• ernest meyer
    100
    Don’t make the mistake of assuming that this capacity to recognize feeling in music is either ‘innate’ or just a concatenation of reinforcement contingencies.Joshs

    I don't lol. Musical patterns are learned. Recently they found a songbird species that had forgotten its song

    https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-56417544

    Have a nice day )
  • Banno
    24.8k

    You have to say it three times to make it true. So copy and paste it again.

    On re-reading our discussion, I don't see what it is, if anything, that you are objecting to in either Strawson or Wittgenstein.
  • Count Timothy von Icarus
    2.7k
    I'll just leave this here for the universalists. What color is the dress?

    220px-The_Dress_%28viral_phenomenon%29.png

    I personally choose to deny the existence of qualia, mostly because mind body philosophy can get dense and produces the qualia of confusion in me.
  • j0e
    443
    Phenomenology starts in the wrong place and proceeds in the wrong direction.Banno

    As mentioned in another thread, consider the concept of lifeworld, which is maybe where phenomenology wakes up from its lonely dream.

    The concept represented a turning point in Husserl's phenomenology from the tradition of Descartes and Kant. Up until then, Husserl had been focused on finding, elucidating, and explaining an absolute foundation of philosophy in consciousness, without any presuppositions except what can be found through the reflective analysis of consciousness and what is immediately present to it. ...With the concept of the lifeworld, however, Husserl embarked on a different path, which recognizes that, even at its deepest level, consciousness is already embedded in and operating in a world of meanings and pre-judgements that are socially, culturally, and historically constituted. — Wiki
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeworld
  • j0e
    443
    Suppose you show me a sample of a red paint chip. I agree that this is what I call red, but this does not get us any further. What I am seeing, what it looks like to me is not something I can show you. We have learned to call this sample 'red' but this is as far as we can get.Fooloso4

    :point:
  • Olivier5
    6.2k
    following Husserl and Merleau-Pontus, the ‘physical’ is a higher order derived product of constitution, and can’t be used to ‘explain’ the fundamental basis of color in perception. .Joshs

    It cannot be used to 'explain away' perception in an eliminative manner -- one cannot say on the basis of one's perceptions, that perception is an illusion -- but I see no reason why one could not provide a reasonable account of biological processes involved in color perception, in an affirmative manner: "Perception works, and this is how it works, based on my perceptions" may be a circular argument but not self-contradictory.
  • Joshs
    5.6k
    I see no reason why one could not provide a reasonable account of biological processes involved in color perception, in an affirmative mannerOlivier5

    I guess what I’m saying is that we always have a certain account in mind when we think about what perception isor how we talk about the processes that precede something like perception historically , like the biological evolution of organisms, or something to which they can supposedly be reduced, like physical
    processes. So for instance to say that the perceptual can reduce to the biological and the biological can reduce to the physical presents us with a problem because we are not simply shifting our focus from one level of perspective to another, we are moving between accounts which I think are incompatible with each other. Why are they incompatible? Let’s take physics and evolutionary biology. Darwinian theory ground biology on a fundamental principle of the unidirectionality of time. Physics, meanwhile is still mostly in thrall to the notion that time is a human invention that is irrelevant to the understanding of physical
    processes. Only now are there some physicists , like Lee Smolen, who are insisting that physics needs to learn from biology and transform itself into a radically temporal account. I think there are similar problems in attempting to reduce perception to a biological account , unless that biological account has learned from constructivists like Piaget, Maturana and Varela.
  • dussias
    52
    is it some weaker claim about an innate ability to develop responses (or experiences) in such a way as to recognise a "rainbow" of distinct (and/or fuzzy) classes (of either stimuli or sensations) that may be different from our own rainbow? But independently of learning what to call them?bongo fury

    I think this approaches the solution.

    Conveniently, red is the color of blood. It's striking for us, nature decided so this color should cause such sensation.

    Now, we also know that colors are just different wavelengths.

