1. Shannon's model, developed for radios and telephones — for precisely this sort of transformation of energy types — is now applied to all physical interactions. So if the model entails indirectness, then everything is indirect. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Shannon was originally looking at noise on transmission lines. Noise is created by electromagnetism in the vicinity of a line. If it's a digital transmission, that means 1's might turn into 0's, and so forth. It's not about energy transformation per se. It's about degradation of information. That idea of information was picked up and exploded in various realms. I mean, there's no doubt that you hear a person on your phone indirectly. I don't think that fact impacts the meaning of information in other realms. If you think it does, could you explain why?

2. These different types of energy turn out not to always be sui generis types. There has been a lot of work unifying these. We still have multiple "fundemental forces," but the goal/intuition, is that these can be unified as well, like electricity and magnetism, or then electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force. — Count Timothy von Icarus

With a computer, the analog-to-digital (A/D) converter isn't transforming energy types. It's just sampling the analog signal and creating a digital stream that can be used to recreate an analog signal somewhere else. It's like if you heard someone and then mimicked them. Something like the A/D, then D/A conversion happened. That's what we imagine, anyway, looking at a human nervous system. The reason I brought this up was to just highlight the meaning of functionality. Mimicry can happen without any phenomenal consciousness. It's all functional. Phenomenality is an extra added bit. We don't know why it's there or where it comes from.

This would seem to leave too many relations as indirect. And if perception is an indirect experience of the world merely in the way that light has an indirect relationship with photosynthesis or sex has an indirect relationship with pregnancy, then the epistemological claims related to this sort of indirectness seem much less acute (maybe this is a feature, not a bug). — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is an interesting avenue to ponder. What's confusing is that you brought experience back into it. We don't know how experience is generated, or if it's even right to say that it is "generated." This argument will have to wait until there's a working theory of phenomenal consciousness (if we ever get that far).

Another wrinkle: wouldn't pain be the transformation of kinetic energy into electrochemical energy, and experience of our own pain thus also be indirect? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Pain is associated with electrical discharges that travel along sensory nerves into the central nervous system. A variety of things can trigger those discharges. A fair portion of an organism's reaction to pain is reflexive. Pain has the potential to alter behavior through conditioning , but again, this doesn't necessarily entail experience. Where there is memory of pain, that's obviously indirect access to the pain.

Anyway, I see where your headed, you're saying the idea of indirectness, once introduced, will quickly generalize.

Are we to say that ghosts are not real for us, but real for them? Are we then saying that people speak of fake ghosts? That sounds strange, but it may be true. — Manuel

We still talk about the psyche, which is another word for ghost or geist:

"Geist (German pronunciation: [ˈɡaɪst] ⓘ) is a German noun with a significant degree of importance in German philosophy. Geist can be roughly translated into three English meanings: ghost (as in the spooky creature), spirit (as in the Holy Spirit), and mind or intellect. Some English translators resort to using "spirit/mind" or "spirit (mind)" to help convey the meaning of the term." -- here

I'm guessing it starts with the idea of an abiding persona that dwells in an ever-changing body. In the Epic of Gilgamesh (around 5000 years old), Gilgamesh learns about the disembodied psyche of his friend through a dream. Back then, they thought dreams were messages. Anyway, even if you don't believe in ghosts, you probably think in terms of continuity of the self over time. That means you're just one step away from believing in ghosts.

Sorry, I don't mean to be oblique. It's that I think accusations of dualism really depend heavily on the exact formulation involved, so I don't want to be overly direct because I don't think it's always an issue. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I misunderstood, then. It sounded to my ears like: "I sniff an attempt to smuggle in communism, so it's bad." We didn't get the argument for why communism was necessarily being smuggled and why that would be bad. :grin:

It comes down to what makes experience indirect, what makes the relationship between people and lemons vis-á-vis seeing yellow different from the relationship between people's breathing and air vis-á-vis oxygenating blood. If that difference just is that one is phenomenal, and that a relations involving phenomenal experience is what makes it indirect, then that looks a lot like mind having its own sorts of sui generis causal relations, essentially being a different substance from other entities, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ha! I'm a respiratory therapist, so I spend a fair amount of time trying to oxygenate blood. The physiological aspects of breathing are similar to the functional aspects of sight. There's a voluntary aspect to both: you can hold your breath and you can direct your line of sight, but for the most part each travels along involuntary tracks. Sight has that second layer of phenomenality, though. Oxygenation doesn't. A person can be profoundly hypoxic and feel nothing out of the ordinary (for a few seconds). Following that, they'll just feel bad with a sense of alarm as the body tries to compensate.

