In saying this, you're assuming the reality of the object outside your judgement of it.
— Wayfarer
Yes, but Kant also assumes this in positing the thing-in-itself. What I'm saying is that the object itself is what my judgement is about, not a Kantian appearance. — Andrew M
↪Andrew M
We can acknowledge dreams (and hallucinations and illusions) without supposing that we can't successfully refer to things even when we are awake and of sound mind.
We either experience qualia or we don’t. What do you say? — Zelebg
But that is just what is at issue. For the purpose of making this point, there is no 'object itself'!
— Wayfarer
Well I guess that's that then! It's all an illusion... ;-)
— Andrew M
Not a mere illusion. Things have a degree of reality. — Wayfarer
This is the model of ordinary public language (see Wittgenstein's private language argument), of Aristotle's naturalism (particular/form) and of physics (system/state), among others.
— Andrew M
But it's based on a implicit realism which is itself a mental construction - vorstellung, I believe is the German term for it. And besides - it's a model, and where there's a model, there's a mind! — Wayfarer
If you mean "Is breaking your toe painful?" then, yes, it is. If you mean "Do we have radically private, immaterial experiences?" then, no, we don't.
By intentional, I mean directing one's focus towards something (i.e., the thing she is intentionally talking about or acting on).
— Andrew M
The very epitome of a dualistic nature: focus towards immediately presupposes focus from. The thing being acted upon presupposes an actor, doesn’t it? — Mww
Nevertheless, the minor objection is still the question....what could Alice possibly be pointing at, if not an object that impresses her senses? Perhaps the hyphenation has some meaning, but I don’t see any difference between object-of-sense and object of sense. There is no contention in saying she is pointing to the object itself, which must be something she senses. Otherwise.....why bother with the act of pointing, or indeed the act of speaking, at all? — Mww
At any rate, usually Alice pointing to tree is chalked up to experience, insofar as Alice already knows the thing she’s pointing at is conventionally named as “tree”. The major objection then becomes, just because we are told why she points the way she does, because of something she knows, does not tell us anything about how she arrived at the correspondence required between the pointing, or talking, she does physically, and the understanding she does mentally, such that the pointing and the understanding don’t contradict each other. What is being asked here is, and what convention of naming things reduces to, is, what happens to Alice between being told “this is a tree”, and her comprehension of what she’s being told? — Mww
Form as in what objects look like, or form as in general characteristic of a class or group of objects. If a tree has a specific form for Alice, how does Alice tell one kind of tree from another? If Alice can tell one tree from another, it cannot be merely from the form “tree” that facilitates such separation, but would seem to require a form for each and every single aspect of difference. The interconnectedness of the root system of aspens absolutely cannot be derived from the mere form “tree”. — Mww
The maybe arises in particular in the fact that things Alice can intentionally point to or talk about may not have a form as does the tree. Alice can certainly point to examples of injustice, and talk about beautiful things, but she is only talking about things under certain conditions. Alice can talk about time, but she’s gonna have a hellava lot of trouble pointing to it. — Mww
And the incompleteness arises from the very simple question.....where does the form reside? How is it possible to determine with apodeitic certainty, that forms reside in the objects, or that form resides in the cognitive system from which identity and representation of objects is given?
I wouldn’t be so bold as to make a positive claim in that regard. — Mww
I grant Alice has a form for herself, which has been called, among other things, the transcendental object, or transcendental ego, the “I” of subjective activity. But the “I” is never used in pure thought, and only becomes manifest in communication as an explanatory placeholder.
I don’t dispute your rationality, one can think whatever he wants, but I nevertheless categorically reject the notion that Alice observes herself, or that she is in the scene. Way too much Cartesian theater for me.
And Alice isn’t in the scene as much as she IS the scene. — Mww
As long as you see that it is absolutely impossible to know everything there is to know about anything a posteriori, which the principle of induction demands, then you must see it is possible for there to be a reason why the two instances of an object are not identical. And possibility is its own justification; we don’t need to know what the difference is, only that a difference is possible. This is why the thing-in-itself is a knowledge claim, not a reality claim. Reality does not depend on us, but our knowledge of reality sure as hell does. — Mww
↪Andrew M
If you mean "Is breaking your toe painful?" then, yes, it is. If you mean "Do we have radically private, immaterial experiences?" then, no, we don't.
