Indeed, agreeing that the proffered definitions of justice are inadequate presupposes agreement concerning what is just and what isn't. — Banno

I would put it differently. We (and the Greeks) already know quite a bit about justice, and quite a bit about why drawing a line under the subject is difficult, and quite a bit about the history (and conundrums) of the question. We don't have agreement on what is just; what we do have is agreement on what will count as sensible contributions to the question, "What is justice?" That is ample for keeping the conversation nonsense-free, and for refuting inadequate definitions.

It's all very "building your boat on the ocean," isn't it? And yet we manage not to drown.

This is red herring, like the "definition of justice in the Great Dictionary of Philosophical Terms." I said "knowledge of health" (or "knowledge of justice") not "the definition." Do advances in medicine and the development of medical skill not involve knowledge of health and disease? — Count Timothy von Icarus

OK, fair enough, as long as "knowledge of X" can be acquired without necessarily being able to define X.

There are, however, professional philosophers or scientists who publish in philosophy who make claims and counter claims about how each other's traditions are nonsense and sophistry — Count Timothy von Icarus

Really? In those words? I'd say that was comparatively rare. Good philosophers tend to be much more interested in understanding and, sometimes, refutation, than in name-calling. Is there some publication or passage you have in mind?

Why not? Why doesn't "anything go"? Why doesn't aporia lead to intellectual anarchy? See the Republic.

Which part exactly? — Count Timothy von Icarus

No one in the Republic suggests that "Justice is really a fish." Why not, if they don't know what justice is? Why doesn't their ignorance open the door to nonsense?

Positions like "might makes right" were popular enough to warrant in depth responses from figures like Hegel (when he was already famous). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, and look what happened: We no longer consider such a position viable. That's how intellectual investigations operate, over time. Less plausible, less defensible positions are weeded out, and newer, stronger possibilities are broached. And the discussion goes on.

Even the extravagant set that Moliere has mentioned above is something in addition to the pebble and the sentence, and this something is a property that the pebble and the sentence share. It is an unimportant property for which we have no word, and being in that set means having that property. — litewave

This is interesting but confusing. Is "Being in that set means having that property" different from "'Being in that set' is a property of the pebble"? I thought we didn't want set membership to count as a property.

For me, "snake oil" is another way of talking about "nonsense" or "anything goes," so my response is the same. There are reasons why snake oil isn't taken seriously as a nostrum -- reasons that have little to do with knowing how to define health -- and likewise, whatever the equivalent of "justice snake oil" would be, doesn't get a hearing in serious conversations about justice. Why not? Why doesn't "anything go"? Why doesn't aporia lead to intellectual anarchy? See the Republic.

All I can do is appeal again to our actual practice. The fact that we may be puzzled about key aspects of a subject doesn't open the door to any discourse whatsoever. Can you think of a discipline in which that actually occurs? Rather, certain perennial, plausible positions are questioned and refined. By what standards? That's what we talk about, along with the positions!

litewave's response was that, when we have different sets, we have different properties (i.e., different justices, plural); however I think one could retain the notion of a property as a set without necessarily having to be committed to this clarification. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. I don't see this as a defeater to the OP's thesis.

Isn't it possible that people might consider properties all sorts of ridiculous ways? I don't see a mechanism here for dismissing Tom's opinion on the grounds that it is "nonsense" when we have already opened things up to every possible set configuration. Yet this would seem to make "everything to be everything else."

I don't think the "opinion based flexibility" works with the modal expansion. And something like "all possible opinions that aren't 'nonsense,'" seems to ignore that there are many possible opinions about what constitutes "nonsense." This is made more acute by the modal expansion, but I would say it applies just as well for what you've said, since there is the question: "who decides what is nonsense?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

These are two somewhat different objections, I think. To the first, we can't call the ascription of a property "ridiculous" but also accept the OP's thesis. So if I understand you, you want to stick with the ridiculousness and abandon the thesis. I would lean that way too (though there are difficult logical issues involved in @litewave's idea that I'm still pondering). But the other option is to stick with the thesis and deny that any set is ridiculous. This is in the spirit of litewave's reply to me, above:

Even the extravagant set that Moliere has mentioned above is something in addition to the pebble and the sentence, and this something is a property that the pebble and the sentence share. It is an unimportant property for which we have no word, and being in that set means having that property. — litewave

I have problems with this, but I'll save them for a direct reply to litewave. In any case, that's a comment on your first, "ridiculous property via modal expansion" objection. The second objection concerns the familiar question about what entitles us to call one opinion nonsense and another insightful, if we lack a definition of the terms involved. I would appeal to our practice. Reading Locke or Hobbes or Rawls, we don't compare what they're saying to a previous definition of justice upon which we agree. Rather, we decide they deserve a hearing based on their familiarity with, and competence with, the questions about justice, including the previous conversations that have occurred in the various traditions. They "know the subject," we say -- and this is what Nonsensical Tom probably lacks.

