Ok, but the panpsychist postis that the 'mental' is a fundamental aspect of reality. So it's no surprise to me that the 'material' and the 'mental' share some properties if panpsychism (in some form) were true. — boundless

So are you suggesting that what science understands about brains could never be true under idealism? How would you explain what we observe about brains and human cognition / behavior in that case?

But even in a panpsychist universe, the brain would have exactly the same role and would completely explain intelligibility in either a materialist or a panpsychist universe. It seems that once you start talking about our understanding of brains, the fundamental metaphysics is irrelevant to intelligibility. The intellect and the material world have analogous structures because a brain is a model of structure that exists in the material world.

the material world has a structure analogous to the one of the intellect. Is this acceptable under a materialist ontology? I am not sure. — boundless

The materialist would say that an understanding of how brainsw work fills this gap.

All very good, thoughtful posts :up:

But the point at issue is, whether time is real independently of any scale or perspective. So a 'mountains' measurement of time will be vastly different from the 'human' measurement of time.

Sensory information doesn't really come into it. Clearly we have different cognitive systems to other animals, but the question of the nature of time is not amenable to sensory perception. — Wayfarer

I don't really see any merit in what you're saying. At the end of the day, we have clocks. At the end of the day, things happen when you no one is looking that seem to behave according to scientific theories which have clocks. At the end of the day, clocks help people co-ordinate actual behavior and activities all over the world. At the end of the day, subjects like history, paleontology many others only make sense when clocks work like they should. At the end of the day, people can have different units of time or find different scales time relevant for different activities but clocks still work and they don't appear to be subjective. Clocks are even relevant to subjective time since subjective time is due to brains whose neurons behave in ways which rely on the timing of processes as measurable by clocks. But we don't need to over-conflate subjective time and what clocks do.

You said, 'So if something is mind-dependent, it co-varies with the state of your subjective state of mind.' The 'mountain' thought experiment shows how one's sense of reality is dependent on the kind of mind. Hence, mind-dependent. — Wayfarer

I would argue that these reflrct how a system might be sensitive to different information, like how some animals see at greater resolution and detail than others.

It depends on mind in a different way to that. — Wayfarer

In what way? I am nit sure what the thought experiment conveys.

But physically, it is not the reality it represents, it is plastics and polymers. — Wayfarer

But this is trivial, no one expects that information about something has to be the same as that thing. That doesn't really make sense, it undermines the whole notion of knowledge, belief, epistemics, etc.

The ability to reproduce the image — Wayfarer

This should be the point: the image can be reproduced on different mediums. Regardless of these mediums you cna probably get a machine or AI to read the same information off of it because the image is the same on different media. The image needs to be put on a media, but the media doesn't change the image, or it is not necesdarily the case that it does, it seems to me.

You seem to be assuming that we’ve already answered that question — Wayfarer

No, I offered that if we can produce concepts that don't seem to subjectively vary (e.g. the ticking of a clock), then is that not mind-independent?

Dependence means that things co-vary. So if something is mind-dependent, it co-varies with the state of your subjective state of mind (withstanding you representing or seeing it). If something does not co-vary with that, then surely it is mind-independent; for instance, the location of Paris. You can see something with your mind, but if it doesn't co-vary with arbitrary states of your mind, then I don't see that as a good definition of mind-dependence. Sure, different animals have different perceptual capabilities, but arguably they are picking up slightly different facets of information in reality; maybe, there could be a case for mind-dependence in some way for some of these things (is a di-chromacy vs trichromacy mind-dependence, or is it more analogous to how some animals have better visual resolution than others and so can pick out more details or fine-grained structure that others cannot?). But I don't think the location of Paris and various other things we can corroborate together satisfy that.

You say you “trivially need experiences to experience the fruit that is beared,” but that’s actually the core issue. It’s not just that we need experience to observe outcomes—experience is the condition for building, interpreting, and validating any model at all. — Wayfarer

To me, this is like saying a photo on a piece of paper doesn't capture information about reality because it is on paper. But surely, regardless of the medium, if the image is faithfully captures or maps to parts of reality, then it doesn't matter.

But the philosophical point is that this doesn’t capture what time is, as in some fundamental way, it is lived. That is the sense in which it is still observer dependent. — Wayfarer

I don't think there is anything more to capture. My view is that mappings or couplings between us and reality are sufficient to pick out "stuff" or ontologies. Time is just a relation we can pick out. And sure, we have subjective sense of time, we may have different time systems, but people have worked together to corroberate these things between them so that we have a time that is "objective", certainly a bit more than intersubjective. And when we look at how relativity changes things, it is not a matter of subjectivity - reference frames are "objective".

From my perspective, "intrinsic properties" of stuff devoid of structure not only are inarticulable but don't really make sense. If something is to be a thing, it out to be a "difference that makes a difference". If it cannot make a difference to other things, and so in principle cannot even be perceived by myself, then its difficult to see in what sense that fits into reality or should be considered as part of reality. To say that there is a fundamental way time is that cannot be captured by any perception then doesn't make sense to me.

Bayesian inference says we should update our models only as much as we need to given the evidence, but if there is no evidence because we are talking about something that cannot make a difference, then why should I change anything about my view?
I can conceptualize the idea that there are things I cannot see right now, but I don't see why there should be a change in properties of objects when I am not looking at them compared to the information I gain were I to measure them in some way, whether through my own perceptions or some experimental device. And one would have to assume there is a change, because it seems to me that you are saying that there is no possible way to perceive the way time or anything else is, so there is no way one could even exhaust the ways of looking at something and find out what it is like fundamentally.

