Posting again here, the topic of the thread is interesting, putting aside the word "material". Is there an external world? Yes. But it's nature and our relationship to it is far from trivial.

In a way, our common sense attitude does not question this distinction much. This laptop here is external to me, so are these books. What's "behind" the eyes is internal.

But that distinction is extremely delicate, in my opinion.

A child that has just been burned as a result of touching fire forms the belief that touching fire caused the pain solely by virtue of drawing a correlation between what they did(touch the fire) and the pain that ensued. We can know this much as a result of their absolute refusal to touch it again. — creativesoul

What does this proposed drawing of a correlation add to the situation ? This sounds either mathematical (statistics) or thought-like or ?

A child is less likely to touch an object that burned him. This we can take as given.

Correlations drawn between different things. <------that's what all human thought and belief amounts to. — creativesoul

In statistics, correlation or dependence is any statistical relationship, whether causal or not, between two random variables or bivariate data. Although in the broadest sense, "correlation" may indicate any type of association, in statistics it normally refers to the degree to which a pair of variables are linearly related. Familiar examples of dependent phenomena include the correlation between the height of parents and their offspring, and the correlation between the price of a good and the quantity the consumers are willing to purchase, as it is depicted in the so-called demand curve.

Correlations are useful because they can indicate a predictive relationship that can be exploited in practice.

I find the correlation theory initially plausible, but isn't some kind of mathematical/functional already mainstream? I did some digging.

Here's a non-journal but seemingly reputable popularization.

The brain is an energy-expensive organ, so it had to evolve energy-conserving efficiencies. As a prediction machine, it must take shortcuts for pattern recognition as it processes the vast amounts of information received from the environment by its sense organ outgrowths. Beliefs allow the brain to distill complex information, enabling it to quickly categorize and evaluate information and to jump to conclusions. For example, beliefs are often concerned with understanding the causes of things: If ‘b’ closely followed ‘a’, then ‘a’ might be assumed to have been the cause of ‘b’.

These shortcuts to interpreting and predicting our world often involve connecting dots and filling in gaps, making extrapolations and assumptions based on incomplete information and based on similarity to previously recognized patterns. In jumping to conclusions, our brains have a preference for familiar conclusions over unfamiliar ones. Thus, our brains are prone to error, sometimes seeing patterns where there are none. This may or may not be subsequently identified and corrected by error-detection mechanisms. It’s a trade-off between efficiency and accuracy. — Psychology Today

This seems relevant too:

Functionalism is the theory that mental states are more like mouse traps than they are like diamonds. That is, what makes something a mental state is more a matter of what it does, not what it is made of. This distinguishes functionalism from traditional mind-body dualism, such as that of René Descartes, according to which minds are made of a special kind of substance, the res cogitans (the thinking substance.) It also distinguishes functionalism from contemporary monisms such as J. J. C. Smart’s mind-brain identity theory. The identity theory says that mental states are particular kinds of biological states—namely, states of brains—and so presumably have to be made of certain kinds of stuff, namely, brain stuff. Mental states, according to the identity theory, are more like diamonds than like mouse traps. Functionalism is also distinguished from B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism because it accepts the reality of internal mental states, rather than simply attributing psychological states to the whole organism. According to behaviorism, which mental states a creature has depends just on how it behaves (or is disposed to behave) in response to stimuli. In contrast functionalists typically believe that internal and psychological states can be distinguished with a “finer grain” than behavior—that is, distinct internal or psychological states could result in the same behaviors. So functionalists think that it is what the internal states do that makes them mental states, not just what is done by the creature of which they are parts.

https://iep.utm.edu/functism/

I think we are both functionalists ?

What Rouse is trying to do is show that our participation within normative practices is not simply a matter of conformity (or not) to pre-established norms, but a continual re-framing and re-configuration.
— Joshs

The situation might be described as an intergenerational dialectic, with science advancing one funeral at a time (if the old dogs refuse to learn new tricks.) Along with reason's autonomy and self-criticism comes endless dynamism, an endless revolution in the memes of seduction. — Pie

We are using different notions of temporality. Rouse’s temporal externalism doesn’t deal with spans of time (generations) but temporality itself thought more radically. The dialectic begins the moment I interact with others, as a dialogic back and forth that reshapes the sense of both of our conceptions in subtle fashion in continually. Heritage and sedimented habits are remade ( even as they remain recognizably the ‘same’) in this dialogic time.

