I've answered numerous times already. — Wayfarer

And I've pointed out that these variations on noumena, because they are ineffable, can't serve as explanations. They are as nothing.

They're not an object of consciousness, but if you're asking, what is the world 'constructed from' then it's an answer. Sure, it's not the kind of explanation that scientific realism will demand.

So there's a "something" that is "outside the scope of observation by any living being" and yet despite that accounts for what we see.

As opposed to there being stuff around us that we see.

You might be happy with that, but I find it wanting.

I sometimes wonder if Kant, were he around and able to avail himself of our understanding of chemistry and physics. would puzzle that there were still folk who held to his surmise that there was unobservable stuff "behind" our observations. Would he just admit that he hadn't thought of the ways science has uncovered his noumena?

Would he just admit that he hadn't thought of the ways science has uncovered his noumena? — Banno

You forget that Kant lectured in science, and that his nebular theory (modified by LaPlace) is still part of current science. Bishop Berkeley wrote a treatise on optics. Schopenhauer was intensely interested in science. But I know this a pointless discussion, so I'll desist.

All philosophy is about sentences to you. It's just language-games.
— Wayfarer

Pretty much. Unlike life. — Banno

I should've stopped there. :wink:

You forget... — Wayfarer

No, I didn't. Science has developed somewhat since Kant's time.

I should've stopped there. — Wayfarer

Probably.

I'm going to attempt a mass reply... @Janus,@Banno,@Wayfarer,@NOS4A2

Hopefully this clears up the position I'm arguing. If not... sorry.

We have an idea that there is a cup in front of me. Something emits the data which I use to decide to reach for the word "cup", to decide where to direct my hand to pick it up, what to do with it once picked up, how heavy it might be, what fits in it, that it's still there even when hidden from view, what to do when I hear someone say "pass me the cup"...and so on. There is a cause of this data, and we assume that cause is external to us (no solipsism).

We know we make errors about, and there are differences of opinion about, the objects which make up the world, such as the cup. So we need a model of how we perceive objects which accounts for those errors and differences.

We could argue, in direct sense, that those errors are merely equipment failures. That something goes wrong in some of the neural pathways (or whatever model we're going to use of how we perceive) such that they do not deliver the 'right' data from the cup.

But this entails two major problems.

Firstly, our errors are not random. We make mistakes almost exclusively in the direction of our expectations. I saw a great example of this on a Christmas Lecture once. Two jugglers performed in front of an audience. The audience are asked to count the number of passes. Unbeknownst to them, a man in a Gorilla costume crosses the stage right behind the jugglers. Only a fraction of the audience even noticed the 'Gorilla'. Everyone saw it when played back. Obviously, proper experiments have also been done on this - but this one was a great demonstration.

Now we know it's not a failure at the sensory organs (it's impossible for the retina to block out or fail to capture such specific information). We can also rule out early sensory processing areas - occipital cortex, auditory cortex etc, as we can see the activity relating to specific stimuli on fMRI and EEG.

Secondly, we don't seem to be able to resolve some differences by going back and checking. Some people simply see things slightly differently to us (more complex objects usually) and no amount of checking and double-checking seems to resolve this difference. What's more, these differences too are not random. Things that are of higher valence will be perceived differently and the valence we give to sensory data is related in some way to our experiences of life thus far.

So we have to conclude that the error/difference is a) not random, and b) related directly to an prior expectation or experience.

Back to the cup. If I make an error in - where to direct my hand to pick it up, what to do with it once picked up, how heavy it might be, what fits in it, that it's still there even when hidden from view, what to do when I hear someone say "pass me the cup"...and so on - I need a model of how I perceive cups which explains, not only the error, but why the nature of the error is so consistently related to what I expect to see or have a high valence for seeing. Something has to be happening at some stage in the perception process, past the sensory organs, past the initial sensory processing, which changes all those responses (listed above) from being related directly to the data coming from the cup, to being related instead to some kind of fusion of {data from cup} and {expectation of cup}. It's pretty much an absolute necessity that such a stage exists, without it we simply cannot explain what we know about perception errors.

As such we've invoked, out of necessity, the idea of {model of cup} as an entity. It's a stage in the event 'experiencing a cup'.

