I think I have to ask for an elaboration on what your view is exactly to answer any of this because I am not sure of the direction you are coming from.

Is a fact of life. — AmadeusD

Biology trivially determines behavior in the way that physics does. All our behaviours are the output of biological processes, scaffolded on processes of fundamental physics.

Yes, but what does it mean in the context of a political or social topic like under this thread? Almost nothing imo. What is nature, what is biology... its just whatever happens to happen.

When you take quotes like this:

... the biology of males [ ... ] Simply put, the necessity for governors, administrators, military, and more for a society to function calls upon the male biology of a hierarchical structure. The female biology of gathering and caring for children [ ... ] gender roles arise naturally ... and women are meant to be the homemakers and child caretakers, while men are meant to be the organizers [ ... ] Most women are simply not capable, by biology — ButyDude

With uses of words like 'meant' or 'necessity' in these quotes, I don't see them as justifiable. They assume or presume these things function in some preferrable way or even perfect way in the first place and could not be done in any other way. Moreover, they don't consider that when you get deviations from the norm, then surely those deviations or changes are too just natural, because its just the consequence of biology in exactly the same way - because biology is what caused them. So how can you use biology as a foundation for discussions about the social or political? You cannot. You can have arguments based on merit, but if certain merits happen to - or happen to not - be general common occurrence in nature, that should not be the point at all. Thats just completely incidental.

Arguing the benefits of social norms or hierarchies should have nothing to do with biology. Yes, social hierarchies tend to happen in various ways and this is a consequence of biology in the trivial sense that any organism behavior must be an output of biology.

But this is the interest of the biologist, not the concern of a politician.

Well, why not play the game? — Banno

Yes, I do play the game, there's no other choice, but there's always a caveat. I think its impossible to view the world outside of some particular perspective and so in that sense I would say that our notion of objective truth is an idealization. We might say there is an objective way the world is but I don't think there is a single perspective-independent way to characterize it. If I were to say there are objective truths, I don't think I would be able to give a satisfying characterization without caveats. I don't want to conflate my belief in an objective state of the world and my ability to articulate things about them because the latter is something I cannot do.

Are you saying it is better to play the game in the wrong way? — Banno

No, I mean right way in the sense of avoiding and ignoring caveats which makes the veracity of "truths" seem obvious.

Trouble is, that's just an idealisation. — Banno

Honestly, I feel like my views on the world would actually be less consistent if I didn't think that my views or the things I said did not suffer those kinds of qualities of idealization or related issues. Part of the central basis of my views is that what we do or say is at the mercy of the constraints of how our minds, brains work as computational systems. It would actually be not as coherent if I didn't think these kinds of things to my own mind and thoughts, beliefs, theories all the time. Why would I be exempt from things I apply to the rest of the academic and cognitive world in its entirety?

The idealization thing is only an issue for people with a certain kind of goal here... which I do not think I share.

There are true sentences — Banno

Yes, when you agree to play the game in the right way. Even better when you ignore the parts where it breaks down.

The way I see it, these paradoxes show in a nice way how all truth is an idealization. Why? Because we never have direct objective access to some kind of objective truth. The best we have is a kind of proxy that involves sequences of events with some kind of formal structure, enacted by some kind of observer. In other words, we can't talk about truth, we can just act: say things or assert things or behave in ways that seem coherent in the context of our environment. Our talk about truth cannot be separated from this: from how truth-talk, inference and observation occurs. There needs to be certain assumptions filled to make this stuff valid and "coherent"... but they can be broken.

The subject matter of truth is an idealized model of the "truth" process, of the process of these acts, inferences, observations. But because it is idealized, the required assumptions are only implicit. I like to think the best model is a communication process: an environment provides a signal and the observer responds with an appropriate signal (this in itself is an idealization ignoring how or the means by which the observer validates its signal to itself, in terms of use). We also have state transitions: producing a signal implies a change of state in the observer / environment.

Maybe not a universal explanation, but I think a big feature for many notable paradoxes... the major assumption broken is the underlying assumption that for communication to occur there must be a clear object/subject divide. To talk about the environment, the environments behavior must be completely independent of the signal the observer uses - something which seems like our assumptions about objectivity in the world. The world or things exists or have truth objectively and independently regardless of the signal the observer produces to respond to it in the communication game - context independence. If we see the observer's state transitions as being induces by the environment then the world can provide a signal which induces an observer state transition to a matching signal (which contains information of what is the case) and that is that. The communication problem is finished and the observer state will be stable so long as the environment doesn't change.

