And all he had to do was fire the people who report the economic data and install his own people! — Mr Bee

That was the labor secretary.

Clearly, his anger caused your anger. But I don't think that's the same as experiencing his anger. Do you think you could become angry from looking at a photograph of someone who is obviously angry? — Patterner

For me, at base, it's not my anger or your anger. It's just anger. Telling who it belongs to is an intellectual matter.

We can't get rid of properties or talk of properties. Fear not.

Oh yeah I don't think logic is intuitive at all. — Moliere

Oh, sorry. I thought that's what you were looking for in set theory. I think logic is fairly intuitive, though.

GDP is up 3.3% QoQ!!! Trump is a genius! And the economy always gets better after the first quarter.

The point of my OP is that the set actually is the property. That may not be obvious. — litewave

I think I understand what you mean.

By being an element of the set, thus having what all the other elements of the set have. — litewave

So you're saying that having a property is a matter of being a member of the set of all things that have that property. That's trivially true.

So the peony has the set of all red things. How does it have that set?

Because a collection is something different than its elements, yet it is also something that is common to the elements. — litewave

1. The property of redness is the set of all red things.
2. A peony has the property of redness.
3. A peony has the set of all red things.

Help me out here. That doesn't make sense.

For thousands of years mathematicians would have said that set theory is illogical. It flies directly in the face of Aristotle's finitism, but it solves problems that are otherwise unsolvable. Don't look for an intuitive basis for set theory down in your noggin. It's not there.

I said instances of redness have the property of redness. — litewave

A red ball has the property of redness. A red ball is not the property of redness, though. They're two different things, so it's hard to see how a collection of red things would be equivalent to redness.

My point is more about how it can feel like anything. I do not see how appreciation of time can happen either in a moment or across a period without some atemporal element being involved. What that means in terms of our physical understanding of the universe is rather nonsensical to us though. — I like sushi

I understand what you're saying, but I think it's relative. If you're watching the passage of time, you're stationary. But you're also in the stream of time, moving past various points, the points in time are stationary. The distance between you and the American Revolution grows bigger every day. You're the one that's moving, not the revolution.

Shades and hues of red are instances of redness, so they all have the property of redness. — litewave

Red has the property of redness? That doesn't sound right.

When I say that a property is identical to the set of all objects that have this property, I mean that the property is completely specified and thus the set is completely specified. In practice we usually don't have such complete specifications and we talk about approximately specified properties like "redness", but that doesn't refute my claim that a property (completely specified) is identical to the set of all objects that have this property. — litewave

So if it's the property red, then the set contains things past, present, and future. It contains things like my blood in the light (my blood isn't red inside my body, just when it spurts out of an open wound.)

It's just seems like you're mixing categories if you say redness is the set of red things. It's closer the set of all shades and hues of red.

a single moment
— frank

It is more or less this that flumoxes me.

Is time discrete? If not, or if so, how can we have any appreciation of it? — I like sushi

It appears to be both. If we're listening to music and clapping along, awareness of is in the anticipation, and then the gratification of all clapping at the same time, a single moment. But at other times, it feels like a flow.

This is Aristotle territory.

I agree. All I know of consciousness is that I am conscious. All the words I have to speak about it are community property, gaining meaning in practical situations. I think there is an implied commonality in the fact that we use the same words. And this sense of commonality extends to the whole world, where thunderstorms seem angry, and quiet meadows seem happy.

I think at the point we decide that you have some quality of being that belongs uniquely to you, we're laying a particular worldview over the scene. We could just as easily believe that our common language about experience has an external referent in something like the mind of God that dwells all around, and we participate in it, resonating with it, injecting our own emotions into it like a cloud. We just don't have that worldview, so we imagine distinct pockets, containing unknowable beetles.

As you say, this is metaphysics that goes beyond the character of linguistic expression. So it's not just that I can deem experience in itself as beyond language, the whole scheme that distributes beetles into boxes is also trying to express something beyond language.

I think that means that to the extent that your experience is private, what I'm talking about is your history, your unique POV, all the external trappings of personhood, with the expertise at lawyering and the owning of things.