So the answer to the question, "Who decides what is nonsense?" is not "The person who looks up the definition of justice in the Great Dictionary of Philosophical Terms," but instead, "The group of people who are competent, by virtue of study and practice, to interpret the question of what justice is, and understand how it connects with other key philosophical issues."

On this account, we don't have many different claims about what justice is, but many different justices. It's a positive metaphysical claim to say that justice just is the set of things each individual considers to be just. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If Tom, Rawls, et al. each make a claim about what justice is, and we don't think any of them can be supported, what is the situation? Do we say, "Each of these people has a different justice. So for them, justice just is what they consider just." No, we say, "None of these people has been able to tell us what justice is. I don't know either, but I don't have to know in order to understand why the proposed definitions are unsatisfactory." This is Socrates' position, more or less. This, I think, rules out the "positive metaphysical claim"; the question is whether @litewave's thesis can also rule it out.

If there is such a thing, we're sure having a difficult time finding it. Partly because it is undetectable by our senses and technology. Do you have any suggestions? — Patterner

We are indeed having a difficult time, but our quick successes with various aspects of the Easy Problem lead me to be optimistic. It's like nibbling around the edges of something, discerning it by creating its negative outline. More practically, I agree with Chalmers that we'll need to reassess our concept of "3rd person objectivity" in order to make progress with the Hard Problem. Dennett, who I find mostly off-track about this stuff, at least had the idea of "heterophenomenology," which is an attempt to fill this need.

Maybe the model here ought to be the study of life in biology and chemistry. I'm not up-to-date on the science of life, but it seems that investigators have found a way to discern and specify the object of their study without requiring that they first comprehend some incommunicable experience of "being alive."

All that said, I'll repeat what I said to @Wayfarer, above: We know so little about the subject of consciousness that my confidence in anything I'm suggesting here isn't high.

But doesn't this mean that there would be many different versions of the same property? So there would really be "justice(Tom), justice(Greg), justice(Sandra), etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. I know you probably don't care for that conclusion, but I think it's exactly what happens. There are indeed different construals and attempts at definition for an abstraction like "justice." But, to anticipate your objection, that doesn't mean that anything goes, that some nonsense from Tom deserves to be taken as seriously as "justice(Rawls)." The fact that we cannot define something doesn't mean we can't know anything about it, or can't tell a promising clarification or interpretation from one that isn't. Look at the Republic. Justice never gets a satisfactory definition, but it would be hard to read the book carefully and not believe you've learned something about the subject.

I supose that ↪this answers your question? — Banno

Yes, you and @litewave both crossed posts with me. But I still have questions, above, about the identification of property with set, for litewave to consider.

Now I do not think that there is general answer to the question of why we group some things together. — Banno

Right. The "bleen people" group as they do (choosing bizarre intersections of "green" and "blue"), and while they are doing something we find impractical and hard to parse, they may have their reasons.

If even in quantum physics the notion of an observer-independent reality is problematic, then this holds all the more for consciousness — which is even less tractable to purely objective analysis. — Wayfarer

Well, yes, but nonetheless physicists get on with the work, even given this conceptual unclarity -- and progress is made. Couldn't the same thing apply with regard to consciousness? I'm resisting the idea that whatever issues about mind-independence might arise are such as to halt investigation in its tracks, on methodological grounds. That doesn't seem right.

Also, we're homing in on a difficult fraction of scientific practice, where the very nature of what is physical comes into question. My comments about scientific intersubjectivity address the much more common practices of the majority of science, where questions about mind-independence make no practical difference in what scientists study, and can agree on.

That couldn't be more wrong. — Wayfarer

I beg to differ. You're talking about interpretation, not about what (non-theoretical) physicists actually do. One of my friends is a physicist, and delights in discussing the issues you name. And, he freely admits that it makes no difference whatsoever to his daily pursuits in the lab. "Shut up and calculate."

"object" is ontologically loaded. I'd include "property" there.

A set is a collection of individuals. They need not have anything related to one another, or share anything at all -- the individuals are the set and there's nothing else to it. The pebble on the ground and the sentence I say 5 miles away can form a set. — Moliere

Yes. So what, if anything, would we want to say about identifying such a set with some property? I take it you don't want "being in set X" to count as a property -- nor could it, on the OP's proposal.

As long as it is possible (logically consistent) for an organism to have a heart without a kidney, or vice versa, then the set of all possible instances of having a heart is different than the set of all possible instances of having a kidney, and thus these two properties are differentiated. — litewave

I think this replies, with a cross-post, to part of my question, thanks.

I've expressed it as "a set is a collection of objects -- where objects are logical objects (any name whatsoever) -- that need not share anything in common other than being in that collection of objects" — Moliere

Would that mean that "being in that collection of objects [or individuals, per @Banno]" is a shared property? Can an object "wander in," so to speak, and partake of that property? This may not be a question about your definition so much as an expression of uncertainty about "property".

Good OP!

Identity can be defined extensionally using substitution, and without circularity. That's how it is done in modern logic. — Banno

This -- and the earlier queries of @Count Timothy von Icarus and @Hanover -- is where my attention is drawn as well.