Why do we have the experience of sight on top of visual functionality? That's presently unknown. If a person sees in that a reason to embrace duality, that's because they were dualist to begin with.

Without a way to specify the "indirectness" it seems to reduce to "being phenomenal is indirect because phenomenal awareness is a special type of relation," which is where a sort of dualism seems to come in, along with begging the question. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If there was no such thing as phenomenality and all humans had was the functions of consciousness (without any accompanying awareness), there would still be indirectness to it, in the same way that a computer's data collection is indirect. If a computer listens to the sound of a bird, it converts the analog frequencies to a digital stream and subsequently manipulates that stream. From what we know about the nervous system, it appears that something like that is happening in the brain. Obviously the preceding statements indicates that scientists have quite a bit of confidence in their own brains' ability to accurately construct the world. Still, what they're describing is indirect realism.

3. Ancient peoples coherently talked about their mental states.
4. Ancient peoples did not coherently talk about their brain states.
5. Therefore, mental states are not identical to brain states. — RogueAI

I think it works in the vein of the conceivability of a distinction. The stakes are just about who has the burden of proof regarding reduction.

Talk of Superman is not the same as talk of Clark Kent. — fdrake

The two have the same extensional definition, so there's a sense in which talk of one is talk of the other.

I think there is a more general concern that the "indirect" term is smuggling dualism in. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You tend to do these oblique attacks instead of swapping argument for argument. I'd rather you set out why indirect realism is necessarily dualist (property dualism? substance dualism?) rather than imply it as a concern. Maybe it's just a difference in style.

Yes, perhaps. I meant it as an intermediary between the "thinking" aspect of consciousness (that interprets and makes use of phenomenal experience) and the external world.

So perhaps it is more accurate to say that we are directly cognisant of phenomenal experience and through that indirect cognizant of distal objects. — Michael

I think that about sums up the prevailing outlook of our time. I lean toward the notion that all three: the phenomenal, the conceptual (by which we make sense of the flood of incoming data), and the Big Kahuna: the self, are all products of analysis, where we draw back from experience and pick it apart. In the midst of living experience I think those three are kind of fused.

What does this mean? It is often repeated, but how close does the Tractatus map to the writings of Schopenhauer? — Fooloso4

It's not a matter of mapping. In the Tractatus his very wording tells us we're in the setting of the WWR (although I have to note that I'm not in a mood to write an essay on that, so if you disagree, that's fine). He's not a disciple of Schopenhauer. He's solving a problem left behind by him.

Phenomenal experience is the intermediary — Michael

I think the very idea of an intermediary is a red herring. What's really at stake is whether phenomenal experience alone informs us about the world around us. It very clearly does not.

Ever since we discovered the anatomy of sensory apparatus, the only way to argue for direct realism is to equivocate.

while having good stuff in it, is also in some respects, a step down form the Tractatus. — Manuel

Yep.

And introduces new (bigger?) problems, like why did the conveyor belt come back with six dots rather than three? And why/how do things cease to exist when we turn around and come back into existence when we turn back? — Michael

The basic idea is that explanations are post hoc. You place the event in a historical context as in dreams. Explaining the six dots is not a challenge to this kind of idealism. The challenge is solipsism.

If you can measure how parsimonious a model is, then it wouldn't matter much what a community thinks. I think in this case, it's probably provable (not by me) that A is more parsimonious than B, because it takes fewer bits to describe a universe where A is the case than B. — flannel jesus

A couple of problems with (A) are Zeno's Paradox and the problem of induction. Fewer bits with a few giant holes.