    So yes, I'd agree that the answer for this matter needs us to separate rationalization from what we understand so far about nature (physics).
  • Corvus
    3.1k
    If you are a colour blind, you won't see red. It will appear as grey?
    In either China or Korea, colour red is symbolises blood, therefore death.
    They write dead person's name in red ink. It is taboo writing living person's name in red ink.
  • Olivier5
    6.2k
    unless that biological account has learned from constructivists like Piaget, Maturana and Varela.Joshs

    Exactly. A non reductionist account, an account of the mind that gives justice to it rather than try to eliminate it, is not logically impossible, whereas a reductionist account of the mind would be self-contradictory
  • j0e
    443
    Exactly. A non reductionist account, an account of the mind that gives justice to it rather than try to eliminate it, is not logically impossible, whereas a reductionist account of the mind would be self-contradictoryOlivier5

    For me the self-contradiction is best focused on language as a substitute for mind. For instance, why do we assume that there is one mind per skull? Why grasp the brain as a unity in the first place? Other ways of thinking are vaguely possible, and the mind-matter distinction itself has an inherited, cultural aspect. On the other hand the unreality of theory (of language) is more bluntly self-contradicting, along the lines of 'this sentence is meaningless.'
    EDIT: started a thread on Wittgenstein's Blue & Brown book which touches on this issue. I invite you to join.
  • Joshs
    5.6k
    For me the self-contradiction is best focused on language as a substitute for mind. For instance, why do we assume that there is one mind per skull? Why grasp the brain as a unity in the first place?j0e

    If we substitute the ‘I’ or ‘self’ for mind , then I think the issue of a unity comes down to whether perspective, interpretation and ‘ for-me-ness’ are fundamental features of any experiencing of a world. One would then have to examine how phenomenologists treat this idea of a primordial ‘self-awareness’ in such as way as to avoid the Wittgensteinian accusation of solipsism and internality (beetle in a box). I think they succeed at this, and in so doing enrich Witt’s account by integrating it with perception and temporality.
  • Fooloso4
    6k
    why do we assume that there is one mind per skull?j0e

    I am of two minds about this.
  • frank
    15.7k


    I have a question. If a person believes redness is essentially a linguistic trick, how does that work?

    If the toddler sees someone point to an apple and hears them say "red", doesn't the child need to have an experience of redness to associate with the word?
  • Isaac
    10.3k
    If the toddler sees someone point to an apple and hears them say "red", doesn't the child need to have an experience if redness to associate with the word?frank

    Why 'experience'? I can see why you'd need something to happen in the brain to attach the word 'red' to for next time, but why need this be an 'experience' (by which I assume you mean conscious)? Surely it could be any brain activity at all. The firing of some neuron in the v4 region would be sufficient.
  • frank
    15.7k
    How is the kid aware of this firing?
  • Isaac
    10.3k
    How is the kid aware of this firing?frank

    Do they need to be?
  • frank
    15.7k
    They need to associate the word with something.
  • Joshs
    5.6k
    As mentioned in another thread, consider the concept of lifeworld, which is maybe where phenomenology wakes up from its lonely dream.j0e

    Maybe not , but then its ‘lonely dream’ may be misunderstood by those who are wont to attribute it to an idealist solipsism.

    Husserl wrote this a few years before his death, in the midst of his so-called ‘life world’ period:

    “The epoche creates a unique sort of philosophical solitude which is the fundamental methodical requirement for a truly radical philosophy. In this solitude I am not a single individual who has somehow willfully cut himself off from the society of mankind, perhaps even for theoretical reasons, or who is cut off by accident, as in a shipwreck, but who nevertheless knows that he still belongs to that society. I am not an ego, who still has his you,
    his we, his total community of co-subjects in natural validity. All of mankind, and the whole distinction and ordering of the personal pronouns, has become a phenomenon within my epoche; and so has the privilege of I-the- man among other men. “(Crisis, p.184)

    “...it was wrong, methodically, to jump immediately into transcendental inter-subjectivity and to leap over the primal "I,"the ego of my epoche, which can never lose its uniqueness and personal indeclinability. It is only an apparent contradiction to this that the ego—through a
    particular constitutive accomplishment of its own—makes itself declinable, for itself, transcendentally; that, starting from itself and in itself, it constitutes transcendental
    intersubjectivity, to which it then adds itself as a merely privileged member, namely, as "I" among the transcendental others. This is what philosophical self-exposition in the epoche actually teaches us. It can show how the always singular I, in the original constituting life
    proceeding within it, constitutes a first sphere of objects, the "primordial" sphere; how it then, starting from this, in a motivated fashion, performs a constitutive accomplishment through which an intentional modification of itself and its primordiality achieves ontic validity under the title of "alien-perception," perception of others, of another "I" who is for himself an I as I am. ”(Crisis, p.185

    I have been arguing that this ‘solitude of the ‘I’ for Husserl is somewhat akin to the mineness of experience for Heidegger’s Dasein , not as a reified idealism but as a more intimate way to understand the perpsecrival
    nature of experience than through the Witt’s language discourse
  • Isaac
    10.3k
    They need to associate the word with something.frank

    Yes, I agree, but why an 'experience', was my question.
  • Fooloso4
    6k
    I have a question. If a person believes redness is essentially a linguistic trick, how does that work?