The extension, let's say, of all beings with kidneys is the same as that of all beings with hearts. (I don't know if that's true, but no matter). We can also say, The extension of all triangles with equal angles is the same as that of all triangles with equal sides. But if we were to decide, as the OP recommends, that we have identified the properties of having a heart and being equilateral by pointing to their sets, how do we deal with the problem that the reason why the respective sets are co-extensive is different in each case?

In the case of the triangles, it's not implausible, as you point out, to declare that being equilateral and being equiangular are two ways of describing (or should it be "naming"?) the same property. That's because the two descriptors are logical equivalents -- to assert the first is to assert the second, a priori. But hearts and kidneys are different. A posteriori, it turns out that there are biological reasons (again, as we're supposing) for beings with kidneys to have hearts, but that is not a conceptual or logical equivalence.

Does this matter, on the question of whether we're zeroing in on a property, in each case? I'm not sure, because I'm not sure how you understand "property". Are you recommending a new use for the term "property," or a new, improved analysis of what "property" has always meant?

Also, @Count Timothy von Icarus's query is a fair one: Yes, we can define identity in the usual way of modern logic, but the OP is asking us to stretch. Is that kind of identity really intended to be the same? Your answer was: "I mean that the property is the set." That "is" deserves expansion. If all you mean is what @Banno means -- the "is" of logical identity -- fair enough, but we want to be sure.

Scientific objectivity has customarily been grounded in the notion of the 'mind-independent object' without taking into account the Kantian insight into the mind's constitution of the object. — Wayfarer

This is an interesting observation; I think it's both true and not. A scientist doing science is not going to worry about whether an atom of hydrogen is "really out there" or not. As you say, the working assumption is that, if we act as if the atom is mind-independent, we can learn what we need to learn about it.

Some scientists, to be sure, have reflected on the Kantian insight. Let's add that insight to scientific practice. What do you think would change? Are the findings of science any different? Or rather, is it the philosophy of science -- the bedrock and framework beliefs about what is real -- that will change?

I'm suggesting that the particular brand of objectivity that we call scientific objectivity -- essentially an intersubjectivity, a faith in a shared point of view -- will be unchanged. Now suppose the object of scientific investigation is the phenomenon of consciousness; not the experience, but the fact. What we want to know is, Can there be a shared, 3rd-person object of study here that is mind-independent in the same way, and not any more or less, than any other object of study? Or is mind-independence structurally impossible, given that we require minds in order to study anything? But isn't that the same kind of mind-dependence that Kant has alerted us to? How has making consciousness the object of study changed anything?

Again, it's crucial to remember that we're not asking our scientist to study 1st-person phenomenology as such -- that's what I'm calling "the experience, not the fact." We're asking them to investigate the fact of consciousness, the state of affairs that allow consciousness to be part of the world. It's very true that, without our 1st-person experience of consciousness, we wouldn't know what it is that we want to understand. Here, if anywhere, we can perhaps find that special confusion that studying consciousness creates. But I don't think it's obvious in principle that there can be no methodological separation.

Descartes could have more accurately said cogitatio est, ergo esse est — 'thinking is, therefore being is.' What is indubitable is the occurrence of thought, not the existence of an enduring ego. — Wayfarer

This is good, and relates back to a discussion on Descartes I was having with @Ludwig V a while back, based on Bernard Williams' book about D. There's a middle-ground alternative too: We can posit a thinker as indubitable, along with the occurrence of thought, without having to characterize that thinker as "an enduring ego." If I'm not mistaken, Paul Ricoeur suggests something like this, connecting the "ego" in "cogito ergo sum" with the conscious "I" and pointing out that the unconscious or pre-conscious (or even cosmic consciousness) might be what truly endures.

pretty much all the discussion of mental to mental causality in that space that I have seen actually centers around mental to physical causation (generally on the idea that, if a mental state m1 brings about another, m2, such a change is thought to also necessarily involve a physical state transition from p1 to p2). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Exactly, and I find that unsatisfactory. Even if the m's and p's are correlated, it doesn't necessarily mean that "p1 causes p2" is a good explanation of my how my thought of Plato makes me think of Socrates. Indeed, it sounds like a terrible explanation. We can't even cash out "p1" as "Plato" without some theory of how mental and physical events supervene.

So yes, that's what I want to explore, once I pull enough material together. As @Leontiskos mentions, we could just rule out the physical entirely and claim that "mental to mental causation" is the same thing as propositional entailment, but I don't think that works, for a variety of reasons I'll go into eventually. Just with this example, it's clear that "Plato" doesn't entail "Socrates" in any logical way, yet surely we want to say that the one thought, as an event in my mind, not as a proposition, caused or influenced the second. How? It can't only be a matter of neurons, but nor does it really resemble the "causality" of entailment. That's just a sample of the headaches involved in this topic.

there are also formal signs (internal, like concepts or species intelligibiles) that generate interpretants, so mental causality isn't necessarily distinct from the physical. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sounds interesting, thanks. I'll check it out.

