Can you demonstrate how quus is dealt with by the approaches you have said?

Girard's Ludics is a formalisation of this pragmatic idea of meaning as interaction — sime

Well, on the face of it, this sounds not disimilar to Wittgenstein's meaning as use.

I'm suggesting such knowledge is not out of reach. To show that it is out of reach would require ignoring all the people who claim to have such knowledge, or proving they do not. . . — FrancisRay

Who actually has a suggestion though? I don't think a fundamental ontology can be characterized because all explanations are functional and rely on our stream of experience. What does anything actually mean independently of the dynamics of experiences? What is the utility of any factual statement except in how that statement predicts further experiences? We might then want to characterize experience as the fundamental ontology but I resist that because I don't think there is a coherent account of what experience is or means and it seems impossible to characterize publicly or in scientific paradigms due to the nature of the hard problem.

Ah. I didn't say this and would argue against it. You're conflating consciousness and experience, but I;m suggesting that the former is prior to the latter. — FrancisRay

Well this is confusing; you seemed to say it since you replied to the quote that you agreed. I have only been referring to experience the whole time. I am not sure what you mean by consciousness here. When I say experience is primitive, I just mean in a kind of epistemic sense - experiences are immediately apparent and intuitive to us and they don't have an explicit characterization... I just see blue, I cannot tell you what it is.

My whole experience (tentatively I would say consciousness) is just a stream of these things. They cannot be reduced further... they are the bottom and foundation for everything I know and perceive. That is to say nothing about reality but just that experiences are the primitive, irreducible foundation of what I know and perceive.

Bear in mind that experience-experiencer is a duality that must be reduced in order to overcome dualism. . . — FrancisRay

Not sure what you mean by experience-experiencer duality beyond conventional dualism. I am not sure what "experiencer" means.

There are no primitive concepts or experiences. This was shown by Kant. — FrancisRay

Again, my notion of primitiveness just relates to the immediate, irreducible apprehension of experiences after which there is nothing more basic epistemically.

For a solution one would have to assume a state or level of consciousness free of all concepts and prior to information. — FrancisRay

I don't think you can have consciousness free of information nor do I understand wht you think this is required for a solution.

and information theory requires an information space, and the space comes before the information. . — FrancisRay

I don't think there is priority here. If there is information, it exists on an information space; n information space is defined by the information in it. One doesnt come before the other.

If you believe this you will never have a fundamental theory and will will have to live with the 'hard' problem. forever. I wonder what leads you to believe this when it is just a speculation. If you believe this then much of what I'm saying will make no sense to you. I would advise against making such assumptions, or indeed any assumptions at all. , . — FrancisRay

I don't see what your alternative suggestion could possibly be if you don't believe dualism is true. Regardless of what you think the fundamental reality is, the evidence is overwhelming about how consciousness relates to or can be characterized in terms of brains in a functional sense (I hope you understand what I mean when I say functionally). What is your alternative characterization?

I am starting to think you haven't understood anything I have said at all. Its hard to believe now that you could have said my previous post was perceptive and a good summary if you really understood it. Neither have I been trying to think about some fundamental theory that resolves the hard problem. My initial post said that I didn't think the so called hard problem could be solved at all.

Yes, that's part of W's point. We can apply the rule to imaginary or possible cases, but we have to formulate them first. We cannot apply a rule to infinity. Hence mathematical induction. — Ludwig V

Yes, obviously induction is one of the big parts of this, but I wasn't intentionally referring to that. I was referring to the idea of starting with some repertoire of rules and using it to generate some behavior (e.g. the behaviors people acceptably think of as addition). Very true, the induction problem applies even to this issue which just emphasizes Wittgenstein's points, and I have been an advocating for my interpretation him this whole time, even if inarticulately.

I think it is arguable that nearly all humans find counting and the basic arithmetical operations intuitive, so it's not arbitrary, Mathematicians have specialized skills that enable them to find things intuitive that the layperson cannot even comprehend because they don't have the requisite training or ability.

It looks like we are going to continue to disagree, but that's OK with me. I believe I would change my mind if given good reason to, but I haven't seen anything approaching such a reason thus far. — Janus

I genuinely think we agree on more than you think but i think you have a different understanding or interpretation of the issue that is put forward.

