We don't have an "outside perspective" from which we can see that I am seeing Xs and you are seeing Ys. We can't talk about the Xs and Ys. You only have access to your experiences and I only have access to mine.

Outside of a fantasy show, we can't "swap bodies" to check. — khaled

Why would we need to swap bodies? Surely Whatever these Xs and Ys are they have a physical effect (otherwise how are you distinguishing them?) So we can either observe, or talk about, that effect. If there's no such effect, the X isn't really different form Y, is it?

(I'm missing your notifications by the way - there's some software glitch which seems to make this happen occasionally, I only just spotted this post by chance - apologies if I've missed anything else)

Say when I look at objects A, B and C I have experiences X, X and Y. When you look at objects A, B and C you have experiences Y, Y and X. Or even Z,Z,R. When we want to communicate these experiences, we would BOTH call A “red” and C “green”.

Different experiences, shared meaning. — khaled

Yep, I'm with you so far.

“Red” isn’t referring to a particular experience, (not a particular X or particular Y) but rather a shared structure (A and B are the same experience but C is different. Doesn’t matter what the actual experience is. Same structure) — khaled

Sort of. I think this is highly speculative and would need some neurological support which isn't really there - but we can shelve that for the time being, I get that it's plausible.

Now if someone looking at the same set of objects experiences Z,Z,Z, and he learned that “Things that produce the experience Z are called red” he would be colorblind. In his world there is no distinction between C and B/A. He would look at C and say “this is red” because that’s what he learned to call objects that produce the experience Z. That’s when we know he’s colorblind. — khaled

Maybe, but we also know we're colourblind by being told we are, but again, I sense that's not the relevant point so we won't derail into it.

Here's what I see as the relevant issue with what you've laid out here. What's wrong with the following conversation (using your terms)

"What's 'red' like for you?",

"Oh when I see red I get lot's of X's and a Y"

"Yeah, I get a few Xs too, but for me it's mainly Ys, plus a Z oddly enough"

"Yeah Z is odd, I've never heard of anyone getting that off seeing red before"...

...then repeat the same conversation fo talking about the experience of X, Y and Z themselves (composed perhaps of a,b, and c in varying proportions).

If I decide to take leaves, and no person or condition stops me — Janus

Then it is neither sufficient, nor efficient, nor proximate is it?

You were pressing me to explain why pains are subjective but noses are not. I offered an explanation in terms of personhood. A better explanation, more relevant to the OP, might be that the subjective is whatever aggregates to make the “intersubjective”. My view is that it’s individual people. — Luke

Yep. That's the bit I saw as circular; because your definition of individual persons contained their ability to feel pain as one of the defining factors. So you end up with "pains are subjective because they're in the list of things which are subjective".

Why are persons defined by their ability to feel pain, but not by their having noses?

In the first case it's in accordance with ordinary usage. In the second case we are talking about a statistical phenomenon, not an individual decision (like whether to rake leaves or not) so I don't see the relevance of the examples. — Janus

I'm not asking what is and isn't in accordance with ordinary use. I'm talking about the assumptions entailed by ordinary use.

The point I'm making is...

We ordinarily use 'cause' to mean any reasonably high significance physical necessary factor "the heavy rains caused the landslide".

We ordinarily use cause to apply to some preceding factor even when it is only statistically likely "the cold summer caused a drop in ice-cream sales"

Yet when human agency is involved, we refuse to accept either significant physical factors of statistically likely factors in as 'causes'. We have different rules when one chain in the link is a human brain. that's what I'm trying to explore.

Not true, I was talking about what I think is the general logic behind ordinary usage of the term "cause". — Janus

I haven't heard anything about the logic yet. I've only heard protestations about how it not what people mean. What logic are you imputing here? What is the 'logic' of calling the human decision the' cause' of leaf raking when it is neither sufficient, nor efficient, nor proximate?

People are just generally considered to be responsible for their actions in ways that are not compatible with the idea that their actions are wholly driven by neurological processes beyond their control. The two paradigms are incompatible. What basis do we have for priveleging one over the other — Janus

Scientific fact. We can all believe what we want privately, but government policy should really be based on that which is common between it's citizens (I think) rather than favouring some over others. Science is the closest we have to such a common model.

Task relativeness: representations are typically construed as accurate/less accurate, purposiveness doesn't fit % accuracy, % accuracy instead is evaluable relative to a purpose - an analogy there might be the relationship of a salience map of the face to a face classification task. — fdrake

I agree so far as object recognition is concerned, but this comes back to the point I made to Joshs about the features of perception being more fundamental that objects. active inference begins to work at things like edge recognition, contrast detection...and I just don't see how those sorts of things could be task oriented. By the time we get up to object recognition, I think salience matters, but active inference authors, certainly Seth, have already concluded the same and speak of multiple models. For Friston as well, the 'surprise' the model is trying to minimise is the signal it is receiving, which, for higher models like object recognition, will be inputs from other cortices, so task salience has already been subsumed in the model by then - one of the hidden states in the object recognition model will be signals from the parts of the brain tracking things like objective. Like if you're thinking "Where have I put my keys, I'm sure I left them on my kitchen table", the expectation that your keys are on the kitchen table will be an input into the system modelling the objects there.

Representation construed in terms of efficiency and accuracy alone can allegedly create a drought of semantic information; something has to make perceptual features and actions meaningful chunks of body+environment, not just accurate and task fit. — fdrake

I don't think this is the case, but I get that I'm straying away from the core of active inference in saying so. I don't think the chunks have to be meaningful. In fact I think they often aren't. I think 'meaning' is a post hoc activity of higher models to try and minimise surprise from the lower models. I don't see any use for it in the act of perceptions. I think it's sue comes in reviewing that act seconds later for efficient recall, or conversion into things like speech acts or object-oriented actions. Obviously the meaning-infused recall will then figure heavily in the next saccade, but only as one of many signals, not as an overarching control.

The over reliance on cognitive categories is that we end up feeding enough context into the active inference machine for it to work in a domain; like Friston's saccade experiments facial recognition study; but we don't learn how to evaluate which domain we're in using the same procedure. So we've fed in a cognitively demarcated context without paying attention to the demarcation of contexts, and we end up manipulating representations within a domain rather than tuning a representation generator that varies over domains - like what long term Friston's free energy approach aims to do but hasn't yet (@VagabondSpectre for central pattern generators being another framework). — fdrake

Yeah, that seems like a valid criticism. Perhaps it reflects the limits of a scientific approach. I can see the problems, but not necessarily the solutions in the lab. It may be time to let us wishy-washy psychologists loose on the subject, something more like Feldman Barrett is doing with emotion?

Besides... give us a questionnaire and a statistics suite and we'll prove anything*!

*(to p=0.05)

I would rather refer to necessary and sufficient conditions, which for me is a whole different context than what people generally think about in relation to causation. It seems to me that when people think of causes they think of agency, direct action, in other words in terms of efficient cause. — Janus

So the sentence "last week's heavy rains caused the landslide" makes no sense to you? Or "The cold summer caused a drop in ice-cream sales"? These are all you uses of 'caused' you think are odd and not generally used?