Bergson’s insight was that clocks don’t measure time; we do. What we call “objective time” (e.g., seconds, hours, spacetime intervals) depends on our ability to synthesize change into a unified experience. — Wayfarer

Okay, clocks don't measure objective time, they measure schm-ime. I can then do a separate study on actual (subjective) time and the cognition of our perception of it, possible cognitive mechanisms that are undergirded by neural mechanisms which can be related to schm-ime since they are physical. I can integrate time and schm-ime into the same view of the world, neither have to be wrong.

Without someone to whom change occurs as change, your "objective time" is just an uninterpreted sequence of events with no temporal character. — Wayfarer

Bit schm-ime doesn't have a temporal character because its not time.I don't need time to have a model of the physical world with schm-ime in it. Obviously my model of the physical world is something used and done by person with experiences and who experiences time, and tjeyir direct experiences of the world involve their subjective time. But their subjective time is not the contents of the model of physical time which can be used to make predictions, just as their subjective time has nothing to do with sabermetrics, even though they may be experiencing time when watching a baseball game or doing sabermetric calculations.

The fact that I have a subjective awareneaa doean't necessarily refute what my models do and the fact that they can make predictions which bear fruit. I trivially need experiences to experience that fruit that is beared, but if humans can construct models and ways to examine those models and their empirical consequences in ways that are not changed by subjective experiences (in virtue of experiential subjectivity), then in what sense do they depend on the subjective. I see things through subjective experience, but there are things I see that can be mapped to events that occur can regardless of whether I am there to see them. If there is a fundamental way those things are that cannot ever be known to me in principle then that doesn't make much sense to me.

But it's also important to point out 'post-positivism' which acknowledges that certainty is rarely achieveable but often probabilistic and provisional; that theories are not simply verified so much as confirmed or falsified; and which also recognises that values and paradigms inevitably shape theoretical posits. — Wayfarer

The irony is that I would consider myself closer to these post-positivists than positivists, and many post-positivists would probably also disagree with your ideas.

Asking for someone to clarify what they mean doesn't make them a positivist.

If by 'realism' one means that our models do have necessarily correspondence with reality if they 'work', I guess that yes your view might be classed as 'anti-realist'.

But 'realism' and 'antirealism' have also an ontological meaning. In the most general sense, 'realism' in this context means that there is an independent reality that is in principle knowable. 'Anti-realism' is the denial of this (and I saw it used as a flat denial of any kind of independent reality). — boundless

I would say I allow realism but in a thinner, looser, more deflationary sense of a consistent mapping or coupling to the outside world without requiring much more than that. When those mappings become systematically erroneous, we might, it then becomes possible to conceptualize them as not real. But I do not think there are systematic, tractable, context-independent nor infallible ways of deciding what is real or not real. And I think people all the time have "knowledge" which is some sense false or not real but persists in how they interact with the world due to ambiguity.

but it seems to me that you are pretty certain that there is an external, independent reality. — boundless

Well, this seems a given unless you have a more nuanced definition of what you mean by external, independent reality (or the converse).

If some kind of 'rudimental' mentality is there in the more fundamental level of physical reality, we IMO have a more consciouness-friendly world than the usual 'physicalist' position. — boundless

I definitely see this point; but I think doing this unnecessarily specifies the metaphysics without adding anything in return since I don't think the notion of experiential or mental has much in the way of interesting properties to articulate other than the fact that it has structure. Why would I bring along additional connotations that come with "mental" or "qualia". I am trying to say that I cannot say anything further about the fundamental metaphysics; saying it was mental would get in the way of this and arguably would commit me even more to the prospect of strong emergentism which I don't find evidence for.

One might think that 'consciousness' exists as a 'latent potential' in panpsychist position (which is fully actualized in conscious beings). — boundless

This would make me commit more than I wish and it seems to suggest some kind of ontology that I would like to see scientifically backed-up, which I don't think is the case.

Anyway, since I lean more towards the 'idealist' side of things, I do not endorse panpsychism. — boundless

How does your panspychism and idealism differ?

Well I think any non-positivists, physicalists, naturalism-ists can say that too.

I just wanted more clarity on the meaning of space and time as about in the head, not outside it. Clearly, what we perceive is embedded in what is going on in our heads. Clearly we cannot perceive / experience everything, every event in the physical reality outside our heads that makes a difference that has an effect on other things in reality. But nonetheless, I think what we do experience, or at least a significant amount of it has a broadly consistent mapping to specific things that actually go on. To me, that is enough to say that we see real stuff in a weak sense. I think there is no observable intrinsic fact-of-the-matter about representation, only a dynamic statistical coupling between brains and the world which a scientist or philosopher can cash out as representation. The coupling is enough. If I think of veridicality weakly in terms of a kind of coupling or mapping then there is not really a sense that I could exhaustively couple a system to the rest of reality and have it miss anything about reality. When stuff is missed, it because there are couplings missing that give us novel information. Space and time can also be seen in terms of these kinds of couplings, at least the concepts we have made reasonably precise by measurement (i.e. objective time). My subjective sense of space and especially time may be more fallible or is different for various reasons (e.g. speculatively: because time and space are inferred through informational properties of the brain which can be easily perturbed, e.g. if I close my eyes, I lose some of the information required to specify physical space (at least at some allowable resolution) and become more reliant on say body information than I normally would; if subjective time could plausibly related to information flow (e.g. something like entropic time by ariel caticha, possibly), then information processing in my head may distort my sense of time).

