Connectionist models are just representations, so they are built for a reason other than the reason for which the thing represented was built, as they are built to represent that thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, they are not built to represent a thing. It's simply not what they do. They produce responses which minimise the surprise function of a prior prediction about the response under a particular policy. Nothing to do with representation. It's about prediction error in response, not representation.

Again, it pays to consider a wide range of examples. I think your argument here has complications caused by colour being a secondary quality. Try making the same point with a primary quality instead - does it still work?

SO the eggs might be rendered something like:

"Some object is an ovoid if it causes most humans to see an ovoid ..."

Is that something you wish to assert? Because it seems to me to be wrong. — Banno

Yes. Shape is as much a feature of experience as colour. There are ovoids-as-seen, ovoids-as-felt, and these aren't at all similar (see Molyneux's problem). To think that one or both of them are "external" to the experience is a mistake.

and yet shape is not constituted by experience, as would have to be the case if idealism were true. Idealism needs it to be the other way around: experience as a feature of shape.

It is easier to think of a thing no longer being red when the light goes out than to think of it no longer being ovoid.

It is easier to think of a thing no longer being red when the light goes out than to think of it no longer being ovoid. — Banno

So you think of it being oviod-as-seen when the light goes out? And ovoid-as-felt when you stop touching it? I think both are a case of mistaken projection. It's as naive as thinking the same about colour.

So you think of it being oviod-as-seen — Michael

No. Rather, I've no clear idea what oviod-as-seen might be as distinct from ovoid.

mistaken projection — Michael

So the egg is not ovoid? What could "mistaken" mean here?

No. Rather, I've no clear idea what oviod-as-seen might be as distinct from ovoid. — Banno

But you don't think the same about ovoid-as-felt?

So the egg is not ovoid? What could "mistaken" mean here? — Banno

The egg is ovoid, external things (i.e. waves/particles) aren't ovoid, and so eggs aren't external things. I have said several times that I think it's a mistake to reduce the everyday objects of perception to being the external causes of perception (i.e waves/particles).

The egg is ovoid, external things (i.e. waves/particles) aren't ovoid — Michael

This is just begging the question. External things are ovoid. They are just other shapes as well. Like the stars of Orion, the fact that they form a myriad other shapes does not mean they don't form the shape of a man with a bow.

You've not given an account of why external things (your 'waves/particles') must only form one shape. Just like you never gave an account of why they must only be one colour.

No. Rather, I've no clear idea what oviod-as-seen might be as distinct from ovoid. — Banno

And I agree; I have no clear idea what "ovoid" might be as distinct from either ovoid-as-seen or ovoid-as-felt. Ovoids are only meaningful as an appearance (either visual or tacticle), not as some external un-seen and un-felt property.

I have no clear idea what "ovoid" might be as distinct from either ovoid-as-seen or ovoid-as-felt. — Michael

Ovoid is a property of some hidden state which causes your 'ovoid-as-seen' and 'ovoid-as-felt'.

There. What's not clear about that?

Ovoid is a property of some hidden state which causes your 'ovoid-as-seen' and 'ovoid-as-felt'.

There. What's not clear about that? — Isaac

It's red₁ and red₂ all over again. You can use the word "pain" to refer to the external cause of pain if you like, but when I talk about pain in everyday conversation I'm talking about the feeling, not any external cause. The same with colour. The same with shape. Your position just leaves us susceptible to equivocation which I would prefer to avoid.

You can use the word "pain" to refer to the external cause of pain if you like, but when I talk about pain in everyday conversation I'm talking about the feeling, not any external cause. — Michael

Why would I do that? That's not the way we use the word 'pain'. We use the word 'pain' to describe our subjective feeling. We use the word 'ovoid' to describe a property of some hidden state (an egg, for example).

We say "that egg is ovoid". We don't say "that needle is pain".

You're the one making the claim that our ordinary language use is wrong in the case of the egg, so bringing in 'everyday conversation' doesn't support your case.

Everyday conversation talks about external objects which have properties.

I have no clear idea what "ovoid" might be as distinct from either ovoid-as-seen or ovoid-as-felt. Ovoids are only meaningful as an appearance — Michael

That's not right. Ovoids are a shape - the negative pedal curve of an ellipse with eccentricity e<=½, I'm told.

The egg is ovoid, external things (i.e. waves/particles) aren't ovoid, and so eggs aren't external things. — Michael

I really do find that argument risible. Was there ever a clearer case of special pleading?

Again, that notion of internal and external leads you astray. Eggs are ovoid, and are in the chicken coop or fridge, not in your mind.

Ovoid is a property of some hidden state which causes your 'ovoid-as-seen' and 'ovoid-as-felt'. — Isaac

:rofl:

Ovoids are a shape — Banno

Yes, and shapes are an appearance.

Eggs are ovoid, and are in the chicken coop or fridge, not in your mind. — Banno

An ovoid egg being in the fridge isn't an external cause of perception. It can't be reduced to just being the wave-particles of the Standard Model. It's something seen or felt.

Here's something I referenced a while back:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enactivism

Enactivism is a position in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. It claims that the environment of an organism is brought about, or enacted, by the active exercise of that organism's sensorimotor processes. "The key point, then, is that the species brings forth and specifies its own domain of problems ...this domain does not exist "out there" in an environment that acts as a landing pad for organisms that somehow drop or parachute into the world. Instead, living beings and their environments stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or codetermination" (p. 198). "Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world."

An ovoid egg being in the fridge isn't an external cause of perception. It's something seen or felt. — Michael

Indeed, I agree. It's an egg in a fridge.

It might, as things go, be perceived by some cook or chook, but that is incidental and not relevant to it's being an egg.

