I was asking you. After establishing interest, he takes it home. End of story? — Mww
I'm not sure what we're getting at here. — Terrapin Station
Everything is phenomenon
— I like sushi
If that's the case, then the notion itself can and ought be cast aside for it cannot be used to further discriminate between anything at all. It becomes superfluous, unhelpful, and offers nothing but unnecessarily overcomplicated language use.
— creativesoul
Eventually.....maybe....we would have arrived here, at this very place. It is not correct to say everything is phenomenon, but rather, every object of sensibility, called appearance, united with an intuition by imagination, is phenomenon. — Mww
I admit Kantian epistemological metaphysics is historical...to be kind. It is, nonetheless, complete in itself, and incorporates enormous explanatory power. — Mww
If you insist on casting phenomena aside, what would take its place? — Mww
Not all thought and belief should be deemed "a report" because some exists prior to language.
— creativesoul
Cool. Thanks.
I guess my concern, with respect to understanding each other, was to eliminate “report” as a metaphor, as in the case where, say, the senses “report” their perceptions to their respective receptors. Of course, the metaphoric report from the senses, while such machination certainly “exists in its entirety prior to language use”, isn’t a thought or a belief either, until or unless such machination is taken into account by a thinking subject. — Mww
Secondly, I'm not necessarily arguing that non- human primates have an abstract concept of fairness/justice like ours. For a start I think it more likely we'll find our concept isn't quite so abstract and top-down acting as we think, not that chimpanzees have topgdown acting abstract concepts, more that we don't. — Isaac
Minimize variance? The sympathetic nervous system dramatically throws the body out of equilibrium. The parasympathetic does also. Some systems resist change, some create it. How does that fit into your perspective? — frank
Sadly though, one researcher in particular(regarding rhesus or macaques) was drawing unwarranted/unjustified/invalid conclusions that amounted to the personification of the the animals(anthropomorphism). However, not all of them did nor do all seem prone to make such mistakes. — creativesoul
Sure, I can "visualize" a really loud noise. I can visualize a set of all sets as a container that contains all other containers. I can visualize myself as being lost. — Janus
I really don't understand you. To my reckoning, there are these weird people who picked up a way of describing bizarre altered states of activity from a book, and I never understand what they're talking about. They always say "but what's it like to be you" or "what's it like to be a bat?" and things like that. As if they can literally feel it. I don't think very highly of their self awareness, they seem to be replacing their experiences with a description of their experiences. If they payed more attention, they'd see a flux with some continuity in it, and a persistent history that is accessed through memory, and some aspirations and anticipations, but a feeling of themselves as distinct from their sensory capabilities and self attending bodily processes? Madness! Madness I say. It's a cult, a cult! — fdrake
Regarding qualia, wouldn't you say experiences involve perceptions that are distinct from whatever causes those perceptions 'out there'. I mean you can stimulate a part of the brain and shut off or induce a color of blue, or the sight of a number etc even when there isn't one. So empirically it looks like what you see is not exactly the same as what's in front of you. Doesn't that provide unambiguous evidence for first person qualia [i.e. percepts]? — aporiap
I never wanted to deny that there is a phenomenal character of experience. What I picked a bone with, to my reckoning, was the way people split up experiences using the word. If you are quite happy to label facets of phenomenal character "qualia", for some suitable sense of "facet", this is fine with me.
What is not fine with me, say, is an arbitrary division between "colour qualia" and "shape qualia", say, without some account of why the division makes sense. In that example, we do perceive colours and shapes differently; colourblind people can agree with non-colourblind people on the shape of objects perceived differently; but I don't think it is warranted to go from this to thinking of "colour quales" and "shape quales" as distinct facets of phenomenal character; the colourblind person and the non-colourblind people still don't see colours without shapes or shapes without colours.
So, the mechanism that contrasts the two cases is based off of differences in how people process visual information (which is sensible), but why would that distinction propagate into distinctions in lived experience of each agent between colour experience types and shape experience types? — fdrake
single phenomenal fabric prior to incorporation into a unified conscious experience. — aporiap
there are separable elements — aporiap
But can't you, for example, imagine how you'd feel if you won the lottery? Surely there you'd be imagining a feeling, not an image? Even visualising yourself being lost, it's more than just the image isn't it? Doesn't it come along with feelings, thoughts you might have etc? — Isaac
Yeah! I don't think perceptual features (motion detection, colour sensitivity) are generated as a unified whole. What I want is for people to pay more attention to the generating mechanisms for perceptual features, and not to do so a-priori like with "red quale". I care where the distinctions come from because I want the accounts to be right.
there are separable elements
— aporiap
Definitely. So my desire is to see accounts which look like: (stimulus information types/distinctions) <=> (perceptual feature types/distinction) <=> (information processing system types/distinctions) <=> (first person experience types/distinctions); systematic inter relations between these phenomena, studied. Not:
(a priori conceptions of experience types) = > (first person experience types/distinctions)
And I certainly wouldn't like (a priori conceptions of experience types) => [ (stimulus information types/distinctions) <=> (perceptual feature types/distinction) <=> (information processing system types/distinctions) <=> (first person experience types/distinctions)]. That's such a lazy waste. — fdrake
, it's very dangerous to do — aporiap
Eventually.....maybe....we would have arrived here, at this very place. It is not correct to say everything is phenomenon, but rather, every object of sensibility, called appearance, united with an intuition by imagination, is phenomenon.
— Mww
Spoken like someone who likes Kant's Noumena. — creativesoul
That which exists in it's entirety prior to humans is relegated to Noumena, and as such is grossly neglected. — creativesoul
Nah, metaphor is poor philosophy. — creativesoul
I see trees, not phenomenal representations thereof. — creativesoul
We don't need to know anything about what's 'really' there, we seem, just as a species, to be fundamentally interested in variance minimising. There appears to be a white square when the black circles are (what appears to be) behind it. As soon as the black (what now appears to be) pacmen are removed, there no longer appears to be a white square. We want to reduce this variance, we prefer a model which has either a white square or not. Not a model which has a white square one minute but none the next. So we choose one to be 'accepted' and label the other 'illusion'. Rather than doing so randomly, we do so by minimising variance with a whole host of other models too. The white square being the 'illusion' does this best. At no point in the whole process do we need access to reality nor even to care which is which. — Isaac
The tree you see (with your eyes) is a transcendental object of experience. The point of transcendental reduction is to bracket out your concern for a tree ‘being there’ (as it may be a dream). — I like sushi
What is so obvious is that it is a tree, yet what it is that makes it ‘obvious’ is the ‘aim’ of the phenomenological investigation. — I like sushi
I'm not so sure personification is unwarranted. — Isaac
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