Human beings learn conceptual schemas as they grow up, — Marchesk

There's a problem of induction. There's apriori knowledge. Whatever's being learned as one grows up, it's not space and time. It's not how to apply logic to new situations. Ounces vs grams? Sure. We learn that as we grow up.

That makes sense to me; and I agree with the point about Kant. The upshot then would seem to be that there is nothing but reality as interpreted; which would seem to be synonymous with reality as conceptual schema, or Wittgenstein's 'world as the totality of facts'. — John

But then what are we to make sense of the world without us, since the totality of facts shows us that we've only been around a short time, and only exist on little speck of dust.

Is the world really on as humans conceive it? Or is it that the world has to be as we fundamentally conceive it (time, space, quantity, etc)?

Or is it that there is no world without us, which runs counter to totality of facts we've accumulated.

I don't understand this position by Davidson, Kant or Witty. Are we back to Protagoras? Man is the measure of all that is and all that could be? Yeah, humans!

This is simply an impossible question to answer because any answer we give will be a reflection of our own conceptualizations.

The best we can do is to say things like, for example, that if we had been around at the time of the dinosaurs, and if we are right in thinking that they existed at that time, then we would have seen them.

he best we can do is to say things like, for example, that if we had been around at the time of the dinosaurs, and if we are right in thinking that they existed at that time, then we would have seen them. — John

Which would mean it's possible the world is as we think it is, at least in some cases, such as dinosaurs living 65 plus million years ago, we just can't get outside being human to know.

So then the Greek skeptics were right about our knowledge claims.

I think we have very good reason to believe that our thinking the world is a real process, an expression of the world, like anything else, like for example, a flower is an expression of the world. Our thinking is a kind of flowering of the world, it is in in that sense in total harmony with the world, like all expressions of nature. Really, when you think about it; how could it be otherwise?

Our thinking is a kind of flowering of the world, it is in in that sense in total harmony with the world, like all expressions of nature. Really, when you think about it; how could it be otherwise? — John

Because humans noticed a long time ago a discrepancy between appearance and reality, and that people are quite capable of being wrong about a number of things. Simon Blackburn called this the loose fit between mind and world, and the reason that philosophy came into existence.

Dennett has said that although some animals appear to notice the difference and appear troubled by it, they are not able to reflect on it.

I'm the world looking at itself? But point of view requires separation. Maybe I'm a snake looking at its own tail. The tail is the world.

I would say the discrepancy is not between appearance and reality but between imagination and reality. The imagination can confabulate all kinds of things which never actually reliably appear. Anything that does reliably appear is considered to be real.

Anything that does reliably appear is considered to be real. — John

Is the stick bent in the water, or does it just appear bent, or are we imagining it to be bent? Did I hallucinate the person in the window, or just imagine seeing a face there?

Is it hot in here is it just me?

If "we" are trapped inside anything, it is the present moment in time. We are poised between the two kinds of world that are the past (some accumulation of definite constraints on possibility) and the future (the space of unspent but now constrained possibility). So really the experiencing of the world is the view of an observer at the point of transition in which possibility gets fixed as actuality.

As observers, we could be spatially located anywhere in the universe and it wouldn't make a difference (except in terms of our comfort). But the only place we could be in time is on the cusp of the present.

So when it comes to schemas vs naive realism, the idea of being stuck inside with our ideas, and wondering about what it would be like to jump the fence to see what is really outside, is itself a limiting schema. Conceptualisation is instead about open ended predictions. We have good reason to expect a lot of what will happen based on past experience. Yet then at the point of possibilities becoming actualised, it is the contradictions of our expectations - the differences that make a difference - that stand out in attention as what "really just happened".

The temporal view anchors consciousness. The spatial view leaves it untethered. The temporal view makes it clearer that the goal of conceptualisation is not to "give us reality" in a way that makes the world's own process of possibility-actualisation redundant. Instead, concepts are necessary to us even being sensitised to what is really happening - in terms of being that which we didn't quite manage to predict.

And that is what we can't get outside of. If we have no prior expectations, then nothing can meaningfully count as "an event". We can't construct a view of the noumenal except in terms of how there was some phenomenological surprise, some failure of a conceptual schema that we then need to correct - by a reconception that leads to better future prediction.

So a spatial metaphor of the realism~idealism issue fails because it is essentially dualistic. Minds have no real attachment to a location in space. It makes no essential difference seeing the same world from somewhere else.

But the temporal metaphor is inherently triadic and semiotic. We are located now at the one particular point which marks a transition from the possible to the actual. Until the future becomes the past, nothing is real in the naive realist sense of being some concrete state of affairs. Propositions can only be referring to probabilities and other kinds of conditional fictions.