It's when seeing a particular lot of leaves brings such thoughts to mind, that I may feel compelled to rake them. I still may fail to rake them, so if there is an efficient cause of my raking them it must be my decision to rake them. — Janus

Why must it? You decision to rake them could still be frustrated by physiological failures in your arms, or you finding you forgot where you put your rake. The efficient cause, as I said earlier, is the release of acetylcholine into the synaptic cleft attached to your muscle cells. You're picking an arbitrary point in the chain and giving it a special label. I'm asking why.

The impact of hitting the ground at a certain speed and angle would actually be the efficient cause of course. But if you fell off a twenty story building you would almost certainly be injured, and probably killed. — Janus

What's 'almost certainly' got to do with it? Is 'cause' to you some kind of probability threshold - is that what you're trying to say? That once we're past something like 90% chance of the thing being consequent we call the last point in the chain that got us there the 'cause'. Otherwise I can't see what 'almost' certain is doing here?

People generally aren't concerned with the "laws of physics" when they attribute causation. Again this shows your misunderstanding of what I've been arguing. — Janus

What you were 'arguing' was not the matter of what people are generally concerned about. Had you opened with 'people aren't generally concerned about certain categories of necessary causation' I wouldn't have any disagreement with you. But you didn't. You started by telling me I'd make a 'common mistake' in my language use, not by telling me that people aren't generally concerned with the matter I raised. That was pretty much my reason for raising it.

As to the "thought (an immaterial thing) cause action (a material thing) which defies the laws of conservation of momentum" that is only inconsistent or incoherent if you try to marry considerations of physics with the ways people think about agency; and this is an impossible union; they are two very different ways of looking at things. Why do you assume they must be unified or one or the other eliminated? To me that seems like a baseless presumption. — Janus

Because - as per free speech arguments - opponents of free speech legislation oppose it on the grounds that speech does not cause the response, as NOS is doing right now. That is an empirical statement (because it's saying that removing the one factor will not have the physical effect claimed). I didn't start the mixing of agency-talk with physical-talk.

We can talk about agency - who has responsibility for their actions, and we can talk about consequences - broad patterns of neurological reactions to external stimuli. I've no objection to that. What I object to is the idea that we cannot, should not, make legislation on the basis of sound scientific knowledge about broad patterns of neurological reactions to external stimuli but on the basis of some cultural assumptions about agency, just because they're infused into our language.

Your sense is way off in my own case. Throughout history censorship has been used against minorities of all types: religious, racial, political, the individual. — NOS4A2

You're not fooling anyone. You know that, right? This is a good example of when words don't have an effect. When I disbelieve the person speaking them.

the magical thinking that words cause adverse effects on groups of people or society as a whole — NOS4A2

We've been through this argument and you bailed, not me. Don't start it up again like nothing was said last time. If you have a non-magical means by which physical neurons are caused to fire without prior signals then lay it out. Otherwise shut up. I've no objection to you believing in magic/religion/yet-to-be-discovered science. But it's pitiful to try and paint that belief as knowledge and the current science as the fantasy. Again, if you have a non-magical means by which physical neurons are caused to fire without prior signals then just lay it out. Otherwise it's your notion of uncaused reactions which is nonsense here.

So I tend to oppose that type of thinking and don’t want to see our children taught to believe it, not only because I believe it is metaphysical nonsense, but because it disarms them against hatred, cruelty and bullying. — NOS4A2

What rubbish. If there are two necessary causes of an event, how does legislating against one prevent us from teaching defense against the other? So, by your logic here we should not have laws against violent attack because in doing so we somehow make self-defense lessons impossible? Bullshit.

Can we just say that a gestalt shift not only opens one up to a new approach but changes their interpretation of their currently held model?
Now suddenly , in the light of this changed perspective, that current model appears ‘lacking’. — Joshs

Yes, I think that makes sense, but 'knowledge' seems a much bolder claim than that. A new perspective can indeed show areas where the previous one is deficienct. So now imagine a person whose first experience is with this 'new' perspective and who now comes across what, to us, is the 'old' perspective. Are they not going to have the same experience?

If instead I simply argued that it was ‘wrong’, incoherent, nonsensical, irrational or falsified , I would run the risk of being called a modernist or realist. — Joshs

Applies both ways though, yes? Active inference does account for the Doberman. It just does so differently, from a different perspective. Either we're realists about our models (in which case there's got to be a truthmaker), or we're constructivist, in which case the Doberman example is a category error.

I’m going to use Clark as representative of the pp position. Let me know if that’s not a good idea. — Joshs

Not that it's a bad idea, but I'm much more familiar with Friston, Feldman Barrett, and Seth, so I may not always be faithful to his ideas specifically.

I don’t get the impression that for Clark the organism co-constructs and co-defines the very environment that it navigates by virtue of its interactions with that world, except in certain circumstances — Joshs

OK, so here's the first hurdle. Friston, Feldman Barrett, and Seth definitely do see co-construction as central to active inference. Hidden states are just that. 'States'. Not objects, or scenes, or environments. All of those are constructed as part of the active inference process. I'd need to work more directly from Clark to see if the disparity is your interpretation or his version, but either way, it's not the version I subscribe to.

when I perceive , the ‘stimulus’ I perceive doesn’t stand outside of me , over against me , it isn’t ‘matched’ against internally generated
action -oriented representations. Rather, it appears directly as a figure standing out against but defined in its very meaning by its role with respect to that background field. — Joshs

What active inference accounts of perception are acting on is signals, not objects of perception. So that which is 'matched' is an edge, a lightness, a movement... I don't see how such perceptive elements could possibly be already 'defined in meaning'. They're handled by the V1 and V2 cores, these don't even have direct connections to semantic cores.

there is no object in itself and no anticipational ‘prediction by itself, no guess that takes place PRIOR TO encounter with an outside — Joshs

Again, this concept is core to Friston's active inference.

and thus no moment of matching outer with inner — Joshs

Not seeing how this follows.

In general, the more you explain phenomenological approaches to me, the more impressed I am by the way they presaged active inference approaches. Which, although not your objective, I'm very grateful for. But I'm certainly not seeing any divergence. Quite the opposite.

I consider subjectivity to be somewhat synonymous with personhood and its traits, such as conscious awareness, rational thought, sensory perception, and the ability to feel pain. This is how our being two different people/persons relates to subjectivity. — Luke

I see. Doesn't that open you up a little to @Banno's complaints that

you cannot therefore use the privacy of pain as evidence for subjectivism - at least, not without a vicious circularity. — Banno

You've defined 'subjectivity' in terms that assume the existence of subjective properties (conscious awareness, rational thought, sensory perception, and the ability to feel pain), so we can't then prove something like pain is subjective. It's just in the list there, the list of things you associate with subjectivity. It would be tantamount to saying "pain is subjective because it's in the list of things which are subjective".

What I suppose I'm asking for is an account of some the factors that unite the things in that list and set them collectively apart from things like noses, outside that list.

