Observation is a noting of information. Interaction is a reciprocal action. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think Terra is referring to the very specific and unusual use of the word 'observation' that is employed in quantum mechanics to refer to what is sometimes called 'collapse of the wave function'. Under the 'decoherence' view, which I think is accepted by a majority of physicists, that refers to an extremely rapid interaction between the microscopic quantum system that is the subject of attention and the relatively enormous, macro system that is the scientific equipment used to record information about the micro system. The macro system usually includes a person looking at what is recorded by the equipment, but it doesn't have to.

You are right that that has very little commonality with the everyday use of the word 'observation'. It's a common practice in science, for better or for worse, to take everyday words and assign a special meaning to them in the context of a very specific scientific context.

I should add that not all physicists believe that decoherence fully explains 'wavefunction collapse', and some of those physicists believe that consciousness is involved, which gives an interpretation more similar to the everyday one.

Physics itself is silent on which interpretation is correct, or even preferable.

The macro system usually includes a person looking at what is recorded by the equipment, but it doesn't have to. — andrewk

I'm happy to accept this idea if it is right, but I don't understand it. How could it ever be known that 'it doesn't have to', because even if there is a macro system that performs a measurement without a person, we can't know that the measurement has actually collapsed anything until we look at the macro system, at which point we become part of the system? No doubt I've misunderstood something and am happy to be corrected.

I don't remember anyone saying we were "simply apes" — Baden

In the context, it was a discussion about whether, or in what sense, modern physics tends to support a kind of idealist philosophy (which is suggested by some physicists). That opens up many questions about ontology, mind, matter, and so on. So the remark about us being 'moderately clever apes on a watery rock' was made in response to that, I think to kind of deflate or debunk the suggestion. More broadly, I concur with the traditional philosophical view that there is an ontological distinction between humans and other creatures, which however is derided as being 'human exceptionalism'. It's one of the implications of naturalism that humans must be understood as being part of nature, and so in some sense continuous with their primate forbears. To say otherwise, I am told, is to 'hate nature' or 'denigrate nature'. There are of course many further things to unpack there, but I don't think I will pursue it at this point as it is a separate (but equally vexed) topic.

I think Terra is referring to the very specific and unusual use of the word 'observation' that is employed in quantum mechanics to refer to what is sometimes called 'collapse of the wave function'. Under the 'decoherence' view, which I think is accepted by a majority of physicists, that refers to an extremely rapid interaction between the microscopic quantum system that is the subject of attention and the relatively enormous, macro system that is the scientific equipment used to record information about the micro system. The macro system usually includes a person looking at what is recorded by the equipment, but it doesn't have to. — andrewk

Each, the micro system and the macro system are constructed so as to interact. So the human involvement in the interaction is not restricted to whether or not there is a person looking, just like the human involvement with the robot who picks up the gun and shots someone is not restricted to whether or not the robot gets found out by the police.

I should add that not all physicists believe that decoherence fully explains 'wavefunction collapse', and some of those physicists believe that consciousness is involved, which gives an interpretation more similar to the everyday one. — andrewk

Consciousness is definitely involved, because the conditions of 'wavefunction collapse' are artificial. Human beings are messing around, experimenting in the creation of micro systems. These systems are far from natural, and scientists have little if any means to relate the information gathered from these experiments to anything natural, due to ontological deprivation.

Human bias and partiality is not limited to the limitations of our senses. Bias also stems from our opinions and beliefs. And what else is the 'human perspective' if it isn't (at least in part) our opinions and beliefs? [It's what you said too, but as well not instead.] — Pattern-chaser

Sure. I know there are other biases. But I am heading for one's that are so built into the body, I think they cannot be denied or avoided. that we happen to experience the universe with time not as a dimension of space but as something unfolding. But certainly all sorts of paradigmatic, cultural and psychological biases enter into scientific research and affect it. One can try to minimize that stuff. One cannot minimize the fact what I mentioned. At least, I don't think one can.

Ok, I'll leave my defence of our apehood at that. It is more or less off-topic.