One has a timeworn conceptuality at one's disposal. It provides the fore-concept for the interpretation. The interpretedness of a 'time' is strictly determined by these structural factors and the variable forms of their realization. And it is precisely the unobtrusiveness of these factors --the fact that one is not aware of them -- which gives public interpretedness its taken-for-granted character. However, the 'fore'-character in the structure of interpretedness shows us that it is none other than what has already been that jumps ahead, as it were, of a present time pervaded by interpretedness. Guided by its interpretedness, expectant concern lives its own past.
— Heidegger

This part is key : the 'fore'-character in the structure of interpretedness shows us that it is none other than what has already been that jumps ahead, as it were, of a present time pervaded by interpretedness.

Or: I am my past in the mode of no longer being it — Pie

You introduced me to this passage from Heidegger’s early work, for which I am grateful. I went on to incorporate it in a paper that makes the opposite argument from the one you think Heidegger is making concerning time.

A present time pervaded by interpretedness is the vulgar time of public interpretedness, otherwise known as the average everydayness of Das Man. What Heidegger is pointing to here is not the fundamental nature of time for Dasein but ways of thinking about time that we fall into. We convince ourselves that the future that arrives is a duplicate of our past.

"The essence of something is not at all to be discovered simply like a fact; on the contrary, it must be brought forth. To bring forth is a kind of making, and so there resides in all grasping and positing of the essence something creative…. To bring forth means to bring out into the light, to bring something in sight which was up to then not seen at all, and specifically such that the seeing of it is not simply a gaping at something already lying there but a seeing which, in seeing, first brings forth what is to be seen, i.e., a productive seeing. "(Heidegger 1994)

Being-affected always addresses and modifies all of ones prior experience as a whole. Beings can only be produced because the foundation of their being is created anew as a ‘ground-laying' every time we see something as something. The creative re-making of the ground, which Heidegger says is the essence of feeling, is at the same time the productive seeing of an intentional object.

“Every “foundation” in the sense we discussed comes too late with regard to the positing of the essence, because the productive seeing of the essence is itself a productive seeing of that in which the essence has its ground—a productive seeing of what its ground is. Knowledge of the essence is in itself a ground-laying. It is the positing of what lies under as ground“(Heidegger 1994)

Heidegger(1994) refers to this ground-laying as displacement, because the act of laying a ground is the displacing of a previous ground.

“Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general." Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having been temporality.”(Heidegger 2010)

The dialectic begins the moment I interact with others, as a dialogic back and forth that reshapes the sense of both of our conceptions in subtle fashion in continually. — Joshs

:up:

You introduced me to this passage from Heidegger’s early work, for which I am grateful. I went on to incorporate it in a paper that makes the opposite argument from the one you think Heidegger is making concerning time. — Joshs

Glad I could help ! But how do you know what point I'm making. Aren't we still on the way toward making it together ?

A present time pervaded by interpretedness is the vulgar time of public interpretedness, otherwise known as the average everydayness of Das Man. — Joshs

A present time pervaded by interpretedness [just] is ... the average everydayness of Das Man.

I see (hope you'll agree) us, the world, and language as a unity. The background or given is the one, what one can assume of one, what everyone 'knows.' The philosopher is a little freakier than others, a little more able to recognize pseudo-necessity (encrusted interpretedness) as historical contingency, the way we happened to end up doing things, the stuff we happened to end up taking for granted...as bedrock reality.

What Heidegger is pointing to here is not the fundamental nature of time for Dasein but ways of thinking about time that we fall into. We convince ourselves that the future that arrives is a duplicate of our past. — Joshs

I get that, and I plucked some of the quotes you used from The Concept of Time. A vulgar way of thinking about time hides our profound historicity from us. The past leaps ahead.

The essence of something is not at all to be discovered simply like a fact; on the contrary, it must be brought forth. To bring forth is a kind of making, and so there resides in all grasping and positing of the essence something creative…. To bring forth means to bring out into the light, to bring something in sight which was up to then not seen at all, and specifically such that the seeing of it is not simply a gaping at something already lying there but a seeing which, in seeing, first brings forth what is to be seen, i.e., a productive seeing. — Joshs

In other words, phenomenology is making it explicit, foregrounding the otherwise inconspicuous. We should also make a space for stronger forms of invention, genuine additions to the space of reasons (new abstract objects, new distinctions.) This is expressive rather than inferential. One expects new metaphors and new styles to be part of this.

“Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general." Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having been temporality.”(Heidegger 2010) — Joshs

:up:

Beautiful.

However, I see no reason to believe that bat experts have knowledge about how thought and belief emerged, simply because they are bat experts — creativesoul

Right, I didn't have that in mind either.

A child that has just been burned as a result of touching fire forms the belief that touching fire caused the pain solely by virtue of drawing a correlation between what they did(touch the fire) and the pain that ensued. We can know this much as a result of their absolute refusal to touch it again.
— creativesoul
What does this proposed drawing of a correlation add to the situation? — Pie

Drawing correlations between different things is a basic outline that adds elegance and explanatory power where it's been found lacking(in our accounting practices of meaningful human experience as well as human thought and belief). It adds a means for arriving at a scientifically and philosophically respectable position when it comes to taking account of the origen and evolution of meaningful experience. The scope of rightful application is as broad as it can be. It applies to everything ever thought, believed, spoken, expressed, and/or otherwise uttered. Well over a decade ago, when I first began delving into this, the scope was daunting. It's much less so now that certain pieces have fallen into place, so to speak.

It adds a bridge for explaining how meaningful thought and belief first emerge and subsequently evolve into our own metacognitive endeavors via language creation and use. It adds the ability to explain how some meaning is not existentially dependent upon language use; how language is created; how naming and descriptive practices work; how rigid designators work; how reference works; how new meaning is formed; how meaningful language use transcends the individual speaker; how users of different languages can say much the same thing about the same things using remarkably different syntax and semantic structures. It's how meaningful language use(marks) becomes utterly meaningless and uninterpretable when all the users have long since perished; how the Rosetta stone became a translation device as a result of having enough shared meaning with at least one language still used; how all meaningful things become so; how symbolism works; etc.

You say you are right where all philosophers up till now are wrong...on an important issue. That's a strong claim, for which a strong case ought to be made. — Pie

Indeed! Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof/justification/warrant. First things first though.

I've already offered a simple easy to understand distilled version of what convention has been wrong about. Convention has it that both truth and meaning are existentially dependent upon language.<-------That's true, and the basics.

If truth and meaning are existentially dependent upon language, then language less creatures either cannot form thought and belief or language less thought and belief is neither meaningful nor truth apt(capable of being and/or becoming true or false).

There are also all the problems surrounding language use itself and how it emerges. Banno referred to Davidson's paper on malapropisms and the clear refutation of conventional understanding that they posed at the time of the paper. There's a thread about that paper on this site. I think Banno linked it. It's well worth reading!!

I like the correlation approach. I'd just say that this seems to be the kind of mathematical modeling of disposition that I mentioned as an option earlier...as the non-linguistic or less-linguistic approach that made sense. If such modelling is a part of psychology currently, perhaps there are more recent philosophers who have integrated this fact into their thinking?

It adds the ability to explain how some meaning is not existentially dependent upon language use; how language is created; how naming and descriptive practices work; how rigid designators work; how reference works; how new meaning is formed; how meaningful language use transcends the individual speaker; how users of different languages can say much the same thing about the same things using remarkably different syntax and semantic structures. It's how meaningful language use(marks) becomes utterly meaningless and uninterpretable when all the users have long since perished; how the Rosetta stone became a translation device as a result of having enough shared meaning with at least one language still used; how all meaningful things become so; how symbolism works; etc. — creativesoul

:up:
All great issues.

I wonder to what degree exactly such an investigation can avoid attributing postulated linguistic beliefs, supplementing the math ? As a math guy myself, I know that the numbers are anchored in real world concepts in applications.

“Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general." Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. — Joshs

The past leaps ahead for a project in the way it handles the present ?

The past leaps ahead for a project in the way it handles the present ? — Pie

I like the way Eugene Gendlin put it:

“…the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in”.

I like the way Eugene Gendlin put it:

“…the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in”. — Joshs

Nice ! What's your favorite Gendlin text?

What's your favorite Gendlin text? — Pie

I think his magnum opus is ‘A Process Model’. It’s hard to get through; could have used an editor. But I think it’s important stuff and hasn’t been discovered
yet.


I downloaded all his papers. One of my favorites is ‘The Responsive Order-a new empiricism’.