So maybe there are discrepancies between objective time "inside" and "outside" as it were but only in some sense that informative couplings have been missed to some part of reality. Good example is obviously relativity phenomena like time-dilation. Maybe the way brains work or learn over time mean that mappings or couplings can be established or parcelled out in different ways; but nonetheless these are just different mappings to events that actually occur, and they are overlapping or inter-relatable so that even though I may be measuring in inches or centimeters, because they are being mapped to the same stuff in reality, there is no sense that these different perspectives are telling me anything new or different about space. And there is nothing else to know about space beyond my sensory boundaries unless that thing to know about space makes some physical difference (because space is physical) to observations and theories and experiential perceptions.

Yes, I can make sense of the fact that there is stuff about reality that I and no one else can see right now, but that doesn't mean it isn't in principle mappable or coupl-able. Seems what you are saying is that there is some sense in which any kind of coupling misses something about the physical reality of time. But to me, that doesn't make too much sense because it seems to be saying that there are events out there that don't affect anything. In quantum theory, maybe there is an interesting exception in the sense that couplings disturb reality, but from my perspective of quantum theory, this isn't intrinsic to how reality (fundamentally speaking) works but just reflects a kind of very persistent kind of physically confounding effect not in principle different to the kinds of measurement confounds in any other kind of science; for instance, observer or hawthorne effects or demand characteristics in psychology (one might note, for example, that methods like weak measurement and other ways of getting weak values can be seen as approximating information about the undisturbed quantum state, so in some ways this is an example of avoiding measurement disturbance comparable to if one had some kind of technique for avoiding demand charcteristics [like observing someone who doesn't know they are being watched]).

So there is nothing more to say about the metaphysics of reality beyond our best scientific models that supervene on the physical — Apustimelogist

Well, I have come to the conclusion that if we cannot say more about reality than models that in some sense couple to it, there is nothing more to say about the metaphysics than those models themselves, which happen to be the scientific ones. I don't think science is in principle different from the rest of knowledge, so I wouldn't inherently rule out other areas; you can talk about history, anthropology, the study of religions, the analysis of sports as valid areas of knowledge, but its clear they are further away from the topic of metaphysics than physics is - and historical events, human behaviors sit on top of physics.

Someone doesn't have to be a positivist to disagree with your ideas.

That sounds close to logical positivism — Wayfarer

Well it is not.

And more broadly, the assumption that metaphysics supervenes on physics is itself a metaphysical position — Wayfarer

No, its just what the body of scientific knowledge looks like, and thereis no evidence to the contrary.

But as you said before you will only be persuaded by an empirical argument, — Wayfarer

Its about not including things in my account of things that don't have any difference. Its fine to say that we view the world from specific perspectives based on our brain machinery and how it interacts with the world, in the sense that there is information about stuff in the world, information for making predictions, that the brain does not have access to or is not able to utilize. In principle someone could have a different brain that can utilize this information, or use technology to gain access to things we ordinarily wouldn't.

But to say that there is a world out there, it is not the same as we perceive, yet there is no way to unveil what we cannot perceive, is meaningless, especially when we perceive the world through physical interactions. Its like saying there is something out there that the mind-independent world is like which has no physical consequences and no mental consequences either since we are talking about the noumena. I don't see a reason to entertain this anymore, its not saying anything. On the otherhand, if something like what a clock measures can find broad agreement, where discrepancies seem to be about our limited access to the physical world rather than the mental, there is no reason to think this is still obscuring some kind of further aspect of time in the mind-independent world which has no way of affecting anything we do anyway.

And that's because you look exclusively through the 'objectivist' stance that characterises scientific positivism. — Wayfarer

I like LSD and The Doors as much as the next guy, they just don't tell me much about the way the world that I see with my eyes is.

Anyway, it seems to me that you are saying: .... — boundless

I think this is more or less an acceptable interpretation.

I would think that your position should be called a form of 'realism'. — boundless

Hmm, I think it is compatible with realism and anti-realism, because I am just appealing to our models, claiming that our best models of reality don't point to the mental as fundamental among the things they talk about.

Regarding the 'hard problem', I do believe, however, that it is a very profound problem and, like intelligibility, to me suggest that the 'mental' must be in some sense fundamental. I have found no explanation of the propeerites of consicousness in 'physical' terms that have been satisfying. — boundless

My line on this has always been that I think that there will always be things a brain or mind cannot explain, and so arguments like the knowledge argument or inverted qualia or whatever don't need to be construed as having any ontological import. From my perspective, saying that the mental is fundamental is about as informative as saying that structure is fundamental - I don't think these views are distinguishable, and I would rather lean to the latter rather than the former, if just to have a story to tell about things in reality. But it doesn't really say much.

I don't think saying that the mental is fundamental really solves the hard problem either. All resulting metaphysical views have an issue with the problem that our direct experiences seem to look completely irreducible to descriptions that science says are more fundamental because they seem to occupy a higher scale of reality. Panpsychism doesn't solve that, it just reframes the problem in a different way - the combination problem - which requires also something like a strong emergence of macroscopic experiential phenomena, which imo kind of has the same properties as substance dualism. The problem is for me that there is no scientific evidence of something like this strong emergence, which would result in epiphenomenalism also. So I don't think the problems you have with certain views are not necessarily resolved by panpsychism.

Woops, premature post.

To me, however, it isn't granted. It's a mystery that 'cries' for an explanation (which in turn might 'cries' for another and so on). — boundless

Fair enough. We will just have to agree to disagree.

If that is the case, it seems to me that the 'mental' is somehow fundamental (at least as a fundamental aspect of physical reality as some panpsychist affirm) — boundless

My use of the word physicalism is maybe misleading, but I like using the word because it captures where my side of these arguments leans toward.

I agree with some that the "physical" as a metaphysical category is difficult to make substantial because at the end of the day, we just construct models of things in the world from what we can point out and is plucked out of what we see empirically, which we do through "experience".

