OK. The idea that we don't "see" anything at all is interesting. I must have missed it. (I'm assuming it's in this thread somewhere?) — Ludwig V

Aha, I think it was something I wrote but must have not posted because it was both too vague and complicated a thought, and distracting from some point of a post. Just forgot I didn't post it.

I agree that the images on our retinas are 2D. But I would say that our brain has access to information about the 3D world through somato-motor engagement (with some reservation about hearing) and I think that affects how the brain interprets the 2D information and consequently how we see it. I think the distinction between our brain doing something and us doing something matters. But I admit that what conscious experience amounts to is not at all clear. — Ludwig V

I think thats fair.

You would not be wrong to say that we both see the same markings in a different way. — Ludwig V

What I would say is seeing the same marks differently is more to do with a different engagement with the information extractable from those markings; but I agree that "see" is ambiguous, partly leading to my previous consideration of whether we see anything at all.

You mentioned attention. When I look through a telescope or microscope, I do not attend to the image as such (unless I need to focus the lens, or clean it) — Ludwig V

You're always attending to things whether you realize it or not, constantly scanning parts of what you see.

The case of writing is somewhat special, in that writing is 2D, and the writing in the image on my retina is exactly the same as the writing in the 3D book. So we shouldn't have a problem in agreeing that what I see is the writing (or the marks). What's going on with 3D is still unclear. — Ludwig V

I don't think this is relevant because I don't believe the distinction between the outside 3D world and what we see is relevant given the fact that our brain cannot access anything independently of 2D information. From my perspective, the patterns we see are 2D. Its our somato-motor engagement with the world that brings an additional dimension to what we "see", both in terms of our body and eyes.

In each case, your experience will be different. — Ludwig V

Yes, but what is different isn't the markings but your reactions to the markings.

The duck-rabbit illusion that you give is an excellent example. My inclination is that what is happening is still about changes in the way we are reacting to the image: attending, sampling, making predictions regarding the image and confidence of reporting. The experience then is inextricably entwined with our ongoing engagement with the image, imo.

The issue for me is that incorporation of the insights I mentioned can inform and transform the content of the hard sciences, just as it has already begun to have its effect on biology, neuroscience and cognitive psychology. — Joshs

Hmm, I don't really recognize that at all, I don't think.

It is marks on paper and how those marks relate to other parts of the world. The difference in vocabulary depends on and signals a difference in how we are to think about the phenomenon. — Ludwig V

Yes, but if you look at writing, you just see marks. You don't somehow see marks and the totality of its relations to other parts of the world. Those relations are only experienced in real time in specific behaviors or thoughts or reactions.

But, at the same time, they do work for many purposes, and we've been quite clever about working out ways of pushing the boundaries. — Ludwig V

Yes, I think if you assume that there is some objective way the world is, then they have to work in some effective way, mapping to things out in the world. But, I would say that if one were able to make a coherent separation between some thing and some other thing "representing" it, then their relationship is not an intrinsic one but subject to the whims of how the world allows them to coherently map and the "representation" be used. That it is a representation is then, imo, in a weak sense - hence the use of "". I have no objection to the notion of representation as long as it comes with caveats regarding how they work, how their use can be deconstructed. If everyone were to agree on representation in this sense, then I guess the "" would be redundant though.

or the two are inter-dependent. — Ludwig V

Naturally!

Different sciences talk about things in different ways. Some rely on reductive causal abstractions, some begin from the contextually particular circumstances of persons in interaction. It’s not a question going into the ‘depths’ of an inner subjectivity but of staying close to the interactive surface of intersubjective practice and. it abstracting away from it with with claims to pure ‘objective’ description. — Joshs

Sure, but then I don't understand what the issue is. We have a whole range and breath of intellectual fields, sciences, arts, humanities that generate knowledge or culture in different ways. So I don't really understand what the central issue is here.

Sure, but there is no way to communicate about qualitative experiences in a way that is any different to what science, or any other intellectual field, does when it constructs knowledge and talks about things. You can't really go any deeper.

Whats the issue?

Science has little to say about your subjective experience as it is impossible to capture. Its not just science, but anyone. Even the closest person in your life doesn't know what your actual subjective experience is. — Philosophim

Completely agree, and partly why I have never really understood what Wayferer is trying to push with his perspective and what precisely he is saying is lacking or what that has to do with science.

It's as if you were to say that all writing is just marks on paper etc — Ludwig V

What else is it? Anything else about it does not come from the writing itself but context and relationships those markings have to other things, including our engagement with them. Without those things, yes writing is just marks on paper; writing is nothing more than marks on paper and how those marks relate to other parts of the world.

.. and you only have experiences of your actions because you act. — Ludwig V

Which are not intelligible without experience of them!

I'm particularly interested in whether you think there is such a thing as indirect perception and what that might amount to. — Ludwig V

I'm quite agnostic on direct vs. indirect perception. I think both can be argued in different ways. I think the idea that we are directly aquainted with structure in the outside world is a coherent notion. But I am not someone inclined to say that there is some single, strong, absolute way of describing structure in the world, so I think this direct perception is quite weak. There are plausible inumerable kinds of structure that an organism could tap into when engaging with the world. You could also argue indirectness though in the sense that we are still in some sense insulated from the outside world by our sensory states, the structure of the brain and its possible foibles, and in principle issues of chronic indeterminacy. So I am open to both types.

