Science is indeed a by-product of philosophy. — Olivier5

It doesn't just get truer if you keep repeating it.

Well, it seems to me like I think and wonder in language, if that's any different. I'm never aware of myself thinking and wondering using neurons. — Luke

No, I don't suppose you would be. I don't suppose you're aware of your kidney's functioning either, but that doesn't mean they don't. again, what you have to take on board (if you agree with the science of course - it is speculative after all), is that what you think is happening is a post hoc narrative put together after the actual event. Let's take a really simple example - turning a light switch on. When you switch the switch you no doubt think that you switched the switch, then you saw the light come on. You didn't. You saw the light come on before you felt you'd switched the switch. The signals from your finger took longer to get to your brain than the light took. Your occipital cortex processed the data from the light bulb before it even received the data from your finger. It sent signals to the parts of your brain dealing with object recognition and spatiotemporal response, all before the signal from your finger had even arrived. These even reached the same areas of your brain usually involved in conscious processing...then the data from your finger arrived. this new data was sent to the part of your brain dealing with sequencing (episodic memory). It then sent backward acting neural signals which suppressed sequencing data in the original message coming from the occipital cortex. It changed the story to make it seem like you saw the light after you switched the switch, because that's what you were expecting to see (based on what you know about switches and lights, cause and effect).

So what actually happens in areas we know deal with specific sub-parts of processing the stream of conscious awareness is not what you later recall happened. If we artificially interrupt this sequence we can get you to think the initial sequence is what happened. It did enter your conscious steam of thought, you just revised it a few milliseconds later. Your introspection does provide you with an accurate picture even of your stream of conscious awareness. It provides you with a heavily filtered, selective and occasionally flat out made-up narrative of what just happened. Most of that re-telling of the story is affected by models picked up in childhood - ie culturally mediated, public data.

It seems you think in language because you've been enculturated into modelling your thoughts that way. Whatever goes on in your brain, you're going to post hoc re-tell the narrative to fit the model you're expecting it to fit, in this case "all my thoughts were words". It may or may not work with you, but one introspective exercise that sometimes is revealing is to work out some relatively complex strategy - say how you're going to negotiate an obstacle course, or solve a bit of first order logic. Then try to recall (if you really think in words) the exact sentences you used to think that through, word-for-word. Most people can't.

You think too fast to form full sentences, but we're so embedded in language that the language centres of our brains convert the stuff we think into words as we go assuming we might need to communicate it at any moment. Since the thoughts are too fast, it only has time to select a few key words - hence the incomplete sentences. Your brain (if it has been enculturated to do so) interprets this association as 'thinking in words' and so it suppresses the data with the alternate sequencing because it's not expecting it. You end up with the narrative that you thought in words.

I think there are two different meanings of "awareness" at work here, and both are "common use". — Luke

Yes. I've not made clear what I was trying to do there. I'm not disputing that your use is common. What I was trying to highlight is the (what I believe is unjustified) special pleading with which 'awareness' os used differently with regards to the mind than in all other cases. I don't dispute it's common use, I dispute it's revealing anything useful about the way the mind works. It's a comforter, not an insight.

All you have done here is to identify brain activity with conscious awareness; it doesn't explain how you are conscious of your brain activity. — Luke

This is another way in which mind-talk uses 'special pleading'. If you ask me how the petrol gets to the engine in a car, a description of the fuel pump and line is usually considered to have answered the question 'how?'. Maybe a description of pressure in a closed space might be added if necessary. Whenever minds are introduced, suddenly any description of process has no longer answered the question 'how?'. it's like one can forever ask - "but how does all that lead to conscious awareness?" and absolutely anything said will be unsatisfactory. What would an answer look like, to you. Give me an example answer to the question "how are you conscious of your brain activity?" that you would accept as a satisfactory series of steps.

Apparently it records CPU usage but not each binary step. — Olivier5

The point is it is using the CPU to report data about the CPU. That's all. It's presented only in opposition to the claim that we cannot use a model to report on our modelling process. We obviously can.

Descartes, Leibniz, Giordano Bruno, Gassendi, Averroes, Avicenna...