    If the toddler sees someone point to an apple and hears them say "red", doesn't the child need to have an experience of redness to associate with the word?
    frank

    I don't know what you mean by linguistic trick. Red is the name of a color.

    What is an experience of red? How does she know it is an experience of red? By comparing it to another experience of red? Does the toddler also have an experience of apple? Are these two different experiences?

    I would say the toddler sees this thing she learns is called an apple. She at some point also learns her colors. Being told the apple is red might be part of that process. It might go something like this: she is shown various things - "red wagon", "red shirt", "red crayon", "red apple." Rather than an experience of red I would say she is shown things that are red.
  • frank
    15.7k
    Yes, I agree, but why an 'experience', was my question.Isaac

    She just needs to associate the word with something. What do you think that something is?
  • frank
    15.7k
    would say the toddler sees this thing she learns is called an apple. She at some point also learns her colors. Being told the apple is red might be part of that process. It might go something like this: she is shown various things - "red wagon", "red shirt", "red crayon", "red apple." Rather than an experience of red I would say she is shown things that are red.Fooloso4

    She learns that the word is an abstraction?
  • Fooloso4
    6k


    When the toddler sees someone point to an apple and hears them say "red", how does she know this does not mean the object pointed to is called red instead of apple? If she already knows "apple" she might be confused or even laugh at the joke of calling an apple a red. If she already knows "colors" then she might know that you are not pointing to the apple but the color of the apple.

    The color is not an abstraction, but it not the object, not the apple.
  • frank
    15.7k
    I imagine it's partly mimicking speech, before understanding much of it, then moments of positive and negative feedback.

    I think all of this would come from spontaneous exuberance like what we might see in a baby lion learning to leap and attack. Something innate is being activated. In us, it's the capacity to symbolize.

    Once learned, it can't be unlearned to see how how it came to be, though.
  • Isaac
    10.3k
    She just needs to associate the word with something. What do you think that something is?frank

    This (massively oversimplified) model...

    A certain wavelength of light excites the retinal ganglia, which fires a part of the v4 region, which fires parts of Broca's associated with the word 'red', which creates a steeper action potential in the neurons that would make the mouth say the word red (but not enough to fire them)

    Meanwhile a desire to make the right sound (to please mummy) fires some neurons which also create a steep action potential in the neurons that make the mouth say (or imagines saying) the word red.

    Those neurons now fire (having two dendrites excited), the word 'red' is spoken.

    The child is aware of a desire to say the right word, will generally do so in response to a certain wavelength, but no 'experience' of red is necessary.

    The relation between 'red' and the word is carried by the ventral stream, the toddler's intent is only to say the right word. Only signals from both streams will be enough to get the word said.
  • Fooloso4
    6k
    I imagine it's partly mimicking speech ...frank

    Yes, only they do not think they are mimicking, they are speaking. I think they may understand
    ... before understanding much of it ..frank

    I think they may understand far more than we give them credit for.
  • frank
    15.7k
    The relation between 'red' and the word is carried by the ventral stream, the toddler's intent is onto say the right word. Only signals from both streams will be enough to get the word said.Isaac

    Cool. So later, while the child is playing with toy soldiers (as all american children do), her brother asks for the red soldier.

    Now it works in reverse. The word causes the child to seek the wavelength.

    This is wrong btw, but I'm asking if it's what you believe.
  • frank
    15.7k
    I think they may understand far more than we give them credit for.Fooloso4

    You're probably right.
  • j0e
    443


    Nice quote! Looks like things are messier than I implied.

    I have been arguing that this ‘solitude of the ‘I’ for Husserl is somewhat akin to the mineness of experience for Heidegger’s Dasein , not as a reified idealism but as a more intimate way to understand the perpsecrival nature of experience than through the Witt’s language discourseJoshs

    Fair enough, though I must say it's hard (for me, at least) to get clear on this 'mineness.'
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