Philosophers like Pinter — Leontiskos

Charles Pinter is not a philosopher - he's a mathematician with a long interest in neural modelling; all of his previous books were on algebra. And as I said, I can't do justice to all the material in his book with a few extracts. But his basic idea, and that of the neuro-scientists in the Big Think video that I posted, is not that difficult to state: that the brain/mind receives input from the environment and then constructs its world on that basis. This complex neural construction is what constitutes reality for us. These scientists do not deny that there is an external reality, but show that this is only one aspect of the totality of experience. This is why the neuroscience of cognition has something in common with Kant's philosophy (although they will also differ in important respects). Your arguments against, I'm afraid, really are just re-statements of Samuel Johnson's 'appeal to the stone' - even down to your choice of representative object!


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Actually, a rather poignant note - I have just found that Charles Pinter died, aged 91, in July 2023. After reading his book, I emailed him via his website (now apparently taken down) and received this reply, in June 2022:

Dear Wayfarer

I thank you very much for your kind letter about my book “Mind & the Cosmic Order”. As you wade further into the book, I hope you will find it clear and comprehensible. If I make any claims in the book that you would like to question or challenge, please feel free to write to me, and I will carefully think about your point of view and will respond as best I am able.

I am happy to learn that you are a student of Buddhism. I personally have been deeply influenced by Buddhist teachings, and the cornerstone of my own personal ethic is to recognize the absolute value of every sentient being.

If you have any general comments about the book as a whole, it would be very kind if you could send a brief review to the Amazon review page of my book. And once again, please feel free to write to me if there is any issue in the book that you’d like to discuss further.
Cordially,
Charles

I did indeed write an Amazon review, which can be found here. (There is also a review by one Barry N. Bishop who indignantly rejects Pinter's idealism. It is and always will be a perennial dispute. The review above mine, by McIntyre, is a good synopsis.)

Perhaps you can share any thought you might have on Spinoza's perspectivism, and connections to Wittgenstein's 'I am my world.' — plaque flag

Sorry, I don't see the connection. Spinoza is talking about reflective reasoning from (parallax-like) both the perspective of eternity and the perspective of time. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, is talking about the constitutive meta/cognitive constraints of logic-grammar. I suppose for both thinkers the "I" is impersonal (ergo universal? ontological?) ...

Imagination is an infinitely resourceful faculty. On the other hand, people do sometimes say they have encountered something, or something has happened to them, which was 'unimagineable' - 'I never imagined that would happen!' — Wayfarer

That sounds like a linguistic use of "imagine" (meaning he never expected that would happen). But I was meaning "imagination" as a creative visual faculty. Doesn't this faculty have central connection to the OP? - The Mind Created World ? If not, which faculty of the mind does the creating the world process?

which part of the mind does the creating the world process? — Corvus

If you mean, how does the mind (or brain) create or construct the world - isn't that pretty much what the whole brain is involved in? There are many things the brain does beneath the threshhold of conscious awareness - particularly the brain-stem and autonomic systems in the brain. We're not aware of growth, metabolism, and many other functions, not to mention the sub-conscious activities of the mind. The processing involved in conscious attention is only one part of what the brain does.

This leads to a particular set of functions that I think is philosophically interesting. That is the ability of the brain to maintain the 'subjective unity of experience'. We are self-aware as a unified whole - perception of shape, colour and movement appear to us as a unified whole (or gestalt) even though the sub-systems of the brain which process these are separate. Neuroscience hasn't identified the particular brain system that provides for this unification. It's called the 'neural binding problem' and is recognised as a scientific validation of the hard problem of consciousness (note the reference to Chalmers below):

There is now overwhelming biological and behavioral evidence that the brain contains no stable, high-resolution, full field representation of a visual scene, even though that is what we subjectively experience (Martinez-Conde et al. 2008). The structure of the primate visual system has been mapped in detail (Kaas and Collins 2003) and there is no area that could encode this detailed information. The subjective experience is thus inconsistent with the neural circuitry. Closely related problems include change- (Simons and Rensink 2005) and inattentional-blindness (Mack 2003), and the subjective unity of perception arising from activity in many separate brain areas (Fries 2009; Engel and Singer 2001).

Traditionally, the NBP (neural binding problem) concerns instantaneous perception and does not consider integration over saccades. But in both cases the hard problem is explaining why we experience the world the way we do. As is well known, current science has nothing to say about subjective (phenomenal) experience and this discrepancy between science and experience is also called the “explanatory gap” and “the hard problem” (Chalmers 1996). There is continuing effort to elucidate the neural correlates of conscious experience; these often invoke some version of temporal synchrony as discussed above.