We don't say that I can only have my phone and you can only have yours, either. — Luke

Yeah, bad example, too easily confused with property talk. Noses would be better. You can only have your nose, even if we swapped with some horrific plastic surgery, what was mine would become yours. But noses are not subjective, right?

Edit - What I'm saying is that you seem to be arguing that pain is subjective not because it's unique (I might well have an experience with coincidentally exactly the same components as yours), not because it's private (the terms we'd use, if broken down would forever be public meanings), but rather simply because it takes place, is embodied, in you not me. But that's the same with noses.

that you can only have your pains and I can only have mine because we are two different people. — Luke

OK. Then I'm missing how this relates to subjectivity. I can only have my phone and you can only have your phone. That's there in the definition of 'my' and 'yours'. But we don't say phones are subjective. So what are we saying that's different about pain?

I would say that having someone scream in agony for many years and not be able to commit suicide is more severe than suicide. I think having time, energy, and resources to commit suicide is actually a privilege in many ways. People in past often didn’t have adequate means to commit suicide and they often were too busy trying to survive and find comfort to even seriously contemplate suicide. — TheHedoMinimalist

Wtf?

On the other hand, our existence as individuals with individual experiences, pains, perceptions and viewpoints is also evident. — Luke

I don't understand how this becomes a difference of type (objective/subjective).

If I have a pain and you have a pain, they're unlikely to be the same whole experience, granted. So 'pain', the experience, is a family resemblance term, or, like Wittgenstein's Moses, one which is constituted of 'props'.

But those props are themselves only components publicly shared. My pain might be sharp and intermittent, yours might be dull and sickening. But 'sharp', 'intermittent', 'dull' and 'sickening' are shared terms, not private ones.

You might say that your 'dull' is different to my 'dull'. Yes, probably. But again the props which make up your 'dull' are still shared, I still know what you mean by each one.

No matter how we break up these multi-propped terms, we end up only with individual props which are themseves shared. I don't see where you end with with subjective meanings.

The disparity that you point out makes more sense if you think of causation as manipulation than if you think of it as contribution. — SophistiCat

I think that's true, but, as you say, domain-specific. It causes problems in contexts which cross domains (were there's both a physical causal chain and a 'free-willed' manipulator). We often end up using 'cause' in the same proposition with a different meaning attached to each use. Generally not a problem in day-to-day language, we're quite adept at disentangling such complexities on the hoof, but when we try to draw knowledge out of such use we'll stumble.

With free-speech the decision is about the extent to which speech 'causes' the harms associated with it. Here, with a question of policy, I think we need to be very careful not to mistake our colloquial use of 'cause' in the sense of 'application of will', with the very material sense in which social policy either works or does not.

In this example causation also gets mixed up with responsibility, which confounds the issue even more. — SophistiCat

Absolutely. Maybe I'm being uncharitable, but I sense, in the arguments of free-speech absolutists like nos, that they're not merely 'confounded' but deliberately use the confusion as a smokescreen for promoting the use of language to suppress minorities. That's really the only reason I got involved here, to point out that assuming a hard disconnect between the speech of one and the response of another is a political, not a logical decision.

So, the word “anger” had a different meaning before neurology? — khaled

'Meaning' is a slightly different matter. I hold a broadly Wittgensteinian view that the meaning of a word is found by looking to its use. This might not be exhausted by the label we give to some predictive model. That would, most likely, only be one of many uses, and so one of many meanings. In regards to that specific use though (labelling a particular predictive model), then yes.

We now know stuff about anger which we did not know before, and that new knowledge will be integrated into our models.

Wouldn’t that require us to know what neurons are before making words that describe their hidden states? But clearly words such as “anger” are older than “Amygdala” — khaled

Yeah. Our models are changing all the time. Before neurons we would have had very different models.

There are different ways to understand and talk about causation in ordinary language, specialist language and philosophy. Janus leans more on ordinary language, while Isaac insists on certain specialist and philosophical uses. — SophistiCat

I think that's true, but what I'm leading up to is the assumptions that the ordinary language use carries. I didn't want to prejudice any alternative explanation Janus might have given, but essentially what I'm seeing is a rejection of direct physical causes when they pass through a human mind.

Me pushing a cup off a table causes it to break. We're quite happy with that use of cause despite the numerous other factors which are necessary in that causal chain.

Seeing the cup broken causes me to swear is more problematic. No greater number of missing factors in the causal chain. In fact nothing logically different at all between the two scenarios. Except that in the latter, a human mind is in the causal chain, and we just don't like determinism when it comes to humans.

I was just trying to draw that out.

Given that we agree there, what’s your stance? Epiphenomenalism? Something else? Are you a dualist in the first place? I’m curious. — khaled

Epiphenomenalism of a sort. I think minds are a model we make of the processes in our brains. Models are (mostly public) constructs which act to minimise surprise in the variables of hidden states. When certain neurons are firing and we want to minimise the surprise in the hidden states (we don't literally know which neurons are firing) we create a model which we call thoughts, which proceeds according to the rules of the model - logic, aesthetics etc. This then minimises surprise at the condition of the subsequent hidden states.

Since what we talk about as 'reality' consists entirely of these models, I don't have a problem with calling the mind 'real'. But since our best model of physical stuff (like neurons) requires things like the law of conservation of momentum, I don't think we would have a very useful model if we said that 'mind' was the sort of thing that could affect neurons. that would require us to make too many changes to the models of physical reality, for no good reason.

I have noticed that there seems to be quite a few philosophers who have a tendency of spending a lot of time criticizing modernity. These criticisms are quite unusual as it is quite contrary to the opinions of most non-philosophers who mostly think that modernity is clearly better than living in the past. — TheHedoMinimalist

Why is the only alternative to modernity "living in the past". What about an alternative modernity?

I don’t see why pointing out problems caused by something requires us to criticize that thing in any significant way. — TheHedoMinimalist

It's literally the definition of criticising.

Of course, “first world problems” can cause some serious distress to modern people and may even cause them to commit suicide. But, this wouldn’t entail that modern people are justified to be so upset about these problems or that these problems are just as big as the problems that existed in the past. — TheHedoMinimalist

Really. What is more severe than suicide then?

In contrast, it seems like there are plenty of people like me that just don’t have any problem with modernity whatsoever. Given this, I tend to think that maybe we should give modernity more credit and maybe we should be more modest in our criticism of modern life. — TheHedoMinimalist

You're happy with it so the rest of us should be? What a bizarre argument.

if I engage in an argument with you, then nothing physical has passed between us. — Wayfarer

Then what are the sounds, electrical signals, ink marks or whatever forms the substrate of your conversation?

Those are the activities of the mind. And insofar as that effects the body, for example in psychosomatic medicine or by causing neurological changes, then that is 'top-down causation'. — Wayfarer

They don't. Not without breaking fundamental laws of physics. You're positing a system which defies the laws of physics - despite being well within the purview of physics ("causing neurological changes" - a physical event). If something defying the laws of physics isn't reason to look elsewhere, then what is? Are you seriously suggesting that "It seems that way to me" is a stronger argument the "It is consistent with all the laws of physics"?