But there is - which is the reflexive problem of 'the eye not being able to see itself'. We can't stand outside ourselves, or outside reason or thought, and see ourselves. We're always the subject of experience, and the subject is never an object of perception. This is the topic of the paper I mentioned by Michel Bitbol, It is never known but it is the knower - the title more or less serves as an abstract! — Wayfarer

That's the dualism that I pointed out earlier. Bitbol moves from the unproblematic example of an eye's blindspot to positing a world of appearances:

If we move anywhere even by thought or by imagination, we are still in our Umwelt; we are still thrown into the world of appearances. — Bitbol

science implicitly depends on the human perspective.
— Andrew M

You can say that now, but I bet if we had been having this conversation a couple of decades ago, it would have been fiercely contested. And really this whole debate is about making the implicit, explicit. — Wayfarer

The history goes back further. This is just the difference between Platonic and Aristotelian realism. Plato advocated the God's eye view from nowhere, Aristotle the human-oriented viewpoint, as epitomized by the School of Athens fresco.

I'm happy to accept this idea if it is right, but I don't understand it. How could it ever be known that 'it doesn't have to', because even if there is a macro system that performs a measurement without a person, we can't know that the measurement has actually collapsed anything until we look at the macro system, at which point we become part of the system? No doubt I've misunderstood something and am happy to be corrected. — bert1

The apparatus can record the time of measurement along with the measurement. Decoherence happens extremely rapidly and pervasively so you'll be part of the system shortly after the measurement anyway even if you don't look. The difficult trick is actually to avoid decoherence which is why quantum computers are so difficult to construct.

Here are a couple examples of a belief that we can eliminate bias:

<links deleted for clarity>

Do you agree that those are examples of the belief? — Terrapin Station

Yes, I agree they are examples of the belief you describe. But my conception of bias and partiality is a lot broader than this. The links you offer describe ways to avoid making silly mistakes, simple misreadings and the like. The human perspective is much broader and deeper than these trivial examples, and the bias and partiality that result have a correspondingly wider reach.

For example, an American scriptural literalist scientist who is a biologist would be loathe to report that homosexual behaviour is widespread among God's creatures (as a minority behaviour), conflicting as it does with the Bible's perspective. But please don't focus on this one example; there are hundreds of others, referencing the hundreds of strange beliefs and opinions that affect what we humans [don't] say and do. Together, the result is bias and partiality, and the effect is much greater than simple mistakes and misreadings.

I agree with you, but what I'm focusing on is the fact that there is a belief that we can overcome bias, and I gave a couple examples of people with such a belief, examples that you agreed were examples of people having that belief, whatever our criticism of the belief might be.

what I'm focusing on is the fact that there is a belief that we can overcome bias — Terrapin Station

Yes, there is such a belief, and I believe it to be mistaken and wrong-headed. We humans have beliefs and opinions. Our perspective requires, and is based on, our bias, prejudice and partiality. These give rise to our opinions and beliefs, just as our opinions and beliefs give rise to our bias, prejudice and partiality. It's all mixed up together, and we wouldn't be human if these things weren't an intrinsic and fundamental part of us. These are not things we can just set aside, as if we can become Spock or Data just by deciding to do so. We are human, and humans have a human perspective. This is not right or wrong, it just is.

Sure. Again, the only point I was making was that science (and journalism, and other fields where this is an issue) isn't ignoring human perspective. The whole idea behind overcoming bias, as misconceived as the idea that we can may be, is the belief that it's a feature of human perspective that we can overcome bias.

The whole idea behind overcoming bias, as misconceived as the idea that we can may be, is the belief that it's a feature of human perspective that we can overcome bias. — Terrapin Station

I'm sorry, I don't even know where to start with stuff like this.

the only point I was making was that science [...] isn't ignoring human perspective. — Terrapin Station

And I contend that it is, and that it cannot help but do so. By aspiring to 'impartial observers' they aspire to non-human observers. The human perspective is all about partiality. The only way that science addresses the human perspective is in its attempts to avoid it.

Sorry, maybe I'm overthinking this. Do you mean to say that, because science does everything in its power to circumvent or destroy the human perspective, it can't be said to ignore it? :chin:

The idea is that what it is to ignore x is to not think about x at all, or to at least intentionally brush x aside or gloss over it.