But if the world is dependent on the signal then stability is broken because, like the observer changes their signal due to the environment, now the environment changes due to the observer's signal. The observer's "truth" description of the environment then induces the environment to change its signal. If the signals that the environment and observer can make are all easily distinguishable and unique to every possible new situation, then stability is lost and the environment and observer will keep changing, inducing changes in each other. Like a (idealized) mirror scenario: you hold up a signal of what you see in the mirror, but the second you hold up your signal, the mirror image has changed to you holding a signal. So to communicate what you see, you must now hold up a signal which is about you holding a signal... but that changes the mirror image again. The stability of the observer's signal is impossible because any signal they make changes what they are observing which then changes their signal and it goes on and on. It seems to me, all these paradoxes are only ever made salient when you talk about their consequences in a sequential fashion like this which never stabilizes. Obviously the mirror alludes to how self-reference is a special case of this.

The "truth" then cannot be beyond the assumptions and processes that embody how observers enact their epistemic behaviors. And once the formal or mechanical or physical scaffolding that supports that fails then so does notions of truth. Without the strong object-subject divide enforcing context-independence then it is impossible for the signals of the environment and observer to match up at any point in time (denoting stable, coherent communication). This doesn't necessarily need to be between one observer and environment (or an observer and themself) either but maybe networks of observers communicating to each other in a way that context-independence fails for all of them because the signals directly influence other signals in the network of communication.

The fact that these paradoxes can occur just reflects the mechanical or formal capabilities of the system being described and the same which underwrites any communication process - sometimes the system cannot settle in its dynamics. Our notions of truth or even the notion of communication are secondary; communication as we commonly see it assumes that there is an objective fact of the matter about a meaning of what these signals represent which is somehow beyond the formal or physical mechanics of the situation. In reality, the mechanics are all there is, just like the epistemic activities of humans is nothing more than brain behaviour, or maybe sequences of experiences - depending on how you want to view the mind. Our everyday coherent notions of truth or communication require constraints beyond what is constrained in these mechanics and so it is no surprise they sometimes fail.

I think probably another reason why things like these fail sometimes, which I won't go much further into, is something which I crudely refer to under the umbrella of factorization assumptions. which sometimes we cannot but help make, but also may make things like computation or representation easier. For instance, If we want to make statements about the world, and that information is in both the word meanings AND syntax, well they cannot be independent when it comes to any kind of truth descriptions of the world (but maybe speech isn't just about truth so I am deliberately ignoring part of the picture). However, for whatever reasons, whether trivial or sophisticated, syntax and semantics are obviously independent, which allows you to make nonsensical statements - e.g. colorless green ideas sleep furiously - which again reflect the fact that the mechanics and formal constraints on truth are much tighter than the constraints on the systems which enact or embody these things for us. Its interesting that when you look at machine learning and occasionally computational neuroscience, things like factorization assumptions that enforce statistical independence are used because it makes inference easier... however, it also amounts so something like making a deliberately false assumption about the data. You can even see this kind of thing in a slightly different way in moral statements: many statements are very coarse like "stealing is bad" but in reality we all know that whether stealing is bad depends on the situation - its different in every scenario (e.g. what if stealing was involved in some operation which was about national security) - but because there are regularities we can assume we can make the simplifying statement "stealing is bad" is independent of the situation.

Yes, I wasn't necessarily trying to identify meaning with function but more like there isn't anything more to what we call meaning than 'function' which is just a vague way of me talki g about sequences of events. Like Kripke, Wittgenstein, Quine suggest, I think meaning becomes completely deflated. There's no objective essence about it. We can concpetualize ourselves as complex brains which just go through sequences of brain states. Or alternately sequences of experiences. But with experiences it gets vague and I feel like my intuition of experiences are very different from some other people.

there are neither intensional nor intentional states imo

It seems to me that the identification of meaning and function per-se doesn't distinguish function realism from function anti-realism and idealism. (Kripkean skepticism comes to mind again) — sime

Not sure what you're saying here but definitely a fan of Kripkenstein.

I appreciate the answer and I like your forthrightness. But I don't think Chalmer's point in 'facing up to the problem of consciousness' really is a call for an explanation. It's not pointing out a flaw in the naturalist account, by saying the nature of consciousness is a problem for naturalism as currently understood. Or that scientific accounts of the mind leave something important out. — Wayfarer

I am not sure what you are suggesting the problem of consciousness is then. I think it must be related to explanation because if there was an explanation then there would be no issue for physicalism. I think though there are alternative ways of looking at naturalism if we go through the avenue of looking at how there may be inherent limits on explanation.

