Here you are:

To return to the physiologist observing another man’s brain: what the physiologist sees is by no means identical with what happens in the brain he is observing, but is a somewhat remote effect. From what he sees, therefore, he cannot judge whether what is happening in the brain he is observing is, or is not, the sort of event that he would call "mental". When he says that certain physical events in the brain are accompanied by mental events, he is thinking of physical events as if they were what he sees. He does not see a mental event in the brain he is observing, and therefore supposes there is in that brain a physical process which he can observe and a mental process which he cannot. This is a complete mistake. In the strict sense, he cannot observe anything in the other brain, but only the percepts which he himself has when he is suitably related to that brain (eye to microscope, etc.). We first identify physical processes with our percepts, and then, since our percepts are not other people’s thoughts, we argue that the physical processes in their brains are something quite different from their thoughts. In fact, everything that we can directly observe of the physical world happens inside our heads, and consists of "mental" events in at least one sense of the word "mental". It also consists of events which form part of the physical world. The development of this point of view will lead us to the conclusion that the distinction between mind and matter is illusory. The study of the world may be called physical or mental or both or neither, as we please; in fact, the words serve no purpose. There is only one definition of the words that is unobjectionable: "physical" is what is dealt with by physics, and "mental" is what is dealt with by psychology. When, accordingly, I speak of "physical" space, I mean the space that occurs in physics. — Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Philosophy (1937)

There's a good paper by Friston (although very speculative, I should stress) on how this might come about.
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1399513/1/Friston_Journal_of_the_Royal_Society_Interface.pdf — Isaac

Heh, "Life as we know it" - not too ambitious, are we? ;) I heard Sean Carroll talk to Friston on his podcast about his free energy minimization model for cognition, mainly, but they touched upon his foray into OOL as well.

Well, yes and no. That's the difficulty which gives Hoffman the space in which he can introduce this theoretical 'veil' without abandoning all credibility. The problem is that the result of our prediction (the response of the hidden states) is just going to be another perception, the cause of which we have to infer. No if we use, as priors for this second inference, the model which produced the first inference (the one whose surprise reduction is being tested), then there's going to be a suppresive action against possible inferences which conflict with the first model. String enough of these together, says Hoffman, and you can accumulate sufficient small biases in favour of model 1, that the constraints set by the actual properties of the hidden causal states pale into insignificance behind the constraints set by model 1's assumptions.

The counter arguments are either that the constraints set by the hidden causal states are too narrow to allow for any significant diversity (Seth), or that there's never a sufficiently long chain of inference models without too much regression to means (which can only be mean values of hidden states). I subscribe to a combination of both. — Isaac

When we develop models analytically, such as in science or in everyday reasoning, it is certainly possible - and seductive - to come up with a model that is resistant to falsification. But it seems to me that such a modelling system would be difficult to evolve in the first place, because the selective pressure would be weak to non-existent.

Thanks for the comment. Yeah, the OP is just dumb, but I'd come across Hoffman before and thought it would be an interesting topic. The critical paper that you referenced is in the same issue as the HSP paper. Full text: Perceptual representation, veridicality, and the interface theory of perception.

What Hoffman brings is the idea that this disconnect is not going to be random, it's going to be subject to selective pressure. I can see that, but the fundamental function of these models is surprise reduction and that is correspondence dependant (or at least there's no reason to assume it's not). — Isaac

Isn't making good predictions (and thus minimizing surprise, i.e. failed predictions) the real test of correspondence?

P.P.S. In a sympathetic comment in the same issue (Esse est percipi & verum factum est) Jan Koenderink writes that the "interface theory" is "part of a minor tradition in Western intellectual history that has been around for centuries" and puts it into the perspective of life sciences, mainly in the period between 1850 and 1950.
@Joshs may also be interested in this, seeing as the ideas put phenomenology front and center.

P.S.
D.D.Hoffman, M.Singh and C.Prakash: The Interface Theory of Perception (2015)
Perhaps @Isaac could say something intelligent about it.

Don't get me wrong, I haven't actually said anything against Hoffman's work other than that it's controversial, which is actually a good thing if, like our OP here, all you know about him is that he is a scientist guy who claims to have proven something in a youtube clip. It means that he is publishing and that there are others in his field who take his work seriously enough to read and argue about. I thought it was interesting enough to look into what that "interface theory of perception" was about. Even if it's completely wrongheaded, it may be wrongheaded in an interesting way.

lol, pot, kettle?