I don't understand this. There is a difference between something continuing to exist and something ceasing to exist and then coming back into existence. — Michael

I meant there's no difference in terms of the force of the supporting argument. In both cases, it's a matter of taste. I think that's what you're disputing here:

Presumably one of us is wrong. Either (A) is more parsimonious or (B) is more parsimonious. I'm not sure that reason is relative. — Michael

I think the reason (A) seems parsimonious is that it conforms to a standard narrative, one we develop spontaneously in early childhood. (B) solves (or appears to solve) a number of philosophical problems, which is why it shows up perennially.

I would say that (A) is the more parsimonious explanation and so should be favoured, unless there's actual evidence to the contrary. — Michael

That's a good answer. But say a community finds (B) to be more parsimonious. They would advise you to accept (B) unless there's actual evidence to the contrary.

The point is: fundamentally, there's no difference.

There is no "right way up". There's just the way things seem to you and seem to me, determined entirely by how our bodies respond to stimulation. — Michael

Think of two scenarios:

A. Contemporary science starts with the assumption that each person is a body responding to stimulation (and simultaneously altering the environment). The image is similar to a computer arrayed with analog to digital converters. The question scientists grapple with is how the computer is creating a seamless experience out of the flood of data.

B. Now compare this to Berkeley's view: the "stuff" isn't even out there until we turn our gazes upon it.

What draws one to accept A over B?

I don't really know what environment you're talking about. I've been focusing more on the evolution of ideas. I'll defer to your knowledge of 20th Century anti-realist environments. :up:

Wittgenstein is a product of his time, and the thing in philosophy at that time was to call all sorts of things "meaningless. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There are a number of ways to interpret the Tractatus. Some of the contemporary interpretations see it as a rejection of metaphysics. The idea is that there's a way of philosophizing that seems meaningful, but on closer inspection, it's a misuse of language.

Wittgenstein didn't really call "all sorts of things" meaningless. He liked the idea that meaning is found in language use (as opposed to being revealed by dictionaries, for instance.) As much as Wittgenstein talked about rule following, Kripke found in his writings reasons to reject the idea that meaning arises from it. It's fun to think about what paths unfold from there.

I don't think any rough equating of the thing-in-itself with that of which we cannot speak will suffice here. — Banno

I agree.

Wittgenstein had an infamous disregard for the history of philosophy. Some might say this was in order to think things through without prejudice; others that it was in order to claim credit for the ideas of others. — Banno

You can't really read the Tractatus without picking up on the way he's addressing Schopenhauer, though.

But Kant does not loom large either in Wittgenstein's own accounts of his influences, — Banno

Kant was Schopenhauer's primary influence. The same basic ideas were probably rolling around?

Schopenhauer leaves us with that question: 'what do the necessities of thought have to do with the way the world is?'

Wittgenstein answers that question, so it's a long philosophical conversation. Witt owed Schop, who owed Kant, who owed Hume, and so on.

Is there really such a thing, for Kant, as what the individual can't know? Or is it the case that there is only such a thing as what the individual cannot know empirically? — Metaphysician Undercover

He says we can't know about that logical orphan: the thing in itself. :grin:


:up:

On the other end of the spectrum, it's possible to get a dog to follow rules and perform acts based on verbal commands, but the rule following there hardly seems like it can "fix" the content of thought. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Dogs cannot set out the rule they are following. We can. — Banno

Kripkenstein says normative meaning is a folktale. It sounds great and it fits a socially-centered narrative, but it's really not more than conjecture.

Back to Kant and what the individual sees and knows (and can't know).

. But I want to bring in Wittgenstein's later philosophy and the notion of language games and forms of life to emphasize that the locus of his new kind of transcendental philosophy is ultimately taken out of the head and placed in social practices. — Jamal

Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. His later philosophy breaks the last rule in the Tractatus. He knew that.

For Hoffman, the core mistake would be the presupposition that experiences must necessarily be of objects "out there," which in turn leads to the concept of the noumenal and thus the significant problems understanding the world around us that follow from this being being posited axiomatically. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What would you replace that paradigm with?

Plus, if you think there now exist better answers to Hume's challenges and you are unhappy with where Kant ends up (or different readings on Kant), going back to the drawing board for a new paradigm only makes sense. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think there is a better solution to the problem of induction. Searle resorted to repeating Hume. What better answer did you have in mind?

