universal statements cannot be definitively verified for obvious reasons; we can never observe every case, or even if we have observed every case, know that we have. So universal statements can only be falsified. Apparently some of the logical positivists were not happy with this because according to their own criterion universal statements would have to be thought to be meaningless. It's surprising that something so obviously wrong would be clung to by highly intelligent thinkers. — Janus

The problem is only with the definition of the set. If you say all Xs just happen to have property Y, you're expressing a probability function between two independent variables, this can be dealt with using Bayes. If, on the other hand, you're proposing some relation between X and Y, then the strength of your claim depends on the mechanism describing the function of Y given X.

In neither case do we need to observe all Xs to verify the universal statement. The only situation in which we would might be a frequentist probability function of independent variables, but there's no reason why we'd need such a thing.

So "all swans are white" does not need observation of all swans. If 'swaness' and 'whiteness' are independent, then verification is just the approaching to 1 of P(white|swan), but if we know 'swaness' and 'whiteness' are independent we must already have prior beliefs about both. In the more normal case 'swaness' and 'whiteness' are not independent, which means that "all swans are white" can be verified by the definition of 'swaness' - say, for example, some gene which codes both for 'whiteness' and some other defining characteristics such that nothing not white could possibly be a swan by definition.

Also, if we have reason to believe that P(A|G)=1 where G is some set of variables (x,y,z...) then in the case that P(y),P(z)...etc are non zero (ie, not yet falsified), an increase in P(x) does indeed lead to an increase in P(A). So where z implies A, z does increase the likelihood of A given a set of prior beliefs about the set of variables conditional for A, of which z is part.

In short, your instinct was right, they weren't that stupid. The confusion comes from a naïve treatment of our beliefs as if they were a half-dozen independent logical correlations rather than a complex network of hundreds of thousands of interconnected implications.

Well that's fair enough. I shall be interested to read any response if and when you might feel so inclined.

Well if that's what is meant by it, fine. — jamalrob

Well, yeah. Except we then go on to look at which cases are which, we carry out carefully designed experiments to distinguish the two cases, we make predictive models and see how they fare against those experiments...but yeah, broadly speaking I don't think any indirect realist is saying that we somehow are mistaken about every single aspect of reality. It (or my version of it anyway) is just an acknowledgement that our model of the way the world is now (the thing we act in response to) is only partly formed by the data collected from the way the world is now. It is also partly (indeed mostly) formed from our prior expectations about the way the world is. So the realism of our model is not direct (formed from the data we receive), but indirect (formed after passing some filtering system which adapts and sometimes alters it completely).

I was busy for a few days and this thread seems be going nowhere so I'm sorry if this reply is no longer relevant, but I didn't want to just leave it hanging.

1. Beliefs are not propositions. Beliefs are states of mind equivalent to a tendency to act as if... — Isaac

Would this mean then that animals have beliefs? — Coben

I'm not a purist about language except within context. 'Beliefs' can obviously mean a range of things depending on how we're using the word, so I want to be clear that when I say beliefs are 'tendencies to act as if...' I mean that in the context of psychology. As such, intelligent animals can have beliefs, but machines can't, simply by definition (beliefs are something which minds have). In a functional sense, I'm quite happy to see a belief as no different to the tendency of a thermostat to turn the radiator down when the room is to hot, but that wouldn't be a belief - despite it's functional similarity - because it's not a state of a mind.

a) not possible to have a belief which is contrary to the evidence of your senses (beliefs are formed by a neurological process of response to stimuli), and — Isaac

Does this mean that one cannot come to believe things that are counterintuitive: relativity, for example, or that the earth actually revolves around the sun. If we take the latter case that we can find empirical evidence that this is the case, very few people actually do that. Or that color exist outside us. — Coben

No, because there's no obligation on our senses to deliver us a coherent set of data. We can observe the sun rise and set, we can observe pictures of the earth from space, we can listen to scientists whom we trust talk about orbits and construct a mental image of such - all these may well range from slightly inconsistent to completely incompatible. We can believe one at some time and another at another, we can believe one in one context and another in another. Nothing enforces coherence.

-- this leads to the more general criticism that there is no target of the normative claim, it's like telling people that they ought to breathe. — Isaac

What was his normative claim? — Coben

The actual normative claim seems to be that we should reject a system of beliefs which, in it's entirety, is inconsistent, in favour of one which is consistent, but that we should not prefer one consistent set of beliefs over another. so long as they are consistent, they're OK.

Since I doubt anyone would agree that we should maintain an inconsistent belief system, or that we can dismiss the beliefs of others on grounds other than consistency, I don't see how there's any proper target here.

The problem is, @Pfhorrest only resorts to this wider sense of the claim when pushed, as soon as that pressure is released we go back back to the much more narrow sense - that some people hold beliefs which (my personal take on) empirical evidence shows to be wrong, and they shouldn't.

Like, I'm going to out on a limb and say the vast majority of these sorts of philosophies, they're looking for a stick with which to beat their moral or ideological opponents, and no stick is bigger or heavier than "the world says you're wrong", or "logic says you're wrong". Unfortunately the world turns out to be fiendishly complicated and if it says anything at at it's in virtually indecipherable code so these projects always fail.

the small woman I saw waiting outside my apartment building the other day was actually a pile of boxes, but apart from that kind of thing, appearance vs reality is a very troublesome opposition to me. — jamalrob

So apart from the cases where appearances oppose reality we shouldn't oppose appearance and reality?

