my intuition is a perceptual experience (which I'm guessing we're imbuing with phenomenal and mental content since we're talking about experiences) is a component part of perception. — fdrake

I think you're right here, and again, looking at the active inference stuff, I think that's quite well supported (for those unfamiliar with the idea the diagram on page 19 of the paper I cited earlier gives a nice plain idea of the model). In most respects this is the notion I was arguing in favour of, that our experience is one part of a process, that it receives inputs, suppresses and filters them, and then modifies the environment.

I think that last part is a component of perception that is too often ignored, we do not perceive objects in a one way process. What we later describe as our 'perception' of an object is actually hundreds of sequential images, each one designed to supply just that information which minimises variance from the model developed from the previous one. It's an interactive process which develops over time but we don't experience it that way, we experience it as 'seeing the apple' a single object we can recall the image of, not a hundred different images.

Anyway, I suppose I would have thought, in my naivety, that the very fact that the aspect of perception we actually experience is filtered, summarised and condensed, would make it de facto indirect. If not, then I'm lost as to what indirect might be referring to. Have I missed the point, or is this exactly what you're trying to get at by saying that the two sides seem to disagree about what the problem is?

Friston even approves of Gibson's theory of perception, which is a form of direct realism, so it's no so clear cut that indirect realism is the only way to be consistent with neuroscience — fdrake

Not crucially important, but Friston approves of Gibson's theory of perception as it pertains to affordances, but he disagrees with the extent (contrast Gibson's "Ecological Approach to Visual Perception" and Friston's opus with regards to the role of Shannon-type information). The point I was actually disputing was that "an 'experience' cannot be a result of neural activity", that it must be either the whole thing or not in that category at all. I don't think current neuroscience supports that notion as there is definitely work done in non-experience parts of the brain which modify the inputs from sensory corticies prior to our concious awareness of the output from those corticies. As such I don't think it can be at all right to say that experience does not result from neural activity. It is fairly certain that what we experience is the output of several neural corticies, none of which directly transfer (unmodified) the content of their input.

How that all relates to direct/indirect realism I'm not sure, I'll wait to read your modified post before responding, but I just wanted to clarify that I was disputing a much more specific claim.

Can a belief (a state-of-mind as I define it) have form apart from language? This has nothing to do with pointing to something in the mind — Sam26

A belief can be a particular neural network. It would function in exactly the same way - a tendency for some action to result from some circumstance. My belief that the pub is at the end of the road could consist entirely of the arrangement of neural connections which are responsible for my walking to the end of the road when I want to go to the pub.

So if you want to avoid this possibility, you'd have to declare it axiomatically, or demonstrate how it cannot be the case by conflict with some other definition. It's not valid to declare that it simply does not have anything to do with pointing to something in the mind, it doesn't follow from what you have specified so far about beliefs. Unless, of course I've missed (or misunderstood) the argument dismissing such a definition.

do our actions reflect beliefs apart from statements or propositions? — Sam26

I'm presuming that from your answer to @Banno's earlier questions, you're not referring here to beliefs which cannot form statements or propositions, but rather beliefs which are not statements or propositions? But also, given the above, beliefs which also are not features of the mind (otherwise we very well could point to them in exactly the manner you rule out)?

So what forms are we left with that a belief might take?

This whole thread does that. And a deal of it happens in question form - "where is experience?" and so on. — unenlightened

I'm not seeing the problem with such a question, apart from you (and others of your opinion) declaring it to be. By 'problem' here I'm meaning something like a failure to grasp some otherwise useful concept, a sense of confusion or distress resulting from the language use, an actual failure in prediction or potential for such failures. Something like that. But obviously if the discussion is annoying you there's no good cause to continue.

but if you make category errors you will fall into folly and indirect realism is a very venerable folly, that has deluded philosophers for a long time — unenlightened

I couldn't agree more. What I'm enquiring about is this list of follies. What problems arise from speaking this way? I've listed a few problems I think arise from not speaking this way, I was hoping you could provide a few problems which arise from speaking the way you recommend against.

That you have conscious experiences. — Marchesk

You previously said that the thing that emerged was "complex and novel", now you're claiming it's so fundamental and obvious it can't be ignored. Which is it?

Start being strict with your language, and everything indirect will disappear, because it is all a series of category errors, and literalised metaphors. — unenlightened

It's not about being 'strict' with language, it's about using it in a particular way. You're trying to enforce a use of 'see' where it is not normally so restricted and you've not yet provided any argument as to why. I can guarantee that most people, when describing a dream, would quite happily say "I saw a tree", and everyone to whom they're speaking would understand them. If you want to claim that usage is confused or leads to problems you'll have to show what those problems are. And you'll have to be able to defend them pretty robustly. Trying to restrict normal language use (for whatever reason) is no trivial undertaking.