Might it be valid to say that what is often labeled in Kant as "a priori" might be better described using modern concepts of "unconscious" processes, a concept unavailable to Kant? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Innateness is pretty modern since Chomsky. Remember that Kant is part of the trunk of the western philosophy tree. Every philosopher since Kant has been influenced by him in some way, even if he was seen as something to defeat.

I still think you're just sort of ignoring what's central about his epistemology. But good discussion! Thanks

However, his elucidation of these issues would seem to cast greater doubt on Kant's suppositions. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Which suppositions?

I guess my point was that we should take a second to understand Kant's thought experiments before we poo poo him.

Phenomena for Kant are appearances - which I so far take to always be in one way or another empirical. And, hence, I so far take it that for Kant space and time - both being a priori representations that are then in no way empirical - are not phenomenal in and of themselves.

Which is not to then say that either pure or empirical intuitions are not representations for Kant.

If you find this interpretation mistaken, can you please back up your disagreement with references. — javra

You're right. I thought you were saying that space and time are mind independent. Kant shows that they can't be.

So, Kant's analysis might very well be relevant to some "essential nature," of human experience, provided we narrowly defined what constitutes the actualization of such an essence. However, it can't be prior to sensory perception. If anything, developmental biology would suggest that such regularities only come to exist provided a narrow range of environmental inputs. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think what you're missing is that there's an aspect of the underlying framework of developmental biology that is a priori. You're putting the scientific cart before the logical horse.

That bats and humans might experience a rock differently does not entail that no part of their experience might be tied to the properties of the rock in a direct manner. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Kant isn't a simple indirect realist where there's some supervenience relation between the noumenon and the phenomenon. What's revolutionary in his insights is that the whole spaciotemporal framework is a priori.

Although all of this is a summery of sorts, I do take it to evidence that our scientific knowledge confirms that, for one example, the yellow flower which all of us humans can effortlessly agree occurs out there in the world independently of our senses and concepts is, in fact, fully contingent on our senses and concepts—this in all, or at least nearly all, respects other than its spatiotemporal properties (neither of which are phenomena in Kantian terms). To some other species of life, the very same spatiotemporal object which can be apprehended by all coexistent sentience will then be neither yellow nor a flower. — javra

Science doesn't confirm that there's a flower independent of our senses and concepts. It starts with that assumption.

Spaciotemporal properties are aspects of the phenomena for Kant, or aspects of what we intuit. You're thinking of Locke when you say those properties are independent of us. Kant showed that whatever those properties are, we somehow know about them a priori. We don't learn about them.

You can take the above and create a picture of humans projecting a framework of space and time for the things they encounter, but I think this is going a step further than the insights actually warrant. All we can really take confidently from Kant is that we aren't blank slates.

I hear the Tractatus as an anti-explanation — Paine

Exactly.

I think objectivity and subjectivity are two poles of the same concept. They appear together because each is in the meaning of the other, so to speak. Objectivity is fundamentally the perspective that isn't subjective. It's the narrator of the story as opposed to the first person account.

Kant explains why objectivity as we know it has a framework that appears to be a priori. Locke was wrong that we're blank slates that nature writes upon. Whatever is happening, it's not that.

That leaves us with a secondary kind of objectivity: the story of the thing-in-itself. We don't have access to that kind of objectivity. What we have access to is our own map-making.

Not at all surprising. Although, as a personal pet peeve, I do dislike the way mathematics-specific concepts sometimes overtake more mainstream philosophical concepts. Mistaking the purposive, hence teleological, notion of function for the mathematical notion of function comes to mind as one example of this. But be that as it may. — javra

:grin: :up:

To your knowledge, does the history of this particular mathematical concept of "abstract object" extend beyond this:

Abstract object theory (AOT) is a branch of metaphysics regarding abstract objects.[1] Originally devised by metaphysician Edward Zalta in 1981,[2] the theory was an expansion of mathematical Platonism. — javra

I think the concept of an abstract object comes from Frege.


:up:

In terms of the question of what Kant's view of the limits of empirical knowledge were, it seems to me to be a mistake to see that aligned to any theory of physics. How does one traverse the gap between space and time being posited as intuitions and having those concepts build a model of the world as it "truly" is? — Paine

Kant showed that we're bound to think along certain lines. I call it the contours of the mind. We feel our way to those contours by logic and conceivability. When we discover the indubitable, we've found it.