Rather harder to insert something between the key movement and the ape-body feeling the movement. We could go on about nerve fibres and proprioception, and molecular forces at the interface between finger and key, but the notion that touch is indirect seems less attractive as an idea. Will anyone argue for the indirect realism of touch? — unenlightened

So how would you describe the sensation of decreasing distance between two ridges (felt with the finger), which, on later examination with a ruler, turn out not to have been decreasing? Or the sensation of vibration which, when later measured with vibration detectors turn out not to have been present? Or the sensation of slipperyness in place of coldness (often experienced by autistics) which, when later examined with slope experiments and thermometers turn out to be mistaken?

If all these sensations are just telling us exactly the way the world is, then what are we to make of the sensations which later tell us it was not that way? Do we construct some convoluted framework just to avoid having to cope with the fallibility of our senses? Or do we just use the ordinary language of 'illusions' and 'reality' to talk about that fallibility?

All indirect realism is saying is that the world, as we expect it to be, as we expect others to share it, is not the same as the world as we immediately percieve it, that sources other than immediate sense data form the expectation model we have of our environment. That's a perfectly valid use of the term 'indirect'. Sense data literally takes an indirect route from reality (the source of sense data) to our model of it (the thing we respond to as if it were the case).

Same for neuroscientists. — jamalrob

What is 'the same'? I'm not sure what you're saying here. We use terms Luke 'solid', 'really', 'actually' differently in different contexts and we seem to manage fine. A scientist might well say he studies 'solids' and at the same time say "of course, they're not really 'solid'" and a competent English speaker would have little trouble recognising the change of context.

Likewise here. It seems to you, looking at your fruit bowl, that you 'see' the red apples which are actually there outside of you, in our shared world. That's what 'actually' does in that context. If I then find, by experiment, that the way things seem to you is informed more by your prior expectations than by what is, right now, in our shared world, why does it now become 'misleading' to use the exact same contextual meaning to say you're not seeing the fruit bowl as it 'actually' is?

I don't really see the problem, at least as you've described it. Physicists have no problem using "solid", and it's consistent with one of the main ways we use it in everyday life. Tables and walls and rocks are solid, and the scientist explains what a solid is down at the atomic level etc. — jamalrob

You said...

I think that this is as confused as saying that solid things are not actually solid. — jamalrob

If you say to me "this block of wood is solid", and I cut it open to find a hollow in the centre, I'd be liable to say "no, this is not solid". When the scientist 'cuts open' the wood even smaller and find no less of a hollow you want to deny him recourse to the same language to describe his findings.

Likewise with a magic trick where it appears there's an apple before you, the magician might later say "there wasn't 'actually' an apple", by which he means the way things seemed to you was not as there were. Then, when the neuroscientist finds such a relationship between the world as we respond to it mentally and the world as we detect it with other instruments (say cameras), you want again to deny him use of the same language to describe his findings.

You think that our scientific investigations have revealed that apples are not actually red.

I think that this is as confused as saying that solid things are not actually solid. Following unenlightened, I think that our scientific investigations, rather than being a substitute for seeing, explain it, i.e., explain how we see red apples. — jamalrob

Right, so if all our terms, all our language, just means what it means to us a lay people, then what language is left to the scientist in which to render his answer?

I’ve already given an argument for why we could only ever assume one way or another about that, and why we pragmatically ought to assume there is, instead of just assuming there’s not. — Pfhorrest

More foundationalism. If your conclusion is in any way problematic, that is just as much cause to question your premises as your premises are cause to reach your conclusion. You can't keep referring back to things you've 'shown' before as if those matters were unaffected by the issues here whilst simultaneously maintaining an opposition to foundationalism (or at least maintaining an understanding of Quine).

You can only ever know what possibilities are for sure wrong, never which are for sure not wrong. — Pfhorrest

Right. So how do resolve Van Inwagen's position about possibilities which are 'for sure wrong'?

It’s literally just defined as such. Anything at all that is neither fideistic nor nihilistic is okay on my account. I think you think I’m advocating something much narrower or more specific than I am. — Pfhorrest

Yes, but your definitions are subjective (see my reply to Coben if you want a summary of why), so this amounts to nothing more than "anything which I find to be the right balance is OK", which is virtually tautologous.

Foundationalism starts with basic beliefs that are taken to be self-evident or indubitable. I don’t do that. I start with reductio arguments against certain broad classes of view — fideism and nihilism — showing how assuming that those are true leads to problems — Pfhorrest

Are you suggesting that 'absurd' is some kind of objective measurement? Otherwise how is your belief that your reductio arguments show what you claim they show not then "basic beliefs that are taken to be self-evident or indubitable"? You literally claim (by introducing a reductio) that it is self evident that fideism and nihilism lead to absurd or repugnant consequences. Furthermore, by limiting discussion to the consequences of this conclusion, you're holding those beliefs to be immutable.

Could you give a short presentation of what your criticism of Phfforest's position is. His position, not so much how he has presented it. I can't quite get what is going on in your dialogue though I get the feeling I would be interested. What is wrong with his version of critical liberal epistemology? — Coben

I'll do my best.

1. Beliefs are not propositions. Beliefs are states of mind equivalent to a tendency to act as if... As such it is a) not possible to have a belief which is contrary to the evidence of your senses (beliefs are formed by a neurological process of response to stimuli), and b) people's stated propositions are not necessarily reflective of their beliefs and it is a category error to develop an understanding of one based on experience of the other (just because people say their 'belief' is based on foundations, doesn't mean it is; just because people say they doubt everything, doesn't mean they do)

-- this leads to the more general criticism that there is no target of the normative claim, it's like telling people that they ought to breathe.

