It’s an unbearably sinister view, that there’s this cabal of evil millionaire pharmaceutical companies scheming to get rich by pulling the wool over the citizen’s eyes. — Wayfarer

It's not a 'view', it's in black and white in the articles of association for the company. They are incorporated to make money for their shareholders. It's not some tinfoilhat-wearing conspiracy theory that pharmaceutical companies try, above all else, to make as large a profit as they can. What exactly do you suppose would prevent them, should the opportunity arise, from lobbying to have their particular 'solution' be the government approved one? Do you suppose the quarter of a billion dollars the pharmaceuticals spent on government lobbying at the outset of this crisis was just spare cash that they thought they might as well spend despite it being unlikely to work?

As the author of the above paper said "The return on investment on a dollar of lobbying appears much higher than a dollar of R&D". Basically, lobbying hard to get a drug supported by the government yields a higher return than producing a drug that is actually more effective than its rivals.

What possible reason could there be for creating another person?

The only reasons I can imagine are completely self centered around the parents personal desires. — Andrew4Handel

To continue improving the fate of those who remain after your death through projects that take longer than one generation to complete.

Good is anything that raises an individual's quality of life;
Bad is anything that lowers an individual's quality of life. — Yun Jae Jung

Are there many other words in the English language you feel obliged to define?

I saw in a UK poll yesterday that even a year after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic about 50% of respondants could not name the disease's major symptoms. I find this level of ignorance staggering. — Tim3003

Did the poll control for confounding factors like confidence, trust, or question misinterpretation? Did you check before concluding that it represented evidence that people were more ignorant? I ask because I find the general level of ignorance about what polls can and cannot be reliably used to demonstrate quite staggering.

in this thread it's not even an especially detailed one I'm talking about: it's just "all that matters, morally speaking, is people not suffering" (and consequently, which lead to this discussion, "therefore we should update our idea of what's moral when we discover that something causes someone to suffer"). Which seems like a kindergarten-level "insight", not something that should make me look like an "authoritarian know-it-all". — Pfhorrest

But of course it does, because 'we' don't discover anything, individual people do. So absolutely any method which involves applying some fact about how things are or should be is an attempt to lend authority to one's own version of that. It's never just 'we discovered that X causes A to suffer', it's "I believe that X causes A to suffer - and therefore you should refrain from X no matter what you personally feel about it". One does not simply 'discover' facts, one believes them. There are always competing models and, no non-circular way of choosing between them. The reason it comes across as authoritarian is that we can all see the implication (something you're either blind to or disingenuous about). As a system it absolutely requires some authority to determine what is 'true' about what causes more suffering than what and to use that 'fact' to lend weight to prescriptions based on that. Absent of that it's nothing but of purposeless exchange of 'maybe's.

The problem is woven throughout your approach (and that of many others). The conclusions are trivially true given the premises - you want us to focus on the quality of the logic, when that's child's play. The issue is with the premises. People try this sleight of hand different ways, but with you it's forever "That's not what this thread is about, I've dealt with that in another thread" (but when we look to that other thread we just find a whole load of unresolved problems). Basically, the desire to systematise, the neatness of all these analogies and categorisations, just leaves one having to discard or bend out of shape all the stuff that doesn't fit, like packing for camping and leaving the poles behind because they're longer than the box you had for the tent.

If one excludes the religious, then I think it is indeed plausible (trivially so) that "all that matters, morally speaking, is people not suffering", if you want to frame everything that way, you can. (virtues are such because they lead to less suffering, customs likewise, even many religious edicts could be parsed that way if you include the afterlife), but then you gloss over all the complexities of ethics with "therefore we should update our idea of what's moral when we discover that something causes someone to suffer" - which is not trivially true at all, far from it. It packs within that all sorts of assumptions about how to deal with uncertainty (do we act immediately on every 'discovery', or are we cautious about new knowledge?), how we deal with trust ('we' never discover anything, some group does - do we trust them?), and our socially-mediated concepts (what constitutes 'suffering' changes between cultures and generations, what constitutes a 'cause' is bound up with what we see as immutable and what is not). Once you unpack all that you just end up with all the ethical approaches humans have come up with thus far.

Almost all of the many ethical approaches are attempts (even if not consciously so) to deal with some of those issues. Sticking to customs and virtues is a way of hedging against the fragility that 'brand new' data often has, so we update more slowly by following traditions and laws. Egoist systems take the most extreme position on trusting others to have 'discovered' facts about what's best. The many relativist approaches are attempts to deal with the cultural mediation of what constitutes 'suffering' and 'cause' etc. So laying it out this way just re-iterates the debate, it doesn't move it forward.

And before you say "all this is true of empirical studies too", it may or may not be, but that is not an argument in itself. We might well make those compromises for empirical studies, that just shows that we can, not that we ought to in all other situations. Proscriptive domains are about possible states, descriptive domains about actual ones. That's no insignificant difference, the assumption that they should be treated the same just because they can is crazy. Again, I know you've responded in the past that we can make progress this way, 'better try than not', but this begs the question. It's not progress if the wrong approach, it's just movement.

You create this chain of abandoned threads, littered with unresolved issues, which are then treated as foundations for key structures in some new edifice, with an agenda, fixed from the beginning, without any mutual consideration of the issues others raise, when the end result of all this is supposed to be determining how other people behave. It obviously looks very much as though you're determining how other people should behave according to your own private beliefs without consultation. Is it any wonder it's seen as a little potentially authoritarian?

The central questions of philosophy do not change, you are simply intellectually unadventurous. — Bartricks

It's not an adventure if we've all been there before, it's just proselytising. You pronounce things that seem to you to be the case to be "self-evident to reason", draw some utterly trivial logical conclusions from them, then simply declare anyone who disagrees with your premises to be intellectually inferior on no other grounds than that they disagree with your premises. Narcissism is not philosophy, and I don't think a public forum should be acting as a mirror for anyone's mental self-grooming.

We find what's common in the degenerate neuronal systems that produce the same cognitive function? — khaled

Trouble is what's common is possibly only that they produce the same cognitive function. Other than that...