Everything we model boils down to (counterfactual) regularities or structures in experience, and I cannot further specify about experience other than the fact that they are informative. I would even say that there is no other property I can draw out of my experiences other than the notion of informativeness - i.e. making distinctions.

But nonetheless, our epistemic activities lead to a hierarchy of models explaining how the world behaves in increasingly general (i.e. fundamental) ways that, in principle, supervene on each other in a way describable in terms of coarse-graining as an epistemic consequence of the resolution of our perceptual / observational / technological apparati. At the end of the day, any models we construct about the world that survive just end up being either subsumed under "physical" or supervening on what is subsumed under "physical", so the physical as a metaphysical category seems vacuous because we just use it to subsume all our successful models.

Obviously, all our epistemic activities and their consequences are embedded and enacted within experience - surely experience is fundamental? But the aforementioned models of the natural world are the only ones we have, and they tell us that experience relates to the events described in those by the same kind of coarse-graining. Experiences are not as fundamental as the things being described by our models of the world at more fine-scaled levels of description, and with more causal generality. There is a kind of dual-nature to this insofar that experiences are structures that both: 1) supervene on brain activity; 2) In virtue of how experiences model the world, we can also say that they are about structures beyond our sensory boundary that supervene on other finer-grained or general structures beyond our sensory boundaries. Structures are just what we can consistently distinguish about the world beyond our boundaries. Perhaps the kind of dual-aspect thing, and other information processing properties elicit the intuition we have for dualism or ontologically separate mental "stuff".

My view of physicalism is more akin to a naturalism that asserts these models as the only ones we have. Because of the hard problem and perhaps other reasons (God? Religion? Spirituality? Supernatural? Parapsychology?), people try to assert additional models. The problem is that reality fails to give persistent indications of these things. But people still assert them, and naturalism (physicalism) is mostly a stance against that.

Human knowledge has not given us models of the mental that do not just relate to more fundamental descriptions through coarse/fine-graining. There is no evidence for mental substance (or similar category) that is separate from what our other physical models describe, and can make a difference to what those things describe. Nothing else is added beyond fine/coarse-graining of information. If the mental and cognitive fits into our hierarchy of scientific models via coarse-fine graining, it is then hard to make sense of them as more fundamental since they are not the most general or fine-grained way of describing what happens in the world. The mental supervenes on interactions at the bio-chemical level. At the same time, bio-chemical models are embedded in and describe or enact structural relations through our "experiences"; all physical models do this and so there is no sense that my physical models are talking about some kind of "substance" inherently incompatible with the nature of experience itself; they just track structural relations through whatever perspectival manifold or space our epistemic activities are furnished on. Experience itself is difficult to articulate anything about other than the property of informativeness or distinguishability (e.g. direct acquaintance), which has structure.

Experience is structure. What physical models pick out about the world is structure. There is no inherent incompatibility when no intrinsic "substance" is attributed to either the experiential or what physical models are about, but we know that the structures of experience cannot be the bottom. And in principle, more elaborate structures (than naive experience) that describe brains, cognition and their relation to the world beyonds their boundaries may be able to better explain why experiential structures are limited in certain ways with regard to information about what they supervene on, and why our own explanations about them are limited. These limitations may be why we seem to have intuitions that there is something more to the mental beyond their place in the hierarchy of models about reality.

But to emphasize, all I have been talking about is this notion of structure. So there is an inherent agnosticism (or even rejection) about fundamental metaphysics, and even a skepticism about there being anything to say about it beyond what our intelligible models of reality say. These intelligible models are just the ones I have been talking about all along, with the physical at the core on which other models supervene or relate through coarse/fine-graining.

So there is nothing more to say about the metaphysics of reality beyond our best scientific models that supervene on the physical.

From this, there is no sense in which the mental can be the most fundamental as a model of how the world works, imo.

Then how are you supposed to convince me of what you say with such confidence if it has no demonstrable consequence for anything. If there is no demonstrable consequence for anything, how am I to be convinced that what you are saying actually means something and not just a bunch of words strung together like:

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"

Sure, I understand all the words. Sure, is grammatical. I can read it...

But am I saying anything ... ?

‘I referred to his view qua idealist that, really, there was no world per se before the first perceiver, but also that science is correct in investigating ancient history, i.e. the world before perceivers. How could both of these claims be true? This is a general problem that idealism must address.’ — Wayfarer

Again, with the example of quantum observer-dependence, you can point to actual theoretical, empirical consequences. That is what I want to see. I don't see the same kind of tangible consequence here, just someone choosing to use words in an unnecessarily mysterious way: e.g. "that there was no world per se". Imo, the veracity of time might be doubted when there are contradictions, irresolvable disagreements, false predictions. I get the impression that we don't really have those problems regarding what a clock measures; I don't see what is changed by noting 'time' is a concept. A concept is part of a model, and what is being modelled is a world that behaves independently of us.

we are able to measure time objectively and with minute accuracy, but that doesn't negate the necessity of their being a system of measurement nor a mind to measure it. — Wayfarer

Given that you would agree that the universe had a history before any organism observed it, this is just meaningless. Absolutely no need to conflate one's subjective sense of time and what clocks measure.

I'm talking specifically about your Kantian space and time stuff:

e.g.

What I’m proposing is in line with the Kantian (and later phenomenological) insight that space and time are conditions of appearance—they are the framework within which any object can appear to us at all, not features of things as they exist independently of experience. — Wayfarer

Yes, some.

Honestly, I find this time and space stuff meaningless. I don't understand what you actually mean by it or what implication has for anything at all in any possible way.

