I understand the transcendental to be not "above", but "below", our conscious experience, and thus not "transcendent"... — Janus

Don't you see a problem here, my friend?

Seriously, I like the shit outta you(that's an endearing Appalachian American colloquialism), so I'm not being disrespectful in any way.

:cool:

This is perfectly normal parlance. — Janus

Well of course. All sorts of people say all sorts of stuff all the time. Language use can be perfectly sensible and say stuff that's dead wrong.

It is inherently inadequate for taking proper account of that which consists of both. Experience is one such thing. — creativesoul

I agree; we could say that experience is subjective insofar it is conscious, and it is objective insofar as it is not. But since what cannot be consciously apprehended cannot be an objective for us, then in that sense pre/sub/un-conscious experience is neither subjective nor objective, and in yet another sense is, or at least encompasses, both.

I think you'd change your mind if you carefully considered the logical consequences of that argument. It leads to a reductio. — creativesoul

I don't see how it does. That our capacities for conceptualization emerge out of a pre-conceptual 'matrix' or 'context' does not entail that we can get a discursive handle on its pre-conceptual nature. That our conceptualizations are "influenced" or "structured" or "conditioned" by a pre-conceptual 'Real' does not entail that we can examine the nature of that influence, structuring or conditioning.

Well of course. All sorts of people say all sorts of stuff all the time. Language use can be perfectly sensible and say stuff that's dead wrong. — creativesoul

But it's not wrong to say the mountain experiences erosion if it does.

Think experience in the sense of undergoes. Like the mountain experiences erosion. Conscious experience emerges out of a matrix of primordial process or undergoing which is beneath, I.e. transcendental to, conscious experience.

We see emergent layers of existence emerging directly from previous ones: atom - molecule - cell - organ - organism... Why then say conscious experience emerges from way down below instead from the previous size scale like everything else?

Mind emerges from the dynamics of overlapping densities of the magnetic and electric fields in the wrinkly cortex. Only now emergent layers reverse direction and new complexity of collective entities emerge inwards into the smaller and smaller size. We might be talking about the same size scale at the end, but I think I'm talking about a completely different realm, mental realm, quite real, testable and measurable, if we only manage to get sufficient resolution and recognize those emergent elements or "mental atoms".

You know, I like you too, but that's not helping me see the problem you can apparently see there.

We see emergent layers of existence emerging directly from previous ones: atom - molecule - cell - organ - organism... — Zelebg

All of those are items, in one way or another, of human experience; they are always already in conceptual form, so they are not what I have been talking about.

We could say, as for example McDowell and Brandom (and Hegel) do, in their various ways, that the Real itself is, exhaustively, in conceptual shape; but that would be a different argument.

If you remain consistent, you'd be forced to say that you cannot get a grasp upon anything pre-conceptual.

I agree; we could say that experience is subjective insofar it is conscious... — Janus

...it's not wrong to say the mountain experiences erosion if it does. — Janus

:brow:

Do you see the problem here?

No, I haven't said that the mountain's experience is subjective. But, on the other hand, there is a sense in which that could be said; we could say that the mountain is subjected to erosion. Much of the polemic in these arguments turns on conflating different senses of the usage of terms.

Those layers are not conceptual forms, they are causal and autonomous entities in their own size scale. — Zelebg

It all depends on what you mean by "conceptual". Of course atoms are not litereally concepts in the ordinary sense that we understand concepts to be ideas in people's heads.

As Kant says:"Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. It is, therefore, just as necessary to make our concepts sensible, that is, to add the object to them in intuition, as to make our intuitions intelligible, that is, to bring them under concepts."

All of those are items, in one way or another, of human experience; they are always already in conceptual form, so they are not what I have been talking about.

Do you perceive yourself as a conceptual form, without "self", without your own intention? Those layers are not conceptual forms, they are causal and autonomous entities in their own size scale. By the way, I ask my question in the sentence after the one you quoted, and I make my point in the paragraph you ignored.

I see you have a problem dealing with context when reading. It isn’t Janus.

Looks like I repeated a mistake already made. Copy and paste a misattribution repeats the mistake.

My fault.



Original above... Edited later to add the following...

On second glance, I believe it is you, my friend, who've made a mistake here. Janus did indeed say what I quoted. I took your word to be good, at first... Second looks are well worth having.