On "conceptual schemes", I should add that there is quite a lot that Davidson says that I agree with. I think he is right to argue that there is not one single conceptual scheme that all human beings share. I do maintain, however, that our world includes many partially incommensurable schemes - partly shared and partly not. Further, the difference between scheme and content is not anything like as clear-cut as his argument requires. On the other hand, I accept that the differences in thinking can be expressed as beliefs. I think, for example, that belief in God is not a straightforwardly empirical scheme, but the anchor of a way of thinkng about the world that is conceptually different from the way an atheist or sceptic thinks about the world. But then, Davidson doesn't seem to recognize that there are different kinds of belief. — Ludwig V

I more or less agree with Davidson's reasoning in his argument about conceptual schemes but I have never really been familiar woth the context of why he is making these arguments. He is attacking a very strong notion of conceptual schemes; when I think often peoplr talking about this kind of thing just might be referring to what I think is trivial - we use words in different ways depending on the environments and cultures and customs we have been exposed to, and sometimes it is difficult communicating between these things. I don't think this notion needs to be as strong as the one Davidson is attacking. I think maybe the core of what Davidson is attacking is possiby relativism, which would require that not only do people have different ways of talking and refer to different things, but their validity relative to someone's conceptual niche cannot be overturned, maybe entailing that there can be no communication between different conceptual niches in which such a challenge to validity can arise. So maybe thats why his notion of conceptual schemes is very strong, whereas I think most would agree we can uphold the trivial idea that people have different ways of talking or referring without mecessarily having to uphold some kind of relativism.

So when is part 2?

So what is your solution in all this!!??

Thanks :up:

what I see is the ship or star. — Ludwig V

Which is just a pattern that I see; thats all I mean by image, without further distinctions or assumptions.

But that does depend on linking perception with action rather than experience. — Ludwig V

They aren't mutually exclusive. You only know something about your actions insofar that you have experiences about your actions.

If you suppose anything like an image or model in the brain, the question arises how the brain can access it in order to apply it to the incoming information. The answer is always an observer of some kind. But then, that observer will need to construct its own model or image and there will have to be a second observer inside the first one.... I'm sure you see the infinite regress that has begun. The brain is not an internal observer - unless you call it an observer of the outside world. — Ludwig V

The brain is the model, no infinite regress of observers required.

Some images are images of something, some are just patterns. If you treat them all as of the second kind, you have lost the significance of the image. — Ludwig V

I believe that all the images are just patterns and the significance is retained by way of what I said in the bit you quoted.

I don't understand what you mean here. — Ludwig V

What you see must be constrained by your physical perceptual systems.

If "directly" just means inside the body, then obviously I cannot be directly acquainted with objects outside my body. — Ludwig V

I wasn't using directly in the same sense as earlier!

So, classification needs to be agreed before the facts can be agreed, and if people are in the grip of the idea that animals are just machines, that agreement is not possible. — Ludwig V

Yes, agreed.

We do agree pretty much on how the eye works, yet we describe the facts differently. Our disagreement is not about the facts, but about agreeing a coherent way of describing them, i.e. how to think about them, i.e. a coherent conceptual structure for understanding them. It's not a straightforward task. — Ludwig V

Yes, I would probably agree here too.

Ironically, much of the recent neo-Aristotelianism flows from a growing dissatisfaction with the artificiality of possible worlds semantics. We are slowly correcting modern errors, first with Kripke's modal form of essentialism, and then moving with Fine and Klima towards more traditional and robust forms of essentialism, that do not rely on the overrated device of possible worlds. — Leontiskos

Any good references?

Perhaps not. But a knuckle joint or a thumb or an arm or a spine can. — Ludwig V

Well, I think its at least debatable. I don't think those joints are anywhere near mobile enough, imo.

None of those is true of images of the car, no matter how many you accumulate. — Ludwig V

Well then the 2D image is how I am seeing a 3D car. I can't shake the awareness that my visual field is two-dimensional (except for the color dimension) even though I can distinguish distance.

wouldn't object to that. But what validates the inference? There must be some way that you can compare the image of a 3D object with the 3D object. But you seem to deny that we can. — Ludwig V

The brain doesn't have any direct access to the outside world. It can never intelligibly compare things with some criterion that has come from the way things somehow are on the outside world. All the brain can do is construct models which make predictions about what happens next, and that can fail and get re-adjusted.

So the image of my car is no different from an image of starship Enterprise or a dragon - and even in those cases, we know what it would mean to see the real thing, even if it never happens. — Ludwig V

Not sure what you mean here.

It depends what you mean by "literally". For me, when I walk through my front door, I literally see my car. If I only see the image on my retina, then I don't see "literally" my car, but an image of it. — Ludwig V

I'm just saying I dispute the idea that there is some kind of phenomenal essence to things that we recognize and perceive - rather I see it in terms of just the direct patterns I see, and my reactions to those patterns in real time. Without those reactions, the idea that I am recognizing an object like a car is empty. I see the 2D patterns of the car and react to them in a way consistent with my recognition of it.

An image is always an image of something else, never the real thing. So my anchor is the real thing. That's what makes the image of a car an image as opposed to a complex array of coloured shapes. — Ludwig V

Sure, but I don't think the "real thing" can be transcend the 2D information accessible from the retina.

I think the difference in our perspective is that you just say you see the 3D car and stop there; while to me, my percepts can be deconstructed so I do see that my visual space is 2D (apart from the color). But you seem to just embrace the idea that you are directly acquainted with a 3D object. When I then ask what it means that I am acquainted with these 3D objects, it comes back to what I have said about 2D information and enactive processes.

