Are Mathematics and Metaphysics "real" or "ideal"? — Gnomon

How about neither and we come up with a better word.

Is an electron a wave or particle? How about neither and we come up with a better word?

Is an electron a wave or particle? How about neither and we come up with a better word? — Harry Hindu

Some have proposed "wavicle". What do you suggest?
My question about Math & Metaphysics was philosophical, not scientific. So the distinction between Real and Ideal is relevant for a philosophy forum. :smile:

What is a wavicle?
"It is in your dictionary. Something which simultaneously had the property of a wave and a particle in physics. My physics class was over 70 years ago so I’m not up on that contradictory word. It is like saying something is frozen and liquid at the same time. Like an “honest thief”.

Its a rather pathetic attempt to assign one ( made up) word to the wave-particle duality of nature that is described in quantum mechanics mathematics. Wave–particle duality ___Wikipedia.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-wavicle

I appreciate your taking the time to lay all this out for me. Could I ask you to take this to a simpler level, and describe to me what you think happens when I imagine a purple cow? I'm still concerned about the hard problem, understood as the emergence of subjectivity (or the illusion of subjectivity, if you prefer) from chemical/neuronal activity,

It sounds like where we differ is that you want to eliminate the idea of a mental image altogether. I think there are plausible and persuasive reasons for doing this in the case of perceptions. But not for imagined or remembered images. If these experiences are not, in some ordinary-language way, mental images, then what are they? And how could they be explained away as being identical with their physical substrates? — J

I don't want to eliminate the idea of a mental image. The ability to imagine things is central in my daily work (architecture). Like most people, I have a limited ability to mentally imagine what complex and detailed buildings look like. That's why we draw sketches, renderings, use photos etc It's an interactive process between one's imagination and the feedback one gets from seeing colours and shapes. In this way it is possible to generate, revise, and accumulate knowledge of spatially complex and detailed buildings before they exist.

It would be impossible to imagine the complete building, or even a simplified contour without encountering problems. I can hardly imagine 5 or 6 features of my cat and rotate them sideways without forgetting some or having to start over again. The composition of this alleged mental cat seems disjoint or detachable unlike the continuous compositions of visible images. For example, I imagine looking closer at the imagined cat, but its features don't appear more detailed. It's more like a verbal description where the words have been replaced by memories of cat-features. Like the words in a sentence can be composed in ways that evoke feelings, memories of having seen cats can be composed in ways that evoke the feeling of seeing imagined cats.

Actually, direct realism is part of the hard problem. In asserting that you see the world as it is - as static objects and physical brains, and comparing that to how the mind appears and is described as being non-physical and immaterial is how the hard problem arises. — Harry Hindu

:roll: That's not direct realism. Why bother?

I asked you what an observer is, and you didn't answer the question. — Harry Hindu

For example, a bird observing its environment,, birdwatchers observing the bird, a prison guard observing prisoners, a solo musician observing his own playing, an audience observing the musician, scientists observing their experiments, a thinker observing his own thinking (e.g. indirectly via its effects).

This is a great description of what mental imaging is like, and accords completely with my own experience. But then what do you mean when you say:

A "mental image" couldn't even resemble visible objects such as cats or images — jkop

What it's like to see the cat is a feeling, not an image. — jkop

Doesn't your description contradict these statements?

I have quoted your question and my response in this thread as it is offtopic for this one.

Computers create models of the world. Does this mean that the computer can imagine things? What makes brains so special in that minds arise from them but cannot arise from a computer? Both are physical objects and both are doing similar things in processing (sensory) information. If a physical object like a brain can produce a mind, then why not a computer? — Harry Hindu

Computers operate according to the parameters, programming, and designs created by the scientists who build them. While it's true that large language models can generate unexpected insights based on their training data and algorithms, the key point is that these systems do not understand anything. They process and output information, but it's not until their output is interpreted by a human mind that true understanding occurs.

Additionally, I dispute the idea that the brain is simply a 'physical object.' The brain might appear as a physical object when extracted from a body and examined by a pathologist or neuroscientist. But in its living context, the brain is part of an organism—embodied, encultured, and alive. In that sense, it's not just an object but part of a dynamic, living process that produces consciousness in ways that no computer can replicate.