The problem with any neuronal representation (and I agree with your general approach here nonetheless), is that a neuron itself has only two options (fire/don't) and only one variable to determine this outcome (degree of potentiation). So the neuron itself is of little help. That we have a Halle Berry neuron (should we accept that we do) is obviously not a feature of the neuron itself, no data is contained therein, but a feature of all the constituent neurons it's connect to. To simplify massively - imagine that the neuron is connected to the ones which fire for 'heads', 'arms' etc such that it fires in response to those, and then connected to neurons which fire your your vocal muscles in such a way as to say "Halle Berry". We can normally use its location, but that's really just a shorthand for its degree of connectivity to other locations (there's nothing stopping all your auditory cortex being scattered randomly through the brain, they just aren't).

So 'pattern of potentiation' becomes the identifier. As I think I mentioned to you in one of our other conversations, we can trace a 'fuzzy-edged' casdcade of neural activity from an external stimuli to a behavioural response and usually see a similar looking cascade in other people in the same situation. The trouble is - seeing as identifying that cascade by location is only shorthand for connectivity, in situations like recovery from brain damage, the only way we had of identifying that cascade has gone.

What we need (and what both Friston and Tonini advocate in separate papers) is a computational model of the neural network, rather than our current locational model. In such a model mental states are relationships between nodes rather than just arrangements, this allows them to be (theoretically!) mapped, not to neurological states, but to neurological computational processes. Imagine, rather than 'hungry' being when some pattern of lights fixed to a board light up, it's more whenever a pattern of gates are open on a farm such as to allow cattle to get from barn to parlour. We name it by whether it allows cattle to get from barn to parour, not by which gates are open where. This then allows for the degeneracy we see in these rare cases of recovery from brain damage.

Of course, none of this undermines the incredible utility of the locational model since it covers 99.999% of the population using an easy and fairly robust model. It's only my more fanatical colleagues in the philosophy department who might concern themselves with the fact that it's not 'The Truth™'

Anyway, I don't mean to derail your thread with a discussion of neuroscientific models, I just thought the concepts of degeneracy and pluripotentiality might be useful in assuaging some of the more serious objections to identity theory - issues around the lack of one-to-one relationships between mental states and neurological ones.

Of course, as regards counter-arguments you've still got to contend with the classic "it just doesn't feel that way...". I can't help you with that. All I can suggest is the equally powerful "That's what you say..." as a retort.

This is, I think, the specific point on which Isaac and I differ. If I understand him aright, he thinks that there must be one brain state for one mind state. I suspect this is something he assumes for methodological reasons: it makes the MRI scans more impressive. — Banno

Just a fly-by post this, not intending to join the discussion, but you might find this paper interesting in this regard. It's not so much about brain states, apparently, as functional processes. What's interesting about this approach is that it requires that the process itself be recognised somehow as distinct from the actual neurons firing...and how do we recognise 'that' particular pattern...?

"Would you care for another glass of 'Two Barrels'*?" — Isaac


That's a play on words, both meanings are using "two" as a number. — frank

No, because if the whiskey were called 'Three Barrels' and I asked for 'Two Barrels', I would not be given two thirds of a whiskey, I'd just be given the wrong brand. 'Two' in that sentence is not being used to count, it's being used to indicate the type of whiskey wanted (not that it ever would, Two Barrels is awful).

But yes, this is a digression. As you were.

We can. — Banno


An example? — TheMadFool

May I?

"Would you care for another glass of 'Two Barrels'*?"

*it's a brand of Whiskey.

1. An agent is only responsible for an act if said agent could have done otherwise. — ToothyMaw

The concept 'could have done otherwise' means something different depending on whether one has a foundation of indeterminism or not, and if not whether compatibilist or not.

Basically, if a compatibilist, 'could have done otherwise', just means 'other people in roughly the same circumstances have chosen differently'.

To argue that 'could have done otherwise' literally means to change the course of events from those which were determined begs the question. Indeterminism must be assumed before such a notion can be coherently spoken of.

Leaving a fundamental flaw unresolved and pushing on with the detailed implications nonetheless seems rather like ignoring a gap in one's foundations and continuing to build the house, but that to one side, the issue I wanted some clarity on is...

If that is accepted then the rest should follow for anyone who can keep up with the logic (which NB does have novel implications as well as drawing novel connections between disparate well-known things). — Pfhorrest

We'd just established that no-one would disagree with them. That doesn't sound novel.

What are these novel implications?

sensation of the representation.....is backwards. — Mww

Backwards? How so?

Nobody I know of denies that you can, but plenty of people, anyone opposed to altruism or hedonism, denies that it matters to: anti-altruists denying that other people's anything matters, anti-hedonists denying that anybody's appetites matter. — Pfhorrest

Right. But that's the meta-ethics bit.

So when you say...

I am of the peculiar opinion that applied ethics is not properly speaking a branch of philosophy at all, but is rather the seed of an entire field of underdeveloped ethical sciences — Pfhorrest

What you actually mean is just that you don't agree with those meta-ethical positions.

Afterall, if you take the moral good to be the word of God, then applied ethics is exactly what those people think it is.

If, however, you take the moral good to be that which meets all hedonic appetites in any given circumstance, then it follows logically that finding out what that is would constitute applied ethics. And, as you say, no-one would disagree with you about that.

So what exactly is the novel approach here? It all seems to logically follow from your stated meta-ethical position in a way which you've just admitted no-one would disagree with.

As usual you're expending pages and pages explaining that with which no-one disagrees and presenting very little new angle on the actual matter of substantive disagreement, which are the flaws in your meta-ethical position.

No doubt that's 'to come later' again?

It seems like this is simultaneously a principle that everyone must have already learned as children, but somehow also a controversial opinion among learned people — Pfhorrest

Give us an example then. What philosophical approach denies that you can find out what feels bad for others by putting yourself in their shoes?

Moon-object-public; sensation of the moon-representation-not public. — Mww

Fixed it.

It's not a model. I'm telling you what I haven't experienced. As far as I know, it is logically impossible to experience such a thing, because I cannot have anybody else's experiences. — Luke

That's just a repeat of the same assertion. Why is it logically impossible for you to have another's experiences?

Perhaps there's not such thing as 'your own' sensations at all, by your definition. — Isaac


Perhaps there's no such thing as 'your own' brain at all, by your definition. — Luke

Well no, my definition of 'your brain' is quite simple. It's the one in your head. You want to deny that the experiences you have are the ones in your head, you want to detach experiences from any physical origin, so you've no similar anchor.