Contrast it for instance with the quantum stuff about perspective-dependence. That actually has information in it because quantum theory is telling you that system behavior actually depends on measurement in some way which can be demonstrated mathematically and empirically. So there is an actual concrete implication for this; there is a graspable fact of the matter about what this means, even if someone chooses to interpret these empirical facts differently.

I have absolutely no idea what kind of implication or difference to anything with regard to what you are saying about space and time. I want something that is actually tangible like in the quantum case so I know what you mean by this. And I don't think relativity is relevant.either because that has nothing to do with human cognition. The fact that clocks can read different times due to the effects of gravity after having been put on different plane journeys has nothing to do with human cognition. In one post you talked about people using different units of measurement, but I don't really see how these implications either. Some people use inches, aome use cm; so what? 1 inch = 2.5cm.

I disagree, unless you think that existence involves intelligibility (which is something that classical metaphysics asserts but I'm not sure physicalists generally would say). In any case, if you assume that the world is intelligible and its existence must be intelligible too, then it would be meaningful to ask if the world is contingent or not contingent and discuss the consequences of such statements. — boundless

This is just going in loops I can't follow
A physicalist would say that you can describe how a brain does what it does in understanding the world virtue of physical processes by which it works and interacts with other physical processes.

This is also because it includes things that I would never classify under the term 'prediction'. — boundless

Don't think about it as prediction then. Its just about models or maps that tells you where things are in relation to others. My use of the word "predict" is clearly an idiosyncracy that comes from its appearance in neuroscience where I would give it a slighlty more general meaning.

Well, I believe that it's simply becuase for you it is a fact that needs no explanation. So, you don't see a problem (perhaps I am the one that sees a problem where there is none. But I am not persuaded by that). — boundless

I don't understand what you mean by the idea that structure of the world needs explaining. Its like asking why there is anything at all, which is a question not resolved by any perspective.

Not sure about this. Let's say you encounter the words "one way" in a traffic sign. How is that 'prediction'? It seems to me that here meaning is not predictive. — boundless

Its entirely prediction. You see the words, you infer the kinds of behaviors you expect to see in that context and act appropriately. Words and meaning is about association which is just what anticipates a word, what comes after a word, what juxtaposes words - that is all I mean by prediction. prediction is just having a model of associations or relations between different things. Like a map that tells you how to get between any two points. Fictional stories are included. Everything we do is included.

Ok. The problem for me, however, is to explain from a purely physicalist point of view why there are these 'structures' in the first place. — boundless

I suspect that I don't understand what you mean.

It also means that the 'stuff' behaves in a certain manner and so on. — boundless

Sure, but I don't think that is any novel step from what I just said. To understand that behavior is then effectively just to be able to predict what happens next in some context. There's nothing special about that. A brain can do that in virtur of its physical properties regarding neurons.

Furthermore, it seems to me that intelligibility also conveys meaning. — boundless

Yes, meaning is just more prediction. Nothing different, nothing special.

For instance, the meaning of the word 'word' is difficult to explain just in physical terms. — boundless

The meaning of 'word' just comes from its associations with other aspects of our experiences which become apparent in how we use the word 'word'. Nothing more than prediction.

I guess that the negation of this isn't 'impossible' but it doesn't seem plausible. — boundless

What do you mean?

More or less. My point is that in order to even think to follow and catch a ball, you need some interpretative mental faculties. Same goes for some basic innate concepts (like a basic notion of 'thing', 'change' and so on). — boundless

Alright, sure. I just think those things come from a brain that has evolved able to infer abstract structure in the information it gets from the environment. There is a kind of pluralism in the sense that depending on how the brain relates to the environment, different information appears on its sensory boundary and so different structures are inferred. Like say if you are looking at an object from different angles and it looks different.

Well, yes, but my question is how to understand why the physical world is intelligible in the first place. A physcialist might well aswer as you do. It is just a 'brute fact'. But IMO it would be ironic. The very intelligibility of the world is left unexplained (and perhaps unexplainable). — boundless

For the world to intelligible imo just means that it has structure. To say the world has structureis just to say something like: there is stuff in it and it is different in different places, which is kind of trivial.

that is, we get incredibly good predictions in the absence of an intelligible structure of reality. Weird. — boundless

Yes, this doesn't make sense to me. If we can fit coherent models to reality, even if they turn out to be erroneous after some limit, it would suggest they capture some subset of the intelligible structure (at the very least intelligible empirical structure) of reality. This just happens to be embedded in a model whose wider structure is erroneous.

Aha, no that was a mistaken phrase; I did not mean to imply essentialism for myself!

And yet, on the other hand, probably even in order to 'see' the trajectory, you need to have already some kind of interpretative structure — boundless

I am not sure what this means: the interpretative structure of following a ball and catching it?

And BTW, you are assuming that the 'world' to be structured but you are not explaining how it can be. — boundless

What kind of answer you want? I don't understand why you want me to explain how the world can be structured. It seems self-evident to most people.

So, where 'more or less' comes from? Isn't that evidence, then, that concepts do map 'reality' in some way? How is that so? — boundless

Actually, the history of physics clearly showed us how some 'obscure' mathematical concepts have been used in physical theories. Moreover, I do believe that this property of math as being 'more' than what is actually employed in physics gives more credence to platonism. If math wasn't so 'broad', its truths would be accidental. And, frankly, I am not even sure in a purely physicalist perspective how can we even conceive something that has no relation to '(experienced) reality'. What would even the point of that? — boundless

We have a brain that receives sensory input and abstracts structure that maps onto structure in the world. I can then manipulate that inferred structure. I can then construct a system that describes abstract stuff and discover new implications from it. But this isn't really more interesting than brains doing stuff. I don't need a platonic realm to do this, I just need a brain that can infer quantity in the sensory world and extrapolate.