I am not compelled to rake leaves everywhere I see them — Janus

I explained the difference between a necessary and a sufficient cause, did I not? Are you claiming that there are no such things as necessary but not sufficient causes, that all causes must be sufficient ones - that's a very tall order. I'd even go as far as to defy you to give me a single cause that is truly sufficient?

What causes me to rake particular leaves is the thought that they look untidy, or that they will rot down and contaminate a hard surface with organic material. or that they will stain the driveway or verandah if I leave them there. — Janus

So every single time you have one of those thoughts you're compelled to rake leaves, even if there aren't any leaves to rake?

It seems to me that people generally use the term 'cause' in expressions of the form "X caused Y" when Y must happen when X obtains. — Janus

Not always, but let's see...

'He pointed a gun to my head, and ordered me to rake the leaves': in that case I would probably say that having a gun pointed at my head and being commanded to rake the leaves caused me to rake the leaves (or alternatively, I might deny this claiming that I still had a choice — Janus

...and immediately what follows is an example where the word is used in a situation where Y needn't follow. Do you actually have an example of this manner you claim most people use the expression. In what example of "X causes Y" in normal conversation is it the case that Y necessarily follows because X?

'falling from the roof, and landing badly on my left leg caused it to break', — Janus

Only it didn't, because lots of people fall from roofs and land badly without breaking their leg (unless you're defining 'landing badly' as 'landing in such as way as to break a leg', in which case your argument is just tautological, not causal). So some other factors must also have been necessary.

'being hit by a car caused her death' — Janus

Same as above. Being hit by a car does not always cause death. You claimed above that leaves could only be a cause if you are "compelled to rake leaves everywhere I see them", so for "being hit by a car caused her death" to be judged by the same standard it must be that every time anyone is hit by a car, they die. Which is not true.

If you allow 'being hit by a car' to be a cause of 'death' even though it does not cause death every time, then why are you not allowing 'leaves' to be a cause of 'raking leaves' on the grounds that they do not cause raking leaves every time?

You accuse me of appealing merely to how things seem to me, but in the practice of philosophy that applies to all. What authority do you imagine you are appealing to when you say 'leaves cause me to rake them' beyond how it seems to you? — Janus

No authority. Just what I anticipated would be common assumptions - laws of physics, logical thought processes...the usual assumptions we make when discussing things rationally. Basically your position is inconsistent with the laws of physics (it has thought (an immaterial thing) cause action (a material thing) which defies the laws of conservation of momentum, and it appears inconsistent (one minute a necessary but not sufficient cause is labelled 'cause' - the car hitting someone, but a different factor with the same properties - necessary but not sufficient, is denied that label) That goes against normal methods of rational thought. I merely assumed that you shared assumptions like the law of conservation of momentum and logical consistency. If not, then there's not much point discussing matters as these are really the only tools of persuasion I have available to me.

Do you think his ideas have been discredited? — Wayfarer

Yes. Without doubt. Since the discovery of how the memory forms traces of neural events the idea of someone directly interfering at any point, unnoticed, has been discredited. We know what's going on in our brains because the activity leaves traces which we then (fallibly) interpret in recollection.

Early neurosurgeons were very like garden machinery mechanics sent to work on a space rocket. Whatever neural events you imagine happen when a particular mental or physiological event occurs, multiply that by several thousand and you may just be close to what is actually happening.

It's difficult to even estimate, but we're probably talking about several billion firings a second. so every second several billion pathways of neural chains are being started. Are we surprised when the surgeon intercepts just one, that the others are nonetheless related to the rest of the brain's perceptions?

No problem.

To the topic... I have to admit to using the term myself quite a bit, but I've found myself persuaded by your arguments here. I really can't make an argument for what "inter-subjectively agreed" adds to just "agreed". All agreements in such a context are agreements between subjects. I begin to suspect the addition of the word tries to give the agreement some weight which would otherwise not be entailed by the agreement alone. Probably not a helpful thing to do when that is exactly the matter in question.

You would think that if this process was mechanical then the subject wouldn’t be able to tell if these were a consequence of the surgeon’s activities. — Wayfarer

Why would you think that? What has physical detection of the origin of a signal got to do with it?

Scenario 1 - some set of neurons fire which causes two neural events, one the firing of sensorimotor neurons leading to the movement of the arm, two a trace of the initiating process through hippocampus.

Scenario 2 - the surgeon's stimuli causes the firing of the sensorimotor neurons, but not the trace of that initiation through the hippocampus.

On recollecting the two scenarios, they're different because one has a trace of the initiating event and the other doesn't

What do you not understand about that?

Psychologist and their fellow travellers have pretty much dismissed the notion fo passive receptivity — Banno

Indeed. I'd cite the evidence, but I fear the publication dates may upset poor @Mww. Like waking a sleepwalker, one must be careful with Kantians not to too abruptly alert them to the fact that people have, in fact, continued to think things after 1804.

I notice you like to attempt to dismiss your interlocutor's arguments by trying to frame them as some cliched, unargued response. — Janus

It's not a frame. You literally presented a cliched and un-argued response.

The distinction between cause and condition is obvious to those who think about, their conflation is a common mistake of those who don't. No contradiction there except for the simple-minded. — Janus

Wow. So now we've moved on to "anyone who doesn't reach the same conclusion as me simply hasn't thought hard enough"

It is obvious to me that leaves don't cause me to rake them, because I don't rake them unless I feel like it, have some reason to and so on. Perhaps you could enlighten us as to just how leaves cause you to take them. — Janus

What causes you to 'feel like' raking them? What causes there to be a 'reason' to rake them in your mind? In both cases - the leaves.

The leaves (their particular molecular properties) reflect light, sound etc which triggers a long and complex chain of neural reactions which, together with signals from other unrelated neural chains, ends up starting the long complex chain of signals which move your body in the manner of 'raking the leaves'

The leaves are therefore a necessary cause (you cannot be 'raking the leaves' without leaves to rake), but they are not a sufficient cause (you also need many other such neural chains to fire, such as knowing how to rake leaves, predicting what might happen if you don't, experiencing a negative affect in response to that prediction...etc).

So the problem is, if none of these are 'causes' simply because they are not sufficient, then raking the leaves has no cause, it is an uncaused event. Not a conclusion I think any of us want to come to. So we have to let non-sufficient causes into the definition of 'cause'

Now we have a list of non-sufficient causes. You want to give primacy to one in that list. Not (as you claim) the most proximate one - that would be the release of acetylcholine at the neuromuscular junctions in your arms and legs. No, you've picked one group of non-sufficient causes, somewhere in the long chain of events leading to raking the leaves and decided that it requires, not just an identifying label, but a label so unique that all other stages in this long chain of events must be relegated out of 'causes' and into some other term.

