But that's arse about. We construct language to be about the world. It is odd, then, to be surprised to find that the world can be set out using language. — Banno

:up:

Somehow, this makes sense. A lot of mathematical forms have an isomorphic material counterpart. — Raymond

Do you mean something like models fitting data pretty well?

As I mentioned before, the indirect realist says something comparable to "we read words" and the quasi-direct realist says something comparable to "we read about history", both of which can be correct. — Michael

:up:

Along these lines, it also makes sense to avoid taking certain issues too seriously. So often we are just talking about usage and differences that mostly make no difference.

Think of the duck-rabbit or vase-face set-up. If someone tells me the image is a rabbit that will prime me perceptually to look for ways to construct it as a rabbit. — Joshs

:up:

If a vervet monkey produces an alarm call , do you think nearby monkeys are more inclined to recognize objects as predators? — Joshs

:up:

I don't know how it's possible to escape the conclusion that we do have private experiences — Marchesk

Let me just start by saying I don't deny private experiences. For me it's more about trying to point out their semantic uselessness. 'Red' can't refer to something private. I grant that 'my red' or 'how I see red' or 'what I'm calling red' makes sense enough. It can still function in licensed inferences. I can infer that for you the color of the fire engine is also the color for you of the rose.

Take an experiment with that blue/gold dress before anyone knew about it. How would you know that someone was seeing a different color (blue or gold) than you were (gold or blue) until they told you? You couldn't know just by showing them if they're instructed to keep quiet about what the dress looks like. — Marchesk

But this seems to support me as much as you on this issue. One of my big points is that we only have reports of the other's sensation, never that sensation itself (which is more about grammar than some Cartesian ectoplasm.)

We do dream after-all, and nobody can share our dream experience. Many of us have inner dialogs and day dreams. People lie and there's no foolproof way to always tell. Nor can we always know what someone is feeling or thinking. — Marchesk

If someone could share our dream experience, we'd likely no longer call it a dream. So such statements are, in my view, at least as much about how people like us use the word 'dream' as they are about dreams themselves. If dreams are radically private, we can't say anything sensible about them (a tautology almost, upon consideration). But the use of the word dream is public, and there are correct and incorrect ways to use it. If, with Sellars, we think of meaning in terms of norms that govern inferences, we can climb out of this traditional K-hole. Without denying our strong intuition that there are raw feels and yet without trying to build public reality out of them. (Lying is another good issue, but I think that kind of thing is well-tackled by Ryle, and this post of mine is already too long.)

We wouldn’t need an evolutionary explanation if ‘beauty’ ‘efficient’ and ‘graceful’ can be understood as self-grounding concepts. — Joshs

Is there such a thing? I lean toward Saussure's notion of a system of differences without positive elements. Concepts are only sold in sets.

they must be dumped in favor of what evolutionary process implies: selection of adaptive concatenations of arbitrary causal mechanisms. — Joshs

Why arbitrary? Dennett's vision of a evolution as an algorithm makes sense to me. It's true that neutral traits can come along for the ride (so there's some randomness), but surely there is real selection too.

I've commented on this before. ArXiv.org receives 150 - 300 math papers a day, most probably pure math that vanishes into the academic aether after a while having served its purpose, tenure, promotion, prestige within specialties, curiosity, etc. — jgill

:up:

How about the private recognition of redness? — Michael

Sorry for the delay. Just saw this. Do you mean something like saying to oneself that such and such is red? I can relate to the experience. I can see it figuring after the fact in an explanation. 'That's when I noticed the light was red, when it was too late to stop.'

I believe I have what I am tempted to call the usual intuitions , but I also see that such a thesis is unsupportable not only in practice but even in principle. The inverted spectrum possibility should make us question the whole framework, it seems to me. (As I see it, it makes a beetle-in-box-point itself.)

An argument matey. Make an argument. — Bartricks

Sorry, matey. You are reminding me of my cat when she no longer chases the red dot but only stares at it. I feel as old as yonder elm.

I've made quite a few. Be wary of taking grammar (by which I mean, in this context, proprieties of usage) for theology-strength cosmic insight. Maybe don't think about the mind as some kind of weird plate made of dream stuff. Maybe the mind is better thought of in terms of understanding and unifying a person's doings in this world. The mind can be thought of as the ways their body do. If we are tempted to call it 'single,' that's probably because a person is a unity, a focus of praise and blame. We explain what a person does by reference to a single system of beliefs, unified by the norm that such beliefs don't contradict one another.

I bet you say that to all the girls, you old rake.