Ok, Husserl might not seem to be a dualist, but the assumption that consciousness is immaterial in the sense that it never appears as an object in a world of objects, implies an epistemological dualism, and the hard problem reappears. For if consciousness is immaterial, then it seems we have no way of knowing what it's like to be another observer, or how immaterial experiences arise in a material world. — jkop

Well, that's true! The whole point of the argument is to throw into stark relief a fundamental gap in the generally-accepted physical account of the world. It has been said many times that in the transition from the medieval geocentric universe to modern cosmology, that the world became concieved in terms which make life itself, and human life in particular, a kind of anomaly* (per Stephen Hawking's often-quoted quip that we're a kind of chemical scum on a medium-sized planet, or Steven Weinberg's remark that 'the more the universe seems comprehensible the more it seems pointless'.)

The point is, though, that the objective judgement of the miniscule dimensions of human life against the vast background of modern cosmology is existence 'viewed from the outside', so to speak. It is made from a perspective in which we ourselves are treated as objects. And that is a direct implication of modern objective science in which the measurable attributes of objects (mass, volume, number, velocity and so on) are declared fundamental and the appearance, colour, etc assigned to secondary or subjective status. It is a worldview tailor-made to exclude the subject to as to arrive at the putative, scientific 'view from nowhere'. And I think that is all the hard problem argument shows up - and it does so quite effectively (one reason why at any given time there are a number of threads discussing it.)

For idealists for whom everything is consciousness, the hard problem does not arise from a metaphysical or epistemological wedge. Likewise, it doesn't arise for direct realists under the assumption that we see objects directly — jkop

I consider myself idealist, but I also believe that all the objects I interact with are real objects. They're not constituted by mind, but on the other hand, they only appear and are meaningful within experience. That is what I mean by 'idealism', although perhaps it is closer to phenomenology. Whereas I have the sense that when you say 'idealism', you believe that it posits something called 'mind' which is constitutive of reality in the same way that 'matter' is for materialism. But that, I would suggest, is what Whitehead meant by the sense of misplaced concreteness, or the attribution of reality to abstractions (such as 'mind' and 'matter'). It's a reification.

Which leads to:

For example, a bird observing its environment,, birdwatchers observing the bird, a prison guard observing prisoners, a solo musician observing his own playing, an audience observing the musician, scientists observing their experiments, a thinker observing his own thinking (e.g. indirectly via its effects). — jkop

Splendid observation! This brings up the idea of the 'lebenswelt' or 'umwelt' which is very much part of both phenomenology and embodied cognition. They refer to the 'meaning-world' in which all organisms including humans orient themselves, where 'objects' appear in terms of their use and meaning for that being. Within that context, objects are no longer abstractions, but real and felt elements of lived experience.

Compare this passage from the phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau Ponty:

For the player in action the football field is not an ‘object,’ that is, the ideal term which can give rise to an indefinite multiplicity of perspectival views and remain equivalent under its apparent transformations. It is pervaded with lines of force (the ‘yard lines’; those which demarcate the ‘penalty area’) and articulated in sectors (for example, the ‘openings’between the adversaries) which call for a certain mode of action and which initiate and guide the action as if the player were unaware of it. The field itself is not given to him, but present as the immanent term of his practical intentions; the player becomes one with it and feels the direction of the ‘goal,’for example, just as immediately as the vertical and the horizontal planes of his own body. It would not be sufficient to say that consciousness inhabits this milieu. At this moment consciousness is nothing other than the dialectic of milieu and action. Each maneuver undertaken by the player modifies the character of the field and establishes in it new lines of force in which the action in turn unfolds and is accomplished, again altering the phenomenal field. (Merleau-Ponty, 1942/1963, pp. 168–9, emphasis added) — Quoted in Précis of Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, Evan Thompson

Notice that this approach undercuts the tendency to view 'consciousness' (or mind) as an object, state or thing of any kind. This is why the embodied cognition approach provides a solution, or remedy, to the hard problem, by showing up the artificial nature of the division between mind and world which is at its root.

------
*This is the thrust of an early (1955) esssay in the phenomenology of biology by Hans Jonas: The Phenomenon of Life.