Ultimately, I think as metaphysical frameworks, naturalism and physicalism are pretty thin; but they also capture strong intuitions myself and other people have. As I have mentioned elsewhere I suspect maybe it could be conceptualized instead in terms of the rejection of certain scientist hypotheses about the world e.g. about dualism, the supernatural.

Philosophy itself is very much concerned with the meaning of being. I — Wayfarer

For me, meaning is functional. If our behavior is functionally explained by brains entirely then meaning is as well.

Not at all. I'm saying there is nothing special about science. I believe knowledge and methodology evolves in different ways to best suit the field. That's how physics has arrived at its methods, same with biology, same with history, sociology, musicology, theology, sabermetrics, anthropology, etc, etc.

I genuinely don't think that there is any possibility of explaining phenomenal consciousness through the lense of a biologist or anyone else. Because I don't think phenomenality can be explained by anyone, I have no motivation to look at things from any different perspective that were to be radically different from modern neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology. I am not casting away phenomena. I just don't think there can be given a compelling, satisfying explanation for what-it's-like-ness.

And I think the motivation for that is to try bring the issue into the ambit of science, neuroscience in particular, as if this makes it tractable to scientific method. It is exactly one of the targets of the hard problem. — Wayfarer

I think science is just how human knowledge naturally manifests for particular kinds of subject matter. If the hard problem cannot be resolved in science, it cannot be resolved in any area of human knowledge.

We can imbue machines with that ability, because we already possess it. If we can discern it in brain functions to some extent it's because we know what it is, and so, what we're looking for. And we know what it is, because it is internal to thought. If it were not already so, we would not be able to discern it in anything. We can't see it from the outside, though, because in order to see it, we must already possess it. — Wayfarer

Yes, but surely this is the case with all knowledge. Knowledge doesn't come in a vacuum without our own prior knowledge, prior abilities. I don't think it changes the empirical relationships we observe, which suggest that the cause of what we possess is brains.

Yes, I think this is reasonable insofar as it doesn't devolve into dualism.

I don't know if I think epistemological priority comes into this. For me its about consistent observations we make.

This stuff:

ability to make inferences, to infer causality, to say that this phenomena must mean that [x]. — Wayfarer

Might be one.
Facts about things like brains can be another. They don't really contradict each other at all, and why would they? What we know about the world and have observed tells us that they are intimately related to a deep, deep extent. Its pretty much certain at this point that our abilities to do anything mental - to see, think, behave, whatever - are a direct consequence of brain function. Thats just the status of our knowledge about the world at the moment and I don't think things like the hard problem of consciousness give us any reason to doubt that. In light of the hard problem, nothing about the mind can be reduced, abstract or not. That doesn't mean these things are not a consequence of brain function. Computers and machine learning programs can perform abstraction. In theory, any kind of abstraction could be performed by some kind of neural network.

Reading this article is like trying to translate a completely different Kuhnian paradigm. Its just completely disconnected from the way I think about it that I don't think it is saying anything or addressing anything that touches how I conceive of things. The brain is basically a neural network that can make inferences about sensory data, predict what goes next, generate behavior under a model of what should come next embodied in its physiology/anatomy. Abstractions are just a product of what these neural networks are calable of doing. Just completely alien to what this article talks about.

I'm not sure I understand where you're coming from. I'm pretty sure its been proven neural networks are like universal computers that can pretty much learn to perform any task in principle.

I like this doppelganger thing. Think most interesting question is how you would treat an identical copy of say, a family member or friend. Maybe to make it less trivial, frame in in a scenario where your friend goes off somewhere, some event happens, and they come back but there is the possibility this family member or friend could be a doppelganger. You don't know and they are otherwise identical in every single way including memories etc. They don't even know they may be a doppelganger.

Another interesting question possibly is how the transporter scenario meaningfully differs from say a scenario where someone has become clinically dead and their brain shuts down but then are brought back to life. Is there a point in such a kind of scenario where the discontinuity would render them a different person when they are resuscitated. Would other changes to the scenario make a difference like, when the brain is shut down, we replace some brain cells with different ones of an identical structure. Or maybe we scramble up the brain parts and then put them back together. Why would any of this make a difference while the brain is shut down before resuscitation?

I am not sure I see how mind-body dualism affects the scenario though.

I actually agree with you in how brains do time perseption but there is more to it. In dealing with the past or future, brains are picking up on something non-physical, retaining it, and using it as input for further mental processing. It's like the brain deals in these non-physical things. — Mark Nyquist

Why does this need to be the case? I don't see why the brain needs anything else other than, effectively, remember its own activity through processes such as synaptic plasticity and recurrent feedback.