How about addressing what you did say, and my response to what you did say?

I'm going to keep you on your toes!

Either mountain experience is not subjective, experience is not subjective, or mountain experience is not experience...

Which is it, because you've claimed that experience is subjective and that mountains experience?

I never denied he said those words.

I've no idea what you meant then.

Could you rephrase your first reply to me tonight?

On the other hand, if I take mountain/erosion as metaphor for change, then I must say experience doesn’t change; each is as it is in itself. Experience is singular and successive, not a unity and changing, the technical definition of consciousnesss.

Don’t want to take you off on a tangent, but......just wonderin’.

You are making exactly the right point - qualia is integrated information.

It's a physical effect, a realization in the form of 'inner representation'. See, looking at all the electric impulses in the brain and expecting to find consciousness is like looking at electrons running in the hardware components of a PC and expecting to see what program it is running.

All that information has to come to some place where it's finally integrated, realized, where the signals become qualia. For a PC that place is the monitor, only there all the movement of electrons in the hardware components actually realize their true meaning, and that meaning exist in a higher emergent layer - not scale of electrons and atoms, but scale of complex electronic components.

Similarly, we should not look for qualia between neuron signals, but at a higher level of complexity emerging from those signals, or even higher, i.e. somewhere between overlapping densities of electric and magnetic fields of the wrinkly cortex. It also means qualia can not emerge from neural network software, it needs actual 3D space and actual EM fields - it can not be simulated, only emulated.

It all depends on what you mean by "conceptual". Of course atoms are not litereally concepts in the ordinary sense that we understand concepts to be ideas in people's heads.

What I meant is clear in my question and the whole last paragraph, both of which you ignored again.

I understand the transcendental to be not "above", but "below", our conscious experience, and thus not "transcendent"... — Janus

I understand the transcendental to be... not transcendent.

:brow:

That's incoherence rearing it's ugly head.

If you were more familiar with German Idealist philosophy and phenomenology you would not say that.

OK, fair enough.

Why?

Do they say stuff like that too?

ignoring all the tough questions leading up to a refutation of their own claims — creativesoul

I haven’t had any tough questions to ignore, and I’m tired of being led up to, so.....

I'm not sure what you are aiming at here...isn't erosion a process of change? — Janus

Yes, of course. And just as much as that is true, so too is the........

....matrix of primordial process or undergoing which is beneath, I.e. transcendental to, conscious experience. — Janus

.......but I nevertheless caution against the use of “experience” in the context of.....

........we experience processes and forces just as the mountain experiences erosion. — Janus

....because we don’t experience those at all, even if the transcendental system itself, does. Which is what I’m guessing you meant all along.
—————-

If primordial experience, as distinct from conscious experience, is pre-conceptual then no discursive handle can be gotten on it — Janus

Exactly. Discursive has to do with cognition by conceptions, conceptions being the sole purview of the understanding. If primordial experience is deemed pre-conceptual, it is therefore pre-understanding, hence it follows necessarily such process cannot be discursive. The primordial experience pre-conceptual is the object represented by sensation (appearance) synthesized by the imagination according to rules (schema) to the object of intuition (phenomenon), which is then presented to understanding for logical judgement. Your quoted passage perfectly exemplifies this a priori, rational activity, which is the task of reason alone to “grasp”, long before experience proper, and therefore, the cognizant subject.

On the other hand, if I take mountain/erosion as metaphor for change, then I must say experience doesn’t change; each is as it is in itself. Experience is singular and successive, not a unity and changing, the technical definition of consciousness.
-Mww

You are making exactly the right point - qualia is integrated information. — Zelebg

I take you to mean I’m making the right point on consciousness, and qualia are the integrated information contained in consciousness. I’m ok with that.

While I understand how qualia arose from the predicates of modern philosophy, I don’t think they accomplish anything more than the old-fashion intuition. For me, consciousness represents the quantity of that of which we are aware, but qualia represent the quality of that of which we are aware, re: the “what it is like” addendum. The former relates to the substance of our intuitions, the latter relates to the right-ness of our intuitions. To allot the quality of right-ness to consciousness relieves our conscience of its job with respect to morality and feelings in general, and relieves judgement of its job to determine right-ness with respect to empirical cognitions.