If one thinks about x, if one takes it into consideration, one is not ignoring x.

The conventional way of doing science takes the human perspective into consideration. It doesn't ignore x. But the way it typically takes it into consideration is via a belief that it's possible (at least largely) to surmount the bias in human perspectives if we make the right moves--if we require corroborating observations from other experimenters in other circumstances, if we develop ways to avoid cherry-picking data, if we require peer review, and so on.

Whether this approach actually removes bias is a different issue than whether scientists think about this sort of stuff and address it. As long as they think about it and address it--no matter how flawed or wrongheaded it might be--it's not the case that it's being ignored.

And I contend that it is, and that it cannot help but do so. By aspiring to 'impartial observers' they aspire to non-human observers. The human perspective is all about partiality. The only way that science addresses the human perspective is in its attempts to avoid it. — Pattern-chaser

There are two ways of thinking about the human perspective embedded in this issue. Of course everything humans do is a manifestation of the human perspective, just as anything any animal does is a manifestation of the perspective of that kind of animal.

Science is blamed for objectifying the world, but in the primary recognition of entities, which makes the world intelligible in the first place, humans and even animals always already use a kind of primordial objectification in order to survive in and understand the world. In other words all organic beings to some degree separate the world into self and other in order to be able to respond to and flourish in an environment teeming with other entities.

The aspiration to impartiality that characterizes the sciences, is not best thought of as an attempt to get outside of the human perspective altogether, to achieve a "God's-eye view" of the world, even though some may think of science this way. It is rather a matter of suspending our preferences, putting aside our partiality, "bracketing" how we would like the world to be in accordance with our desires and fears, in order to see phenomena through clearer eyes, and come to understand how things actually work. But it should be obvious that whatever we observe will always be things as they appear to us. The very idea of getting outside of that to see the world as it does not appear to us, or as it is in itself beyond its appearances to us, is simply incoherent, an impossibility.

So, to understand the world at all, to be able to respond to it at all is always already to see it in terms of individual entities and their interactions, and this is the primordial basis of objectification. In hunter-gatherer societies individual spirits were imputed to all entities. We call this 'animism' and you can see the connection between the name and the idea that individual spirits animated individual entities, made them alive. Of course everything was understood to be interconnected in these cultures, Modern science too is increasingly demonstrating the interconnectedness of all things.

Early modern science was a mechanistic model, though. The Newtonian world was seen as being fundamentally the motion of "dead" material particles. This worldview had its inception with the Platonic idea that the world we experience is not the real world, the spiritual world, but a kind of fallen facsimile which is of no value in itself. Christianity continued and amplified this tendency to see the world dualistically, with this world being mostly seen as a "a vale of tears", a fallen cosmos, and the real importance and meaning of life being understood to reside in some transcendent realm, an afterlife in Heaven.

This kind of worldview is, in significant part at least due to science, coming to be seen as deeply flawed, being based as it is on a detrimental mixture of fear and wishful thinking, on a desire to escape the world, a world which is seen as hard and cold instead of provident. In large part the apparent hardness and coldness of the world is due to capitalism, and the sense of scarcity that comes with the attempt to compete with all others to own, and thus control, as much of the world as possible. There is very little of the world today which is not owned, and despite appearances most of it is really owned, really controlled, by the very few who own and control most of the money. The world is objectified in the most negative sense by money, not by science.

The aspiration to impartiality that characterizes the sciences, is not best thought of as an attempt to get outside of the human perspective altogether, to achieve a "God's-eye view" of the world, even though some may think of science this way. It is rather a matter of suspending our preferences, putting aside our partiality, "bracketing" how we would like the world to be in accordance with our desires and fears, in order to see phenomena through clearer eyes, and come to understand how things actually work. But it should be obvious that whatever we observe will always be things as they appear to us. — Janus

That is not obvious in the least. It is one of the major contentions of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, elucidated over hundreds of pages of tortuously complex prose, but nevertheless often misunderstood for that. The Einstein-Bohr debates were very much about this same point; Einstein always maintained that the aim of science was to see 'things as they are in themselves', and he never accepted the fact that quantum theory could be a complete theory, if it didn't do this.