Ari-fuckin-stotle. — Olivier5

So philosophers then? Yet it was somehow the height of illogic for me to suggests that scientists invented science?

the significant point is that the scientists are usually playing catch-up with the philosophers — Joshs

If you can show some general progress that philosophy has made you'd be in a very small minority. Even among its advocates, it's generally accepted that philosophy doesn't actually 'progress' in that way. So whilst I don't doubt that professional philosophers have widened the scope of enquiry into the philosophy of science, It's just personal bias to suggest that there's a direction of thought that they should be moving toward but aren't (or are doing so too slowly). It's not as if all the philosophers in the philosophy of science have all agreed on anything, there's no "Yep, we nailed that one - let's tell the scientists" on any issue at all.

Looking at your conversation with Olivier, I should add that there are no fixed boundaries between what constitutes science vs philosophy. There are more and less theoretical or applied sciences , and the same goes for philosophy( analytic vs continental) . I’m less interested in whether a particular set of ideas is labeled philosophy or science that how profound and useful
those ideas are. I should add that all other areas of
culture including poetry, literature , music and art , contribute to the shaping of theoretical ideas. That’s why I’m fascinated by the way a particular scientific theory belongs to a large cultural
movement. — Joshs

I agree with you here. It's the point I was making, only more so than you it seems. The biggest difference between philosophy/art and science (even in the loosest sense of 'science' to include some humanities) is that the sciences are, even when wholly speculative, based on a body of empirical knowledge acquired by testing that is usually too extensive or specialised for a single person to carry out. This may seem like a trivial difference, and it is, when it comes to the utility or social contribution of the work. The non-trivial difference is in exactly that which we're discussing here. Anyone can do what Kant did. I could write something similar tomorrow. His insights were gained entirely by introspection using his mind, and we all have one of those. Even the authors he may or may not have read (Wittgenstein had famously read very little philosophy) he has simply chosen to agree or disagree with using nothing but introspection.

Even the most trivial scientific theory, by contrast, is based on a set of empirical findings which a non-scientists would be usually prevented from replicating or testing, simply for pragmatic reasons - the sample size is too large or the equipment too technical. There is a body of such empirical knowledge which, if you haven't read it, you will be unable, no matter how hard you try, to replicate it.

So I agree, in the Quinean sense, with the non-binary definitions of science and philosophy as regards their method of theorising, but there is a difference as to who can rightly claim to be carrying out such theorising. If you don't have the empirical data on which scientific theories are based, then you're not doing science (and yes, before the inevitable question, I am one of those people who thinks some theoretical physics is philosophy, not science).

What I objected to in the line of argument here is a kind of opposite framing, that anyone could do science, but only philosophers could do philosophy. That's just obviously wrong given that the sole source of data for philosophy is the mind and we all have one of those, whereas at least a partial source of data for science is a previous body of empirical test results and one may or may not have access to that.

I would argue if you need such a thing demonstrated you’re probably not fit for this world. — NOS4A2

Go on then.

Lorber's patients either had no brains — Dharmi

None of Lorber's patients had no brains.

That severely lowers the probability that brain produces consciousness. — Dharmi

So not

decisively debunked — Dharmi

then.

And how exactly does it lower the probability? If have a smaller car than usual does that lower the probability that cars facilitate transportation? What exactly does size have to do with the probability that an organ produces any given phenomena?

I'm not understanding why you wouldn't extend the same attitude toward the psyche. — frank

I do. The signals are invariant, but the structures we generate with them (the models) are themselves socially constructed yet, being based on the same hidden states, no less 'real' for that.

I'm not arguing that mental states aren't real, only that they're socially constructed (to the extent that I'm arguing, anyway).

Entity just means thing. The thing that produces self reports is what? The whole organism? — frank

Yeah. The thing containing the mouth they come out of. Nothing philosophically deep, I'm afraid.

It's decisive proof against the idea that brain creates consciousness. Since the folks involved had no brain hemispheres, or were missing massive volume of their brain hemisphere, yet were fully conscious and had intelligence. Many were even students at university. — Dharmi

You can't just make this shit up. If you want to discuss philosophy, discuss philosophy, but I get really pissed off when folks start discussing empirical matters as if they could just stick a finger in the air and take a guess.