The hard problem is more about trying to explain how color "arises" from non-colored things, like neurons and wavelengths. — Harry Hindu

You're drawing a bead on the center of the HPoC. As I understand you, the central issue is the question: How is the subjective experience connected to the physics presumed to be the ground for it?

My first thought (for an answer to your specific question about the experience of the color red in relation to a specific wavelength within the EM visible light spectrum) says "like the experience of
motion, the experience of color is due to a relativistic effect."

Einstein tells us that we only experience motion relative to other material objects either stationary, or moving at a velocity different from ours. If we're in a spaceship traveling very fast between planetary systems, inside the ship we don't known we're moving at all. Only when we look out through a window and see our motion relative to other material objects do we perceive motion.

Likewise, when we experience seeing red, it's because that specific wavelength stands in contrast to other wavelengths of visible light. Therefore, within the neuronal circuits of the brain wherein we interpret the specific wavelength for red, there's nothing therein that's red because the relativistic effect that supports our experience of red exists within the context of the visual field of our eyes, not within the neuronal circuits of the visual cortex of our brain.

The locality of the context of the relativistic effect of experiencing the color red, being separate from the neuronal circuits interior to the visual cortex, like the interior of the spaceship being separate from the external planets it whizzes past, raises the question of the connection between the physics of the brain and the cognition of the mind.

Likewise, when we experience seeing red, it's because that specific wavelength stands in contrast to other wavelengths of visible light. Therefore, within the neuronal circuits of the brain wherein we interpret the specific wavelength for red, there's nothing therein that's red because the relativistic effect that supports our experience of red exists within the context of the visual field of our eyes, not within the neuronal circuits of the visual cortex of our brain. — ucarr

But we can imagine and dream of red things. So it seems to me that the color red is the form visual information takes and stored as such for future use in making predictions about the world. For us to be able to apply what we predict to the world, our predictions need to be similar to what we attempting to realize in the world, or else how could we apply new ideas to the world?

Computers operate according to the parameters, programming, and designs created by the scientists who build them. While it's true that large language models can generate unexpected insights based on their training data and algorithms, the key point is that these systems do not understand anything. They process and output information, but it's not until their output is interpreted by a human mind that true understanding occurs. — Wayfarer

Humans operate according to the parameters, programming, and designs created by natural selection. How does an unconscious process (natural selection) create consciousness, but a conscious process (human minds) can't?

What does it mean to understand something? Searle said the same thing using the Chinese Room thought experiment, but all he showed is that the man in the room understands something. He understands the language the rules are written in and he understands to write this scribble when he sees that scribble. But these are not how one learns a language. If he had instructions that show what the scribbles refer to in the world rather than what to write when he sees that scribble, he would understand Chinese in the same way that native speakers do.

Additionally, I dispute the idea that the brain is simply a 'physical object.' The brain might appear as a physical object when extracted from a body and examined by a pathologist or neuroscientist. But in its living context, the brain is part of an organism—embodied, encultured, and alive. In that sense, it's not just an object but part of a dynamic, living process that produces consciousness in ways that no computer can replicate. — Wayfarer

Sounds like you are agreeing with me by describing the brain as a process or a relationship. :up:

Actually, direct realism is part of the hard problem. In asserting that you see the world as it is - as static objects and physical brains, and comparing that to how the mind appears and is described as being non-physical and immaterial is how the hard problem arises.
— Harry Hindu

:roll: That's not direct realism. Why bother? — jkop

In the philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind, direct or naïve realism, as opposed to indirect or representational realism, are differing models that describe the nature of conscious experiences; out of the metaphysical question of whether the world we see around us is the real world itself or merely an internal perceptual copy of that world generated by our conscious experience. — Wikipedia

If you're using direct realism in a different way then I would hope that you would explain.

I asked you what an observer is, and you didn't answer the question.
— Harry Hindu

For example, a bird observing its environment,, birdwatchers observing the bird, a prison guard observing prisoners, a solo musician observing his own playing, an audience observing the musician, scientists observing their experiments, a thinker observing his own thinking (e.g. indirectly via its effects). — jkop

All you are saying is that an observer observes. :confused:

Yeah, don't bother. :roll:

I appreciate your taking the time to lay all this out for me. Could I ask you to take this to a simpler level, and describe to me what you think happens when I imagine a purple cow? I'm still concerned about the hard problem, understood as the emergence of subjectivity (or the illusion of subjectivity, if you prefer) from chemical/neuronal activity, — J

I'm certainly not claiming that I am certain in what I am saying. I'm just trying to make sense of the mind-body problem by thinking that the problem is more of a language problem than anything else.