But it is not the same as a disagreement about the facts and cannot be settled in the same way. — Ludwig V

But I think the animal case is conceivably a disagreement about facts as opposed to classification.

The problem here is about the meaning of "direct" and "indirect". — Ludwig V

I wasn't intentionally implying anything at all here by the word "direct" tbh other than the fact that the sense comes from inside our bodies.

If what we see is the image on our retina, how is that any different? — Ludwig V

Yes, you're right, I think - it isn't. But as I say earlier, I think you could argue that joint positions don't actually directly convey 3D physical space without further integration of information (e.g. A finger joint typically cannot move through all degrees of freedom of 3D space).

The image is more like a lens, by means of which I see my car. — Ludwig V

But what do you then mean when you say that you see your car? There is nothing more, imo, to seeing a car than this 2D information, your reactions to it, and your ability to make predictions about it and engage with it. Thats the only way knowledge makes sense to me. For me, just saying "I see a car" isn't good enough. I need to make sense of what it actually means that I see that car, and this is the conclusion I have come to introspectively. There is nothing but the images - I can just react to them in sophisticated ways.

But I don't see that we ever see that image, because it is extensively processed, including the amalgamation of two images. Don't forget. that retinal image is broken up into what, presumably is an encoding that is quite different from any image.
I'm not sure whether to count the result of comparing two images or the extent to which our lens needs adjusting to produce a clear image a visual cue. It could go either way, I suppose. — Ludwig V

But I don't think whatever is inferred is anything that isn't latent in 2D patterns on the retina, and hence limited by the 2D nature. Hence, why you can manipulate pictures to create illusions of depth; because it is nothing above picking out those 2D patterns. Yes, you can say that is seeing in 3D, but .... similar to the question of "what do you then mean when you say that you see your car?":

What do you then mean when you say that you see depth?

We have 2D information from the retina, and our ability to engage with how that 2D information may change over time and in different contexts.

We can say "that is far away?". But does saying something is far away have any meaning without your ability to move in 3D space. When you say "that is far away?", are you literally seeing "far away" or are you just reacting to a salient cue in a way that represents or pre-empts your ability to recognize and predict what would happen in some context. Is this cue you identify or distinguish anything above a 2D pattern latent on the retina? I guess it isn't technically 2D because color and brightness add extra dimensions, but these aren't inherently spatial. For me, we just use these distinctions to infer something about what would happen with regard to movement. And this is a continual thing too in real-time, not just because we are bodies always sitting in 3D space, but our eyes are continually sampling the environment, and their sampling will be intuned with depth; most of the time, we aren't even aware of what our eyes are doing.

I guess my perspective also leads to the question - are you literally seeing anything?

Not in any essentialitic way. We see complicated patterns and we react to them in real-time.

"What you see" is ambiguous. — Ludwig V

Yes, I think you are correct. But the 2D nature of the image on the retina is not ambiguous - so that is my anchor.

I partly agree with that. But what is learning is not me, it is, let us say, my brain. I don't ever hear two sounds, one for each ear and then realize that I can deduce where the sound is from that. I hear one sound, located in space. The learning and the processing takes place way "below" consciousness and involves an encoding process that is nothing like a sound even though it is caused by sound — Ludwig V

Its going to be the same for vision and hearing.

But are you actually hearing the location of a sound, or just hearing a certain quality to the sound across your two ears that changes are you re-orient your body? If you have no body to re-orientate, what you hear when you "hear the location" could not possibly give you any spatial information - it would simply be a difference in the quality of sound in your ears.

trompe l'oeil painting. — Ludwig V

But I would say this is what we have been talking about all along.

I would say I am not necessarily saying that we don't see in 3D, but that this is nothing above information on a 2D retina and an enactive component regarding movement and prediction. Space itself I think is the same - spatial perception is more like spatial enaction - familiarity with how movement changes visual information. For me the idea of perceiving any space, let alone 3D space doesn't make any sense above what is essentially a behavioral familiarity - spatial perception is nothing above our real-time manipulation of information through movement.

Please let me know if I am annoying you. — Ludwig V

Not at all!

But the disagreement is not a question of evidence, but of interpretation of the evidence. So Davidson's thesis that we can abandon talk of conceptual schemes and return to beliefs and experiences seems to me to be false. — Ludwig V

I would say that this question of evidence interpretation is a question of beliefs and so in that regard, Davdison would not consider it as something about conceptual schemes.

But how could we have 3D bodies in a 2D world? — Ludwig V

They are different senses about different things, one from directly inside the body, the other from outside.

I'm talking about what you see. Its a 2D image.

BTW, you are forgetting that we have 3D hearing as well. — Ludwig V

But this is not very different from the visual case in the sense that your learning about 3D space vicariously through cues.

We have learned to interpret 2D pictures as 3D scenes. If all we experienced were 2D, how could we even get the idea of 3D? — Ludwig V

For me, the question here is: what does it mean to say that you interpret 2D pictures as 3D? Does the 2D image magically turn into a 3D one? I don't think so. Thats why I believe that 3D perception, and what we might think of as our experiences of 3D space, are rather about your ability to enact predictions about 3D space through body motion, and your inherent familiarity with that. From my perspective, it is then not an experience per se in the same way that directly seeing blue is, or feeling touch on the skin.