Lorber's patients did not have 'no brain' they had between 80% and 5% brain capacity according to his measurements, which were never verified. Hydrocephalus usually results in sever mental incapacity, in cases where it doesn't the reasons may be linked to the survival of glial cells, or to do with the condensing of scale-free neural networks in surviving brain structures. Lack on one-to-one mapping between neurons and their effects. The paper is here

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1571441/

It has absolutely fuck all to do with proving consciousness is not created by the brain.

BTW, you frequently seem to be putting a homunculus in "the brain" which interprets signals. Maybe that's just a result of the nontechnical language you're using. — frank

Yes, flitting between 'you' (meaning the entity producing self-reports) and 'your brain' (meaning that which neuroscientists can see) is an activity prone to errors of translation, of which I may well have made several in my numerous posts. If you spot any glaring ones...

So we never exit the realm of models, right? We just deal in models of models, and models of modeled models.

This language implies the thing that's being modeled (the thing in itself), but that's forever beyond our reach. Is that a fair assessment of your view? — frank

To a degree. The only thing I'd say is that I don't consider the 'thing in itself' to be beyond our reach. I think a model is us reaching it. There's no more 'it-ness' than the impact on our models. Not like there's a 'really real' tree out there and all we have is approximations to it. Out approximations are the tree, the 'really real' one, the hidden states that cause us to model a 'tree' are revealed to us by our sense organs as they 'really' are. We might not be able to sense all there is to be potentially sensed, but that doesn't make what we do sense less real.

Sure, but it's not telling you what the CPU hardware is actually doing. And binary is an abstraction of electricity being moved around through logic gates with high and low voltages. — Marchesk

It doesn't give you a run down of the detail of its calculations though. To do that, the CPU would need to know what it is calculating while it is calculating. IOW it would need to be self aware. — Olivier5

So? Is this not doing exactly that? https://developer.android.com/studio/profile/cpu-profiler

Inner dialogue is talking, no? — Isaac


Private conversation. — Marchesk

Maybe, but that's not the same thing as thinking. Otherwise "I'm thinking of a word" wouldn't make any sense.

A lot of people: us all. We all do it, including you. — Olivier5

And yet we needed to call in specialists to invent science?

No you don't. You think and wonder using neurons. You talk using language. — Isaac


Inner dialog doesn't exist? I hear my thoughts in words. — Marchesk

Inner dialogue is talking, no?

Can computers describe their own calculations in detail, bit by bit? Or do they only report the results of theses calculations, at points specified in the program? It makes a difference. — Olivier5

I'm not a computer scientists, so if there's some technical issue I'm unaware of then maybe this would be difficult, but I can't see the intrinsic barrier. Ctrl+esc gives me a rundown of the cpu's occupation, this, despite the fact that the cpu must be in use running the program which works out how 'in use' the cpu is.

So you think scientists invented science, huh? Logic, anyone? — Olivier5

Who invented philosophy then?

Right but what do we do instead of introspection? — khaled

I don't think we necessarily need do anything instead. We're pretty good at thinking, using all sorts of methods. If there's a mistake, I think it might be in confusing reasoning (as a thinking method) with the social value of 'right' thought. There's a social value in having a case that is immune (or seemingly so) to counter-argument using established methods of debate. That social value is not the same as the utility/aesthetic value of the belief to you.

I would think the answer is “No” then. Doubting your beliefs isn’t fun usually. And if it’s not how you arrive at beliefs anyways then why bother with it? — khaled

Yeah. Only you'll do it anyway, because it's equally uncomfortable to hold dissonant concepts at the same time, equally uncomfortable to hold beliefs which seem incongruous with those in your community (depending on your personality type), and equally uncomfortable to hold beliefs which constantly yield surprising results.

That seems enough to me already. Doing it deliberately on top of all that seems a bit masochistic.