Now if you're focused more on discourse and demonstration, that's a whole different can of worms but there is a lot of interesting stuff there. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right, that's different, though equally interesting. My problem is about how we can justify using "causality" talk -- as we do -- when discussing how one mental event leads to another. To highlight the problem, it's probably better to leave out questions of entailment or demonstration entirely, and focus on the much more ordinary linkages we discover between our thoughts.

Good, the Nietzsche passage is right on target, thanks.

The focus of the OP seems to be how one thought leads to a subsequent second thought. — Fire Ologist

Appreciate your response. What you describe would be the OP I want to write, but I need more background! This one was just a plea for help.

In a sense we're each our own little closed system capable of reconciliation with others to share understanding. — DifferentiatingEgg

Indeed. I'd like to understand how the closed system works, to begin with. But I'll lay out what I see as the problem in more depth, once I've found some good target literature.

Thanks for this clarification. (And yes, Owen Flanagan coined "New Mysterians" as a deliberate reference to the 60s band "? and the Mysterians".) If we agree that consciousness is, for now, a mystery, the question becomes, Are there structural or even transcendental arguments that show it must remain so? McGinn thinks so. Chalmers can be read either way, but I continue to see his description of the hard problem as meaning it can be solved, with important changes in scientific method.

Do you think consciousness has to remain a mystery in Marcel's sense -- that the presence of the inquirer makes the phenomenon irreducible to explanatory language, to "technique"?

Thanks, I'll check it out.

I'd settle for even an article, even a chapter, about mental-to-mental causation. Isn't it bizarre that the subject doesn't come up more often? We all know the experience of having a thought which then "makes us" think of something else. What's going on here? How should this be described? Simply to say "association" doesn't suffice, because what we want to know is, how can thoughts associate? Is it by virtue of their content? How does that work? And what is the relation between the "causality" of thoughts and the entailment of propositions?

you've restated a version of the well-known 'Mary's room' thought-experiment? — Wayfarer

Yes, I thought about referencing poor Mary! (Or is she poor? :wink:)

The blind spot is blind with respect to the subject to whom the data means something, the subject, the observer. — Wayfarer

Yes, at the moment. But I think you're suggesting that the blind spot is methodologically structural, that it can't be overcome in terms of objective science. I think this remains to be "seen" (sorry!). As Chalmers says at 2:20, "It may be that the methods of science have to be expanded." This is a recurring theme, for me: We understand consciousness so poorly that it makes anything we say about it, including how it can be studied, provisional at best. Must we assume that the phenomenon of subjectivity cannot be studied from the 3rd person? Must we assume that, because an investigative method depends upon consciousness, it cannot give a complete account of consciousness itself?

Again, as we've been saying, there's a fine, often indistinct, line between consciousness as phenomenon and consciousness as experience. If we take the question "What is it like to conscious?" as actually answerable, would the answer be phrased in terms that are opaque from the point of objective knowledge? Does the experience of consciousness -- the experience of being me, or you -- forever elude being known in terms other than descriptive?

I think both of us should be uncertain about this.

Does he talk about the problem of other minds? — frank

Can't remember. I took a quick look through the book but couldn't find anything. Not to say it isn't there -- the book has an unusual set-up -- a long target paper by Strawson, then replies by about 16 philosophers, then a long response to all of them from Strawson. So it's hard to find stuff, and the index didn't help. But an excellent book nonetheless.

@Wayfarer is mistaken. — frank

This is me speculating about his position. He may not think this at all.

Our worldview tends to say that intrinsic perspective (or subjective experience), is located in isolated pockets, inside skulls? Mine is separated from yours by a region of air. Could you see yourself questioning that assumption? — frank

Yes. Do you know Galen Strawson's book, Consciousness and Its Place in Nature? A very good argument for the plausibility of panpsychism.

We're talking about the most simple, center of everything sort of experience, like the ITT theory graphic:
check it out. — frank

This is a great graphic, thanks.

So right there, I'm not experiencing you as you. — frank

Yes, yet another aspect of the impossibility -- not only do we have our experiences, but we have our attitudes toward our experiences, our "experience of experience," and that would presumably be different for you and me, even if we somehow shared the 1st-level experiences.

I have more questions about how you think this relates to the hard problem. — frank

So do I! And if you've been following my discussion with @Wayfarer, you see that not everyone agrees on exactly how to characterize the hard problem. I read Chalmers as saying it's a scientific problem, hard but potentially solvable through scientific inquiry. Whereas I think Wayfarer sees Chalmers as being closer to the New Mysterian position of McGinn and others.

What are your questions about hard versus impossible?

I guess what I meant is that all explanations are reductive in that they tell one story, where others might also be told, analyze things in terms of their components (causal processes, reasons or rules) and none of them go anywhere near to capturing the whole picture or covering all the bases. — Janus

I'm fine with the "one story" aspect -- an explanation that allows for other explanations isn't complete. But we have to be careful with "components." If consciousness supervenes upon brain activity, rather than relates as an effect to a cause, then it's not clear if we should describe the physical strata as "components" or not. I guess, as long as components aren't understood to be necessarily both causal and completely explanatory, we can use that term, but then the associated explanation isn't reductive.