Then please explain how you can see or experience or verify what other people's sensations feel/are like. — Luke

I have been doing so for the last 36 pages.

You can perceive someone else's behaviours, but you cannot perceive someone else's sensations. — Luke

Then where are these 'sensations' such that I cannot see them by any means. How do you detect them, but I can't? What is the mechanism by which they interact with the physical world, but only for you? Is there a keypass you're given at birth or something?

If I tell you how I feel, all you will perceive are my behaviours, not my sensations. If you could perceive my sensations, then I wouldn't need to tell you how I feel. — Luke

I bet you if I looked at an fMRI scan of your brain I could tell you how you feel 75% of the time, and the technology is still in its infancy. Will it ever reach 100%? No, I don't believe that's possible because of the inherent complexity in a systems with as many nodes as a brain. But likewise no thermometer will ever read the temperature that accurately either, it doesn't prevent us from talking about the temperature of the room.

How do you know that "behavioural consequence is a property of your sensations"? — Luke

So you're now positing that sensations have no consequence? Earlier you posited they have no cause. Have I really just wasted 37 pages of discussion with you about a phenomena which you believe has neither cause nor consequence? We might as well have been talking about the teapot orbiting Mars.

Again, this is not analagous. We can verify the makes and models of our phones as easily as we can verify the phones themselves: simply by looking at them. — Luke

Yes, and we can verify the associated behaviours, speech and neural activity of sensations just by looking at them. Those with the same behaviours, speech, neural activity etc... are 'the same' sensations, in exactly the same manner in which two phones of the same make and model are 'the same' phone. Make and model are properties of phone (though not the only properties). Associated behaviours, speech and neural activity are properties of sensations (though not the only properties).

I don't have pains unless I am consciously aware of them, or unless they hurt. I don't see how I've equivocated on this. — Luke

There is no 'them' to be ware of. It's just not how your brain works. There's no 'pain' sitting somewhere in your brain fro your conscious to rummage around and find. You don't become aware of pain, you infer pain. It is a model created from the the various physiological and environmental inputs that neural cluster receives. You learn this model. That learning (typically) takes place in a social environment.

If I'm not consciously introspecting and 'seeking out' pain signals, then I'm not the one doing it. — Luke

Which is itself a contradiction. What is the 'I' in the first part. There's something you referred to as 'I' there which is not consciously introspecting. Then you say that there is no 'I' apart from that which is consciously introspecting.

Also, does this imply that near-identical bodies produce (only) near-identical experiences? Perhaps this is what Isaac is getting at with his talk about 'sameness'. — Luke


I think so. — khaled

Yes. That's right.

Whether we adopt a purely physicalist model or a social language development model it doesn't matter. We either have some idea that things are caused (in which case the same set of causes will result in roughly the same thing. Or we adopt the idea that things are uncaused, in which case anything goes and there's no matter here to discuss.

Under the first model, the more reasonable presumption about experiences is that the same external causes acting on the same basic physiology in roughly the same social environment would yield roughly the same experience.

To assume otherwise is to either impute a completely hidden cause (one that has defied all our attempts to investigate it) for no reason at all, or to suggest that experiences are not caused by anything at all but rather reside in some alternate realm detached form ours (in which case how do we know about them?)

It all comes down, to me, to (correct example this time!) Wittgenstein's 'stand roughly there' in PI88. For me the model is neurological, so that's the one I'll use, but linguistically it's the same. We can see a cascade of neural activity preceding a person's report of some experience. That cascade is like the water pouting from a tap. There are splashes and micro-droplets all over the place in a (basically) chaotic, unpredictable distribution, but that does not in any way prevent us from describing the course of the water from the spout to the plughole.

Conversely, it is impossible for science to distinguish the functions of reason with respect to components of the brain. That is to say, imagination is not to be found in the region containing this component, understanding in that region, moral constitution thataway, aesthetics over yonder. Cognition....aisle three right; opinion....level ten left. — Mww

True to a point, but not entirely. I mean simple lesion studies can isolate broad parts of the brain associated with those things. Remove a section of the brain and find people incapable of such activity and you have your culprit. With the more general functions you list, it's much more difficult, but it can be done to a degree. The main point was that there's a temporal aspect in both models - A follows B - it's somewhere both agree of terms (what it means for something to follow something else). That means that without getting into the other areas of dispute, when one model says "I feel the switch and then I recognise the light turned on" It can justifiably be countered with the other by saying " We both agree what A follows B means, right? Well your A does not follow your B".

does the exact same region of my brain respond to my understanding of race riots, as it does to my understanding of internal combustion engines? — Mww

In all likelihood, you literally have a neuron (or neural cluster) which will respond to 'race riots' and only to race riots, likewise with 'internal combustion engines'. Is the same region involved in the whole production of response?...It depends on what you mean by 'the same'. As per my discussion with Luke - 'the same' is not an exact measure, never can be. so yeah, it is roughly the same regions that deal with the same types of thing. They become very specialised.

Everydayman will the more readily accept that he thinks by means and ends of reason, than he will accept mathematical algorithms and natural law as necessary for how he thinks. — Mww

So I'm finding...

One does not think the pain he is in, one does not report anything whatsoever to himself — Mww

Exactly. There is no 'your pain' for me to know in that sense - unless we use the term technically (which I reserve the necessary right to do). A doctor must try to eliminate their patient's pain, and they must do so by treating 'their pain' as if it were the sum of the activity of their nociceptor system and the various brain regions responding to it. One does not want to open a packet of painkillers to find nothing but a note saying "What is pain anyway, man", one wants to find chemical which interferes with prostaglandin release, or prevents activity at synaptic clefts within the nervous system by binding opioids there.

And the upshot of that is that it is improper to talk of representing our own pains and pleasures. "I have a pain in my hand" is not like "I have an iPhone in my hand"; it is more like "Ouch!" — Banno

True. It seems to me this is at the heart of the problem here. As above, I think there is a language game in which pain is a thing, it's a technical game between doctors, or research scientists where pain is necessarily treated as the sum of certain activity in a particular region of the central nervous system. One might, in this game, say "I have a pain in my body" and mean exactly the same thing as "I have an iPhone in my hand". The problem we find here is that some want to take that technical definition to show that 'pain' is inherently private (happens inside a closed physiological system), and then apply it outside of it's proper game, to say that the experience must therefore be private. We keep crossing over games and seeing words used outside of the context in which they mean anything.