What I'm saying is that what you refer to as "chemical/neuronal activity" is just another process that lies outside of the process of your mind. We can continue to use those terms of "chemicals" and "neurons" but instead of thinking of them as physical things, we think of them as other processes. There are processes in the brain that are not related to our conscious mind. We can be unconscious and there is still brain activity. So when you imagine something your conscious process is accessing certain mental information stored in an unconscious process of your brain.

You might ask, 'Why would we need to be conscious of an imagining?" Why can't a p-zombie do the same thing but without the actual experience of imagining a purple cow? The answer is that I don't think the p-zombie is a valid argument. Blind sight patients still respond to their environment even though they don't have a visual experience but only to a limited degree. Blind-sight people do no behave in the same way than people that do have visual experiences. A blind-sight person would not be able to drive or operate complex machinery. Consciousness is necessary for learning and making predictions. It is a type of working memory. Just think of how you learn something and eventually become proficient at it. When you are learning something new you are fully conscious of what you are doing. You have an idea or prediction (which is the same thing as an imagining about some future state) about what you want to accomplish and use your senses to be aware of the current state and you process the information about how to get from the current state to the predicted state. You engage in certain behaviors to get to your predicted state and then observe the effects, and then try again (creating a sensory-behavior feedback loop) and again until you accomplish your goal. Once you are able to repeat the process to and continue to get the same results you become proficient at the task and eventually the information process is off-loaded to unconscious processes where you can accomplish those tasks without thinking much about it. Think about when you learned to ride a bike. You were fully conscious of every movement you were making and your balance in practicing to ride a bike. Now you can ride it without thinking about it, or without much conscious effort.

Because we evolved the ability to link different concepts together to come up with new ideas that can be applied to the world means that there will be times that our brains link together new ideas that cannot be applied to the world, or not in the way you might think. Can imagining a purple cow cause you to then paint a cow purple or genetically engineer a cows to have purple fur or skin? Imaginings, hallucinations and dreaming are these types of imaginings. Predictions are imaginings with some type of goal applied to them, whereas dreams and imaginings of purple cows are not.

Some have proposed "wavicle". What do you suggest?
My question about Math & Metaphysics was philosophical, not scientific. So the distinction between Real and Ideal is relevant for a philosophy forum. :smile: — Gnomon

The key to understanding the relationship between philosophy and science is to realize that philosophy is a science and the conclusions of one branch of the investigation of reality must not contradict those of another. All knowledge must be integrated. Dualism causes problems. Monism solves those problems.

What is a wavicle?
"It is in your dictionary. Something which simultaneously had the property of a wave and a particle in physics. My physics class was over 70 years ago so I’m not up on that contradictory word. It is like saying something is frozen and liquid at the same time. Like an “honest thief”.

Its a rather pathetic attempt to assign one ( made up) word to the wave-particle duality of nature that is described in quantum mechanics mathematics. Wave–particle duality ___Wikipedia. — Gnomon

Either we take the attributes of waves and particles that do not contradict each other and integrate them into what it means to be a wavicle, or we come up with another word. What about process or information?

Doesn't your description contradict these statements? — J

No. In my description of a mental visualization of what a cat looks like, I use the word 'feeling' instead of 'mental image', because the word 'image' is literally false in that context.

What's mental is the intent to find out what the cat might look like, which may feel like seeing, since it can be satisfied by one's ability to use memories and beliefs about cats. It can also be satisfied by doodling with a pencil on paper until the visible shapes of a drawn cat satisfy what you had in mind. But what you had in mind was never an image, only a hunch, a feeling evoked by the intent etc.

Those are mental states, and unlike visible images that can be used for representing things, mental states don't represent anything. Instead, they present what there is to see, such as images and cats.