No, but I think complex novel things emerging is considered spooky in a way that brute fundamental things are not. — Marchesk

Possibly, but the thing emerging is not complex and novel. The thing emerging is conciousness. The whole point of the hard problem is that conciousness itself is taken to be a familiar, obvious fact (otherwise we'd just be rid of the whole thing). It's the mechanism that's mysterious, and we're quite used to mysterious mechanisms. The whole history of science has been the gradual revelation of previously mysterious mechanisms.

Sure, but it just becomes another brute fact of existence, along with the existence of QM, Relativity and fundamental properties and fields. — Marchesk

Why couldn't unexplained emergence be a brute fact? Are there some limits/preferences about what can and cannot be a brute fact?

One can say perception is direct in that you perceive things directly rather than perceive mental objects or something — jamalrob

I can't post images so I'll have to link to the whole document Here, but what I want to ask you is about the model of perception on page 18. Note the suppressive feedback within the Hippocampus and between the Striatum and the Ventral Tegmental Area (marked VTA). These are measured, confirmed events.

If perception is of the object, not the mental event, then on what are these suppressive feedback loops acting prior to our awareness (in either prefrontal lobe)? It can't be the actual object (that's outside the brain), but they're acting on something, and it's that something we become aware of an later act on. So, if you want to have a direct realist model, what would you refer to that something as?

Panpsychism is trying to solve the irreducibility of conscious experience by spreading it out through everything so that it's a building block instead of just mysteriously emerging. — Marchesk

This my not be what @Graeme M is getting at, if so I don't want to derail his thread with this, but - how exactly is spreading it out through everything a solution to the problem of it mysteriously emerging?

We certainly haven't reduced the mysteriousness - we've just re-invented the nature of the entire universe with a stuff that previously didn't exist and can't be measured.

We haven't reduced the 'how' questions - we still have the question of how this stuff interacts with matter only now it's interacting with all matter.

I'm not seeing what's improved.

Coincidentally the same problem as on the other thread about direct/indirect realism. In removing the mental state of belief from discourse you remove the ability of those interested in the component parts of the process to talk about it. It may well be that the mental state component of belief drops out of most language games, but not that which takes place between two neuroscientists discussing how best to manage some patient with damage to parts of the brain responsible for certain beliefs.

Asking how much our perception resembles reality, or gives us information about it, is akin in this context to asking, "what do tables look like, independently of how they look". — jamalrob

This is only true in a very self-centred sense though. To ask the extent to which our perception resembles reality does not dissolve to a question about tables when we're not looking at them the moment we start to have concern for other people. What about the schizophrenic? When he sees the table is a monster coming to devour him, should we help? Is that what the table really is, or has he made some mistake? Now the question of whether our senses deliver us information about how the table 'really' is becomes crucially important, we need to know whether to treat the man's illness or help him beat off the ravenous table with a stick.

Next, the question of how we can help. Where, in his brain, is he getting the idea that the table is a monster coming to devour him. Are his eyes broken, is his occiptal cortex broken, his frontal lobes? If we stop at simply saying it doesn't matter, the table just is what it is, we've failed to help the man.

A belief that the world existed long before oneself is most certainly a linguistic one. That belief is the result of holding two very complex notions side by side for comparison. The age of oneself. The age of the world. Comparing the two requires naming and descriptive practices. — creativesoul

I don't think it does. Take a person with no language at all, present them with a time machine (which works by reading your desires) and demonstrate it's use (perhaps by making several marks on the ground, taking him back in time to before those marks were made, or smashing some identifiable vase and taking him back in time to before the vase was smashed). Do this repeatedly and at some point the person may use the machine to undo unwanted damage of their own (we can train mice, even flatworms by repeated demonstration so we know this works without language, we also know pre-linguistic animals can interpret the intentions of others, and have a sense of time passing, or at least sequential events, so he could easily see how and why the machine was being used). If, at some point, the person uses the machine to travel beyond his own birth, then he holds a belief that the earth (the place he's expecting to end up) existed prior to his own existence), if he never does, we might assume he does not hold that belief.

A more simple example. Putting a seed in the ground from a tree one recognises as having been there all ones life, and expecting a similar tree to grow shows a belief that that tree grew that way and so must have existed as a seedling prior to one's own existence.

There's no belief in which language is actually required. There's just beliefs which are constituted of a tendency to certain linguistic responses most of the time.