When you seek to discuss the actual internal state as to what it is, the private sensation, you are outside what Wittgenstein would allow language to do. You're discussing metaphysics. Language isn't for that sort of discussion because meaning is use, not meaning is internal referent. — Hanover

So when someone tells me they're in pain, we aren't investigating an internal state, because language doesn't do that. It's more that they're announcing that they're conscious of something bad? And they're using language to give a warning, ask for help, or just get acknowledgement?

Beyond that, we have to be satisfied that we don't have any linguistic fingers that can't touch consciousness?

Second point. What we mean by identity is when talking about sets is extensionality, that is, that if A and B are sets, then A=B iff every member of A is also a member of B , and vice versa. Read that as a definition of how to use "=". So we should read S={a,b,c} as an identity between S and {a,b,c} and we can say that they are identical. That is reply to ↪litewave. — Banno

So litewave wants the property P to be equal to the set of all things that have P, we'll call it set Q. But we can't say that P=Q? Because they're different types of things?

Yes! Exactly. — Patterner

Panpsychism fan?

How can you anticipate though. That is where our reasoning breaks down. — I like sushi

There's anticipation in agriculture, where the farmer waits for the last frost date. There's anticipation in music, as when you clap along to the beat. What you're anticipating there is a single moment in the future. Everyone anticipates the same moment and claps at the same time.

Then she is mistaken. Or has been misread.
It does not matter how we specify the set, or how we order its members, or indeed how many times we count its members. All that matters are what its members are.
— Set Theory An Open Introduction — Banno

I stumbled over this same issue, so you're not alone, but you're wrong. In the club metaphor, the set is the membership list, not the members themselves.

A set is an abstract object. That's the part you have to get in order to understand set theory.

Nuh. The set is the teachers. The criteria are not the set. — Banno

nope. Read Mary Tiles' book on set theory. The club metaphor is from her book.

Identical" is defined extensionally by substitution. I hope we agree that there is nothing more to the set {a, b, c} than a and b and c, no additional "setness" in the way RussellA supposed by adding his box. — Banno

A set is not its elements. Imagine a club that all teachers automatically belong to, by virtue of being teachers. The set is this membership criteria, not the actual teachers. A set is an abstract object.

My comment on your argument is that direct experience is inviolate. If you experienced X, you experienced X. If you deny that, you'll end up in the middle of a reality crisis after you've realized you have no criteria for determining what's real and what isn't. To keep your bearings, you hold to your direct experience on pain of being tortured to death.

On the other hand, explanations for your experiences should, at least to some degree, be in flux. You may have your pet theory that explains your experiences, but you should hold out the possibility that new information will appear and revolutionize everything you believe, so direct experience is the center of your universe. Explanations orbit and possibly explode if they're disproved.

Look for information about what the world will be like in 2100. For instance, much of the Middle east will have become uninhabitable, with human life only possible near the coasts...

Oh, word? — AmadeusD

Word to your mother.

Obviously not. — AmadeusD

I discussed it with the world the other day and it said it definitely hates Israel.

:up:

The whole world hates Israel.

It's very common, as in you are walking on the street a fellow civilian gets hit by a rock or bitten by a dog - whatever. Or you find him injured and he says his leg hurts, you may either see an injury or assume the pain is not visible to the eye. You don't doubt he is in pain. — Manuel

Right. I think my point might be too obscure. Let me tell a story.

I was once sitting in a cafe and I found myself becoming agitated and angry. I couldn't pinpoint why. But I eventually realized what it was: without consciously registering it, I was looking at a man with an angry look on his face. I realized I'd experienced empathy that wasn't mediated at all by the intellect. There was just: anger, and I thought it was mine, but it wasn't. I was experiencing this other guy's feelings as if they were my own.

My point is, all this about distinguishing my feelings from someone's else's: that's all higher level intellectual functioning which attends to identifying threats, and so manages things like motive and my feelings versus yours.

Without the intellect setting out borders and providing explanations, there is just emotion. It doesn't belong to anybody. It's just there. Does that make sense?

