Verbal Comprehension
Perceptual Reasoning
Working Memory
Processing Speed — Reformed Nihilist

Thanks for the clarification.

If you can tell me what intuition is and how it can be recognized, it should be testable. Same goes for "street smarts" . I'm not sure that novelty by itself is something we usually associate with intelligence (any idiot can make a tuna fish and pineapple sandwich, that doesn't require intelligence, but it is novel). — Reformed Nihilist

Curious that you mention an "idiot" instead of a "person."

The thing that responses like this seem to fail to consider is that the world's best educated experts have spent entire careers on the subject of functional intelligence have over generations have crafted these tests to do exactly what you seem to think they can't, and your view appears to be based on a very passing familiarity with the subject. Why wouldn't someone who's spent their whole life on this subject have considered the objections you bring up? — Reformed Nihilist

The world's most educated experts have serious trouble accounting for the behavior of a single particle when it interacts with a receptor and a screen, in a field which is significantly more developed than psychology.

Perhaps intelligence is a bit more complex than a particle.

I assume I am mistaken in many things, this included. It's always a possibility.

There's no certainty in the empirical world.

I base my conclusion on the observation of what the test does. It asks questions pertaining to two domain within belong to what we tend to call "intelligence": verbal and mathematical.

Perhaps they've expanded recently and put in reading comprehension and some other things.

But I think it is evident that such a constraining circumstance can only account for a small fragment of what is called "intelligence". Street smarts, intuition, psychological acuity, insight, novelty, depth and a bunch of other factors are excluded.

Unless you are of the opinion that intelligence is that which the IQ test measures.

If the latter is your view, then it's no surprise you think IQ tests say much of substance.

I likely have a negative IQ. Cant count for shit, nor spel neither.

At best, such things can probably indicate that you are good in very specific situations of abstract reasonings. Maybe you have a larger vocabulary than other people and you can do some difficult math problems.

But to equate these two to something as complex as multi-faceted as intelligence is a stretch.

Doesn't matter much now, to my surprise, he's playing in the Open.

I should say, when dualism was seriously proposed - and taken seriously - it was done as a scientific move on Descartes part.

He thought he could account for res-extensa - matter - based on mechanistic materialism. However, materialism could not account for the creative properties of language use, nor for the mind more abstractly considered.

Out of other intelligible options, he did the sensible thing, he postulated a res cogitans, which would work with different principles than matter. But the goal was to provide a intelligible picture of the world, even if it was dualist in nature.

Now we know, due to Newton and others, than we do not know matter anywhere nearly as well as was thought, so (substance) dualism collapsed.

Which is only to say, that if dualism can coherently be re-articulated, in should be done so with the goal of explaining or providing a framework for phenomena which cannot be explained using the current methods we have.

But it shouldn't be done, in my opinion, as a move away from understanding, but as means of integrating knowledge.

If it had not been pointed out, I wouldn't have even considered there was "mistake" here.

The artist might care and maybe an avid fan, I don't think others would care much.

Not that it's ugly to me, I like colours, I just have trouble seeing what's artistic about this...

Absolutely.

I mean, not really knowing what makes up 95% of the universe is a bit of a problem. Hopefully James Webb can shed some light on that.

But the point remains, as you say, our faculties were "meant" for survival in the wild, not for scientific hypothesis.

I mean, I know it's easy to criticize but shouldn't he have settled on Federal law? That's the most important one, usually.

However this plays out, I would be shocked if they let Novak play, I don't think most fans at the Open would even want him at this stage of this drama.

Well, in Hume's famous Appendix to his Treatise, he concluded that:

"In short there are two principles, which I cannot render consistent; nor is it in my power to renounce either of them, viz. that all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connexion among distinct existences. Did our perceptions either inhere in something simple and individual, or did the mind perceive some real connexion among them, there wou'd be no difficulty in the case. For my part, I must plead the privilege of a sceptic, and confess, that this difficulty is too hard for my understanding."

Bold letters inserted by me.

He's probably right.

It was a relatively minor surgery. He was out partying when COVID first broke, didn't cry then when he helped infect a lot of people, as well as encouraging others through his example of not getting a vaccine.

Also seemed to be in a good mood the day after he tested positive and was around other people, without a mask.

If he has a legitimate medical issue for not doing so, fine, then state it. If not, then that's a problem given who he is.

What a clown. Good. People with that level of influence have more responsibility.



