It depends on what we both mean by think. What I meant here was just the internal vocalization of the word which we nonetheless still experience. To me, thinking is just another instance of "use" and state transitions, whether in ongoing vocalizations or those moments where you stop and "think" where in fact its all blank for a second and then suddenly pops another internal vocalization or some form of reaction in accordance to a eureka moment of some sort.. or intensely attending to an equation. To me, these are all the same kind of state transition/ "use" kind of thing.

I found the parts of PI on understanding and reading quite convincing in this regard. For a while, a lot of these kinds of thinking as kind of mysterious mental processes didn't make sense to me, but this kind of enactive / situated approach just makes much more sense to me. I think of Wittgenstein as a the godfather of enactive cognition and that kind of stuff. I have a nice quote actually from important late developmental psychologist Esther Thelen who utilized an enactive dynamic systems approach which is reminiscient of the Wittgenstein view imo:

"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."

But surely there cannot really be a notion of shared meaning based on someones personal pain independently of observable pain-related behaviors. infact it is conditionally independent. the exact nature of the pain is virtually redundant compared to the functional implications.

my point, or RussellA rather, is that Witts premise about “use” cannot be solely what picks out meaning. — schopenhauer1

I actually do agree on this because I don't think all uses of words are what we would normally think of in terms of meaning. But I also think the boundary is arbitrary, maybe not in terms of meaning, but in the sense that it still uses the same mechanisms. In other words, there is nothing particularly special or unique about meaning other than another kind of "use" in terms of state transitions, which we just happen to highlight and add special signifcance to. But I don't think there is like some specific clear cut.

But whatever you want to call it, that is an internal mental phenomenon that has to take place. Not only that, there has to be a sort of internal “understanding” in order to use the word. — schopenhauer1

If you mean internal as in experiences then I would agree but I dont agree on any kind of "hidden" internal mental stuff, at least thats what im calling it, I hope you get what i am getting at there. We don't need internal understanding, only hebbian learning and neural activity which drives the state transitions, and these cannot be cached out in terms of semantic meaning or understanding because they are just mechanistic physical mechanisms. "Meaning" is just how the word is used in terms of the context in which we say the word or think it. Nothing more is necessary.

Not sure about Kripke but Wittgenstein definitely mentions stuff l like that in philosophical investigations. rules and explicit definitions are more like signposts than prescriptions on how to behave. in fact, i think a major point in PI is that meanings and definitions in language are effectively so impoverished that it should render language un-usable, but it doesn't. A repeated theme it seems to be this underlying inscrutable, implicit underlying behavior where there is room for the kind of indeterminacy, fuzzyness or perhaps plurality about how people accomplish things.

Excerpt from PI:

"232. Let us imagine a rule intimating to me which way I am to obey it; that is, as my eye travels along the line, a voice within me says: "This way!"—What is the difference between this process of obeying a kind of inspiration and that of obeying a rule? For they are surely not the same. In the case of inspiration I await direction. I shall not be able to teach anyone else my 'technique' of following the line. Unless, indeed, I teach him some way of hearkening, some kind of receptivity. But then, of course, I cannot require him to follow the line in the same way as I do.
These are not my experiences of acting from inspiration and according to a rule; they are grammatical notes.

235. It would also be possible to imagine such a training in a sort of arithmetic. Children could calculate, each in his own way—as long as they listened to their inner voice and obeyed it. Calculating in this way would be like a sort of composing.

234. Would it not be possible for us, however, to calculate as we actually do (all agreeing, and so on), and still at every step to have a feeling of being guided by the rules as by a spell, feeling astonishment at the fact that we agreed? (We might give thanks to the Deity for our agreement.)

235. This merely shews what goes to make up what we call "obeying a rule" in everyday life.

236. Calculating prodigies who get the right answer but cannot say how. Are we to say that they do not calculate? (A family of cases.)

237. Imagine someone using a line as a rule in the following way: he holds a pair of compasses, and carries one of its points along the line that is the 'rule', while the other one draws the line that follows the rule. And while he moves along the ruling line he alters the opening of the compasses, apparently with great precision, looking at the rule the whole time as if it determined what he did. And watching him we see no kind of regularity in this opening and shutting of the compasses. We cannot learn his way of following the line from it. Here perhaps one really would say: "The original seems to intimate to him which way he is to go. But it is not a rule." "

See, evrn in this reply you don't make a constructive point which makes it difficult for me to have an answer or even know what I am supposed to be defending.

And the intersubjectivity part, requires the mental aspect, exactly which supposedly doesn't matter in the beetle-box. But it does, sir. — schopenhauer1

I think that Wittgenstein seems to apply his skepticism to mental states in a way which I find just as convincing. I think it is possible to deflate the mental aspects so that really it is just all "use". Or to be more specific, "use" is entirely about states and transitions between states, or in other words: if i am in some experientisl state, what will the next state be? and these experiential states will include all of our linguistic interactions, social behaviors and even "internal" thought processes. The question of why or what causes state transitions is hidden from us, caused by the underlying neural interactions to which we have no access or are "blind" to.

I don't know, I would have to think about it, I am neithere here or there.