There is a plausible functional story for the stable world illusion. First of all, we do have a (top-down) sense of the space around us that we cannot currently see, based on memory and other sense data—primarily hearing, touch, and smell. Also, since we are heavily visual, it is adaptive to use vision as broadly as possible. Our illusion of a full field, high resolution image depends on peripheral vision—to see this, just block part of your peripheral field with one hand. Immediately, you lose the illusion that you are seeing the blocked sector. When we also consider change blindness, a simple and plausible story emerges. Our visual system (somehow) relies on the fact that the periphery is very sensitive to change. As long as no change is detected it is safe to assume that nothing is significantly altered in the parts of the visual field not currently attended.

But this functional story tells nothing about the neural mechanisms that support this magic. What we do know is that there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene (Kaas and Collins 2003). That is, enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience. So, this version of the NBP really is a scientific mystery at this time. — The Neural Binding Problem(s)

How does phenomenology explain the existence of disagreement between people? And how does it propose that disagreement be resolved? — baker

Husserl puts the emphasis on empathetically understanding the other from within their one perspective.

“The human being lets “himself” be influenced not only by particular other humans (actual or imagined) but also by social objectivities that he feels and apprehends as effective objectivities in their own right, as influencing powers. He is afraid of “the government” and carries out what it commands. He views such and such individuals, for instance, the police officer, etc., as representatives of the government only; he fears the person who is an official representative. The customs, the church, etc., he feels as powers, too. Seen from the objective perspective of the historian and sociologist, human beings are real and, among them, such and such interconnected relations exist, such and such social objectivities exist, etc. And the task is to describe this in general, concrete and, where possible, in comparative terms, to describe the factual connection, to delineate universal class-concepts and rules, etc., just as in any morphology.

If the community of humankind is to be described historically in concreto in its becoming and in its dependence on other communities (for even the social objectivities have their “causality”), then the objective of an understanding of the inner connections requires that one immerse oneself so deeply in the consciousness of the respective individual human beings, so as to be able to exactly relive their motivations. One must immerse oneself so deeply that one brings to “givenness” their interpretations, supposed experiences, their superstitious fantasies, by means of which they let themselves be “influenced,” let themselves be guided, attracted, or repelled. The “real connections” consist in this: Under given circumstances such and such notions, etc., were (“understandably”) evoked in human beings, whereby such and such reactions were motivated in them, which in turn determined the course of their development.” (Basic Problems of Phenomenology)

Charles Pinter is not a philosopher - he's a mathematician with a long interest in neural modelling; all of his previous books were on algebra. — Wayfarer

I understand that, but if he is writing a book on the mind-world relation then in my opinion he is a philosopher. Being a mathematician does not prevent one from being a philosopher. In fact there is a giant overlap between these two fields, so much so that Aristotle complains in his Metaphysics that mathematician-philosophers were creating confusion, scientism-style.

that the brain/mind receives input from the environment and then constructs its world on that basis — Wayfarer

That sounds a lot like a Humean model. Impressions -> construction

But I will remember his name for future reference.

Your arguments against, I'm afraid, really are just re-statements of Samuel Johnson's 'appeal to the stone' - even down to your choice of representative object! — Wayfarer

I have never heard of him, but this is of course a rather bad misrepresentation of my position. Do you truly think a modus tollens argument is an "argumentum ad lapidem"? Premise (2) is not, "Your argument is false." It is a proposition that contradicts your thesis and one that we have both agreed to. Quite different, I'm afraid.

(The crux is not a dogmatic insistence that your argument must be false. The crux is the fact that you have attached yourself to a theory which entails that boulders do not have shape, combined with the fact that we both agree that boulders do have shape. Given that I have not read Pinter at length, this need not be detrimental to your project. But it should be taken into consideration, as a commonsensical critique of the theory. If you look at it from my perspective, there are about a million different theories on offer, and so I am going to start by considering those that account for the fact that boulders have shape. If those turn out to be unworkable, then I will move on to consider the others.)

Lots of us have read lots of things. The trick when it comes to dialogue is to be able to synthesize, state theories in your own words, and interact in an organic way with diverging worldviews. It's quite difficult, but I think this was a good conversation in which good progress was made (at the very least in understanding one another's views). Thanks for that. Until next time.

We are self-aware as a unified whole - perception of shape, colour and movement appear to us as a unified whole (or gestalt) even though the sub-systems of the brain which process these are separate. Neuroscience hasn't identified the particular brain system that provides for this unification. It's called the 'neural binding problem' and is recognised as a scientific validation of the hard problem of consciousness… current science has nothing to say about subjective (phenomenal) experience. — Wayfarer

Enactivists disagree with Chalmers belief that we dont have a way to explain the unification of consciousness or subjective experience empirically. For instance, Evan Thompson sees affectivity as the unifying glue.