A non-minimalist would have said "to a greater or lesser extent" and cut out all the "maybe" qualifications. — Ludwig V

I wouldn't necessarily say I am a minimalist then, I just don't know what level of mutual comprehension occurs between humans and other animals - and presumably it dependa on the animal - and I was framing it in a way I would if I didn't know what the other person's perspective on that would be either. I think even people who think very little of animal cognition would agree there is a minimal level of intelligibility between humans and certain animals, even in an emotional sense.

But none of that is 2D information. — Ludwig V

Well, yes it is 3D information in the sense that the objective world seems to be spatially 3D. I'm just saying that we can only navigate this visually, on a 2D space of the retina.

Maybe proprioception and body motion you can argue actually is much more directly 3D...

[Edit: and I am not sure 3D body information is entirely trivial since no single joint in your body has access to all possible degrees of freedom of motion in a 3D space. It is conceivable to me that information of movement in a single joint is not sufficient for a brain to infer 3D space - rather I imagine, many joints are needed and possibly even other information like vestibular and visual, at least for 3D space as we know it.]

... But then the inference about 3D space as you see it in vision is then a consequence of how body motion changes a 2D image. The non-trivial way in which this happens allows the inference of 3D space, but I would say that this can equally seen as just transitions in 2D patterns on the retina interacting with proprioceptive and other kinds of sensory information. All the visual information about space is inherently 2D. For me, 3D visual perception is not some direct perception of 3D information - you only ever have 2D visual information. Rather, its your ability to enact predictions about 3D space through motion, and your inherent familiarity with that.

It would seem you are a minimalist on this question. — Ludwig V

What would non-minimalism be?

Not the foggiest what you just said, I'm afraid!

Yet we experience them in 3D. — Ludwig V

We don't make the inference - the results of an inference made "unconsciously" are available (are reported) "directly". — Ludwig V

Depends what is meant by "experience them in 3D" I guess. For me, 3D "experience" is nothing more than our ability to navigate and predict the 2D visual information. In terms of the body, it is about the integration of joint positions and predictions regarding those degrees if freedom -. Imo, the results of the unconscious inference about 3D space - that becomes available to us - is almosr entirely enactive in terms of my familiarity with the consequences of movements in terms of visual and joint information. And we must include eye movement and lens focusing (i.e. ciliary muscle) in this too - your eye palpates the scene in its motion and focusing which is part of your distinct familiarity with 3D space.

That fits with Wittgenstein's idea that human life and practices are the essential context for everything. It would seem that he did not see any similarities with non-human life. This is somewhat puzzling to me, though I would not automatically extend that understanding to all life. There is disagreement among human beings about that.
There is more to be said about how we deal with extreme - non-regular - contexts. — Ludwig V

I would say maybe there is something like intelligibility in common with non-human life. Maybe we can say humans an animals might share some vague sense of mutual intelligibility with regard to something like space or even emotions on some minimal level depending on the animal, but then animals may be incapable of many of the kinds of abstract predictions a human can. Maybe an animal has a kind of intelligibility in terms of the spatial engagement with a ceiling, but an animal may not have access to the kind of abstract semantic relations and predictions a human could associate with a ceiling. Or maybe a writing is a better example - many animals can see and distinguish letters but will never be capable of attaining more abstract, higher-order predictive content about semantic meaning.

Yes. But that's a misunderstanding of what intelligibility is. Intellgibility is not black and white, but a spectrum. He seems to think that "conceptual schemes" are a tight logical structure which is either completely intelligible of completely unintelligible - which leads to his reductio. That fits with what appears to me a very naive view of translation as just a set of equivalences. That's seldom or never available — Ludwig V

Yes I agree, there are gradations of intelligibility. I think the point is that nothing humans do is in principle unintelligible (in regular contexts). When different, say, cultures collide in the same environment, the individuals in that environment are generally engaging with the same structures of the world (or maybe the weaker claim of some common accessible structure is available) - but the difference is their knowledge, ability or simply the norms or conventions of navigating these structures. But they are in principle navigable.

That's very close to what I would call a concept. — Ludwig V

Yes, agreed. I think concepts can be seen as tied to something like meta-awareness or meta-distinctions... awareness of one's own awareness or ability to distinguish one's own distinctions one makes about the world. We model this in word-use - like how we use 'dog' in relation to some coherent structure of experiences.

Not quite right. We have 3D stereoscopic vision because of our two eyes; it fails at larger distances, but it works well at smaller distances - as the 3D films show. Our ears manage to give us 3D hearing as well. — Ludwig V

All visual cues trivially occur to us on a 2D field - the retina is a 2D structure. The use of two retinas does not change this fact. You are just using 2D cues in an interesting way to make inferences that guide action and predictions about the world.

Because thats what all our sensory-motor states are and words (or word-use) are just a special case.

If we are good regulators then thats trivially what they are.

The point being conveyed was that a good model can be entailed by any fashion in which an organism can couple to its environment.

I dont like the metaphor of lens as a depiction of the relation between mind and world. It implies a detached, subjectivist view of how we make sense of the world, as though the information contained in reality is already sitting out there and all we have to do is notice and process it internally. — Joshs

Maybe. What I was thinking about was the idea of attention - selecting parts of the outside world as more relevant than other parts. For me, this idea of attention conveys a lack of one privileged structure from the perspective of an organism - instead, organisms can interact with the world in different ways, to different parts, for different reasons.

We don’t pick out factual aspects of the world based on relevance for our purposes, we actively do things with the inanimate and social world, and the patterns of our doings forms normative structures of intelligibility and purpose which determine HOW the world appears meaningfully to us — Joshs

Not sure I see a fundamental difference.