I cannot imagine what any other non-reductive kind of explanation could possibly look like. Could not a reductive explanation of consciousness possibly show why (if such were the case) it is not identical to its physical components. For that matter are there any explanations at all which are not given in terms of components? Would understanding consciousness even conceivably be possible if it could not be analyzed in terms of components? — Janus

The supervenience model is meant to address these concerns. And again, it depends on your understanding of "reductive." I would say that an explanation of consciousness that shows why it is the case that it is not identical to its physical components, is ergo non-reductive.

If we are undertaking a [scientific] investigation into consciousness, what could we be doing if not looking at behavior and neural activity (anything else you can think of?) using observation and reasoned analysis? — Janus

OK to add "scientific" above? I assume you don't mean a phenomenological or other 1st person investigation.

I think the answer to your question is, "Science doesn't know, at this point." Behavior and brain activity are certainly on the table as places to investigate, but the problem of consciousness is so poorly understood and apparently intransigent that I wouldn't be surprised if an entirely new area of inquiry opens up. Who know, maybe Penrose was right (in "The Emperor's New Mind") when he postulated quantum effects as responsible for consciousness.

I can see an image of the eye, but I cannot see the act of seeing the image. That is the whole point, which I can't help but feel you're missing. — Wayfarer

No, I think we both grasp the point, but are coming at it from different analyses. The "eye" metaphor arose from your quote, "The eye cannot see itself." I took this literally, and disputed it. But I think what you meant was, "The eye cannot see itself seeing itself," and this is a different matter, and quite true.

The difference is important, both philosophically and methodologically. We can investigate a subject using (roughly) scientific methods, and "see" (know) it in ways that are impossible to the naked eye of phenomenology. But by the same token, what phenomenology allows us is a way to understand experience that isn't available to science. I think we both agree with this. You encapsulate it nicely in the quote above.

When it comes to consciousness, we may have a special case -- and I think that's the deeper subject of this discussion. Is there something about consciousness, and about being conscious, that calls into question this division between knowing and experiencing? We need consciousness to do any sort of seeing or knowing, including the strictest of scientific projects. A blind person can understand how the eye works, because understanding is not a true visual seeing, but a way of grasping intellectually. But can the blind person (from birth, we'd have to stipulate) know what the experience of seeing is? Probably not.

So we might be in a similar position with regard to consciousness. Does consciousness always entail being conscious, such that it cannot become an object for the conscious subject? I don't think so, but it is certainly an open question.

We could also phrase it in terms of the "Blind Spot" quote:

We devise a powerful explanatory method that abstracts away consciousness while forgetting that the method remains fundamentally dependent on consciousness. — The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson

Is this in fact a flaw? Does this dependence vitiate whatever explanation may result? Again, I don't think so, but my degree of confidence in this judgment isn't high, because many good philosophers see it differently.

Does any of this make sense so far?

Thanks, we always have to remember that animals belong within our circle of identification and compassion.

I have a friend who's coined the term "The Impossible Problem" to describe this wrinkle in the Hard Problem. (And yes, @Wayfarer, this is the very same question we're examining from different angles in the other thread.) My friend means the problem of actually experiencing another person's consciousness. Why does this seem impossible? It creates a dilemma: If I experience your consciousness as myself doing so, that is clearly not what it's like for you -- there's no observer or alien presence for you. But if I don't do this, and instead simply have your experience (how? but that's a different question), then I haven't experienced it -- my "I" is not present to do any experiencing. Either way, it doesn't seem possible that I can ever know what it is to be you (leaving aside the somewhat ambiguous "what it's like".)

This doesn't mean, of course, that it's unreasonable to suppose that being someone else resembles being me. The resemblance gets less and less close as we move through the animal kingdom.

The problem Chalmers describes is the relationship of third-person, objective descriptions of physical processes with first-person experience. — Wayfarer

Take a look at this video, especially starting at 3:40. Chalmers explains what the hard problem is. "What is the relationship" doesn't really get it -- Chalmers is asking why, not what.

I wear specs and of course the optometrist has instruments and expertise to examine my eyes and prescribe the necessary lenses. But she doesn’t see my seeing. — Wayfarer

This is exactly the point, and the difference. She can't see your seeing; that is a subjective experience. But you can also see what she sees, namely the eye itself. And thus for consciousness. I can't know what it's like to be someone else, but that is a different problem from what consciousness is.

I could put the question in terms of "life" rather than consciousness. Would you say that, because you are alive, you are unable to know what life is? That a biological study of life must always leave something out? If you say, "What it leaves out is the experience of being alive," then we agree. But if you say that we can never have a complete explanation of life because we ourselves are alive, I don't see it.