Why?

the particular widespread agreement I’m talking about is informing the Chemero link I sent you as well as the ‘smallism-localism’ link. — Joshs

Ah, then we have crossed-wires a little. I was referring to the slightly more general sense in which you claimed to 'understand' the arguments of Seth and Feldman Barrett (despite holding an unpopular interpretation of them). I'm making the analogy that I could make the same claim about phenomenology (or even a certain brand of it). Simply because I hold the (unpopular) view that it's methods and aims are such-and-such, cannot be held as evidence that I don't understand the approach. You can't cite more popular sources explaining that it's aims and objectives are not such-and such as evidence that I don't understand. Otherwise I can do the same for your unpopular interpretation of Seth and Feldman Barrett. Sort of veering wildly off-topic here, but it's a common theme and so of interest to me. A popular response (particularly in the more 'continental' philosophies) is to claim one's interlocutor doesn't understand. I've never really understood what measure of 'understanding' was being used.

My answer won’t be very satisfying to you. You simply have to do your best to read Husserl, Merleau-Ponty or Heidegger and decide for yourself. Either it will make sense and produce a gestalt shift in your thinking or it won’t. If it produces that shift , you won’t need an iota of empirical evidence in order to know what is missing from pp models. — Joshs

A nice answer. One I have a lot of sympathy with. But the last section seems out of place with the approach. I wouldn't 'know' what was missing would I? Knowledge is not gained by gestalt shifts, only perspective.

Yes, but that won’t help you understand what shared conceptual commitment is guiding the non-representationalist, post-computational
extended mind community. — Joshs

There's that 'understand' again. Grrr!

It is quite helpful when there are two competing research paradigms in psychology and one of them is claiming that the disagreement is a conceptual one rather than a dispute over evidence. — Joshs

OK, How so?

Let me introduce Husserl’s analysis of the perception of a ball. — Joshs

It sounds entirely consistent with active inference accounts of perception. I'm not seeing the difference. You might need to provide me with a little exegesis.

I can give you a slightly deeper reason than that. It's morally wrong because the moral sense objects to it; classifies it as wrong instinctively. — counterpunch

I'm just going to refer you to 's comment above which makes the case far more eruditely that I was doing.

Where do you get this stuff from? — Isaac


Does it matter? I'm saying it. This is my philosophy. I'll gladly explain it to you, but I honestly cannot understand your interest in something you apparently have such disdain for. — counterpunch

You do know there's a difference between 'Philosophy' and 'Making shit up' don't you?

You sound to be suggesting that it's only the intuitions, gut feelings, etc, that we have to rely on, and if those aren't doing the trick, tough, there's nothing more to be done. I'm suggesting that we can invent new things to try doing, besides just whatever comes naturally. — Pfhorrest

And where does the will to invent these new algorithms come from? Where does the sense that they're working (or not working) come from? Where does the determination to follow through on their product come from? If we're bereft of intuition as to what's right, the why would we follow the prescription the algorithm produced, we might just as easily throw it away.

Just being curious what it is that people think would not be unethical. I would gladly explain in as much detail as you like what my views actually are — Pfhorrest

That assumes you have privileged and exhaustive insight into what you actually think which would be fully and faithfully reported verbally. I don't believe that to be the case, and I think a substantial canon of psychological literature supports my view. My interest is in what you actually think and how you actually arrive at and shore up those thoughts. I don't believe you have any more privileged an insight into that by reporting how it seems to you than I do by observing how you present ideas and respond to dissonance.

Then your position is exactly the "just giving up" that I say all of the philosophical positions I'm against imply. Thanks for proving my point. — Pfhorrest

I don't see it as giving up any more than I see acknowledging that we can't defy gravity as 'giving up'. We can lead perfectly happy lives within the limits of our abilities, I really don't see any reason to struggle against them.

It's a suspicion I begin to have after going around and around in circles for a long time, running into increasingly implausible interpretations of what I'm trying to convey. — Pfhorrest

Yeah, that's basically what I mean. When faced with the situation where a simple linguistic misunderstanding has to be ruled out, your only other recourse is that the other person must be maliciously misinterpreting you. Not that the other person has such a radically different way of looking at the problem, that your statements, in their framework, don't mean what you think they mean. Things that seem obvious to you don't always seem obvious to other people. One's language, one's whole presentations is infused with such seemingly obvious assumptions such that you don't even think about them and the word 'just mean' what they seem to you to mean. The only way to see what these are is to talk to other people with different assumptions and explore why what you're saying doesn't mean what you think it means.

I'm not being shown some unseen assumptions I have, because you don't even accurately understand what my views are — Pfhorrest

Again, how would you tell the difference between "I don't understand what your views are " and "your views mean, in my framework, exactly what I say they mean, they don't seem to mean that to you because of the hidden assumptions outlining your framework"?

The only outcome I hoped to get out of that latest one was to reach some point or another where I don't have to worry that every time I say anything here you're going to jump in and the whole thread will just become the same argument with you over again. — Pfhorrest

You realise that you ignoring me is not the same thing as me ignoring you. I have no problem at all with your responses to me, I've thoroughly enjoyed all of them, as I have the opportunity to read what you have to say. I'm intrigued by the limits you have on what you want by way of response, but I don't suppose now I'm going to get a chance to pursue that further.

War is a situation in which moral norms have broken down. All property is theft is Proudhon; an anarchist - so again, a rejection of social norms. — counterpunch

Now you're just begging the question. "Killing is considered morally wrong because when we do sanction killing we're not being moral... because killing is considered morally wrong", "Theft is considered morally wrong because the people who don't consider it that way are themselves morally wrong because they don't consider theft morally wrong".

Oh, and according the WHO report on domestic violence ""Often, men who coerce a spouse into a sexual act believe their actions are legitimate because they are married to the woman."

So yes, we do kill steal and rape and we sometimes consider all three to be morally acceptable, even morally advisable. The factors which make them so vary from culture to culture.

The basic laws of the land are much the same the world over. — counterpunch

What do you see as the similarities then -the world over. Give me a few examples of laws that are universal.

morality is fundamentally a sense. — counterpunch

...is given without any evidential support (again). So it does not show...

That's wrong, because morality is a sense, and while there is a significant commonality of moral intuition, we do have different values based, one presumes on the facts we were exposed to - within our limited apprehensions, and the values we were encouraged to by early experiences, when the human organism is, by dint of evolution, trusting of authority figures. — counterpunch

Where do you get this stuff from?

I take that to mean we don't go around killing, robbing and raping each other. — counterpunch

But we do. War is sanctioned killing, all property is theft (according to some) and many countries still sanction rape if it is within marriage, other places treat all sex without affirmative verbal consent to be rape (again with disagreements abound)

We don't even agree that we shouldn't kill, steal and rape. All are allowed in certain context which vary depending on who you talk to.

Once you reach the level of handing over pocket change to a homeless person, you already watered down your claim to "most of us" - which it is abundantly clear is false otherwise there would not be any more homeless people.

Either we do not share any common moral intuitions, or we do, but they are easily swamped by other more important concerns.

Either way, appeal to such commonalities is rendered pointless in resolving moral dilemmas.

Isn't it obvious? Leaves do not cause us to rake them; our desire to rake them does. — Janus

Ah, the old "isn't it obvious", argument.