And that fits with the natural logic of the psychological process. To be aware of the realities of the present, we must be informed by the expectations of our past. And keeping it all "internal", it is our failures of prediction which constitute our signs of what "really just happened". We know we were surprised and so by logical implication (rather than direct knowledge) it is right to suppose that there is the noumenal out there as the apophatic source of our uncertainty.

There are some anedotes I learned in anthropology which are interesting in this regard.

The first was the diary note of Joseph Banks, who was the botanist on Captain Cook's 'Endeavour' when it sailed into Botany Bay on its discovery voyage to Australia. The Endeavour sailed in and dropped anchor in Botany Bay, which is a large, almost circular bay immediately south of what is now the City of Sydney. Banks noted that there were a group of indegenes on a sandbank some distance from the ship, but within clear sight. However they showed no sign of recognizing the Endeavour at all. After some hours, the Endeavour put down a longboat which began to row towards the shore. As soon as the longboat separated from the Endeavour, the indigenes all began to take notice - pointing, shouting and raising spears. Banks didn't offer a rationalisation, other than to say that the indigenes behaved exactly as if they didn't see the Endeavour. I wondered (of course I don't know) if it was because they were not able to assimilate or comprehend the image, to the extent they remained unconscious of it, up until something like a canoe appeared. (This anecdote is reported in Alan Moorehead's The Fatal Impact.)

There was another anecdote concerning a pygmy chieftain, who was transported to a mountain look-out. This individual had lived his whole life in the very dense forests of Central Africa. When taken to the look-out, he started to kneel down and reach in front of him. The anthropologists realised he was reacting to a herd of wildebeest that were visible on the plains below - he was trying to touch them. He had no conception of the kind of distance he was looking at and thought the distant animals were small and close.

There were other examples I read about in cognitive science. Plus there's the well-known stories of neurologist Oliver Sachs, author of 'The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat', involving the strange consequences of brain injuries and conditions on perception and cognition. They illustrate the way the mind 'builds' the world and assimilates novel information into it.

They illustrate the way the mind 'builds' the world and assimilates novel information into it. — Wayfarer

Which means a naive view of perception or realism doesn't work. But it's also a mistake to conclude that just because our minds work that way, the world is that way. For example, some have concluded from a meditative or drug induced state that all is one, because of their experience. But another explanation is that the mediation or drugs created the experience, and it has no meaning beyond showing that the mind is capable of collapsing self-other distinctions.

And that fits with the natural logic of the psychological process. To be aware of the realities of the present, we must be informed by the expectations of our past. And keeping it all "internal", it is our failures of prediction which constitute our signs of what "really just happened". We know we were surprised and so by logical implication (rather than direct knowledge) it is right to suppose that there is the noumenal out there as the apophatic source of our uncertainty. — apokrisis

You're saying that surprise is justification for belief in the world beyond us. If we were never surprised by anything, never wrong about how we think or perceive, then there would be no reason to suppose there is more to the world than what we think about it.

Yep. The usual question is how can we know what we perceive is real and not imagined. But turning it around - internalising it all - it becomes a matter of imagining the world so we can discover how we failed. The surprising becomes the sign of something we missed. The phenomenology is dualise into the expected and unexpected. The noumenal is then the third thing of that which is implied by this state of affairs.

It is thus a temporal process of reasoning. But that becomes hard to see if consciousness is being understood as a spatialised thing that exists at a location, like stuck inside the head looking out through the windows of the eyes to the world beyond.

But that becomes hard to see if consciousness is being understood as a spatialised thing that exists at a location, like stuck inside the head looking out through the windows of the eyes to the world beyond. — apokrisis

It would seem that our sight dominated hominid brains have been fooled by a metaphorical way of thinking about our relationship to the world.

Which means a naive view of perception or realism doesn't work. But it's also a mistake to conclude that just because our minds work that way, the world is that way. — Marchesk

You mean, the world as it is not perceived?

It would seem that our sight dominated hominid brains have been fooled by a metaphorical way of thinking about our relationship to the world. — Marchesk

Seems like an opportunity to mention Donald Hoffman.

Question: how can seeing a false reality be beneficial to an organism’s survival?

Hoffman: There’s a metaphor that’s only been available to us in the past 30 or 40 years, and that’s the desktop interface. Suppose there’s a blue rectangular icon on the lower right corner of your computer’s desktop — does that mean that the file itself is blue and rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your computer? Of course not. But those are the only things that can be asserted about anything on the desktop — it has color, position, and shape. Those are the only categories available to you, and yet none of them are true about the file itself or anything in the computer. They couldn’t possibly be true. That’s an interesting thing. You could not form a true description of the innards of the computer if your entire view of reality was confined to the desktop. And yet the desktop is useful. That blue rectangular icon guides my behavior, and it hides a complex reality that I don’t need to know. That’s the key idea. Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you.