2. If you look at the graph where 'critical liberalism' is defined (on the other thread) you see it is based on avoiding extremes of two axes. One is 'willingness to change one's belief in the light of evidence to the contrary', the other is 'extent to which beliefs are accepted/justified without foundation or evidence proving their necessity'. Going not far enough in the first is 'fideism', going too far in the second is 'nihilism'. But both of these scales contain subjective judgements and are superlative. As such they are useless normatively, which is the intended realm of the original proposition. Given my definition in (1), above, I contend that no-one would hold their beliefs were impossible to change even in the light of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and that no-one would hold themselves to have no beliefs at all because they can't be proven. Rather what we find are degrees of faith and degrees of doubt about some belief(s). The former is that the belief should be maintained so long as it is even remotely possible to do so. The latter is the complete absence of any preference. The reasons for that choice, the extent to which they're maintained and the methods by which they are, are all subjective.

-- this leads to the general criticism that there is no conclusion to the normative claim because all the important elements required to use it are missing from the claim. Like telling people they ought to consult a certain etiquette pamphlet at all times but neglecting to give them the pamphlet.

The argument against 1 seems to be that people do claim beliefs to be immutable, such as Reformed epistemology, but I find this uncompelling because in such systems reasons are given for why the belief should be held.

The argument against 2 is that this is just a preliminary stage and that objective measures of methodological questions will follow. I find this argument uncompelling (notwithstanding the fact that I anticipate such methods will prove just as subjective) because I find it to be foundationalist. It appears to cement each 'foundation' and then move on assuming the only direction of play is from these foundations forward to their consequences, whereas properly their consequeses should no less be considered reasons to reject/alter the prior conclusions.

I hope that's served to clarify things.

I am not claiming that when someone says "the apple is red" that they are necessarily having a certain experience. I am claiming that in general use (and assuming one isn't lying of course), "the apple is red" is used to indicate a certain experience produced by the apple. You have shown that saying X, and Y occuring are two seperate operations in the brain which occur at around the same time. So what? You have disproven the former claim but did nothing to the latter. — khaled

That's fine, but then all you've got is the intent behind the expression, but we're talking about ontological commitments here. "Harry Potter" is used to refer to the child wizard in JK Rowling's stories, we wouldn't want such a use to commit us to the real-world existence of Harry Potter would we?

if I look at a red apple and say nothing, then describe to someone the color of the apple 3 minutes later, what am I referencing? What does "the apple is red" then mean if not "The apple invoked the experience we agreed to dub 'red' "? — khaled

It 'means' whatever the term was used to do. It might be to get you to pick one of a similar colour, or to evoke some emotion, or to get a refund on purchase of five green apples... we use words to do things, so long as the ting gets done, the word has been used well. They do not have 'meanings' held in perpetuity in some platonic realm.

I can sit here and stare at a red object for five seconds before commenting on it, which means I've had time to be consciously aware before deciding to speak. And during that time, I may notice detail that wasn't immediately obvious and report that — Marchesk

How would you do that when the sensory input resulting from that detail fired the relevant neurons many minutes ago? How can you 'notice' the detail after five minutes when the signal causing it has either stopped (if it was detail that you noticed five minutes ago, or has just fired (in which case you're in no better situation that the instantaneous response? Obviously what's really happening is that you're manufacturing an idea of what you're 'noticing', a story of what's happened. You can possibly be actually 'noticing' the things in this deliberation because the sensory memory only hold images , sounds ect for a few seconds.

How could we talk of being in pain or having dreams without there being such experiences? — Marchesk

I don't understand at all the link you're making here. If I had a wire directly running from my knee to my mouth which formed the word 'fish' every time my leg bent I would say 'fish' a lot while running. There's no intrinsic need for me to be having any kind of conscious experience whatsoever in order to produce language.

It's armchair speculation to suppose it's some form of self-reporting illusion. — Marchesk

No it isn't. I've provided a substantial amount of empirical research showing that our intuitions on this matter are at odds with what seems possible from the neurology. Of course it's not a 'done deal', but it's just insulting to suggest it's just as much 'armchair speculation'. A massive amount of hard work has gone into it.

You have also equivocated between sensations being identical to certain neuronal activity and them being illusions — Marchesk

No I haven't. What I'm showing is that certain neural activity precludes some intuitive explanations for our responses.

It's no different to the standard knee-reflex test. It's not possible for you to voluntarily decide whether to raise your knee or not. We know this because we can trace the signal from you knee to your muscles and prove it does not even get to the brain (it's dealt with by the spinal column), so even if you 'feel' like you're moving your knee voluntarily (as some people do) then you must be experiencing an illusion of voluntary action because the signals do net get to a part of your brain where such action can be decided upon.

All I'm doing here is showing that this seem very likely to be the case with responses to stimuli. We can see from fMRI and other interventions that the signals from certain stimuli to certain responses do not pass through areas of the brain which could even feasibly be responsible for conscious decision, so we can show, just like the knee-jerk, that if you think you're making a conscious decision about the response, you must be experiencing an illusion of some sort. It's not equivocation. It might be wrong (but if it were it would be wrong on the basis of better neurological evidence), but it's not equivocation. If you feel like you're conscious of something which the best neuroscientist evidence tells us you can't possibly be conscious of then the best theory is that your feeling is illusory.

Conscious experience isn't a story we tell ourselves. It just is how we experience the world and our own bodies. — Marchesk

Those two things are not mutually exclusive.

What about "seeing red" when someone is angry? The image being your entire visual field turns red in a fit of rage. That doesn't happen to me, but I can imagine it, and maybe it happens for some people. — Marchesk

I'm not sure what your ability to imagine that something might be the case has to do with a discussion about whether something is in fact the case.

That can only work on immediate responses prior to being conscious and not when taking your time to reflect on the red cup before you. — Marchesk

How do you know this?