Hmmm, interesting. I suspected something of the sort, in terms of him being a big name draw, and hoping most people would turn a blind eye to him coming in. They did not count on omicron, which really made people mad, with good reason.

I mean, surely the Victorian government looks to be somewhat culpable here and even more so the actual tournament, who would want Djokovic in, since Federer is out, and Nadal is rusty.

Sure, there's some bit of not-good looking PR in the whole situation. But I think that had Djokovic team been more thorough, they would've noticed that he did not have sufficient documentation for clearance in all levels of government. He posted in his Instagram that he had exemption like a day, or even mere hours, before taking the plane.

His wife I hear, is quite loony with alternative medicine, and his father is just crazy. Djokovic cried when had to take a minor elbow surgery, that's how much he dislikes modern medicine...

One aspect which is interesting is the way that languages vary unlike mathematical ones, like numbers and the basic principles of mathematics. — Jack Cummins

Strictly speaking, mathematics is not a language. You can say "mathematics is the language of the universe" in a poetic sense, and that's perfectly fine and legitimate. But it's not to be confused with an actual language with syntax, phonemes and all the other technicalities belonging to linguistics.

I do wonder how the basic ideas seem to have a certain universality but with different expression in the many languages. — Jack Cummins

That's an excellent question. I think Chomsky is right here, the different languages human beings use are rather superficially different, though to us the differences seem immense, but we have many of the same basic concepts, RIVER, MOUNTAIN, LOVE, TRIBE, FRIEND, ANIMAL, etc.

It's quite mysterious, related to innate ideas in some manner.

It could be asked how such similarities and differences come about. In some ways, it is about naming of objects in the physical world, but it is also about abstract concepts — Jack Cummins

Yep. It is curious, why so many different ways of talking about essentially the same things. When it comes to abstract concepts, almost nothing is known, it's very sophisticated and complex.

@Banno@Wayfarer@StreetlightX

Since ya'll from Down Under. I wanna know, do you think Djokovic's lawyers stand a chance appealing the governments decision?

To be clear, I'm not a fan of his and I think he's a clown on this - and other topics. But, that's neither here nor there. Come Monday, he should be out or what do you think?

We know a little about language, not much. I think it's "primary" use, so to speak, is to articulate thought to oneself.

Communication is done by all animals, and they don't have language, if by language we have in mind what people do. So, language can't be about communication, it would be superfluous.

Consciousness is a process of the brain, which we don't understand much at all. One can call it "physical" or "ideal", doesn't matter much what it's called. Our views about experience need not commit us to an ontology.

Yes, I agree, Dennett does appear to articulate a strain of thinking which is misleading, imo, but, influential nonetheless.

This variant is pretty crazy, everyone is getting it. At least it's less bad than Delta, but mutations are already arising.

It's incredible that we are still at this stage of things. Forget about "cooperation" with Global Warming, we can't deal with this BS.

Unreal.

I have to say, your post-quality ratio is truly impressive.

Nearly every post you make is full of extremely interesting, well thought out information.

It wouldn't be philosophy otherwise.

Is there any experience without acquaintance with nature, or any acquaintance with nature without experience? I think experience is just a word to denote that we have awareness. — Janus

True, I use experience so to avoid saying "consciousness", and to a lesser extent "awareness", as they are used too frequently.

I think technically, what you say is correct. We have acquaintance with nature in so far as we can experience parts of it. But parts of it must be outside our experience.

To my way of thinking the so-called "hard problem" is a kind of illusion based on thinking that what matter is is clearly understood; that it is something like "dead" particles that could not, according to our conception, possibly give rise to what we think of as "immaterial" subjective experience. — Janus

100%

That's actually historically accurate. Locke speaks about this extremely lucidly in his Essay. A lot of what he said has been forgotten.

I shared a quote here by him, though the whole chapter is fantastic:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/387/tpf-quote-cabinet/p11

The hard problem then seems to me to be an expression of incredulity based on ignorance. — Janus

You're speaking about this better than me. Yeah, I think we sometimes verge on the fallacy that we know so much, when I think it's the opposite. Which makes what we do know all the more impressive. There's no reason why a species should understand anything about nature.

I can go along with attributing a form of DID to everyone.

But not to nature. We don't know if nature is intrinsically like or unlike experience, so it seems to me to anthropomorphize nature in the extreme, to speak of objects as "alters".

Maybe neutral monism is a better metaphysical model/position than either idealism or physicalism, if this is the case. — Paul Michael

Yeah either neutral monism, or naturalist monism.

