this would raise questions about what is meant by "feeling" in this context and how it is related to the physical processes that occur in the universe. — schopenhauer1

:up:

Yes. And if someone methodically designates an elusive entity that cannot, even in principle, be plugged into the rest of the causal nexus, then it's no surprise that science can't help us with it. It's been defined as exactly what concepts can't address.

Yes. And if someone methodically designates an elusive entity that cannot, even in principle, be plugged into the rest of the causal nexus, then it's no surprise that science can't help us with it. It's been defined as exactly what concepts can't address, as a surplus or remainder of public inquiry. — green flag

Yep. That seems to be the case. Good way of putting it "cannot..be plugged into the rest of the causal nexus" and a "surplus" or "remainder of public inquiry". Precisely. The thing that provides the very foundations of knowing, interpreting, sensing, and perceiving of the other phenomena seems to be itself elusive.

The thing that provides the very foundations of knowing, seems to be itself elusive. — schopenhauer1

:up:

'We don't know what we are talking about.' Of course we know practically well enough, but it's like fog that we mostly don't notice is fog. We repeat the party line. We ourselves are bots, who mostly don't notice it, spitting out a blend of what we've gathered -- sure that we 'really exist,' without being able to say what that means.

then there's something wrong with firstperson experience as a metaphysical concept. It's as elusive as the meaning of being. — green flag

I wouldn’t say it’s elusive. I’d say that my first person experience is the most self-evident thing there is to me. And I have no reason to believe I’m special, so I assume others have it too.

Good point.

I wouldn’t say it’s elusive. I’d say that my first person experience is the most self-evident thing there is to me. And I have no reason to believe I’m special, so I assume others have it too. — Michael

I don't think @green flag meant that way of being elusive. Rather, I think he was meaning that it's elusive in how it fits in the narrative of other phenomena. It's "wrong" in terms of being "not at home" with the other things that that very experience interprets. He can correct my interpretation of him of course, if I am wrong on that.

I think it might help to put aside the question of a private language for a moment. If I point to a mark '7' and ask what you see and you say "the number seven" then there should be no problem of agreement. But if I ask if it is purple you will either see it as purple or not. This much we agree on, we see the mark and identify it as the number 7. If I hold up some color samples we are likely to identify the same chip as the purple one. Of neither of these would we say that what we see is in our head in distinction from something we can point to and others can see as well?

What then is the difference between me seeing the sample as purple and seeing 7 as purple? Have I added something in one case and not the other? We might say that the difference is that only I see the 7 as purple, that I am seeing something that is not there. But is it the case that I am adding the color to the 7? Perhaps that is simply the way I see it. Is what we all see public and what only I see private? Or is there perhaps something wrong with this whole way of looking at it?

What would someone who did not know our number symbols see when the saw '7'? Would the see the same thing or different things if the font changed? Would we see it differently or would changes in some aspect of its shape escape our attention because we see 'seven'? Do we see two different things, the number and the shape or three, number, shape, and symbol? Is seeing the number in our head? Is what we see culturally conditioned? Is what we see something added?

All of this makes clear that what we see is not simply passive reception of things in the world. But neither is it, as Hoffman would have it, an illusion.

I thought you might appreciate that.

I’d say that my first person experience is the most self-evident thing there is to me. — Michael

Is this synthetic or analytic knowledge ? A discovery or a paraphrase ? What is the nature of this self-given self ? Is this person itself given ? Are you a 'pure witness' before which there stands an empirical ego which is transparent to itself ?

Whence the unity of the voice that speaks I can doubt therefore I am. What is this 'I'? Why not an 'it' or a 'we' ? What does it mean to say 'I am' or 'there is something'?

But who will doubt that he lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows, and judges? For even if he doubts, he lives. If he doubts where his doubts come from, he remembers. If he doubts, he understands that he doubts. If he doubts, he wants to be certain. If he doubts, he thinks. If he doubts, he knows that he does not know. If he doubts, he judges that he ougth not rashly to give assent. So whoever acquires a doubt from any source ought not to doubt any of these things whose non-existence would mean that he could not entertain doubt about anything. — Augustine, On the Trinity 10.10.14 quoted in Richard Sorabji, Self, 2006, p.219

This is not unlike Aristotle's articulation of 'common sense' that I quoted in another thread. We are shrewder now. We have asked after the nature of this 'he.' And you more than others have surely studied thinkers who doubted this traditional vision of the self ?

The tautological unity of the self, the singularity of the ghost presumed to steer the machine, is a worthy theme.

Problems arise in respect of the indubitable reality of one's own being when treated as object. What kind of thing is it? Does it exist? etc. All empty questions. The self as subject of experience is never the object of cognition but that to whom they appear. It's worth reading up on Husserl's analysis of cogito ergo sum in this respect. Husserl's main criticism of Descartes' argument was that it relied on the notion of the self as a substance. According to Husserl, Descartes assumed that the self was an enduring subject that remained constant over time, but Husserl argued that this assumption was not warranted, instead saying that the self was a process that was constantly changing and evolving.