This, of course, is not the same as saying that language did not, in practice, act to create sets of beliefs which would unlikely have arisen without it. The naming and reference process obviously proved instrumental in the formation of the vast majority of human belief. But a thing's being instrumental in something and it's being essential to something are not the same.

if neurones produce experience, someone has to be experiencing the experience that the neurones produce. And there is no such homunculus. It cannot either be the person the neurones are part of, because that person has no knowledge experience or awareness of their neurones. This is the tangle that results from the category error. — unenlightened

We say a record player produces the sound made by the record (yet the player's plastic cover actually plays no part in producing the sound), we say the tree grows toward the light (yet it's roots are not photophilic), we say a house needs a good paint (yet we don't intend to paint every single part of the house), we say a car is a red car (yet clearly some parts of it are black).

So what exactly is the problem with saying that a person has an experience, in general, and then on more detailed specific analysis, isolating which parts of the person are actually playng a role in the having of that experience and which parts seem disjunct from it?

Either we cannot say

So if neurones produce experience, someone has to be experiencing the experience that the neurones produce. And there is no such homunculus. — unenlightened

How do you know there is no such 'homunculus'? If there is a part of the brain responsible for conscious awareness then that is the part whose activity constitutes what we think of as 'someone' (in terms of an entity having an experience). We don't say that 'I' experience my kidneys filtering blood. No signals get sent from them to the parts of my brain responsible for conscious experience so 'I' do not experience it. Yet it clearly takes place in my body, so 'I' (in terms of an entity having an experience), must be something different from my kidneys. An arm might 'belong' to that entity, but not constitute that entity. It makes perfect sense to be able to talk about 'a person' in more than one different way depending on the subject matter at hand.

If I invite 'you' round for a cup of tea, I expect the whole of you, not just the parts of your body responsible for conscious experience, but if I'm a neuroscientist investigating the effects of neurons on reported experience, why can't I talk about parts of the brain which seem constituent of that experience and other parts which don't. Why shackle language that way? It's not as if the neuroscientist is going to get confused and start inviting parts of people's brains round for tea. Apparently they're quite clever, I think they can handle different meanings in different contexts.

Usefully, policy recommendations are partitioned into those contingent on unjust distribution of money and those not. — Tech

Yeah, I think this could be a useful way to look at it, but I doubt much beyond basic reward for labour and ideas would pass muster.

1) Solutions aiming to fix bad links often have large costs of their own, 2) Often the (perceived) thief and victim are dead, so there are no good candidates for punishment or compensation. — Tech

Agreed, but I don't think a presumption of just transaction is the solution to either problem. Some system will be in place, we cannot have 'no system', so (1) is going to have to be dealt with whatever we do, inaction has no less risk of large cost than action. We may not be able to identify thief or victim, but it is a trivial matter to identify those who benefit from such transactions having taken place and those who are harmed by them. In the absence of an identified thief and victim, what could possibly prevent us from simply assuming those who suffer now are de facto victims?

This emerges from your general view on who should and shouldn't be permitted to own particular scarce resources. Can you expand this view? It will improve my understanding of your comment. — Tech

Personally I don't agree with land ownership at all and I think that joint ownership of natural resources, such as the air and soil, demands joint responsibility. But my actual comment wasn't really derived from this at all. It was merely to undermine the idea that natural scarcity determines economic value. Economic value is best thought of as the maximum return the seller can generate. This might be done by market manipulation, monopolies, lobbying for legal benefits, speculation, withholding investment, manipulating debt... Natural scarcity of the resource barely gets a look in. Read up about how De Beers manipulated the diamond market, its a really good case study.

All material goods needed or wanted are currently owned by someone else. This is not unique to property. — Tech

Yes, my comment applies to most resources.

it is possible for firms to form cabals. But the incentive for members to silently defect make cabals unstable. This instability remains until government begins punishing defectors with fines and jail time. — Tech

Legal monopolies and the 'cabals' I was loosely referring to are not quite one and the same. No matter who 'defects' as you put it, the price of the resource they collectively own will still be set my the minimum that person is willing to receive, not the amount the purchaser is willing to pay. Their willingness to pay doesn't figure in the calculations at all because they simply must, on pain of death, pay whatever the minimum available price is.

Say all landowners set the price of fields at £6,000 an acre. One landowner thinks he might rake in all the sales by accepting £5,500. That then is the price of land. The willingness of farmers to pay that price never entered the equation, they simply have to because they must have land to make food to eat.

I said this:

Experiences are things happening to people. They are not 'the result of neural activity'. No one is experiencing neural activity or the results of neural activity. — unenlightened

.

Right, so your claim seems to be that the entire process 'just is' the experience (otherwise experience might be the result of neural activity).

But that flies in the face of modern neuroscience (hence my questioning if you thought the whole venture misguided.