Tell me, how is it, do you think, that it is both "obvious" and "a common mistake"?

So leaves are not a cause of us raking them...because it's obvious that they're not?

"Why do human interactions on the internet tend to skew negative, as opposed to positive? What does this say about human behaviour?" — GLEN willows

Because a far greater proportion of communication is carried in body language and social status than we think and so what you think of as a nice warm, open comment is often read as hostile, condescending and combative.

Basically, you're doing what everyone else is doing, it's just that you read their comments in the absence of all the intended additional context but your own with all that implicit context known to you.

For instance , many in the community might say Sartre’s version falls short of Husserl whereas Merelau-Ponty and Heidegger go beyond him. Many of those attempting to integrate phenomenology with cognitive science make use of a mixture of different phenomenologists. So I think that even though there are all sorts of internal disagreement about interpretation within that community, they would be in the same page concerning Chemero’s critique of Clark, because I think it’s general enough to capture what is common to all these versions. — Joshs

Doesn't this fall foul of my first hurdle? We've already dismissed commonality as a measure, Remember Thomspon's 4 citations compared to Seth's 86 did not carry weight as a measure of understanding in psychology, so why would widespread agreement carry weight in any particular interpretation of phenomenology? Do you doubt that, should I trawl the papers, I could dig up an interpretation contrary to that general agreement and cite it, just as you did Thompson?

a claim that when we begin from even the smallest , most irreducible starting point for our model, for instance the neuron and its interconnections ( we could go further in the direction of ‘smallism’ : yes, smallism is a thing, and begin from the molecular or sub-atomic level, but then we’ve switched to an account which will hide everything useful from a psychological perspective — Joshs

Right. But when we drill down into that claim, I'm getting nothing by way of evidence. The claim, as you cite it here, invokes what is 'useful'. How are you judging what is 'useful' - especially "everything useful"?

we run smack to philosophical pre-suppositions that it is not the job of an empirical science to examine — Joshs

This is a common complaint. Again, one I've never really understood. Any scientific model has philosophical pre-suppositions which it does not examine. I get that. A philosophical model could examine them. I get that. But a philosophical model could not examine them without philosophical pre-suppositions. Philosophers are not super-human, they don't get to see things without those pre-suppositions. So how is it helping at all? We replace one set of pre-supposition infused ideas for another. Where does that get us?

For example...

For instance, we owe the notion of empirical objectivity to a certain geometrization of the world into mathematical objects that took place between the time of Aristotle and Galileo. Implied in this formation of modern empirical science are assumptions such as the definition of the real world in terms of the calculable behavior of objects in motion. Phenomenology attempts to burrow beneath these assumptions in order to make explicit what is implicit in models like Barrett’s. — Joshs

...Where the first half of the argument is itself a pre-suppostion on which the second half is based. As is the pre-suppostion that thinking about something can reveal a truth about it (the central pre-suppostion of philosophy).

tell me more about how we can talk about what lies outside of a psychological system in its environment. I can see the influence of Kant on pp, but what is it about the difference between an outside and an inside that makes i it necessary for you to insist that they not be already co-implied in each other. Try to explain this without recourse to markov blankets but unsung a more fundamental language. — Joshs

Well, @fdrake has already done a good job, so I won't repeat that ground. Instead I'll add...

In order to talk about 'a ball' we have to, at the same time as labelling it, know what it's boundaries are. To know it's boundaries is to know that it is 'a ball' because the boundary is the point where 'ball' stops and 'air' begins. The ball interacts with the air, but it is not part of the same thing as the air. If it was, it wouldn't be nameable. It's the same with 'me', you' , 'a person' etc. If we don't have boundaries we can't name the objects. If there's nowhere where 'me' ends and 'everything else' begins, then your statement that "the mind is intentional" has no referent. To make a claim about what 'the mind' is, you have to have a boundary to 'the mind' to know that you're making a claim about it and not about just everything. That boundary is the Markov blanket (damn, I nearly got to the end without mentioning Markov blankets!)

The scenario in question is one where they have failed to do so, and we're looking for a way to move forward despite that impasse. Saying that what we're usually inclined to do is all we possibly can do is just to deny that any resolution to such an impasse is impossible, which is just to not try to resolve it. — Pfhorrest

What resources do you expect to tap into other than those of our mental processes? Do you think perhaps we should use supercomputers? It just seems you're saying "when all of our mental faculties fail to show us the right way, why not use some of our mental faculties to help". If a whole load of intuitions, gut feelings and empathetic emotional states, all processed by various rational algorithms didn't solve the problem, why would it help to throw away half the data sources and just do the calculation again?

Did you mean this the other way around? — Pfhorrest

I did, yes. Oops.

None of those things are arguments. Those are other kinds of responses I would find positive; and also things I would like to help other people do too. But none of them seem to be anything like you do around here. If you're aiming to do any of those things, it's coming off all wrong. — Pfhorrest

Oh dear! Come to think of it, my students used to have a similar complaint about my draconian marking scheme, maybe there's a pattern...

...using someone as a lab rat without their consent, are both trollish things to do — Pfhorrest

Really? I don't see taking an academic interest in people's posts as an unethical thing. Publishing examples thereof maybe, but I think you're trying to legislate the wind if you want people to suspended any meta-level interest in the way people present themselves or their ideas. Maybe if on some occasion one were to poke a little too hard just to see what happens that might cross a threshold, but would it be any worse than poking too hard out of anger or frustration? Notwithstanding, I always thought I was one of the lighter pokers. You should see the ethical compliance statement for the experiment Streetlight is running on us all.

So you think progress beyond the impasses we've been stuck at is impossible, then? — Pfhorrest

Yes.

Imagine if that view had prevailed during the transition from the Dark Ages to the dawn of the scientific revolution."There's nothing to be done about disagreements on what is real, as taught by the infallible church, other than try to kill the people who disagree."? That's pretty much the state of moral discourse still, except with the state in place of the church, in places where those aren't still the same thing. — Pfhorrest

We managed to live for nearly half a million years in fairly stable, egalitarian (if modern hunter-gatherers are anything to go by), and successful societies. In just the last 10,000 we've managed to enslave half the world, kill most of it's animals, make entire habitats uninhabitable, and now stand on the brink of self-destruction from irreversible climate change. I don't think it's our native faculties that are at fault.

Not in the sense of "you are correct! what a brilliant genius!" that you seem to impute. But also not "let's see how I can interpret you in a way that you're clearly wrong" either. Just "oh hmm curious" is the most I really hope for. — Pfhorrest

Is it not obvious from the extent of my engagement that I at least find your position curious?

