject can be understood and dealt with at differing levels of complexity, so that your argument just doesn't fly. That's the problem. An unspoken premise was false, if you want to get clinical. — Reformed Nihilist

I disagree.

I think topics that are up to empirical research definitely have an inherent complexity. When things get too complicated to a physicist, he gives the topic to the chemists, when the problem becomes too complex for the chemists they turn to the biologists, then the biologists turn to the psychologist, the psychologist to the sociologist, ending in the cultural critic or novelist.

It's because physics deals with simple structures that it is so advanced. They abstract away almost everything from the world.

But if you think that intelligence is inherently no more difficult than physics, then I think we're stuck.

Suppose I'm wrong and that IQ does measure intelligence. What good could it do, absent understanding aspects of intelligence for its own sake?

It could help organize schools in a different manner, thus helping some people, as happens in college with sports to an extent.

It might help recruiters in certain fields hire people more easily.

That might well be of some benefit to society.

We do things all the time that we don't understand. We don't understand art too well, yet we do it, we don't understand human psychology too well, yet we deal with people all the time. We don't understand how particles could combine to create colour experience, yet we see colour all the time.

We don't know what life is, yet we do biology. We don't know what mathematics is, yet we do extremely complicated theorems - at least some people do.

So yes, we proceed to work with what we're given and construct theories. The simpler the phenomena, the more developed the science is, hence physics is considered the star of the sciences. That doesn't mean there aren't plenty of important things to work on in chemistry or biology or all the other fields.

I don't see the problem.

The point about the "idiot", though rhetorical as you well point out, is that people who are fascinated by IQ tend to make these distinctions with more frequency than others.