As you can probably tell, Dennett is pretty divisive. Personally, I don't think he makes sense. So I'll skip commenting on him, don't want to ad-hominem just because I don't like that type of thought.

I think the interesting fact about consciousness and language is that we don't have a good way to talk about ideas absent language. I think it's clear to many of us (if not most), that ideas are one thing, language is another, but as soon as we'd like to speak of ideas, we use language.

There's plenty of stuff we can't talk about, language fails to capture many experiences accurately. Other times, we can express subtle experiences through language use.

As for culture, who knows? It's what we're in all the time, but the only thing I can say about it, is that it's whatever is peculiar to us as about another group of people. Otherwise, it's the same.

Aha. Now we are getting each other.

People who reject physicalism and, for example, adopt monistic idealism (á la Bernardo Kastrup) claim that consciousness/experience is fundamental to reality itself as a whole rather than generated by the brain. — Paul Michael

His is a very interesting case. He makes some good points, I mean, it is true that in terms of acquaintance, we are best acquainted with experience than anything we study in nature.

However, it seems to me that if consciousness were as fundamental as he says, we should be able to introspect and know everything about the world. And there's lots of things to say about unconscious brain processes which are far more prevalent than mental states.

Just look at the reports of people who have taken large doses of psychedelics, for example. The chemical directly interacts with the brain, as can be observed by neuroscientists, and they all report extreme changes in their experience. These reports are pretty convincing to me that the brain generates experience. — Paul Michael

An "idealist" can say that chemicals are the way nature looks like to an experiencing being who is not aware of this. All psychedelics do is show how what we take for granted is actually a product of mind.

A "physicalist" can say, as you point out, these are just chemicals, and attempt to verify this claim by looking at brain scans.

It leaves the status of experience exactly as it was, "metaphysically neutral", as it were.

Sure, a blow to the head can alter experience pretty substantially, as can a shock to the brain and so on.

No, I mean, I personally don't have too much issues with "qualia", but it seems to me *some* people here start arguing about the term, which I don't see the point of.

So I speak of seeing outside your window, listening to music or tasting chocolate. If people have trouble with that, then we aren't going to have much of a conversation.

That is to say, we don’t need to know the manner in which the brain gives rise to experience in order to know *that* it does. — Paul Michael

Sure. That makes sense. It's assumed to be the case, because what other option exists? Surely experience is not in my finger, or nose, or leg.

I think it's a kind of massive epistemic gap. We can say some things about the human body as well as physics, we can say some things about the brain as a biological organ.

But the difference between looking at neuronal activity in a person and actually having the taste of chocolate or listening to you favorite tune, etc. is just enormous. We lack intelligence to know how this is possible.

But I'm a bit peculiar on this topic. :cool:

Most problems in understanding the world are "hard problems".

Anyone can use whatever vocabulary they see fit, I'm thinking qualia here is just a very loaded word. We all have experience, we can see outside our window and see a blue sky, or a green tree or a person walking around.

We can listen to music, etc. No problem with that.

We know way too little about the brain to think about how the brain interprets a stimulation as an ordinary object.

We have problems with the behavior of particles, much simpler than a brain. So, it's not surprise we can't say much about something as complex as seeing another person or looking at the sky, etc.

It's basically a sensory overload in which we are tricked into believing these things have shape, colours, speed and the like. Combine that with adrenaline and dizziness and you have yourself a well pulled off magic trick.

:wink:

No killing intended, messenger or OPs.

However, if rollercoasters are immune to the status of illusory entities, then I say we have a problem, because I don't know how one can ride one, if there's no time involved.

Perhaps.

But then what isn't?

What's unreal about time?

I suppose we could speculate on the whole "time before the Big Bang" topic, if that even makes sense. But that aside, I don't understand what unreal time means.

We are wayyy too far from understanding the brain to be able to say that we have an explanation for consciousness.

If the behavior of a particle is giving us serious trouble in physics, I don't think the human brain is likely to be "solved" any time soon.

Damn. That's a lot, significantly more than my family, and we live pretty comfortably.

I mean, Marx is simply just very well known, there's also the whole anarchist tradition in philosophy to consider such as Bakunin, Proudhon, etc.

It's interesting to note that, Descartes and Hume were relatively right wing figures, as was Schopenhauer. But we also have to consider cultural factors of the time, such as the Church and a different mind set too. Not that culture isn't a massive issue now.

As to your questions, well, you have a lot of freedom. You can donate to organizations and political movements and the like, find candidates that are actually good instead of typical politicians.

