Nope, it is not. The idealism I defend, posits that the world we belong to, this world here, is only intelligible to creatures with the capacity to use cognitive faculties to make sense of that world.

It doesn't deny evolution, nor QW. These things happened independent of us but can only be discovered to animals endowed with reason.

There is time as we experience it, and time as it occurs in the universe, which doesn't have subjectivity.

I don't defend Hoffman, in fact, I'm critical of his formulation of the problem as you can see.

But, as you will tell me, I am confused in my use of words - because since you studied Wittgenstein with a magnifying glass, you understand the actual meaning of words, as opposed to the clowns.

But then, don't bother with clowns, myself included.

Would it not be that humans see the world just fine for what we need to do in it. — Tom Storm

'We are all the philosophers of our level of adaption' ~ anon.

Now evolution and quantum mechanics and cosmology posit that events occur over time, and that they happen to discreet individuals. — Banno

If idealism were simply the belief that 'the world exists in your or my mind' then that would be a valid criticism.

You are displaying an obstinate refusal to understand the actual claims made by some forms of idealism. What would be the point of debating someone who refuses to understand or acknowledge what his interlocutor is actually saying?

...and immediately I regret having made the offer.

The idealism I defend, posits that the world we belong to, this world here, is only intelligible to creatures with the capacity to use cognitive faculties to make sense of that world. — Manuel

So the world is intelligible only for those for whom it is intelligible.

Yep. Not exactly Berkeley, is it.

What is it that makes this a form of idealism, I wonder, since it seems to be something with which a realist would agree unproblematically?

If idealism were simply the belief that 'the world exists in your or my mind' then that would be a valid criticism. — Wayfarer

Indeed, idealism has to become far more sophisticated, to invent universal minds, gods, or quantum mini-consciousness in order to avoid mere inconsistency.

Are you, Wayfarer, serious in a defence of the arch-scientism offered by Hoffman, because it gives some small solace to idealism? You hussy, you!

Are you, Wayfarer, serious in a defence of the arch-scientism offered by Hoffman, because it gives some small solace to idealism? You hussy, you! — Banno

:rofl: I have my questions for Hoffman, but overall he's on my whitelist.

I don't find Hoffman's arguments convincing. The criticism that his position cannot be consistently derived from, or supported by, evolutionary theory holds in my view.

If the world in itself were nothing at all like the world we perceive, then fitness (or anything else) would seem to be impossible to explain.

But he may have rejoinders for this criticism: I haven't delved into his ideas enough to know, just on the face of it his philosophy seems unsupported and inconsistent.

So the world is intelligible only for those for whom it is intelligible.

Yep. Not exactly Berkeley, is it.

What is it that makes this a form of idealism, I wonder, since it seems to be something with which a realist would agree unproblematically? — Banno

It's not intelligible to a rock, so far as I can see. Other animals don't seem to have concepts, so the issue of intelligibility doesn't arise.

It's a form of idealism because it is only through the way objects affect us, that we are able to form any picture of the world at all. As I quoted Hume before:

"Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible; let us chase our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appeared in that narrow compass."

The fact that we can attribute independent existence to the entities postulated by science is a (reasonable) postulate, subject to further refinement.

For instance, Pluto was downgraded from a planet to a minor planet, after more information was gathered. GR and QM were discovered and used as a way to complete a picture that what once held as absolute, Newtonian physics.

And on and on, from re-labeling species to the age of the universe, if these refinements don't come from a mind capable of analyzing, conceptualizing and so forth, I don't see how it would be possible.

Finally, science studies appearance, not inner natures or "things in themselves". We observe what gravity does, we don't know what it is.

And we can't get out of our bodies and see how the world is, absent us.

:100:

He doesn't actually bill himself as a philosopher. He's a professor of cognitive sciences. But plainly his work has philosophical implications. Haven't got around to getting past the Kindle sample yet, but all the examples thus far are from cognitive science.

"Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible; let us chase our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appeared in that narrow compass." — Manuel

This Hume quote includes the veil-of-ideas (intuitions, perceptions) presupposition I was talking about. As I see it, it's just a metaphor gone wild, which results in quasitautologies mistaken for discoveries. One defines perceptions as the ownmost given and everything else is conjecture...but what of the context that makes 'perception' intelligible ? The sight of others' eyes seeing ? Is not this sight the root for a theory of perception ? But then it depends on the reality of the world it pretends to break into mere perceptions.

It's a form of idealism because it is only through the way objects affect us, that we are able to form any picture of the world at all. As I quoted Hume before: — Manuel

But a realist could - would - agree with this.

