I'm thinking a Nagel article might be good for the next thread. One that has nothing to do with Bats.

I think mentioned before that his discussion of Davidson did not work for me. We always have a basis for translation in our shared reality.

I updated to include McGinn's cognitive closue and a Wity reference.

Where?

I thought Davidson argued against incommensurability?

Nagel post you responded to.

I do think Dennett manages to have a representational account of perception without being a Cartesian; the thing doing all the representing is a bodily process' pattern, that matches environmental patterns in some way, so there's no mental/physical event distinction in the ontology for the Cartesian distinction to attach to — fdrake

What is the basis of that judgement? From what perspective do we match the bodily pattern with those environmental patterns? What faculty does that?

Yes; one cannot coherently insist that there is a language that we cannot understand, because recognising it as a language involves recognising that it is understandable.

So, for example, recognising dolphin noises as a language is exactly recognising that it is about fish and waves or some such.

Nagel post you responded to. — Marchesk

Yah, I looked for that but couldn't find it. Can you link?

Dialog, by definition, is a conversation between two or more people. Inner dialog extends this idea in a metaphorical way.
— Andrew M

But the philosophical challenge is to then get literal again. Lest your poetry be seized on.

Inner dialog (and music) is a good place to be literal about thinking, as it is relatively easy to recognise as being supported, even if not utterly constituted, by neural shivering. In the extreme, we might catch our lips (fingers) moving; but plenty of more central neural/neuro-muscular twitching is also noticeable.

Such recognition may not threaten anyone's intuition of purely phenomenal "sound" events, even if they begin to notice that shivering at some level always accompanies them. After all, perhaps the alleged theatrics are something weird emerging from the bio-physics of the more central shivering.

But it's a good place to start. — bongo fury

Sounds good. (Goodman referenced noted.)

The main issue for me is that a description of a human being at a physical level should not contradict descriptions at other levels of abstraction. What differentiates a human being (and other living creatures) from the rest of the universe is not the fundamental material they are composed of (say, atoms, etc.), but their structure and organization. And it is this structure that gives rise to the predicates we use at different levels of abstraction. For example, that we absorb and reflect light as physical systems. That we perceive things, feel pain, etc., as sentient creatures. And that we have thoughts, desires, and purposes, etc., as human beings.

So the point there is that thoughts, desires, perceptions, etc., are not something in addition to, or separate from, the physical. They are instead characteristics that are specific to certain kinds of physical systems - in our case, as human beings. So to seek to understand these characteristics is to seek to understand our physical structure and organization (as compared to and differentiated from other physical systems).

As I've repeatedly argued, regardless of whether one wishes to defend the concept of qualia, it's the colors, sounds, feels, etc. that do not fit easily with the mathematizeable explanations of science.

Or as Chalmers puts it, the structure and function does not account for the sensations of experience without positing some extra natural law, like integrated information theory. — Marchesk

Some things cannot be reliably quantified to be sure. I don't believe that everything can be explained in terms of the laws of physics, so in that sense I am not an eliminative physicalist. No 'third person' explanation of experience is ever going to satisfy us, because intuitively experience is 'first person' to us. That's why we have poetry and literature, the arts and music. But that is not surprising, it seems only reasonable; how else would you expect the situation to seem?

If we reify the first person seemingness as qualia; then we are committing Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced concreteness", insofar as we are trying to render the first person seemingness as third person quasi-entities. It's a category error of thinking so easy to fall into, and that's the problem I see with qualia.

I seem to recall a debate in which I used your ideas for floor polish.

Was that here, or in The Other Place? — Banno

I remember that several different ones ended similarly.

a belief is still an attitude towards a proposition. — fdrake

You do not seem to remember that the above ends here:Either propositions exist in their entirety in the complete absence of language such that a language less creature is even capable of having an attitude towards them, or language less creatures have no belief.

But a belief is still an attitude towards a proposition.
— Banno

Would be a good thread. — fdrake

A belief is an abstract object probably, all patterned and what not.

↪frank We're not getting our gold stars, being on the wrong team in this thread. — Marchesk

The Greeks made a terrible mistake in taking their frustrations out on the Trojans. They should have won with grace and mercy. So we have to just walk away knowing the gods will bless us for being so civilized about it. :confused:

seems to hold a position very similar(the most similar, I think) to my own.

I think there's a pretty strong alliance between that perspective and embodied cognition approaches, though there's a rabbit hole to go down regarding how much of embodiment is the brain's doing. Do you think the role of the brain can be emphasised without falling into the Cartesian trap?