Also, this is a learned response, not something infants do. They don't utter "red" the first time they see a red object. You're talking about a learned reflex. — Marchesk

Yep. That's right, I'm not sure what bearing you think that has on the issue. It's a fairly simple matter of demonstrating pretty conclusively that the use of the word 'red' does not reference a conscious experience. It can't do because the decision to use the word has already been made prior to any occipital originating signals in areas of the brain associated with conscious awareness. How that connection got made originally is a different matter. We can go into that too if you like (spoiler - it's not by association with conscious awareness of 'redness' either), but it's not relevant to the argument here which is much more simple.

The responses we make which indicate to us that something red is in our field of vision (or in our imagination) - which include saying the word 'red', or feeling more 'angry', or picking it when asked to "pick the red one" - are initiated prior to any conscious awareness of the colour aspect of the perception model that is being processed at any given time. They are post hoc. Stories our brain makes up to give the mental events coherence where otherwise they might have been contradictory.

I'm calling them stories in a technical sense. We treat these stories as reality whether we like it or not, even whilst we're trying to investigate them scientifically (a position @Banno and @Andrew M seem to be advocating - I think, and one I have a lot of sympathy with). Yet, if we're doing some form of cognitive science, we might need a technical language to allow us to break the stories apart, just for the purposes of understanding brain function.

What we have no use for at all is armchair speculation about what the constituents of our perception-response system might be without any cause or evidence for such an arrangement.

So you admit that such people do exist. Why then were you pressing me for proof of them? — Pfhorrest

Because it's important that you specify. Imagine we we're arguing about the nature of 'true believers', back and forth for pages, only to find out that 'true believers' for you were the Catholics, whereas I presumed you mean the Protestants. The specific people whom you consider as being either fideistic or nihilistic matters. These people aren't one or the other solely on your say so, nor even on theirs. If there's a fact of the matter about what their thinking methods are then it is independent of either your beliefs or their beliefs about that matter.

It would not be very epistemologically sound, or discursively fair, to approach someone espousing something you think is false and reply to that only with an analysis of the conditions that have caused them to come to believe that, as if presuming that they are a crazy person who can't think rationally, just because they've reached a different conclusion than you. If what they believe is actually true, then you'd be dodging the issue they're trying to talk about entirely.

When people do irrationally believe falsehoods (or meaningless nonsense), it is good to figure out what's causing them to do that, but first we need to assess whether what they believe is false, and whether they believe it on rational grounds. To do that, we need to determine what the rational grounds for believing things are... and that brings us back to epistemology again.

(And if they are believing falsehoods on rational grounds, then doing philosophy with them, i.e. having a rational argument, is the most epistemologically sound and discursively fair way of changing their mind anyway. Only once that fails, and we conclude that they are not thinking reasonably, should be begin concerning ourselves with the irrational causes of their nominal belief). — Pfhorrest

All of this is begging the question. It assumes that there is some method of doing this which is the very matter about which there is disagreement. You'd have to first resolve Van Inwagen's argument from epistemic peers (broadly, if you don't already know it - if one of your epistemic peers disagrees with you about a matter, then that proves it is possible for someone with your knowledge and skills to be wrong despite thorough application to the issue - if that's the case then how will you ever know it's not you who are wrong?)

Unless you think fideism or nihilism will get us anywhere (which it seems you don't), then whatever other method could possibly get us anywhere will be some subset of my method, because it's just the negation of those two things. — Pfhorrest

That you think it's just the negation of those two things is one of the matter under contention. No-one is contesting that your position at least vaguely holds together as a system, you've built a perfectly adequate castle. We're contesting it's lack of foundations, not the integrity of it's later structure. Your claim that it is the best (or even the only) epistemological method for establishing which beliefs are justified is not supported by pointing to it's internal consistency. It's like trying to win an argument about which is the best car by pointing to the fact that yours has wheel firmly attached. Well, they all do, that's not what's at issue.

We're on the surface of an infinitely deep ocean, with the infinite sky above us. Therefore we cannot stand on the bottom, because there is no bottom. And we cannot grab for the sky, because the sky isn't some solid ceiling above us; nor can we just stick our arms up and hope our imaginary friend Superjesus will save us from drowning or anything like that. If we try to do either of those things, stand on the bottom or hang on to something above us, we will surely drown. Therefore we have to do something other than those things: neither try to stand on the bottom nor hang on to anything above us.

In other words, we have to swim. I'm not specifying how to swim, nor saying that the specifics of how to swim are unimportant. I'm just pointing out that there is no bottom to stand on and hanging from the sky isn't an option either, so we've got to do something else directly involving the water we're immediately surrounded by instead. — Pfhorrest

I can do no better than @Srap Tasmaner in responding to this, so I won't bother repeating it, but rather jump straight to the issue

No, I started off with arguments for why we must start in the middle. I’m not repeating those arguments in full in every thread, but exploring the implications of that conclusion on each sub-field of philosophy, thread by thread. — Pfhorrest

This essentially repeats the same foundationalist error you're trying to eliminate. Your previous arguments are not somehow 'foundational' to these, knowledge is not built up like an inverted pyramid, there are no 'implications of that conclusion' that are not also implications on that conclusion.

It's an interesting exercise nonetheless. Watching you oppose foundationalism by claiming you're building up an argument from foundational principles, watching you oppose dogmatic fideism by dogmatically sticking to you unaltered beliefs despite nearly all of your epistemic peers disagreeing with you...

Correct. The word "red" is associated with awareness of a certain mental state. Now if I told you "but actually, you formulate the word before you become aware of the mental state" what bearing does that have on the statement? — khaled

That I am prone to use it even then does not invalidate the statement "red is associated with a certain experience". And again, I don't see how they're related. If you're going to continue down this path then for the next neurological fact you cite, can you explain how it invalidates the statement "red is associated with a certain experience" — khaled

I really don't know what to say. Your claim is that X is associated with Y, I show and example of X without Y and you say it's irrelevant. I don't know what more I can do if you can't understand such a basic rational method.