Christianity continued and amplified this tendency to see the world dualistically, with this world being mostly seen as a "a vale of tears", a fallen cosmos, and the real importance and meaning of life being understood to reside in some transcendent realm, an afterlife in Heaven. — Janus

So they cruelly and fortuitously went around establishing the hospital system, the university system, freeing slaves, and building the foundations of universal human rights, in the rubble of the collapsed Roman Empire, which was immensely more humane than those wretched Christians, what with their contemptuous notions of universal salvation and love for all beings. Indeed it's a wonder that the Western world got as far as it did, with those backwards, world-denying ascetics in charge of things.

Please provide a quote from Einstein where he says that the aim of science is to see "things as they are in themselves" in the kind of sense that you mean it. The way I see it the idea that science aspires, or should aspire, to sees things as they are is in the same spirit as Husserl's call to return "to the things themselves". The aim is to see things as clearly as we can while bracketing the question regarding the existence of an objective or external mind-independent world, since it is impossible to definitively answer. Einstein by all accounts was well-versed in and influenced by Kant's CPR.

In any case I think Kant would have agreed with Einstein that the moon is still there even when no one is looking at it, since he was, after all, avowedly an empirical realist. What it would mean in the Kantian paradigm to say that the moon is there when no one is looking is that whatever it is that appears to us as the moon is not dependent on us for its existence. Wolves would still bay at the moon, even if there were no humans.

As to your shrill little rant about Christianity's good deeds: it is irrelevant since I haven't claimed that no good works have been done by the religious institutions. In fact it was the Catholic Church that largely sponsored the early rise of the sciences, so it's not as though science and religion have always been at loggerheads.

Please provide a quote from Einstein where he says that the aim of science is to see "things as they are in themselves" in the kind of sense that you mean it. — Janus

It's thoroughly documented in books such as Quantum, by Manjit Kumar, and Uncertainty: The Battle for the Soul of Science, by David Lindley. The former, in particular, is an excellent read.

The Copenhagen Interpretation says 'that reality is determined by the experiment the scientist chooses to perform. One kind of experiment will cause light to behave like a particle; another kind will make it act as a wave. There is no underlying truth about what light "really" is.' (Steve Poole, review of Kumar). Whereas Einstein couldn't accept that this amounted to a complete description of reality; he was convinced that there had to be a real entity which existed irrespective of what the observer did (hence, the 'moon' quote). And that is the crux of the whole problem, and why this is one of the main factors behind the very point that is at issue in this thread.

This same point is made in the Wheeler paper, Law without Law - if you look at it, the second heading is called 'Phenomena', and explains why Einstein couldn't accept this. The nub of the earlier disagreement in this thread was whether 'observation' or 'measurement' requires or implies an actual observer; that remains a moot point, but I am of the view that no measuring apparatus would exist had it not been made by an observer. And Wheeler concludes this section with an unequivocal statement: 'we are inescapably involved with bringing about what appears to happen'. That is in line with the Copenhagen interpretation. And this is why he named his idea 'the participatory universe'. That is a reversal of 'objectivism', after all; once you admit a role for the participant, then you're in a fundamentally different paradigm from the Galilean/Cartesian.

I think Kant would have agreed with Einstein — Janus

Einstein dismissed the fundamental axioms of Kant that time and space a 'primary intuitions' - he thought that time and space, too, were objectively real, independently of any contribution from the observer. He didn't say much about Kant, but whatever he said was generally sceptical; but I don't think he 'got' Kant. And saying that, I know that Einstein was a genius and that I will never understand the maths behind relativity. But the point at issue is tangential to this fact. The kind of realism that Einstein advocated can only be changed by a kind of gestalt shift, a radical shift in perspective. Kant, and the later kantian and neo-kantian tradition, had been 'through the looking glass' in a way that Einstein had not. (I am meaning to read up on Ernst Cassirer, who was a neo-Kantian interpreter of physics; Michel Bitbol is another.)

Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Schrodinger and many of the other quantum pioneers were, at the end of the day, European thinkers, and heir to the European philosophical tradition. In addition to being brilliant scientists, they were philosophically sophisticated. Many of them wrote in later life about the philosophical implications of their life-work. Heisenberg came down firmly on the side of Plato (see here); Bohr believed that his 'principle of complementarity' was of such importance that he literally incorporated the Taoist ying-yang icon into the family coat-of-arms; Schrodinger wrote frequently about Schopenhauer and Vedanta; Wolfgang Pauli had a long and documented relationship with Carl Gustav Jung.

When after WWII, research focus shifted to America, then physics research became increasingly beholden to commercial, military and industrial patronage, and the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics were mostly forgotten (see Quantum Mysticism: Gone but not Forgotten). Hugh Everett III, who was by turns brilliant and tragic (died aged 50 an alcoholic and emotionally-remote father, leaving instructions to put his ashes out with the garbage), left academia for a career designing re-entry paths for ICBM missiles in the Cold War after planting the seed for the controversial 'many-worlds interpretation'. Wheeler, who we mentioned, did indeed engage in a lot of speculative philosophy based on his work, but overall I think the generation since have shied away from it, preferring (for some bizarre reason) to believe in multiple splitting universes.

I don't think that mainstream English-speaking philosophy has incorporated these insights from quantum physics at all. That is why it has become a fertile ground for the counter-cultural and alternative mob; click on quantum consciousness in Amazon, and you'll get a strange brew, not all of which is rubbish.

shrill little rant — Janus

I felt one shrill rant deserves another ;-)

You present a lot of verbiage and no substantiating quote form Einstein. If you want to claim that Einstein definitely thought this or that then you should be able to provide something he actually wrote to back up the claim.

As I see it Einstein's spacetime has no bearing on space and time as we experience them and think about them in terms of the "a priori" reasoning based upon analysis of that experience. Einstein's spacetime is postulated as the fundamental fabric of the world that is affected by and affects the movement of objects due to their mass. It is four-dimensional according to Einstein's theory in a way that we cannot even visualize.

That Einstein did not equate spacetime with space and time as we usually conceive them and did not consider time, if not space, to be objectively real, as you claim he did, is shown in this statement;

"People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

And here is the abstract from a paper to be found here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy/article/einstein-and-kant/D4B197513E6DE86D10B7686E18615D51

"The paper aims to explain and illustrate why Einstein and Kant, relativity and transcendental idealism, came to be discussed in one breath after the Special theory of relativity had emerged in 1905. There are essentially three points of contact between the theory of relativity and Kant's objective idealism. The Special theory makes contact with Kantian views of time; the General theory requires a non-Kantian view of geometry; but both relativity theories endorse a quasi-Kantian view of the nature of scientific knowledge. The paper shows that Einstein is a Kantian in his insistence on the synthesis of rationalism and empiricism, but not in the details of his physics."

Regarding your claim that your "shrill little rant" was a response to a shrill little rant of my own, I say that the post in question was not any such thing.

If one thinks about x, if one takes it into consideration, one is not ignoring x. — Terrapin Station

Yes, I'm sorry for being obtuse. I was looking for a deeper point that wasn't there. :blush:

Experience, which is "the practical contact with and observation of facts or events (OED)", is implicit in any scientific model. And that "practical contact" can itself be modeled scientifically.

In a general sense, there's the world, and there are separable systems within the world, from particles to human beings to galaxies, that we can seek to describe, explain and interact with. It takes a human (or similarly sentient being) to experience and model that world but there's nothing preventing the modeling of the modeler themselves.

As I see it, the puzzles of experience are front and center in science rather than neglected. — Andrew M

There is an implicit assumption in there, the assumption there is such a thing as facts and events existing independently of experience. But how did we arrive at these 'facts' and 'events' if not through our experiences?

Then if you start from these 'facts' and 'events' and attempt to model the modeler through them, you're not actually modeling the modeler, you're modeling your experience of the modeler. Most scientists don't realize that.

So they're not addressing the puzzles of experience that way, they just believe they're addressing them because of poor philosophizing.