We actually figured out the source of the misunderstanding in that thread: there are (at least) two different things meant by "confirmationism", one of them that I was arguing against, and another championed by someone (Hempel) who also argued against what I was arguing against. Janus et al thought I was arguing against Hempel's view, when I was actually arguing against the same view Hempel argued against. That explains why everyone kept saying things I already agreed with as though they were refutations of my position. — Pfhorrest

Well, that's not how I understood the critique, but I'm not going to get back into that again, the point is that even if the fact that "Janus et al thought I was arguing against Hempel's view, when I was actually arguing against the same view Hempel argued against." does explain why "everyone kept saying things I already agreed with as though they were refutations of my position" doesn't that just exactly prove my point. Your initial presentation was insufficient to give the clear understanding you thought you were imparting. People didn't misunderstand you in weird ways, they didn't interpret you uncharitably, they misunderstood you in a perfectly reasonable way and interpreted you wrongly, not for uncharitable reasons, but for reasons entirely resulting from the lack of clarity about the matter inherent in your presentation.

It seems very odd to expect charity from others, but when those others misinterpret or misunderstand you, your default explanation is that they're doing so deliberately out of malice. Surely charity works both ways, no?

I don't have to assume I'm flawless to see that you clearly think I mean something other than I do. — Pfhorrest

No, but you assume you're flawless to see that as my problem in understanding and not your problem in presentation.

I'm having to figure out what weird assumptions you're making about me, rather than you showing me what weird assumptions I'm actually making. — Pfhorrest

...is basically the definition of assuming you're flawless. My assumptions are the weird ones because...

If you did actually understand what I was saying, and pointed out things that must be true in order for the things I think to be true, that would actually be helpful and welcome. But that's not what's happening. I'm just spending all my time clearing up your misunderstandings about what I think in the first place. — Pfhorrest

You're not teaching me, you know that, right? I don't require my misunderstanding to be 'cleared up' because I'm not signed up to some 'Cult of Pfhorrest' where it's vital I understand exactly what you're saying. You are the one trying to publicise you ideas. If they cause misunderstanding you can either walk away, or try to present your ideas more clearly. Either way it's your choice and of benefit only to you. It shouldn't be an onerous task which needs doing. If it is then I'll save you the bother. I'm not in the least bit interested in what your philosophy actually is. Why on earth would I be? I have access via the internet to the libraries of the world, philosophy papers online and in journals, personally I'm even fortunate enough to have access to one or two philosophers themselves (if I'm willing to shell out for a flashy coffee). So please don't put yourself under any obligation to ensure that I've understood you properly unless you want to. I shan't be taking the exam later, and it's been longer than I care to remember since I had to be concerned about my grades.

___

Anyway, all this talk about your approach is way off-topic. Fascinating to me, but I suspect completely irrelevant to everyone else.

The on-topic point is that we personally find persuasive is a psychological matter, not a matter of some golden chalice of propositional properties, and it necessarily precedes any attempt at 'inter-subjective' agreement.

yeah everything can be linked to something with the other direction of fit: just take the same principles, that are fit-agnostic, and apply them to something with the opposite direction of fit. — Pfhorrest

Why not aesthetics then? What's different about the statement "X is beautiful"? When I mentioned this before, I'm sure you said it was to do with what people expected (ie an actual psychological fact about the world). Now, when I point out actual psychological facts about the world with regards to morality, you say it's nothing to do with such facts and only about what you personally mean in the abstract. So perhaps I've misunderstood your original objection, perhaps you could restate. What would be the problem with making this exact same analogy with "X is beautiful". "X is tall", "X is good", "X is beautiful", "X is the best!"... All could be treated in the same way - unless you're taking into account actual real-world facts about how we deal with aesthetics and personal judgement. But if we're to do that then we must also do so with morality.

First of all, I’m not talking about empiricism or hedonism at all here yet. We've stepped back to the topic of what we’re trying to do when we tell someone something — Pfhorrest

Yep, that's still what I'm talking about too. Our language is dictated by our models of life, so it reflects our psychology.

For all I'm concerned about this topic of language alone, the descriptive claims could be about supernatural things being real, and the prescriptive claims could be about ritual purity being morally obligatory — Pfhorrest

Yep. And the same problem would apply. In the former you're making a claim about an object (some supernatural thing) which we then expect to have invariant properties. In the latter you're giving an opinion which we expect to vary between individuals. If, instead one were to make the second claim something like "The bible says you should not X" then it would be a claim like the former. We don't expect what the bible says to be different for different readers.

I’m telling you in those examples what I would mean if I said them — Pfhorrest

You know the story of Humpty-Dumpty, yes? You've read Wittgenstein? There's no such thing as 'what you mean' by a word. There is only what the word means. It's a public definition, not a private one.

I polled my gf, who is not otherwise privy to this conversation, about what she would think if someone said that they thought something was morally wrong but that they aimed to do it anyway, and she said that would sound weird, that such a person seems like a sociopath who doesn't understand what it means to think something is wrong, and only understands avoiding retribution from others. — Pfhorrest

Ha! Unfortunately my wife's also a psychologist, so I don't think we'd have a fair sample if I asked her!

the state of affairs being talked about, and what’s being said about it (that it is or isn't a true or real state of affairs, or that it is or isn't a good or moral state of affairs). — Pfhorrest

See Ramsey on truth. "P" and "It is true that P" express the same thing (broadly). Saying that "sequoias are tall" is the same as saying "I believe that sequoias are tall". The property 'tallness' is being connected to sequoias by the statement. This is not the case with "Helping the poor is good", although you're still importing the same "It is true that helping the poor is good".
But 'tall' is a property of sequoias. 'Good' is not a property of 'helping the poor'. It's a state of mind, an attitude toward helping the poor, it's a property of your mind, not the event.

In one you're saying a tree has the property of tallness, in the other you're saying your own mind has the reaction of feeling goodness in response to thinking about helping the poor.

In the one the property would continue to be true even if you and everyone else in the world ceased to exist, it is an invariant property: sequoias will always be tall. In the other your mind is the vehicle of the property concerned, not the event that is the subject of the sentence. So unlike the first, where the subject of the sentence is also the vehicle of the property, it would not continue to be the case in the absence of your mind. without your mind to feel it's 'good', helping the poor would have no such property. Without your mind to believe it, sequoias would continue to be tall.

If I take myself, Forrest, thinking X is morally wrong, to be the same thing as me, Forrest, disapproving of X, and I tell you that X is morally wrong, and you, for whatever reasons, take away from that something that you call yourself, Isaac, also thinking X to be morally wrong, such that you say you agree with me about that proposition as stated, but you take you thinking it’s morally wrong to be the same thing as you thinking that I, Forrest, disapprove of it, then you haven’t actually agreed with me. You haven't adopted the same attitude toward the same state of affairs as I have. — Pfhorrest

What about if your statement means that you think of the action in a certain way 'wrong', but as a result of you saying it, I now think of that action in that same way? The property 'wrong' is still a property of our respective minds, not a property of the action. So the linguistic exchange has been about the states of our minds, not the action.

So with "the tree is tall" it's rightness is in the tree. It's right if the tree is, in fact, tall. We might judge that rightness with our flawed senses, we might use widespread agreement to better judge, but the truthmaker is the tree, an external, invariant object - whether it is or is not tall.

With "helping the poor is good" it's rightness is not in 'helping the poor'. It's in the mind of someone thinking about helping the poor. We still might judge that by our flawed senses (listening to them tell us they feel that way), but the truthmaker is not 'helping the poor', it's the mind of the person thinking about it.