An idealist worthy of the title goes the further step of saying that only through the way objects affect us are there objects at all.

How odd. I must say I'm disappointed. What is it you found positive...?

Which objects do you know of that exist, but do not affect us?

If something exists, that doesn't affect us in any way, then I don't see how it could be called anything.



The human genome was completely mapped, what in the early 2000's or so? I wasn't consulted about it, that I know of.

And when new drugs are created, I'm not invited to take part in the test trials.

But then, how does this work? It is assumed, correctly, that we share the same nature, so that if the genome of another person is mapped, then mine is as well (at least to a massive degree, perhaps a difference of .00001% or something.)

How do I know a person is depressed? If he tells me, and is honest about it, then I can assume he is depressed. He could be lying. I cannot enter his head.

But if I observe his behavior and see that he acts in a way consistent with a way I would act if I felt depressed, then I have a good reason to believe that he is depressed. Add that to his own description, and we can proceed.

Generalize this to virtually everything, and you can see how what Hume said is not a contradiction. There will be a tiny portion who diverges from this norm, but that's to be expected.

We are the same creature, and thus overwhelmingly act in a similar manner, given similar situations. So, I don't see a problem.

Which objects do you know of that exist, but do not affect us? — Manuel

:wink:
There's the rhetorical slide.

In support of what I think @Manuel is saying, and in response to @Banno's realist objections. I've quoted this about umpteen times previously, but I'll give it another shot (probably to no avail)

'Everyone knows that the earth, and a fortiori the universe, existed for a long time before there were any living beings, and therefore any perceiving subjects. But according to Kant ... that is impossible.'

Schopenhauer's defence of Kant on this score was [that] the objector has not understood to the very bottom the Kantian demonstration that time is one of the forms of our sensibility. The earth, say, as it was before there was life, is a field of empirical enquiry in which we have come to know a great deal; its reality is no more being denied than is the reality of perceived objects in the same room.

The point is, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, which apprehends all the objects of empirical knowledge within it as being in some part of that space and at some part of that time: and this is as true of the earth before there was life as it is of the pen I am now holding a few inches in front of my face and seeing slightly out of focus as it moves across the paper.

This, incidentally, illustrates a difficulty in the way of understanding which transcendental idealism has permanently to contend with: the assumptions of 'the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect' enter unawares into the way in which the statements of transcendental idealism are understood.

Such realistic assumptions so pervade our normal use of concepts that the claims of transcendental idealism disclose their own non-absurdity only after difficult consideration, whereas criticisms of them at first appear cogent which on examination are seen to rest on confusion. We have to raise almost impossibly deep levels of presupposition in our own thinking and imagination to the level of self-consciousness before we are able to achieve a critical awareness of all our realistic assumptions, and thus achieve an understanding of transcendental idealism which is untainted by them. — Bryan Magee Schopenhauer's Philosophy, Pp 106-107

'Through the looking glass'.

And what is it you think this oft-quoted piece argues?

Space and time lost their status as phantasms of the mind at least as long ago as special relativity.

I can't see this ending well.

Tallis' argument is that Hoffman uses evolution to undermine evolution. It looks cogent to me. Either there was a past in which evolution occurred, and an idealism that denies time is wrong, or time is a phantasm, and evolution no more than a just-so story.

:clap:

He got me into philosophy and his ease in explaining philosophers is unparalleled.

I am forever in his debt.

:up: Glad you get it!

I emailed Tallis once, and he replied.



Some notes on the support cognitive science lends to views once understood as idealist.

First, it has shown that our perceptions of the world are not passive reflections of an objective reality, but rather active constructions generated by our brains. Our sensory experiences are shaped by our cognitive processes, such as attention, memory, and expectation, which are themselves shaped by our beliefs, values, and cultural background. This suggests that our experience of the world is not a direct representation of a mind-independent reality, but that there subjective elements are fundamental to our consciousness of it. Furthermore, these subjective elements are not themselves directly available in experience (they're transcendental in the Kantian sense.)

Second, cognitive science has shown that our mental states, such as beliefs, desires, and emotions, are not simply epiphenomenal byproducts of physical processes, but rather causally effective in shaping our behavior and experience. This suggests that mental states have an ontological status that irreducible to purely physical phenomena (which is the hard problem, again.)

Finally, 'embodied cognition' or 'enactivism', an approach within cog sci, reveals the profound interdependence of the mind and the environment. This suggests that the boundaries between the mind and the world are not fixed, but rather fluid and context-dependent. As Buddhists might put it, that the subjective and the objective are 'co-arising'.