I mean subjective experience, of pain for example, yes radically private. You deny? Ok, let us hear your reasoning then. — Zelebg
Language depends on public criteria. See Wittgenstein's private language argument and specifically regarding pain, see his beetle-in-a-box thought experiment. — Andrew M
Note that in an argument against writing, the metaphor of writing is employed. — jjAmEs
I would interpret this as a statement of Plato's attitude towards written texts generally. — Wayfarer
His Hindu contemporaries philosophical teachings were likewise called 'upanisads' - meaning 'sitting close to', i.e. indicating a spoken or silent teaching between guru and chela. — Wayfarer
↪Andrew M
So I had to read all that just to see your point is that you are refusing to talk because you have nothing relevant to say about it. — Zelebg
For me it's not as some in is thread might see it. It's not that private experience like pain is being denied. We know what people mean by such talk (we know how to get along in less philosophical conversation.) Nor is something like the presence of meaning being denied. But this general notion of immediate contact with sensation or meaning is revealed as a largely unquestioned assumption, to those willing to suffer the damage such an insight does to their current attachments. — jjAmEs
Although neuroscientists are committed materialists, and adamantly insist on this aspect of their anti-Cartesianism, they have, Bennett and Hacker argue, merely jettisoned the dual substance doctrine of Cartesianism, but retained its faulty structure with respect to the relation of mind and behavior. — Notre Dame review of Bennett and Hacker's Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience
The only pain we feel is our own. — David Mo
We observe some linguistic and bodily behaviours. — David Mo
If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word "pain" means - must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?
Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case! --Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. --Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. --But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language? --If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. --No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.
That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant. — Wittgenstein
from Voice and Phenomenon.The unique and permanent motif of all the mistakes and distortions which Husserl exposes in "degenerated" metaphysics, across a multiplicity of domains, themes, and arguments, is always a blindness to the authentic mode of ideality, to that which is, to what may be indefinitely repeated in the identity of its presence, because of the very fact that it does not exist, is not real or is irreal—not in the sense of being a fiction, but in another sense which may have several names, whose possibility will permit us to speak of nonreality and essential necessity, the noema, the intelligible object, and in general the nonworldly. This nonworldliness is not another worldliness, this ideality is not an existent that has fallen from the sky; its origin will always be the possible repetition of a productive act. In order that the possibility of this repetition may be open, ideally to infinity, one ideal form must assure this unity of the indefinite and the ideal: this is the present, or rather the presence of the living present. The ultimate form of ideality, the ideality of ideality, that in which in the last instance one may anticipate or recall all repetition, is the living present, the self-presence of transcendental life. Presence has always been and will always, forever, be the form in which, we can say apodictically, the infinite diversity of contents is produced. The opposition between form and matter—which inaugurates metaphysics—finds in the concrete ideality of the living present its ultimate and radical justification.
…
Husserl will awaken it, recall it, and bring it back to itself in the form of a telos— that is, an Idea in the Kantian sense. There is no ideality without there being an Idea in the Kantian sense at work, opening up the possibility of something indefinite, the infinity of a stipulated progression or the infinity of permissible repetitions. This ideality is the very form in which the presence of an object in general may be indefinitely repeated as the same. The nonreality of the Bedeutung, the nonreality of the ideal object, the nonreality of the inclusion of sense or noema in consciousness (Husserl will say that the noema does not really—reell—belong to consciousness) will thus give the assurance that presence to consciousness can be indefinitely repeated—ideal presence to an ideal or transcendental consciousness. Ideality is the preservation or mastery of presence in repetition. In its pure form, this presence is the presence of nothing existing in the world; it is a correlation with the acts of repetition, themselves ideal. — Derrida
It seems you misunderstood my response. If pain were radically private (in the Cartesian sense), then we would not have language to talk about it.