That's why it's not particularly puzzling why - when someone has a broken leg, or even a cut and say, "it hurts", we understand what they mean, because that's what we would say if we were in a similar situation. — Manuel

Just thinking it through, but what if you say "it hurts" in certain situations because you're a natural born mimic? Over time, you learn to associate certain actions with certain feelings, but you have no language for the feelings other than what you learned from copying? Like this:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8wTmSIbGsIA

Interesting quote

It is a first-person phenomenon, so-called experience, that anything with the ability to experience knows what it is like to have such a certain experience rather than other experiences, given what you are, where you are, etc. — MoK

I came the same conclusion. If you tried to say anything about what's unique about your own experience, it would be a description of your history and present location.

That reminds me of the way the parts of a single sentence gain meaning relative to one another, even though it's expressed sequentially. In the middle of expressing a sentence, you may have a sense of freedom, the ability to say anything, but the beginning of the sentence limits the ways it can end. Toward the end, the possibilities narrow down to just one. At the end, there is no freedom, and the constraints are coming from the imperative to say something meaningful, and meaning is fundamentally holistic.

I wonder if that idea about sentences could be generalized to cover all of thought.

I cannot seem to fathom how we can appreciate time without partially transcending it. — I like sushi

I understand what you're saying. My theory is that the conception of time is related to anticipation. Agriculture creates anticipation throughout the year: farmers plant around the spring equinox, they wait all summer to see how the crop will do, they harvest around the fall equinox, and then wait all winter for the next spring.

All of that requires being relatively stationary. You can't be nomadic and farm, and being stationary is how people were first able to mark out the solar calendar.

As you say, if you're looking at the whole calendar, your vantage point seems to be outside of the passage of time, in some eternal spot.

Cool. I see he quotes Schopenhauer, so I approve.

Yes. Do you know Galen Strawson's book, Consciousness and Its Place in Nature? A very good argument for the plausibility of panpsychism. — J

I haven't. Does he talk about the problem of other minds?

And if you've been following my discussion with Wayfarer, you see that not everyone agrees on exactly how to characterize the hard problem. I read Chalmers as saying it's a scientific problem, hard but potentially solvable through scientific inquiry. Whereas I think Wayfarer sees Chalmers as being closer to the New Mysterian position of McGinn and others. — J

Wayfarer is mistaken. Chalmers is non-mysterian. He thinks that in order to create a scientific theory of consciousness, we need to posit first-person data as an explicandum, in much the same way gravity was posited by Newton without any accompanying theory. A mysterian would say any such project is hopeless from the start.

Chalmers has talked about pan-psychism as exemplifying the kind of theory we might start with: just accepting that consciousness is a property of our little universe, and go from there.

Our worldview tends to say that intrinsic perspective (or subjective experience), is located in isolated pockets, inside skulls? Mine is separated from yours by a region of air. Could you see yourself questioning that assumption?

Does that make his thumbs scissors — flannel jesus

:lol: Edward ScissorThumbs.

I have a friend who's coined the term "The Impossible Problem" to describe this wrinkle in the Hard Problem. (And yes, Wayfarer, this is the very same question we're examining from different angles in the other thread.) My friend means the problem of actually experiencing another person's consciousness. Why does this seem impossible? It creates a dilemma: If I experience your consciousness as myself doing so, that is clearly not what it's like for you -- there's no observer or alien presence for you. But if I don't do this, and instead simply have your experience (how? but that's a different question), then I haven't experienced it -- my "I" is not present to do any experiencing. Either way, it doesn't seem possible that I can ever know what it is to be you (leaving aside the somewhat ambiguous "what it's like".) — J

We're talking about the most simple, center of everything sort of experience, like the ITT theory graphic:
check it out.

Let's call it the intrinsic perspective (for lack of another name?). Schopenhauer speculated that there is only one of these, and it's universal, each person thinks they own it. So Schopenhauer would agree with your friend, not because I don't have access to that most basic level of consciousness, but because if I could "download" your experiences, I might balk at the parts I'm not prepared to deal with. You don't balk because you're use to it. So right there, I'm not experiencing you as you. So here, the definition of self is about a certain history rather than raw intrinsic perspective, right?

I have more questions about how you think this relates to the hard problem.