So there aren't unpleasant sensations until we create words for them? That makes no evolutionary sense. — Marchesk

Why not? What's evolution got to do with the judgement of sensations? Evolution requires that appropriate behaviours are produced in response to environmental circumstances. It has no preference at all for how.

Semantics. What difference does it make if we lump all the sensations which hurt... — Marchesk

That is to have already lumped them.

That's my question to you: how do you know that it isn't? — Luke

Same way as we 'know' anything - we assume it, act as if it were the case, and see if we're surprised by the results of doing so. Acting as if we all had radically different private experiences yields the surprising lack of physical explanation for that difference.

It's private because I've never known or experienced anyone else's sensations except my own. — Luke

You might have done. You've not given an account of the origin or nature of 'sensations' under your model by which they're detached from physical causes, so how can you say that you've only experienced your own? Perhaps there's not such thing as 'your own' sensations at all, by your definition. Once detached from any physical measurement whatsoever, absolutely anything could be the case, we might as well be discussing the offside rules in Quidditch.

My argument for privacy is that you cannot have other people's experiences/sensations; you can only have your own. — Luke

That's not an argument, it's a statement.

There are the inner sensations and the outer expressions, and you can never see or experience or verify what other people's sensations feel/are like. — Luke

Again, that is the matter under discussion, so it doesn't help to pull it in as evidence for a conclusion therein.

All you will get is a (verbal) behaviour. You still won't be able to see or access their sensations. — Luke

In what way is the verbal behaviour not a form of access to their sensations? Is a ruler not a form of access to a thing's height?

How can I not have access to my own feelings of pain? — Luke

I thought I explained that. There's this equivocation over what constitutes 'your feelings of pain'. On the one hand they're some immutable private thing embedded in your body (and so inaccessible to others), but on the other they're whatever you currently think they are, which seems easily communicated.

People generally use the term 'my feelings, or my memories, or my opinion...' to refer to some fixed object as if it were stored in their brain somewhere. That model is wrong. Those things are created in real time, not retrieved from some mental filing cabinet. If you don't have that model, such that when you refer to 'my pain' you mean 'whatever feeling, or memory of a feeling I happen to be creating at this very moment', then my description of your lack of access to it does not apply to you. The consequence, however, of that model is that it's a chimera, which you can never talk about because it changes in the very act of doing so.

I have conceded that we could all have the same experiences. That wasn't my point. As I said: "We could all have the same experiences, but do we? Probably, but who knows? How can we know?" — Luke

I don't really need to add anything to what has already written on this.

The point of Wittgenstein's Eiffel Tower example is — Isaac


I'm not familiar with that example. Do you have a reference? — Luke

No, sorry. I can't think where I got that from - I was convinced it was one of the examples from PI, but cannot now find it. What I had in mind was his discussion on 'exactness' in PI88. He actually uses the example of a pocket watch vs laboratory time, I thought the example was measuring the height of the Eiffel tower. The point is still the same though. Nothing is 'exact' to some default degree, it is implicit what level of exactness we mean.

Accuracy is irrelevant to my argument. It's the fact that we cannot access other people's sensations in order to compare them. — Luke

Yes, I see that now, to an extent. But behavioural consequence is a property of your sensations - the behaviour they cause, the language used, the neural activity associated... These are not only real properties of your experience, but they're the only properties we have to measure. If the only properties we can measure seem to indicate a strong similarity (and exactness qua Wittgenstein), then that is as good a ground as we're ever going to get for treating them as 'the same'.

Just like we look to make and model to determine if you and I have 'the same' phone. We look to behavioural consequence, associated neural activity etc to see that you and I have 'the same' experience.

You can only know of your pain sensations by being conscious of them — Luke

See here you equivocate. Previously you assume direct access to your 'pain' by denying my model of inference. Now you're again describing your pain sensations as if they were some fact of the matter that you become aware of. Which is it to be?

I have direct access to my pains when I feel them. — Luke

And again here. If you're going to talk about your 'pain' as being just exactly that which you feel at some given time, and not that which is inferred from some other physiological trigger, then there is no 'access' at all. You make it up at the time, you're not 'accessing' anything. The only sense in which 'access' is coherent is a model where 'pain sensations' are a physiological thing which you 'seek out' by introspection.

If reason is reserved for conscious processing, which is granted, and if much of the modeling is unconscious, how can such modeling be said to be acting like reason? — Mww

Only that when I say 'like' the properties I'm describing as similar do not include the property of 'taking place in conscious processing'. That would be one of the properties by which the two differ.

that modeling is utterly irrelevant to a separate system that models itself absent all those terms in its purpose, even while operating in conjunction with it. — Mww

It's the 'conjunction with it' bit that matters though. If a model of brain function identifies a region as associated with some function, and the association is suitably strong in all cases thus far, then when we look at that component in our alternative model running 'in conjunction with it' we should find it correlates. If it doesn't then either there's something wrong with one of the models or they are no longer 'in conjunction'.

Who’s we? The teeny-tiny fraction of intellectually specialized humanity that even considers the new system a better explanatory device? — Mww

Yes. The usual manner in which science advances. It hasn't prevented any other common understanding. There's no 'folk-electronics' which runs a whole alternative set of computers. Why should there be a 'folk-psychology' which describes mental events outside of the scientific understanding?

So, technically, you’ve replaced nothing, but only attacked a common opponent.....ignorance.....from a different direction, and with a much smaller hence potentially less effective force, using experimental weapons. — Mww

Yes, I agree, but I don't see a better approach.

I suspect there to be many senior firefighters, soldiers, and these days, nurses’ aides, boldly scoffing at that. A few of ‘em.....the more senior.....rolling on the ground, even. The most insulted, the most senior, would look at you with that, “what....you wouldn’t do your damn job???” expression, and immediately proceed to ignore, if not regret, your very existence. — Mww

Fortunate then that the quality of our models does not have to pass the 'would be scoffed at by firefighters' test. I wonder how much of Kant would be scoffed at by firefighters. I think you and I both would have to to throw out our pet theories were that the test.

