What is mathematics composed of if not the visual of black scribbles on white paper? If you're talking about what the scribbles represent, then I would still assume that you mean something real and observable, for if you didn't mathematics wouldn't be of much use. — Harry Hindu

Yeah, mathematics refers somehow to the world. They're probably symbols, but obviously no paper is needed, for blind people can do math, they interpret the stimulus through another medium either sound or touch.

What is internal self stimulation and would the baby be considered "thinking" when in this state? If so, what OF? Does hallucinating and dreaming qualify as thinking? If anything this latter example is evidence that the brain needs sensory input to function properly enough for the entire organism to survive long enough to be meaningful. — Harry Hindu

Good question. We don't have a good enough definition or conception of thinking in normal states. If you push me for an answer, I'd say yes, the baby is thinking. About what, I don't know. The best I can come up with is some kind of activity, which seeks some patterns in the dark.

I think dreaming can qualify as a kind of thinking, hallucinating sometimes may count as thinking or not, depends on reflection and explicitness.

I just don't see how that could be. My point is that you can't have one without the other. What could you be intellectualizing about if you had no sense? What form does your intellectualizing take if not sensory data (qualia)‽ — Harry Hindu

It's unclear is this example would hold, but perhaps mathematics. Or, consider the following thought experiment: suppose a baby is put in a complete sensory isolation chamber, it's not inconceivable to me that they would have internal self stimulation of some kind. Of course, I can't say if this would happen, but it's possible.

[if] the world and mind are synonymous, then I don't see much use for the word, "mind", as there would only be a world and no mind and no we. Minds and we would simply be part if this strange world. — Harry Hindu

If that is the case, then what you say follows.

I don't think we are the world though, because if we were, I see no reason why we cannot, in principle, introspect to the bottom of things and figure out all the hard problems in physics by thought alone, absent experiment. Likewise with psychology, we would be transparent to ourselves, it seems to me.

The fact that we do need experiments and that the world science discovers does not work as our intuitive psychology thinks it does, suggests to me that many aspects of the world are hidden from us, and hence existent (in some admittedly obscure manner that's hard to verbalize ) independent from us.

Hmm, I'll take another stab at this topic. It's (thoughts) related to the term "mental", it's hard to given a definition of what thought is, without using substitute words related to it.

I like Strawson's definition here of the "mental", which is "occurrent experiential episodes". The happenings that go on in your mind now and the nows that go on beyond this instant, as you "focus" on them, constitutes mental happenings.

A thought would be a mental happening that has a (inevitably arbitrary) beginning and end point, which if someone asked you about it, you could say, I was thinking about how Airplanes go through clouds or how Descartes thinks of metaphysics, etc.

Of course, what we verbalize captures a part of what goes on in our heads, as we don't express colours and emotions and the like with mere words.

I thought they did not even know where he was buried. He died completely neglected.

It's fair that know he's recognized for all he did, which was quite a lot.

Ah. Gotcha. Yeah, that's true actually about "internal" and "external" word use. Having granted that, I think that we can mislead ourselves, when thinking a bit more reflexively, in speaking loosely of "external things".

In ordinary use, it's fine, we can speak of the things external to the house, or external to the relevant situation or even external surface, etc.

Why attribute the least things possible to objects? — frank

I meant that if we want to be scientific and try to speak of things independent of us, then we have to try to strip away those things that don't help us understand the phenomena.

If a given rock is 5 feet or meters away from me, the colour of the rock, nor its texture, nor its smell, matter in relation to the distance of the object.

Reminds me of Goodman's "irrealism" and his talks of versions.

I mean, we can do that, yes, but the thing is attributing the least things possible to objects, unless necessary to make sense of experience.

I actually don't mind labels much. As in, you can be a total idealist and say that we create the world with our minds. Or you can be a metaphysical dualist. If the arguments are interesting and persuasive, that's what matters. I only dismiss "eliminitative materalism", because it's just very poor philosophy.

Hmmm, I can see that argument. I think we agree that we have to consider sensations and intellect as different but closely inter-related "modalities" or "faculties", for lack of a better term. It could be that brains evolve prior to sense, it's possible.

Perhaps at some point "down the system" these things actually converge, in very primitive organisms but then they develop differently. The one thing that keeps coming to mind is that sense alone, is poor when compared to the intellect alone, in as much as we can separate them in actuality.