Half a mind makes no sense. Half a banana, yes. Half a sandwich, yes. Half a mind, no - incoherent — Bartricks

Not so fast. I'm of half a mind to correct you and half a mind to leave you to your sandbox and its kitty droppings.

https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/half+a+mind

Or, for your perusal, the etymology of dubious...being of two minds. I'll let you look it up if you care.

Also, some Ryle, to rile you up perhaps.

One of the central negative motives of this book is to show that ‘mental’ does not denote a status, such that one can sensibly ask of a given thing or event whether it is mental or physical, ‘in the mind’ or ‘in the outside world’. To talk of a person’s mind is not to talk of a repository which is permitted to house objects that something called ‘the physical world’ is forbidden to house; it is to talk of the person’s abilities, liabilities and inclinations to do and undergo certain sorts of things, and of the doing and undergoing of these things in the ordinary world. Indeed, it makes no sense to speak as if there could be two or eleven worlds. Nothing but confusion is achieved by labelling worlds after particular avocations. Even the solemn phrase ‘the physical world’ is as philosophically pointless as would be the phrase ‘the numismatic world’, ‘the haberdashery world’, or ‘the botanical world.’

But it will be urged in defence of the doctrine that ‘mental’ does denote a status that a special footing must be provided for sensations, feelings and images. The laboratory sciences provide descriptions and correlations of various kinds of things and processes, but our impressions and ideas are unmentioned in these descriptions. They must therefore belong somewhere else. And as it is patent that the occurrence of a sensation, for instance, is a fact about the person who feels the pain or suffers the dazzle, the sensation must be in that person. But this is a special sense of ‘in’, since the surgeon will not find it under the person’s epidermis. So the sensation must be in the person’s mind.

Moreover sensations, feelings and images are things the owner of which must be conscious of them. Whatever else may be contained in his stream of consciousness, at least his sensations, feelings and images are parts of that stream. They help to constitute, if they do not completely constitute, the stuff of which minds are composed. Champions of this argument tend to espouse it with special confidence on behalf of images, such as what ‘I see in my mind’s eye’ and what I have ‘running in my head’. They feel certain qualms in suggesting too radical a divorce between sensations and conditions of the body. Stomach-aches, tickles and singings in the ears have physiological attachments which threaten to sully the purity of the brook of mental experiences. But the views which I see, even when my eyes are shut, and the music and the voices that I can hear, even when all is quiet, qualify admirably for membership of the kingdom of the mind. I can, within limits, summon, dismiss and modify them at will and the location, position and condition of my body do not appear to be in any correlation with their occurrences or properties.

This belief in the mental status of images carries with it a palatable corollary. When a person has been thinking to himself, retrospection commonly shows him that at least a part of what has been going on has been a sequence of words heard in his head, as if spoken by himself. So the venerable doctrine that discoursing to one self under one’s breath is the proprietary business of minds reinforces, and is reinforced by, the doctrine that the apparatus of pure thinking does not belong to the gross world of physical noises, but consists instead of the more ethereal stuff of which dreams are made.

An indivisible thing has no parts (for if it had parts it could be divided into them). And as such the indivisibility of the mind also implies its eternal existence.

it should also be noted that the existence of simple, indivisible things can be independently established. For it is manifest to reason that not everything can be made of other things, for then one has to posit an actual infinity of parts, which is incoherent.

Thus, there are simple things in existence.

And if we listen to our reason rather than convention, we will find that we are among those simple things. — Bartricks

Why is an actual infinity of parts incoherent? We are comfortable with the infinity of the primes. If we listen to careful proofs rather than internet cranks. I agree that it's more intuitive for us humans to think in terms of genuine atoms, but I'm not sure reality plays by our rules. Maybe our physicists keep finding parts made of parts made of parts....

Why does indivisibility imply eternal existence? That seems like an unwarranted leap. This whole foray into sincere pre-Kantian metaphysics is quaint even. Quasi-theological. Remains of the day, last scraps of a vanishing religion.

Our brains can be divided. Our minds cannot be. Thus, our minds are not our brains. — Bartricks

Here you make a case that 'mind' and 'brain' are used differently. The thesis is true. But you forget that we can give one another a piece of our mind. Or https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/of%20two%20minds So the argument is flawed.

But who here is claiming that minds are brains? Not Ryle. One of us would know that.

I'm curious what you'll say, knowing how wrong you are.

You haven't read him. You are a b/s artist with nothing to say. — Bartricks

Bless your little heart, friend. Go in peace.

You haven't actually read Ryle have you? — Bartricks

Of course I have. It's weird to make such a big deal of it. It's a relatively easy read. Heidegger for the less pretentious ?