Some preliminary conditions for reason are subconscious, but these are not decisions. — Mww

Yes, fair enough. A better word is needed to describe the selection of an outcome by subconscious algorithm, to reserve 'decision' for it's more common use. 'Outcome' perhaps?

It evidently hasn't - "I can't explain it." — Isaac


It's the object of "can't explain.". — frank

Seems a self-immunised definition of 'talk about' to go with. The very sentence "One cannot talk about it" would be self contradictory by that approach. In fact there would be nothing we cannot talk about, rendering the distinction useless. Personally I prefer to avoid definitions which render entire forms of speech useless by dissolving the distinction they're aiming to talk about. Our talk of 'that which we can talk about and that which we cannot' is about some distinction or other, so 'talk about' in this context needs to be defined in such a way as to make such talk functional, so we ought reject the idea that appearing only as an undefined pronoun is sufficient to qualify as having 'talked about it'.

We recognise them using our reason — Bartricks

Your reason. Not our reason.

That you still haven't grasped the difference between you thinking something is the case and something's actually being the case is at the root of your proliferation of uninteresting threads. The correct resolution of your syllogisms is child's play to most people here and your arguments in all cases come down to some premise with which others disagree but which you claim to be immutable on no grounds other than that it seems that way to you.

It's philosophically dull, a dead end...

Not a highpoint in the intellectual life of the forums. — Banno

One can understand. Hmmmm. Does that mean one has to calculate? Or might he....you know....introspect? — Mww

and by your own admission, this science is itself speculative, so all that’s happened is we’ve substituted an older speculative system for a newer one, which is nonetheless speculative for it. — Mww

Yes, indeed. A common objection it seems. I remain unconvinced by this idea that since the science is only 'modelling' models it's somehow open season and anything goes. Models can be more or less coherent with each other, more or less useful, more or less parsimonious.

We've replaced the older speculative system for the newer one, not on a whim, but because it works better.

for all intents and purposes, why not just say we simply reason to the prevention of cause? — Mww

You could, but 'reason' has typically been reserved for conscious processing, and much of the modelling that brain regions have been shown to do is subconscious. It 'acts like' reason. In fact one really good study compared people subconsciously updating their expectations in the face of contrary sensory data, with a mathematician doing the calculations using Bayesian probability. The results were compared and found to be statistically correlated. I don't think that means that the occipital brain regions being studied actually carried out Bayesian analysis though. It's just that the algorithm programmed into the neural structure of those regions is similar enough to the one the mathematician carries out that the results of each are correlated.

humans can reason to prevention, then proceed to ignore it. — Mww

I don't believe they can. 'Reason' is usually a post hoc construction to rationalise a decision that has been made anyway further back in the subconscious. The fact that some particular thought method leads to one conclusion and another leads to another tells us almost nothing at all about how we actually arrived at the choice.

One thing I noticed: the paper recognizes the human cognitive system as representational; there are eleven instances of that conception therein. Always a good first step, methinks. — Mww

Nice to know there's cross-over even on hotly contested topics.

We have the same experiences because we're both human. We each have private pains because you don't have access to my nociceptors. — frank

As with Luke, if you invoke physiology to support privacy you need to have an accurate model of the way on which physiology causes experience. If you don't, then you'll have to abandon physiology as support. Your model is wrong. Neither do 'you' have unfiltered access to your nociceptors, no more so than a neuroscientist does.

The reporter asks what it's like. I say I can't explain it. You'll just have to go through it yourself.

A unique, private experience has been talked about. — frank

It evidently hasn't - "I can't explain it."

That's a misunderstanding of what is being said. — Banno


A useless comment without explanation. — Janus

Whereas...

I've read pretty much the entire thread and have seen no cogent explanation. — Janus

...is not?

If you want to be prudent, you need to prepare for everything, including natural catastrophes and the collapse of economy. For this, billions are needed. — baker

Billions would be of no use to you in the case of the collapse of the economy, would they? A gun and the skill to use it would reverse the acquisition of even a trillion dollars in heartbeat in the case of a collapsed system.

Indirect realism"s weakness is about the trustworthiness of representations. How do you confirm that they're accurate? — frank

Pragmatism.

But you grant that people can have experiences that aren't publicly know — frank

Yes, of course. If you lived and died a hermit you would have experiences that weren't publicly known. That's not the same as saying they're not publicly knowable.

most people simply have pain without needing to make any predictions. But this highlights our differences in talking about the issue. You're talking about our brains making predictions, which happens unconsciously, whereas I'm talking about our conscious experiences of having pain sensations. — Luke

Only you're not. That's the point. Despite seemingly wide opinion to the contrary, I don't think neuroscience or cognitive psychology has the answer here, it's a useful adjunct only. The reason I've written so extensively about it is because empirical claims about neurological processes keep being imputed in the counter-arguments, as they are here.

If you were talking only about your conscious experience of pain, that which is in your mind as being an experience (regardless of it's origins, or historical accuracy) you would have absolutely no ground at all to say that such an experience was unique, or intrinsically private. How on earth would you know? There might be a set of only a dozen such experiences identical in all humans which we consciously experience one of on each occasion. If you are solely talking about your personal experience, uninvestigated, and unsubstantiated, then on what grounds would you even suspect it to be unique, private...? Perhaps we're only capable of twelve different experiences, perhaps whatever causes experiences spits out the identical ones in every person....

No. Your argument about privacy relies on an assumption about the causes of experience, an assumption that those causes are so multifarious that their rendering must be unique, that those causes obtain inside you and so are not accessible to others, hence private. Otherwise, how can you say I don't know what it's like for you to stub your toe? Maybe just by thinking about it, I know exactly what it's like, maybe, I replicate the exact experience, just by imagining it, maybe I detect the 'aura of pain-generating particles' which surround you and cause your experience and so know exactly what experience you're having... You refute such models by invoking a model of how physiological functions result in mental features. You necessarily bring in physiology. Your model is, however, wrong.

You want me to cite the studies proposing the disagreements that you're referring to? I don't know these studies. I had in mind something along the lines of Wittgenstein:

244. ...How does a human being learn the meaning of names of sensations? For example, of the word “pain”. Here is one possibility: words are connected with the primitive, natural, expressions of sensation and used in their place. A child has hurt himself and he cries; then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain-behaviour.

257. “What would it be like if human beings did not manifest their pains (did not groan, grimace, etc.)? Then it would be impossible to teach a child the use of the word ‘toothache’.”