Not all neural activity results in what is reported as an 'experience'. So some neural activity must consist of something outside of experience. People do, however, report something they call an 'experience' consequent to some of this non-experience neural activity. Not only that, but the same non-experience neural activity seems to consistently result in the same neural activity reported as being an 'experience'.

So your idea that experience is not the result of neural activity is absent of a satisfactory explanation for this otherwise astonishing coincidence where some non-experience neural activity consistently seems to preceded what's called an 'experience'. And @Michael has taken pains to point out the evidence demonstrating this.

If you want to take 'experience' out of the field of neuroscience altogether, then we're simply back at the idea that neuroscience cannot help at all because you've robbed it of its means of communicating its results.

Experiences are things happening to people. They are not 'the result of neural activity'. — unenlightened

So neuroscience should just give up. If someone has a serious brain lesion and it's affecting their experience of colour the neuroscientist should throw up their hands and say "can't help you there, I just deal with neural activity and your experiences are not the result of neural activitie I'm afraid. I shall just leave that occipital lesion exactly as it is"

If we're already at a stage where we can't in practice distinguish motivated reasoning using badly interpreted, overstated or false claims from well interpreted, well contextualised and well justified ones, public knowledge is in bad shape. — fdrake

I'm somewhat reluctant to say it, but I think this was something like where I was going. Not to say the public in general are that bad, but that the very people who need to be persuaded about the validity of certain sources, are.

It kind of repeats what I was trying (but ultimately failing, I think) to communicate in the conflict resolution thread. For any given list of rules/factors/thresholds we might dictate, I think we'd get almost 100% agreement on them from our interlocutors, maybe some tweaking at the edges (and that might turn out to be really important - don't know yet), but general agreement would be the order of the day.

Accompanying this ruleset are always a list of graduated measures (just how contrary to lay knowledge is enough to worry about, just how much ulterior gain is enough to cast doubt, just how much leeway with 'simple vs true' can we allow...). And these are all judgement calls, which is fine - we wouldn't expect it to be simple, but... If the ability to make judgement calls is itself being used to (in)validate an authority in order to win an argument (rather than to genuinely judge the authority) then we've no recourse to dispute that by stating the rules, they were agreed anyway, the issue was the degree of some particular judgement call, and we don't have a rule for that (that's the whole point of a judgement call).

Take for example, the rule "the source should not regularly conflict, or appear unknowledgable about facts in their field which even lay people know (except cases like spinach where lay knowledge is generally wrong)". I don't think many would disagree with that rule. Where they'd make their case would be to claim "this is my 'spinach' exception".

We can do the same for a motivated reasoning rule "a source is invalid if they have some strong ulterior motive to make the claim they do (except where that motive is well-reasoned or exceptional or set against a sufficient background of quality output)". Again, you'll get very little complaints about the rule itself, but when it comes to an actual dispute, the argument dissolves to whether the ulterior motive really is 'well-reasoned', just how exceptional it is, whether such and such level of previous quality output is enough or not.

It's possible that you can ignore all of this as it might be quite specific to my experience. I recognise we probably do have people here quoting sources so beyond the pale that we don't need to entertain any dispute over judgement. We've probably also got people who actually would disagree with even the most basic rules.

I also wouldn't want you to get the impression I'm dismissing discussion of the actual rules as pointless, far from it. I'm just bringing up the dimension of the whole issue which I find most interesting.

in any plausible revolution, someone may lose something which is not a chain; they might drop their keys. — fdrake

Ha, yes. Pesky revolutions. I lost my reading glasses during the Easter Uprising, quite spoit the day for me.

Giving well justified reasons why the source is acting in disaccord with the claim (partisanship, motivated reasoning, funding conflicts etc) strengthens the argument that seeks to defeat the appeal to authority. — fdrake

Does the opposite effect ever weaken the argument that seeks to validate the appeal to authority? An argument was posted on the coronavirus thread that the WHO (usually regarded as a valid authority, surely), were not justifiably appealed to on the matter of facemasks because they had some cause to be dishonest - they wanted, so the theory goes, to underplay the effectiveness of facemasks in order to preserve stocks for healthcare professionals. In this case the common knowledge that "of course masks have some effectiveness" was used against what it usually a valid authority and supported by the claim that the authority had some ulterior motive.

We know this does happen, Public Health England were, not to long ago, taken to task because their report claimed that any amount of alcohol was bad for your health despite there being no evidence at all to support this (most studies show a j-curve). They admitted their misstep but in their defence cited the fact that it fitted their purpose better, convincing people to drink less, if the message was clear and simple.