Besides, if the totality in consciousness represents the way things are, because we cognize them as so, why do we care about what they are like? Even if we cognize incorrectly and amend that with its consequence, then the qualia will be equally incorrect and amended as well, which seems to indicate they really don’t differ that much from mere representation anyway, as regards their origin.

And ya know what else? If qualia are meant to tell me what it’s like, how come they can’t tell me what bacon smells like when it’s not right in front of me, frying away on the ol’ cooktop? I can’t represent to myself the smell of frying bacon either, but doesn’t that just say the one is no better for certain things than the other?

Anyway.....thanks for the compliment. After this, if you wish to retract it, I won’t complain.

....because we don’t experience those at all, even if the transcendental system itself, does. Which is what I’m guessing you meant all along. — Mww

Yes, whatever it is that appears as us experiences those processes, undergoes or is those processes; so it is not we as conscious subjects who experience those.

If primordial experience is deemed pre-conceptual, it is therefore pre-understanding, hence it follows necessarily such process cannot be discursive. The primordial experience pre-conceptual is the object represented by sensation (appearance) synthesized by the imagination according to rules (schema) to the object of intuition (phenomenon), which is then presented to understanding for logical judgement. — Mww

You have said it better than I.

It's not an error because the pattern is there, it just doesn't exhaust the possible number of patterns which no less error value. — Isaac

I do think we agree on most things here. I think we have differences in intuition on the relevance of structure on the hidden causal states; I think we're interpreting "hidden" differently.

If we aggregate perception and sensation as a single construct;, a causal diagram here (ignoring time) works like:

External states -> Perceptual states
Perceptual states -> Promoted Actions
Promoted Actions -> Perceptual states
Perceptual states -> Internal states
Internal states -> Promoted Actions

This is just writing down all the arrows in Box 1 in that paper. You can read X -> Y as "The distribution of Y depends on X when everything else is held constant". If I've read it right, these are all random variables.

We also have:

Hidden states *-> External states
Hidden states *-> Perceptual states

But these are arrows of functional dependency, we have some function f and some function g that encode how hidden states act as environmental stimuli (like how only the "error" is stochastic in usual linear regression, the trend is the deterministic signal the error is the random noise). We could think of f and g as innate (anatomy level) tendencies of our sensorium, and these innate tendencies have limits; we don't see IR light, but we feel its heat. f and g could be deterministic functions of the hidden states.

If we make the external states and perceptual states random variables of the hidden states, we end up with the causal graph:

Hidden states -> External states
Hidden states -> Perceptual states
External states -> Perceptual states
Perceptual states -> Promoted Actions
Promoted Actions -> Perceptual states
Perceptual states -> Internal states
Internal states -> Promoted Actions

In this graph, the vertex set of (internal states, actions) is d-separated (Markov blanket) from the node (hidden states) by the vertex set (external states, perceptual states). But (external states, perceptual states) are not separable even in principle from (hidden states).

What does this entail?

(1) External states and perceptions are causally related to hidden states.
(2) External states and perceptions are partially causally driven by the hidden states (and partially causally driven by our actions, and the error terms in both).

What does this not entail?

(A) Any realisation of a perceptual state is causally driven by a specific, given realisation of a hidden state (phantom limb stuff stops this)
(B) All environmental states relevant to the organism's functioning are arguments of f or g (radiation stops this).

Crucially, it also does not entail:

(C) Any derived phenomenon from this model if it is true (like concepts, thoughts) cannot be partially causally dependent upon some hidden state which is not a function argument of f or g. (radiation here again)

I think we can disagree on the consequences of the paper because we're actually disagreeing about (C) (or something about the relationship of the paper to C)!

I'm full of the most awful cold at the moment so that might be to blame for my mental fog, but, if you've time, I think I might need you to lay out (C) in a little more detail for me. I'm not quite sure what you mean by it (a lot of negations to keep track of - its does not entail...cannot be...which is not a function of...) it's a little more than my virus-addled brain can process, but since I'm doing nothing else today other than sitting in an armchair, I'd like to have a go nonetheless.

Other than that, the first part is perfect, that matches my understanding of the paper too. Just one query, your...

(B) All environmental states relevant to the organism's functioning are arguments of f or g (radiation stops this). — fdrake

... wouldn't radiation still have a function with regards to its causal relationship with environmental states? Does the stochastic nature of the event really pull much through to the environmental state thereby generated? Probably a minor point - but it might be important since it relates to (C).