Taken together, these insights from cognitive science support a view of reality as fundamentally grounded in mental states, insofar as they challenge the traditional Cartesian dualism between mind and matter, and also emphasize the role of subjective interpretation and embodiment in shaping our experience of the world.

Whether that amounts to an idealist philosophy in the Berkeleyian sense is moot, but there is a scholar called Andrew Brook who's made an academic career on Kant and cognitive science. You can find some of his articles on SEP.

This suggests... — Wayfarer

slides to

...support a view... — Wayfarer

It isn't as convincing as you suppose.

(probably to no avail) — Wayfarer

The core of realism, probably also to no avail, but for comparison, is simply that there are statements that are true, yet not known or even believed.

Things such as those we haven't found out yet, or are mistaken about.

That is, there is a world that is not dependent on our understanding of it.

Notice how this addresses similar issues and uses similar terms to @Wayfarer's account, but that the two slide past each other in terms of the problems they are trying to solve?

Hence the views seem irreconcilable...

Thanks for the credit at my having invented transcendental idealism. Now please help arrange the royalties.

only through the way objects affect us are there objects at all. — Banno

Which objects do you know of that exist, but do not affect us? — Manuel

These say very different things. One is more the case than the other.

If the world in itself were nothing at all like the world we perceive, then fitness (or anything else) would seem to be impossible to explain. — Janus

Our perceptions of the world need not resemble the world in any way, in order for us to develop some sort of understanding. All that is required is consistency in usage. For example, the words we use, and mathematical symbols we use, do not resemble in any way the things they refer to, yet the usage of words and symbols develops into an understanding. This is the nature of "meaning", it is based in consistency of usage, not in resemblance.

Hoffman seems to be making the point that we ought to look at the relationship between the human mind and the supposed "world", which is developed through sensation, as a relationship of meaning rather than a relationship of facsimile. The way that the world appears to us is a product of how meaning is apprehended.

Or, to put this in a better light, if we want to understand the reality behind how things appear to us in sensation, we ought to look at how meaning appears to us because the sense apparatus has been developed to aid us in dealing with things which are meaningful, significant, and important to us. So, to understand the way that meaning appears to us, our best and most direct examples are in the use of language and symbols.

What we can see, as a starting point here, in an analysis of the use of symbols, is that the principal usage of symbols is as an indicator, or sign, of some form of classification, type, or universal. The use of the symbol acts as a memory aid, so that a sophisticated concept is signified with a simple symbol, facilitating the memory. There is no need for the symbol to resemble the category. If we now look at the act of naming a particular object or individual, use of a proper noun, we can see the same thing, there is no need for the name to resemble the named particular, only a need for the mind to have the capacity to make the required association.

So if we look at sensation now, we can see that the lower level senses, the tactile senses of taste, touch, and smell, deal exclusively with types, general or universal feelings. We associate similar smells, tastes, or feelings, as "the same" sort of feeling, and we have little if any capacity to distinguish unique peculiarities. Hearing gives us a better tool for distinguishing peculiarities of the particular circumstances, and seeing is even better. Notice that the two basic categories, the principals of the fundamental tactile feelings, are pleasure and pain, and these are subdivided with a whole range of sub-categories. None of these in any way can be construed as resembling the thing sensed.

If we look at the higher senses now, hearing and seeing, there has been developed a stronger capacity toward distinguishing uniqueness and peculiarities. Still, there is no basis for the assumption that the way that the peculiarities of the individual circumstances of sensation are being signified is a mode of resemblance. And, as the evidence of the lower senses indicates to us, it is highly unlikely that it is a mode of resemblance. So if we take the electromagnetic activity which sight is sensitive to for example, we see that a very narrow range of wavelength is interpreted through the eyes. it appears like distinguishing tiny differences within this very limited range has proven to be more meaningful than interpreting a very wide range of wavelengths. But of course, we can understand that colour in no way resembles electromagnetic waves.

Idealism, one way or another, has it that there is nothing that is not related in some way to mind. Hence things only exist if they stand in some relation to mind. — Banno

You ought not describe everything in monist terms. From a dualist perspective, (and many idealists are dualist) there is an unintelligible aspect of reality. So not everything has a relation to the mind, as there is that which does not have a relation to the mind, and this is consistent with idealist dualism.

From the dualist perspective, the issue is which fundamental aspect of reality has priority, is it the intelligible or the unintelligible. Depending on how one understands this priority, the person is either an idealist dualist, or materialist dualist.

there is a world that is not dependent on our understanding of it. — Banno

Which world is that? Existent worlds depend on human understanding, possibly existent worlds depend on human understanding. Even those cursed damnable noumenal worlds depend on human understanding, fercryinoutloud. What other kind of world is there?