Not sure how can you understand something without being 'right'. — boundless

You can have an intelligible model that is incorrect. Like people used to have models of the solar system that were intelligible, gave correct predictions and turned out to be completely wrong.

Yes, I think for me this is the kind of view of language that should go there. Itsthe kind of view that speaks to my inclinations and provides important nuances that seem to often be missed by various other essentialists on the philosophy forum.

I was searching for any context where 2+2 might be equal to something other than 4, any reason to not accept 2+2=4 as an absolute truth. — noAxioms

This is the same as what the bit you quoted was describing.

But I say that concepts are not physical - they're the relations of ideas. — Wayfarer

You could say that but then again, many of our concepts are about physical things, many of our abstract concepts are about things that "supervene" on physical stuff, and concepts themselves can be explained in terms of what we do or think which can be explained in terms of a physical brain. The entire universe and everything in it is a physical system.

we must rely on concepts — Wayfarer

But again, concepts can be explained in terms of brains. Now, just because I think the universe is just a physical system doesn't mean I need to explain everything going on all the time in terms of particles or physical stuff. I can still talk about art, literature, aesthetics, anthropology, psychology without mentioning physics or chemistry.

Perhaps more importantly, I don't think one must "know everything in order to know anything." The continued existence of some mystery vis-á-vis a phenomenon does not preclude us having any knowledge about it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure, but if you can't articulate what you mean, then you are just effectively circularly re-asserting how you use words and behaving in response to something you can't elaborate on.

I don't know what you mean by reductionist account or what the alternative is.

But why appeal to the complexity of the brain in particular? Sight also involves light, and the light wave/photon have more than enough mystery to make the same sort of argument. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Its all included.

Anyhow, this still seems to be misunderstanding the concept of form. The form is, in part, the actuality in things that is responsible for their appearance. Being is prior to interaction. Something needs to first exist in order interact so as to appear a certain way. Appearance—perception—is also prior to the development of language. Form is not primarily about explaining language, although it might do that to. It's about what must lie prior to language and perception (else our determinant perceptions would be caused by "nothing in particular," in which case they essentially wouldn't have causes at all). The form of things isn't just their appearances though (which you seem to be suggesting), nor what is said of them, but rather is upstream of each of those, because being (existing) is a prerequisite for interaction and being known. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, I think what I am mainly resisting is the notion of inflating this stuff beyond me saying something like "I see stuff"or "I see a 'round' thing".

In the broadest sense, a thing's form is what makes anything any thing at all, it's particular actuality or "act of existence" by which it is some thing and not "nothing in particular." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I mean, why do I have to unnecessarily flower up the fact that I can see 'round' things like this? I don't even really understand ehat this sentencr is saying.

"what brains perceive and talk about," then "brains" themselves would have no true existence as anything distinct, and so would have no determinant powers, ruling out the very possibility of a "science of brains." Brains themselves would be merely "something brains perceive and talk about." This appears to me to be a rather vicious circle. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well I think there is always going to be a circularity of some sort imo, like my own quote here:

I actually haven't! I just like the phrase in order to describe the inability to get out of a perspectival context - this constant tension between trying to give descriptions of what is the case and the fact that this can effectively be deflated in terms of word-use and enactive cognition, which itself is a description of what is the case, which brings us back to the beginning (in the sense that describing or giving a story about what is the case regarding how cognition works is itself word-use and enactive cognition).

And our conceptual networks all run i to places wherr we can't articulate things so well. There are always limits to what we can explain or describe. The biggest tension is that stuff exists in the world clearly independently of us, yet we can only engage with stuff from within a perspective through what a brain does in terms of predictions, word-use, etc. And its the same for the study of our own brains.

But we're not required to know that — Wayfarer

Yes, my point is just that if we don't know that then we are just re-asserting the way we use words in response to what we see without any deeper explanation. If that's all you're saying, fine. My point was more aimed at kinds of inflations of concepts to platonic realms.

Here, you're simply projecting the inherent limitations of materialist philosophy of mind onto the whole issue — Wayfarer

Not at all, and whatever limits there may be here are not transcended by any other purported view.

That's the empiricist argument in a nutshell. The problem is, many animals other than h.sapiens see round things, but they never form a concept of 'round'. LIkewise with my quoted example of 'equals'. 'Equals' is obviously fundamental to rational argument, symbollically denoting 'the same as'. But how is equality discerned? When we say that two objects are of equal weight or length, we must already possess the concept 'equals' to make that judgement. And no amount of sensory experience will convey that to a subject incapable of grasping the concept. Hence the argument that 'equals' (and other universals') are discerned by reason and cannot be derived from experience alone (a point which Kant elaborated at tiresome length in his master work.) — Wayfarer

Well, seeing 'round' things and inferring things about them is mediated by your brain. All concepts are to some extent abstract. A 'stone' or a 'particle' is an abstract concept as much as 'money' or 'health', all inferred through how the brain interacts with the world, but at the very core and central place that makes this universe of stuff tick is physical concepts.

Indeed, that was precisely my point. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure, and I think part of my point is that this kind of thing is already inside the kind of perspectivr related to word-use. So invoking forms doesn't add anything.

"none of us actually know how or why we personally are able to perceive and point out 'roundness' in the world," is simply not one many people — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, I think my claim is not quite what you had in mind. What I was thinking of is more along the lines of how someone performs a skill but the performance is automatic. People very skilled at playing the piano and sight-reading can just play the notes straight off the sheet music of a very complicated song. They will then memorize thr song as second nature and br able to play it almost without thought. I don't think anyone in these moments has conscious understanding or insight into what they are actually doing. They have just learned to do it and do so automatically. Do you think Novak Djokovic actually knoes why he was such a good tennis player? Do you thi k these tennis players actually have a strong understanding of why they were just able to beat all the other kids growing up? Not long ago I saw a video of Magnus Carlson beat someone at chess while blindfolded; do you think he really knows how he is able to do this? I think we can say similar for all skills - reading, facial recognition, any kind of knowledge. Sometimes I recall facts or events in memory and I don't even know how I learned them. They just come.