That I start to form the word (or expect to see) red before I see red does not in any way show that the statement "We associate 'red' with a certain experience" is false. — khaled

By 'an experience' I assumed Yuan meant some conscious awareness of mental states, otherwise I've no idea what you mean by the term.

If I asked you to imagine "red" you would be able to correct? — khaled

No. I could imagine something which is red, I don't think I can imagine 'red' I don't believe there is such a thing.

The original thing I replied to seemed like an attempt to attribute qualia to apples. — khaled

Yes, which, as you pointed out, is also consistent with your first interpretation. I was just saying that I don't think anyone means to argue for you second interpretation.

But when I say "the apple is red" WHILE my brain is fully intact and functioning I do in fact mean that I am having the experience 'red' points to. — khaled

How can you possibly when the centres of your brain associated with the semantic connection to the word red are not even active at the time the word is beginning to be formed? In fact, colour words are quite unique in the route they take from sensitisation to motor function. They barely touch your working memory from only a few years after the acquisition of the term.

If you still disagree, then perhaps you'd like to offer your alternative explanation for the errors seen during Stoop tests for mismatched colours and written words. If your answer 'red' points to an experience of 'redness', they why are you prone to use it even when seeing the word 'red' printed in blue ink?

Okay, well part of my position could be phrased in your terms here as "don't assent to things you don't actually believe" — Pfhorrest

Why not? It's really super useful to assent to things you don't believe. It greases the wheels of social interaction, it bonds social groups, it might even create useful beliefs in the long-term. I'm not sure why you'd want to rule it out, except fro some Kantian obsession with radical honesty.

I was thinking more of things like the relativity of simultaneity, which is far more counterintuitive than just a different explanation for why things fall down. — Pfhorrest

Same thing would apply. The matter that people would have fundamental beliefs about would not be the matter that Einstein theorised about. People do not have fundamental beliefs about models of physics, people have fundamental beliefs about what will happen in their day-to-day lives - how objects respond to manipulation, move through 3-dimensionsal space, interact. None of these things are affect by belief in the models which explain them.

It's sounding more and more like you think my positions are generally correct, and only object that they are trivially so. — Pfhorrest

No. I don't know how to make this any more clear. I object to the implication (resulting from such a long exposition) that there exist people who seriously disagree with you but who do so only because they haven't seen the strength of your argument. If you think these people are irrelevant then it seems petty to disabuse them of the cruxes. If rather, like me, you think these people's purported beliefs can be quite importantly damaging, then it seem crucial to find out exactly why they have them (or pretend to), not just guess at it from your armchair.

The entirety of Descartes Meditations is basically an exercise in this, starting off with a cynical justificationism rejecting everything that can't be positively proven from the ground up, then claiming some beliefs are basic and unquestionable (not just the cogito, which is much more subtle in its flaws, but he basically grounds everything besides his own existence on "God exists and wouldn't let me be deceived"). It's classic foundationalism. — Pfhorrest

Yeah. And do you think it's a coincidence that deeply religious person in a deeply religious society concluded from his 'radical doubt' that there must be a God? Of course it's not foundationalism, it never was, it was never doubt either. It was a convoluted post hoc rationalisation for a belief which he already held for mush the same reasons as you're here advocating (in his case it would go something like "I believe there's a God because I've ben told there is, so I'll hold that for now" (liberal part) - "Literally everyone I speak to who I consider an expert in the matter says there is a God, and I've personally experienced no contrary evidence, so I think I'll keep that belief"(critical part). The meditations was just Descartes re-arranging his beliefs (exactly as you advise) to accommodate some inconsistencies in observation (the lack of clear connection between the outside world and the mental picture he had of it).

People will say any old thing to make a narrative out of their beliefs, you really should take too much notice of it.

Sure, but that just means humans are incapable of perfectly conducting the epistemic process, which is uncontroversially true. Humans are limited and fallible. Saying what they should aim to do doesn’t require that they be capable of doing it perfectly. — Pfhorrest

I strongly disagree. It's absolutely imperative if you're going to advocate a task that the task is either achievable or, if not, then the partially achieved task is worth the effort that must be put into it relative to other methods. We can't fly either, despite the fact that it would be great if we could (save a lot on fuel). Do you think on those grounds alone it would be sensible to advise that we 'keep trying' to fly, just do our best, keep flapping those arms and jumping even if we only get a little bit off the ground because flying would be so great if we achieved it. No. If it is abundantly clear that a method cannot be achieved, then we need to consider the next best alternative - not just assume that a partially achieved version of the first idea will automatically be the next best thing.

we would both refer to a given apple by the same name because we've been taught to associate "Red" with a particular experience. — khaled

No we haven't. Activation of Brodmann's area precedes signals being sent to the working memory. You literally start forming the word 'red' in response to firing from the V2 area prior to being aware of the fact that what you're seeing is red. It's not an 'experience' you're naming, it's just a chain of firing neurons, leading to the production of a name. You have the 'experience' afterwards. Does this matter to anyone except those in cognitive sciences...no, probably not. But for that very reason, I see little point in speculating about it from your armchair.

If by "this apple is red" you mean "this apple produces the experience 'red' refers to" then yes that apple is red. If by it you mean "this apple produces the experience 'red' refers to for me, equally for everyone" then no not necessarily. — khaled

I don't think anyone is saying that.

It refers to the contents of your experience. Think of "red" as a pointer if you're familiar with programming. "Red" is a word that points to a certain experience — khaled

Again, it demonstrably doesn't.

So when I say "the apple is red" I'm saying "I am having the experience 'red' points to — khaled

No, you're not. You're carrying out the consequences of a link between some stored phonology from visual stimulation, this would happen even if your working memory could be theoretically removed in such a way as you have absolutely no formation of real-time experiences at all.