There is an implicit assumption in there, the assumption there is such a thing as facts and events existing independently of experience. But how did we arrive at these 'facts' and 'events' if not through our experiences? — leo

Yes that's exactly how we arrive at them. Per the OED definitions, a fact is "a thing that is known or proved to be true" and an event is "a thing that happens or takes place, especially one of importance". Which shows that facts and events have an epistemological and even normative aspect to them (in an age of "alternative" facts) as well as an ontological aspect.

Then if you start from these 'facts' and 'events' and attempt to model the modeler through them, you're not actually modeling the modeler, you're modeling your experience of the modeler. Most scientists don't realize that. — leo

Consider an ordinary, everyday scenario:

Alice steps gingerly through the train door and finds the nearest seat, choosing to ignore the peeling blue paint that reveals the grey metal underneath. Carefully placing her bag on her lap, she observes the other people around her. Several are tapping on their mobile phones, an elderly woman is napping opposite her, and a young couple at the far end of the train car are holding hands, chatting happily. Bob, a guy who works in the same building as her, catches her eye and says, "Good morning!". She smiles in acknowledgement while thinking, "I've had better". She winces as she becomes conscious of the pain in her ankle again. "Are you OK?", Bob asks, looking concerned.

So there are a number of experiences described there, some are Alice's, some are other people's, some are interactions between other people, or between her and others. All within the broad scenario of Alice catching a train to work.

Alice is modeling her experiences, which includes modeling the people she encounters (who, in turn, are doing the same, at least when they're not preoccupied) and she is even modeling herself (e.g., evaluating her morning, reflecting on her pains).

It's not a formal scientific model in the sense of a mathematical hypothesis that has been rigorously tested. But the basic elements are there. That is the human-oriented view with the experiences that ground scientific investigation and enable self-referential modeling.

So there are a number of experiences described there, some are Alice's, some are other people's, some are interactions between other people, or between her and others. All within the broad scenario of Alice catching a train to work.

Alice is modeling her experiences, which includes modeling the people she encounters (who, in turn, are doing the same, at least when they're not preoccupied) and she is even modeling herself (e.g., evaluating her morning, reflecting on her pains).

It's not a formal scientific model in the sense of a mathematical hypothesis that has been rigorously tested. But the basic elements are there. That is the human-oriented view with the experiences that ground scientific investigation and enable self-referential modeling. — Andrew M

She isn't modeling herself nor the people she encounters, she is modeling her experiences of herself and of the people she encounters. From her perspective she might say she is directly modeling people and herself, but from anyone else's perspective she is modeling her experiences of people and herself.

If you assume she is actually modeling other people, you quickly encounter the problem that these people exist and do not exist at the same time. They exist to Alice, but they do not exist to those who have never met them. Isn't it more coherent to say that she is modeling her experiences of them?

That's precisely in that sense that physicists neglect the human perspective. They equate their perspective with "how the world really is outside of their perspective". And so they end up building models that omit the human perspective, these models describe how what they see behaves, and so they cannot explain how is it that they see.

It is impossible to derive from their models that photons of wavelength 460nm stimulating an eye will give rise to an experience of the color blue. It is impossible because they have neglected the human perspective. They are not modeling the world, they are modeling their perspective while believing they are modeling the world, that's a crucial distinction to understand.

When we spend time listening to and conversing with other people, we realize that they sometimes have very different perspectives, and it is when we realize that that we really stop neglecting the human experience. On the other hand, when we call our perspective "observations of the objective world" is when we are neglecting the human experience.

It is impossible to derive from their models that photons of wavelength 460nm stimulating an eye will give rise to an experience of the color blue. It is impossible because they have neglected the human perspective. — leo

Seeing of colour is not exclusively reliant on "the human perspective". Animals see colour too, although in different ways depending on their (in some cases very) different optical setups. All this is physiologically well understood. The following passage is quoted from the site which came up on the top of the list of a search "how the eye responds to colour".