Presumably, the reason for these expressions of pain are (consciously experienced) pain sensations. — Luke

Why 'presume'? I've cited a dozen papers now in our various discussion on the topic. I've done my best to explain the current theories of active inference, yet without any contrary citation at all you just 'presume' that what I've said and what all the collected neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists I've cited have said, is wrong and that there are such things as 'pain sensations' which cause expressions of pain. So I don't think it's unreasonable of me, given your insistence, to ask fo the studies on which you base this recalcitrance.

People's heights are not private. You can see and measure how tall someone is. You cannot see or measure someone's pain sensations which are private. — Luke

You can ask.

You're trying to make this about language again, here, instead of the privacy of subjective experience. It's a given that we use the same words to refer to the same sets of behaviours. — Luke

We don't 'refer' using words. To say "John is in pain" is not 'referring' to a set of behaviours. It's getting help for John.

But more to the point you don't have access to that particular set of signals either. — Isaac


What particular set of signals? — Luke

Whichever signals you're interpreting as your being 'in pain'.

fMRI scans, conversation, behavioural observations... — Isaac


These can only measure pain behaviours, not pain sensations. — Luke

FMRI scans can measure pain sensations. But the other two can't. That's not the point. The point here is disputing your claim that it's not about how we use 'sameness'. You and I might have 'the same' phone based on a agreed set of properties (make and model) we ignore that yours has a scratch on one side. Likewise 'sameness' in experience can be, perfectly reasonably, determined by the properties {neural regions involved, behaviours produced, words used to describe it...etc}. We might reasonably ignore, in our use of the word 'same' the property of {exact spatial location of neurons involved, precise range of mental events associated...} just like we ignored the scratch on one side in determining that you and I have 'the same' phone.

The point of Wittgenstein's Eiffel Tower example is to reveal that we not only choose to do this sometimes, but that we must do this all the time, in order to speak of 'sameness' at all.

If these aren't enough for you to know we have the same experiences, then it is a question of 'sameness'. — Isaac


They're not enough, because there is no way to verify the sensations themselves. — Luke

Exactly. So

1) the exact range of sensations are like the exact scratches on your phone, or the dimensions to the nanometre, we don't use those properties to talk of 'sameness' when it comes to phones. Why should we use them to talk of 'sameness' when it comes to experiences?

2) you're amply demonstrating here exactly what I've argued at the opening of this post. Your conclusion that experience is radically unique and private is hooked into a model of it being caused by these unique and private 'pain sensations'. that is a) a psychological model and b) wrong.

We can compare and look at each other's phones, though. That's the difference. — Luke

We cannot look at them to the nanometre though. We cannot inspect their exact atomic structure. We cannot draw up an account of their histories atom-by-atom. Yet these failings do not prevent us from declaring them 'the same' phone. We pick the level of accuracy we want to use.

It would be clearer if you could define what 'private' does mean, instead of what it does not mean. — Luke

In this context - accessible only to the person concerned. Hence, accessible to no-one would not count as private. Like Private land. It has to be legally accessible by the person concerned and not by others. Land legally accessible by no-one at all is not private land, it's just unclaimed. Likewise private experience would be experience you can access but others can't. Experience which no-one can access is not 'private' it's just unknowable.

Why do we need to "predict" what pain is? Why does someone who is in pain, after stubbing their toe, need to make any predictions? — Luke

Evolution. Why do we 'need' to have camera eyes and not compound eyes? Why do we 'need' to have legs and not wheels? We just do predict the causes of sensations, it's how our brains work. The cognitive scientists who develop these theories don't just make this stuff up on a coffee break you know. Over the course of our various discussions on this topic I've probably posted more than half a dozen studies demonstrating that the brain uses Bayesian-like inference models to handle sensation modelling. I've twenty-four such studies in my bibliography database alone, I could list them all here if it's needed to convince you.

How does a child infer and predict their own pain without knowing the word for it? Do children not feel any pain before they learn how to use the word 'pain'? — Luke

Children feel all sorts of things and respond to them. That some of those thing should be labelled 'pain' is obviously something children only learn when they learn a language. That some of these things fall into on group and not another is something they might learn pre-linguistically by observing others in their social group. The idea that they have some kind of 'natural grouping' of some of these sensations which they're just waiting for a label for has been quite soundly refuted by the evidence from psychological studies. It's not, of course, universally held. There's disagreements, but if you want to discuss those disagreements you'll need to cite the studies proposing them so we've got something to discuss. You just 'reckoning' there might be such natural groups is all very well, but it's not really something we can discuss beyond the fact that you think that way.

Yes, that's my point (assuming by 'signals' you mean pain sensations). Once again, I'm talking about the privacy of subjective experience, not the privacy of language or the privacy of the use of the word/model "pain". The pain sensations might be radically different. Indeed. — Luke

Did you even read the whole section I wrote after this? Two people's heights are radically different too at the nanometre scale. so now we can't ever say two people are the same height. I don't have a nanometre calibrated ruler, so now I can't say I 'know' what height a person is?

Every single instance of every single object, property or event is a fuzzy categorisation based on similarities and ignoring certain differences, otherwise we would simply have a billion nouns and be inventing new ones all the time. It's normal to group things by similarity at some scale.

But more to the point you don't have access to that particular set of signals either. It's not private (in the sense that you have access and I don't) it's hidden, in the sense that neither of us have access. I have indirect access to it via your self-reports, your behaviour, fMRI scans etc. You have access to it via your working memory, your sematic centres, your somatosensory feedback systems. Neither is more direct than the other, neither is privileged, neither more accurate.

Why can't you be sure about this? Is it due to the privacy and inaccessibility of knowing the subjective experiences of other people? — Luke

Inaccessibility, yes. Privacy, no. As above, you don't have access either. So far the best access is from computational neuroscience, but even that is limited by it's own models. Nonetheless, it's better than your own guesswork based on what we know for a fact to be flawed memories and socially mediated self-reports.

We could all have the same experiences, but do we? Probably, but who knows? How can we know? — Luke

fMRI scans, conversation, behavioural observations... If these aren't enough for you to know we have the same experiences, then it is a question of 'sameness'. You're setting the bar unreasonably high for judging two experiences to be 'the same'. If they have the same neural signature, the same behavioural response, if we understand each other when we talk about them, even in intricate detail, then we've just as good a reason to call them 'the same' as we have to say you and I have 'the same' phone.