The question of intuition is arbitrary because this is about the notion of objective rules or meanings. Why does intuition matter for objectivity? A putatively objective scientific theory should be true regardless of intuition. The truth of thermodynamics doesnt depend on my cats ability to find it intuitive. Intuition doesn't stop behaviour being describable in a certain way, and if you want to appeal to intuition then I will have to ask you to define what you mean further, which you haven't tried to do so far because I think you will know that will be very difficult (even if you could, I think its always possible to provide some quus-like alternative, or continue the regress of definitions or perhaps point to counterexamples like Moliere did in terms of how your counting example cannot be identical to addition semantically); however, without such definitions, how can I know you mean what you mean and rule out alternatives. It points to how vacuous the explicit semantics of these things become as opposed to implicitly based demonstrations of our ability to follow rules (but then its hard to explicitly characterize when and why these rules are broken). You have appealed to implicit ability as a defence several times which is why I think we agree more than you think. But the problem isnt about skepticism towards whether we can perform certain behaviors, its about objective semantic characterizations. Appealing to your intuitive ability to perform a behavior that you cannot even define properly is not an explicit semantic characterization!

Intuition really doesn't matter because its arbitrary. What is intuitive to a human may not be intuitive to an animal or an artificial machine. What a mathematician finds intuitive might be different from a layman.

I think you can. If you can make up arbitrary rules like quaddition then you can think up infinite many rules which give describe all the same processing ability.

Even if you could come up with something, that wouldn't change the fact that addition is intuitively gettable, while the alternative is just some arbitrary set of rules that happened to work, and which would be parasitic on the gettability of addition in any case. — Janus

To you maybe. It might be totally unintuitive to a different kind of being. Addition might be arbitrary or unintuitive to someone else just like how you might find the notion of some operator that subsumes division, addition etc etc unintuitive.

If they don't make any difference, how are they alternative?

On the other hand, it is perfectly possible for two or more of us to get along quite well for a long time with different interpretations of the same concept or rule. The differences will not show themselves until a differentiating case turns up. This could happen with quaddition or any other of the many possibilities. Then we have to argue it out. The law, of course, is the arena where this most often becomes an actual problem. — Ludwig V

Well you can use sets of concepts with different meanings to refer to the same thing, enables by the natural underdetermination.

There is a forward problem of mapping rules to behavior in which case, I can use any number of multitude of different concepts and combinations of concepts in order to produce the same behavior as you might get from addition.

There is also the inverse problem of mapping behavior to rules in which case, even under some single case of differentiation, there is always a multitude of alternatives that underdetermine what the successful rule actually is at any given time.

What is fundamental to understanding concepts is not their definition, but knowing how to apply the definition. That is a practice, which is taught. Learning to count and measure defines number and quantity. — Ludwig V

Well that suggests you have a definition in the first place. Neither would I say that you can define these concepts by the behavior itself. But yes, part of my view all along is the distinction between explicit definitions which are chronically underdetermined and the implicit behavior which we have a mastery of but is difficult to give explicit descriptions.

As stipulated the rules of quaddition do provide different outcomes: — Janus

My point here is the forward problem as described earlier. Even though quaddition has particular outcomes, someone can generate all of the behavior of addition and define it, have definitions, without using addition, even if they require a plethora of other concepts to make it work. And again, this all depends on people agreeing with all the necessary concepts which are required to make something like quaddition work. My understanding of all concepts is scaffolded on prior concepts and prior implicit understanding or abilities that have been learned by practise without definitions.

unnecessarily pessimistic — FrancisRay

In what way? I don't see it as pessimistic at all or that anything is lost. What does a solution to the hard problem look like? I don't think there is a good one I can think of which doesn't imply some sort of dualism which I fundamentally disagree with.

This would be a hopeless approach for for the reasons you give. A fundamental theory must look beyond computation and intellection. — FrancisRay

I am not suggesting looking for a fundamental ontology based on computation but an explanation for why knowing about fundamental ontologies are out of reach.

I think the explanation is actually already there, it just has to be articulated and demonstrated. Like you said, experiences are primitive. We know experiences are related to the functional architecture of our brains. We can transfer or demonstrate the concept of this kind of primitiveness into the architectures and functional repertoires of A.I. We use A.I. to demonstrate the limits of what kinds of information is transferable from the environment, what kinds of concepts are created and what information they don't or can't include, and then see what kind of metacognitive consequences this has. Does a. A.I. come up with primitive phenomenal concepts on a purely functional basis that it cannot explain, similarly to our hard problem? This is a totally plausible research program even if it may not be possible right at this moment.

But if you think human beings are are intelligent machines or one of Chalmers' zombies then I'm afraid you're stuck with the hard problem for all eternity. This assumption renders the problem impossible. . — FrancisRay

Not sure what you mean here but functionally, yes we are just intelligent machines. We are just brains.