I wonder to what degree exactly such an investigation can avoid attributing postulated linguistic beliefs — Pie

Properly implementing the approach requires drawing and maintaining the distinction between language less thought and belief and thought and belief that includes language use. That also serves as the basis for calling out anthropomorphism. As mentioned heretofore, it involves setting out thought and belief in terms of their elemental constituency and existential dependency.

If such modelling is a part of psychology currently, perhaps there are more recent philosophers who have integrated this fact into their thinking? — Pie

Perhaps.

It adds the ability to explain how some meaning is not existentially dependent upon language use; how language is created; how naming and descriptive practices work; how rigid designators work; how reference works; how new meaning is formed; how meaningful language use transcends the individual speaker; how users of different languages can say much the same thing about the same things using remarkably different syntax and semantic structures. It's how meaningful language use(marks) becomes utterly meaningless and uninterpretable when all the users have long since perished; how the Rosetta stone became a translation device as a result of having enough shared meaning with at least one language still used; how all meaningful things become so; how symbolism works; etc.
— creativesoul
:up:
All great issues. — Pie

Just the tip of the iceberg.

Thanks. I plan to check out his work.

Certainly, there is no physical world in the absence of a conscious subject, for we can only know the world on a subjective level, take away the conscious subject and the world ceases to be, subjectively. It is true we cannot step outside of subjectivity to know a world independent of consciousness. Science may enable us in the future to answer this question, to me the statements of today, that state that all is energy is a hint that idealism is in fact the nature of our apparent reality. We do not doubt that the objects of apparent reality make themselves known to us by the alterations they affect in our biological consciousness/read body. It seems to me not a great stretch to assume that all is energy and our biological readout of those effects upon our biology may be the creation of objects. That would make our apparent reality biological reactions. My reasoning tells that all biological creatures are reactionary creatures, indeed reaction is what makes evolutionary development or adaptation possible. I further believe that reaction is consciousness and as strange as it seems biology is the measure and meaning of all things and I would venture to say we are energy forms creating the physical world of objects.

Idealism is true ... to an extent! You really don't want to doubt the external reality of a a 3-ton boulder rolling down the hill, straight at you. The great Pyrrho of Elis did but with a horse cart, unlike me though he had friends! :rofl:

but can we know that there are other minds?

Are you not saying (if you allow me to put it in my own words):

"Idealism is true ... to an extent! You really don't want to doubt the external reality because idealism is false."

If idealism is really true, you should be able to save yourself by simply stopping your perception of the boulder - no need to move out of its path.

Wayfarer left TPF three months ago.

What I don't understand is why all idealists are not also solipsist.

My interaction with all other people is through the material world. I can't directly access the consciousness of anyone else. So if I doubt the material world, it is logical that I also doubt the existence of consciousness other than that which I directly experience.

Idealism is true ... to an extent! You really don't want to doubt the external reality of a a 3-ton boulder rolling down the hill, straight at you. — Agent Smith

But idealism doesn't say there are no risks in what we call the 'physical world'. The physical world is seen as a kid of dashboard of readings which make consciousness apprehensible (al la Donald Hoffman). In this view of idealism, you may still be harmed by things which present as physical to our dashboard system. They just aren't what we think they are.

Ok, so that three-tonne boulder is...?

Whatever else it might be, it remains a three-tonne boulder.

And it will remain a three-tonne boulder regardless of what one believes or knows about it.

So:

...there is no physical world in the absence of a conscious subject — boagie

doesn't look right. There are things which are the case regardless of what we believe or know. boagie mat be right that we only know what we know, but there is stuff we do not know. But then boagie's post is very hard to follow, since it seems to say contrary three things: that without consciousness the world ceases to be; that despite this, biology is real; and biology somehow creates the physical world. There appears to be a vicious circularity here in which we can't have consciousness without biology and yet we can'[t have biology without consciousness.

And again, this seems to be a failure to differentiate between what is true and what is believed. Things like three-tonne boulders do not care what one believes. What is true is quite independent of what one believes.

What I don't understand is why all idealists are not also solipsist. — PhilosophyRunner

Those with whom I have discussed this issue suppose that one infers the existence of other minds from one's experience. But then, if we can do that, why not infer the existence of three-tonne boulders on that same basis?

Those with whom I have discussed this issue suppose that one infers the existence of other minds from one's experience. But then, if we can do that, why not infer the existence of three-tonne boulders on that same basis? — Banno

Exactly. And I experience other people through the material world the same as I experience a boulder (light, sound, etc). If I doubt that material world, I should question the existence of both boulders and other people.