As you say, recurrent neural networks, but there seems to be an ability to 'go off the page' of what is possible with physical matter and do things in a non-physical environment. Seems like math for example is an exercise in manipulating non-physicals — Mark Nyquist

Seems to me basically everything we experience is modeled off activity at our sensory boundaries. Things like math are just an abstraction of that information from our sensory boundaries. All our concepts are abstractions though. When I see a dog, that involves an abstraction because even though all dogs look different I can recognize that there is something the same about them and I can categorize them accordingly. The concept of similarity is as much an abstraction where I can identify different objects as the same. Once I can see objects as the same I can count them numerically, just as a direct consequence of sensory information. Obviously though, these concepts are so abstract that they can apply to virtually any different arrangement of sensory information. Simultaneously, this kind of abstraction is not qualitatively different from my ability to recognize a dog or recognize that lines have different directions. All perceptual categorization involves lumping different things into the same concept and this doesn't seem any different from how we have come upon concepts in math.

And what wound that mechanism be? — Mark Nyquist

Recurrent neural networks.. essentially. Not literally.. but similar concept in regard to allowing time-sensitive, history-dependent behavior.

Unfortunately for many of you, I am 85% sure the stochastic interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct. Unfortunate, because it is very boring and marks a return to the realism of classical particles with the caveat that they move about randomly. But it literally answers every single interpretational issue in quantum mechanics in very commonsensical parsimonious ways.

I guess there's part of the issue with bringing with bringing quantum mechanics into it ... interpretations are so controversial because everyones got very different opinions. Then again, its hard to ignore because if the quantum mysticists are correct then it does have possibly very big metaphysical implications. Big implications no matter who is correct I guess.

I'm still not entirely sure whether you mean some kind of dualism or just that something like math is obviously not a physical concept. The way I see it, all our categorizations are just high level abstractions of sensory input. Something like a dog is such an abstraction. Math is abstraction in the exact same way imo, only that it is so abstract that it doesn't pick out any specific physical object in the world. We can then make abstractions of abstractions, systems of rules for these abstractions in and of themselves in which we learn to manipulate content and then even superimpose onto other concepts (like when creating a mathematical model of empirical phenomena).

But when you say mental content drives the physical, this sounds like dualism.

I feel as though something needs to be said about physical reductionism and it's place in culture. One of the quotations I often fall back on is from Thomas Nagel's 2012 book, Mind and Cosmos. — Wayfarer

This 'poweful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality' comprises the basis of what is generally described as the modern scientific worldview. Although science itself has already overflowed those bounds on many different fronts, it still retains considerable if not always obvious influence in philosophical discourse: that what is real are the objectively-measurable attributes of the kinds of entities that science is able to analyse. 'The subject' was bracketed out of this reckoning at the very outset. (The quotations that Joshs provided in this post both diagnose and remedy this issue from the perspective of phenomenology and embodied cognitive science.)

This view is at the back of many of the arguments in favour of physical reductionism, as to admit an alternative philosophy is to have to defend some form of dualism or philosophical idealism and their attendant metaphysical baggage. — Wayfarer

I was talking about general explanations appropriate to their respective scales of being as opposed to mind-physical reduction.

I don't have the same issue as put forwarx in your quote because I simply don't believe that subjective experiences can be explained and so they don't really have a role in any of our explanations anymore than they already do in psychology. The only explanations we have are the kind of functional ones that cannot apply to experience.



One thing you have to understand is that because of the hard problem, it is impossible for there to be an intuitive connection between how brains work in a mechanistic manner compared to how we experience the world.

I think its less about trying to explain what minds are doing as we directly experience them and toward just finding neuronal architectures and objective functions that will lead to reasonably realistic replications of behavior that humans can do. The most you can do is correlate neural behavior and experiences or behaviors. There is no assumption of some kind of interaction with non-physical things. Obviously, many people will find this unsatisfying but for me, replicating complex behavior, finding information information processing principles is enough. We can't do more than that.

Yes, I think it makes sense that we cannot and maybe sometimes should not go for the most reductive explanations. I don't think of science as having a goal toward explaining things in increasingly reductive or decomposed ways.