Oofff. Gets really complex here. I don't know how to express "here" mathematically. I guess if you add something in relation to you, say a Capital or mountain, then yes. But with nothing else to go on, over here is hard.

"There" can be expressed mathematically in so far as you have an object in mind which you can express in measurable units, as in, the Moon is 384,000 kilometers away from the Earth. But we remove here all phenomenal properties by saying this as a fact about the world.



Yeah. That's the elephant in the room. Didn't want to say this because then I'm put in a position of having to defend the existence of an external world, which I think should be taken for granted. But, it turns out, it needs a minimum of justification too.

While what you say is true, I assume that for reasons we don't know, these mathematical relations do hold to the extra mental world, such that it is true that there was a world 6 billion years ago and a "Big Bang" 13.8 billion years ago, not completely dependent on human beings.

Yeah but "over here" and "over there" are just as much mental attributions as colours are.

A different thing, in that it likely applies to the external world, are some aspects of mathematics.

Well, it's tricky. I believe they are external to me, that is something which existed prior to me, or human beings in fact.

We get into problems when speaking of "over there" and "next to me" or "close to my hand" and so on. If you aren't spatio-temporally located, how can you give coordinates to that rock?

From the Cicadas perspective where is the rock? At best you could say a Cicada would react to a rough surface of some kind, something with extension.

We can be confident abstract mathematical descriptions will hold of what we interact with, beyond that, it's very hard, because perspective must enter.

I think a big part of the problem here is in the use of the world "external".

"External" means, not belonging to me (or us) and thus, extra mental.

The objects we interact with directly (though mediated by our sensory organs and intellectual apparatus) are not "external" to us.

In fact, it leads to a kind of forced dualism which need not arise in these instances. Not that all dualisms are bad, but, they should be avoided when possible.

What seems to be external to us is the things physics talks about and describes, chemistry too. When it comes to biology, we begin to enter into complications about what's external or not.

An open question is if the stuff physics describe what's internal to objects or is it the external manifestations (atoms and particles) of something internal to the thing (whatever it is that gives rise, at bottom, to the things studied in physics) , which we cannot access.

It's tough.

Well, depends on the type of optimism.

If it's Leibniz optimism "We live in the best of all possible worlds", then yeah, that's quite stupid. Even geniuses as Leibniz undoubtedly was, say pretty silly things.

But then if a person argues for optimism as the basis for trying to get the world to a better place and thus not succumbing to authority and what is forced upon you, then that kind of optimism is quite sensible.

It's going to boil down to the type of optimist you have in mind.

What use are the senses without cogitation? What use is cogitation without senses? Brains evolved later from nerve nets. Feelings existed before integrating them into the whole of the brain. — Harry Hindu

I suppose a very simple species would avoid pain sensations. An ingrained habit from evolution. Unless one would postulate a cognition from the most basic organic entities, which, who knows?

What good is cogitation without the senses? Well, not entirely senseless, but look at, say, deaf-blind people, they can read by only pressing their fingers over bumps on a page and get an extremely rich story out of that.

So the senses can be extremely poor compared with the cognitive reply.

Yep, I agree. If it seems you are looking at a red apple or listening to a piece of music, you are looking at a red apple or listening to music.

But then let's say you're not, what you thought was a red apple was a red ball and what you thought was music was birds chirping. It's still the case that you experienced these things are a red apple and as music, even if it turns out what was there was something different from what you initially perceived.

The "seeming" language is used as an excuse to get rid of some hard problems, like having experience. Easier to do biology if you can get rid of experience theoretically.

I guess. I mean, it personally doesn't cause me difficulties, but then again, I rarely use the word because of all a sudden conversations like these pop up and are fraught with accusations of vagueness, confusing words with things, dealing with false aspects of the world, denying the utterly obvious and so on.

I personally like "manifest reality" or manifest properties, the given. They likely won't lead to a science as is currently practiced, but it's the stuff of novels, art, delight and so forth.

What I don't see productive at all, is not so much quibbling over the word qualia, but denying that we experience the colour red (like blood) or blue (like the sky) or a beautiful piece of music (Mozart or the Beatles or whatever) and such things.