Now, present an argument for the materiality of the mind. You are about to be taken to school — Bartricks

I never claimed the mind was material. It seems that, like many folks who charge at metaphysical windmills, you can't see around your pet dichotomies.

I'm not trying to be Pepsi to your Coca-Cola. I'm saying we don't need this bubbly acidic sugar water in the first place.

Do commas smell like cream spirit? Is the mime shingle?

Now, locate for me an actual argument that the mind is not an immaterial soul — Bartricks

Dude. Descartes has been tied to the whipping post for quite a while now. Prove to me first that Jesus isn't the crown prince of the Crab Nebula.

The mind is a thing.

Thoughts are states of mind. They're not things . They're states.

Likewise, consciousness is a 'state'.

States are always of things.

The things that conscious states are states of are called 'minds'.

There's a big philosophical question over what kind of a thing a mind is.

But it is a thing. — Bartricks

As I see it, you are describing grammar here as if you were purveying eternal cosmic truths. Yes, we talk of states of mind, states of one and the same mind. But I don't see why states are grammatically kinds of things. Presumably we'd like to do more than give ESL lessons to one another. But that's the problem with analytic truths or and pseudo-profound quasi-tautologies. I don't mean this as an attack. I'm just saying it's way to easy to cough up grammatical platitudes as quasi-theological insights.

I think it more accurate to say that red is the colour that roses are seen to be. This then accommodates both the "convention" that roses are red and Locke's inverted spectrum hypothesis. There is the common public use of the word "red" and the private understanding of redness. — Michael

I can make some kind of sense of 'the color you see' as opposed to 'the color I see.' We can agree to use 'color' this way in this kind of context. But calling that a private understanding of redness might be misleading. What I have in mind is the way that concepts fit together (material implications, such as being red implies being colored, etc.). If your private experience of redness has no bearing on on other concepts or the inferences you recognize, 'understanding' seems like too strong of a word.

It's great to see Ryle and Sellars get recognition around here.

Assuming that we have the same kind of eyes and same kind of brain, and assuming that the relationship between body and mind (whatever that is) is deterministic, then we should have the same kinds of private experiences. — Michael

I understand why one would say this, but consider that we only have evidence for behavior. Our talk and doings are indeed synchronized. The assumption is unwarranted, in my view. Fortunately, it also seems necessary. Note that I don't deny some kind of inner experience. I just think it can play no role in reasoning. As Sellars might put, reporting a sensation would be a kind of entry move. It's a way that I might explain some otherwise dishonorable or just unexpected action (I had a terrible itch, so I didn't bowl a strike.)

The word "beetle" and the phrase "the contents of our boxes" would mean different things to me. — Michael

A good point. I don't deny that we have grammar for unique experience. I think this naturally connects to a scorekeeping understanding of rationality (Sellars via Brandom.) The 'I think' and the 'I feel' implicitly accompany all our reports. Jim might be credulous and Tammy might cry over a mosquito bite. I just think we should be wary of reifications. I look toward norms rather than ontologies on such topics.

Or again, consider Locke's inverted spectrum hypothesis. If such a thing happened I wouldn't then continue to say that grass is green and that rubies were red. I would say that grass is red (or "looks red") if you prefer and that rubies were green (or "looks green"). It's a perfectly coherent scenario (not withstanding it's physical possibility) and so clearly there's more to the meaning of colour words than just some public activity. — Michael

I agree with you about the persuasiveness of the inverted spectrum scenario. I can relate very much to experiencing color as some kind of ineffable stuff, but it's just that ineffability that seems to make it semantically irrelevant. Roses are red and grass is green, even if their colors are reversed for one of us. But what can reversed or inverted mean here? Whose raw feel would have priority? Neither, I say. Inversion implies a norm. But clearly all that matters is the convention that roses are red (like calibrating a scale.)

If there were a finite number of things on 3 axises, could that same information be represented in a single line? Do higher dimensions exist only for when values go on forever in an axis? — TiredThinker

It sounds like you'd want an invertible function $f : S \subset \mathbb{R}^3 \to\mathbb{R}$, with $S$ finite. That should be easy (an infinity of choices.) One boring but easy approach is ordering the points in the domain set ('alphabetically') and just counting them off like $0 ,1, ... , n - 1$.

I think what you are really interested in is bases for vector spaces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basis_(linear_algebra)

You will always have to live with yourself. That's merely a fact.

It's the fact that you should always consider in making a choice.

Hence, a real ethic -- you *should* consider that you'll always be with yourself. — Moliere

I like the approach, but it occurs to me that you are leaving something out: death.