The problem is, once we open this particular route, who wouldn't fit in it? Medical researchers have pharmaceutical company ties, academic publishers have their citation rings, psychology has its replication crisis, what organisation doesn't have internal politics, economic pressures... And let's not forget, scientists are people too with in-group pressures, political biases and cultural prejudices.

I don't know what the answer is, just saying that if we allow factors regarding a source's motivation to strengthen a claim against their validity as an authority, we need to circumscribe the applicability of such factors to limit their use.

Doctor being paid by the tobacco industry claiming cigarettes are fine > not a valid authority; but Doctor who happens to be a Labour Party member claiming workplace stress is damaging > too tenuous a motive to undermine their authority?

Edit - I guess what I'm saying is, similar to the point I made to Baden, is this extra consideration at risk of muddying the water? Your "If they are an authoritative source on X, they must know Y" seems like a strong and sufficient measure of validity on its own. Does it need the additional consideration of motive, or could that be an argument tangential to the validity of their authority?

Assume the original money maker acquired the money justly. — Tech

I refer you back to @Pfhorrest

"What if we treat all income as earned income? Therefore everyone deserves everything they get, QED." — Pfhorrest

You're just begging the question. Why would we assume the money was acquired justly? Why would assume the transfer was just?

do you agree that the money is such a record before the transfer (inheritance)? — Tech

No, because it's rarely the result of a single transfer. It's will usually be the result of several hundred transfers since the original property was acquired by murder or violent supplanting of the previous owner.

Property owners did and do not create the scarcity of property. — Tech

Of course they do. If, as a property owner, I withhold unproductive land from someone who needs it to grow crops I am creating artificial scarcity, the true availability of land for productivity is not as it seems because property owners retain land for no purpose other than to increase its value. Why else do Russian Oligarchs own entire tower blocks in London which are completely empty?

Additionally, does your prior justify any and all government "enforced willingness" on firms? How do you decide which such "arrangements" are just? — Tech

That's the point. There already needs to be some judgement outside of market values to determine how just an economic structure is, so why invoke market forces in the first place?. People need houses and all property is currently owned, so the owners of that property can collectively charge whatever they can get away with (the amount the most generous among them is willing to accept) to the would-be homeowner. The amount the home-seeker will pay, therefore, has nothing to do with their 'willingness' (any more than being forced to do something at gunpoint has). It has to do with the minimum generosity of the group of people who own the resource they need (in this case property). If every single property owner were so inclined to demand £x for the property, then that's how much it would cost. It has absolutely zero to do with the home-seeker's willingness to pay, they have no option but to pay whatever is demanded or die of exposure.

Once you accept that cabals can set the price of some resource on the basis of collective power, then 'the government' becomes no less entitled to do so. If you want to place some moral control over the government's ability to set prices, then the same moral control should apply to those who own resources.

Thanks for the links. I'll have a read.

Or any other form of unearned income. — Pfhorrest

Indeed. Economic structures distribute resources. One of those structures is supply and demand (the basis of the OP). It's not even the most important one. As the old Fry and Laurie sketch goes - 'The Market' is like Santa Claus, most people eventually grow up and stop believing in it.

The inherited money is the donor's record. I think this amendment preserves the regime — Tech

No, because you say

Work done by group X is too highly demanded by other people — Tech

and

More government activities should be funded by group Y's trades — Tech

are useful rephrasings, but neither apply to inherited money. If the amount of money being declared 'too much' is inherited, then it is not translatable into "Work done by group X is too highly demanded by other people" The people being described as having 'too much' money are not the same people as those who did the work to acquire it.

If the money the government is taxing is inherited then it cannot be translated into "More government activities should be funded by group Y's trades" because the group being taxed (group Y) are not being taxed on the basis of their trades, but on the basis of trades by a completely different group (their predecessors).

To the contrary, I suggest it undermines the coherency of statements like "The government should increase the minimum wage". — Tech

How so? You say

The government should require more willigness from firms for employee labor. — Tech

but if willingness includes involuntary willing, then the government enforcing that willing on behalf of the employees is no longer surprising. Why would property owners be allowed to enforce 'willing' (by removing all other options but to pay for their services), but governments not allowed to similarly enforce 'willing' by giving employers no option but to pay a certain price for labour?

A man's money is a record of other men's willigness to trade for his past work output. — Tech

What about inheritance?

Plus

If an agent is 'required' to be 'willing', is it correct to describe the agent as 'willing'? — Tech

No - so that rather undermines the whole project doesn't it?

And you...

...when you are the reader? — creativesoul

Yeah, same applies, obviously.