".... cones are composed of three different photo pigments that enable color perception. This curve peaks at 555 nanometers, which means that under normal lighting conditions, the eye is most sensitive to a yellowish-green color. When the light levels drop to near total darkness, the response of the eye changes significantly as shown by the scotopic response curve on the left. At this level of light, the rods are most active and the human eye is more sensitive to the light present, and less sensitive to the range of color. Rods are highly sensitive to light but are comprised of a single photo pigment, which accounts for the loss in ability to discriminate color. At this very low light level, sensitivity to blue, violet, and ultraviolet is increased, but sensitivity to yellow and red is reduced. The heavier curve in the middle represents the eye's response at the ambient light level found in a typical inspection booth. This curve peaks at 550 nanometers, which means the eye is most sensitive to yellowish-green color at this light level. Fluorescent penetrant inspection materials are designed to fluoresce at around 550 nanometers to produce optimal sensitivity under dim lighting conditions."

From here: https://www.nde-ed.org/EducationResources/CommunityCollege/PenetrantTest/Introduction/lightresponse.htm

That's all fine and dandy, but where in there is it explained how photons of a given wavelength give rise to the perception of a color at all? Saying that "cones are composed of three different photo pigments that enable color perception" does not explain by what mechanism these give rise to color perception. What they do is they measure how some parameters of the eye change as a function of the wavelength of incoming light, there is no explanation as to how this gives rise to any experience of color. They're not explaining the very fact of experience, they're explaining it away.

The problem is not why the wavelength 460nm corresponds to the color blue rather than some other one, but why it gives rise to any experience at all.

Again, if we build a model that describes what we see, that model can never explain why we see, because at no point we are modeling the modeler, we're just modeling our view of the modeler. We're just finding correlations within our experiences, how could they tell us why we experience? If we find correlations within a movie, how could they tell us how the TV works?

The physical processes involved in bringing about the seeing of colour are well understood. What you seem to be asking for is an explanation in physical terms of what the subjective experience of seeing colour is. That is not possible simply because the asking of the question is based on a category error; physical explanations only of what can appear to us as observable objects are possible. The subjective experience of seeing colour cannot appear to us as an observable object, so to ask for such an explanation is to commit a category error.

To conclude from this that subjective experience is something that cannot merely be an emergent property of physical systems is unwarranted. The problem may lie with the simple fact that, due to the way things are physically consituted, a subjective experience of the subjective experience of seeing colour just cannot be had, on the contrary all we have is the subjective experience of seeing colour.

Actually, even to say the latter is to perform a kind of reification: it would be better to simply say that all we have is seeing colour. So colour itself can be objectified and measured by spectrometers, but the seeing of colour cannot be objectified or measured at all. Why should we expect to have a physicalist explanation of something that cannot be objectified or measured?

She isn't modeling herself nor the people she encounters, she is modeling her experiences of herself and of the people she encounters — leo

:up:

That is the human-oriented view with the experiences that ground scientific investigation and enable self-referential modeling. — Andrew M

What I think this demonstrates is a kind of 'presumptive naturalism', i.e. it arises from the very 'blind spot' at issue. And please don't take this as a pejorative because it's actually a very subtle and important point, and it's not by any means obvious.

What I mean is this: that most forms of realism presume or take for granted the reality of the domain of sensory experience - that the world of people moving about on trains and living their lives possesses a reality independently of anything we ourselves experience or perceive.

But if that is questioned, then the response would probably be, "are you saying that this whole world of other people and the vast universe exists in the (or my) mind?' And this is often how people respond to what they understand as 'idealism'.

But what I think is being argued for, is that the process of perception also implies apperception ('the mental process by which a person makes sense of an idea by assimilating it') and interpretation ('what does this mean'), which is an activity that the mind is continually engaged in, at a level which is beneath the level of conscious attention. That is the sense in which the mind 'constructs' reality (and is the basis of the various forms of philosophy known as 'constructivism'.)

There's a seminal concept from Kant here, which is that of transcendental apperception. As the wiki description is so brief, I include it here verbatim:

In philosophy, Kantian transcendental apperception is that which Immanuel Kant states makes experience possible. It is where the self and the world come together.

Transcendental apperception is the uniting and building of coherent consciousness out of different elementary inner experiences (differing in both time and topic, but all belonging to self-consciousness). e.g. the experience of "passing of time" relies on this transcendental unity of apperception, according to Kant.