I think it can, so long as the image of the brain producing output mind states as distinct phenomena from their production is discarded. Body patterns as environmental patterns. Refusing to put events involving an agent not a privileged ontological stratum - like as a separate substance (a "res cogitans") or aspect of substance (an "infinite mode" or "attribute"). — fdrake

Yes, agreed.

Pretty much. The use of those terms reinforce the Cartesian theater such that its difficult to understand that there can even be an alternative. Per Ryle's ghost in the machine metaphor the materialist, in rejecting the ghost, simply endorses the machine (where physical things are external, third-person, objective). But that still accepts the underlying Cartesian framing and so doesn't resolve anything.
— Andrew M

This makes a lot of sense to me (maybe). In what way do you believe conceptualising things in terms of mental and physical phenomena can propagate or reinforce a Cartesian perspective? — fdrake

Thoughts, feelings, perceptions, etc., are embodied - they aren't non-physical. So the mental and physical aren't opposing duals. But neither is the mental eliminable, or reducible to some lowest-common-denominator set of physical characteristics that we might share with other things (say, lower animals or machines).

The root of the problem is that the mental-physical division is a philosophical idealization, not a naturally arising distinction. It's as if some philosophers have found the world too unwieldy for their tastes, so have decided to split it into two parts and categorize everything as one or the other. (Different philosophers do this differently, but the principle is the same.)

From an earlier example, suppose you were playing a game of football where you scored a goal. It was clearly a physical activity. Yet it was also an activity that required intelligence and purpose. You can't separate your experience into physical and mental phenomena, nor separate your thinking from your bodily movements. To suppose one can is to create a (dualist) puzzle where none previously existed.

Instead we can describe the activity from a particular point-of-view, and at a particular level of abstraction. For example, we can note that the ball curled into the net (a physical description), or that it was a deliberate strike rather than an accidental deflection (a description of one's purpose), or that the score is now 2-1 (a logical consequence of the rules of the game). So categorical terms like physical, mental, psychological, biological, mechanical, logical, etc., arise as natural distinctions depending on the scenario and what one wishes to say.

Duals like subject/object, internal/external, physical/mental, mind/body, are assumptions that frame the analysis for dualists and materialists alike. Yet these terms do have natural uses when understood apart from dualism, as suggested above.

Should we do this, again?

The notion of a proposition without language is nonsense.

The notion of a proposition without language is nonsense. — Banno

I would concur.

How can a language less creature have an attitude towards a proposition?

I didn't understand much of what Mww had to say. — Banno

‘S ok. Take refuge in my having quined qualia years ago. In principle anyway, insofar as nothing with which qualia is supposed to be concerned, hasn’t already been accounted for.

‘S ok. Take refuge in my having quined qualia years ago. In principle anyway, insofar as nothing with which qualia is supposed to be concerned, hasn’t already been accounted for. — Mww

Banno's not a fan of Kantian frameworks.

Should we do this, again? — Banno

How about we do it for the first time?

:smile: :flower:

Hardly anyone is.

It's the conflating perception with reality stigma.

I get the impression that there is a good conversation for us to have, if we could only find the right topic.

That question needs answered.

They can't. But they can have an attitude towards their food.

An experience is not a concrete thing like cups and taste buds are. It instead describes your practical contact with things in the environment, which occurred at some time and location.
— Andrew M

1. Isn't the "practical" (physical?) contact between you and your environment a "concrete thing"? — Luke

No, it's an abstraction over concrete things. It describes something that a person does or has. That is, no person, no experience. (Which we can appreciate if we substituted a robot for the person, since robots don't have experiences.)

2. Isn't there more to an "experience" than this physical contact? E.g. There's not just the "practical contact" experience of light entering the eye, there's also the experience of seeing red. — Luke

Those aren't experiences, at least on an ordinary definition. This is a good example of how we're using language in completely different ways.

Experience isn't merely physical contact. A robot can do physical contact. But it isn't therefore something separate from physical contact either (which would be dualism). It's an abstraction over that physical contact in a manner applicable to human beings.

And I would add that the practical contact is between the cup/coffee and the person, not between the person's eyes and the photons. The latter is detail about the physical process and operates at a different level of abstraction than what I'm describing here.

The thread has been revived, like a p-zombie at a picnic!

...a little bit of defibrillation goes a long way...

They can't. But they can have an attitude towards their food. — Banno

Their food is not a proposition.

Yep. So, what does that all imply?

Cats do not have belief.