To say “there is” is a positive existential inference, to say “there is a world” makes explicit an object related to the inference necessarily. To call out “world” presupposes human understanding as necessary for both the conception the word “world” represents, and the judgement on a given (“there is”) and its relation to an object conformable to it (“a world”).

Still, conception does not imply existence necessarily, so it is that there may be existent or possibly existent worlds not dependent on human experience in order for there to be knowledge of what such worlds entail. But we can think any possible world we wish, every single one of them entirely dependent on the understanding of it, which reduces to….there is no possible world that is not dependent on human understanding of it, but there is no inclusive authority in the understanding, that grants its reality. And do we really give a crap for that which isn’t?
————

…..few have the courage to set out an argument. — Banno

….but not all. And because of this…..

It isn't as convincing as you suppose. — Banno

….arises this….

(probably to no avail) — Wayfarer

Same as it ever was….

Many previous threads discuss idealism in general, rather than Hoffman's views. Nothing wrong with that but it leads to the following question: Do Hoffman's Icon and and Grand Theft Auto metaphors necessarily imply idealism?

I think not. I think they can be taken as supporting indirect realism: icons, steering wheels, etc. are our mental representations of transistors and voltages which really exist. Evolution has tuned us to see the icons and steering wheels so we can survive; if we saw wavefunctions, reality would be too confusing and we'd end up as lunch for some predator.

Hoffman himself theorizes a deeper reality of conscious agents. He uses another analogy. Twitter is a community of millions of conscious agents. The deeper reality is similar to the interactions between twitter users.

What is occurring in Twitter right now? The entire reality is too complicated for us to comprehend. But we could see a summary. To use my own example, imagine a heat map of the U.S. where each city's twitter activity is represented from blue (low activity) to red (high activity). The objects of our universe are like the colored cities on the map; they represent reality but are not in themselves reality.

Materialism = physicalism in common usage. Reductive materialism = all phenomena can be examined in terms of fundemental physics, at least in theory, or more strongly, that all wholes can be explained in terms of their most fundemental [physical] parts.

This is why Nagel could write a book called "Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False," in 2012.

I don't get why this process isn't "direct". I take it that it is directly caused by the object, as we react to them given the brains we have. Why would I doubt the existence of the world and its objects? I have no reason to take skepticism too seriously, or otherwise I couldn't move.

In part, we don't think it's direct because empirical sciences tells us such experience is not direct. Every organism is bombarded on all sides by a sea of entropy. If organisms internalized all, or even a single percent of all the information they are exposed to, encoding it within a nervous system, these organisms would succumb to entropy and cease to exist as a self-replicating organism (see Deacon: Towards a Science of Biosemiotics). Organisms require boundaries to help keep them (relatively) isolated from the enviornment, and this means most data cannot enter sensory systems.

Obviously, we only sense a very tiny fraction of the photons in our enviornment through vision. Our skin can't see for one. Also, we can't see certain wavelengths, and the photoreceptors of the human eye can only be stimulated so rapidly. So we have a huge filter on available information at the level of the eye and optic nerve.

Cognitive neuroscience, paired with experiments in psychology, show us that most of the information coming from the optic nerve undergoes a first level of computation where it is analyzed for salience; then the vast amount of information is dropped, not analyzed any further. The structure of this computation is largely shaped by genetics, but it requires exposure to stimuli and neuron-level learning as well. Most incoming information just gets stamped "irrelevant."

What does appear to make it to conscious awareness is not an accurate representation of the visual field. Most of what we see is the results of computation. This is how optical illusions work. Preconscious processes "fill in the blanks," while also culling out the data considered as not useful for fitness. For example, because humans are social animals, we have a huge amount of processing power dedicated just to faces. When this area is damaged, and people view faces presumably as they would view other objects, they cannot detect emotions there or identify familiar faces.

If the visual cortex is sufficiently damaged, subjects don't report experiencing sight, even in memories of vision prior to the damage or in dreams. Vision is not a faithful interpretation of what the eye records, but rather a model of the world constructed in concert with learned knowledge and feedback from the other sensory systems, as well as heuristics selected for by natural selection.



Example: this picture is 2D but appears 3D. Also, squares A and B are an identical color. That they look different is all computation. Same thing here:



Obviously we can uncover the illusions here, but can we always. Shit smells like, well... what it is to us. Flies love it. Whose sensory systems is telling it correctly? Here it seems that evolution has totally shaped the senses; do chemicals have a small outside of sensation? It doesn't seem so. So why do we assume objects have shapes outside sensation? Indeed, physics seems to tell us discrete objects exist only as arbitrary, subjective creations. Real shapes and dimensionality don't exist (see: Mandlebrot on the length of the coastline of the UK and fractal geometry), it's all about perspective.