It matters at the level of determining action, but the capacity to hold seemingly contradictory perceptions in the mind simultaneously (and without judgement) is the key to understanding. — Possibility

The use of ‘qualia’ as a consolidation of conscious experience into definable objects, seems to me a step in the opposite direction. — Possibility

Funny that you say that, I recently finished re-reading C.I. Lewis' Mind and World Order. He was the person that introduced "qualia" into the philosophical literature as we understand it today, and in effect, he was arguing that these things are helpful in so far as they are guide to actions.

As for "seemingly contradictory" perceptions, I think you are right. Language is good for ordinary use, it becomes problematic when we try to do some kind of metaphysics with it, we force the world to conform to word use, which need not follow.

Recognising categorisations such as better, naive, weirdness and sense as value structures under certain experiential conditions can help us to keep an open mind. — Possibility

I agree. And saying that all this is weird is just true, because it is.

We always have cognition, but sometimes we have cognition alone, meaning without perceptions. Any mathematics done in your head, without transferring it to speech or paper or whatever, is cognition alone. Something else that seems to have bit the modernization dust....a priori knowledge. Can’t see it, can’t smell it, can’t measure it, get rid of it. — Mww

It's interesting you mention math. I'm going down the rationalist road for the time being and questions arise. What you say is true, but I wonder how such a claim could be tested. In principle, yes, correct.

In practice, as in, imagining a baby locked in a space it can't move or have perceptions nor sensations other than darkness and growing in such horrid environments, would such a person develop math skills?

I guess it might, but I don't know. I think experience here plays some minor role in the flourishment of even basic math skills.

Maybe it’s as simple as hardware vs software. — Mww

Maybe. But it's not clear to me what is software and hardware here.

Mr. Mww, nice seeing you puzzled for a change. :cool:

No explanatory gap in sensibility? Well the senses themselves don't cogitate. So there's no puzzle by itself here.

With cognition, problems do arise. Why do we have these senses and not other ones? Why not just have cognition alone?

Most importantly, why is that what we sense differs so much from the phenomena that causes the sensing. Such as photons hitting the eye, looking red and blue. Or vibrations in the air sounding like intelligible words or music.

Vibrating matter feeling like clay, or wood, etc. , etc.

So yeah, it doesn't make sense from this perspective.

It is on the basis of the science of perception that we have come to see that this naive view is mistaken. On the other hand the naive view, for all practical purposes, is very close to our everyday experience, which probably explains why it is so hard to shake. — Janus

Fully agree. I was remembering a nice line from Cudworth saying "it's as if these objects taunt us", which they kind of do. I mean, we began this journey seriously, back in Greece when people noticed that a stick bends in water!? No, we see it bent, the stick is straight.

Fast forward to the scientific revolution and we see "action at a distance", which doesn't make intuitive sense at all, and it governs the planets, not only apples.

By now nothing makes sense, especially all this quantum weirdness. But as you say, we just can't shake off this naïve image. But if we lacked it, or any version of it, we would have no science.

It's very, very strange.

By the way, I was arguing with everybody/nobody not meaning to pick on you or anything, just to avoid any misunderstandings.

It's just that this topic becomes more controversial than it should be, in my opinion, in terms of doubting that we see colours or listen to music - in some obscure manner to be sure, it drives me crazy.

:wink:

end rant/

I don't have any problems with the way you are presenting (ha!) your arguments here. Like, we can say we directly perceive a river, by virtue of the way we are so constituted.

Or we can say we mediate our presentations and say our perception is indirect, if direct perception is taken to mean that what we experience in everyday life, is what exists absent us. Which makes no sense.

Representations in the Kantian or Schopenhauerian sense.

We do re-present what directly hits our eyes and ears into an intelligible image that we can understand. We take whatever is "out there" and make intelligible.

If we didn't "re-present", we would have no world and no cognition. Cognition is only possible given biological constraints. Or we could be an amoeba of some kind, but we're not.

Call it whatever you like, but the manifest world is the most clear thing we are acquainted with out of everything.

Just because we cannot give an account of how the stuff of physics could possibly result in colour pheneomena or sound phenomena or tastes or anything else, does not mean what's manifest is problematic.

It is only by studying the given that we have science at all, not the other way around.

Perhaps. But with distance comes time. Time is not with us.



What you say makes sense. The thing is, who would front the money?