I am not angry, but I don't respect lazy and incurious people, especially not on a philosophy forum. I have actually looked a bit into this topic, which is more than you have done.

What Hoffmann does it's a mathematical proof using evolutionary game theory. If you say there is a controversy about it without pointing out any particular flaw in the logic that is not a logical argument but an opinion. — FalseIdentity

Excuse me if I come off patronizing, but you give an impression of someone who is not at all familiar with how science is done. What Hoffmann et al. do is what everyone does: they do some research and publish it for their peers to evaluate, tear apart or support. (He also likes to appeal directly to popular media with his unproven theories, which is a crankish thing to do.) Just because the argument has some mathematics doesn't mean that he's provided a "proof." Biology is not a mathematical discipline. Any mathematics in that context would rest on theory and assumptions, and it is that which is mainly in question, not how well he can do mathematical derivations and write computer simulations.

That there is a controversy about it is not an opinion but a fact that you could have found out yourself if you actually did your homework, instead of just watching a youtube video.

A new discovery in the science of evolution has shown that a logic developed through evolution will never seek to understand the truth, it just learns to maipulate it's environment without a deeper understanding of what it is manipulating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY&t=997s — FalseIdentity

That's not a "new discovery" but rather a purely theoretical and controversial argument promulgated by Donald Hoffman (a bona fide cognitive scientist, if anyone is wondering).

The idea of wanting something to be "truth-apt" is to have something to depend on, justify our acts, ensure agreement, etc. The sense of a statement that is true or false takes our place--which I say is the structure of a moral claim, in our having to be true to something. — Antony Nickles

Let's just say that there is more than one sense of truth. One basic sense is where you accept or reject a proposition. This sense is well tracked by language: pretty much anything that can be stated as a meaningful proposition is truth-apt in that sense. But then, as you point out, there are senses that extend beyond one person and past the here-and-now.

I am interested in the performance of "accepting" a claim without doing anything; I've called this platitudes, slogans, quotations; but that is to put the responsibility on the speech, not the speaker. — Antony Nickles

There clearly is a sense of morality that does not necessarily imply action. Otherwise we couldn't have had moral attitudes towards past events, or generally anything in which we cannot partake or just don't happen to have an occasion to partake, and that's clearly not true. One can moralize without acting - indeed, since "passions" are what motivate and guide our actions in the first place, how could they not precede actions? And when one fails to act, that doesn't retrospectively render one's attitudes amoral.

Morality is, as you say, a commitment that one takes upon oneself: commitment to be and to do as a moral principle demands of you. But such a commitment does not arise just at the moment "when we are lost as to what to do." Just as with morally-neutral decisions, at the point when a decision is contemplated, all the beliefs and attitudes that will inform that decision are usually already in place. And just as with non-moral beliefs and attitides, that is possible because we have been developing those beliefs and attitudes all throughout our lives, long before this particular action opportunity presented itself.

I haven't read the works to which you refer (Cora Diamond and her unnamed critic), but I like your gloss on the nature moral statements.

I wouldn't worry so much about whether moral statements are truth-apt though. Pragmatically, I would say that anything one can assert or reject is perforce truth-apt. And I think that the take on a moral assertion as a "pledge to be responsible for its state" applies somewhat to other kinds of assertions as well. Assenting to a statement is a pledge to proceed in accordance with that statement - anything else would be disingenuous or vacuous.

I don't get what it is you don't get, but let me address this bit:

Chess exists in a vacuum. A line does not. — Caldwell

No, chess does not exist in a vacuum, any more than a line. I think when people talk about Wittgenstein's "language games," and how math is "made up" because it is just a game we play (@Banno), they may be led astray by an association of the word "game" with something arbitrary and frivolous. But that's not at all true about literal games, such as chess, is it? If you make up an arbitrary game, it's going to be shit and no one will want to play it. And yet chess has been played for many centuries (and has evolved quite a bit over time). That doesn't just happen arbitrarily.

And the same is true about math, of course.

Funny you say this. I won't preface a statement about math objects as "usually". They're just are. — Caldwell

Within the context of a given mathematical system, yes. But there is more than one system, and hence more than one way to define/describe a line. For example, in analytical geometry a line is a collection of points, because that's just how analytical geometry is built up. Roughly speaking, you start with numbers, from numbers you build points and spaces, and from that you build all the geometrical objects, including lines. That is not how lines are introduced in Euclidean geometry though. Euclid himself doesn't really define a line - he just gives an intuitive picture of what he is going to talk about. The real "definition" of a line comes in the form of axioms that constrain its properties.