Hoffman is making the same points Kant made vis-á-vis the trancendental. Faculties shape reality prior to cognition. Evolution has shaped us to see things that aren't there, to see two shades that are identical as different.

His point is that this applies to more than just optical illusions. Our entire conception of 3D space time might be flawed, a point he borrows from physicists. We might live in a holographic universe, where a third dimension only emerges from a 2D informational entity.

That being the case, how can we move forward?

His solution isn't radical skepticism. It is to realize that these issues are insoluble. There is an epistemic curtain we can't pull back. If that is true, then the existence of non-observables is always and forever impossible to access, their potential differences from what is observable always and forever identical with the limits of perception.

If you accept that, then you have to wonder: "why posit ontological difference that cannot make a difference?" You could instead start from an agent based model and rebuild modern physics up from there. This is something that has already been done to varrying degrees for a host of different reasons anyhow, but not holistically.

I don't buy the argument entirely, but it's not a skeptical position. Knowledge of a world external to the agent is knowable for Hoffman. He would probably claim that his position is actually less skeptical because it doesn't posit an inaccessible noumenal world lying underneath the apparent world. That is, the popular view says that we must always be skeptical of all our knowledge because it isn't a view of things in themselves, but always filtered, and thus perhaps illusory. In this view, it is the conventional view that is radically skeptical.

Part of the problem is getting people to decide on what the real transistors are. Makes me recall a polemic I came across in a physics journal that likened a fixation of particles with focusing on the shadows on the wall in Plato's cave. Some had freed themselves and gone outside, but the sun hurt their eyes so they looked at the reflections on the pond instead. These people saw fields. But, there were a few starting to look at things themselves, and these people saw informational networks.

This was backed up by some esoteric mathematics I couldn't figure out, so for me, the issue seemed undecided.

I think this points to an issue with positing the fundemental "transistors" and such though. They tend to be impossible to describe coherently with one analogy and then it turns out the mathematics can also be replicated using different starting assumptions and techniques.

No roads, cars, steering wheels, or brake pedals really exist. — Art48

No. Roads, cars, steering wheels, or brake pedals really exist. And so does whatever is going on at the molecular, atomic, and sub-atomic levels.

We have been told by popular scientists that the floor on which we stand is not solid, as it appears to common sense, as it has been discovered that the wood consists of particles filling space so thinly that it can almost be called empty. This is liable to perplex us, for in a way of course we know that the floor is solid, or that, if it isn't solid, this may be due to the wood being rotten but not to its being composed of electrons. To say, on this later ground, that the floor is not solid is to misuse language.

(Wittgenstein, Blue Book)

Sure, all those things you point out are true, there is a tremendous amount of filtering, selecting of information, unconsciouss processess and so forth that provide us with the image we end up seeing, that is a fact for us as creatures endowed with the capacities we have. And, of course, if we lacked these things, we couldn’t construct anything. But then we’d have to grant that some aspects of the things science discovers, are also so aftected by us - if we had no capacity for mathematics, say, or if we categorized things differently, then we might construct a slightly different theory about, say, the brain. Alternatively, if we had acute enough vision, we could see photons. But it sounds misleading to me to say “we percieve objects indirectly”, as if there is some other possible way to percieve objects at all- absent some system that constructs sense data into something intelligible. The object directly causes our own innate systems to react the way they do- by the methods you describe. We see something indirectly if something is obstructing our vision, or if we find evidence of some force we cannot detect with our sense organs. And I say all this while accepting or agreeing with the concept of things-in-themselves. Hoffman thinks we can have knowledge of this based on some theories that suggest that spacetime is doomed. Fine. I don’t think things in themselves are of a representational nature.

Yes, I suppose it depends on what you mean as "direct." I think the comparison is between "what we have," and "what we can envision as an idealized type of perception."

Of course, this idealized view will be based on our understanding of the natural world, which is in turn shaped by our nature. But, I think we could still say something about such an idealized view.



He addresses this. Demonstrating "not-P" is not the same thing as demonstrating "Q instead of P." The main point of the book is that the popular view is undermined by its own standards of evidence.

As to if evolution may have misled us in terms of our logical sense and ability to come up with the mathematics used to show that P is unlikely, his defense is brief and not that satisfactory. However, it is worth noting that if one doesn't trust in our ability to use logic, or that the world is rational and that this rationality is comprehensible to us, then one has no grounds for believing in the findings of any science in the first place, nor their own senses. Down that road lies true, radical skepticism.