Rather than being a collection of pre-specified modules, the brain appears to be an organ that constructs itself in development through spontaneously generated and experience-dependent activity (Quartz & Sejnowski, 1997; Quartz, 1999; Karmiloff-Smith, 1998), a developmental process made possible by robust and flexible developmental mechanisms conserved in animal evolution (Gerhart & Kirschner, 1997).”

“Douglas F. Watt (1998) describes affect as ‘a prototype “whole brain event”', but we could go further and say that affect is a prototypical whole-organism event. Affect has numerous dimensions that bind together virtually every aspect of the organism—the psychosomatic network of the nervous system, immune system, and endocrine system; physiological changes in the autonomic nervous system, the limbic system, and the superior cortex; facial-motor changes and global differential motor readiness for approach or withdrawal; subjective experience along a pleasure–displeasure valence axis; social signalling and coupling; and conscious evaluation and assessment (Watt, 1998). Thus the affective mind isn't in the head, but in the whole body; and affective states are emergent in the reciprocal, co-determination sense: they arise from neural and somatic activity that itself is conditioned by the ongoing embodied awareness and action of the whole animal or person.

Although the physical and energetic coupling between a living being and the physicochemical environment is symmetrical, with each partner exerting more influence on the other at different times, the living being modulates the parameters of this coupling in a way the environment typically does not. Living beings, precisely because they are autopoietic and adaptive, can “surf” environmental events and modulate them to their own ends, like a bird gliding on the wind. Interactional asymmetry is precisely this capacity to modulate the coupling with the environment. If we lose sight of this interactional asymmetry, then we lose the ability to account for the directedness proper to living beings in their sense-making, and hence we lose the resources we need to connect sense-making to intentionality.”

“One of the basic propositions of the enactive approach is that being autonomous is a necessary condition for a system to embody original intentionality and normativity. Unless the processes that make up a system constitute that system as an adaptive self-sustaining unity, there is no perspective or reference point for sense-making and hence no cognizing agent. Without autonomy (operational closure) there is no original meaning; there is only the derivative meaning attributed to certain processes by an outside observer.”
(Thompson 2001)

So to be clear, when I am talking about knowing mind-independent reality, I am talking about knowing things whose existence is distinct and unrelated to mind. Your claim that <If a reality can be known, then it is not mind-independent> is therefore neither here nor there. I don't think anyone in the thread has been conceiving of "mind-independent reality" in this way.

Gotcha. I see what you mean. I agree, most people don't think of "mind independent reality" the way I put it. I brought it up that way though because I'm not sure if "mind independence," can usefully be defined any other way without recourse to dualism.

If the supposition is that "mind independent entities " are those whose existence is not causally dependent on minds interacting with them, then this seems like a type of "mind independence" objective idealists acknowledge as well. There are exceptions, but generally the idealist claim isn't that perceiving or thinking about objects causes them to exist.

Can we have "mind independent existence," in a stronger sense? Maybe. But if it's something like "all the properties and effects of mind independent objects exist without reference to mind," that just seems wrong to me. It would seem to require some sort of implicit dualism where things' interactions with mind, and the properties instantiated in those interactions, are somehow unreal or "less real" properties.

But what is a definition of "mind independent existence," that goes further than "thinking of things doesn't cause their existence," but also accounts for the reality of the fact that all the objects we know about do,trivially, interact with mind?

This, I am stumped on. Generally definitions I am familiar with run along the lines of: "objects have all the properties they have independent of mind. These properties cause all phenomena. We can know about the objects because of their phenomenal effects. However, phenomena have no effect on objects' properties (i.e. their "mind independence")." This reminds me a bit of Neoplatonism's downward causality, only inverted such that Nous is below Psyche and Psyche is determined by and beneath the material world.

My objection is that it seems to me like the influence between the supposedly "mind independent" objects and phenomenal experience is a two way street. E.g., you don't like how your wall looks so you paint it, people think mountains are pretty so they photograph them, etc. The two causally flow into each other without distinction, which is what monist naturalism seems to suggest should happen.

Any division seems artificial to me,conflating a epistemic distinction with an ontological one. To the extent I have a problem with indirect realism, it's the fact that it tends to lead to this sort of soft dualism and hidden humonculi who are there to view the "representations" of the world.