You'd have to have a high percentage of trained people being sent anywhere in space, to be prepared for how to deal with upcoming challenges. So you can train the poor and disenfranchised, but the money is key.

The rich will do whatever they can. Either a remote luxury island, a bunker or a space hotel.

I suppose we have to go by "baby steps", next big thing is going to be the James Webb telescope. That's going to be really informative. One can only hope all goes well in launch and in destination.

I mean, the only evidence we have of intelligent life is here, with us being the only creatures capable of explicit reflexive consciousness. So if there is intelligent life out there, something of which I'm not nearly as confident as I used to be, then it would stand to reason that it would similar to us in several important respects.

One of those similarities, one would guess, are the basic needs of life. I don't know if we can or cannot trust ourselves.

I'm under the impression now that size matters. Once you're speaking about massive cities with tens of millions of people, sustained political organization seems ever more difficult, as we can see now.

But even this would not be the biggest difficulty, it's simply that space is so damn big. It would take 4.3 light years just to reach our nearest neighboring star system.

Andromeda, the nearest galaxy, would take 2.5 million years, travelling at the speed of light to get to. That's just too much.

Earthlings (baseline, unmodified by extensive biotech / nanotech) cannot live in space, only visit briefly if they intend to return alive (healthy) to Earth. — 180 Proof

Well, I mean, I know of some guy around here, like to throw knowledge around. I'd say that one can try to experiment living in space for a long time for memento mori. :joke:



Speculation here is pretty wild. I mean, the International Space Station worked relatively well for some time. But it seems to me that on practical affairs, we'd want to make the space travel we currently do, more comfortable and suitable for us.

Hell, going to Mars would take like 7 months in very close quarters with people you'd eventually want to kill or something.

Self sufficiency is still a long ways away on this planet, never mind Mars.

But this is crazy rambling really, I mean, we can't freakin' get together to beat a quite (comparatively) weakish virus (in terms of % death rates).

Doing something significant in Mars or the Moon, seems impossible....

You beat me to making this thread. Thanks for posting.

I'm quite excited to see what we may discover here.

:up:

A and D look to me as the least problematic or most attainable for a short term project, D in so far as shielding technology is concerned.

The James Webb telescope, due to launch in a few days, includes shields that will block virtually all sunlight to prevent it being fried by the sun, as it's going to deploy quite a bit removed from Earth.

I think we're going to be quite surprised to see what it discovers.

I said that a colony on Mars might not be the best medium term goal for space exploration, because of several quite severe complications associated with such a project as of today.

Maybe in some years it could be feasible. Maybe.

The politics is not possible to remove anywhere. I'd happily bump up NASA's budget to 2%-4% of GDP, and slash military spending 50%. This still guarantees the strongest army in the world by vast quantities and frees up money for people in need.

Besides fascinating priceless info, we might learn practical things here on Earth by continuing space exploration.

But any massive space program involving lots of people will involve politics, if a concrete actionable plan arises, then we can talk about political organizations and the like.

Everyone who says that we should focus on Earth is correct. It is not controversial and is evident.

What I'd like to point out, that does bother me quite a bit, is that there need be no mutual exclusivity between discovering and exploring space vs. taking care of things in Earth. What we as a society spend on Space related stuff is NEGLIBILE, compared to all the waste going to banks, military, etc. etc.

Keep in mind that NASA's budget, for instance is 0.5% of the US budget. That's nothing given how much money is used.

Having said this, maybe not a settlement on Mars, but having a concept of how to have many people survive in space for years, might be worth it. Not to mention all the wonder stuff with new telescopes and robots giving us priceless information on our universe.

It's often presented as if it's because we spend money on space that we don't have nice things here on Earth, which is just false. Space exploration is a human miracle.

Thomas Metzinger's magisterial Being No One (I highly recommend the less technical, much condensed summary version The Ego Tunnel). — 180 Proof

That I can agree with. :cool:

He's a very interesting guy. Not as well known as he should be.

Haven't seen popular work from him in good while though.

Isn't that person dependent?

I mean, we may want to be consistent on all areas of knowledge we know a little about but there may be no way of reconciling these areas in a consistent manner. As in, deep down there are say quantum fields and way above that atoms. But then I think that I can't deny that I see that red apple in the corner.

But atoms or fields don't have colour. I'd like consistency, but I can't find it here.