Scientists, as a loose collection, would not even exist in the first place if philosophers had not first carved up a safe space for freedom of inquiry, sometimes exposing themselves to significant risk of punishment in doing so, and if they had not used this space to invent the scientific method. — Olivier5

Historicism without a shred of evidence.

I typically think and wonder using language. — Luke

No you don't. You think and wonder using neurons. You talk using language.

what I'm consciously aware of does not have the nature of, or is not in the form of, a brain signal — Luke

It obviously does. That doesn't mean it's the only way to talk about it. But you seem to be missing the point I raised a few posts back (Shakespeare/Milton example). Common use of 'about', or 'of' when it comes to awareness assumes one can be wrong in identifying the object. Yet here you want to say that whatever you think is the object of your awareness just is, purely by virtue of the fact that you think it is. That seems contrary to the way we use the expression in all other areas.

You become aware of the signal because they're connected to the part of your brain for which activity therein is what we call 'conscious awareness'." The latter doesn't at all explain how, or at what point, you become aware of the signal. — Luke

But I said "...because they're connected to the part of your brain for which activity therein is what we call 'conscious awareness'". That's how. As to 'at what point'. It's dynamic, so I'm not sure that identifying a specific point in the process would be anything other than arbitrary.

Then what is it that you are aware of? — Luke

We could say neural signals, or we could perhaps also talk about models, or features of perception to get away from neuroscience terms.

In this case, doesn't it seem to you - that is, aren't you consciously aware - of your arm being in one location, when it is, in fact, in another location? — Luke

Yes, it does seem that way to me. As I've just said above, in no other field is 'it seems that way to me' deemed sufficient ground to establish the object of one's awareness. If it 'seems to me' that I'm aware of the works of Shakespeare that is insufficient ground alone to say that is indeed what I'm aware of.

Of course, Popper was influenced by scientists, mainly by QM. — Olivier5

Right. So they influenced themselves?

Point is, just because someone wrote something down is insufficient to say anyone after then has been 'Influenced' by it. You'd need either evidence they'd read the work, or evidence that the work was so unprecedented that any use of it could only have come from that source.

Anything less than that and you have only a much weaker version of 'influenced' into which the author themselves also falls, rendering the whole issue of who influenced whom moot.

Very few scientists seriously study Popper, even fear read Kant. Neither's ideas were earth-shatteringly unique. So you've not got that strong use of 'influenced'.

Scientists, as a loose collection, use, have used, and will continue to use, a weakly related collection of methods and assumptions which will be very broadly influenced by the general academic culture in which they were taught and work.

Humans are the meaning-makers and we're outside the computer. — frank

I don't see what that's got do do with the metaphor. All I'm saying is that computers can use their internal calculation mechanisms to report the state of that same mechanism.

We can use our models and shared language to report the state of our models and shared language. Saying "Ah, but your conclusion is just a model too" isn't sufficient on its own to undermine anything.

You want a lesson in computer architecture? — frank

That wasn't the part of your response I quoted. You compared two things. Only one of them was computer architecture.

Realizing that is not at all the same as considering that the world is basically discourse. — frank

Are you planning to support that, or was it just for me to add to my collection of 'things Frank thinks'?

Meaning? — Olivier5

Scientists discuss theory with Popper, they're "influenced by Popper". Popper discusses theory with scientists he's not "influenced by scientists"?

Or if he is, they why not just that we're all influenced by ideas that have come before us?

You've implied a route through published works of philosophy, then argued that even those who haven't read those works are nonetheless influenced by them via the social uptake of those ideas. So the same's true of Popper, right? Or is he immune?

The question then is: Now what? Is this reason to doubt more, or less? — khaled

Does it matter? If we're not really arriving at our beliefs that way anyway, then we don't really need an answer to that question.

Then again, doesn't this also apply for the reasons you believe this: — khaled

Yes, indeed it does.

We seem to be stuck here. If we throw everything out as "Oh you just believe that because you've been conditioned to believe that" we'd have to throw THAT out too. — khaled

I don't think we need to throw anything out. I don't intend that one should read what I said as pejorative. Most of that methodology is perfectly effective. As you've said yourself many times, if it was a rubbish way to arrive at beliefs about the world we'd never have resolved to do it that way.