Quaddition seems to arbitrarily countermand the natural logic of counting and addition; the logic that says there is neither hiatus nor terminus. — Janus

There would only be a logic to countermand if there was a sensible definition of these things in the first place which specified the correct behavior without requiring prior understanding... and if rules like quaddition provided different outcomes to addition. Sure, only considering quaddition on its own doesn't provide the right answers but considrr that there are an infinite number of possible alternative characterizations which you can even use in any number of combinations.

It is therefore possible to use alternative concepts without any difference in behaviour. How is that countermanding logic? It cannot be. This is in the same vein as Quine's indeterminacy of translation also.

Again, the only recourse you have is "Naturalness" and given that I don't think you can give me a satisfying definition of counting or quantity, that to me is almost like begging the question without being able to tell me what you are even begging, so to speak. The only reason I know what you are saying is that I have an implicit undrrstanding of what you are talking about. Not necessarily an explicit one.

You've already said that you think this stuff is implicit so I think it must mean we agree more or less but you are failing to distinguish that there is the explicit notion of these rules and then the implicit "blind" notion. This is maybe why we are talking at cross purposes because you agree about the implicit thing, so do I. The whole debate however is about the explicit characterization.

I think some people would assume that means I end up a behaviorist — frank

If we want a complete description of behavior then I believe that a better term would be a neurobiological-ist which I think many people would find totally reasonable perspective!

I don't think the so called hard problem can ever be solved. All our explanations are functional, that is therr nature, so how on earth can there be any kind of explanation of the sort we want for qualitative conscious experiences?

A conscious-centric framework will not even be able to explain consciousness because it is possibly the most trivial concept we have since it is the primitive base of all knowledge. There is absolutely no constraint on what can be considered to be an experience. It seems plausible to me that there are an infinite multitude of experiences that we could never even imagine for different possible kinds of sentient agents. Once you think like that, can you even point out what it means not to be conscious or be an experience? I am not even sure anymore, especially if someone like a panpsychist thinka that even the simplest possible micro-thing can have some form of experience that is just extremely, unfathomably basic.

There's no possible characterization of consciousness. It is utterly primitive to us as information-processing creatures. All we can do is fit it in as best we can with the rest of science. Since consucousness has no actual characterization, the only thing we can do is juxtapose with useful physical concepts like people already do in neuroscience. Physical concepts are doing all the hard work and science hasn't found any evidence of dualism. Sure, panpsychism could be true but again since consciousness lacks any decent characterization, which of our concepts do the heavy lifting in relating experience to the rest of reality? The physical concepts.

Again, explanations are inherently functional. Experiences are not. There will never be a good explanation of consciousness and anything useful to our knowledge will be functional and so inherently at odds with describing or explaining experiences. Maybe physical concepts don't explain consciousness like we want them to but physical concepts are central to any kind of useful explanations about fundamental reality. I think fundamental ontology is likely impossible to comprehend and the next step is a computational or informational explanation of why that is and for how that hard problem arises in intelligent machines like us in the first place.

Actually, thinking about it, I don't even really know what it means for the universe to be physical either in a similar way, since all I have is my experiences and my experiences definitely so not provide a direct link to the physical reality beyond my sensory boundaries. In so far as physical models are just predictive instruments that usually involve math substantially, then the boundaries of what it means to say the universe is physical (in the sense of our models) or mathematical blurs. But then, maybe its trivial, because we can impose mathematical language on almost anything in some way.

What does it really mean for the universe to be mathematical though? Doesn't seem like its about platonic math objects floating around but if not that I have no clue what it means that the universe is math.

But not the significance that know-how doesn't give a determinate know-that

I have been talking specifically about synthetic a priori knowledge of what is intrinsic to embodied experience: spatiotemporality, differentiation and the other attributes I mentioned. — Janus

Well I would say there is still a difference between know-how and know-that when worded like that.

You keep mentioning objectivity, which has nothing to do with what I've been arguing — Janus

Well what have you been arguing?

It's not mere speculation because experience is something we can reflect on and analyze. Metaphysics is not based on experience at all but on imaginative hypothesizing. — Janus

I think in many ways reflecting on experience is just that though. I feel like people can have radically different views of what experiences are, what feelings are, what they actually perceive, and how do people make something of their perceptions other than by intuition?

I don't believe you can. — Janus

Hmm, thinking about it, I think it might be difficult if your intuitions are set on counting rather that quounting. But maybe a quonter would find no problem with it.

inevitably evolve out of experience — Janus

But so what? Unless you can show that someone cannot use those "parasitic" concepts and that they don't or can't work, then what is to say it matters what is "natural" when that itself is dependent on contextual factors of how your brain is structured and the things you happen to learn. I am the type to think that just because everyone agrees on something, doesn't make it some how unique or objective. I think ultimately what is "natural" just boils down to something like an impelled preference and I don't see that as a valid way of arguing that something is somehow unique, correct or objective.