Can you give an example of one (or more) of these properties. I assume redness is out. Bitterness? — Luke

None of those things would be properties of mental processes, they might at best be categories of mental processes, as in "this particular set neural activities is part of 'bitterness', but it would be a very fuzzy set. I think it makes more sense to think of things like bitterness as convenient fictions. The word does a job and does it quite well, doesn't mean it's referent actually exists.

Properties of consciousness would be more like the pattern of signals it has, the causes and consequences of it,...etc

It revolves around the simple question: do you understand what a p-zombie is? Dennett describes it in the article and seems to accept it as a meaningful idea.

1. If you agree that it makes sense, then you should be able to see the logical wedge this drives between qualia and function.

2. If it doesn't make sense to you, all bets are off — frank

Just because we can see what someone means by identifying something, doesn't mean it exists. I can understand the idea of an ordinary zombie animated by telekinesis, doesn't make either real.

Our sensations are not linguistic constructs or self-reports to make sense of behavior. — Marchesk

Why not?

Or we could just ask a mathematician whether a color is a number, but they'd probably think we were trolling.

Numbers are abstract quantities that you can perform mathematical operations on. Sure, you could assign 0 to purple and 1 to green, or use the standard digital hex value or HSLA. But numbers can be assigned to represent anything, from unicorns to philosophers. — Marchesk

I don't understand what point you're trying to make. Neither I nor Dennett are arguing that all things are the same as all other things, so you being able to find two things which aren't the same as each other doesn't prove anything relevant here. The proposition is that colours just are states of neurons in some sense. You seemed to think that a suitable counter-argument is just to say colours are one thing and neural states are another, but that argument only works if no thing we give separate names to turn out to refer to the same entity. As with Hesperus and Phosphorus, we know that's not the case. So what is your actual argument as to why colours cannot be neural states. Why are they like numbers and colours (two different things) and not like Hesperus and Phosphorus (two different names for the same thing)?

And one last thing. Global vaccine take-up hovers around the 80% mark with well-trusted, widely distributed vaccines whose patents have either run out or been disseminated. We're in the low 40s with the rest. How exactly do you think we'll achieve anything like the necessary global take-up with one which has been rushed through testing, and is in the hands of a small number of multi-nationals with a reputation for putting profits over health?

No. All a vaccine is going to do in the short term is make an enormous amount of money for a few firms out of the terrified wealthier nations, while the rest of the world gets shafted by their utter failure to do anything at all about the cripplingly poor healthcare systems which could otherwise cope adequately with this and future such pandemics.

Oh, and also...we already have a way of slowing the spread of coronavirus. Test, trace, isolate, mask, hand-wash. It's nothing short of criminal that these things haven't been (and still aren't being) properly done and betting everything on the 'white knight' of the coming vaccine is part of that problem.

I'm not saying vaccines don't work, but seriously...if this happened in any other field we'd be up in arms - oil industry, pestcides, arms sales, banks...we don't trust a word they say and with absolutely good reason. The covid narrative has become so politicised that industries like the giant pharmaceuticals can just sweep in uncontested because literally any opposition to any action at all taken to prevent the disease is automatically considered right-wing, and they're not going to oppose the pharmaceuticals are they? So we hand them whatever corporate strategy they want on a silver platter because the right-wing don't care and the left-wing have voluntarily gagged themselves in frenzy of partisanship.

Yes, because a vaccine will help slow the spread of coronavirus. — Michael

According to the industry with hundreds of proven (and thousands of suspected) cases of lying about the results of its trials, lying about the procedures for testing them and manipulation of markets.

Do you disagree with Dennett that there are properties of conscious experience? — Luke

I presume you're referring to

Everything real has properties, and since I don't deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties.

I don't really agree or disagree here. I think the concept is too poorly defined. If by 'reality of conscious experience' we merely mean that some mental goings on can be referred to as 'conscious experience' then I'd agree that, being real, they'd have properties. I'm tempted, based on Dennett's subsequent views to think he has this in mind, but it's not clear from the text alone. If, rather, it means the same sort of ineffable, intrinsic, private and accessible entity as qualia, but just somehow aggregated to avoid the issues individuating qualia, or some sort of platonic entity, then no.

Pfizer believes it will be able to supply 50 million doses by the end of this year, and around 1.3 billion by the end of 2021.

...and this is supposed to be good news? Has the narrative so easily been rewritten?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/pfizer-flynn-pharma-fined-prices-drugs-nhs-cma-a7460266.html

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pfizer-bribed-nigerian-officials-in-fatal-drug-trial-ex-employee-claims/

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/pfizer-fined-23-billion-illegal-marketing-off-label/story?id=8477617

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pfizer-lawsuit-idUSKCN10D1D8

I assume you reject qualia because you take "qualia" to refer to properties of conscious experience which do possess these four special qualities. And therefore, like Dennett, you would allow that we do e.g. see the redness of a flower or taste the bitterness of coffee. — Luke

No. Whilst I agree with Dennett about rejecting the purported properties of qualia, I also reject that there is such a thing as the 'redness' of a flower. I don't think it makes sense. If there were such a thing, we'd expect some evidence of it, ie it would have some effect on the world. I don't see any evidence of the effect on the world of the 'redness' of a flower, in the sense of a quale. The photons reflected from it have an effect on our retinas, which have effects on our visual cortex, which has effects on our decisions, mental states and behaviours, but I don't see where 'redness' is in any of that.

Seems like you mean to say that the word "qualia" has no referent, rather than no meaning. — Luke

Yes, that might be better, but I would say that a word with no proper referent has no consistent meaning (use) and so it's involvement in technical fields like philosophy is highly questionable.