Well, we fix flaws in concrete acts of understanding, but not foundational flaws in the faculty of understanding (the intellect). — Leontiskos

I believe that foundational flaws are flaws of the ends rather flaws of the means which are methodological flaws or flaws of technique, according to this difference which I described in my last post. Methodological flaws (flaws of the means) are epistemological, while flaws of the ends are metaphysical flaws. This is why pragmaticism is a form of epistemology and it provides no acceptable metaphysical approach. It can provide no real principles for judging ends and determining foundational flaws (flaws of the ends).

So I believe that we actually can address foundational flaws in the faculty of understanding itself (the intellect), through metaphysics. And, I believe that change in these foundational elements (ends) is a form of evolution which is evidenced by the history of metaphysics and theology. Evolution is very real and the intellectual limitations of one species are not the same as those of another, so we need to be able to account for the reality of real substantial changes to the faculty of understanding (the intellect).

Sure. My point was only that if one accepts the premise that the faculty of the intellect itself is inherently incapable of knowing reality as it is in itself, then no amount of self-reflection or epistemological work will change that fact. I think we are in agreement. — Leontiskos

As stated above, we are not in agreement here. One thing I tried to explain in the last post, is the point of |the ideal", as the highest possible perfection which is not ever actually obtainable. If we set an obtainable goal, then our efforts to better ourselves cease when that goal is reached. Therefore if we want to forever better ourselves, we need to set a goal of perfection, the ideal, unobtainable goal.

So when it is said "that the faculty of the intellect itself is inherently incapable of knowing reality as it is in itself", what is meant, is that there is an ideal, perfect knowledge of reality (God's knowledge for example), which we recognize that we will never achieve. However, this does not preclude the possibility of greatly improving our knowledge of reality. So it's not like we can never know anything about the independent reality, because clearly we make all sorts of statements, and pretend to know all sorts of things about the supposed independent reality, and many of these things are acceptable as true knowledge. However, such knowledge will always be fallible, and never of the sort of perfect certainty which some epistemologists who exclude fallibility from knowledge would request. Therefore it's only by excluding fallibility from knowledge, and forcing that requirement of perfect certainty, that "knowing" gets defined in such a way which produces the conclusion that we cannot "know" anything about the external reality.

Accordingly, we can accept the premise that "knowing reality", in this sort of perfect sense of "knowing" which excludes fallibility, this ideal knowledge, is impossible for the human intellect. But this need not stimy our attempts to produce such perfect knowledge through good metaphysics. To conclude then, I, as a human being, recognize that I will never obtain this ideal knowledge, but I do not exclude the possibility of another being reaching that level, so I will do what I can to help in that effort.

Your arguments against, I'm afraid, really are just re-statements of Samuel Johnson's 'appeal to the stone' - even down to your choice of representative object! — Wayfarer

I replied <once>, but let me revisit my <initial post> since I don't think I will end up writing the thread on this topic any time soon. I find that the misrepresentation of this important idea is significant enough to warrant a response and clarification.

The following is a paradigm case of a bad argument, and it is the sort of thing that Hume falls into. It evinces a failure to even understand what argument is:

P: [Unlikely theory]
Q: [Numerous things we hold with a great deal of certitude]

1. P $\to$ $\neg$Q
2. P
3. $\therefore$ $\neg$Q

The problem here is that argument, by its very nature, proceeds from premises that are more certain and more known, to conclusions that are less certain and less known. So in many ways this does not even rise to the level of an argument. It begins with a dubious premise and proceeds to an absurd conclusion, when instead it should reverse course and draw a salutary reductio. Argument is always a tug-of-war between different certitudes and different degrees of knowledge, and this example fails to understand that fact. It fails to understand that, in order for it to function as a real argument, P must be more certain than Q, when in fact the opposite is true.

But then what does this have to do with Pinter? The point is that—concrete certitudes aside—P and Q are inversely correlated, and whichever possesses less certitude will be eliminated in the conclusion of the argument. Hence, as should be obvious, theories which contradict a great many strongly-justified beliefs are implausible theories. If Pinter's theory does this, then it is implausible. If it does not, then it need not be.

The point at issue is that one cannot simply <present a theory as a justification for excluding facts>. The facts must be allowed to have their say. It is perfectly conceivable that the facts will make mincemeat of the theory, and that the rational course of action will be to accept the facts and reject the theory. Of course it may also be as @Wayfarer says, and we may have to give up the facts. But we surely do not want to be uncritical about the way in which facts and theory (among so many other things) play tug-of-war. Just because a theory excludes certain facts does not mean that the philosopher no longer has to reckon with those facts.

...so I apologize that my initial post may have been somewhat brusque and annoying, but it is certainly not the so-called "argumentum ad lapidem." Hopefully this post shows why.