Now granted, this hinges on a particular understanding of what an explanation is, and what it must cover. I'm clear that a reductive physical explanation of consciousness is unlikely. But that is not the only possible way of explaining it. Part of what makes the hard problem so hard is that we don't yet understand the phenomenon of consciousness, so making a link with the "how and why" of it remains for the future. I think Chalmers makes all this pretty clear in the video. He says, "Ultimately it's a question for science, but it's a question which right now our scientific method doesn't have a very good handle on."

Are not all explanations reductive? — Janus

A deep question, certainly. I would say no. You say, "All explanations are given in causal terms," but you're thinking of a type of common physical/scientific explanation. Is the explanation of the Pythagorean theorem a causal one? Surely not. What about an explanation of how football is played? Does that reduce to an analysis of what the players do? A reductive explanation of consciousness would not only show how it comes to occur, but also why it is identical, in some significant sense, to its physical components, just as water reduces to H2O. I'm suggesting that explaining consciousness may not fit this model.

Consciousness is not trying to explain itself―it is reason, the discursive intellect, that is trying to explain consciousness. — Janus

That's an interesting move. Again, it seems to hinge on what the activity of explanation consists of.

It doesn't seem to be as simple as we are conscious when awake and unconscious when asleep, for example. — Janus

In a way, it is that simple -- for now. I suspect that when we get a biological explanation of consciousness, which I believe we will, in time, we'll discover that "conscious = awake" is too simple. But can we abandon, for purposes of investigation, the basic stance that to be conscious is to be awake and aware, and to be unconscious is to lack those attributes? I can't think of a better place to start, can you? I don't just mean scientifically -- when I discuss this subject with friends, that's certainly what they mean, and they understand quite well that some aspect of subjectivity or personhood can remain when the mind is asleep or sedated, so consciousness isn't the same as "being me" or "being alive."

No it isn’t. He quotes Nagel in support of his definition; — Wayfarer

He's giving a description of what he means by consciousness, not a definition of the hard problem. It is, in fact, a pretty good description of what subjective experience entails: "visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations. . . " etc. Being able to describe this is not a hard problem at all; the problem is why and how it is possible.

But perhaps we're just placing different emphases on aspects of the problem. Would you agree that the hard problem is also a problem of how consciousness emerges, and why it does so? That is the standard version.

why does that mean we can't seek an explanation for it?
— J

Because of recursion: you’re trying to explain that which is doing the explaining. ‘The eye cannot see itself’. — Wayfarer

I know this seems obvious to you, but I don't understand it. The eye can see itself, actually, by using scientific technology -- in fact, such technology allows us to see, and explain, the eye much better than we can do as mere experiencers and observers. And it still involves using our eyes. Why wouldn't the same be true for consciousness? Again, I think there are rebuttals to this question, but simple recursion isn't one of them.

As is well known, he says the really hard problem is 'what it is like to be...' By that he means the experiential dimension of life, the 'subjective aspect' as he calls it. — Wayfarer

No, that's not the hard problem. Chalmers says:

. . .even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report—there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? — Chalmers, Facing Up . . .

This is a different problem from "What is it like to be conscious?" The latter problem is associated with Nagel, not Chalmers.

The hard problem is a why and how problem: Why does consciousness arise from physical experience, and how does it do so? These are completely within the scope of cognitive science. "What is it like" is a different animal, and probably not amenable to scientific response.

The SEP article on consciousness puts it this way:

"The so-called “hard problem” (Chalmers 1995) which is more or less that of giving an intelligible account that lets us see in an intuitively satisfying way how phenomenal or “what it's like” consciousness might arise from physical or neural processes in the brain."

Again, the problem is to say how "what it's like" consciousness arises from brain processes, not to give a description of consciousness itself.

The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role.

Sure. But why does that mean we can't seek an explanation for it? (Not, of course, a reductive explanation; that would be to beg the question in favor of physicalism.)

I think many of the problems arise because of the tendency to try and treat consciousness - actually, I prefer 'mind' - as an object. It may be an object for the cognitive sciences. — Wayfarer

I suppose my 'bottom line' is the irreducibility of consciousness (or mind). If something is irreducible then it can't really be explained in other terms or derived from something else. My approach is Cartesian in that sense - that awareness of one's own being is an indubitable fact — Wayfarer

Like you (and I think @Pierre-Normand), I don't believe consciousness or mind can be reduced to the physical. But I'd like to see a clearer discussion of what's entailed in your statements above.

Two things:

1. If mind can be an object for the cognitive sciences, what does this mean? How does the attitude or program of cognitive science allow an escape from what you call "the indubitable fact that we are that which we seek to know"? Perhaps the answer lies in a discrimination between 1st and 3rd person perspectives, but what do you think? When a scientist studies consciousness, what are they doing differently from our everyday experience of being conscious?

2. That some awareness is an indubitable fact does not entail that it can't be explained in other terms. Yet you seem to imply that this must be so. Why? Aren't we confusing the experience, the phenomenology, with that which is experienced? My awareness of a drop of water is irreducible and, for some, indubitable, but we have the science of chemistry nonetheless. Why would the situation be different for consciousness? I can think of several candidate answers here, but tell me what you think.