I take all this to mean that it takes some time for a signal (e.g. sense data) to travel (e.g. from the skin) to the brain. Without wanting to derail the discussion too much, the question becomes: when is "real time", or with what is "real time" synchronous? You seem to suggest it is (e.g.) when light hits the retina. But why then? And whose retina? — Luke

Not quite. It's not the route taken that's at issue (otherwise you'd be right, we simply pick a point to class as 'real time'). It's that the point we pick as 'real time' is separate from the activities of the neural circuits which are processing the data we attach to that measure. So with signals we expect to be asynchronous (like light and touch - light is much faster) the faster signal is held back before it is sent to cortices which combine the two senses. Not all cortices (including sub-conscious ones) are getting synchronous signals, which means that whatever we set as 'real time' it's impossible that all parts of the brain are working to it.

↪Isaac

what would an answer to this question look like?. — Isaac


One possible answer is that some from of consciousness is inherent in all matter. Another would be some set of conditions that produce consciousness. Another would be whatever Dennett is doing. There are plenty of hypothesis. But without a "consciousness-o-meter" they're all untestable. — khaled

Cool. I have no objection to that. I ask because the majority view from 'hard problemers' seems to be that Dennett is somehow 'not even addressing the question', rather than that he just cannot be shown to be right about the answer. It's a position I've yet to understand so I'm trying to gather some different perspectives on it. If you're not in that camp then you're not really the target of that question. It doesn't really go anywhere from here, but thanks for answering.

So you deny basic logic? Numbers and neurons aren’t colors. This is a matter of identity. You expect me to reconsider? — Marchesk

How does logic tell us what sets the things we label belong to? Are you saying that Hesperus and Phosphorus are two different things, despite both being the same star just because they have different names? Is a chair not a collection of atoms, but some other thing on top of such a collection because atoms are atoms and chairs are chairs? If this is basic logic, then you should be able to write it out in formal notation so we can see how you arrived at your conclusion.

This may be a root of our disagreement. I do agree that well-formed beliefs are coextensive with "tendencies to act as if...", but there is a broader sense of "belief" that I am also concerned with here, a sense something like "propositions one would assent to". — Pfhorrest

Funnily enough, I spent a good 15 years of my academic career studying the differences between "tendencies to act as if..." and "propositions one would assent to", but the former are an indicator of at least some mental connection between the state of affairs believed in and the action about to be taken reliant on that state of affairs. The latter is a completely different indicator of the statements which constitute a membership criteria for social groups to which one aspires to belong. I'm not sure what you're going to get out of mixing the two other than a mess. What people actually believe and what they publicly assent to (or even self-deceptively assent to in internal verbalisation) are two completely different things with completely different origins and processes, they involve different parts of the brain, they're about as disconnected as it's possible for two mental activities to be.

We tend to resist questioning them, sure, but rationally speaking we need to always be open to questioning them if pressed. Look at how many widespread intuitive assumptions about the nature of the world have been overturned in modern theories of physics, for example. If we hadn't been willing to question those things, we wouldn't be where we are now in our understanding of the universe. Our intuitions are frequently wrong, sometimes even our deepest and most securely-held (and widely-shared) intuitions. — Pfhorrest

This depends on how you verbalise the belief. Prior to Einstein humans didn't have a fundamental 'belief' in classical gravity, they had a fundamental belief that when you throw things up in the air they come down in a predictable way, they still do after Einstein. what changed there was the beliefs about the deeper scientific model of why, those weren't fundamental at all. That being said, I agree with you that in principle, any belief could be wrong, not matter how fundamental (people have to behave in unintuitive ways in space for example, they're simply not expecting there to be no up and down), but I don't think there's any evidence that people don't or wouldn't do this, so I think expending effort on explaining why they should is pointless.

My point being this isn't a one-sided thing; until the ground is settled, we both think the other is making an unfounded assertion by appealing to that ground, and neither of us is more right or wrong in thinking so, until the ground is settled. IOW I see you as doing the same thing you see me as doing. — Pfhorrest

Yep. The difference being I haven't written a long series of posts on a public forum under the assumption that other people could benefit from my insight on the matter. That sets the threshold of justification higher for you than for me. You asked me for my opinion (implicitly, by posting on a forum), I never asked you for your, you decided it was important enough for other people to hear. We are not doing the same thing here.

Well you'll find plenty of people right here on this very forum claiming that God as they conceive of him is not empirically testable. I agree that this is a poor kind of belief, and ultimately claims of that sort are meaningless, but nevertheless people assent to the truth of such meaningless propositions. Showing why that's a useless or erroneous way of thinking is part of the aim of my philosophy.

It seems like you really want to restrict the topic of discussion to the subset of discourse where people are already being fairly reasonable, when all I'm trying to do is show why discourse beyond that subset is useless or erroneous. All the possibilities within the domain you're concerned about discriminating within are already A-OK by me; I'm only concerned with those who wander far outside that domain. — Pfhorrest

Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired — Jonathan Swift

That hypothesis is not central to my project, so it's not something I've researched in any depth, and if the hypothesis turns out false it has no bearing on any of my main points, which are all about why it's counterproductive to do certain things, not what inclines people to do them. — Pfhorrest

But it does if your hypothesis is wrong to the extent that there is no proper target for your normative assertion anymore. That's the point. You need a good prior hypothesis that people do genuinely believe there's a rational argument for them to deny all contrary evidence for a belief they hold (or against nihilism, that people genuinely believe no beliefs are more reflective of what is the case than others). Absent of this hypothesis you're presenting a normative theory to an audience who, to a man, already act that way.