Going back to:

If [abstruse theory], then [boulders cannot have shape]
[Abstruse theory]
Therefore, [Boulders cannot have shape] — Leontiskos

The reason that I compared it to Johnson's 'argument from the stone', is because the argument is predicated on the assertion that 'boulders obviously do have shape', meaning that the [abstruse theory] is required to deny an apparently obvious fact. That's the sense in which this argument is like 'the appeal to the stone', the difference being, instead of kicking the stone, you simply gesture towards it. But it is basically the same argument, with the difference that instead of appealing to the stone's hardness, you're appealing to its shape. The reason it is said not to be an effective response, is that it does not counter the claim that what we experience as an external shape is actually an idea or sensation generated in our sensory-intellectual system. What Berkeley actually denied was the existence of material substance that exists independently of being perceived. In other words, he didn't deny the existence of the rock as an idea or perception in our minds. He denied the existence of the rock as an independent material entity outside of our perception. (For Berkeley, a rock "exists" insofar as it is perceived by a mind. If no one is perceiving the rock, God, who perceives everything always, ensures its continuous existence by constantly perceiving it.)

The point at issue is that one cannot simply <present a theory as a justification for excluding facts>. — Leontiskos

As noted previously, it is the nature of 'facts' that is one of the points at issue (if not the main point!) But part of Pinter's case is that there are no facts in the absence of the observer (as detailed in this earlier post.) That is the point at issue.

I understand that, but if he is writing a book on the mind-world relation then in my opinion he is a philosopher. — Leontiskos

Oh, and yes, I grant that, and also that I'm obviously putting forward his argument as a philosophical argument.

the argument is predicated on the assertion that 'boulders obviously do have shape' — Wayfarer

A proposition that we have agreed upon is not a proposition that is being asserted/imposed (link):

It is a proposition that contradicts your thesis and one that we have both agreed to. — Leontiskos

The reason it is said not to be an effective response, is that it does not counter the claim that what we experience as an external shape is actually an idea or sensation generated in our sensory-intellectual system. — Wayfarer

But it does address that. If what we experience as an external shape is actually no more than an idea or sensation, then we would have no reason to believe that boulders would treat canyons differently than cracks. Yet you assented to the proposition that boulders do treat canyons differently than cracks (even when no minds are involved), precisely because you believe that shape is in fact more than an idea or sensation. The argument which supplies (2) counters precisely that claim.

I haven't waded through Pinter's system and pinpointed the exact junctures where he goes wrong, but we have agreed on (2), and this implies that he is wrong on that point. Maybe that's less than could be hoped for, but it is something. It's a work in progress.

But the whole reason we've reached this somewhat difficult point in the dialogue is because your intellectual honesty allowed you to affirm two things that you believe to be true, and yet which happen to contradict one another. That's great, and it's why I started the conversation in the first place. I would have skipped the thread if I didn't think the author was capable of this. There's nothing at all wrong with laboring through tensions or contradictions, and I would be remiss for pressing you too hard on the point.* No fruit comes without the aporia, and no one can tell how you will eventually go about resolving it. But I wish you luck in it.


* Really, I just think <this idea> is important to understand, and so I didn't want to let it get trammeled under foot or downplayed. "Systems" loom large in modern philosophy, and receive undue weight. I have not published my thread on that topic because folks tend to be suspicious that what is at play is nothing more than a debater's trick (as you were). Nothing could be further from the truth, but I haven't worked out how to make it more persuasive for publishing.

My objection is that it seems to me like the influence between the supposedly "mind independent" objects and phenomenal experience is a two way street. E.g., you don't like how your wall looks so you paint it, people think mountains are pretty so they photograph them, etc. The two causally flow into each other without distinction, which is what monist naturalism seems to suggest should happen.

Any division seems artificial to me,conflating a epistemic distinction with an ontological one. To the extent I have a problem with indirect realism, it's the fact that it tends to lead to this sort of soft dualism and hidden humonculi who are there to view the "representations" of the world. — Count Timothy von Icarus

In my view, there's a very deep and profound underlying reason behind this conundrum. I think it has to do with the fact that in earlier times, as the world was seen as an expression of the Divine Will, then humans understood the world in a more personalistic way - there wasn't the same sense of separateness and 'otherness'.

One of the key quotes I often hail back to is the 'Cartesian anxiety' which 'refers to the notion that, since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other" (From Richard J Bernstein Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis, 1983).

Thomist philosophy did not suffer from this 'anxiety' because it had preserved the sense of the 'union of knower and known' from Aristotelian philosophy. But remember, this union was on the immaterial plane, the union of the intellect with the Forms of particulars. With the nominalist/empiricist revolution of late medieval and early modern periods, and the abandonment of scholastic realism, objects came to be regarded as being inherently existent, when, from the earlier point of view, they have no real being of their own.