The problem I see is that it's not clear what we mean by "mind" and even less clear what we might mean by "mind-independence". For example Wayfarer says that because it is us thinking about the time before we existed that the time before we existed must be mind-dependent. On that stipulation everything we think about must be mind-dependent, as opposed to merely the way we think about it. — Janus

I'll leave that to you and @Wayfarer, but my 2 cents is that Wayfarer is saying something a bit different. Your general point, however, is that "mind" and "mind-independence" are not terms with universal consensus, and that's quite true.

Pretty much all I see in Wayfarer's posts is the attempt to explain (away) modern philosophical positions and dispositions in psychological terms―the rise of science has caused us to become blind to something important in traditional "proper" philosophy, modernity has lost its way, "blind spot in science", physicalism could not possibly be a coherent position, blah.

I don't find any of that remotely convincing, worth taking seriously or even interesting, so you must be seeing something there I don't. — Janus

On this particular topic, what I find interesting is his use of "real" and "existent" to refer, respectively, to universals and physical stuff. I'm way oversimplying, but his idea is that we could therefore speak about numbers as being real, while not "existent" in the same way that a squirrel is. As you know, I'm not fond of those particular terms, but it shouldn't blind us to the distinction W wants to make, which I believe is a valuable one. There is a metaphysical or ontological difference between a number and a squirrel, and I understand why some philosophical traditions would want to characterize it as W does. But rather than bickering about the labels, let's say more about the details of that difference, the respective properties of numbers and squirrels, etc.

My point about the existence–reality distinction is very much in that spirit: we shouldn’t collapse reality into empirical existence, but we also shouldn’t reify reality as if it were some external substrate “out there". — Wayfarer

Yes. Again, I have issues with those particular terms but that's irrelevant to the point you're making, which I think is extremely important.

I read Rödl to not [be?] saying we could know the limits of "logical" principles. If we cannot know their limits as the basis of "experience", we cannot know their absence as a verification of fact. — Paine

I'd like to hear more on this. (Did I edit your 1st sentence correctly?) I'm not sure I understand the part about "we cannot know their absence as a verification of fact."

As usual, there's a lot to unpack in Rodl, but I've generally found it worthwhile. Let me start with a simple question (and I don't want to take us too far from the main thread of this conversation): Rodl's idealism would probably view talk of "reality" and "mind-independence" as sharing a fatal flaw, such that to say one is more or less useful, philosophically, hardly signifies. That flaw would be an assumed demarcation between what we can know as real/unreal, and mind-dependent/independent. A "judgment of experience," here, has nothing to do with logical principles; I think you're suggesting we interpret such principles as the mind-independent reality that we want to connect with experience. "The logical principle supplies no justification of any judgment of experience; no scientific principle can be derived from the principle of logic."

Is this on the right track?

My point about universals is that they are fundamental constituents of this ‘R’. I think Wheeler’s simile of ‘paper maché’ is a little misleading, as the tenets of physical theory are rather more ‘solid’ than this suggests. But regardless the elements of the theory are real in a different sense to its objects. They comprise theories and mathematical expressions of observed regularities. — Wayfarer

Works for me. What would be interesting, then, would be to investigate the ways in which the elements of the theory are different from its objects. If I understand Wheeler's conception, that can be done without further talk about "real."

the question as to what we might mean by "mind-independent'―a term that seems to be much more slippery than 'real'. — Janus

Yes, it's slippery, but it lends itself more easily to some kind of investigation than "real" does. I simply don't know how I could tell if a philosophical object is real or not. Depends what you mean! Whereas with "mind-independent," the ground is a bit firmer. If I claim that universals and abstracta have no existence apart from minds, I'm saying they lack the property of mind-independence. If I further claim that my thought of "If p, then q" is dependent on my thinking it, whereas the proposition "If p, then q" is not, that's another way of talking about mind-independence.

You may feel there's not much difference in clarity between "mind-independent" and "real," and I agree it's not a huge categorical difference; I just find myself knowing a little better what I'm thinking about, when I think about what "mind-independence" means. This could be because "real" has so many contexts and usages, whereas "mind-independence" is rather technical, and not as widely connotative.

I think the takeaway is that we cannot hope to get a "one-size-fits-all" definition of 'real', or 'existent'. It seems the best we can do is hone in on a somewhat fuzzy sense of the term and hopefully sharpen that sense up a bit. — Janus

Thanks for taking the time to parse my rather terse "which direction" question! I could try to say it again, better, but your takeaway is pretty much where I was going with it. We can either adopt a definition of "real" and go on to discover things that fit our definition, or we can take a look at what I've called the "conceptual landscape," see how the various denizens relate, and then decide that "real" would be a good term to use for one of the denizens, based on how it's been used in some respectable tradition. But either way, it's a pragmatic effort, in the best sense. As you say, we aren't likely to come up with a "one-size-fits-all" definition. But it may well be the case that something like @Wayfarer's schema, for instance, can do excellent philosophical work for us, without requiring us to pin "real" down to some fact of the matter or some correct usage.