It's just about recognising that there are numerous influences on beliefs. I'm not even rejecting the idea that things like parsimony, coherence and the like are in the mix.

The problem is reliably isolating them by introspection is very difficult (maybe even impossible), so whilst such analysis might be loosely instructive we shouldnot expect any particularly robust results from it. As you said, Descartes 're-discovered' God that way. Hardly a unforeseen plot twist!

You haven't refuted it ... — Marchesk

Refuting. The activity, not the status.

None of the process is consciously thought, no. You're only aware of the result. — Isaac


Then why are you referring to "thinking" and "wondering"? Those are not things you do unconsciously. — Luke

Yes. They're both things you do unconsciously. You may have a conscious feeling of having initiated them (you could even have your 'free-will' version of having actually initiated them), but the process itself is subconscious. Having initiated a recall, you don't then consciously follow the signals around the brain.

You said, "No, it feels to you like an awareness of your arm." Now you're saying instead: — Luke

The part I was objecting to was "... of your arm", not "become aware...". The process by which you become aware is as described, but it is absolutely evident that it is not 'your arm' that you become aware of.

This might be why someone is consciously aware, ... What makes someone aware of them? — Luke

I don't understand the distinction you're trying to make here. Isn't a reason why the same as the cause?

You said earlier that the feelings are inferred from the signals. This is the opposite. — Luke

I don't see it as opposite. It's not one or the other. It's both. The relevant part of the whole model for our discussion about arms is the inference from somatosensory signals. The fact that there are suppresive feedback signals is irrelevant to that point. I only mention it now because to disagree with your assertion as it stood would be false.

The matter at hand is the proper object of your awareness. I'm saying it can't be {your arm} because {your arm} is a public object, you can be wrong about it. So we need a more proximate source for our model.

Maybe we already decided what to believe for the most part, and only doubt as a pretense to seem reasonable in front of others, when we're really just trying to find a way to confirm our own beliefs logically. — khaled

Spot on.

'Reasons' are mostly post hoc narratives to explain to ourselves, and others, why we believe what we do.

We'd no doubt like to imagine they're foundational. The phenomenal influence of culture, social group, peer belief, subliminal data etc on our beliefs pretty much conclusively shows otherwise.

Some scientists read Popper, argue with Popper, discuss Popper between themselves. The idea of falsifiability (and others) makes its way in the discourse. — Olivier5

And that's a one way system because...?

Scientists were influenced alright, whether they like to admit it or not. And whether they are conscious of this influence or not. Don't take take their word for it. — Olivier5

Interesting. So what was the mechanism by which a scientist becomes influenced despite neither reading, nor being constrained by the writing in these publications? Is it telepathy?

Popper was Kantian and had an undeniable, modern influence on epistemology and philosophy of science. — Olivier5

Probably. But none of that has anything much to do with whether he had an influence on scientists.

Scientists are very ambitious. They’re very competitive. If they really thought philosophy would help them, they’d learn it and use it. They don’t. — Lewis Wolpert

Although my absolute favourite is from Paul Dirac

[philosophy is] just a way of talking about discoveries that have already been made.

So none of this is consciously thought/wondered. — Luke

I'm not sure what you're referring to by 'this'. None of the process is consciously thought, no. You're only aware of the result.

If you become aware of the signals by having the feeling, then the signals are inferred from the feeling, rather than the other way around. — Luke

Not following you here. You don't become aware of the signal by having the feeling. You become aware of the signal because they're connected to the part of your brain for which activity therein is what we call 'conscious awareness'.

If, perhaps, what you're getting at is that the feeling itself plays some part in inferring the signals, then yes, that's rather the point. Models higher in the hierarchy suppress and filter signals from those lower down. It's a two-way process.

You do realize this is just a social construct right? — frank

A pubic carving up of the world. — Marchesk

Yep.

It always baffles me that this this is seen as some coup de grace. "But the study of social constructs is itself just a social construct", "You're using rationality to work out the origin of rationality", "All metaphysics is nonsense is itself metaphysics"...