I think that, the more honest a person is, the more willing they are able to change what they think in line with new evidence, or, failing that, good arguments.

Russell did this a lot, and to his merit, acknowledged doing this. And he was an extremely important and productive thinker.

But consistency for the mere sake of it, may not always be attainable.

Very interesting breakdown. I'll have to get around to Schelling and Fichte especially, someday. Now I have a vague notion of what they're arguing for.

Much appreciated.

He does talk about it, but it is out of the custom that has arisen in philosophy, it's not as if he loves the use of the term. Not implying that you are saying this.



"Qualia" simply highlights the qualitative aspects of life, those aspects which we experience directly and immediately and form part of our ordinary life. That (a few) people consider something as obvious as this as problematic, is embarrassing. Here Strawson is 100% correct, I know of no other idea in the whole of philosophy that shouldn't be less controversial than this. It's astonishing that it can be a cause of controversy.

If the term is troubling, then you can say "sensible properties", or "appearances", manifest reality, etc.

Well, these things are inescapable. One thing is to claim neutrality from bias, another thing is to not have any, which is likely not possible.

It makes sense to think that personality factors into one's choice of accepted approaches to philosophy. How far does this factor alone determine these things, is likely not possible to say.

Paris is spatial. So is the sentence. You can't say "Capital of France" absent space. You need a world with people who speak to each other and can understand such things as "the Capital of France".

Another issue is if you want to say that the Capital of France is a property, as opposed to a fact.

The thing is that properties of objects are spatial. You may try to highlight a property, but it includes space, you can't take it out.

Changes can occur in the object, or in the perceiving subject. It depends on each specific circumstance.

It's a state you're in.

It is possible to be in peace and calm in a noisy environment. It's much harder to achieve, but doable.

Yes, you can find consistency and some scientists like to be able to think in terms of reduction. The thing is, almost all physicists would agree that, based on physics alone, you would never be able to predict a biological phenomena emerging, much less a complex mammal.

And we may call physics "physical", but I like to point out that these things are discovered through equations and then verified by observational evidence. The issue is that I cannot think of something less "physical" than mathematics. So we have an ideal theory formation (equations we come up with) combined with physical observation. Looks like messy metaphysics to me.



It's strange. I often feel I understand a human being better when I'm told why they did something, say, I discover John was mad or Jane was excited, because John was fired and Jane got promoted.

But this "understanding" is way different than understanding a scientific theory.

Science is a way to organize experience in a repeatable manner, such that we have some confidence in the mind-independence of some phenomena. Of course, this independence cannot fully be actualized, but postulated.

One problem with relying too much on science as a worldview is that it must overlook personal (private) experience. I suspect this is part of the reason why psychology as a science, has not made as much progress as other fields, the phenomena get too complex eventually.

I don't know if it's even possible to negate a metaphysical perspective.

:up:

The short answer is that we don't know.

A longer answer is that the term "identical" isn't useful here, a brain is not like experience. We in fact can see this empirically, we see brains outside of heads, lacking experience. Or in the cases in which a person is conscious and a surgeon sees inside the brain, the surgeon sees the brain as it appears to his experience, and not experience itself.

All we can say, at this point, is that the brain is a necessary condition for experience. But the how this is possible question, might well be beyond our capacities to understand, which is very plausible.

To the extent that you don't share or speak about your idea at all, then they belong solely to you.

As soon as you express it though and another person hears it, you'll be stuck with the problem of not knowing if your idea was tainted by another persons idea, which you forgot about, or absorbed indirectly. Most of the time, even when you do think you have a unique idea, then you realize someone else said it long ago, often (but not always) better than you did.

The really interesting issue, the really mysterious one, is a persons first idea. That one comes from within. The only "learned" thing here is the word you use, not the idea. Innate knowledge is very tough.

Fascinating.

Well, in a sense. I mean, everybody has a metaphysics, scientists included. They just don't have a particularly good metaphysics.

So take a scientists who believes in only what the evidence shows. The world is made of quantum fields. That's what the evidence says exists at bottom. It's a fluctuating space that vibrates. It's a physical thing that we'll never see, can only get at thorough (physical) mathematical equations and offers no hints that a rock, much less an organism would ever arise.

That is a metaphysical view. That's a strange belief to anybody, even if it has evidence.