That’s the key idea. Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you.

I heard hims say that in a talk on consciousness with Chalmers and Dennett. Dennett did not agree.

It's an interesting metaphor, but the problem I have with it is how we learned that pretty much of all of reality is stuff we don't need to know.

His argument is that despite only having the desktop appearance available to us when using computers, we've still managed to figure out quite a bit of the internal workings such that we know the desktop is an illusion. Evolution itself is a good example of figuring stuff out.

Dennett's counter argument was basically that animals need to be able to know enough truth to be fit, such was who's a mate, what food is, and what will kill it, otherwise evolution wouldn't work.

If the argument is that mates, food and things that kill are just metaphors, then one wonders what evolution is selecting on.

conditions of realization in the world — Glahn

Interesting, Glahn; but I'm not sure what the above phrase might mean. An example?

Its natural to consciousness that it is the attempt to see through to the stability of the world - a mental picture of some panorama of predictable objects. Change is then the confusing bit where we feel instead momentarily puzzled or unfocused.

So the spatial location of a world of real things is what the naive realist presumes they ought to be able to see because that is "what's there". But if you check our visual system, it in fact relies on constant change to construct its impressions of visual stability. If an image is actually stabilised on the retina, it rapidly fades from awareness as the neurons are tuned to signalling only changes in luminance.

So if we fixate on something in the world that is not moving or changing, then our eyes have to compensate by dancing about in microsaccades - keep up a constant jitter to maintain some kind of excited surprise in the retinal cells.

The naive realist reasons the world is some located collection of objects, so the brain just has to look and can see that directly. It is a shifting and unstable world that would instead require an extra effort to decode and represent.

But the temporal nature of consciousness means the opposite. We are always projecting the future and anticipating change. If the world lacks sufficient change to keep us interested, then we start prodding it and disturbing it. We have to force it to change. Consciousness can't exist if it stays in the spatial location. It has to keep riding the edge of change - the temporal location that marks the transition between past and future.

Understood that way, the conceptual basis of awareness becomes an obvious necessity. We must start with some idea of the next moment like a scientific hypothesis to be falsified. We are projecting ourselves into the world as a set of putative actions rather than passively receiving the world as belated news of some existing set of fossilised facts.

However they showed no sign of recognizing the Endeavour at all. — Wayfarer

That story is cobblers. Just didn't happen.

Sure Banno. You were there, hiding in the bushes, with your binoculars. Besides, you know Joseph Banks to be an habitual confabulator, right?

Understood that way, the conceptual basis of awareness becomes an obvious necessity. — apokrisis

Which is why Kant is still taken quite seriously in cognitive sciences.

I have posted this previously, but I think it's relevant to the discussion.

According to evolutionary biology, homo sapiens is the result of millions of years of evolution. For all these millions of years, our sensory and intellectual abilities have been honed and shaped by the exigencies of survival, through billions of lifetimes in various life-forms - fish, lizard, mammal, primate and so on - in such a way as to eventually give rise to the mind that we have today.

Recently, other scientific disciplines such as cognitive and evolutionary psychology have revealed that conscious perception, while subjectively appearing to exist as a steady continuum, is actually composed of a heirarchical matrix of thousand, or millions, of interacting cellular transactions, commencing at the most basic level with the parasympathetic system which controls one’s respiration, digestion, and so on, up through various levels to culminate in that peculiarly human ability of ‘conscious thought’ (and maybe beyond).

Our consciousness plays a central role in co-ordinating these diverse activities so as to give rise to the sense of continuity which we call ‘ourselves’ - and also the apparent coherence and reality of the 'external world'. Yet it is important to realise that the naïve sense in which we understand ourselves, and the objects of our perception, to exist, is in fact totally dependent upon the constructive activities of our consciousness, the bulk of which are completely unknown to us.

When you perceive something - large, small, alive or inanimate, local or remote - there is a considerable amount of work involved in ‘creating’ an object from the raw material of perception. Your eyes receive the lightwaves reflected or emanated from it, your mind organises the image with regards to all of the other stimuli impacting your senses at that moment – either acknowledging it, or ignoring it, depending on how busy you are; your memory will then compare it to other objects you have seen, from whence you will (hopefully) recall its name, and perhaps know something about it ('star', 'tree', 'frog', etc).

And you will do all of this without you even noticing that you are doing it; it is largely unconscious.

In other words, consciousness is not the passive recipient of sensory objects which exist irrespective of your perception of them. Instead, your consciousness is an active agent which constructs reality partially on the basis of sensory input, and also on the basis of an enormous number of unconscious processes, memories, intentions, and so on. That is the sense in which the philosophy of idealism does indeed recieve support from modern science, insofar as idealism (specifically, Kantian) recognises the constructive nature of conscious thought, of the act of knowing, which lies behind conscious perception.