It's just not the logical flaw people seem to assume it is. I can ask a computer to print out the actual binary of its last calculation. There's no problem at all with it using binary to code a printout of the previous bit of binary. I can even ask it to print out the binary coding for printing out binary. I can carry on doing this forever without running into a single problem with either the process or the utility of the results thereby gained.

Psychology's models of how the brain works (including that we model the world) is itself just a model of the world (in this case the brain bit of it). So what? What's the killer blow we must now succumb to because of that insight?

Which of all that (and the several hundred more) is 'happiness'? — Isaac


If you don't already know what it is to feel happy, why should I bother trying to tell you? — Marchesk

Because you're claiming it is something private, yet identifiable. I'm refuting that claim, so the next step is for you to present your alternative. I don't know if you're familiar with how discussion works...

They don't feel the need to borrow the intellect of an eighteenth century German. — Isaac


Their beliefs and worldviews might have been influenced by Kant, unbeknown to them. Scientist do not live outside of society and they are influenced by the culture in which they live. — Olivier5

Perfectly possible. As is its opposite. They might also have been influenced by Kant's house-cleaner.

I don’t get how asking these questions is supposed to lead me to your conclusion. — NOS4A2

It's like you've never encountered the use of questions before. Do I really have to explain this to you?

"I've not been outside today" - "Then how come your boots are muddy?"
"I've never met her before" - "Then how come you have her phone number in your phone?"
"I don't know anything about that stolen painting" - "Then how come your fingerprints are on it?"

...

It's quite a normal method of enquiry. That you're baffled by it says more about you than the enquiry itself.

All of the above can be acquired without appropriation, through common enterprise and free trade rather than force and coercion, as I’ve already stated. — NOS4A2

Yeah. I don't know if you've noticed this in life, but just stating that something is the case does not constitute an argument. It tells us nothing at all of any shared use. This is a public forum. For discussion. It's not here to canvass opinion like some complex Gallup poll. Nobody cares if you think these things can be "acquired without appropriation, through common enterprise and free trade rather than force and coercion". The standard needs to be a bit higher than you just reckoning it. Hence the questions.

I'm asking you to demonstrate that it's the case, with examples. You know, like in a proper discussion.

I'm not asking because I want to double-check what you already think to complete my list of 'stuff NOS reckons'.

There are many forms of physicalism.
For instance , what allows Barrett to reject naive realism is her indebtedness to Kantian idealism. That’s why she can talk about a veil of appearances separating us from a world we have no direct access to and must use interpretive faculties to understand. She would agree we can never access the thing in itself. That notion of the physical only emerged with Kant. So I would say the default position in most of the sciences is a physicalism
derived from , or at least consistent with, Kant’s idealism. — Joshs

Absolutely. Model-dependant realism I've heard it called.

I doubt It's much influenced by Kant though. The majority of scientists I know just tend to get on with what they do and any underlying assumptions and broader frameworks are questioned (when they're questioned at all) by their own intellect - coffee room discussions. They don't feel the need to borrow the intellect of an eighteenth century German. Just weird like that I suppose.

Toiling your own field, planting a seed, watering the seed, and using the sun to grow wheat for flour is somehow appropriating the product and labor of others. — NOS4A2

Well then how did you acquire the field, if not from the common? By what means was the water kept clean, if not by the efforts of others upstream? By what means did you acquire the seed, if not from the common? How has the soil maintained sufficient fertility to grow your seed in if not by the efforts of those who have come before you? By what means is the air kept clean enough if not by the collective efforts of those other who share it?

And that's just one grain of wheat growing.

Now do that for the computer you're writing on.

Right. But I answered that. You're wrong. There are not two ways.

all "products of [one's] own labour" involve "appropriating the products and labor of others" - the field, the seed, the clean air, the good soil, the clean water, the open ground... All the products and labour of others. and that's just to grow a grain of wheat. Multiply that by a thousand for your computer, your fridge, your car... — Isaac

Ignoring it doesn't make the error go away.

That’s wrong and for the reasons I’ve already stated. — NOS4A2

What reasons? You've not stated any reasons why some are entitled to the products of their labour but others aren't. What are these distinguishing factors?