I tend to assume that you haven't (in the context of my talking about how victory and defeat are not resolutions,) accidentally immediately brought in those terms that personalise the positions. — unenlightened

But throughout our recent disagreement about the meaning of 'charitable interpretation' you have consistently referered to the alternatives under consideration as 'yours' and 'mine', what 'I' and 'you' think. This seems an entirely normal and unimportant way of identifying two positions, completely devoid of significance. I'm still not understanding the thought process and that bothers me because some (obviously quite strong) false supposition has been made about my position and its a position which, as was discussed earlier, forms a core part of my world view. I can correct the supposition easily, as you say, I could have said "yeah that's petty much what I meant", but correcting the false supposition is only half the solution. What I really need to correct is the background which led to such a (seemingly) skewed interpretation of what was at best extremely ambiguous pointers as to what I might be thinking.

would never assume within the limits of ambiguity, that you said whatever is most agreeable to me, but rather I make the interpretation that maximises your clarity and consistency. — unenlightened

OK, so in what way did you think my choice of identifiers ('yours' and 'mine') meant that the clearest and most consistent interpretation of my view is that I don't care to listen to other people's opinions, or that discussions must result in victory or defeat. What else had I said to that effect that led you to the conclusion that this was the most 'consistent' interpretation?

Thus wiki:

In philosophy and rhetoric, the principle of charity or charitable interpretation requires interpreting a speaker's statements in the most rational way possible and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation. — unenlightened

The wiki here uses the terms 'most rational', 'best' and 'strongest'. I don't see how that supports your emphasis on 'clarity and consistency', perhaps you could explain the link.

And when you replied in terms that I was at pains to rule out, it would not be charitable to assume you understood and agreed. — unenlightened

I think you and I have very different ideas of what 'charitable' means. To me it refers to seeking the most agreeable interpretation of someone's expressions. As such, the most charitable interpretation would be that I did agree with you unless my choice of words indicated overwhelmingly to the contrary. Simply labelling the two ideas under discussion 'mine' and 'yours', is not, by any stretch, overwhelming evidence that I disagree with your notion that "this agreement cannot be a victory for one or a defeat for another, because they are not in agreement." I can't even see how it could be interpreted that way, but am open to the possibility. What is absolutely beyond the pale is the idea that my choice of identifier provides overwhelming evidence that I disagree with your notion about victory and defeat in conflict resolution.

I'm saying it is mistaken because not everyone uses them like that. — creativesoul

I gathered that from your first post, what I was asking was what these other ways of using conditionals are, I can't really think of any.

Had you said what was suggested, I too would have been a bit more convinced that who proposed the method did not matter, and that you were - in fact - interested in considering another method. — creativesoul

Indeed, but charitable interpretation does not require that one use the language most likely to convince the listener of their positive intent. It is a duty on the reader to assume positive intent unless convinced otherwise, not a duty on the writer to do all in their power to prove positive intent.

it could also be the case that the reader/listener was looking for some confirmation that you were willing to do those things, but were uncertain based upon what you did say — creativesoul

Possible (although a strange way of going about it - what's wrong with "did you mean...? "), but my point is rather that there is no prior cause to even question this, why would anyone not simply presume such willingness of their interlocutors until overwhelmed by evidence to the contrary?

I can assure you that that's not an accurate report of Un's thought and belief on the matter. — creativesoul

Good.

But he used the contingent "I wish you would have..." along with the conditional "Because then you want to hear my method, and you want me to hear yours, and you want to hear what I think about your method and what I think about what you think about my method.". If I've missed some rhetorical use of the contingent/conditional paring that doesn't imply that in the absence of the condition, that upon which it is conditional does not occur, then I will be glad to be shown ways in which this new device is employed and what it means.

Additionally, if he's not implying that I've no desire to hear another's method, or hear what they think about mine, then I'm not sure what the conditional is trying to say. If that's the state of affairs as things stand, then what does the 'If...Because then...' do?

If I say "I wish you had said X because if you had then it would have meant Y", I can only think of either one of two cases. Either Y is currently not the case and only would become the case contingent on my saying X, or Y is contingent on X but not exclusively so, Y may be the case anyway - in which case the statement seems to have no purpose, as Y may or may not be the case regardless of my saying X.

"I think it's unlikely that this coronavirus — because it's so readily transmissible — will disappear completely," said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious-disease specialist at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee

"The lesson here is that, over time, diseases very rarely disappear" - World Health Organisation 'Managing Epidemics'

"I think the most likely prospect is that we don't entirely eradicate it." - Joshua Epstein, a professor of epidemiology at New York University

"It will probably never end, in the sense that this virus is clearly here to stay unless we eradicate it. And the only way to eradicate such a virus would be with a very effective vaccine that is delivered to every human being. We have done that with smallpox, but that's the only example - and that has taken many years." - Guido Vanham, the former head of virology at the Institute for Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium

“In the absence of robust herd immunity at the population level, we have some risk of a second wave of the epidemic,” - Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at Harvard University

"We do have a big problem in what the exit strategy is and how we get out of this," - Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh.