Well, it's not what I mean. Armchair speculation I would class as metaphysics, not phenomenology. — Janus

I don't really see how phenomenology is not another form of armchair speculation in a similar way.

I don't see the relevance at all, and no one seems to be able to explain clearly what it is, so... — Janus

The relevance for what? Its simply the issue of whether the descriptions you ascribe to behavior is uniquely determined as opposed to underdetemined or indeterminate.

We are not blind to considering how counting and the basic arithmetical operations can be instantiated using actual objects. This is not the case with quus. — Janus

I can demonstrate quus with objects just as well as I can with addition. Neither am I blind to doing that with counting. What I am blind to is a good description of what counting or quantities are. I know these things very intuitively, I am very good at doing them. Its difficult to give a explicit account in a way that I would personally find satisfying imo.

You can derive addition from counting. Counting basically is addition. — Janus

I dunno, it seems to me with what

— "Moliere

has been saying that what these concepts mean and how they relate to each other is not trivial in a way that questions whether counting actually does much at all in this context. You want to use the example of counting tonshow you can get to what we deem thr correct answer but I think demonstrating your ability to meet a goal is not the same as specifying a description or meaning of what you actually did.

I'm not seeing the relevance to deciding whether addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are basically derivable from counting operations. — Janus

If you can't derive addition from counting then how are you proving you are doing addition?

If it was them having fun surely they would be bored of it by now. The persistence of this phenomenon us what you would expect if it was just our minds playing tricks imo. Similar with ghosts.

Thinking about that Im curious whether more people believe in ghosts or aliens.

Ive always found that the way humans have interacted so far with "aliens" is too bizarre for it to be actual aliens and is more likely just like Peoples minds playing tricks. I mean UFOs have been seen for decades and they seem to be really common. Like people are seeing this stuff all the bloody time.

Its just like... what kind of super advanced alien civilization would do that. Its like bizarre trolling behavior just basically spamming space craft all over earth for decades on end for no apparent reason. Just doesnt make any sense to me that UFOs are actual intelligent aliens.

It is proven under Fine's theorem here:

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=2543155278787880428&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1

That Bell violations are equivalent to the absence of joint probability distribution for all variables which is equivalent to the presence of incompatible joint probability distributions caused by non-commuting variables.

That is suggesting that Bell violations are caused by non-commuting variables and this is a completely formal result; in other words, it does not matter why the variables do not commute, they will cause Bell violations so long as they fulfil the formal conditions that characterize non-commuting observables. Quantum mechanics fulfils these exact criteria; in having non-commuting variables it will have Bell violations as a necessary mathematical consequence. That is absolutely sufficient for the "mystery", without requiring a physical explanation since the relation between Bell violations and joint probability distributions is completely formal, even if it looks really really bizarre.

The something that is "at work" is the non-commutativity in the spin measurements (it causes the absence of global joint distribution) which has a natural local explanation in that 1) canonical position-momentum commutation is a generic feature certain kinds of random dynamic systems, even classical ones 2) 3d descriptions of rotation inherently have non-commuting properties for formal reasons which you can actually demonstrate for yourself by applying successive rotations in different orders even to your own hand.

My point in making that distinction was that some concepts, like counting and addition come naturally, and other concepts like quaddition are arbitrary artificial constructs. — Janus

I don't really understand the connection as I have read in your comments so far tbh. Neither do I see a real significance in the distinction between "natural"and "artificial" concepts.

I don't see the phenomenological dimension of philosophy as "armchair speculation", but rather as reflection on what we actually do. — Janus

Well thats more or less what I mean.

I see the quus issue as not merely under-determined, but trivial and of no significance, and I wonder why people waste their time worrying about such irrelevancies; but maybe I'm too stupid to see the issue, in which case perhaps someone can show me that I'm missing something. — Janus

Well most philosophical issues are arguably trivial and doesn't make much difference to what people do in the world. Most people haven't even heard of these issues so why do they matter. As I have already said, the quus issue has no relevance or consequence for people's ability to do things but I think if you are interested in notions of realism or whether we can have objective characterizations, problems like this are very interesting and central.

The causes of our thoughts are presumably neuronal processes which have been caused by sensory interactions; my point was only that we are (in real time at least) "blind" to that whole process. I don't believe we are phenomenologically blind to activities like counting and addition and I think it is a plausible inference to the best explanation to say that these activities naturally evolved from dealing with real objects. I'm not claiming to be certain about that, just that it seems the most plausible explanation to me. — Janus

I think if you consider that quantitative abilities and counting might be primitive processes we cannot non-circularly decine then I would say actually, yes we are blind to these. We are able to count, we don't know why we can, just like someone extremely good at mental math wouldn't know why they are so good at problems other people find impossible... the answers just come to them very quickly. Addition and counting as the same and would involve other blind processes like the ability to immediately discriminate the things you are counting etc etc.