One might add that the feeling of imagining a cat can become as immersive as the feeling evoked when seeing a real cat. AfaIk, it's the same part of the brain that is active in both cases. That's why hallucinations are possible, but also the ability to empathise and know what it's like to be another person or animal.

Therefore, it is possible to know, at least partly, what it's like to be a cat, or even a bat!

Additionally, I dispute the idea that the brain is simply a 'physical object.' The brain might appear as a physical object when extracted from a body and examined by a pathologist or neuroscientist. But in its living context, the brain is part of an organism—embodied, encultured, and alive. In that sense, it's not just an object but part of a dynamic, living process that produces consciousness in ways that no computer can replicate. — Wayfarer

Good point! As an isolated lump of neural tissue, a brain is similar to your computer analogy : it processes data, but does not "understand" its meaning in the context of the wider world. On the other hand, a human body is a multi-function organism that does more than just process data. It also converts Energy into Life, and Data into Meaning.

The "more than" is characteristic of complex holistic systems. Complexity scientists cannot currently track each path of energy/data in body/brain to produce novel sentimental conscious concepts about the nurturing-yet-risky environment. But they are working on constructing an informative model of such autonomous integrated thinking & feeling systems*1. :smile:


*1. The New Science of Consciousness:
Exploring the Complexity of Brain, Mind, and Self
https://www.amazon.com/New-Science-Consciousness-Exploring-Complexity/dp/1633882195

But we can imagine and dream of red things. So it seems to me that the color red is the form visual information takes and stored as such for future use in making predictions about the world. — Harry Hindu

...within the neuronal circuits of the brain wherein we interpret the specific wavelength for red, there's nothing therein that's red because the relativistic effect that supports our experience of red exists within the context of the visual field of our eyes, not within the neuronal circuits of the visual cortex of our brain — ucarr

Now we go deeper into the brain_mind interface. The experience of seeing red, like the experience of seeing animated graphic images on a computer screen, is an interpretation of code for the experience. The Graphical User Interface of images viewed on a computer screen is an interpretation of Java, C++, etc. When you look at the code directly, you won't see any graphic images. Likewise, when you study neuron synaptic firing rates, electric current and voltage levels in active parts of the brain, etc., you won't see any graphic images replicating the natural world. There's no analog simulation of the natural world within the databases of computers, and there's no analog simulation of the natural world within the brain.

To continue the parallel, consider the visual field of your eyes. As you scan the natural world around you within the visual field of your eyes, you're not seeing directly the actions of the rods and cones of your eyes, nor are you seeing the neural processing of your brain's visual cortex or other subsequent visual processing parts of your brain. Instead, you're seeing a composite simulation which is a product of the processing. In other words, the experience of seeing red, like all other experiences, compiles a construction that is a simulation of the natural world.

The translation from sensory processing to compiled-construction-as-experience raises gnarly questions about physico-material boundaries. This specific type of question is why we're participating in this conversation.

Consciousness is the spinner that enters the fray and sets the natural world spinning furiously through whirlpools of complex mysteries.

When you dream of red suns in galaxies light years away from you, are you lying entirely within your bed?

I have the sense that when you say 'idealism', you believe that it posits something called 'mind' which is constitutive of reality in the same way that 'matter' is for materialism. — Wayfarer

I mention idealism and direct realism as examples of philosophies in which the hard problem does not arise from splitting the world in two between body and mind.

Bishop Berkeley understood, correctly, that such a split makes no sense, so he decided to focus on the mind. Matter is not eliminated, but it's not fundamental. Mind is.

In direct realism, the mind is directly linked to the world. My conscious awareness of the world is the actual world, not a mental replica. There's no gap between my conscious awareness and the world.

If you're using direct realism in a different way then I would hope that you would explain. — Harry Hindu

In direct realism, the mind is directly linked to the world. The world that I'm consciously aware of is the actual world, not a mental replica. So, there is no gap between my conscious awareness and the world, and without the gap, there is no inexplicable relation to explain. The hard problem of consciousness is a problem invented by dualists.

... a human body ... converts ... Data into Meaning — Gnomon

When the brain converts data into meaning, do you think the process involves using one narrative (data) to generate another narrative-about-a-narrative (meaning)?

Is meaning a higher-order narrative of a baseline narrative (data)?