Spell it out then. What does Luke mean by 'private' that I've thus far misunderstood. — Isaac


Nothing special. In this context, I'm using 'private' to mean 'not publicly known'. — Luke

Well then we might have been talking past one another all along. Private does not simply mean 'not publicly known' to me. There's a difference between unclaimed property and common land, though neither is privately owned.

Pain doesn't come from language, it's biological. — Marchesk

No, sensations are biological, 'Pain' is a concept created by a socially communicating group collecting some of those sensations and naming them.

We wouldn't have language for sensations or feelings if we didn't already have them. — Marchesk

No-one is denying that you have sensations.

Certain pattens of neurons fire and we experience color. How do neurons firing result in color sensations? There's no answer to this as of yet. — Marchesk

That's just repeating the question. I asked you what form an answer should take. specifically why an answer in the form I've already given does not suffice when answers in that exact form suffice for other questions starting 'How does...'

I have no idea what an answer will look like. — Marchesk

Then how do you know that the answers I've provided are not answers. If you don't know what an answer would look like, you can't say what isn't one. I'm just asking you what's missing.

which for you means taking all the unknowns of experience and squashing them into a little guy in the closet who does something with a representation or model. He's got a second pair of closet eyes with which he does that, and so forth. You need to explain that away as well. — frank

I felt like I already had. Perhaps you could try highlighting the parts you didn't understand.

If you're naming the various neural clusters responsible for modelling the cause of hidden states as 'homunculi', then yes, we have several. What is your concern here? That we'll run out of brain?

We've a model which models models. Can that model model itself? Sure, why not? IT has outputs which can be stored and re-iterated as inputs. Computationally there's no barrier there. But even if there were, What's to stop the models in other people's brains from modelling by 'model of models'. It's not self-referential even in that case.

You seem, though it's not clear, to be worried about some infinite regress of models (homunculi), but you've not made clear why you think that's a problem. Obviously it mean we cannot infinitely model models, but so what. This discussion is only three layers in, we could get a million layers in and still have enough brain capacity to handle the results. I don't think we need anywhere near infinite layers to have a pragmatic understanding of how the brain works, three or four will do.

Create our own new....

What better inkling of “private” could there be? “Create our own new” is merely speechifying synonyms for inventive, individual, personal, and time-successive, all necessary ingredients in the recipe for “private”. — Mww

Yep. Beetles are private. That was the point of Wittgenstein's argument, I think.

Nahhh....nothing so dramatic. — Mww

It is. Unless you have some study to the contrary, I don't see the advantage in throwing out good quality research in favour of your introspection. What reason do have have for believing you have access to the mechanisms your brain uses?

Pain speaks to dangerous effect; reason speaks to the quantity and quality of the cause of it. The one is immediate and not a cognition, the latter is mediate and is always a cognition. — Mww

Correct, but irrelevant. I'm not denying cognition is involved in locating and mediating pain.

What ta hell is a hidden state anyway? — Mww

https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/The%20free-energy%20principle%20-%20a%20rough%20guide%20to%20the%20brain.pdf

Isaac believes things like pain are social constructs, as are things like trees and the moon. — frank


Yep; and since social, public and hence not private. — Banno

Exactly.

As has been said over and over (even though my own exposition of it is probably excessively computational), the hidden states themselves within any inference system, being hidden, drop out the conversation about it. That doesn't make them unknowable (in the ridiculous Kantian sense) - of course we 'know' them. They directly affect our models with real properties, what more could 'knowing' them constitute than that? But it does make them undefined. The definition, the drawing of lines, boundaries, whatever... collecting up inferences about hidden states into groups and models... that process, to the extent that it is talked about at all, is public, has to be.

No-one just 'knows' what pain is.

When you stub your toe, thousands of neurological events take place, and probably hundreds of mental events. (I don't think mental events are exhaustively described by neural events, but the one certainly causes the other - there's no mental events without neural events - but that's a whole other mess).

Of these thousands, some of them we infer as 'pain'. How do we decide? The answer is that we decide by applying predictive models of what sensations are likely to be caused by, and such models are, without doubt, influenced by the social environment. The mere existence and use of the word 'pain' in association with behavioural cues goes into making up those models by which we interpret the thousands of signals rushing around at the time of stubbing our toe.

No-one is denying that the exact range of signals happening in response to you stubbing your toe is going to be the same as the range that happen when I stub my toe. But the range of response-signals precedes the inference of a 'pain' sensation. Those signals are not 'pain'. Pain is the model, not the signals the model infers from. The signals might be radically different (in their entirety), but the model is not.

Is it different at all? Yes, probably. But this causes us no linguistic problems normally. Am I the same height as you if we're both 5'8"? Yes. If we go down to the millimetre we're probably not the same height, but we don't talk of height in millimetres. Micrometres? Nanometres? At some point we're just different because we're standing in two different places... None of this usually affects our talk of 'sameness', and for good reason.

Notwithstanding the 'how high is the Eiffel Tower' type argument above, even if we were to start talking about the differences between your model of 'pain' and mine, there'd be

a) just as much difference between your model yesterday and your model today as there would between our models today, and

b) your model yesterday (or even thirty seconds ago) would be no more accessible to you than it would to me. It's gone. Replaced by a filtered and re-arranged version moderated by... yep, your social environment.

I'm not really adding much here to Wittgenstein's beetle, only to say that neurologically, we can show some of that beetle and talk about it using specialised technical terms. In doing so, of course, we only create our own new beetles, but that's no bad thing if it gets a job done, which, I think, neuroscience does.

I think Isaac is basically an indirect realist who has a persistent misunderstanding about what others, like Luke, mean by "private." — frank

Spell it out then. What does Luke mean by 'private' that I've thus far misunderstood.

You can cite all the neuroscience you want, but we already know the brain is behind consciousness. We still want to know where the red, pain, dreams, etc. come from, since neural activity isn't itself colored, painful, etc. — Marchesk

What kind of answer are you looking for then? What would be an answer to the question "Where does pain come from?".

The answer 'pain is a word we use to get others to act in relation to a broadly shared set of physiological states' is apparently 'not an answer'.