Yet we do. So the term pain must have public criteria. This is surprising to many people. The links were to Wittgenstein's arguments against the possibility of a private language, in case you or other readers weren't familiar with it.
There's no dispute that Alice is acting intelligently here (...). The issue is over whether this is characterized in a naturally observable way or in a radically private way (...). — Andrew M
....what could Alice possibly be pointing at, if not an object that impresses her senses?
— Mww
It's of course true that she wouldn't be pointing at the tree if she hadn't sensed it. What I'm distinguishing here is the object itself (which she has a representation of) and the representation itself (as a kind of reified object).......
(Ok. Understood.)
........An analogy would be with a photograph of Alice's son Bob. When Alice shows the photo to a friend and says that this is her son Bob, she doesn't mean that the photograph she is pointing at is her son, she means that the person that the photo represents is her son. (....) That's what I'm indicating with (hyphenated) object-of-sense there. — Andrew M
....does not tell us anything about how she arrived at the correspondence required (...) such that the pointing and the understanding don’t contradict each other.
— Mww
So on my model, "correspondence" is not the right term here, which implies a matching up between what she is doing physically and what she is doing mentally (...). But she is not performing two activities, she is performing one activity which is simply pointing at the tree. It's an identification (i.e., that this thing that Alice is pointing at is what she means by tree), so isn't subject to dualism's intractable interaction problems. — Andrew M
This raises the issue of how she can be certain she has successfully pointed at the tree (perhaps it is an illusion). The short answer is that she can't be certain. — Andrew M
Think of this as a formal model for how language terms operate. It proceeds from knowledge of the thing, not knowledge of the appearance. — Andrew M
The model says that on the condition that Alice has identified a tree, she has acquired knowledge. — Andrew M
What is your conclusion then: there is no hard problem, there is no qualia, or what? — Zelebg
In my view, Wittgenstein's point about the beetle in the box is a radical insight. It applies not only to pain or sensation but also to the issue of meaning. If the concept of pain depends on social convention, then so does the meaning of 'subject' and 'object.' The basic philosophical prejudice is arguably the notion that words are attached somehow directly to mental entities. And then this prejudice understands social practice to be secondary and derivative, ignoring that the functioning of a concept is radically dependent on social practice. — jjAmEs
Thus, to resolve the issue as stated, I submit that all acts of the intelligence are characterized as radically private, all intelligent acts are naturally observable, and in general, the human does both. — Mww
There have always existed in the breasts of philosophers, including our own breasts, two conflicting tempers. I nickname them the "Reductionist" and the "Duplicationist" tempers, or the "Deflationary" and the "Inflationary" tempers. The slogan of the first temper is "Nothing But . . ."; that of the other "Something Else as Well . . ." — Thinking and Saying - Gilbert Ryle
An analogy would be with a photograph of Alice's son Bob. ...
— Andrew M
Looks a lot like the ol’ map/territory paradox. — Mww
Ok, understood. But your model presupposes knowledge. — Mww
The model says that on the condition that Alice has identified a tree, she has acquired knowledge.
— Andrew M
Not my model. My model says on the condition that Alice has knowledge, she has thereby acquired the means to identify an object in the world. Whether or not the object is a tree depends on something else. — Mww
Yeah, so how do you reject the hard problem of consciousness? — Zelebg
I think that the idea of a hard problem of consciousness arises from a category mistake. I think that in fact there is no real distinction between hard and easy problems of consciousness, and the illusion that there is one is caused by the pseudo-profundity that often accompanies category mistakes. — Massimo Pigliucci - What Hard Problem?
The philosopher Peter Hacker argues that the hard problem is misguided in that it asks how consciousness can emerge from matter, whereas in fact sentience emerges from the evolution of living organisms.[76] He states: "The hard problem isn’t a hard problem at all. The really hard problems are the problems the scientists are dealing with. [...] The philosophical problem, like all philosophical problems, is a confusion in the conceptual scheme."[76] — Peter Hacker - Hard problem of consciousness (other views) - Wikipedia
↪Andrew M So do you think a third-person description of pain is pain? — Wayfarer
It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does. — Chalmers
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