IF that concept gets its sense from a discursive system of practices that is only peripherally shared by you. — Joshs

But there is nothing inherently stopping anyone from becoming becoming more familiar with that.

In particular, it is not clear that conceptual schemes correspond in any helpful way with "models" in cybernetics, whatever they are. — Banno

If concepts are just the coupling of word-use to the states of the world then that is fundamentally what they are. Words are proxies which convey the sense in which we - and how we - perceive, predict, attend or engage with our environments. If different people seemingly have different concepts then it is because they are interacting with the world in different ways or interacting with different parts of the world.

I like what @Janus says:

It seems to me that it is the various explanations for how and why the world we perceive is as it is that involve various conceptual lenses (conceptual schemes), and that is not that what we perceive is determined by conceptual lenses, but rather by what is noticed, what is selected, which in turn is determined by what is of interest or use.

We can attend to the world in different ways, paying more attention to certain aspects, configurations, things that seem relevant to us for various reasons and are maximally informative in regard to affording the behavior required to live or do what we want to do. I think all our perception trivially is picking out structures in the world even if it requires some processing to do so (e.g. our ability to sense and engage with 3-dimensional depth in visual space can only be inferred indirectly from 2D visual cues and also information from our bodies). Different brains may inclined to attend to some structures more than other, some brains may not even be able to pick out some structures (e.g. color blindness), and brains can often be wrong in some sense (e.g. illusions).

As @Ludwig V suggests, we may have local disagreements in the sense that we make (or think we make) meaningfully different predictions about how the world works. The fact that different cultures or even different people may attend to the world in different ways or use words in different ways then doesn't necesarily preclude some in principle mutual intelligibility in how these people use words, and people generally have access to the same information from the perceived world due to our shared biology and intelligence. This point can be somewhat separated from the idea that people can have different beliefs with different predictions or counterfactuals about how the way the world works - the belief in the existence or absence of God in different cultures is about disagreements of beliefs. Obviously these beliefs may involve novel concepts, but then Davidson's point is that the idea of conceptual schemes becomes vacuous once mutual intelligibility is allowed - it is not so troublesome to incorporate a concept you have never heard of before into your own conceptual repertoire. I think Kuhn's notion of paradigms was never about some notion of global unintelligibility but about general underdetermination of the kinds of hypothetical metaphysics that can account for empirical evidence, and local misunderstandings that cause scientists to sometimes talk past each other.

On the idea of interpreted experiences, I like a kind of middle ground in the sense that I think we just see what we see in terms of direct experiences. However maybe those experiences just change given the context for various reasons in your brain; for instance, color inversion / afterimage illusions is just a very extreme example of the fact that we can plausible have different experiences to the same stimuli given some different context. You might then think of having different experiences to the same stimuli in the sense of the kind of structure that is, so to speak, being inferred by the brain from its sensory inputs - the brain can react to the same sensory inputs in different ways to extract the most information in some context.

There is though, I think, also an interpretation aspect in the sense that we can plausibly act or re-act in response to the same experiences in different ways - that is a sense of interpretation purely in the sense of acts, behavior, changes of attention, vocalization, prompted thought or even mental imagery, prediction, memory, etc ...

Aside:
(Imo, its not necessarily very easy to disentangle experiences and interpretations introspectively because the nature of our experiencrs tends to be in flux - in a William James sense of the metaphor of continual flights and perchings and flights again of a bird. From my introspections, meaningfully making sense of a perch involves a flight which obviously takes you away from that perch - my own experienced cannot be made sense of in an intelligible, noticeable way outside of the fact that those experiences are a continual stream. There is no sense in which I recognize a dog without the reactive changes in attention and behavior that it entails, or the later ability to report and re-affirm that experience. In those attention-blindness tasks with the dancing gorilla, my cortical system may have registeted information on the retina which is related to the gorilla, but without attention and the ability for this information to affect other parts of the brain that react to the gorilla; then for all intents and purposes, nothing was registered, nothing was noticed, nothing was seen, because registering something is an act).

Continued:
... This all in the same sense that different people may attend or have tendencies to make different predictions or construct relationships about what they see in the world. We could then be "wrong" in some sense - the kind of structure inferred may have a different relationship to the world that contradicts counterfactuals related to the particular relevant scenario - a brain can be wrong in some sense when its predictions about its own experiences do not cohere. We use words like 'dog' in relation to a coherent structure of experiences that map to an outside world insofar as our biological machinery is coupled to an outside world. And biological structures can couple to the world in different ways (whether at the level of different species, cultures, individuals, etc), coupling to different facets, in a way that carries some kind of veridicality insofar that they organisms are predictive machines that react appropriately or at least consistently to the environment as a "good regulator": e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_regulator.

I think part of the motivation for deflation arises from the position that truth applies only to sentences — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think its more the fact that we cannot talk about truth without using sentences and words. The deflationary account then becomes a sufficient way of talking about truth. Sure , you can say organisms without words have an understanding of the world and 'what is the case' in some sense - which arguably is nothing more than our fallible ability to predict things and have those predictions fulfilled in our experience. But you obviously still cannot talk about that without words - the intellectual activity of truthing is then asserting 'what is the case' with words.