The key difference. There's only one tree we all share. One truthmaker, therefore one truth.

There's not only one mind thinking about helping the poor, there's seven billion. Seven billion truthmakers, seven billion truths.

You are conflating condition with cause; a common mistake. — Janus

Really? How?

I suppose flour is the necessary cause of bread, and hops the necessary cause of beer. I’m not going to use such language. No matter what word you use to modify “cause”, and no matter how easily we can drift into the passive voice when we describe tea-making, none of these ingredients can gather and mix themselves with other “necessary causes” to create the end product. — NOS4A2

Then how do you suppose bread and beer are made? I've already said that human mixer is one of the necessary causes. Put all those necessary causes together and you get bread an beer. Take any one away and you don't. No amount of enthusiastic human mixer is going to make bread without flour, are they? So why does the human get primacy, or some special label of their own?

If you wanted to stop me responding you would have to stop yourself from responding. In both cases, the words did not cause any of these actions. These are the decisions of an agent, the only being with the capacity to act in such a manner. — NOS4A2

So what? No one is talking about sufficient causes and I've already explained why we can't remove the term 'cause' from all factors which are not alone sufficient causes. The words are insufficient to make me respond. So is my will to respond (without the words I'd have nothing to respond to). I need both the will to respond, and the words to respond to. Two necessary causes. On what grounds are you selecting one of them for special labelling and dismissing the other as barely even relevant?

The one thing that gathers the ingredients, boils the water, and combines the ingredients to form tea hardly makes an appearance in your analogy, or is relegated to the same species of cause as boiling water. — NOS4A2

That one thing might be a teas-maid, a robot. Does it get special treatment then? Or is it just humans. Do animals count? What's the boundary for this special labelling you want to apply? Are you going to tell me gravity does not cause the stone to fall now because gravity has no will? Was it God did it?

I suggest we teach people to not fear leaves so that we need not resort to such measures. — NOS4A2

Why. You've two options remove the speech which is one necessary cause of the harm (without the speech there's be no harm). Or remove the response which is another necessary cause of the harm (without the response there'd be no harm). You've not given any reasons at all for your choice of which necessary cause to remove.

Change the terms all you like, the fact remains that these two factors result in the harm and that removing either one will remove the harm, so it's insufficient to simply say that your preference for the removal of one over the other is because the other is not something you'd call a 'cause'. What does your idiosyncratic labelling system have to do with it?

Yes, absolutely! But I realize I’d have to prove that to you — Joshs

Well I admire your pluck, if nothing else! But now it's on me to respond, so were I to have the courage (I don't) how might I rise to the equivalent challenge? How could you test my understanding of phenomenology in the way I could test your understanding of cognitive psychology? The people you cite as 'misunderstanding' phenomenology have read the relevant books, to no less a degree than you've read Barrett and Seth.

That their conclusions about aim and methods differ from your can't be held as a measure of understanding surely? Otherwise I could use the same measure to claim you don't understand Barrett ans Seth.

That their conclusions differ from mainstream interpretations cannot be used either, otherwise, again, I could use the same measure to claim you don't understand Barrett and Seth?

Maybe you could quiz me on what was actually said? But I could pass that no less than you could with a Google search - again we're no closer to understanding here.

The problem is, we're talking about apples and oranges. In the case of Barrett and Seth they're presenting experimental results and postulating the implications, then trying to find a model which fits the result, make predictions from it and test those. With phenomenology people are just postulating the model alone, or often not even the model, but a way of talking about the model. I'm not sure in this latter case there's even any body of information of which it is coherent to use the term 'understand'.

My expertise in psychological theorizing is concentrated in clinical psychology, psychotherapy and personality theory. Since Barrett ventures into this territory from time to time , we could use this as a source of comparison with cbt and other approaches to psychotherapy. Of course the sort of evidence that must be accepted in this area is different from that which neuroscientific models make use of, but it is nonetheless does have predictive power ( it must since it is results oriented rather than just abstract theory). — Joshs

Yes, that's certainly something which would contribute to the discussion, but again, it's apples and oranges. That a therapeutic approach works is a different evidential data-point from a neural response helping us understand why it worked. Otherwise we'd not distinguish between placebos and medicines.

And yet you said that you abandoned S-R theory for cognitivism not on the basis of the empirical evidence but on the basis of a conceptual shift. — Joshs

No, I abandoned methodological behaviourism because I felt it's tenets no longer applied. Methodological behaviourism was simply the admission that all we had available to us were stimuli and responses. It would therefore be unscientific to pretend otherwise. The study of psychology at the time was a study of what stimuli caused what response, not because we considered the 'black box' to be a simple switch, but because we had no accurate way to look inside it and so any speculation as to it's workings was unscientific. I gradually switched approach as the data coming out of neuroscience made that less and less the case. The more accurate data we have about the 'black box' the more we can make good models of computational cognition. I still think methodological behaviourism is appropriate for many areas of investigation, particularly with very young children.

if a pretender to the throne of new psychological paradigm impressed you on these terms, then you could embrace it even if it hasn’t yet been translated into a thriving research community? — Joshs

Yes. I think that whether one embraces a particular paradigm is a very personal and intuitive thing. It might be a coherency, it might be some quality of it's advocates, it might be because you fancy the lead researcher... I really don't think it matters. What I'm objecting to here is the idea that some paradigm which is entirely consistent with the evidence, can be called 'wrong' simply by pointing out that it has paradigmatic assumptions and then loosely hand-waiving and one or two of those and calling it a critique. considering the depth of, say, Barrett's modelling detail and the extent of physiological corroboration, I found the attempt to undermine with an anecdote about a Doberman pretty insulting really. It's something I find all too often where cognitive psychology and philosophy meet. Detailed intricate and complex models are dismissed with the most trite "well it doesn't feel like that to me"...as if it would!

Let's see some saccade studies, some time series EEG, some micro-electrode investigations...anything serious and detailed showing the way in which the outside world forms part of the Markov blanket for our mental models. Then there'll maybe be some cause to rethink the paradigm. The gut biome idea, for example is a good potential route, but it would need far more than the speculative connection given thus far. We'd need to see a clear single path from biochemical marker to specific neural signal, otherwise the biochemical marker is simply being modelled, not integrated and we're back to it's actual state being hidden.

I think Ratcliffe makes an interesting and somewhat significant distinction between accounts of emotion that make it an interpretive construction oriented to bodily states , and an interpretive construction that takes into account these bodily states but is primarily oriented toward the world. It is the glass which feels cold, not my bodily sensation of it. — Joshs

I think this misses the point of the place in which Seth, Friston and Barrett see their model. I'm not sure I've read it right, but I think this is the point has made above. That there is a risk, even a tendency, to associate the Markov blanket with the limits of agency has no bearing on either the utility or the accuracy of the model. what we talk about and the reality thereby created ("The glass feels cold") need not be reflected one-to-one in a model of how such talk comes about in the machinery we assume constructs it.

The way we feel our thought processes to take place and be oriented toward, is a result of the actual processes, not a report of them.