Husserl also criticized Descartes for relying on the language of subject and object, which he believed reinforced a dualistic view of the world. According to Husserl, this dualism created a separation between the subjective and objective worlds, which he believed was a mistake. He credited Descartes with the breakthrough of realising the fundamental role of the subject, but then mistakenly portraying it as a 'thinking thing' - a 'little fag end' of the natural world was an expression he used. That is what becomes the subject of Ryle's criticism of the ghost in the machine, subsequently rectified by the analysis of the embodied cognitivists.

(Plaque Flag? I thought we were done with rotating user ID's.)

*5. Punted: To Give Up
But as an idiom, “to punt” means to give up, to defer action, or to pass responsibility off to someone else. — Gnomon

Telling an Australian how to punt? :lol:

In the post in which this discussion started, you claimed that one could accept idealism and realism simultaneously, that this was an acceptable paradox, analogous to other supposed paradoxes.

It isn't. It's more a failure on your part to understand what is involved in realism and idealism, commensurate with your general naive understanding of other philosophical issues.

Philosophy consists in attempting to say things clearly. Concatenating diverse ideas is poor philosophising.

Yeah, I'll get pilloried for being too direct. Philosophy is hard. I'm not claiming to have all the answers, I might be wrong, yours might be a brilliant and correct approach. But I'm not seeing it.

Might leave it at that.

I play a bit of guitar. I don't read sheet music. You know the old joke, "How do you stop a piano player? Take away the sheet music. How do you stop a guitar player? Put sheet music in front of them."

Yeah, I'll get pilloried for being too direct. Philosophy is hard. I'm not claiming to have all the answers, I might be wrong, yours might be a brilliant and correct approach. But I'm not seeing it. — Banno

Philosophy certainly seems hard to me and no matter what you think you have learned, there are constant set backs. I think your approach is collegial and helpful. It's fascinating to see people getting angry or irritable when there's a disagreement. You like to tackle an argument head on and why not?

Husserl also criticized Descartes for relying on the language of subject and object, which he believed reinforced a dualistic view of the world. — Wayfarer

Which you would expect from someone who has made a set of different assumptions. I'm not clear if Husserl has actually resolved the question of dualism or simply bracketed the matter.

Husserl seems to be saying that the categories of mind and body are an abstraction and that everything is understood as pure experience or transcendental consciousness. Can you clarify? And does this really resolve the question or just push it to one side? I'm not aware of Husserl ever answering the mind body question, he just seems to have it in for Descartes' legacy on Western thought. Would anyone argue that Husserl was a successful monist? It seems to me that what remains is an 'I' who is experiencing consciousness and a body which the 'I' uses to interact with the life world.

More generally, it looks like the rhetorical crowbar of fancy math is used against the boundary of science and metaphysics / religion. — plaque flag

yeah, it does. There are papers I came across where he and his students claim to be clarifying more empirical stuff, like vision, and he gives some account of his solution to the combination problem, and a rough account of how a wave function is supposedly identical to a Markov chain, although in my limited understanding it appears to happen by saying it is so rather than demonstrating that it is so.

The reply to the objection that his account applies equally to non-conscious entities, "Even if the definition could apply to unconscious agents, that would not preclude it from applying to consciousness, any more than using the integers to count apples would preclude using them to count oranges" seems to me to beg the question. As I said earlier, his claim that what is described by his mathematics is the very same as what we call consciousness remains conjectural; a long bow to pull.

To say nothing of qualia as probability spaces. Your red, here, now as an equation...

But there might be something here that is usable. Who knows.

Thanks.

Can you clarify? — Tom Storm

I'm reading it again - it's the subject of several chapters in Crisis of European Sciences which I bought recently (dense and difficult text). Husserl's claim to fame is, obviously, the founder of phenomenology, and as such the principle source of what is now 'the Continental Tradition'. The schools of enactivism and embodied cognition draw a great deal from phenomenology. (All these sources I've only become familiar with through the Forums in the last decade or so and am trying to get up to speed on. By the way, very interesting article here on Collingwood, Gilbert Ryle, and the origin of the analytic/continental divide.)

There are forms of idealism that are suggested by both cognitive science (Hoffman and others) and also by at least some interpretations of quantum physics (going back to James Jeans and Arthur Eddington but with many contemporary representatives.) It might be that 'idealism' is really the wrong term for a lot of these ideas but what they have in common is the sense in which the world is constructed and shaped by the experiencing subject, rather than simply being a given (subject of 'the myth of the given') inscribed on the tabula rasa of the mind.

The schools of enactivism and embodied cognition draw a great deal from phenomenology. (All these sources I've only become familiar with through the Forums in the last decade or so and am trying to get up to speed on.) — Wayfarer

Indeed. I've only been reading this stuff for the past 2 years. I find this material fascinating.

...James Jeans... — Wayfarer

Goodness, that brings back memories - of a well-thumbed paperback full of fuzzy black-and-white images that as a child I found awesome – in the real meaning of that word; now we have the James Web.