That's the longer thesis that I'm working towards.

Any division seems artificial to me, conflating a epistemic distinction with an ontological one. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would point with to Descartes, as I think that distinction is what underlies the "objective domain" cited by the OP.

So when <talking about> the mind knowing mind-independent reality as it is in itself, 'mind-independent reality' designates things like boulders, trees, mountains, walls, paint, etc. It doesn't really matter if the distinction is artificial, so long as an appreciable number of designata are understood by the term, and able to be spoken about. I don't see that the thread has foundered on this distinction in any way. It seems like everyone knows what is being spoken about. To be precise, though, the most obvious and most primary complement would be private, mind-generated realities, such as thoughts, opinions, Descartes' recognition that he is a thinking thing, etc.

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- :up:

It doesn't really matter if the distinction is artificial, so long as an appreciable number of designata are understood by the term, and able to be spoken about. — Leontiskos

One of the themes I'm studying in Aristotelian-Thomist (A-T) philosophy, is of the way that the intellect (nous) knows the forms or intelligible principles of things. I will probably start a thread on this topic, but here is a passage in a text on Thomist psychology that I find highly persuasive.

To hark back to your 'boulder' example - I suspect that, if we peruse the texts on classical epistemology, we won't find any passages that concern the reality or otherwise of boulders. I would further suspect that this is because 'a boulder' is simply the accidental form of the idea 'stone', the essential characteristics of which are impenetrability, heaviness, and so on. But the nature of stones has not been something of much discussion, I don't think. It reminds me of the question in The Parmenides as to whether 'hair, mud and dirt' have forms.

As I mentioned above, one of the hallmarks of modern philosophy is that objects come to be regarded as being inherently existent, when, from the pre-modern point of view, they have no real being of their own. As Meister Eckhardt said, 'beings are mere nothings'.

I put this to ChatGPT4. You might be interested in perusing the dialogue.

the very concept of perspective is completely unreliable, because, after all, it remains a hidden way of saying that there is an objective reality, from which perspective tries to be different. — Angelo Cannata

I think maybe you are conflating perspectivism (at least as I defend it) with indirect realism. Perspectivism is not the view that we each get our own TV-screen which merely represents some differing and otherwise obscure Reality. Instead we are ourselves (as 'pure witness' behind the psychological subject) 'are' perspectives, which is to say the very being of the world itself, with the world understood to have no other kind of being. As we look down on that city in the valley, it exists only as the-valley-for, never from no perspective at all.

Sorry, I don't see the connection. Spinoza is talking about reflective reasoning from (parallax-like) both the perspective of eternity and the perspective of time. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, is talking about constitutive the meta/cognitive constraints of logic-grammar. I suppose for both thinkers the "I" is impersonal (ergo universal? ontological?) ... — 180 Proof

:up:

Thanks, I am trying to follow a thread, including its running through Leibniz's The Monadology, and I was curious if it runs through Spinoza's work too. We all 'face' and 'intend' the [ same ] world, but this world is given to or through individual 'faces ' ('subjects.') I take the TLP to identify the 'pure subject' with exactly the being of the world --a triumph over dualism and the reification of awareness as some other kind of elusive material.

Maybe this is what you meant by 'ontological' [subject.] The limits of my language are the limits of my world because my 'belief' is the meaningstructure of the world, not something 'in' me.

Saying that we are perspectives implies that the idea that "we are perspectives" has a meaning only inside the perspective of those who say it. This is equivalent to say that it is meaningless, because its meaning is entirely limited inside itself, entirely determined by itself.

Respectfully, I don't think you have responded really to my point. Indirect realism, which seems to be your position, is (I think) even the dominant view.

You wrote:

By ‘creating reality’, I’m referring to the way the brain receives, organises and integrates cognitive data, along with memory and expectation, so as to generate the unified world–picture within which we situate and orient ourselves. ... By investing the objective domain with a mind-independent status, as if it exists independently of any mind, we absolutize it.

I think you are also half-suggesting that the brain creates itself, if you really understand it to create the world. On the whole, I think you are more likely presenting indirect realism. Some kind of elusive urstuff is Really Out There --- as in Kant, who does not want to be mistaken for an idealist.

Idealism consists in the assertion, that there are none but thinking beings, all other things, which we think are perceived in intuition, being nothing but representations in the thinking beings, to which no object external to them corresponds in fact. Whereas I say, that things as objects of our senses existing outside us are given, but we know nothing of what they may be in themselves, knowing only their appearances, i.e., the representations which they cause in us by affecting our senses...Can this be termed idealism? It is the very contrary. — Kant

Here's indirect realism, which sounds very close to Kant.