Romeo and Juliette are together in eternity. We can be like they are.

A slave might risk life and limb to escape or avenge or defend a comrade. A pessimist might hang himself by stepping off a stack of freshly printed volumes of his cold but windy manifesto.

To paraphrase Kerouac, maybe each of us is the void pretending to be a man pretending not to know the void.

it seems that indirect realism is ontologically committed to the folk-psychological notions of goal driven behaviour and mental states. — sime

Might be yanking this out of context, but it inspired a question. Does the philosophical situation itself, occurring in the space of reasons and dominated by rational norms, commit itself implicitly to such folk-psychological notions? Is the gist of indirect realism the possibility of an individual being wrong, or an individual perception being wrong ? The gap between me and the truth might involve the degree that my word alone (without further evidence) should count as reliable.

the idea is that red is a property as we see it, not something that causes us to have a response, — Marchesk

I think the wrinkle is in red is a property as we see it. It's as if 'red' is supposed to do double-duty for some ineffable private experience which is somehow known to be the same ineffable private experience for all (an impossible public-yet-private experience). Ryle attacks this kind of confusion in The Concept of Mind, just as Wittgenstein does with his beetles and boxes.

If the thesis is that we all see red the same way, then any data supporting this thesis is impossible in principle ('grammatically') when 'see' is understood to refer to some radically private experience.

All we can compare is public behavior, and this is also enough semantically. Anyone who grasps the proper material implications (and other appropriate uses of the concept red) is seeing red as much as such a thing can be reasonably established. Or that's the best sense I can currently make of the situation.

Excellent book. The beginnings of clear thinking about mind. The Official Doctrine might well be sitting behind ↪TiredThinker
's OP. — Banno

:up:

I think so.

After reading Ryle, I thought now this is the book for those who find the later Wittgenstein too nebulous. He just chops away confusion methodically.

I should also plug Sellars here. His normative, inferential approach to concepts and rationality demystifies 'reason' as Ryle does 'mind.'

Where is there any evidence that questions about the mind are of this sort? — Bartricks

You might find some in an excellent book entitled The Concept of Mind. It's by this dude named Gilbert Ryle. It's one of my favorites.

You either think there's reason to think that's true, or you think there's no reason to think that's true but you think it anyway.

If you think there's reason to think that's true, then you accept the authority of reason. Which is just as well, for all philosophy involves appealing to reason. — Bartricks

Yes, philosophy appeals to reason. As Popper and Kojeve and who knows how many others have noted, philosophy is a second order tradition. We don't just trade stories about the way things hang together; we criticize and edit and synthesize such stories. This becomes the way we do things. No individual person or claim has a fixed status (is sacred.) Only the second-order tradition itself is sacred. The opposite of being reasonable is perhaps some combination of arrogance and dogmatism.

Now, our reason represents our minds to exist and to be indivisible things. — Bartricks

Need I point out that this is bald claim ? And that it's also controversial? Perhaps your reason gives you that impression, but that in itself is a personal matter. The mere fact that many find old-fashioned metaphysical chestnuts like that one to be highly questionable if not outright nonsense should give you pause...if you want to be reasonable.

That's evidence that that's precisely what they are.
— Bartricks

This might be a good time to present that evidence?

Mathematics, though proven as a tool for uncovering truths, is itself not/only partially about truths (truths to be understood in the conventional sense). — Agent Smith

I agree with the point I think you are making. We can think of math as an excellent syntax for expressing truths about our world. One of its best features is how quickly we make inferences within this syntax. It's also lean and efficient. Take a messy scatterplot and transform it into two parameters and a measure of fit. That's some juicy, concentrated info. Like bears eating salmon brains.

Where in that book does Ryle present a single argument against the idea that the mind is a single, indivisible, thing? — Bartricks

IMV, good philosophers often try to show us that our questions were ill-conceived in the first place.

It also makes more sense to me that metaphysicians should have to argue for their positive claims.

Note that I suggested above why folks are tempted to make strange claims like 'the mind is single' in the first place. I'm trying to plug what would otherwise be silly talk into real life, into the practical unity of a self.

It's our intellectual duty to be consistent. Our bundle of beliefs should work together. The ego is a kind of unifying fiction or piece of software.

Barring infinity, what's the solution set to the equation x = x + 1? — Agent Smith

You basically need to situate that equation within a number system. Consider that $x^2 + 1 = 0$ has a solution in the complex number system but not in the real number system. There are also strange number systems like finite fields. Or "+" could represent the operation of a group. From this POV, infinity is only a solution if this infinity is carefully defined in a systemic context.