Yes they obviously are natural abilities and they evolved but again, this is completely missing the point. The point isn't about our ability to do things, this is uncontroversial. Its about descriptions and characterizations of the things we find ourselves doing.

Not quite, If I am understanding you correctly. Its saying that because quantum mechanics under this interpretation is solely about long run statistics of many repeated occurrences, realism is not about the indefiniteness of individual particles, it is about entire probabilitu distributions. These probability distributions are realized by those many repeated occurrences or experimental runs, each involving a particle with definite properties at any given time.

Fine's theorem proves that a Bell violation is just equivalent to a lack of joint probability distribution. It doesn't matter why there is a lack of joint probability distribution, it doesn't matter exactly what forces are acting on the system and why, as long as there is a lack of joint probability distribution in this setting, Bell inequalities will be broken as a formal requirement. It is in that way that it is an artifact of statistics; the violation is very real, just that it is an artifact of the lack of joint probability distribution. This lack of joint distribution is caused in quantum mechanics by non-commuting observables and I believe this non-commuting nature is just a necessary fact of certain types of randomly behaving systems like quantum mechanics seems to describe.

Not really, I think it is literally true that we are being created moment by moment—until we are not. — Janus

Yes but for the purpose of this topic it doesn't really matter. Talking about the nature of the self is does not really have an impact on what I mean when I say we construct concepts, at least not in this context from the way I see it.

I don't see a slippery slope, but rather a phenomenological fact that we make a conceptual distinction between what is merely logically possible and what might be actually, physically or metaphysically, possible. We don't know what the real impossibilities are, but we inevitably imagine, whether correctly or incorrectly, that there are real, not merely logical, limitations on possibility. — Janus

And my point ia you are doing this with pretty much every conversation you are having about philosophy. Philosophy is an armchair science so a huge amount of its arguments rely on this same kind of conceivability of what seems correct, what seems possible, logical, metaphysical or otherwise.

I think we mostly do assume that there is a fact of the matter, but of course we have no way of knowing that for sure or of knowing what a "fact of the matter" that was completely independent of human existence could even be. — Janus

I don't think there can be a fact of the matter independent of human experience and even within experience, people find themselves unable to determine a solution to issues like this quus one. Its chronically underdetermined, there is no objective way to see it that can definitely rule out all of the others. Thats the vision that makes most sense to me anyway.

If you wanted to count a hundred objects you could put them in a pile, and move them one by one to another pile, making a mark for each move. Then if you wanted to add another pile of, say, thirty-seven objects you just move those onto the pile of one hundred objects, again marking each move. And then simply count all the objects or marks. I don't see why we should think that all the basic operations of addition, subtraction, division and multiplication cannot be treated this way. We really don't even need to make marks if we have names for all the numbers and we can remember the sum totals. — Janus

Again, this has nothing to do with what we can and cannot do. The whole point is this underdetermination occurs in spite of these abilities. You said earlier that you don't even really know the causes of your thoughts or how they arise. So you know the causes of your understanding of addition? Or quantity itself? Can you actually articulate non-circular definitions of these concepts. I'm not sure you can, they are totally intuitive and implicit. You can demonstrate to me how to add but you can't tell me the rule and the only way I can even learn off of your demonstration is that I have a brain intelligent enoigh to learn, mirror, make inferences but then again we have no personal idea why or how our brains do that. We don't know what makes it that an idea suddenly clicks and why. I can apply the same quus-type thought experiment to the concepts that you are using in this scenario. We can equally do this counting thing exactly in the way you wanted but the point is not being able to count or perform addition, its to have uniquely determined descriptions of what you are doing.

so it is not we who construct, but we who are constructed from moment to moment — Janus

Semantics really, isn't it?

There is no self!

but that means no more than that imagining ourselves having been different involves no contradiction. How can we find out if it is really possible? — Janus

Well you start to get into a slippery slope here because modality is something we make use of all the time whether in daily life, intellectual discussion, conceptualizations etc. This kind of skepticism, while very fair, is also I think is an argument against all your thinking, not just in this discussion.

On the otherhand, I could just ask you whether you think you could use the operation quus. Yeah, I'm appealing to the same kind of modal quandry but I would be surprised if you said you were unable to.