There are six steps to transcendental apperception:

1. All experience is the succession of a variety of contents (an idea taken from David Hume).
2. To be experienced at all, the successive data must be combined or held together in a unity for consciousness.
3. Unity of experience therefore implies a unity of self.
4. The unity of self is as much an object of experience as anything is.
5. Therefore, experience both of the self and its objects rests on acts of synthesis that, because they are the conditions of any experience, are not themselves experienced.
6. These prior syntheses are made possible by the categories. Categories allow us to synthesize the self and the objects.

Now, I personally am dubious about (4) as the self, I maintain, is not an object of experience, but the ground of experience. But other than that, I think this is an important principle, especially point (5) - that this 'synthesis' (which is the assimilation and binding together of all of the elements of experience with judgement) is fundamental to experience, but is not itself revealed by or in experience - at least, not without a great deal of reflection or analysis. That is the meaning of 'transcendental' in both Kant and Husserl: a constituent of experience which is itself not disclosed by experience.

But to return to Alice on the train - the train, and Alice, were you there, occur to you as 'phenomena' - as a stream of sensory experiences which you assimilate and judge, moment by moment. But we don't see ourselves doing that - which for most purposes, is not a problem, as most of the time we're simply going about our lives and don't need to dwell on such things. But this conversation is bringing the apparent solidity and reality of common experience into question. I think the point of the article is to show that science incorporates this kind of unreflective awareness of the 'subject-object' relationship into its reckonings. In some ways, it's fundamental to naturalism; I like to say 'naturalism assumes nature', which sounds trite, but we don't notice that we're doing it. Whereas phenomenology (and also Buddhist meditative practice, which the article refers to) deconstructs that taken-for-granted sense of the solidity of the everyday experience of things.

So, even though it seems relatively simple in some ways, the implications are profound, because it does call into question the reality of the sensory domain ¹ . But it also undermines the notion that physical objects are intrinsically real - which is why it is a challenge to scientific materialism.

------------------------

1. For Buddhist philosophy, that is not such a challenge, because one of the basic principles of Buddhism is the understanding of Śūnyatā, that individual particulars are empty of intrinsic reality or own-being (svabhava). Whereas materialism is precisely the claim that material objects possess intrinsic reality.

Again, if we build a model that describes what we see, that model can never explain why we see, because at no point we are modeling the modeler, we're just modeling our view of the modeler. We're just finding correlations within our experiences, how could they tell us why we experience? If we find correlations within a movie, how could they tell us how the TV works? — leo

This is a great issue. 'Correlations within our experiences' along with metaphorical enframing seem roughly to be what we have.

What is the deeper 'why' that you mention? What is the 'why' that can't be answered with some useful or comforting pattern in or metaphorical framing of experience? Is this 'why ?' just a lyrical expression of wonder? Is it a perception of the limit of explanation as it is usually conceived? It's as if the question pretends to want an explanation and yet demands something beyond any conceivable explanation. This same idea can be expressed by denying that so-called explanations really explain with any depth.

Since explain is such a common and useful word, I like the first way of framing it. 'Why is there something?' or 'why experience?' points out the darkness that borders the light of our little campfire. Because it is useless and maybe difficult to grasp, it's easy to shrug off. Addressing the OP, the question I have in mind 'must' be a 'blind spot' of science (and maybe philosophy). It's hard to imagine a theory of any content that isn't finding connections between entities or reframing our situation metaphorically. Is the blind spot an infinitesimal hole poked in our cognition/world?

It's as if the question pretends to want an explanation and yet demands something beyond any conceivable explanation. This same idea can be expressed by denying that so-called explanations really explain with any depth. — g0d

Exactly, and what kind of "depth" should we expect over and above our usual physical explanations? Do we have any actual intellectual justification for asking for such "explanations"? If we want to say they are not "deep" enough, and that "deeper" explanations are possible, then we should at least be able to point to some of those, or if we cannot do that then explain what a "deeper" explanation would look like. If we can't do either of those things, then it seems we are just "whistling in the wind" with our demands.

Personally I prefer to entertain what is deeper in the way of feeling without making incoherent demands for rational explanations of it (given that documented attempts to do that never seem to stand up to scrutiny). To me it is like asking for a rational account of what determinate quantifiable knowledge there is in poetry and the arts in general; it's wrongheaded.