The broader point is that serious mathematics tames intuition, beats it into a kind of Chess with strict rules.

What sayest thou? — Agent Smith

Typically, the concept of 0 is just identified with the empty set. So you don't need your "n" as a kind of function.

It should be mentioned that Benacerraf uses the variety of ways of constructing the counting numbers from sets as an argument against platonism and for structuralism.

I sympathize with the intuition that the counting numbers are the deepest and truest thing in math (maybe with Euclidean geometry also.)

Is the mind a single thing, or does it have parts? If it has parts, what are they? Are its parts tied to parts of the brain? — TiredThinker

Allow me to recommend The Concept of Mind by Gilbert Ryle. I only recently got around to this book, and it's just flamethrower for so many entrenched confusions concerning the mind.

One thing to avoid (it seems to me) is just taking it for granted that the word 'mind' is connected as if by a cord to some sufficiently definite concept to make the 'but is it single' question sensible and interesting.

Let me end on a more constructive note. The mind is single in the sense that the person is understood as a locus of responsibility. In fact, it's one and the same ghost in the machine that catches hell when its body misbehaves. But this is a mere report of the way we happen to do things around here. In theory, another culture could allow for even sane people to be temporarily possessed by demons and therefore pardoned for crimes. Or we can imagine ghosts trading bodies, and a culture holding the ghost responsible. "When you, Tim, were in body #45643, you smacked Joe, who was in body #456." The point is that singleness of mind seems ethically important to us.

I recall, vaguely, that it all begins with ϕ. — Agent Smith

Yes, it's all built of $\emptyset$. I also like thinking of it as the bubbleverse. The empty set is an empty bubble. All the other bubbles are just bubbles containing bubbles. From this point of view, the bracket notation is best. I think you can get away (theoretically if not practically) with the finite alphabet of { and } and , (the brackets and a comma, but maybe just a single bracket-- not sure). So 0 = {}, and 1 = {{}} and 2 = {{},{{}}} , and so on... It's even better to draw circles containing circles, but that's not practical here.

That article is fascinating, but I can't help but to object to this part:

Well, the history of science has proved thatwhatever complex concepts mathematicians created, they finally came to be applicable in the mathematics of physics or even to directly describe an empirical context. Take for instance the classical example of complex numbers.

This is a bold claim... that all pure math is eventually applied. Really? I don't think it's that difficult to program computers to both generate systems of axioms and then crank out theorems.


It makes sense to expect practical math to get more funding than unpractical math. Aesthetics plays a role, surely, but perhaps we are tuned by evolution to appreciate the beauty of an efficient and graceful syntax.

My 'anti-platonist pragmatics' (finitism?) comes to this: pure mathematics is mostly invented (re: pattern-making) and applied mathematics is mostly discovered (re: pattern-matching). — 180 Proof

:up:

Perhaps you could explain but do keep it simple, I no mathematician. — Agent Smith

It's just that the two most popular constructions of the counting numbers from set theory use the empty set as zero. The best is maybe this one (Zermelo ordinals) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set-theoretic_definition_of_natural_numbers

There's a somewhat spectacular journey from the natural numbers all the way to functions defined on the real numbers, and everything is built from/on the 'nothingness' of the empty set. There's nothing 'inside' (typical versions of) set theory at all. Real analysis (and everything else) is just ripples in the nothingness.

By the beginning of high school, students may not have great math skills but they should at least know how math is applied to everything in our lives so they might at least be motivated to learn math. Why would anyone want to learn math? — Athena

Math is a very important part of our lives and that includes policy making and government. — Athena

Hi ! Excellent point. The main reason for most people to learn math is probably its central role in science. I don't just mean physics. I mean any science that infers from data. Math helps us decide rationally whether a drug is safe and effective, or (as you mention) whether a policy is safe and effective. It plays a central role in rationality.

How does a society motivate its members to cultivate their rationality? As others have noted, this is an expression of caring for others and not just for oneself. Granted that none of us are angels, how can we create a virtuous circle ?

In typical philosophy forum fashion, nobody can quite agree on the terms under dispute, in part because we have our philosophical commitments to uphold. — Marchesk

In general it seems that the more 'uselessly' metaphysical as opposed to practical the issue, the more semantics becomes central.

Also, good point about everyone trying to hold their own ship together in rough weather.

4. {{ }, 0}. This set is a valid set. — Agent Smith

Typically $0 = \{\}$, so the set above might not be valid. That depends on whether zero is assigned to the empty set and whether it's OK to repeat elements when specifying sets (it is essentially harmless, if confusing.)