Bu it's a model of a cup, so there must be a cup for it to be a model of, it is not this actual cup which directs our behaviour, it's the model (it must be, otherwise we couldn't account for those errors). So when I say "pass me the cup" I'm referring to the actual cup, but I'm using my model of the cup to do so.

Some other conclusions fall out of this.

The actual cup cannot be some ineffable noumena. I'm referring directly to the actual cup when I say "pass me the cup". I don't want you to pass me my model of the cup. We cannot (yet) know for sure if our model of the cup is correct (we've no way of bypassing the modelling system), but we know definitionally that it is of the cup, not of some ineffable noumena.



Again, if all that seems totally unrelated to what all/any of you are arguing, then my apologies. It seemed like it needed clearing up.

I sometimes wonder if Kant, were he around and able to avail himself of our understanding of chemistry and physics. would puzzle that there were still folk who held to his surmise that there was unobservable stuff "behind" our observations. Would he just admit that he hadn't thought of the ways science has uncovered his noumena? — Banno

One can be a scientific realist but an anti-realist/idealist about everyday objects of perception. Electrons and protons and photons explain why we see what we do, but they are not the what we see. The what we see is an emergent phenomena, brought about by a causal chain involving a multitude of these subatomic particles.

Or perhaps Kant would be, like Hawkings was, a scientific instrumentalist.

Or perhaps Kant would be, like Hawkings was, a scientific instrumentalist. — Michael

Hawking, if I recall correctly, also expressed quite a firm belief in model-dependent realism... If the views of our great scientists are anything to go by...

Hawking, if I recall correctly, also expressed quite a firm belief in model-dependent realism... If the views of our great scientists are anything to go by... — Isaac

Yes, which despite the term "realism" is instrumentalist (much like Putnam's "internal realism" is anti-realist).

I therefore take the view, which has been described as simple-minded or naïve, that a theory of physics is just a mathematical model that we use to describe the results of observations… Beyond that it makes no sense to ask if it corresponds to reality, because we do not know what reality is independent of theory.

...

According to model-dependent realism, it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation. If there are two models that both agree with observation, like the goldfish's picture and ours, then one cannot say that one is more real than another — Hawkings

And more explicitly:

According to the idea of model-dependent realism introduced in Chapter 3, our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the outside world. We form mental concepts of our home, trees, other people, the electricity that flows from wall sockets, atoms, molecules and other universes. These mental concepts are the only reality we can know. There is no model-independent test of reality. — Hawkings

Yes, which despite the term "realism" is instrumentalist — Michael

I see, thanks. So how does 'instrumentalist' (not a term I'm familiar with) relate to realism?

A scientific realist will say that an electron is a mind-independent entity. A scientific instrumentalist will say that the mathematical model of an electron best describes and predicts the results of observation.

So a scientific realist will say that the Standard Model corresponds to the way the world is, whereas a scientific instrumentalist will just say that the Standard Models works.

So a scientific realist will say that the Standard Model corresponds to the way the world is, a scientific instrumentalist will just say that the Standard Models works. — Michael

OK. So does an instrumentalist have a model of the world which explains why their model of part of it works?

So does an instrumentalist have a model of the world which explains why their model of part of it works? — Isaac

Not that I know of.

Not that I know of. — Michael

Interesting. Turtles all the way down, perhaps?

Admirable effort and I can see what you're getting at. My response would be to notice that your approach is indeed instrumentalist - that it takes an instrumental view of reason. This is that there is the possibility of faulty cognition, which is able to be corrected through various rational means, so as to arrive a correct perception. But the underlying assumption is realist, specifically that there is a real [X] which exists even if we might have mistaken views about. And that is in keeping with the overall orientation of cognitive science and scientific realism.

But again, this is a different kind of analysis to the philosophical issue of 'the nature of the external world' and the way it might be constituted. That operates on a different level. (And I don't want to come off as some self-described expert in saying that. I don't consider myself expert, but as a self-directed student who is following a thread of insight, which in my view has generally been neglected in much modern philosophy.)

There's a comment on teacups on the book I keep referring to, Pinter's Mind and the Cosmic Order. As I've said, this too is not a philosophy book as such, although it has many philosophical implications. But the point that he makes is that:

Common sense leads us to assume that we see in Gestalts because the world itself is constituted of whole objects and scenes, but this is incorrect. The reason events of the world appear holistic to animals is that animals perceive them in Gestalts. The atoms of a teacup do not collude together to form a teacup: The object is a teacup because it is constituted that way from a perspective outside of itself. — Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 3).