But if you can imagine a dog does not need to think to yelp and leap from being burnt, why can't we imagine the dog is behaving according to the exact same impulses in everything the dog does? Like a plant cell photosynthesizing - wherefore belief as a component of these motions? — Fire Ologist

Why does it have to be so black and white? If you look at brains of animals you will see a continuum of complexity from insects up to humans, and the core structure of the brain in these cases (at least down to fish) is largely preserved. Dogs will be somewhere in the middle - comparing it to photosynthesis given this then just seems hugely exaggerated.

What wouls you call it if you thought only one type of thing existed but there were innumerable number of them?

Organisms are quintessentially beings instead of mere heaps (existing according to a nature, not solely as a bundle of external causes) because they are self-organizing, self-governing, and most of all, goal-directed. The parts of an organism are proper parts of a proper whole because they are unified in terms of a goal that is intrinsic to the organism. This is the idea of "function" and teleonomy in biology. The parts of a flout or rock are not organized in this way.

And perhaps, ↪Arcane Sandwich, this is also a way of finding a via media between permissivism and eliminativism.
— Count Timothy von Icarus

Conservatives would reject the first premise: there is indeed an ontologically significant difference between bikinis and fouts. But that difference can't have anything to do with the question about scattered objects — Arcane Sandwich

Some of this reminds me of the interesting view of Bayesian mechanics / Free energy principle. A framework for exploring thingness in a statistical sense. Whats interesting is it was originally a framework for describing how the brain works... then all life... then eventually people looked at it as vacuously applying to any thing with different grades of complexity.

The idea of an ontological potential endows even simple physical systems, such as rocks, with a kind of weak coherence and ‘monitoring’ of internal states...

Namely, the FEP covers a broad class of objects as cases of particular systems, including adaptive complex systems like human beings, simpler but still complex systems like morphogenetic structures and Turing patterns, and even utterly simple, inert structures at equilibrium, like Objects that have no structure or no environment, either of which fail the FEP for obvious reasons, exist at one extreme...

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=7909771384315425233&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5 (Elan Vital section)

I don't think a flout would "fail the FEP" if a rock does, but it would be interesting whether a kind of statistical approach could be used to analyse how or why we might have different intuitions for something having thingness. As noted earlier, the Bikini case is also a scattered object - why do we tend to endow it with more thingness than a flout (while at the same time lacking the kind of "autonomy" of a more complex or living thing)? And there maybe some kind of analysis for this regarding how systems or things nest within each other in a statistically meaningful way, like the human use of bikinis as opposed to sme other properties / lack of properties in a flout. Ofcourse this is all just complete speculation whether this kind of analysis can even coherently be done in this kind of framework at all. I also suspect you could probably get some unintuitive results, but I guess it just reflects how my attitudes and inclinations would want to approach this kind of issue ideally.

Rather than asking "what makes this a a thing", it makes more sense from my own outlook to ask why we have certain intuitions about thingness, since all my perceptions about things in the world come through my brain which is processing all the statistics of perception and leading me to say "that ia obviously a fish", even in different contexts where I refer to say a living animal or just a slab of meat in the fridge.

I guess this attitude is also analogous to the kind of research programme some have proposed regarding the meta-problem of consciousness - "what causes our intuitions and understandings of our own consciousness and experiences?". But I don't think you necessarily have to do this kind of research programme and go so far as the statement: "consciousness doesn't exist!". I would rather just clarify the limits on what I can and cannot coherently say, the caveats, about what I am identifying as consciousness rather than completely eliminating the intuitively useful uses of words or perhaps being too permissive and pushing some kind of panpsychism or idealism. I think thats preferable to trying to resolve the hars problem - I do not think it is resolvable and I think metaphysics always has to be from the purview of what we perceive, so notions independent of that don't mean much. I think the most generic, fundamental way we can talk about the universe is that it has structure - we just want tomake our organization if these structures coherent from our perspectives in a way that is informative to us, while acknowledging all the caveats.

@Banno

Well said :up:

Although it does not seem that evolution is always very gradual (e.g. proposed cases of observed speciation). There is evidence for rapid evolution due to bottlenecks, fertile hybrid offspring reproducing in the wild, etc., and the whole EES controversy. It's an open question how larger shifts in anatomy (e.g. hands to wings, hands to fins, fins to hands, etc.) — Count Timothy von Icarus

I mean, any of the timescales regarding these kinds of debates are still going to be very long in general / will be long enough.

Yet neither is the argument: "Either species are defined rigidly in this way, or they don't exist," a good one. It's a false dichotomy. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think anyones saying animals don't exist, but the intractable complexity, variety makes various different classifcatory schemes or ways of talking about animals or referring to groups or population plausible. All there really is are individuals that reproduce other individuals. They are all different but there are also similarities, but this is all graded.

Processes can be more or less stable. We can think of an entire ancestral line as a process. For some species, such as the cockroach, the process has been in a fairly stable equilibrium for an extremely long time, perhaps 100-300 million years. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, sure but I don't think that changes what I say. Those cockroaches still got there from the original ancestor and that still took a long gradual change. At the same time, its not entirely clear what it means when biologists say that cockroaches have stayed stable for millions of years. It might be in a different sense to some other kind of population genetics. Similar to how someone might get confused if they take one of those genetic tests that tell you you're 60% German and then compare it to how biologiata also say you share 60% of your DNA with a banana. Clearly what they mean by these percentages is different, referring to different things.

Yet if two species are indistinguishable, even upon close inspection with instruments, then in virtue of what could they even be said to be "two species?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes but distinguishability can become apparent over longer and longer times. Like how pople visibly age rather slowly.

I think at the end of the day we all agree animals exist and we try to classify them non-arbitrarily in ways that are most informative regarding the world and other facts we interact with.