I think you know about as much about why you can perceive roundness as how much an agnosiac with brain damage would know about why they couldn't perceive or distinguish certain shapes. Sure, a scientist can explain to an agnosiac some information about brains, cognition, the psychology of perception. But at some point, from your first person perspective it boils down to just - you can do some stuff, you can't do some other stuff; you aren't exactly sure why in terms of your own personal insight.

What I am saying here is not a scientific claim about facts related to the brain or cognition. Its a claim about people's personal insight into their own behavior and cognition, which I think most people don't even realize much of the time.

There is no skepticism about science here, just that we cannot realistically get a precise explanation of how these things work without presuming our own use of words. For instance, how a neuroscientist or psychologist cannot study how people see color without relying on people's self-report about color. If you aren't building these things from the ground up, you are to some extent relying on how scientific, empirical facts and models are related to your use of words or perceptual abilities that you may not quite understand. So my point is that if I invoke "forms", I am just re-asserting that fact that I can see stuff without actually explaining what that means. So to me, that's not really interesting, and I know what is happening when my brain perceives stuff is probably a bit more interesting and informative.

These theories might be misguided, but they are not reducible to "word use." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think they are when you view word-use as not in a vacuum. We use words in response to things that are happening in the world, coming from what we see and hear, including from inanimate objects and other people that shape eachother's use of words.

One might indeed criticize a metaphysics of form in any number of ways, but to say that such a broad and well-developed area of philosophy is contentless would seem to simply demonstrate a total lack of familiarity with it ... ... There can be no "neuroscience" if there is nothing determinant that can be said about brains. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This whole section was informative, which just leads me to re-assert the next quote you take from my original post:

Is there actually much difference between my 'structure' and your 'forms' (in the most generic sense of structure)? Maybe I just prefer the former word without the connotations of the latter... other similar words might be 'patterns', 'regularities', etc, etc.

So I guess my conclusion is that appealing to forms and word-use is not meaningfully different. They are only different when trying to inflate stuff unnecessarily — Apustimelogist

Interesting that you mention strange loops. You've read Hofstadter, I presume? — Banno

I actually haven't! I just like the phrase in order to describe the inability to get out of a perspectival context - this constant tension between trying to give descriptions of what is the case and the fact that this can effectively be deflated in terms of word-use and enactive cognition, which itself is a description of what is the case, which brings us back to the beginning (in the sense that describing or giving a story about what is the case regarding how cognition works is itself word-use and enactive cognition).

Anyhow, how does one figure out how to "apply a rule for the word round," if there are not first round things? The form is, first and foremost, called in to explain the existence of round things, second our perceptions of them, and then language. It is not primarily about language because language was never considered "first philosophy" before the advent of analytic philosophy (i.e., "being and thought are prior to speaking.") People must be able to identify roundness to use to words to refer to — Count Timothy von Icarus

But anyone using the word 'round' is using it because they are engaging with the world around them and they see 'round' things.

Imo, if we want to explain the actual reasons why we use the word 'round', you have to talk about an immensely complicated brain and how it interacts with the rest of a very complicated world in an intractable manner - from the perspective of our own intelligibility - to infer something about how it represents or embodies structure out in the world.

We can't actually do that, and for any intelligible investigation of that we must presuppose our own concepts to know what we are looking for.

So when someone says that you need 'roundness' to explain why we use the word 'round'. What are you actually saying? Because none of us actually know how or why we personally are able to perceive and point out 'roundness' in the world, all you have really done is re-assert your own word use. You haven't actually explained anything and so your perspective ends up being vacuously the same as the word-use one which additionally wants us to say stuff like 'oranges are round iff oranges are round' which is asserting that 'roundness' is the case in conjunction with what is seen in the world - which we can point at, also communicating what we are pointing at to other people who use the word in the same way.

So by invoking forms have you meaningfully added anything? Not really - nothing that has not already been asserted by someone capable of using sentences like 'oranges are round iff oranges are round'. I can asser that round things exist without dressing it up in "forms" or "universals". Fine, we can call it that if you want, but I don't know if there is anything more interesting to say about that which wouldn't end up on someone falling back on and taking for granted their own exceptional abilities to make distinctions in the world and use words without really knowing how they do it.

And my own views - about what we might see as 'real' in the world or engagement with a world that 'real-ly' exists independent of us - fully acknowledges this, because the most generic way I think we can talk about the world is in terms of structure...
But what does that word actually mean? Because it is so generic, its very difficult to describe and elaborate on what that word actually means. Nonetheless, I have learned to use this word effectively in virtue of a brain that can make abstract inferences and predictions about my sensory world, and can use the word intelligibly to tell a story about the world which I think has less caveats than certain other stories. But in telling this story, I am still somewhat taking for granted the fact that I don't really know the specific details of how I am doing this. No matter how hard I try, I cannot elevate the kind of metaphysical meat of my word-use of 'structure' here into something which is actually explanatorily useful beyond being a kind of component of my story that relates to other parts of the story.