This is in line with his overall thesis that the identity of things is generated by perceptual gestalts in the mind of the observing subject - that the object in itself is not inherently 'a teacup'.

But I'm not saying that Pinter has it right, and you have it wrong. Your analysis is sound on the level at which it is made, but his analysis is from a different perspective.

As a general remark, the awareness that the Universe as it is in itself really is an ineffable mystery, but one that our evolved cognitive systems interpret in a particular way for our own purposes, strikes me as being a salutory and modest philosophical attitude. The alternative seems to be an unwarranted confidence in our taken-for-granted realism. It is closer to what philosophical scepticism really is - more so than scientific realism, in most cases.

Would he just admit that he hadn't thought of the ways science has uncovered his noumena? — Banno

No he wouldn’t, because science hasn’t, nor will any science done by humans, ever have the means for it.

Nahhhh.....crotchety ol’ Prussian would more likely be pissed at being intellectually bushwhacked.

Tasty bait. Thanks.

So the observer plays an absolutely crucial role in this respect. Linde expresses it graphically: 'thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time', and, 'we are together, the Universe and us. — Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271

Not only is it a "dead universe", but if we assume a universe, independent of observers, then proceed to introduce an observer to this model, we must assign to the observer a temporal perspective. We have assumed an independent universe, and this includes the entirety of the temporal duration of the universe, from beginning to end, and then we want to assign a moment of observation, a "now".

If the proposed "now" is a static point in time, when nothing is moving, such that we can describe 'the way things are' at that point in time, then this is completely inconsistent with experience, therefore an empirically false observational perspective. If the proposed "now" is a duration of time (including some degree of temporal extension), then we must decide how long that "now" is to be. The choice will be completely arbitrary, with possibilities ranging between the tiniest imaginable amount of time (infinitely less than a Planck length), to the longest imaginable time (infinite, forever).

The conclusion therefore, is that if we start with the assumption of an independent universe, and try to introduce an observer to this universe, the observer's temporal perspective, hence what the observer observes from that perspective, will be completely dependent on the choice of perspectives, which will be completely arbitrary.

There is a cause of this data, and we assume that cause is external to us (no solipsism). — Isaac

You ought to recognize here, the distinction between raw data, simple information, and what is produced, or created from the data. There may be a cause of existence of the data, but that "cause" is completely inaccessible to us except through the means of interpreting the data itself. And, the data needs to be interpreted according to some 'principles'. If we are trying to determine something about the cause of the data, how do we derive such 'principles'?

So, any "model" created will be produced from these principles of interpretation. The true cause of the model therefore, are the principles of interpretation, not the data. So the data is nothing more than raw material (material cause), and the model produced is guided by the intention from which the principles are derived (final cause). What is important to notice, is that the model still cannot tell us anything about the cause of the data (material cause), unless the principles applied are somehow consistent with that cause.

You speak of errors in the perception, and modeling process. The biggest, most common, and most influential error, is the assumption that the principles applied in creating (causing) the percept, or model, are consistent with the cause of the data. This produces the conclusion that the percept, or model is fundamentally consistent with, or representative of, the cause of the data received. This is the error which leads to naive realism, the external world is just how it appears to us. In reality, how the world appears to a person, is a creation of that person's own internal processes, which interpret data according to whatever "principles' are employed by that being, and these 'principles' are likely not at all representative of the cause of the data because they are derived teleologically. What we have is a huge gap between material cause and final cause.

Would he just admit that he hadn't thought of the ways science has uncovered his noumena?
— Banno

No he wouldn’t, because science hasn’t, nor will any science done by humans, ever have the means for it.

Nahhhh.....crotchety ol’ Prussian would more likely be pissed at being intellectually bushwhacked.

Tasty bait. Thanks. — Mww

It wasn't very filling, though, was it?

Nope, but then, no need to floss, so.....