But I do think, insofar as we have a spatial conception of the world, there is still this asymmetry of larger scales depending on the small in that kind of supervenience sense, which maybe is quite weak (too weak for decomposition? not sure, need to think about that) as opposed to a full blown reduction (Again, I think probably there are various ways of construing reductionism so its about strength of reduction). But then it has to be weak because then manner in which our models are incomplete and give different conceptual and empirical perspectives / reference frames, the taxonomy of our models and theories do not neatly match up at all to our ideal vision of a world full of objects with rigid boundaries organized at different levels. They may never match up to that ideal, even in principle, because we only can have insight into reality vicariously. We kind of blindly prod at reality and it prods us back, and obviously the prods we feel shouldn't be conflated with the cause of the prod. At the same time, maybe physics shouldn't be conflated with scale since physics works on all scales and some physics applies across multiple scales.

That said, I wouldn't underestimate the degree to which reductive physicalism is the default view of the public, and seen broadly as what "science says the world is like. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, I can see that, though I also think maybe the general public might not really know what reductive physicalism means their views might be still quite vague even if they lean toward reductive physicalism. And I think its possible to lean or are drawn toward reductive physicalism even if they don't actually hold the view. I think I am probably in that category. I don't think I am actually a reductive physicalist at all but there is this kind of gravitational pull tugging at my intuitions. I don't know if it just has something to do with how compelling a person finds science, or something like that.

this is also why compatibilism doesn't seem appealing to them. The problem isn't just that the mind is determined by what comes before any volitional act, it's that mental life has no causal efficacy because real causal power rests with the atoms and molecules. Often I also see a conflation where "if determinism is true then reductionism/smallism is also true," so that evidence for determinism (strong in some contexts IMO) becomes evidence for smallism (weak IMO). — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think I know what smallism is but tbh I don't find compatibilism that compelling for reasons like these.

But equally, it's obvious that organisms can learn to differentiate signals by the "sensori-motor loop". — Ludwig V

Yes, just that representations and symbols are not fundamental nor necessary to this picture.

But what's that like? — Ludwig V

Yup, thats the big mystery. I just fall on the position that that kind of thing is just outside the realm of explanation, description, anything. I can only assume that my experiences are what it's like to be certain kinds of structure in the world around the vicinity of the brain. Our models don't capture phenomenal experience but they are just that - models, not reality - I don't think they capture intrinsic ontology at all, nor do they carve out objective boundaries for ontologies. As you say, we prod and nature prods back, and all the proding can be done in various different purviews or perspectives.

What do you mean by "syllopsistic"? — Ludwig V

Often the way that it is looked at is that Brains are doing inference so that their models optimally match what it's like in the outside world. But obviously a non-representational view isn't about that nor does the brain ever have access to that to know if it is right or not and it cannot know in principle. I guess I just mean talking about things like efficient coding without needing to explicitly refer to objects outside the head (in the sense that the brain is trying to match some kind of representations to something it doesn't have access to).

I think one issue with this whole thing is there are various ways you could conceptualize physicalism. On one hand, you can just define it as explanations for everything being directly reducible to fundamental physics explanations. And people have pointed out this almost eliminativist view is very difficult to hold up just by virtue of how we explain and conceptualize a lot of things outside of fundamental physics. But then, is this the kind of physicalism most people hold? Probably not. I think most people are intuitive physicalists and haven't thought too precisely about it but it just seems intuitive to them. I wouldn't be surprised if those big phil surveys, where most people end up being physicalist, are full of respondents of that kind. Maybe they aren't really physicalists but more like naturalists of a general kind in the kind of manner I proposed on the first page of this thread - essentially they are anti-woo.

I think there are probably various different ways and extents of conceptualizing reduction too. I would actually speculate that not much actually outright reduces to something else without needing to invoke some kind of prior assumptions about how different theories connect. Maybe not everything can be satisfactorily explained in physical terms because different fields can have very different conceptual and empirical reference frames and then we have things like emergence and multiple-realizability. But if you accept the models that have held up in science then I find it very difficult not to accept that the objects and structures you find everywhere in your theories about the world in principle depend on, are constrained by, supervene on the structures we find in fundamental physics. You see that their behavior is enacted in or realized within the dynamics of those fundamental physical entities when looking at it from the lense of physics and the scales it operates in. Nothing additional in principle is involved in determining those dynamics even if we may want a more amenable higher-order description / explanation of those dynamics. Even if our fundamental theories are incomplete or cannot pragmatically do all the work on their own, it seems reasonable to suggest that we can describe things in the world at various different scales but the resolution at smallest scales will always produce distinctions that are more fundamental to which others can be decomposed, given the assumption of placing our models within spatiotemporal contexts where there is inevitable nesting.

But a symbol is always a symbol of something and a representation is always a representation of something. But in the case of mental states, we have no access to the "something" in either case — Ludwig V

Yes, I think the causes of sensation are inherently underdetermined, indeterminate. There is no inherent fact of the matter of what they mean or represent in reference to some external context.