It is not a perception-of-egg, what ever that might be.

...dynamic...

DO you really think that the view described as "enactivism"view is a form of idealism?

I suspect that you are expressing much the same view as @Isaac and I, but giving it the wrong name. So our argument becomes caught in the narcissism of small differences.

Uh huh.

Here's Friston on enactivist interpretations of active inference. You'll note the clear use of Markov boundary models. Enactivist cognitive theories are not only compatible with active inference, but they rely on much of the same mathematical modeling functions such as Lagrange equations.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1059712319862774

I suspect that you are expressing much the same view as Isaac and I, but giving it the wrong name. — Banno

Hopefully made clear by the paper I cited above.

DO you really think that the view described as "enactivism"view is a form of idealism? — Banno

I think it fits within Kant's transcendental idealism or Putnam's internal realism. Colour, shape, eggs, etc. aren't "things" or "properties" in our environment that are then "encountered." Rather we interact with the environment and then colour, shape, eggs, etc. are "enacted" by that interaction.

Kant would describe this pre-enacted environment as being otherwise unknowable "noumena". I'm unsure if I'd go as far as him in saying this or if I'm happy to think of this pre-enacted environment as being the wave-particles of the Standard Model (or the superstrings of M-theory, or whatever our best physical theories suggest), although in this discussion I've been tending towards the latter.

So answer me this: are there true propositions of which we do not know the truth value?

Not a trick question. I think that there are, when we talk about stuff like cups and eggs and planets and so on.

we interact with the environment and then colour, shape, eggs, etc. are "enacted" by that interaction. — Michael

No. That's not what enactivist accounts of cognition are saying.

In short, given a Markov blanket partition, it is fairly straightforward to show that internal states can be interpreted as encoding Bayesian beliefs about external states that cause its sensory states – and so play a central role in the construction of free energy, which is defined relative to these beliefs

Note, the Bayesian beliefs are about external states. The subject is an external state, not an internal model. The 'egg' is the subject of a Bayesian optimised policy, which we can render into grammar as "the egg is ovoid"

So answer me this: are there true propositions of which we do not know the truth value? — Banno

Sure. Either "the real part of every nontrivial zero of the Riemann zeta function is 1/2" is true or it's false, but we don't (currently) know which.

I think that there are, when we talk about stuff like cups and eggs and planets and so on. — Banno

In the counterfactual sense of "if we were to interact with the environment over there then we would see an egg in the fridge", sure. But the (naive) realist would be trying to say something more than just this, and I think that their interpretation is wrong.

Sure — Michael

Then I will count you as a realist, for the purposes of eggs and chairs and stuff like that.

But for maths, I'll join the anti-realists. You may too if you soo choose.

@Isaac, this is the crux of my position:

1. Some hidden state X causes person A to see a red dress and person B to see a blue dress
2. A red dress isn't a blue dress
3. Therefore, person A isn't seeing the same thing as person B
4. Therefore, person A and/or person B isn't seeing hidden state X
5. Therefore, the red dress and/or the blue dress isn't hidden state X

Here you said "the colour of the hidden state is either red (and person B is wrong), or blue (and person A is wrong)."

So, let's assume that the hidden state is red and not blue as in your example. Given this, you cannot respond to my argument above by suggesting that 2 is wrong because the dress is both red and blue. By your own admission, the dress is red and not blue.

So 3-5 follow. Specifically, person B isn't seeing hidden state X and the blue dress isn't hidden state X. So what is person B seeing and what is the blue dress? Because it isn't hidden state X.

So what is person B seeing and what is the blue dress? Because it isn't hidden state X. — Michael

In that instance (where we're saying that person A is right), person B is 'seeing' the hidden state X, but the policy they're seeing it with is not the one which minimises the surprise function. In less technical terms (but inevitability, slightly less accurate terms), they made a bad prediction about hidden state X.

'Seeing' is an interactive process of updating predictions. So 'seeing' X is interacting with X in such a way as to minimise the surprise associated with a particular Bayesian policy toward X. It's what 'seeing' is. A process.

So person B can still 'see' the same hidden state as person A even though they respond differently to it because having a policy toward X is part of the process of 'seeing' X*.

* here X can refer to the hidden state 'dress' or the hidden state 'colour of dress'.

But the (naive) realist would be trying to say something more than just this, and I think that their interpretation is wrong. — Michael

...it depends...

...hidden... — Michael

What is it about this mooted state that is hidden?

Whatever it is, cannot be said... and hence amounts to nothing.

The problem with the noumenal is that it is outside of language and outside of understanding. It drops out of the discussion.

An analogy, perhaps. You and I are both trying to guess what next week's lottery numbers are. You guess 2,4,5,6, I guess 7,8,6,5. We have different guesses, but the thing we're guessing the contents of is the same thing (next week's lottery numbers).

So person B can still 'see' the same hidden state as person A even though they respond differently to it because having a policy toward X is part of the process of 'seeing' X*. — Isaac

The "response" is the seeing. If they're responding differently then they're seeing differently, and seeing differently is seeing different things.

So person A and person B are not seeing the same thing, therefore one (or both) of them isn't seeing the hidden state X.

I think what this shows is that you're equivocating on two different senses of "seeing". I don't know what your second sense of "seeing" is as distinct from the ordinary understanding of person A seeing a red dress and person B seeing a blue dress.

seeing differently is seeing different things. — Michael

Not at all. See above. Seeing is the process of updating predictions about external states. Two people can have different predictions about the same state. Seeing differently does not necessitate seeing different things.

So person A and person B are not seeing the same thing, therefore one (or both) of them isn't seeing the hidden state X. — Michael

No. They're both seeing hidden state X. They're just doing it differently so getting different results. Seeing is a process.