:razz:

This is that there is the possibility of faulty cognition, which is able to be corrected through various rational means, so as to arrive a correct perception. — Wayfarer

I can see why you'd get this impression, but I wouldn't say necessarily 'rational' means. Rational thinking is a mode of thinking we use on concepts, plans, counterfactuals etc, I don't think it applies to perception so much. Most of the modelling work in perception is done by cortices in the brain which are sub-conscious, or at least without the capacity to engage in rational thinking. It's more just Bayesian inference at this level. Having said that, I certainly think that the conclusions we arrive at using rational thinking strategies effect the expectations we have and so thereby affect the models. Maybe "corrected partly by various rational means"?

underlying assumption is realist, specifically that there is a real [X] which exists even if we might have mistaken views about. — Wayfarer

As I think @Banno may have already alluded to, I think this is intrinsic to us talking about it. To have a model of a cup necessarily implies there's a cup. Otherwise it's a model of what? It can't be a model of noumena - I've no idea what noumena even are, so I couldn't attempt a model of them.

There's a comment on teacups on the book I keep referring to — Wayfarer

They seem an inordinately popular recourse as examples. Do you think that says something about philosophers and their lay congregation? Always within reach of tea?

he atoms of a teacup do not collude together to form a teacup: The object is a teacup because it is constituted that way from a perspective outside of itself. — Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (p. 3).

I think in some discourses this makes sense. For a physicist (being a physicist at the time) she'd talk of atoms and within that discourse find nothing to determine them to be 'a cup'. But in our shared world, we do have reason to believe those atoms are constituted that way intrinsically. That reason being that that arrangement (and no other) seems to serve the function of a cup. It's true that we've determined that function to be important and in doing so filtered out all the other possible patterns those atoms (and those around them) could have made, but the existence of other possible congregations does not mean that the congregation we find important is not intrinsic to that part of the external world. It just means that other congregations we do not find important are also intrinsic to that part of the world.

I see it like constellations. The stars of Orion seem organised so as to form the shape of a hunter with his bow. That shape is obviously significant to us, so we pick it out. the same stars also form a myriad other shapes of no relevance to us so we filter them out. But... they still do genuinely form the shape of a hunter with his bow. We haven't made up that they form that shape, we've just ignored that they form all the other shapes too.

I'm using stars as an analogy for hidden states of various sorts. If we infer hidden states are in some configuration (a teacup) and our inference is good (something we can't know, but that's an epistemological question, not an ontological one), then it is reasonable to assume the hidden states are actually in that configuration. It's just that they are also in a myriad other possible configurations that we're ignoring because they're not relevant to our form of life.

So it's reasonable to assume that, if we model a teacup well, there is actually a teacup outside of our Markov Blanket. It's just that the same data could be a dozen other things too.

↪Joshs Sure, I'm aware of such oddities. It looks like a reworking of god as the answer to the three problems I listed.

Pan-psychism brings with it all the problems of any supernatural entity.

Information transfer. That brings with it much the same issue as my original question to Wayfarer - When one's mind constructs reality, what is it it constructs it from? When information is transferred, what is it transferred in? Information is pattern; patterns are in something.

Moreover, if there is a something, independent of mind, then in what sense does the theory remain a version of idealism? — Banno

The points you just made show a confusion concerning what postmodern models are aiming at.
First of all , God requires a stable notion of the good. If good and evil are relative to context and have no ground beyond this , then the idea of god becomes incoherent. The model I sketched is Nietschean, beyond good and evil and thus beyond god. The model is not supernatural, it is immanent.

You say pattens are in something. Why? Where did you get the idea that we have to begin with a something, an object, a thing or force or wave or law with properties and attributes? You got it from a long-standing tradition in philosophy and empirical science. Deleuze doesnt begin with things or facts that change. He begins with difference and shows how we derive things from change. He begins from multiplicities of differential singularities. The singularities are only what they are in reciprocal interaction with other singularites. And most importantly, the singularities are not things, objects, facts, entities, they are differential changes that only occur as what they are once and never repeat exactly the same. Construction constructs from prior constructions. Transfer transfers from prior transfers. Pattern changes prior pattern. What we call stable, predictable empirical reality is the result of only relatively stable pattens which are ‘composed’ of the above internally differential and differentiating changes, which never produce ( or originate in) fixed facts , properties or substances. One could say that each singular is its own world, its own god.