Indirect realism is broadly equivalent to the scientific view of perception that subjects do not experience the external world as it really is, but perceive it through the lens of a conceptual framework.[3] Furthermore, indirect realism is a core tenet of the cognitivism paradigm in psychology and cognitive science. While there is superficial overlap, the indirect model is unlike the standpoint of idealism, which holds that only ideas are real, but there are no mind-independent objects.[4]

My own perspectivism (not really mine) is closer to idealism in a certain sense, but it reduces the subject to world rather than the other way around. (Like James or Mach, etc.)

I guess I'm asking you to clarify whether you are basically an indirect realist. Hence my quotes of Hobbes and Locke who are themselves close to Kant.

The limits of my language are the limits of my world because my 'belief' is the meaningstructure of the world, not something 'in' me. — plaque flag

Perhaps instead, as per Bourdieu, 'my habitus' (or Merleau-Ponty 'my flesh' ... Nietzsche 'my body').

Saying that we are perspectives implies that the idea that "we are perspectives" has a meaning only inside the perspective of those who say it. This is equivalent to say that it is meaningless, because its meaning is entirely limited inside itself, entirely determined by itself. — Angelo Cannata

If you spy on your neighbor by peeping in through one window, and I peep in through another, are we not both peeping in on the same neighbor ?

If I believe that the Jones is guilty, while you believe he is innocent, aren't we both believing about the same Jones ?

I think (?) you are assuming some kind of dualism, as each of us is stuck in a solipsistic bubble of world-dream. I'm saying there 'is' not 'ontological' subject, or rather that such a subject is the being of the world, which is given like a cubist painting.

Perhaps, as per Bourdieu, 'my habitus' (or Merleau-Ponty 'my flesh' ... Nietzsche 'my body'). — 180 Proof

This may be a wild misreading, but, following Mach, are you [also] hinting at the fusion of my flesh and the world ? In a certain sense, I 'am' [also] my coffee cup. The boundaries of the ego are practically-conventionally determined.

But I can't deny that the flesh in another sense is both seeing and seen, and it's 'me' in the sense of its intimate relationship with my 'will.' [ Merleau-Ponty is a great mention. Only in the last year did I finally pay attention to such a great philosopher. ]

To the extent I have a problem with indirect realism, it's the fact that it tends to lead to this sort of soft dualism and hidden humonculi who are there to view the "representations" of the world. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:up:

We end up with a boy in the bubble, who can't be sure there's a world out there.

The separation of form from matter requires two stages if the idea is to be elaborated: first, the sensitive stage, wherein the external and internal senses operate upon the material object, accepting its form without matter, but not without the appendages of matter; second the intellectual stage, wherein agent intellect operates upon the phantasmal datum, divesting the form of every character that marks and identifies it as a particular something. — Aquinas

This translates in my mind into a description of the scientific method. The sensitive stage becomes the gathering of data and experimentation, and the intellectual stage is theorising and hypothesis forming.

“Douglas F. Watt (1998) describes affect as ‘a prototype “whole brain event”', but we could go further and say that affect is a prototypical whole-organism event. — Thompson

"Affect" looks to be functioning here as the objectification of subjectivity. and I think it can help me in this context to clarify what I see as an important distinction between subjectivity and perspective.

Perspective seems to correspond to the form of the rock; the rock has a form, and that gives rise to any subject necessarily having a particular perspective on the rock. Whereas the 'affect' of an organism is the internally generated sense of its own being. The yeast cell defines itself and delimits itself as sugar in, CO2 or Alcohol out.

A subject locates itself as an entity, and its perspective arises from its location. But such a definition of self is necessarily permeable and incomplete. It's affect is its response to its environment as well as its response to itself. ( I am a farmer, teacher, philosopher, scientist an interactor of some sort with the environment...)

So when one starts to speak of colonial species and social species, there is potential for conflicted identification as between the cell and the colony; the conflict we experience as morality. Bees are the original suicide bombers, and greater love hath no bee, than to lay down his life for his hive. Is the hive the environment of the individual bee, or is the beekeeper or the bear the environment of the hive?

It becomes apparent to the environmentalist that the distinction that forms the subject is as real and as vague as the distinction of a weather system. the subject is a temporary vortex that is always part of a larger system to which it is accountable, and into which it dissolves. Forms arise and dissolve and all things must pass.