There's also examples on real life where people categorize concepts differently, like colours in different cultures. Of course, some Amazonian tribe will see the same colours as us, but they will categorize them differently, which is essentially the crux of this problem.

It seems obvious we can interpret what we observe in different ways; that is different people can. Or one person may be able to imagine other possibilities than those which are simply found to be the case. — Janus

Yes, and what is in question is whether there is a fact of the matter about who is correct.

Depends on what you mean by arbitrary. There is a reason we tend to label things in a certain way and its to do with how our labelling and descriptions are literally physically, mechanically caused by a complicated brain that has evolved to infer statistical structures in our sensory inputs and learn.

Maybe in that way, it is not arbitrary, because our brains have evolved to do a certain thing, they do it well and, and there tends to be similarities in what human brains do, whether as due to social influences or without those influences.

At the same time, does this mean our concepts could not have been otherwise, for what ever reason? I don't think so. Is our brain not an arbitrary structure which could have been different in some way and so learned concepts differently? yes. Those concrpts are obviosly motivated by what we observe, just I don't think it doesn't mean we can't interpret what we observe in different ways in principle

Even just the fact that people can come up with ideas like quus shows that there are arbitrary ways we can define, construct, draw the boundary on things. We might think of them as unintuitive but I think that kind of reasoning is as arbitrary as the concepts themselves.

I'm afraid this "separate ontological being" makes no sense to me. If you do believe in such a realm, surely you are back to something like a Cartesian dualism

Yes, I don't believe in that. There was a typo. Should have been : "But that doesn't mean you believe..."

But that doesn't imply the former are physical or even that they are caused by or embedded in the physical.

How else can you conceptualize your thoughts though without some form of dualism. We live in a universe explained by physical models that explain models of our brain which functionally explain in principle our entire mental lives. Even if you're agnostic about ontology or hard find it an inherently noncoherent concept like I would, these things are hard to ignore. Its very powerful. Its much more than a parallel relationship I think; they aren't really even because the mind just isn't anywhere independent of the brain in any meaningful way.

But that doesn't mean that the emotional state is physical

Well it really depends what you mean but my purpose really isn't to kind of re-engineer all our concepts into physical one. But again, even if it is not a physical concept, those feelings we have are inherently to do with our brains.

You might say; "Ah ... but the physical observables are the real thing!" However if you did that, you would be denying your own subjective experience as real because it isn't observable (by any normative meaning of 'observable'), even by you.

I don't think its about making a choice between different things being real, its about the explanatory options open to us, and where they lead, which generally goes toward the brain and computational theories etc.

For Physicalism to be up to the job ...
Expand it's conceptual repertoire to include psychical concepts ... but then it no longer falls under any normative definition of 'Physicalism'.

Again, I think this is just implying a naive kind of physicalism which i dont believe people endorse generally. Its like saying that a physicalist shouldnt take a field like psychology seriously or accept its concepts. Its like saying that anyone who accepts psychology can't be a physicalist. This is obviosly not true. Again, just because we have experiential and psychological concepts, doesn't mean we don't want to in principle exain them at some level thriugh physicla models without requiring any other kind of dualistic notions. Thats all I'm really saying ... I think.

Hope that mind can eventually be explanatorily reduced to (not just mapped onto) physical concepts ... but you and I don't believe that's possible; a long history of scientific 'failure' casts a severe doubt about the possibility; and I think it is logically incoherent.
If one of these get-outs works for someone, fine. But the cognitive dissonance is not to my taste.

I just disagree with the idea that, in order to be a physicalist, you have to believe that everything needs to be reduced and explained in some precise, neat, final way. I think we are limited observers and there can be in principle good physical or informational or computational explanations for the limits of what we can and cannot explain. We may not be able to explain everything, we may not be able to have finalize coherent fundamental ontologies about the universe. But I think within what we can explain there is just this centrality by which everything seems to revolve around and which we describe as the physical. I look around the rooma nd see physical things, I think about where my experiences and thoughts come from and think in terms of the brain. etc etc. we have come a hell of a long way in learning how brains and minds work.

I don't think rules are imposed, they describe behaviors — Janus

Yes, that's what I said, you must have interpreted impose differently. But my point is we construct those descriptions.

Sorry, late reply. Ideally I would like to think of myself as having an anti-normative stance philosophically, generally anyway. I'm not really sure what rationality is and think it probably means various things in different contexts. I think it is probably something that follows conventions more than we think, is fallible. What is rational depends on what people's preferences are too, in the sense that you might not look at someone rationally if you cannot even see what end they are trying to meet, or perhaps even if youre just a staunch believer that acts need "useful" ends.