Nearly finished with Locke's Essay. This last bit is taxing, as he gets quite repetitive towards the end.

But, having said that, damn, what an impressive piece of work. Most of it holds up remarkably well 400 years later. Surely worth the time investment, I'm a huge fan now.

If my brain doesn't melt when I'm done, next up is:

Hume's Treatise.

Currently Reading:

Brunists Day of Wrath by Robert Coover.

We can't escape outside of our bodies to see what's out there. And even if we could, by some miracle, do so, it wouldn't change what we would consider to be valuable intrinsically.

Plainly we value things. Some things we value more than others, say we tend to value memorable experiences than staring at a wall and so on. The problem is trying to articulate a sound argument as to why X should be considered more valuable than Y.

I guess my issue is, what's the problem that's causing you to ask this question? Is it something along the lines of, "why don't people care more about politics than celebrity" or "why don't more people value art than gossip" or what?

Yeah, I remember reading about that, big woops.

Well, they're as prepared as can be. The die's been cast.

At least it'll be halfway to L2 in three days or so. It should be fully deployed a few days after that, but then calibration and getting the equipment in working condition will takes months.

Nothing compared to the wait for Pluto, but much more significant, or so we hope...

:up:

That's a lot.

But, given how much they've tested it, I doubt they'll have significant problems. So far, so good.

"Is there any principle in all nature more mysterious than the union of soul with body; by which a supposed spiritual substance acquires such an influence over a material one, that the most refined thought is able to actuate the grossest matter? Were we empowered, by a secret wish, to remove mountains, or control the planets in their orbit; this extensive authority would not be more extraordinary, nor more beyond our comprehension."

- David Hume

:ok:

"Our knowledge being so narrow, as I have shown, it will perhaps give us some light into the present state of our minds if we look a little into the dark side, and take a view of our ignorance, which being infinitely larger than our knowledge may serve much to the quieting of disputes, and improvement of useful knowledge...

He that knows anything, knows this, in the first place, that he need not see long for instances of his ignorance...

The clearest and most enlarged understandings of thinking men find themselves puzzled and at a loss in every particle of matter... all the simple ideas we have are confined... to those we receive from corporeal objects by sensation...

But how much these few and narrow inlets are disproportionate to the vast whole extent of all beings, will not be hard to persuade those who are not so foolish as to think their span the measure of all things...

But to say and think there are no such, because we conceive nothing of them, is no better an argument than if a blind man should be positive in it, that there was no such thing as sight and colors, because he had no manner of idea of any such thing, nor could by any means frame to himself any notions about seeing.

The ignorance and the darkness that is in us no more hinders nor confines our knowledge that is in others, than the blindness of a mole is an argument against the quicksightedness of an eagle."

- John Locke

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 4.3.22

What's the technically most difficult part, is it this deployment or is it something upcoming?

Good to see the mission going as planned.

It's what we are most intimately acquainted with out of all phenomena, but is most difficult to say anything which is not trivial or obvious.

Being stuck to this, it seems to me that thinking is an activity of the brain, which accompanies self-reflection and is carried out almost constantly in waking life, and if you count dreams too, then it appears as if we think most of our lives.

When we say we had a thought, we imply we are taking out a slice of the activity of thinking and articulating it specifically, and so it "freezes" thinking in place.

As for "philosophy", this becomes terminological more than factual, and we tend to say that certain types of thoughts pertain to issues continuing to the beginning of humanity: what is a self, what is the will, what is an object, what is the right thing to do, what is experience, and so on.

It's interesting. I mean, if anyone take some gas or drug that makes them feel like they're having a deep experience, does that make it any less significant? Not attributing this to you, by the way,

Sure, you may write non-sense - it also happens when people have deep dreams, that is, writing something silly. But I wonder if someone having a "genuine" would not write something similar at the moment of the experience.

But even if it did happen like this, I think this points to a distinction between the moment of experience and the way we reflect on it when feeling "normal", two different "worlds" as it were.

The question would be, if these experiences actually tell you something deep about the world or something deep about the mind, which is a part of the world, sure, but not the world itself, in a way.

These issues of loss of ego, I think I can understand them, I've been close to having such experiences. They were quite powerful when I had them, but, I cannot imbue them with more significance than the moment I had them, in terms of me saying something like "the world is essentially spiritual" or "seeing the mind of God" or how fleeting everything is.

I think people can confuse the moment of the experience with some deep truth. But, I may be wrong here.