How can they be consistent if they don't yield the same results. — Janus

Because I can construct a rule just like quus which is consistent with all of the additions you have done so far in your life and would yield the same results as all sums you have ever done, analogous to how someone may have never done sums with larger than 57 will have been doing an operation totally consistent with both quus and plus. Now the question is whether there is an empirical difference that differentiates the rule you have been using so far as either addition or this other rule? The answer is no, because so far every answer for addition is the same as this new rule. And remember there will be a multitude of these rules; for all your past behavior, this will be underdetermined and this will continue to be the case for t+1, t+2... t+n ad infinitum for every new sum you do.

No, I wasn't referring to gibberish. — Janus

The point is that you have defined what you mean by the fact that addition is diffetent to quudition, but the words in this description are susceptible to the same kinds of skepticism, and further attempts to elucidate what you mean will bring a regress of these definitions on which skepticism can be applied.

All that seems irrelevant. — Janus

well you seemed to be appealing to the extrapolatability or generalizability of addition as to why it is more true but I don't see why this is a fact in making a description more true or not. why should it be that a description that extends to more cases than another be somehow more true?

I don't think that's a particularly interesting result. Rules are instructions, so they aren't either true or false. That is, the rules of chess are not true or false; but they do yield statements that are true or false, such as "Your king is in check". — Ludwig V

Buy "you are following x rule" is factual. What do you think is the interesting result of this story then?

Yes, but that doesn't mean that we cannot have ways of responding to, and dealing with, problems as they come up - if necessary, we can invent them - as we do when we discover irrational numbers, etc. or find reasons to change the status of 0 or 1. In the case of 0, we have to modify the rules of arithmetical calculation. — Ludwig V

I don't think this problem has anything to do with practical problems. The quus issue has no bearing on someones ability to perform math.

What other "strange rule" have I been using? — Janus

other rules like quus. there are probably a multitude of them which are consistent with all of the addition you have ever done so far in your life and you can't rule them out.

Basic arithmetical procedures are simply the infinite iterability — Janus

uhhh don't you mean quu-nfinite quu-terability?

I agree that many rules have been extrapolated out of these basics, but the extrapolations are not arbitrary in the kind of way quaddition is — Janus

why should it be that just because a description is general or extrapolatable means it is any more or less true than a description which is specific. Is the fact you are using addition any less true than the more general description of using an operator? is the more general description of being a mammal somehow more true than the more specific description of being a human?

Arbitrary rules like quaddition do not yield reliably workable results, or at least I haven't seen anyone showing that they can — Janus

Its logically valid so I don't see the issue. Also, don't forget that quus is only one example of many other possible rules so actually you have been using some other strange rule since you started learning math and you have been using it fine. In fact you have been using many rules at the same time. Its all totally workable. Again, the point is underdetermination so its not about whether one rule is workable or not, any time you use addition it has an underdetermined characterization, and your ability to use it and practise it has little to do with that.

Yes, but if you care to think about it, the behavior is consistent with other rules. Your selection of a single rule is based on intuition not on some evidence that contradicts the alternatives. There is nothing stopping someone from saying that they are following the other rules, but supposedly you would just disregard their testimony straight off.

I don't know what you mean when you talk about a rule being objectively true. — Janus

That there is a fact of the matter about what rule is being followed.

I would say that the only intuitively self-evident truths are logical or mathematical, and I don't see that as being merely a subjective matter. — Janus

It is a subjective matter because you are appealing to your intuition subjectively and you cannot rule out the other possible rules you can use.

The truth of scientific theories is not intuitively self-evident in any way analogous to the truth of basic arithmetical results — Janus

So what, some truths are intuitive and some are unintuitive. Their intuitiveness has nothing to do with objective truth. Intuition is a product of your subjective inclinations. Saying that something is more truthful because it is intuitive is like saying your subjective inclinations has something to do with objective truth.

So, scientific theories are never proven. That the math involved in thermodynamics is sound may be self-evident, but that doesn't guarantee that it has anything to do with some putatively objective reality — Janus

And just because a rule is unintuitive doesn't refute it being objectively true.

Well I think I have somewhat of a reply to that in my initial post.



Yes, its computing solutions for equations of motion in physics.



Yes, I still think even in these cases its still just a stream of experience and this kind of thing can be accounted for in terms of attention and access conscious.

I am sorry, I don't feel there is much fruitful to be gained in continuing this specific conversation. I find it very difficult to engage with your way of writing, it all seems very vague

How can a child successfully use the word "mwanasesere" if they don't know what is means? — RussellA

You know what, I think I must have misread this. I was thinking about we don't have to know explicit definitions to use words and children don't learn using explicit definitions.

But the problem leads to my personal concepts of "pen" and "Eiffel Tower", both of which are unique to me, as they have developed over a lifetime of experiences that only I have had. — RussellA

This seems a bit trivial to me because I would say it applies to a lot if not all words.

We have to learn the meaning of a word before we can use it successfully. — RussellA

This is obviously not true especially when you consider how a child learns.

My concept of "peffel" is inaccessible to others as my concept of violet is inaccessible to others. Can you describe in words your personal experience of the colour violet to a colour blind person? — RussellA

I don't see how these are inaccessible in the same way. Violet is inaccessible because experiential qualities are inherently indescribable. Peffel is inaccessible presumably only because its an unusual concept but I see it as no different from a concept like a liger or mule or any other kind of hybrid thing that actually exists in reality and so is therefore an accessible concept.

Tbh I don't think Wittgenstein's private language is about inaccessibility apart from the trivial notion that all my immediate experiences are inaccessible. The point, as I interpret it (maybe I am wrong), is not the inaccessibility but that of I am the only one using the language, the language becomes totally redundant.

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.