I think what I just said is trying to get at a kind of rigorous version of what rationality is but then again I don't think that really has much to do with common sense rationality in daily life. As I said I don't even know what rationality is really but its a very intuitive concept in daily life.

If what we do seems to be the product of these kind of blind processes as Wittgenstein seems to emphasize in Philosophical Investigations, then it will never really matter how we explicitly characterize something like this because life, society must go on anyway and constraints on what is "good" or "rational" will inevitably emerge in a self-organizing way, whether we have a proper understanding of them or not. I don't think there can be any strong objective notion of rationality though.

Once you concede that a purely physical stance is insufficient, how can you be a physicalist? I agree entirely that 'physical' needs a lot more work to define it, but whatever the definition is, it seems to me that there will be aspects of life which physical concepts don't account for. If you can actually provide a sufficient definition of the physical, then you have solved the Hard Problem. — Christopher Burke

Because this is to say that your conceptualizations are the same as your ontology of the world. For instance, everyone believes in feelings which you might label "love", in everyday life peopke may not be able to or want to characterize that physically. But that doesnt mean you dont believe in a universe where there is something called love floating about with its onwn separate ontological being to physical things. Its still something that is embedded in the physical very much so. The fact I can make a conceptual separation is just trivial.

I think the crux here is the implicit assumption that physical = real. — Christopher Burke

No I think its about needing something more than the physical to explain reality. Yes obviously we have things above physics like biology and aocial sciences bit they all seem to be grounded in the physical.

- Physical representations keep changing. 19th century physicists would have said the world is really made of atoms. Modern physicists would regard that as simplistic and have recourse to the much more epistemic concepts of fields and information. Has fundamental reality changed as we've changed our theories about it? A bit implausible. — Christopher Burke

Again, its about needing something more than these models, regardless of what those models say specifically.

Reality, since we have good grounds for assuming it contains conscious agents, is more complex than solely physical concepts can handle — Christopher Burke

I don't really understand what extra things would be needed to explain conscious agents above things related to the natural sciences, math, computation, information theory etc.

But that mode of representation is insufficient to represent all of life as experienced. — Christopher Burke

Well this is fair but I think it is also in some ways a straw man because most people who say they are physicalists will not have some kind of naive physicalism where they believe the only way to describe the world is with physical concepts. Of course we can talk about organisms, the weather, love, sport, green... whatever.

Maybe it refutes physicalism in thr way youre thinking about it but I think most physicalists would find that characterization of the issues extremely trivial. I could come to the point of [3] coherently by this type of thought process but then when I look around, what do I see? The world is full of physical things and everything seems to be grounded in the physical, even my consciousness with respect to brains.

I have actually said earlier in the thread that technically I shouldn't call myself a physicalist but i keep finding myself on this side of these debates which just reflects my intuitive leanings as opposed to a rigorous ontology.

A more rigorous view would note the difficulty in defining "physical" coherently but then I think this is going away from what motivates the physicalist perspective: that a functioning model of how the world works doesn't require dualism or some separable phenomenal machinery to it that is independent from our physical models. There is nothing else to explain about consciousness.

This just shows a misunderstanding of what is at stake imo. It is clearly obvious that in general, people do not have a problem in performing coherent behaviors that help us fulfill goals and desires in the way we want. The point is that describing this behavior and its "rules" is chronically underdetermined, chronically indeterminate. It is clear that we do not perform behaviors in a top down way as a consequence of explicit conceptualizations of rules. Rather, rules are post-hoc classifications and inferences we impose on our own behavior. Our behavior and our abilities arise in a completely implicit, automatic fashion; they are the product of complex neuronal processes that are completely hidden from us and can endow our thought and abilities with a Humean kind of arbitrariness which we often don't stop to take the time to notice. People in A.I. often talk about the problem of interpretability where by our machine learning programs chuck out solutions which are difficult for us to understand or we have no idea how it came to the solution. They can do things in ways that from our perspective seem very non-linear. I think the exact same happens in our own cognition and brains, which should not be surprising given the fact that a brain is just a big machine learning architecture. I think we often consider our own cognition human interpretable because we explain concepts in terms of other concepts which our brains have already chucked out but look at the Munchausen trilemma in philosophy: this approach doesn't go very far.

If someone could prove you were doing quaddition it would equally defeat the point of the thought experiment in the same way that proving someone can do addition would.

I think 'reducing' should be confined to when one is accounting for a thing by referring to that thing's subparts. — Christopher Burke

Yes, this is what I have been talking about all along. But at the same time, a reduction is a special case of a correlation in the way you're talking about. You have two different representations, the original one and the reducex one and you are creating a mapping between them which is as you would describe a correlation.