Read a great critical analysis of the idealism of Jeans and Eddington recently, I'll see if I can dig it up. But the memes that entered popular culture in the 30's and 40's are often quoted:

The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter...we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter. — James Jeans

The idea of a universal mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory. — Arthur Eddington

The physical world is entirely abstract and without actuality apart from its linkage to consciousness. — Arthur Eddington

I dug it out - a bit embarrassing that I still have it - Through Space and TIme, a 1963 reprint of his 1933 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures.

$346 according to Amazon :rofl:

I'll see if I can dig it up. — Wayfarer

I'd like that.

Thanks! I followed the link. I found some weird stuff !

The human mind is predisposed from early childhood to assume object permanence, to assume that objects have shapes and positions in space even when the objects and space are unperceived. It is reasonable to ask whether this assumption is a genuine insight into the nature of objective reality, or simply a habit that is perhaps useful but not necessarily insightful.

Does the human mind have object permanence ? Is the nature of objective reality sufficiently fixed or permanent for us to tell the truth about it ? Clearly we know that most objects are fragile, don't last forever. So is a denial of objecthood altogether ? Also, this dude should read Nietzsche. It's not a new idea that cognition tells us lies without which creatures like us could not survive. But one must be careful not to call oneself a liar.

Evaluating object permanence on evolutionary grounds might seem quixotic, or at least unfair, given that we just noted that evolutionary theory, as it's standardly described, assumes object permanence (e.g., of DNA and the physical bodies of organisms). How then could one possibly use evolutionary theory to test what it assumes to be true?

However, Richard Dawkins and others have observed that the core of evolution by natural selection is an abstract algorithm with three key components: variation, selection, and retention (Dennett, 1995; Blackmore, 1999). This abstract algorithm constitutes a “universal Darwinism” that need not assume object permanence and can be profitably applied in many contexts beyond biological evolution.

How can one make sense of variation, selection, and retention without objects ? And it's silly to require that they last foreverandever.

The argument, roughly, is that those of our predecessors whose perceptions were more veridical had a competitive advantage over those whose perceptions were less veridical. Thus, the genes that coded for more veridical perceptions were more likely to propagate to the next generation. We are, with good probability, the offspring of those who, in each succeeding generation, perceived more truly, and thus we can be confident that our own perceptions are, in the normal case, veridical.

How can prearticulate perceptions be veridical ? Claims are true or false. I don't think we can say much about animal qualia, so it's a matter of this wavelength of light hitting that retina and what does or does not regularly follow. <frustrated growl>

When Gerald Edelman claimed, for instance, that “There is now a vast amount of empirical evidence to support the idea that consciousness emerges from the organization and operation of the brain” he assumed that the brain exists when unperceived (Edelman, 2004). When Francis Crick asserted the “astonishing hypothesis” that “You're nothing but a pack of neurons” he assumed that neurons exist when unperceived (Crick, 1994).

Gee whiz, what can be meant by perception if there are no brains ? I guess immaterial souls ? It's hard to imagine how the soul concept could have been invented if not by intelligent life sharing a world, keeping score, predicting one another, impressing one another, describing one another.

The self as subject of experience is never the object of cognition but that to whom they appear. — Wayfarer

I'm saying : that's not radical enough. The self you can talk about is an object. Yes. But the self you seem to want to talk about, as I see it, is not even a self. Descartes assumed too much. He took the tribal language and its tradition of selfhood for granted. He never questioned whether his monologue was a monologue. The unity of the voice (the givenness of a selfoverhearing discursive self) is difficult but not impossible to question.

I play guitar and upright bass, mostly the jazzy end of blues. I read but too slowly to play at tempo.

I built a couple of guitars from parts, Tele style. I built a couple of amps from kits.

But lately I'm in an extended slump and haven't done much of anything. I used to do the local jams before we moved. Then COVID.

Wait. What's the topic?

Husserl also criticized Descartes for relying on the language of subject and object, which he believed reinforced a dualistic view of the world. — Wayfarer

Exactly ! and Heidegger took this all the way to primordial unity. That's why talking about the 'subject of experience' looks like a Cartesian distortion.

Yes, I requested one last name change. Our benevolent forum lord smiled upon that request. (Thanks again!) Think of me as the zombie bot version of @green flag.

This is flat earth semantics, in that makes sense at first but turns out to be more wrong than right. — plaque flag

It is empirically demonstrable that the Earth is not flat. You keep saying that the idea that meaning can be divorced from use is like believing in a flat Earth. But the latter is not empirically demonstrable, so it's a weak analogy and you haven't even offered any argument for why you think meaning cannot be divorced from use, but just repeated claims that it's wrong, whatever that might mean.

You keep saying that the idea that meaning can be divorced from use is like believing in a flat Earth. — Janus

The analogy is meant to emphasize how initially reasonable Aristotle's assumption is. It's 'obvious.' It's also obvious there are 'more' rational numbers than natural numbers, but that is not the case.

Still no argument; just another bad analogy.

you haven't even offered any argument for why you think meaning cannot be divorced from use, but just repeated claims that it's wrong, whatever that might mean. — Janus

I believe I have offered various arguments, and I constantly allude to philosophers who are famous for making just that kind of case.