The theory is an idealism in that it is grounded in ideas, not things or material causes. Singularities, in their differential structure within themselves and within the multiplicities that they belong to, are ideas. An idea does not have to be the product of a human mind, it can be located in the differential structure
of any event, as the temporal system of past-present-future that reveals the relations between elements
of the world not in terms of fixed causes external to entities but in terms of an anticipatory trajectory intrinsic to each element of relation.

Buddhist philosophy denies the existence of substance in the philosophical sense, and also of the transcendental subject (ātman). But it still has an idealist school. — Wayfarer

Yes, postmodern social constructionist Ken Gergen mentions some of the affinities he sees between buddhism and his model of relational being.

“ Resonating with the thesis of co-action, Buddhists propose that as we remove ourselves from daily cares we come to realize the artifi ciality of the distinctions or categories on which they are based. In effect, our linguistic distinctions are responsible for both our desires and disappointments. We see that in conceptualizing wealth, love, status, or progeny as desirable, we establish the grounds for disappointment and distress. Further, we come to see that the division between self and non-self is not only misleading, but contributes to the character of our suffering. (Consider the common anguish resulting from the sense of personal failure.)


Over time one becomes conscious (Bhodi) that there are no indepen­dent objects or events in the world. These are all human constructions. When we suspend the constructions, as in meditation, we enter a con­sciousness of the whole or a unity. More formally, one enters consciousness of what Buddhists call codependent origination, or the sense of pure related­ness of all. Nothing we recognize as separate exists independent of all else. As the Vietamese master Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, we come to an appre­ciation of inter-being, that “everything is in everything else.”

A scientific instrumentalist will say that the mathematical model of an electron best describes and predicts the results of observation.

So a scientific realist will say that the Standard Model corresponds to the way the world is, whereas a scientific instrumentalist will just say that the Standard Models works. — Michael

Sounds like the instrumentalist is similar to a pragmatist - 'it works'. Isn't a scientific realist a philosophical naturalist and an instrumentalist a methodological naturalist? I struggle to see how a scientist can do much more than propose they have tentative or defeasible models based on the best available evidence right now. Can they really make immutable claims about reality?

In this discussion of what humans/science cannot directly access, we seem to be haunted by variations of Kant's noumena - the effing ineffable!

All that makes sense to me. I think there is a sense in which we can say we see the cup and another sense in which we can say that we see a model of the cup. Of course if I pick up the cup in the presence of others they will not see me picking up my model of the cup, but will see me picking up the cup.

That said, we can also say that they see a model of me picking up the cup. Just two different ways of talking as I see it, neither of which get to the heart of the question as to what the cup is "in itself".

Of course, that question can also be rejected as being incoherent given that there is no possible answer to it, other than that it is "something" which along with the "somethings" that we are,gives rise to our seeing, and being able to feel, tap to hear the sound it emits, pick up and so on, a cup.

To have a model of a cup necessarily implies there's a cup. Otherwise it's a model of what? — Isaac

It should be recalled that here 'the cup' is a token for 'the object of perception'. It is supposed to represent a generic 'thing', anything that can be an object of perception. But we're not really talking about any such things as the proverbial cup. The subject of the discussion is the processes of cognition and comprehension, taking 'the cup' as an example. When you're modelling a specific process of cognition, then it helps to narrow it down to a token item such as the proverbial cup. But that is not strictly the case here; the 'modelling' we're discussing is not of a specific thing but the general process of cognition and comprehension.

So I don't think you have made the case that:

in our shared world, we do have reason to believe those atoms are constituted that way intrinsically. — Isaac

or

. But... they still do genuinely form the shape of a hunter with his bow. — Isaac

These are basically assumptions - but that is the very point at issue! Do constructed artifacts have an intrinstic or inherent nature - or is that imposed on them by their makers, in line with a specific purpose?

(What I find interesting about Pinter's book is his proposal that the 'bare bones' of material or physically-measurable objects don't have any intrinsic identity, but that identity is imposed upon them in the form of gestalts, meaningful wholes, which are the basic primitives of animal and human cognition.)

Ken Gergen mentions some of the affinities he sees between buddhism and his model of relational being. — Joshs

Buddhist Abhidharma and 'mindfulness' was a major influence on The Embodied Mind, and has generally become part of the enactivist/embodied cognition milieu.

This blog post on the Zen Koan 'First there is a Mountain' has some interesting things to say about imputed identity.