I expect most rationalists (e.g. most philosophers) to agree that fideism and nihilism are wrong (but not all of them, of course), yet not to have realized how all three justificationist possibilities (from Agrippa's/Munchausen's Trilemma) inevitably lead to one or the other. — Pfhorrest

Well then a good place to start would be some quotes or texts in which these philosophers make the case that you're claiming they're mistaken in, or reach conclusions that you're claiming have missed a crucial step. Otherwise it's very difficult to see what you're arguing against.

Which makes sense, since you're a... neuroscientist? Psychologist? I forget what you do exactly but you study brains in some capacity, no? So it makes sense that you're more concerned with the nitty gritty details of how human brains in particular work. I don't think that's the domain of philosophy -- it's still important work, but not philosophical work -- and I'm focused on the broader philosophical stuff within which that kind of work is conducted. — Pfhorrest

I'm a psychologist (academic, not clinical). But I disagree that scientists work 'within' broader philosophical stuff of the nature you're investigating here. Your arguments are littered with assumptions about how brains and minds work which can be (and should be) tested and modelled by scientific investigation. If you can conduct the philosophical investigation you're interested in without making a single assumption about how people's minds actually work, then you're welcome to it, but I contest that you cannot, and here that has certainly not been the case. Philosophy, when it's done well, works with the information the sciences provide, not outside of it.

Only if you discard your previous experiences that were modeled well by the old theory, which I assumed was obviously not implied. As you accumulate more and more experiences, the range of possible sets of belief that could still be consistent with all of them narrows. — Pfhorrest

Only if you attend to every single experience you've ever had simultaneously. Which is flat out impossible. Otherwise any 'new' or 'revised' belief could well be inconsistent with some previous experience and will continue to be so until you happen to attend to it. Given the sheer number of beliefs (tens of thousands at least), the number of potential divisions of experience, the relatively short time we have here, the limited bandwidth of the working memory and the limited neural firing speed, there are practical parameter set by basic natural conditions which limit the possible solutions to the problem of maintaining a set of right beliefs.

It’s only in the first person that that matter, as one needs to remind themselves to consider all possibilities, even the possibility that one of their most cherished beliefs is false, if they really do care about figuring out what’s true. — Pfhorrest

Again, this comes back to the fact that you're presenting this normative theory, the very act of doing so assumes there is a target who do not behave this way already which itself is a third party judgement.

A naturalistic account of epistemology cannot help but be circular, because to do the natural sciences soundly you need some epistemological account of what soundly done science is — Pfhorrest

Only if you've started from a premise of denying naturalism about truth already. If you haven't, then you do not need to take that step. "Here is a hand" does not start with an assessment of how we know what it is that's 'here', it's starts with "Here is a hand".

It is a category error. 1s and 0s aren't colors. They're numbers. And neurons aren't colors either. And guess what, neither are photons! — Marchesk

Yes, I don't think your position was unclear the first time so a fourth or fifth repetition isn't helping. What I was asking was, if the separateness of these things is an unquestionable belief for you, why you're taking part in a discussion whose premise is to question them. It's like someone declaring they believe in God as a matter of faith and then taking part in a discussion about whether God exists. It's disingenuous. If you've no intention of re-considering your beliefs in these matters just don't partake in discussions about doing so. Why would you?

It's a category error to say that the difference between purple and green is the neural equivalent of 0 and 1, because numbers aren't colors, and neither are spiking neurons. — Marchesk

...which is begging the question already. As I said earlier, the debate is about these assumptions, discussion is pointless if you're going to start from the premise that they're obviously the case.

the capability for "second or third thoughts" in Pratchett's sense:

First Thoughts are the everyday thoughts. Everyone has those. Second Thoughts are the thoughts you think about the way you think. People who enjoy thinking have those. Third Thoughts are thoughts that watch the world and think all by themselves. They’re rare, and often troublesome. Listening to them is part of witchcraft. — fdrake

Tiffany books. Absolute classics.

‘I would like a question answered today,’ said Tiffany.
‘Provided it’s not the one about how you get baby hedgehogs,’ said the man.
‘No,’ said Tiffany patiently. ‘It’s about zoology.’
‘Zoology, eh? That’s a big word, isn’t it.’
‘No, actually it isn’t,’ said Tiffany. ‘Patronizing is a big word. Zoology is really quite short.’

as Isaac said

If I ask "why do we have noses" an evolutionary, or physiological account suffices as an answer, but for some reason such an account is insufficient for the 'hard problem' enthusiasts. I've yet to get clear on why.


He's right. Why is consciousness so hard for science to figure out? Why have we made essentially no progress on an explanation? — RogueAI

If the sort of answer which is appropriate for noses is also appropriate for consciousness, then we've made loads of progress. We've got some really good predictive models, we've got a few plausible evolutionary 'stories', we've even isolated the development of certain neural networks involved in the development of consciousness. Given how unbelievably complex the brain is (and how recently we've been able to really examine what's going on), I don't think there's any reason to be maudlin about progress.

The question is "Why does inanimate matter produce these mental phenomena we are making these (supposedly terribly inaccurate and incoherent) narratives about?" — khaled

I've asked this on another thread, but for you, what would an answer to this question look like?. If I ask "why do we have noses" an evolutionary, or physiological account suffices as an answer, but for some reason such an account is insufficient for the 'hard problem' enthusiasts. I've yet to get clear on why.

The mere fact that they are doubting shows that they are experiencing something (a thought process). Unless they're not in which case they are p-zombies — khaled

This doesn't make sense. How can the mere fact that we're doubting prove we're having an experience with 'being a p-zombie' as the alternative? If there's an alternative, then is is necessarily true that it's possible to doubt without having an experience of the thought process (presumably that's what the p-zombie does) and so you cannot then say anyone who doubts must be having an experience of doubting purely on the grounds of there being no alternative.