Neither can I elevate various other concepts like, say, "red" or "being", "same" or perhaps even something like "plus"... I am sure, many others. To me, simply re-asserting these latter examples as if there is something else additional to say isn't interesting (even if these are all useful words about stuff), especially when clearly what makes the world tick is to be found in our physical theories that predict what we see - and in theory, an understanding of brains that might give us some understanding into how we see those what we see, and make use of what we see in intelligent ways. Again, the useful way of talking about our theories of the world, with the least caveats, may be in terms of structure and brains' inferences about structure - useful words for my story without needing to elaborate those words in some additional, excessive way. Is there actually much difference between my 'structure' and your 'forms' (in the most generic sense of structure)? Maybe I just prefer the former word without the connotations of the latter... other similar words might be 'patterns', 'regularities', etc, etc.

There is necessarily a strange loop here of sorts in the sense that: understanding and using theories is also something we do. But I do not need to redundantly inflate ontologies that are explantorily useful beyond just how my brain works, resulting in word use. Sure, I will say there are 'round' things, but there are things much more interesting that make 'round' things and everything else tick. Again, even with "what makes the world tick" has limits in the sense that I cannot give you an interesting elaboration on what structure means. I don't need to arbitrarily and redundantly lay out a list of all the of these "forms" that "exist" and try to elevate them in some way, even though I don't really have anything interesting to say about them other than I see stuff with these properties. And because that is all I can say, I am effectively just re-asserting my own word use which renders any attempt to point out something salient about "forms" vacuous and effectively no different than re-asserting the notion that word-use is what is fundamental about concepts.

So I guess my conclusion is that appealing to forms and word-use is not meaningfully different. They are only different when trying to inflate stuff unnecessarily, which cannot be done in an interesting, intelligible way imo. The explanatory importance of concepts is how they relate to other concepts, and I think a theory of "forms" would place some overly abstract concepts or "universals" in a central role amongst our ontological concepts about the world where they have no business being. At the core and center is our best scientific theories, not the patterns that "supervene" at a higher level of description. "Roundness" exists, but lets not make it out to be something more important than it really is.

Apparently Apustimelogist finds your statement completely ambiguous. — noAxioms

Ironically, the original point I was making there is that you are the one finding such things ambiguous hence why you conflate 2+2 referring to completely different things.

Except it is 2+2 being discussed, and not the label nor any of the symbols or concepts of them, nor how anything is spelled. — noAxioms

So its like discussing spelling: m-i-n-u-t-e.

My point is that the 'story' you're telling presupposes intelligibility in order to be 'right'. If you admit that the physical world - at least in some features - is intelligible (apparently enought intelligible to be certain of these things), then, at least the most basic concepts that ground describe the order of the physical world, which seem to imply that they are actually also part of the order of physical reality itself. — boundless

I don't think so, because I don't explicitly need concepts for the world to be intelligible. I can see the trajectory of a thrown ball, predict where it will end up and catch it without overt need for any concepts. We apply concepts after the fact, mapping them to what we see. Much of the time they are wrong and make false predictions. The ones that happen to be empirically adequate may survive, generally.

On the otherhand, I have said all our concepts are anchored to some extent to sensory reality, just some are far more abstract than others. I think maybe then you could argue that math does capture something about the empirical structure of reality - quantity. It is self-evident quantities exist, and we can identify them; but this isn't really interesting like an independently existing platonic realm. Its almost trivial to observe the world around you and be able to identify that there can be more of something or less of something, bigger things and smaller things.

Also about predictions: unless one adopts a quite skeptical approach (for instance the one about 'perspective' I mentioned earlier), these extremely accurate predictions seem to imply that, indeed, mathematics does describe the 'structure' of reality. But if that is true, mathematics isn't invented (at least, the part that describes the structure of the world). — boundless

I am not presuming some exclusive dichotomy of invented or discovered. Something can be both. You can invent a system of rules and then discover implications of following those rules that you did not know before.

Again, you don't need any special explanation for the effectiveness of maths. It is just extremely flexible and broad. If math was an extremely small field that entirely described physics exclusively then I would say you have a point but math can describe thing that are physically impossible or physically don't make sense. It describes stuff that have nothing to do with the empirical, physical world. It just explores the logical limits of manipulating quantities, perhaps in some counterfactual sense.

No, the world is intelligible because it is intelligible (if it is indeed intelligible). — boundless

I don't think it contradict the idea that the world is intelligible to us because we have a brain that allows us to understand it - i.e. it captures the structure of the world in a way that we can predict what happens next.

On the other hand, I can't exclude the possibility that it isn't really intelligible, in which case we evolved in a quite 'lucky' way that enables us to make useful predictions by using models that are in fact wrong. — boundless

Even if your models are wrong beyond some limit, the fact that you can construct models that give correct predictions suggests that there is an intelligible structure to that part of reality which is being captured. If reality wasn't intelligible, you wouldn't be able to do that.

Intelligibility is about understanding and comprehension, it isn't about being right or wrong. I would say something is unintelligible when you cannot create any model that gives correct predictions; even then, I am skeptical that such a thing even exists except for say... complete randomness... even paradoxes and contradictions are intelligible and understandable... even the concept of randomness itself to some extent.

The very fact that we speak of evolution - which is indeed intelligible as a concept - to explain why we can have knowledge presupposes that the world is intelligible in some sense (unless, as I said, one wants to embrace skepticism). — boundless

I think the core issue here is that I just don't agree with how you think intelligibility has some kind of importance here. Like, intelligibility to me seems to just say that the world has structure and we have brains that can capture that. Neither do I need some platonic realm of maths to understand why math can be used to describe that structure. I guess at the most abstract level of description, anything we perceive through our senses can be related to quantities. But again, its just a trivial observation of the world that can be captured abstractly by a sophisticated brain. Why do I need aome special explanation for the fact that I can count things that I see in the world (under the assumption of identifying those counted things as the same)?