But it's the thing signified by the scientific term that existed before man existed, not "whatever the term can apply to." I hope you can see the problem here. Insects can't have existed before man and be defined by however "insect" is used in normal language, because the term is used in various ways in different contexts in normal language. This would mean that some things would be both insect and not-insect. Nor can they be defined by "however science currently defines 'insect,'" since this would imply that whenever a scientific term is refined the being of past entities is also thereby changed. — Count Timothy von Icarus

So how is it defined?

This seems like an argument from ignorance. I know of no reputable biologist who claims that there have actually been very many hominid-like families throughout the history of Earth, just "lost to time." There are just the fairly recent hominids. And the same are true for many families.

What's the idea here. "A man like species could have walked the Earth with the dinosaurs, or any time since, but we just don't know about it." But not only this, but it's "very likely." I don't think so.

The idea that very many families of hominid-like animals have evolved many times is highly unlikely for a number of reasons. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Take yourself and look at the genetic differences between you and your parents. Then their parents, then their parents, then their parents. Miniscule genetic change. Then see what happens when you just trace this lineage back in time. You will get very gradual genetic change and very gradual phenotype change between yourself going back to some other kind of ape in the past to some mammal before that to some reptile and eventually some fish and something before that. All life on earth shares a common ancestor. So what I am saying is a fact. And therefore it is a fact that there is a gradual and continuous change between all of the individuals that ever existed, not just in your lineage but any lineage. The boundaries between your reptiluan ancestors and your mammalian ancestors and your primate ancestors will be continuous, ambiguous, graded, fuzzy.

Nothing to do with the fossil record and fossil record only sees a miniscule of these individuals in various separate branches and times.

And "fish" was used to describe whales for a long time. But clearly, while whales were whales before man, whales were not both fish and not-fish during this period. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ironically, there are actually some fish that are more closely related to whales than they are to any other fish, genetically speaking.

I'm not necessarily trying to promote some kind of metaphysical permissivism (first time I have heard this phrase today actually) or any particular metaphysics about objects, I just think its plausible that people could have found bizarre combinations of things in the world commensensical as things to pick out if the statistical structure of the world afforded them some particular relevance. It just doesn't, so why pick them out. But then that means what we find intuitive as objects probably depends on the context. I mean some flint tools you see just look like literal rocks to my eyes but clearly the subtlety of what makes them not just rocks is not about them as objects in themselves.

The name? Just nonsense.

Anti-essentialism can only get one up to a certain point. "Essence" might be an ugly word for an analytic ear, yet Kripke argued that the essence of a gold atom is the property of having an atomic number of 79, which is the number of protons in the nucleus of a gold atom. Kinda hard to argue with that, even if one isn't an essentialist. — Arcane Sandwich

Its a thought provoking example but it hasn't compelled me to essentialism yet, at least not in a way that doesn't seem trivial.

even ambiguous — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think it is ambiguous if you're willing to consider all animals that have ever existed.

But that is not what the fossil record suggests for man, for just one example. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Fossil record doesn't say much. Whatever fossils we have of anything are a miniscule fraction of individuals that have existed.

There have not been "very many species indistinguishable from man" existing throughout the Earth's history. There have been, on contemporary accounts, just the one. And this certainly wouldn't be true for domestic animals either. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Again, you just have to think about yourself or chickens tracing their lineage back generation-by-generation - perhaps to the same common ancestor of yourself and that chicken, maybe some kind of fish - and ask if there are sudden jumps between one kind and another. There cannot be, it would be absurd. The changes are gradual and slow.

Unless you are merely speaking of the transition from wolf to dog, in which case what of it? Yes, domestication is not a binary. Yet the aurochs is extinct, the cow is not. More to the point, a stegosaurus is not a dog, an oak is not a dog, a rock is not a dog. These are quite discrete distinctions between dog and not-dog. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure, there are objective distinctions between animals, but the kind of criteria that we use to concretely identify dogs as a species start to become fuzzy if you consider all individuals that ever existence and the graded differences in genetic make-up. That allows scope for disagreement or ambiguity about where exactly mammals start and stop being dogs. Even if you use criteria like reproducibility there will be gradation since plausibly there may be two dogs from different times that cannot breed with each other but plausibly there may be an intermediate dig that can breed with both. You then end up with this kind of moving window of different dog species, possibly many many many which are all legitimate and overlapping.

If we cannot find it, shall we conclude that either no dogs ever die, or that none have ever lived? Or perhaps that "life" and "being a dog" are mere cultural or mental constructs, ens rationis and not ens reale? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not necessarily, but classifying species is not a trivial endeavour just because the average person can idenitify a dog on the street and everyone else agrees with them. The mass of all individuals who have ever existed whos genetics have drifted and changed slowly and gradually over time is kind of independent of the ways we choose to classify them, which we do in a way that that our current context allows. Clearly dog genes are some kind of objective marker that separates them from other species, but this objective marker would become less informative were we to consider all the biological animals that ever existed. Thats not to say that it isnt an objective marker shared by those individuals - but it becomes less salient compared to a world where the overwhelming majority of organisms lineages die out or change leaving pockets that are easy for us to discriminate. I think reality is generally more complicated than the everyday way we make classifications.

For example, there are curlterpillars: caterpillar-like objects that begin to exist when a caterpillar rolls up into a ball. There are incars: vehicles that look like ordinary cars, but that can only exist when they're inside a garage. — Arcane Sandwich

Who knows, there maybe some possible scenario where the structure of the world renders these distinctions useful to us.