It's significant that while evolutionary philosophies might appeal to such a Darwinian kind of basis to explain the nature of consciousness, in fact this understanding gives no real comfort to scientific realism either, because it undermines the belief in a 'mind-independent' nature of reality. In other words, whatever significance we attribute to neuronal processes or evolutionary drives, those factors are themselves part of this matrix. That is not to say that they're unreal, but they're not necessarily more real than any other propositional content. In other words, the 'facts of science' are a part of this 'constructive content'; but the point about scientifically-validated facts is that they are 'inter-subjectively' the case, true for any observer.

Sure Banno — Wayfarer

Here's Bank's Journal. Read it for yourself.

The stick appears bent, and we understand why it appears bent. Appearances can be deceptive, but when they are there is almost always, perhaps even always, a good explanation for why they are deceptive. And it is a range of other experiences (appearances) that tell us that the stick is not really bent. We understand what is real and what is illusion by comparing experiences. We know that the appearance of a stick never spontaneously changes from straight to bent; and that objects generally never spontaneously change their appearances.

Whether there was really someone at the window or whether it was a trick of the light you may never know. But if you were able to verify one way or another it would be via another appearance or set of appearances.

I agree; the idea that they simply could not see the Endeavour is ridiculous. Imagine, for example if a the driver of a road train left the road and drove for miles across the plains approaching a mob of kangaroos that had never seen a road train before. I'm quite sure they would not be able to see it all, and they would all just carry on grazing or whatever and get ploughed into the ground. :-}

Sounds about right! Is there anything about your tail that you are unable to see that you have reason to believe would be there nonetheless if you could see it?

the idea that they simply could not see the Endeavour is ridiculous. — John

According to Alan Moorehead, Banks simply logged that when the Endeavour anchored, the natives didn't appear to notice. Later, when they sent a small boat out, then they reacted. They might have decided to ignore it - it's obviously impossible to know. Banks didn't say anything beyond the fact that they didn't react. (I can't locate either the relevant page in the actual log, or a copy of Moorehead's book, but that is what it said.)

I gave you the relevant page from the log. That's the bit were they landed at Botany Bay.

Apocryphal, perhaps; it is a common assertion in new-age and other psychoceramic circles; sometimes it's Columbus and Indians, sometimes it's Maori. There's a hint of racism about it.

Found the passage Moorehead refers to:

By noon we were within the mouth of the inlet which appeard to be very good. Under the South head of it were four small canoes; in each of these was one man who held in his hand a long pole with which he struck fish, venturing with his little imbarkation almost into the surf. These people seemd to be totaly engag'd in what they were about: the ship passd within a quarter of a mile of them and yet they scarce lifted their eyes from their employment; I was almost inclind to think that attentive to their business and deafned by the noise of the surf they neither saw nor heard her go past them. At 1 we came to an anchor abreast of a small village consisting of about 6 or 8 houses. Soon after this an old woman followd by three children came out of the wood; she carried several peices of stick and the children also had their little burthens; when she came to the houses 3 more younger children came out of one of them to meet her. She often lookd at the ship but expressd neither surprize nor concern. Soon after this she lighted a fire and the four Canoes came in from fishing; the people landed, hauld up their boats and began to dress their dinner to all appearance totaly unmovd at us, tho we were within a little more than 1⁄2 a mile of them Of all these people we had seen so distinctly through our glasses we had not been able to observe the least signs of Cloathing: myself to the best of my judgement plainly discernd that the woman did not copy our mother Eve even in the fig leaf.

After dinner the boats were mann'd and we set out from the ship intending to land at the place where we saw these people, hoping that as they regarded the ships coming in to the bay so little they would as little regard our landing. We were in this however mistaken, for as soon as we aproachd the rocks two of the men came down upon them, each armd with a lance of about 10 feet long and a short stick which he seemd to handle as if it was a machine to throw the lance. They calld to us very loud in a harsh sounding Language of which neither us or Tupia understood a word, shaking their lances and menacing...

At least good to know I wasn't actually whistling dixie. It was the underlined passage that struck me, but it was my interpretation 'she didn't really see the ship', and I grant that is entirely speculative. Might have, as I said to John, decided to ignore it - which is, however, almost as remarkable, under the circumstances.

Say you're looking at the Mona Lisa. There's a landscape behind her which implies more landscape which is unseen. Is it reasonable to believe those unseen hills and lakes would be there IF you could see them?

It's not reasonable, it's just an aspect of the concept of world. Isn't implication of the unseen an aspect of garden architecture?