Reading your response, I think I might not have been clear. I was saying that, if we talk about numbers as "real", we likely don't mean "as opposed to fake" or "genuine", or one of the other commonly useful construals of "real". That was what I called a "bad fit."

So if we don't use that construal, which one should we use? The schema you're laying out makes sense, and can clearly be useful in dividing up the conceptual territory, but would you want to argue that it's the correct use of "real" in metaphysics? That's what I'm questioning. I don't think metaphysics is the least bit archaic -- it's one of the most exciting areas of contemporary philosophy -- but I'm suggesting that we now have better terminology than an endless wrangle about what counts as "real."

And BTW, I think (most) universals are every bit as mind-independent as you do. But there we are: "mind-independent" is a property or characteristic we can get our teeth into. Adding ". . . and real" seems unnecessary.

Real" is perfectly clear and useful in most contexts, because we know how to use it.
— J

Real is authentic, not fake, the real deal. Reality is distinguished from delusion, illusion or duplicity. — Wayfarer

Well, yes, that works for many, perhaps most, contexts, as I was discussing with @Janus and @AmadeusD, above. But would you import it into a consideration of numbers, for instance? It seems like a bad fit. My contention is that, the more we enter metaphysics and epistemology, the less useful "real" is. I believe it's a placeholder or term of convenience for various other characteristics that can be more precisely stated. And to make matters worse, those other characteristics vary from tradition to tradition, while "real" remains constant, as if it could cover all of them.

But, as we've said, my view depends on there not being a story in which "real" did have a correct usage, which it lost. This is a specifically philosophical objection. Other uses of "real" observe different constraints.

to agree on the meaning of 'real' would be to agree on what is real. — Janus

And the question is, in what direction does the justification go? Do we discover a knowledge or nous of a certain sort of thing, and say, "This is real", based on what "real" means? Or do we have a term, "real", which we then attempt to match with certain sorts of things in order to discover what it does or could mean?

Some further reflections on keeping truth and justification separate. . .

When we say, “The world pushes back,” what are we describing?

"Truth remains a world-constraint (thin correspondence). If your model predicts rain and it doesn’t, the world corrects you.” — Sam

What if we changed the example from a prediction to an observation? I see a moist situation outside my window that appears to be rain; I offer genuine justifications for my belief, “It’s raining”; but when I go outside I discover that actually it had stopped raining quite a while ago, and what I saw from my window was the rainwater continuing to fall from the high trees in my yard.

What has happened here? Can I say that my belief in the rain was justified, but untrue? Shouldn’t I have taken into account the possibility of rainwater falling from the trees – a phenomenon I’ve seen many times before – when I provided my public-standard reasons for my belief? (the “defeater” criterion). That would make my belief unjustified; at best, I should have said that it was quite likely to be raining. But then again, my “JB” -- my assertion of belief plus justifications – was not offered as a piece of knowledge. Not if I believe in the JTB theory, anyway.

So -- at what point is justification only “genuine” if it indeed tracks the truth? You say, “I can be genuinely justified yet false,” and give the example of the cancelled train stop. Yes, it appears that you were justified in believing the train would come . . . but isn’t another analysis possible? Couldn’t we say, “We all know that train stops can be cancelled. You can affirm your belief that the train will come; you can give your genuine justifications for thinking so; but only the fact (truth) of the train’s arrival will turn this into a JTB, a piece of knowledge.”

I guess I’m asking how we should characterize a “JB” -- a belief that is genuinely justified, according to your criteria, but whose truth is still undetermined. Does a person who asserts a JB assert that they know it? Only the “know of conviction,” perhaps. If JTB is meant to be the definition of knowledge, we can’t say “I know X” until we discover whether X is true – we need all three legs of the tripod. So again, how should we describe “genuine justification” in a way that preserves some daylight between that concept and “true”? How carefully must we consider every conceivable defeater before saying that our justification is genuine?

These are reservations and puzzlements about the JTB concept in general, I think. I want to turn to your more focused version, with its use of Wittgensteinian hinge propositions, especially the idea that hinge propositions “stop the regress (and circularity) that would make any coupling [of methods for determining truth and justification] impossible.” But that will wait for a subsequent post.

BTW – I don’t think you and @Joshs have a serious disagreement about “creative, intuitive modification of norms.” Josh says:

I mean something more like Gadamer’s phronesis — a context-sensitive application of rules that inevitably alters their force. — Joshs

As a third party following along, this seems to me quite compatible with:

Yes, rules are “open-textured;" there is no decision-procedure that eliminates judgment. But that judgment is trained and answerable to public standards. If “creative” means improvisational within the practice (e.g., a physician integrating atypical signs without violating diagnostic criteria), I agree. If it means license to bend criteria ad hoc, I reject it. — Sam26

Gadamer’s phronesis is not at all ad hoc, and I’m pretty sure Josh wouldn’t recommend that.

Amusingly, this is a case of not having rules for knowing when and how to apply rules! And as we know, the lack of “rules for rules” doesn’t make everything ad hoc and chaotic.