Also, interesting that you mentioned constrained by the axioms of the system. Don't you want to direct that statement towards Banno's question regarding chess? — Caldwell

Funny you should mention chess, because chess pieces are a good example of use-definition. A formal description of a chess game would not have a formal definition of a chess piece - it's just an abstract object to which we give a name. Its meaning is given by the use to which it is put in the game: the rules of how different pieces move, etc.

What was @Banno's question?

Far more people die from old age than from what you call "horrible diseases," such as polio, but that doesn't mean that we needn't do anything about polio, does it? The impact of the disease is only one part of the equation; what we can and cannot do about it, and the impacts of different actions and inactions are the other parts of the equation that must be considered as well. We can't do much about aging, especially for those who are already aged, but we can do much, and relatively easily, about polio.

Have you done that kind of calculation for Covid?

W is missing the point. A line is a distance. Two points apart entails a distance, therefore a line. — Caldwell

A line is not usually defined as a distance, if it is defined at all: in some systems it is a primitive element, which is not defined, but merely constrained by the axioms of that system.

I think what you are getting at is that for us to be able to define or describe a line, the world must already be such as to allow for such an object. And if that is so, then all the elements and constraints that are needed to make up a line (points, distances, etc.) are already in place. So what is there left to be invented?

I think a Wittgensteinian answer would be to say that the world (or rather, the "world" of our thoughts and conversations), its objects, and the way we put them together to construct other objects are all part of a language game.

I fully admit to not understanding it, no jest. — Manuel

No, you are right: entropy is a tricky thing (or things, since there are different kinds). Also, while the simple version of the 2nd law (entropy increases in an isolated system) applies to all isolated systems with a large number of "moving parts," the more general entropy equations that one finds in thermodynamics textbooks apply only to well-behaved, slowly changing non-isolated systems. So I was wrong too.

To be fair, you said "the second law" in the thread. The problem is that the second law applies to closed systems. — Manuel

No, the second law applies to all systems, but that just goes back to what you said at the start of your post. You should have stopped while you were ahead ;)

Read response, he talks sense.

From my Youtube likes:

Rosalyn Tureck plays Bach Capriccio BMV 992 "On the Departure of His Beloved Brother"


Rosalyn Tureck plays Bach English Suite No 3 in G minor BWV 808


I like her delicate, flowing staccato.

Ginastera: Violinkonzert ∙ hr-Sinfonieorchester ∙ Hilary Hahn ∙ Andrés Orozco-Estrada


A recent recording, and a recent discovery for me. (This gorgeous concerto seems to be rarely performed - probably because it's so damned hard, technically and emotionally.)


As for fidelity to composer's intentions, some classical musicians (Richter?) even bristle at being called interpreters, insisting that they merely perform what the composer wrote. Whether they really believe it (I can see how one might) or being coy, it's clearly not true that there isn't a good deal of interpretation involved even in the most scholarly and persnickety performance.

And I think a good piece of music has enough life of its own to survive a variety of good interpretations and even reinterpretations. I draw a line at Stokie's heavy-handed Romantic extravaganzas, but I can very well enjoy modern instrument Bach performances, alongside period ones, and even various adaptations and transformations (like one of my favorite jazz albums, Blues on BACH.)

P.S. Or speaking of Britten, here is one of my favorites: his brilliant take on one of Dowland's lachrymose songs - appropriately titled Lachrymae:



Respectful and personal.

My criticism probably won't be useful or convincing to you, but here goes. I draw the line at premise one - a moral system - in the way both your opponent and you apparently intend it, i.e. as a set of general, simple, exceptionless principles styled after logical, mathematical or simple scientific theories, such as Newtonian mechanics. While I am not a moral nihilist, I don't think that real morality either does or ought to conform to such a system.

That this is how both you and this AskYourself person see a "moral system" in this way can be seen in how hypothetical moral stances are framed, attacked and defended. Your opponent doesn't even consider a simple proposition such as "it is acceptable to eat animals" or "it is wrong to eat humans" - likely because such specific maxims don't seem like they belong in a simple axiomatic system. No, ethical principles ought to refer to something general and abstract, such as "intelligence," from which specific instances can be derived.