Is meaning a terminal lying distant from a data starting point?

If I write 2+2, that's a datum (it too has meaning, but for sake of simplicity, right now we'll only see it as a datum)?

If I go on from 2+2 to write: 2+2 = 4, that's a meaning?

Now we can ask, in order for an information processor to have higher-order meaning capacity, must it harbor an in-dwelling subjective self that endures through a continuous personal history?

A windblown rock hits a statue of a man in the face. That's a datum.

A windblown rock hits a living man in the face. Later, talking to his wife, he says, "A rock blew into my face today, and that's why I have a black eye."

Is the living man's statement to his wife the higher-order narrative, i.e., the narrative expressing meaning of the datum: a rock injured a living man's face.

So, meaning is interpretation of an event, with said interpretation operating within a personal identity who discovers meaning in events that s/he reconciles to, for specific example, its enduring interest in survival?

Does all of this suggest a higher-order memory function for spinning out narratives-of-narratives?

If so, why is this brain-centered higher-order memory function immaterial?

All knowledge must be integrated. Dualism causes problems. Monism solves those problems.
Either we take the attributes of waves and particles that do not contradict each other and integrate them into what it means to be a wavicle, or we come up with another word. What about process or information? — Harry Hindu

Yes! My personal worldview is Monistic & Integrated, and grounded on the 21st century science of Information. I call it Enformationism*1. From that perspective, I view quantum wavicles, not as material objects, but as mathematical (statistical) information*2, which is also the essence of Consciousness*3.

But another way to think of quantum reality is as a field of Potential that can become Actual : Quantum Field Theory. The monistic aspect of my philosophical thesis is that the world is all-Information-all-the-way-down. 21st century physics has equated Information with causal Energy*4, which is also transformable into Matter (E=MC^2). And ever-changing causal Energy (EnFormAction) can be described colloquially as a Verb*5. Does any of this make philosophical sense to you? :chin:


*1. Enformationism :
A philosophical worldview or belief system grounded on the 20th century discovery that Information, rather than Matter, is the fundamental substance of everything in the universe. It is intended to be the 21st century successor to ancient Materialism. An Update from Bronze Age to Information Age. It's a Theory of Everything that covers, not just matter & energy, but also Life & Mind & Love.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html

*2. Information :
Knowledge and the ability to know. Technically, it's the ratio of order to disorder, of positive to negative, of knowledge to ignorance. It's measured in degrees of uncertainty. Those ratios are also called "differences". So Gregory Bateson defined Information as "the difference that makes a difference". The latter distinction refers to "value" or "meaning". Babbage called his prototype computer a "difference engine". Difference is the cause or agent of Change. In Physics it’s called "Thermodynamics" or "Energy". In Sociology it’s called "Conflict". In language it's called a "Verb".
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html

*3. Consciousness :
Literally : to know with. To be aware of the world subjectively (self-knowledge) and objectively (other-knowing). Humans know Quanta via physical senses & analysis, and Qualia via meta-physical reasoning & synthesis. In the Enformationism thesis, Consciousness is viewed as an emergent form of basic mathematical Information : ratios & relationships.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page12.html

*4. How is information related to energy in physics?
Energy is the relationship between information regimes. That is, energy is manifested, at any level, between structures, processes and systems of information in all of its forms, and all entities in this universe is composed of information.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/22084/how-is-information-related-to-energy-in-physics

*5. One way to think of a Wavicle :
If everything is made of wavicles and vibrating all the time, then isn’t everything a verb?
https://www.reddit.com/r/AlanWatts/comments/ed2juy/everything_is_in_motion/

21st century physics has equated Information with causal Energy — Gnomon

So, you embrace the understanding information is physico-material?

Energy is the relationship between information regimes. That is, energy is manifested, at any level, between structures, processes and systems of information in all of its forms — Gnomon

So, in the case of an information field flanked by energy fields, we have a grouping of three energy fields, a two-plus-one with info being one type of energy and the flanks being another type of energy?

Bishop Berkeley understood, correctly, that such a split makes no sense, so he decided to focus on the mind. Matter is not eliminated, but it's not fundamental. Mind is. — jkop

And does that make sense to you? Does it seem plausible?