""

The problem with taking this as conveying information about the specific physical structures of stimuli beyond the organism's sensory boundary is that the only thing sufficient for this process is the receptor perturbation, regardless of what caused that perturbation. All that is required is the presence of something sufficiently stimulating and eventually this results in action potentials that communicate information to the brain through action potentials: membrane depolarizations with stereotyped amplitudes and time-courses. Effectively, the only information the brain can receive are one-dimensional signals denoting the presence of some stimuli as distinct from the presence of others. By having different neurons whose firings are statistically independent, in the sense that they have been specialized to receive signals from some stimuli independently of others, signals do not get confused. However, given that all of the different types of receptor cells use the same form of membrane potential signaling, neither we nor the brain can in principle identify the cause of membrane activation by just looking at the nature of the membrane activation.

We have real life examples of this underdetermination. In nature, spurious signaling has been known to occur such that thermal fluctuations in the retina can cause perceptions that are indistinguishable from flashes of light in the dark. Rhodopsin which is used for detecting light in human retinal rod cells is in fact used as a means for light-independent thermosensation in fruit flies. Therefore, not only could an unidentified receptor cell's membrane activation be conceivably caused by any type of receptor interaction, the change at a given type of receptor could be caused by alternative possibilities. It's well documented how neuroscientists can even stimulate sensory receptors or downstream neurons to artificially produce sensations. In one radical case:


Paper - Embedding a Panoramic Representation of Infrared Light in the Adult Rat Somatosensory Cortex through a Sensory Neuroprosthesis; 2016.


Rats were fitted with prosthetic infrared sensors that sent signals directly into the whisker parts of the somatosensory cortex, allowing them to distinguish sources of infrared light in their environment. While the rats eventually learned to be able to discriminate between sources of infrared light and touch, they initially seemed to perceive infrared light sources as somatic whisker sensations. It is clear that given the initial confusion, the downstream neuronal architectures are incapable of discriminating the stimuli purely in virtue of the nature of the external causes of stimulation, whether from somatic vibrations or infrared light. Whether communicated through organic somatosensory afferents rooted in vibrations, electrodes from prosthetic infrared sensors or even re-routing of other modalities into the somatosensory cortex, all information is communicated via the same manner of membrane stimulation. What distinguishes the different sources of information is not anything inherent about their physical causes, but the statistical properties of the patterns of the homogeneous one-dimensional signals which are generated by those causes. These are in some sense incidental to those causes; neurons can perform blind-source separation on these signals but in theory those signals can be artificially mimicked like in a brain-in-vat type scenario. Given that the physical causes of signaling are underdetermined and the way that these signals can only convey a one-dimensional signal about the presence of something, we might see the information communicated as having no explicit notion of representational content beyond their binary states ("bits") of activation or silence. In a sense, the possible repertoire of states that can be generated by these "bits" is what actually gives the possible contents of experiences, independent of and irreducible to the extrinsic causes of those states. Insofar as different patterns or combinations of these states can directly cause distinct downstream responses, these contents then become actionable or usable and might be considered to have meaning in the context of other states.

No measurements are inherently capable of identifying what is being measured without the external observer having prior knowledge about what is being measured or how to interpret the outcomes; without something like an external observer role who assigns meaning to the membrane potential signals and then uses them appropriately, reducibility to the physical causes of sensory activation as we know them is not a given. Such semantic ambivalence is even implied in information theory, as stated by its most preeminent founder, Claude Shannon:

"The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages. The system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design."

""

(Taken very out of context from https://hl99hl99.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-impossibility-of-reduction.html?m=1 which looking back on it I regard as unfinished and in need of lots of editing.)


'Meaning' is a superficial but maybe useful/intuitive idealization that does not fully reflect how cognition and brains work - purely mechanistic enaction or transformation between brain states (not representations). It is about predictive mechanisms in neurons from which sensori-motor loops emerge, about cause and effect. I would say experiences are like a coarse-graining of the structure of brain dynamics.

Nice article:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30714889/

Nice quote:

"Knowing is the process of dynamic assembly across multileveled systems in the service of a task. We do not need to invoke represented constructs such as “object” or “extended in space and time” outside the moment of knowing. Knowing, just like action, is the momentary product of a dynamic system, not a dissociable cause of action.... We think to act. Thus, knowing may begin as and always be an inherently sensorimotor act."