Then there is an expectation of clear distinctions and intolerance of moral ambiguity, which is exemplified both in the "trait equalization process" and in your debate with @khaled. The objection to the soundness of my naive maxims would be that one can imagine a series of hypotheticals in which humans become more and more animal-like or animals become more and more human-like, blurring the boundary between the two categories and leading to moral ambiguity. To which I say: So what? Yes, boundaries can be blurry, and moral ambiguity is a fact of life. If that disqualifies my ethics from being systematic, then so be it.

The question is unclear, which is why I think the responses are all over the place. What sort of an answer to do you expect? Is this a scientific question? Normative? Metaphysical? What do you assume at the outset? (E.g. do you assume that moral behavior is an evolved trait and then wonder why other species did not evolve it as well?)

As I’ve explained, I think there’s plainly a difference between hybridisation and genetic engineering. — Wayfarer

Sure. There's also a difference between hybridisation and selection. And a difference between pumpkins and shovels. Point?

I can understand queasiness, but that's not much as a subject of discussion. Caution I can understand as well, but it needs more substantiation than just pointing out that something is new and different. (So was everything else when it first appeared.) I myself do believe that we should proceed carefully and publicly with potentially disruptive innovations - not an original position, of course.

We have been literally creating new species since prehistoric times. There are parasites that only exist because of humans - not to mention practically every cultivar, cattle, pets, etc. etc.

Yes, it's a new technique. So was grafting when it was invented, as well as every technique in our arsenal.

I am not taking a pro or contra position - I am just looking for something more substantive than hand-wringing.

But not by direct manipulation of the genome. None of them were 'created by humans', except for in the sense that the breed was selected. Artificial selection, I believe is the term, and in fact one of the sources for Darwin's idea of 'natural selection'. — Wayfarer

Direct manipulation of genome is just the latest technology used in the process of adapting other species for our needs - and we are already using it (all those GMOs, you know). But I don't get your point. Why are you drawing the line at this technology and not, say, at irradiating seeds to induce more random mutations? Or the good old-fashioned selection and hybridization? Is there some red line that is only crossed with "direct manipulation of the genome"?

I can't think of any "completely novel lifeforms" created by science. You would be referring to new species, not hybrids or modified species, I take it? Wouldn't the mammoth/ African elephant be a hybrid, just as the so-called Tigons or Ligers or mules are? — Janus

Or, you know, pretty much all the animals and plants that we eat or use or live with. All have been created, intentionally or not, by humans.

I should still commend you for writing out the texts - much better than just dropping a youtube link, which I certainly wouldn't watch, even with a picture of a burger :) Text is still the best medium to communicate complex ideas.

Yeah well, this goes both ways. You are entitled to my attention if you know what you are talking about. And I see no evidence of that. But good luck to you guys.

Infinity as a proof for immortality

(Video starts with the picture of a burger) — FalseIdentity

This is excellent. You should've stopped here while you were ahead :rofl:

Yeah, I did read a bit further than that... Not worth my time, sorry.

Being able to do otherwise doesn't seem necessary for moral culpability. — khaled

Well, it may be necessary in some sense - just not in the sense of physical indeterminism. Indeed, if one insists on considering the question in this key (determinism vs. indeterminism), then indeterminism appears to be just as inimical to moral responsibility, if not more so, than determinism. (Hence some philosophers, like Galen Strawson, go so far as to argue that moral responsibility is altogether impossible.)

Say someone implanted a device into Sam that makes it so that the next time Sam gets angry at someone, but then decides to forgive them, the device activates forcing Sam into a fit of rage and killing them. Sam bumps into someone on the street and gets so angry he kills them without the device activating. Is Sam deserving of punishment? I’d say yes. Even though he couldn’t have done otherwise. Because he intended to do harm and did what he intended to do. That seems to be what really matters for ethics. — khaled

Yeah, one of the Frankfurt cases. So not this sense either. But clearly some sort of freedom - ability to do otherwise - is usually thought of as necessary. (At least in our present Western culture; attitudes towards moral responsibility have varied.)

Another thing is that the scientific enterprise does not exist independently of "other phenomen[a] in the history of histories of human civilizations". Obviously, if the human civilization enters a decline (as a result of a global catastrophe, for example), its scientific pursuits will decline as well. Conversely, it is hard to conceive of science undergoing a decline in the midst of a burgeoning civilization.

Can you please address my first point then? — Caldwell

Your point - that science is cyclical - is just postulated out of nowhere. "[J]ust like any other phenomenon in the history of histories of human civilizations" - that's too broad and vague to even discuss.