No physical concepts can be applicable to the phenomenal image. — Christopher Burke

I don't think any concepta can be to be honest, and in light of that, I don't think you can say the physicalists picture is more flawed in another. There is no alternative kind of more complete picture I think.

When I am talking about reduction here, I am talking about an explanatory relationship. If experiences are purely representations or information about trees, then why should these representations carry information (that can be explained by) about brain states. Trees are the way they are totally independent of my brain. Trees have a shape that is nothing to do with my brain. If I then explicitly represent that shape information, that shape information should have no information about the inside of my brain in it.

Which indicates the most coherent categorisation of the human condition (I believe): we are what-it-is-like-to-be our representations. A bit of reality representing those bits of reality we encounter, including ourself. — Christopher Burke

Yes and I think we cannot know what that what-it-is-like bit really means as I believe you suggested somewhere earlier

Better to see it as correlating parallel representations — Christopher Burke

Well I think this is more or less what reducing is when we believe that this correlating as cogently justified under some context. Now the question is whether there is some justification for reducing the tree to a brain. There is some sense in which it can be because there is a mapping between information in the outside world and your brain states which is physically mediated (i.e. by travelling light, surface reflectance properties, receptor stimulation and neural potentials). However, this isn't the same as the mapping when I construct a description of a tree. The physical mapping aforementioned is incidental since the tree itself is independent of my brain and the physical means information is carried to my brain. The question is, why when I am trying to desceibe a tree, the description I get is my brain. Given the independence suggested just now, there is no actual reasons. Trees are not brains and are totally separated. If my experiential states are representations of trees that map to components of trees, there is no reason why I should be able to examine my experiences and find that I can reduce it to brain activity, because my experiences are simply not about my brain if they are not representations of it.

Its interesting there's this impression that Kripke has misunderstood Wittgenstein or not even attempted to but I find Kripke's interpretation more or less aligns with what Wittgenstein seems to say throughout the book imo. Maybe I am misinterpreting it towards my philosophical inclinations though (but I don't actually believe that).

That's not just a reflex ... — Christopher Burke

Not saying that cats necessarily have analogies but I think these animals are much more complicated than people give tjem credit for and this dichotomy between human deliberation and reflexive animal instincts is not correct

how is it possible to know "what trees in the outside world are made of"? Surely we only 'know' our constructed biophysical representations of the observed putative bit of reality we have labelled as a tree. — Christopher Burke

Yes, this is more or less what I mean. We infer constructs in the physical science from those perceptual representations so that those constructs explain properties of those representations. Its more or less circular in that perceptual representations should only be reducible to things thay share the properties of those representations, things which have those properties because they have been directly inferred from them. The point is that trivially it shouldn't really make sense to reduce it into something which is not itself. It would he a weird world if that were possible or at least cogently defensible.

To know/experience is to represent. So we cannot logically claim that reality is physical, psychical, informational, whatever. All we can do is represent it in convenient ways depending on our purposes, and all these modes have their uses. — Christopher Burke

Yeah, I do make this point in a couple other posts on this thread. As some other posters have pointes out, it is difficult to make physicalism into something cohesive and coherent.

Nonetheless, I think what motivates people who intuitively think of themselves as or defend physicalism is I think the central role of the models we construct in the physical sciences and how other models, constructs, things fit around them. When I look around me in the world... physics. But turns out, making this into something useful or tangible is difficult. I have started to think that maybe physicalism, naturalism, other similar ideas perhaps are often adopted in opposition to, in reaction to ideas of dualism or that there needs to be a separate mental thing because there are things that we find difficult to explain. So maybe it is often adopted without a coherent ontology in mind but is like an anti-dualist stance. I dunno, thats just a thought.

But, we need a system in our brains that is effective to organizing the outside world's as manifested by our sensations so that the species can continue to reproduce and propagate their genes. It is a process that involves many factors that intersect to — Justin5679

Well you've just evoked the motivation for that part, ha!

I think this is a fair point that I overlooked: if one were to “not follow their intuitions”, that may actually help them navigate the world. However, upon further reflection, this is a paradox (which annihilates it as a possibly viable alternative) principle, as in order to follow it one would have to intuit that it is true that they ‘should not follow their intuitions’; but if that is true, then they should not ‘not follow their intuitions’; but if they are intuiting that as true (which they would have to to accept it), then they should not not ‘not follow their intuitions’...ad infinitum. They would not be able to operate, which is means no knowledge of the world whatsoever. — Bob Ross

I may actually have to go back on my agreement on this one because thinking about, someone might be able to just formulate a more specific rule which tells them when they should and should not follow intuitions, which may avoid this.