(quote from Dynamic Systems Theories - Esther Thelen, Linda Smith - Handbook of Child Psychology, Sixth Edition, Volume One: Theoretical Models of Human Development; 2006)

Important to recognize is that any input-output configuration relating one (set of) neuron(s) can be seen as a sensori-motor configuration in itself. There is a nesting of sensori-motor loops on different scales. We might consider even eco-systems as behaving as if it were a big sensori-motor loop in some ways. Then we have individual humans, brains, neuronal systems inside a brain at different scales. It even gets smaller than a neuron, on the scale of the dendrite where signals propagate and interact along the membrane in terms of excitation/inhibition/modulation.

Efficient coding should be syllopsistic and action-oriented -

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4010728/

https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.09063

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006899321004352#b0340

https://direct.mit.edu/isal/proceedings/isal2020/32/121/98428

Indeed, they do not, this is why I said they aren't specific to the hard problem of consciousness. — Skalidris

I think my point on is that these aren't really part of the nature of the hard problem, fullstop. And my quote was never intended to directly refer to those things.

In any knowledge that we create, we can always generate new "why" questions that we aren't able to answer, this isn't specific to consciousness — Skalidris

First part of the problem: we can never produce knowledge that perfectly matches reality. This problem isn't specific to consciousness — Skalidris

I think neither of these really reflect the problem of explaining phenomenal experiences. There is something very different about the way experience cannot be described or explained.

Well arguably these are not analogous scenarios in the respective worlds.

Yes, this is a good point which always gets me thinking.

I guess this is an open question depending on how someone conceives phenomenal experiences.

I am not familiar with this Thales thing but I would argue maybe things like this add extra things (extra scientific hypotheses) to the world beyond what is in current science. I suspect many idealists and panpsychists would also add extra things or at least extra explanations which are beyond what is in current science.

Maybe some idealists or panpsychists wouldn't be so ornate. But then again, isn't the idea that the world itself is just consciousness also an extra scientific hypothesis? If this notion of physicalism I brought forward is just about the rejection of certain hypotheses then having physicalist beliefs doesn't add any scientific hypotheses in the same way. I guess this view of physicalism would be kind of minimalist metaphysically.

I think maybe I would also say that without some additional distinctive structure beyond current scientific hypotheses then the metaphysical idea that everything is mental is just as vague and empty as the idea everything is physical.

Just a random thought. But seems to me that things like materialism, physicalism, naturalism are all kind of difficult to define in a way that doesn't come with some triviality, e.g. Hempel's dilemma, also the thought that if something like the "supernatural" ever became confirmed, it would just trivially become natural. Methodology also to me seems to just appeal to whatever scientists happen to do which is complicated, not easily summarized, perhaps doesn't even have any hard rules (which might seem trivial if anything that gets results is included). Metaphysical views like structuralism that seem to have been created as improvements on physicalism seem to be just as difficult to define - notion of structure seems extremely vague and general, to me at least.

Seems to me these kinds of views seem most useful when you have something to contrast them against like dualism.

I wonder if these views, rather than a metaphysical view, maybe could be seen as closer to like a loose grouping of scientific hypotheses about the absence of certain type of things like extra mental substance and against things like parapsychology, cryptozoology, pseudoscience (pseudoscience maybe just being more like a label applied to certain ideas that are considered false but are still discussed as true in some fringe communities). Arguably the same denouncements could be said applied to methods too.

My remark about recognising the limitations of the model is based on two issues. First, all this simply assumes that we can count a causal process as a cognitive or symbolic activity. But there's an issue about whether this is legitimate. Second, the example is fascinating because it simply ignores the so-called "hard problem". — Ludwig V

Oh I see, quite right; however, I was not trying to invoke that kind of model of the brain or mind. I wouldn't say efficient coding necessatily entails that kind of idea and my views of the brain and mind don't hinge strongly on symbol or representation.

I think we both more or less agree about what is happening in the picture physically and causally in the scenario you are talking about so maybe there is not much more to be said. I just have a kind of "No-Self" kind of view (" " from wikipedia personal identity page) which makes me view those events differently - the causo-historical significance is for the components of the system but nothing about those components or their causal relationships carves out an objective self-boundary. But again, I think we agree on what is happening here physically.

Yes but my point is that if there is no objective identity then this seems trivial in the sense that it is trivial that we are always constantly changing. Its trivial different events have different consequences. Its not trivial how to objectively construe those consequences as a self-contained identities with continuity over time amidst changes.

A popular matephor, but wrong. Nature does not sit out there (wherever that is), like a joint of meat, waiting to be carved up and served up. Nor are we separate from nature, hovering over it looking for the joins. Nature prods us and we prod it back. Interaction, all the time. Nothing is possible without it. — Ludwig V

Yes, I agree this is a much better way of looking at it.