But what does the way we're bound to think have to do with the way the world actually is? My answer is that Wittgenstein explains that in the Tractatus. What's your answer?

Interesting. Its been a while sine I've read the likes of Lock, Hume, and Kant. Still, I so far take a visualized unicorn, for example, to be a "mental object" of one's awareness which is in some way perceptually concrete (i.e., has a specific shape, size, color, etc. when visualized), whereas abstract objects (quantities included) I take to be those mental objects of one's awareness whose delimitations are abstracted from - but do not include - concrete particulars. The concept of "animal" or "world" being two possible examples of the latter, among innumerable others. — javra

"Abstract object" has a specific meaning in philosophy of math. It's not a physical object, but it's still something that transcends the individual. So an abstract object (in this sense) is not a kind of mental object.

The idea of an abstract object didn't exist back then.
— frank

Weren't they termed "concepts", also sometimes termed "ideas"? — javra

I don't think they distinguished between mental objects (what you're thinking about now) and abstract objects (things like numbers and propositions.) I guess the basic idea was around, but not analyzed out?

Is this true though? I feel like I have a pretty easy time imagining abstract objects without having to attribute extension to them. I don't know if I buy theories that involve propositions as abstract, eternal objects, but I've never really had a problem of conceptualizing them. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The idea of an abstract object didn't exist back then. He was talking about things like cups and trees.

I see what you're saying. I agree.

Hence you will have reasons to conclude that there is no need to suppose that something material passes from objects to our eyes to make us see colors and light, or even that there is something in the objects, which resembles the ideas or sensations that we have of them. In just the same way, when a blind man feels bodies, nothing has to issue from the bodies and pass along his stick to his hand: and the resistance or movement of the bodies, which is the sole cause of the sensations he has of them, is nothing like the idea he forms of them."

In this case, objects stimulate an innate mechanism which leads us to form an idea of the world. Notice that the objects just stimulated the blind man with the stick, but his ideas were inside the whole time. Similar observations apply when Descartes mentions the following:

"But then if I look out of the window and see men crossing the square, as I just happen to have done, I normally say that I see the men themselves, just as I say that I see the wax. Yet do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men. And so something which I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped solely by the faculty of judgement which is in my mind."

Leibniz, on the other hand, replying to Locke, points out:

"The reason why there is no name for the murder of an old man is that such a name would be of little use... ideas do not depend upon names [words with definitions, in this context] ... If a... writer did invent a name for that crime and devoted a chapter to 'Gerontophony', showing what we owe to the old and how monstrous it is to treat them ungently, he would not thereby be giving us a new idea."

We already know the meanings of words, prior to definitions. — Manuel

Oh! I see what you're saying. This is the difference I'm seeing between Descartes and Kant: Descartes is sort of saying that our ideas of the world supervene on our experiences. It's the argument from anatomy. Descartes knew that there are "strings" that flow through the body back to the brain. He thought the world "plucks" these strings and the brain subsequently does something with those pluckings.

Kant points out in the Transcendental Aesthetic that we can't imagine an object that doesn't have spacial or temporal extension. He's borrowing the form of Hume's Bundle Theory argument. If you can't conceive of objects without spacial extension, this shows that you don't learn about space through experience. Knowledge of space and time are a priori. That actually is Copernican! To me, anyway.

Kant points out that aspects of the phenomenon are known to us prior to experience with the world. He lays out clear and persuasive arguments for this. What you do next with that information is up to you.
— frank

As does Descartes, Leibniz and Cudworth — Manuel

I've never thought of Descartes as proving that some of our knowledge of the world is a priori. Nor Leibniz. Could you expand on that?

He also thinks he can’t just ignore it, because he regards it as an unavoidable product of the understanding. — Jamal

The idea that science can be purely empirical is still around. It's this vision of science that Kant and others killed, for philosophers anyway.

I once watched a discussion between Dennett and Krause in which Krause announces that he's an empiricist. Dennett tries to explain that he's not really, and Krause gets this quizzical look on his face. Krause is a scientist who thinks he's discovering the noumena. In other words, once you understand the concept of the noumena, then you can ignore it. Not before.