Some kind of elusive urstuff is Really Out There --- as in Kant, who does not want to be mistaken for an idealist. — plaque flag

As the cognitive scientists say, in that video presentation I mentioned, of course there is an external world, but we don't see it as it is.

The reason I don't call that, or my view of that, indirect realism, is because that posits two things - one, the real world, and two, the representation or image of it. But we can't ever compare 'the real world' with 'the representation of it'.

The Mind and Cosmic Order intro again - 'Imagine that all life has vanished from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed. Matter is scattered about in space in the same way as it is now, there is sunlight, there are stars, planets and galaxies—but all of it is unseen. There is no human or animal eye to cast a glance at objects, hence nothing is discerned, recognized or even noticed. Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds. Nor do they have features, because features correspond to categories of animal sensation. This is the way the early universe was before the emergence of life—and the way the present universe is outside the view of any observer.'

My argument is simpy that the mind or brain assimilates sensory and rational information and from this constructs what we understand as 'the world'. I'm not denying that there is a world apart from the mind, but saying that whatever we think or say about that purported world absent any mind is meaningless. I'm struggling to understand what about this is controversial or confusing, it seems very straightforward to me.

Kant... does not want to be mistaken for an idealist — plaque flag

In the second edition of the CPR, Kant took pains to distinguish himself from Berkeley, because critics accused him of being like Berkeley, whom Kant described as a 'problematic idealist' on account of Berkeley saying that a world outside himself is dubious or impossible to know. But Kant described himself as transcendental idealist, and differentiated that from what he described as 'problematical idealism'. You can find details here.

saying that we are perspectives implies that the idea that "we are perspectives" has a meaning only inside the perspective of those who say it — Angelo Cannata

Time comprises the duration between instances, space the distance between points, right? So, how can those have objective reality without an observing mind that perceives the relation between given instances and specific points? It seems to me that as all of these require the connection of points in space and instances in time, that it is only a mind that can ascertain these relations, as without there being a scale or perspective, what is nearer and further or smaller and larger, sooner or later, an immense period of time, or a minute period?

As Kant puts it at the beginning of his critique:

What then are time and space? Are they real existences? Or, are they merely relations or determinations of things, such, however, as would equally belong to these things in themselves, though they should never become objects of intuition; or, are they such as belong only to the form of intuition, and consequently to the subjective constitution of the mind, without which these predicates of time and space could not be attached to any object.'

He concludes 'Space does not represent any property of objects as things in themselves, nor does it represent them in their relations to each other'.

I take it from this, and please correct me if I am wrong, that Kant denies to space and time a purely objective reality; that, in other words, space and time have an inextricably subjective ground. Hence perspective can't really be avoided.

This translates in my mind into a description of the scientific method. — unenlightened

Except that scientific method eschews the notion of there being intelligible forms, per se.

Except that scientific method eschews the notion of there being intelligible forms, per se. — Wayfarer

I don't think it does. Equations are forms; Classificatory systems are forms. They use another language is all.

I don't think it does. Equations are forms; Classificatory systems are forms. They use another language is all. — unenlightened

That's an idea that I'm pursuing; that what Plato called 'forms' are really more like 'intellectual principles' and the like. But still, science generally, since Galileo, has strongly rejected anything sounding like Aristotelian matter-form dualism, and there's nothing corresponding to the Scholastic idea of the 'rational soul' in scientific theory. It's grounded in naturalism, and the existence of 'soul' is rejected as a matter of definition.

My argument is simpy that the mind or brain assimilates sensory and rational information and from this constructs what we understand as 'the world'. I'm not denying that there is a world apart from the mind, but saying that whatever we think or say about that purported world absent any mind is meaningless. I'm struggling to understand what about this is controversial or confusing, it seems very straightforward to me. — Wayfarer

This is maybe the grand issue of German Idealism, so maybe it's not so surprising that it's controversial. Kant's own followers questioned the pointlessness of this X that nothing could be said about. But I think the confusion can be partially laid at your door.

You open with: The aim of this essay is to make the case for a type of philosophical idealism, which posits mind as foundational to the nature of existence.

But you offer some kind of Kantian indirect realism, which if fine, of course --- it's a respectable position. And maybe the point was to ease the non-philosophical causal reader into Kantianism in an unintimidating way. Again, no complaint. But maybe saying mind is 'foundational' to existence is a little misleading ? As many philosophers have noted, that X is ambiguous and questionable.

I don't think it does. Equations are forms; Classificatory systems are forms. They use another language is all. — unenlightened

:up:

I'd say it's bad scientistic metaphysicians [ who may sometimes also be physicists ] who tend to imagine these 'forms' as something somehow 'extra-mental' that is hidden 'behind' appearance/experience.