The answer 'pain is a public term modelling a fuzzy chain of neural activity mainly from nociceptors through to endocrine response' is also apparently 'not an answer'.

Yet, if you asked me where the motion of a car came from, or what 'temperature' is, these are exactly the forms of answer that would ordinarily be satisfactory.

So what is missing, what form must an answer take in order to constitute one here?

All in all, the political verses are not my favorites. — T Clark

I think it is both in the sense that the "Empire" is presented as a condition that involves all those who participate in it rather than a result of a specific class pursuing articulated ends — Valentinus

Yeah, they seem somewhat at odds with the more personal passages, but I appreciate your thoughts, both.

In some developed countries minimum wage is determined by collective bargaining rather than law, and one could argue employees there get better wages and benefits because of it. Bargaining has been the mainstay method of determining renumeration since time immemorial, after all, whether there is law, taxes or not. — NOS4A2

So? Explain exactly what any of that has to do with the fact that part of your wage packet is the property of the government? Note, I've never claimed that wages cannot be negotiated have I? The claim is that your wages have been negotiated with the expectation that some portion of them will be paid to the government, hence that portion does not belong to you by contractual agreement (it doesn't belong to you ethically, nor legally either, but those are other arguments addressed separately).

I agree that bargaining for renumeration necessarily includes taxes wherever taxation exists, but people do not do so because it is right and moral. They do it because they have to or risk punishment. This to say nothing of under-the-table employment or black markets, where taxes need not apply at all. — NOS4A2

Again, what has this fact got to do with the argument here? Honestly, if you can't follow a line of argument there's little point in contributing. The argument here is against the notion that your wages are rightfully yours because they have been negotiated by mutual agreement. The argument that they are not yours on moral grounds is a different argument. That people do not negotiate morally, or pay tax morally has absolutely nothing to do with the current line of argument. The tax portion of your wage packet is not your by right of mutual agreement because that mutual agreement assumes tax. That's all.

So the assumption that only law can determine renumeration is a false and one. — NOS4A2

Indeed it is, which is, I suppose, why no-one made such a claim.

The notion of “common resources” seems to me unappealing. — NOS4A2

Who gives a shit how 'appealing' it is to you?

I live in a very vast country. I don’t claim any ownership over the territories and resources of the Inuit peoples, for example. I would not go there (nor could I) and take their resources just because I claim to have some share over it, because I just so happen to live within the same border. — NOS4A2

See, this is why I impute you people with ulterior motives, because the alternative is to believe that you really are that stupid. Do I have to spell it out for you like we're in Primary school? Do you understand how the atmosphere works, the oceans... anything?

The only one who stole land, in fact, is the state. — NOS4A2

Completely false, in the case you're citing settlers stole the land with the backing of state armies, the state never took ownership (or when it did it was transitory). But nonetheless, this is the crux of the matter. So, if I steal your car and then sell it to my son, that's no longer your car, right? It's his - all done and dusted and you no longer have a claim to it, right?

In order to pay a tax one is forced to labor for the benefit of others. If 20% of my income goes to the government, that means 20% of my labor is forced to serve the benefit of someone else. — NOS4A2

Not even a bit true because, as as been shown to you ad infinitum now, the remuneration you get for your labour assumes tax. Your gross wage is not the amount of money which reflects the labour you put in, not by any metric at all.

Your net wage is the amount of money that has been negotiated as being the value of your labour.

Whether you see that agreement as being derived legally, or by negotiation, or by market forces, it does not change the fact that it is your net wage that everyone involved knows you will take home in compensation for your labour. Your net wage is the amount your employer thinks your labour is worth Your net wage is the amount you can obtain by marketing. Your net wage is the amount you're legally entitled to... Whatever means you use to determine remuneration it is your net wage that is being considered, the difference between that and your gross wage was never yours, not in negotiation, not legally, not by market value, nothing, It was always the government's.

Like it's impossible for a government not to do those things? — Isaac


The use of violence, coercion and the process of corruption and wherever those may lead it, yes. Undoubtedly. — Tzeentch

By what mechanism?

The whole raison d'être of centralised government is to prevent a repeat of the very bloody process of centralisation happening all over again. — Isaac


Centralized government has to do with consolidation of power, not with preventing bloodshed. And it has done none of the sort over the course of history. Again, the greatest atrocities in our history have been committed by centralized governments. — Tzeentch

No.

The greatest atrocity of our history in terms of deaths was perpetrated by the board of British American tobacco. In terms of Poverty, disease and other measures of well-being it has been perpetrated smaller regional governments (as in the case of much of West Africa), or companies acting as colonial powers (like DeBeers). In terms of environmental degradation, it's without doubt companies like Shell, BP and Exon who may well yet yield a death toll higher than British American Tobacco.

The largest centralised form of government today is the UN which, in it's 55 year history has started a total of 0 wars, caused 0 atrocities but instead is responsible for the Human Rights, feeding billions of starving children and several worldwide disease eradication efforts.

Violence is self-perpetuating. Hence, why I fundamentally disagree with its use. — Tzeentch

It's going to be used anyway. You can't prevent a bully by telling him you disagree with violence. Your 'disagreement' might as well be pissing in wind for the effect it actually has.

Developing countries usually struggle with a myriad of other problems, government corruption undoubtedly one of them. And your answer is to give such corrupt governments a further mandate for violence and coercion. — Tzeentch

Who said anything about giving corrupt governments more power? Why would agreeing with centralisation mean doing nothing about corruption? Again, if you want to argue that centralisation inevitably leads to irredeemable corruption, you'll have to do more than just hand-waive at it. Why can we not tackle corruption with better scrutiny and legislation?

Oh, no need to derail your thread (I'm fond of the Tao Te Ching myself so have been enjoying the exegesis). It was more just a testy jab at Wayfarer's usual assumption that anyone not on board with his brand of spiritualism must believe life to be no more complex than a child's automaton. There's beautiful mystery in complexity itself, with or without technical rigour.

Whilst I'm here though, I do have a Tao Te Ching related question, and it sounds like you might be the one to answer it. It always struck me how much of the writing is dedicated to statecraft. Right from around 50ish, we get a lot of, essentially, advice about how to govern. Is that too simplistic a reading, is it meant to be allegorical, or is he literally speaking to goveners and generals?