"The reality is that it will be with us forever because it has spread now.” - Dr Simon Clarke, professor of cellular microbiology at the University of Reading

"We're going to be living with it, and we're not having that discussion at all." - Dr. Michael Osterholm

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This is all I'm gathering so far. What evidence are you using for your view that "eradication of COVID-19 is a very real possibility for some countries", am I reading a really biased set of reporting, because I'm not getting anything like that from my sources, I'd be grateful for any links.

I wish you would have put it is that you don't care whose method, all you care about is to find the best method. Because then you want to hear my method, and you want me to hear yours, and you want to hear what I think about your method and what I think about what you think about my method. That's a discussion. — unenlightened

What happened to charitable interpretation? There are (at least) two methods in a conflict about how to help the homeless (my example). Your method and my method. If it is a conflict between me and you, then one of those methods can be identified with the label 'yours' and the other with the label 'mine'. It's just a linguistic device used in a single sentence. I could have called them method 'A' and method 'B', but I didn't, I chose the more conventional 'yours' and 'mine'. The post before you said you didn't understand my position, next post apparently you understand it so well that on the basis of a single sentence you find yourself so convinced you understand it that you're faced with no more charitable alternative than to conclude I'm an egotist so obsessed with my own thoughts that I don't even want to hear those of my interlocutors.

I let it go the first time you went on about honest enquiry and then simply declared everything I'd said to be untrue without even so much a sentence to explain why. Now you've spent another few posts writing about "concepts like trust and respect." and then accuse me of not even wanting to hear my interlocutor's arguments on the basis of a single ambiguous choice of expression. Where's the ""[asking] me for expansion, justification an so on" - again. Where's the "did you mean...?", or even the more charitable "I'm sure you didn't mean..."

These are not rhetorical questions, I seriously want to know what was going on in your head when you read that one sentence "I want either for you to adopt my methods or for me to find out from you that my methods were flawed and so arrive at better ones" and despite all our talk about respect, trust and charitable interpretation, you decide you're left with no choice but to presume it means I've no interest in hearing anyone else's opinion?

The end point to be ensvisaged, would be for us to reach the state of agreement that might be called 'being of one mind', about whatever our topic is. — unenlightened

I'm not sure if you perhaps had this distinction in mind anyway, but this ideal surely only applies to quite a narrow (albeit important) range of differences. I couldn't care less if, after a discussion (disagreement) about the place of music in human culture, we remained entirely at odds. My goal in having such a discussion would be to try and understand why you think what you do. My method might be to poke at your beliefs with a stick to see what happens. I might even find myself disbelieving your own answers, if I've good cause, but reaching agreement wouldn't be a goal.

If we're discussing how best to help the homeless, however, I really want us to agree. I want either for you to adopt my methods or for me to find out from you that my methods were flawed and so arrive at better ones.

The purpose of entering into the conflict makes a huge difference to what constitutes a satisfactory outcome. Which I think is where much of the disingenuity we experience lies. Topics which really shouldn't have any need for unanimous agreement at any point, that should be quite satisfying without ever reaching that place, end up being approached as if they were the kind where agreement mattered.

I speculate this happens, in part, as @fdrake says. A discussion about something which should be innocuous stumbles upon something fundamental to one's character and all of a sudden entertaining an alternative perspective becomes hard work, dangerous even.

Of course it also happens for far more mundane reasons. Mostly to do with dishonesty about the purpose of the discussion. One party hiding the fact that they really wanted to play the role of teacher, or that they're deliberately trying to lead to some more important disagreement (usually about God).

Absent of either of these cases discussions about unimportant matters should be like cricket, we can just walk away at the end and say "good game".

That certainly overlaps with what I'm saying. There are two aspects to conflict resolution which interest me, one is the actual methods which can be used to resolve conflict (or get to a satisfactory understanding that the conflict cannot be resolved), the other is the psychology of being in conflict and of undertaking some attempt to explore it (I don't say 'resolve it' here because I think many of the activities people undertake within conflict have nothing to do with resolving them).

The two aspects link together for me when considering the abuse of the methods determined in the first aspect to satisfy tangential or occult objectives arising from the second aspect. We cannot derive useful methods of conflict resolution without acknowledging the extent to which our choices can be thus abused.

I like

when I correct someone who's doing mathematics really badly but being obstinate about their correctness; it strikes me as wrong cognitively, but also it's somehow a violation of my identity. — fdrake

I think that really captures one of the most important issues within the second aspect I mentioned above. At some point during a disagreement (even a trivial hobbyist discussion) you might stumble across a contrary position to a belief which forms a central node of your Quinean Web of Beliefs. We feel compelled to quash it.

As you know I tend to see things through a computational lens, so that's how this is going to be phrased. I think we're bound, to a certain extent, to take cognitively efficient paths to modelling and re-modelling. When faced with the potential for a fundamental aspect of our thinking to require adjustment, it's simply more efficient to attempt to quash it (and only change if we absolutely fail to do so) than it is to explore it. The number of threads which would need to be hypothetically cut to really 'see' where the other person is coming from is simply too much work, we often just don't have the bandwidth.

I think people underestimate the consequences of the fact that all our concepts, beliefs etc are actually processes. It's not that we hold a concept that 'A leads to B' somewhere in our mind and so on perceiving A we apply the concept to some other cortex and make B. The having of the concept 'A leads to B' just is the fact that perceiving A makes B. This is very efficient, but makes it quite hard to really see how others might see some issue if the matter is quite fundamental.

Good post. Only one small concern...

scientists or medical professionals who are known to make pseudoscientific claims cannot be considered to be reputable and it is legitimate to dismiss their claims on this basis. — Baden

Isn't this a bit circular? How do we establish that the claims are psuedoscientific without appealing to the same authority we're trying to argue for? Say we're trying to appeal to a psychologist whose work is rejected as pseudoscience by the APA. We'd first need to demonstrate that the APA are not themselves espousers of pseudoscience (so that they're a valid authority). In order to justify that claim, we'd have to appeal to the fact that it is not judged to be so by the APA.

I think you're on safer ground sticking to the original citation, that the appeal is justified on the grounds that both parties agree on the status of the authority concerned. Even if two Jordan Peterson fans are arguing some point (perhaps on the value of Benzodiazepine!) each could appeal to what their authority pronounced and that would be a valid appeal for their argument regardless of what garbage they might referring to.

As you correctly pointed out, determining that an appeal to authority is invalid is not the same as refuting the associated claim. I think that has to apply to pseudoscience too. Demonstrating it to be nonsense is not the same as invalidating an appeal to authority.

If two people involved in the discussion disagree on what the matter they're discussing is, or what's especially significant about it (cognitively/factually or emotionally), in my experience I and my hypothetical interlocutors find that place of mutual understanding, even if the disagreement persists, much harder to reach. — fdrake

Yes, I think this is the case too, but (stop me if I'm getting too psychoanalytical) there's an advantage there - in terms of game theory - to a person wishing to avoid cognitive dissonance but with low confidence in their belief. If they clearly present the nature of the disagreement and the terms of the argument (the mode it will take) then if they eventually have to admit they were wrong, they know the other person will know that earlier than they themselves would feel comfortable changing their belief. Muddy the waters regarding terms of the discussion and you buy yourself time to change a belief if necessary without it being clear to all that you're wrong.

I think a paradigmatic instance of it that we see on the internet a lot is those one line fisking posts that just say the name of a fallacy. It's little more than gainsaying with Latin spices. — fdrake

Yeah, I hate that, like we're playing 'name that fallacy'. The other is 'you obviously haven't read...' as if merely reading a text imparts automatic agreement.

what strategies can be used to ensure that people cultivate being responsive to their interlocutors? — fdrake

This is key, and it's worth emphasising that it's far from natural so it will take work. We've created a game here 'having a discussion' which is made up out of a set of tools 'using language' which were - according to popular theory - not even created for the job.

I think your initial posts covered a lot of good ground that is measurable and can act in a self-regulatory way, for those who actually care in the first place. But I think principles like charitable interpretation, honest representation and a collective agreement about the goal are also really important, it's just that they're too open to abuse (anyone can claim 'foul' on such broad concepts for nefarious advantage, like tripping in the box to get a free kick), and I'm including inadvertent abuse to avoid the pain of cognitive dissonance here, so I'm talking about self-regulation, not regulation of others. So I think any solution will involve pinning down ways of more clearly defining these nebulous concepts.

To that end, I quite like this;

to find out what the other chap is saying, rather than to prove him wrong or contradictory regardless. — unenlightened

This we can recognise. How much of one's interaction is composed of questions? How many times the word 'wrong' has been used? How frequent a reference to what is 'true'? These could act as useful triggers, I think.

there are a lot of biases associated with judging other people's intentions and character. Plus if it's an issue you feel strongly about, you'll be inclined to attribute negative character to whoever holds an opposing view. — