Such a statement can certainly be corroborated (just ask people). Being corroborated isn't a good criteria for truth (e.g., eye witness testimony corroborates the assertions of prosecutors, but is often shown to be inaccurate when the witness didn't previously know the suspect). Ostensible reasons for something = apparent reasons for something, not (or at least not necissarily) the true reasons for something, so I doubt that's the criteria you want to use.

"Subjective consensus," is what lies at the heart of any measurement in the sciences. People agree a thermometer reads 18 degrees Celsius, and that the movement of mercury up the tube accurately reflects heat, etc. When there are controversies in the science, it's often because there isn't subjective consensus on the validity of a measure.

Is your contention that you can't make factual statements about popular opinion?

That's all I was commenting on. I mostly agree with your position, except that, to the extent that phenomenology would be the study of consciousness as it appears to conciousness (how introspection appears to the thinker), people's statements are valid data.

Edit: I should note that vague predictions, inability to explain exceptions, and lack of explainable mechanisms for why a theory holds have all applied to Newtonian physics and genetics. Meanwhile, pseudosciences such as phrenology have had empircle data, testable hypotheses, mathematical complexity to their theories, journals, peer reviewed articles, and the trappings of science.

Unfortunately, the clear dividing line is somewhat elusive as respects what science is. However, I'd say falsifiability is a necissary condition, hence why I'm not sure phenomenology is going to meet the bar without essentially becoming psychology.

It's tough because you have a mix of cases of science just being wrong (N ray radiation) versus pseudosciences (astrology), but parsing them can become a mess.

I suppose a further objection type/substance dualists would have is that claims that studies of the subjective are not scientific, are not studies of nature, are question begging because they assume the subjective world isn't an essential part of nature. I find these objections particularly convincing given all that can be said about how conciousness misrepresents nature, but it is a tricky argument to defuse without getting bogged down.

Apparently, our standards of 'evidence' are incompatible which leaves us talking past one another. As a (methodological) naturalist, and not an idealist of any flavor, I do not find anything to be gained by discussing, in effect, whether or not 'phenomenological exercises' yield propositional statements; so let's agree to disagree, Count.

No more than, for example, traffic lights "cause" drivers to step on the breaks or the gas. Simply put, they are only signals which inform habits, and when circumstances warrant they can be overriden (ignored), unlike "causes" which cannot. — 180 Proof

This^ contradicts this:

The "chain of events" would be unbroken but otherwise, that is, it'd remain first-order (i.e. meta-free). — 180 Proof

In the first quote, the signals do play a significant role in the story of how the brake gets pushed; or in the eating example, hunger plays a significant role in the story of how we come to eat. Whereas in the second quote, it plays no role at all. Distinctions on the meaning of 'cause' or appeals to meta levels don't help you it seems to me. I think you think the phenomenal affects the physical.

EDIT: I'm actually quite interested in what Apo has to say about this. He'll give us some stuff about downward causation no doubt. Anyway, let's attempt a summons.

*casts Protection from Evil*
Throws giblets on the brazier

@apokrisis, you are needed

Hola Apo. What say you?

This^ contradicts this:

In the first quote, the signals do play a significant role [ ... ] Whereas in the second quote, it plays no role at all. — bert1

That's because, there is no signal in the second instance as you say

If you took out the signal, the chain of events is broken, no? — bert1

so, on the contrary, my position is consistent.

In the first instance the event happens 'because' of the signal, or at least the signal plays a role, in the absence of which the event would (likely) not happen. But in the second, we have no signal, but the event happens anyway. In the first you are saying that the signal plays a (likely essential) role in the event's occurrence, in the second, the event happens anyway even though there is no (likely essential) signal. That's where I'm perceiving a contradiction.

Are we managing to talk to each other? I think it's going rather well so far, for us.

In the first instance, bert, "the event" happens "because" the driver responds (by reflex) to a signal which itself does not "cause" the event – it's incidental, not "essential". In the second instance without the signal to the driver, there would be no interruption by the driver (i.e. stepping on the brake or the gas) of "the chain of events" – process – already happening (i.e. vehicle moving or idling).

Are we managing to talk to each other? I think it's going rather well so far, for us.

:up:

The problem with things like traffic lights "causing" anything is that the propositions almost always end up relying on counterfactuals.

Example: If the car would not have stopped if the traffic light was not red, the light played a causal role in stopping the car.

These sorts of counter factual, x-marked conditionals, play havock on formal logic systems. There isn't a clear way to decide the truth status for something that doesn't exist (see: "the current King of France is bald.")

This is why logical positivists relied on statements along the lines of "a substance is conductive, just in case an electrical current is applied to it, and the current flows through the object." Classical if/then statements in natural language don't have to worry about these sorts of counterfactuals since plenty of us feel fine using them, but if you're obsessively trying to ground scientific theories, as the positivists were, this is maddening.

Two things worth considering though:

A. The positivists were able to make enough "just in case" statements to feel they had grounded theories that would allow for traffic lights having a "causal" relationship with stopping cars (they might shy away from the word "cause" though.)

B. Later innovations in using statistical methods to vet x-marked conditionals for "other possible worlds," made the whole problem less of a concern (depending on who you ask).

The problem I see with drawing a distinction between semantic or signaling factors in potential causality versus more obvious physical causes is:

A. Assuming signaling somehow can't have causal import seems to suggest it isn't physical. This might by a pathway for unintended dualism in your system. Elimination has to suggest an alternative physical mechanism that plays these roles, which is hard to do, and it's unclear that even hardline reductivism requires getting rid of signaling or information as concepts in the first place

B. Signaling clearly occurs at obviously physical scales (neurotransmitters, cytokines, logic gates in computers) and it becomes impossible for multiple sciences to function without it as a concept.

C. If you can't form causal connections using abstract signals (e.g., prices) then economics, international relations, social psychology, etc. all become meaningless. But then you have the problem of how they predict physical outcomes as well as they do.

Oh well. lucky you for being so young, then.

C. If you can't form causal connections using abstract signals (e.g., prices) then economics, international relations, social psychology, etc. all become meaningless. But then you have the problem of how they predict physical outcomes as well as they do. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Speaks to the uselessness of what passes for philosophy in our culture.

Caveat: correlation =/= causation ... maps =/= territory...

(Just a reminder, gents.)

Thoughts don't exist IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD, but the brain does. — god must be atheist

:up: (Esp. for using capital letters! :smile:)

Well, that would be a hardline take no one in the philosophy of science actually goes all in on, from what I'm aware of.

Even under the strictures of the old "received view" of scientific theories, you can include these abstractions as part of a theoretical or observational lexicon. You can use operationalization to get around concerns over too much abstraction, and thus dangerous metaphysics leaking into your theories.

The consequence of the received view is just that it can't be said that things such as quarks or leptons exist. All that matters is that they are efficient predictors. Oddly, the most die hard advocates for strict logical grounding and empiricism managed to work their way into a highly pragmatist view of theories, which quite funny when you think about it.

There is a reason this sort of thinking died an ignominious death though.

Right. The map accurately representing the territory is an auxiliary hypothesis. You build your theories out of auxillary hypotheses that operationalize what you want to measure. Per Popper, these auxillary hypotheses need to be independently falsifiable, else you can always explain away bad predictions.

You need auxiliary hypothesis to get anywhere outside basic truth statements about raw sensory experience (which we now know to often be falsifiable themselves). Otherwise, a thermometer isn't a real measure for heat, a scale isn't a real measure for mass, and now something as elementary as Boyle's Law is meaningless.

The problem with things like traffic lights "causing" anything is that the propositions almost always end up relying on counterfactuals. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Can't we just say that the changing light causes a mental state that then causes the person to brake?

Not as a true proposition in the form of "if p then q," since people can run red lights. You also have the problem of the truth value of statements about things that did not occur, such as "if the driver had noticed the light then they would have stopped," since there is nothing they can correspond to.

You can certainly build up to a logical statement that explains how traffic lights can stop moving vehicles, but it requires a lot of auxiliary hypotheses and premises.

However, you run into the problems highlighted by Quine in his Two Dogmas of Empiricism. For one, that you end up needing an endless and circular chain of auxiliary hypotheses to build up your theory, or that seemingly analytic facts/relations of ideas, may in fact just be dogmas.

Sciences also use a lot of analogy, and they use a lot of entities that are isomorphic in nature, such as information, turbulence, etc. Building up definitions for these is difficult using predicate logic. People moved on to using mathematical logic, since it is more flexible, but there are still problems.

As far as science is concerned, I am more on the side of pragmatism on these matters. Although, the endlessly fascinating layers to the natural world, the recursive self similarities of chaos, the protean flow of information as fundemental to the behavior of physical objects, does get my fascination with Hegelian "the truth is the whole" Absolute Knowing going.

I can only hope that I'll one day be apart of a universe fully conscious of its own phase space, having attained the Absolute, pure Gnosis, or some sort of crazy sounding shit like that, .

I think it's one of the reasons for the emergence of bio-semiotics which I've learned a lot about on this forum from Apokrisis. It revolves around the
production and interpretation of signs and codes and their communication in the biological realm:

A. Assuming signaling somehow can't have causal import seems to suggest it isn't physical. This might by a pathway for unintended dualism in your system. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right. And biosemiotics is dualist, although not 'substance' dualism:

All signs, symbols, and codes, all languages including formal mathematics are embodied as material physical structures and therefore must obey all the inexorable laws of physics. At the same time, the symbol vehicles like the bases in DNA, voltages representing bits in a computer, the text on this page, and the neuron firings in the brain do not appear to be limited by, or clearly related to, the very laws they must obey. Even the mathematical symbols that express these inexorable physical laws seem to be entirely free of these same laws. — Pattee

Great reply!

I'm still trying to work out what @180 Proof is actually saying.

I gave hunger as an example of an explanation for behaviour. 180 said that hunger was no more a cause of eating than a traffic light is a cause of hitting the brakes, it being a signal.

But it seems like a bad analogy to me because a traffic light is absolutely critical in the chain of events leading to hitting the brakes. And if the analogy is good, then that means that hunger is absolutely critical in a full explanation of why I eat. And hunger is a feeling. So we have phenomenal experience causing physical actions, in some sense of 'cause' at least.

So I'm struggling. I'll read over the conversation again when I get to a proper computer in case I'm misinterpreting (again).

I'm not sure what maps and territory have to do with anything. If someone could explain I'd be grateful.

The thing that jumped out to me is the claim that causes can't be ignored, while hunger and red lights can. Made me think of positivism and the need for "if p then q" not to be conditional, to hold its status in logical notation such that "if p then always q." Predicate logic can tolerate conditionals ("just in case p and r and s, then q") to be sure, but it can't tolerate modality that well.

That might not be where he is coming from, but it seems related as an issue when you talk about showing cause.

But I'm not sure what he's saying either.

I do see how such claims could work though. If you take a (somewhat) nominalist view of material entities' attributes, then names for complex phenomena will invariably be imperfect constructs, maps instead of the territory itself. The idea of signaling is protean in the sciences and comes in myriad disparate physical forms that are simply not the same thing.

You have the flip side of Kant's transcendental: cognitive models of cause are always filtered through faculties and abstraction, and so don't reflect the reality of actual entities. You're not getting to the real causes when you use imprecise stand-ins for entities and their behavior such as "signaling."

The problem I see here is that this issue is equally true of all scientific/factual statements. Every claim requires auxillary hypotheses for its premises to hold and they all use such stand-ins. That and physics doesn't work without the ability to arbitrarily define systems. It also requires an observation point that represents a physical system itself to avoid violating its own rules (magical observers that can move faster than light, access information without having to store it physically, etc. have caused all sorts of problems for the field but are incredibly difficult to avoid).

We probably shouldn't worry too much about our observational biases. If external objects are real, we must be getting information from them somehow, and we have to be storing that information physically. Recursive representations of the enviornment are the only way a system is knowable.

The thing that jumped out to me is the claim that causes can't be ignored, while hunger and red lights can. Made me think of positivism and the need for "if p then q" not to be conditional, to hold its status in logical notation such that "if p then always q." Predicate logic can tolerate conditionals ("just in case p and r and s, then q") to be sure, but it can't tolerate modality that well.

That might not be where he is coming from, but it seems related as an issue when you talk about showing cause.

But I'm not sure what he's saying either.

I do see how such claims could work though. If you take a (somewhat) nominalist view of material entities' attributes, then names for complex phenomena will invariably be imperfect constructs, maps instead of the territory itself. The idea of signaling is protean in the sciences and comes in myriad disparate physical forms that are simply not the same thing.

You have the flip side of Kant's transcendental: cognitive models of cause are always filtered through faculties and abstraction, and so don't reflect the reality of actual entities. You're not getting to the real causes when you use imprecise stand-ins for entities and their behavior such as "signaling."

The problem I see here is that this issue is equally true of all scientific/factual statements. Every claim requires auxillary hypotheses for its premises to hold and they all use such stand-ins. That and physics doesn't work without the ability to arbitrarily define systems. It also requires an observation point that represents a physical system itself to avoid violating its own rules (magical observers that can move faster than light, access information without having to store it physically, etc. have caused all sorts of problems for the field but are incredibly difficult to avoid).

We probably shouldn't worry too much about our observational biases. If external objects are real, we must be getting information from them somehow, and we have to be storing that information physically. Recursive representations of the enviornment are the only way a system is knowable. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Thanks, that's interesting. A bit too abstract for me though. Not sure I understand you.

If matter is all that exists, what about the fact that we conceive of the world this way? Isn't this what Kant is getting at?

If matter is all that exists, what about the fact that we conceive of the world this way? Isn't this what Kant is getting at? — John McMannis

If conceptions of the world were always present in the world, then unicorns would be real. That's why Kant was not very good at this philosophy thing.

A=A. Valid and Sound
A=B . Not Valid, Not Sound

Kant postulaed that there were propositions that were known to be true without needing to verify them. Propositions we knew the truth of before hand, like: Some objects are heavy.