You should go back and think about this some more.

https://www.google.com/search?q=When+were+clocks+used+for+the+first+time+in+science%3F

In reading a lot of this thread, it strikes me that the many competing theoretical physics models of how the Big Bang might have occured are not particularly useful for answering this question in the sense it is often asked.

Swerve and symmetry breaking as causal explanations don't get at the more essential question: why is there something rather than nothing? From whence all this matter and energy? Or, as important of a question, why does it behave the way it does?

It's unclear to me if physics can give us an answer on this. Physics is the study of relationships between physical forces, but how can it study why those relationships are what they are? — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is unclear to me how anything can give us the "ultimate" answer - one that cannot in turn be challenged with the same question: Why that and not something else or nothing at all?

What does it mean to explain something? We substitute an explanans for an explanandum, reduce what we want to explain to something that does not itself cry out for an explanation, at least in the current context. Something that we assume we already understand. But what could we already understand about a putative ultimate truth? Whence such understanding?

For people who find satisfaction in ultimate explanations, those explanations usually take the form of some religious or metaphysical story or method that appeals to them on some level. When they find something like that, they say to themselves: "Yeah, that sounds about right. I'll run with it." This sort of leap of faith is something that we practice all the time when dealing with minor questions and decisions, as well as matters of taste and preference - we call it intuition, confidence and such like. And that works out alright a lot of the time for practical everyday purposes. But such an approach seems to be incongruous with the sort of thoroughgoing skeptical inquiry that moves us to ask ultimate questions in the first place.

The problem with setting up the existence of matter and energy, or their fundemental behaviors as "brute facts," is twofold.

1. Many things we once considered brute facts have turned out to be explained by even more fundemental forces and particles. The onion keeps being peeled back. A lack of ability to progress in explanation does not mean there is no deeper explanation.

2. This answer is highly unsatisfactory, and explanations of theoretical models with varying levels of empirical support and claims of predictive power all amount to so much window dressing on "I don't know, it is what it is."

Of course, the entire question also seems to presuppose some sort of "God's Eye View" through which all truth corresponds to facts of being. I am not so sure this sort of correspondence epistemology actually makes any sense. On the one hand, it seems beset by the skepticism that has hung like a cloud over modern philosophy, "how can I be sure of anything except for my internal states," and on the other it takes a view of knowledge as somehow pure and ahistorical, when it appears that knowledge is more something that evolved and changes forms over time. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would agree with this, for the most part. The conclusion that I would draw is not that we must strive towards something more fundamental and less contingent than some brute facts du jour. If there is a "God's Eye View" it is in any case epistemically inaccessible to us. So brute facts are all we have to work with. We just need to recognize them for what they are: contingent, mutable, subject to taste and temperament, and most of all, contextual. The explanations that we settle on depend on what sort of answer we are looking for in a given situation.

That's trivially easy. Premise "A is (im)moral" entails the conclusion "A is (im)moral". I don't see where that gets us.

what I mean by justified is that there are sufficient reasons to perform that action. For example, some people say that killing is wrong because you shouldn't kill other people. — Hello Human

That doesn't really clarify anything. What are sufficient reasons? Who makes the determination? If someones determines to do something upon deliberation, they judge there to be sufficient reasons for doing it. Or, to take a completely different tack, if something happened in a deterministic world at time T, you could say that any earlier or later state of the world contained within itself sufficient reasons for the that thing to happen at T.

I guess a climatology class for someone training in meteorology is like a cosmology class for someone training in orbital mechanics. Good to have for a well-rounded education, but not particularly useful for your future vocation.

Yeah, if there was a way to throttle a poster, limiting the number of comments and topics per day to, say, 10 and 1, then he would've been ok. No worse than the worst posters on the forum. But he was trashing up the forum like TheMadFool on drugs.

Just want to say thanks for your erudite and educational posts!

Warmed-over denialist garbage cribbed from notorious purveyors of science disinformation. Nothing to see here.

I thought Russell's point was that the notion of cause applies only to objects (“particular things”). If the universe is neither an object nor an abstraction produced by the mind, then what is it? — Amalac

But then we agree that the universe is not a thing or object, so that it doesn't exist in the same sense in which an apple exists (or would you say a quantifier exists?), and therefore there is no sense in applying the notion of cause to it as we would with an apple, no? — Amalac

Whether or not the universe can be thought of as an "object", what's important in this context is whether it is the sort of... thing that can stand in a causal relation to something else. It's not just a question of mereology either: an apple, or a basket of apples, can be put into a causal relation, no problem. But can the universe?