It goes back to the question whether we can say that computer calculates or speaks. Unlike Searle (if I understand him right) I think we not only do say that but that it is not a mistake to do so.
Nonetheless, I’m sure that in the end, we will have to recognize the limitations of this model/metaphor, if only so that we can get round them. — Ludwig V

What do you mean on this bit?

I think my point in the context of this post here is that if "personal identity" is not objective then the gamete point is trivial because there is no objective fact of the matter that the possibilities belong to a single individual. At the same time there is the strange counterexample of two possible world where everything in someone's life was the same except for the fact that in one world that individual had been conceived with different gamete that had identical genetic information. The difference the gamete brings here then seems about as significant as if one day that person had decided to put on a different pair of socks. You could say that the person is not the same but given that everything else in the world is identical, surely there is claim to say that this is a version of that person in another world. Looking at your Ryle considerations, in general I think often there is no fact of the matter about what makes these counterfactuals the case. We infer that things could have been otherwise purely through our ability to imagine things and there seems no bounds on what could have been the case without having to place an artificial restriction on what seems plausible or not. There's nothing to substantiate these.

Well @Moliere can correct me if I am wrong but I think they are using intension to motivate an argument which is about extension.

Perhaps it would be better to think of what is going on as simplification. We have to decide (and agree) what features of the world are important in a particular context and need to be attended to and which are not. — Ludwig V

Yes, I think this is a core part of science. We carve up nature into systems that are easier to handle, ignoring its interactions with the outside world, averaging over the details to produce simple rules or descriptions. This is exactly what we do in experiments too by controlling the environment so inferences are simpler. Arguably, brains even do this when you consider some common ways of conceptualizing how neurons work like efficient coding.

I am denying objective identity and so I am denying that the developmental trajectory of an organism is deeply intwined with some objective identity. The organism is a collection of components, always changing, always in flux, taking things in from the environment, spitting things back out. There is no essential self there.

My view:

1. There is no dualism; this is demonstrated by the incoherence of the p-zombie concept.

2. The question then becomes about epistemological reasons why we cannot reduce the experiential to the physical.

There is a logical argument, A: If experiences are information about the outside world then it is inconsistent that information about the brain should be derivable. However, this does not mean there is no information about how brains divide up the information in the world - e.g. see that opponent processing and trichromacy in our retinal neuronal architectures were all but predicted by observations about the phenomenal structure of colour - at the same time, what was inferred was not the actual physiology of brain processing but just the way that the brain divides up sensory input that enters the retina by frequencies. It didn't tell us that a brain as we know it was doing the dividing, just that a division or organizing was being made.

There is a skeptical/indeterminacy argument, B: The way brains are structured simply does not give them access to information about the micro-physical causes of input (whether externally or internally) - such causes are inherently indeterminate (and much of the information lost anyway at larger scales).

Conceptual primitives argument, C: A description or explanation is just outlining/modeling relations in a conceptual space. Descriptions or explanations cannot go outside of the space / framework they sit in. If our conceptual space is founded on primitives that are experiential qualities then there is no way of explaining or describing those experiences in a satisfactory way since they are the primitive foundations of the entire explanatory space. They cannot be decomposed or reduced further so they seem ineffable, but this ineffability is unavoidable in any inferential system like our brain that can make explanations.

3. It also must be acknowledged that our scientific theories don't say anything about ontology, they are part of the same explanatory framework as C above. Scientific theories are like predictive tools and there can be a plurality of descriptions. There is therefore no inherent contradiction between physics and experiences if we say that physics doesn't tell us about inherent ontology. Equally we might say that the notion of experience doesn't tell us much about ontology other than the fact it is informative about the external world. If anything, coherently non-trivial fundamental ontologies are inherently unattainable.

Next part is more speculative:

4. If my experiences are what its like to be a brain then we might want to try vaguely conceptualize the world in a way that accomodates their existence. We might look to a kind of structuralist but minimalist metaphysics where all structure is on ontologically equal ground. What we may deem most fundamental in the world may be things like symmetries, invariances, regardless of the scale they occur. Experiences are what its like to be some structure, invariances, information (difference that makes a difference). Specifically my experiences reflect particular macroscopic invariances in the vicinity of the brain among many others that exist and are described in physics, chemistry, biology at various scales.

Simply because if one is skeptical about a coherent ontology for identity then there is nothing for it to be potent about. All it would then be about is labelling things and keeping track of those labels.