This proposition doesn't require you to verify, you know it is both valid and sound without thinking about it. He called this "a prior synthetic knowledge." If that sounds like complete horseshit, you'd be correct, it is complete horseshit. Each of the words in the proposition have already established meaning within your linguistic paradigm, in association with things you have actually verified first hand. You have experinced the difference between certain objects regards to weight, and have verified such long before you saw the proposition. Meaning it's a completely made up concept, like quite a good deal of what he said.

Isn't this what Kant is getting at? — John McMannis

Gotta be pretty careful about “what Kant is getting at”.

If matter is all that exists, what about the fact that we conceive of the world this way? — John McMannis

We conceive of the world.....what way? Conceive of the world in a material way?

Care to elaborate on what you’re asking about conceiving the world and what Kant was getting at?

I believe most materialists would have some knowledge if not a complete one of the opposing worldviews. For a materialist to have absolutely no knowledge of the opposing worldviews would be, interesting, much so in the age of the internet. So perhaps there is meaning in discussing it with them. It's not that they actually can't see, they certainly can see, unless they are truly blinded. Instead they chose actively to ignore the "otherworldly" and thus they do not see. And anything is meaningful if you can make it meaningful. Though on this particular case, what purpose do you want to achieve by speaking about materialism to materialists?

(Thank you for your response to the topic.)

perhaps there is meaning in discussing it with them. It's not that they actually can't see, they certainly can see, unless they are truly blinded.
Instead they chose actively to ignore the "otherworldly" and thus they do not see ... — IP060903

That could be true. Only that, in my experience, they are absolute and unmovable from their position. Indeed, they act as being "blind", although actually they are not, as you say. I mentioned also that they can even get "hostile" --something which unfortunately I have met quite a few times in conversing with them. This is usually a trait of persons who are wrong and they know that, as you mentioned too. They are just defending themselves. And this, because they either don't have "a case" or sound arguments or any arguments at all to defend their position. Moreover, they usually ignore some of my basic questions-arguments, most probably because they don't have a (plausible) answer.

So, I believe that a discussion under the above conditions has no meaning. It's just a waste of time.

what purpose do you want to achieve by speaking about materialism to materialists? — IP060903

None! :grin: I personally, don't speak about materialism to materialists. As I explained above, they are usually not willing to accept or consider or even listen to anything that suggests or even proves that not everything is matter or based on matter. It's a dead issue. Materialism itself is dead. And this was the subject and purpose of this topic.

t's not that they actually can't see, they certainly can see, unless they are truly blinded. Instead they chose actively to ignore the "otherworldly" and thus they do not see. — IP060903

Isn't that just a nasty piece of unnecessary ad hominem with no evidence supporting it? What evidence do you have that they choose not to see?

Pardon me if you consider that as an ad hominem and an unnecessary one at that. However, I cannot apologize for another reason that is I don't consider it as an ad hominem. My words can certainly be interpreted as an ad hominem, but I myself interpret something as ad hominem if they directly attack the person, that is to make an actual moral evaluation of their character in an attempt to derail the argument. If you have your own argument on why my statements are ad hominem, please tell me and I will consider my words once more.

In my defense, my words are not ad hominem because I am simply describing the phenomenon of the matter, or at least an interpretation of the phenomenon. I am also not attacking anyone at all, I am merely describing things in my view. So I find it interesting that you would accuse me of ad hominem.

The evidence that I have that they choose not to see is frankly simple and non-existent at the same time. It is non-existent as they will say that they do not see not because they choose not to see, but because there really is nothing else to see according to their opinion. Yet in simple view, many other people do see something else than just matter stuff, are you willing to categorize these people as being deluded, in a morally neutral way, and say that they are just making stuff up?

Interesting, though I would ask in what way is materialism dead?

In my defense, my words are not ad hominem because I am simply describing the phenomenon of the matter, or at least an interpretation of the phenomenon. I am also not attacking anyone at all, I am merely describing things in my view. So I find it interesting that you would accuse me of ad hominem. — IP060903

You could have made the point you just made in two sentences instead of three paragraphs. :wink:

The evidence that I have that they choose not to see is frankly simple and non-existent at the same time. It is non-existent as they will say that they do not see not because they choose not to see, but because there really is nothing else to see according to their opinion. Yet in simple view, many other people do see something else than just matter stuff, are you willing to categorize these people as being deluded, in a morally neutral way, and say that they are just making stuff up? — IP060903

This paragraph is incoherent to me, sorry. Do you want to try again or shall we move on?

Near as I can make out, it sounds to me like you are being disrespectful to other's experiences and attributing base motives to people and the position they hold based on nothing but some kind of confused smear. Are you saying they are lying? I can't see how this is any more rigorous or useful than an atheist accusing a believer of following childish fantasies because they can't handle real life.

I must apologize for my incoherency or my seeming disrespect. I hold no disrespect, only disagreements. However, if my words indicate any disrespect, I apologize. I do not say they are lying, because I believe they are sincere in their words. Also, I think it's better we move on, I do not see the value in trying this over.