I think ultimately we have to consider that the world is intractibly more complicated than we actually immediately perceive and it is part of the brains imperative to simplify the structure of what we see so it is most informative. But clearly, what exactly is informative depends on the context. Seemingly arbitrary combinations like "fouts" are not interesting and don't connect to the world in interesting, regular ways. Like how if we consider all organisms that ever existed, the dogs on earth now as a species would seem less interesting and stand out less. Certain kinds of sticks on trees bent at specific angles may be completely arbotrary and mean nothing, but imagine if it was the sign that a certain animal had been in the area doing something. It gains information and you end up giving this arbitrary bent stick a name because it helps you find and eat this animal. Classification is holistic. Statistical structures only mean something when they stand out from or relate to a background, and exactly how that statistical structuring is being achieved. Things then can look different in various contexts and different scales even though the information is coming from the same objective world. There is nothing wrong with a plurality in the use of concepts in this respect I think and I think in actuality hardly any of the things or concepts we talk about are strictly independent and mutually exclusive. I think the concepts we tend to use are probably not arbitrary in relation to the world because they reflect the most efficient, informative way of making or pointing out distinctions in our perceptions. But then I think what is most efficient and informative may still depend on the context somewhat, and obviously we only ever get a limited purview of the world. If the context had been different, different structures in the world may become more salient - and thats not to say some things magically disappear or come into existence. We just change the way we attend to what is in perception.

However, words generally try to focus on the actual, not the potential. The act of being a dog is what stays the same in all dogs. We could well imagine some sort of dog, bee, elephant fusion (horrific) and ask: "when does it stop being a dog and become a monster?" Yet no such animal actually exists, it is ens rationis, a being of thought. Language evolves through our interactions with actual beings, so we should only expect that our words will tend to indicate the beings we actually find around us. Language evolution isn't arbitrary after all. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think you have quite got my example.

If you consider every single mammalian individual that ever existed, you will not be able to identify discrete boundaries between the concept of dog and not-dog. You may not even be able to agree on the criteria. Again, I am not considering potential, possible, counterfactual examples. I am considering all individuals that have ever existed in earth. I can't refer to most of these specific individuals, but I know for a fact that they existed. Sure, they don't exist now... and that is like a frame of reference on which the statistical structure of what is being talked about is different o if we change the reference frame, change the scale, change the inclusion of individuals, genetic structures that have actually existed.

All organisms on earth share a common ancestor; it is surely the case that if you trace the changes of all of your ancestors, generation by generation, the changes in genetics will be tiny every time in the context of all of the genetic variation that has ever existed. If, from your earliest ancestor to you now, your lineage has gone through all of the different stereotypical biological kinds - we at least know apes, mammal, reptile, fis, I believe - there is absolutely going to be no dicrete boundaries along the way. Its more-or-less a continuous path of infinitesimal change.

Your ability to identify dogs as a kind of concretization depends on the context of what kind of biological structures just happen to exist right now and happen to be rasily distinguishable. But importantly, the bits inbetween have existed.

But you don't tend to get the same sort of disagreements re lions, oaks, or carbon. — Count Timothy von Icarus

will probably come pretty easily, because, while a cultural role, it can be represented with clear, concrete characteristics. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would also argue the possibility though that "concrete characteristics" are contingent on how the world happens to be, but if you look at how the world could be otherwise, then it doesn't seem so clear. And it seems to me that the way we extract structure from the world depends on a kind of reference frame to which that structure is optimal, but may not be so in another (similar to how different descriptions become inappropriate when we move to different scales of observation). I think its very difficult to do anything with the carbon example without kind of going into silly speculative metaphysics and notions of unconceived alternatives, which may be meaninglessly intangible. But with regard to things like lions and oaks, when you just e pand the temporal horizons of the world we consider, the concrete characterization may no longer exists as you have to consider the gradual changes populations due to evolution over a long period. And here, the biological ambiguities of defining things like species may become more relevant. I think animals is a very good example since it clearly shows our ability to recognize different animals in an easy fashion is contingent on the fact that a lot of the diversity, variety, continuity between different animals is not observable to us, even though it clearly did exist if we consider out entire evolutionary history. Someone more radical might then want to argue that this kind of example should be seen as a general thing that applies to all things that exist when you consider the great diversity, variety, continuity in possible worlds. Things always could have been otherwise so that the boundaries or transition structures we tend to use to identify, distinguish or label things no longer seem to be as optimal or informative.

The dog doesn't know that the blue ball has anything in common with their blue collar or with the blue cabinet in the living room, for instance, unless its being trained and rewarded with food when it point to blue objects — Pierre-Normand

But whatever cognitive or perceptual abilities an animal has is regardless of whether it has been trained to do something or not. The use of rewsrd is just motivation to get an animal to overtly display capabilities that it always had. It just comes to the simple notion that an animal nor a human is going to arbitrarily do things or display certain kinds of behavior unless it has a motivation to do so. If you observe people just going about their business in a public place, you probably won't be able to tell if someone is color blind; you need to engineer the scenario to make their lack of capability visible, which must involve some motivation or requirement to act in a certain way.

And this is the task I was talking about just if anyone's interested:

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_vis=1&q=intradimensional+extradimensional+shift+task+rat+mice&btnG=

You can try a human version here:

https://www.labvanced.com/content/research/en/blog/2023-07-wisconsin-card-sorting-test/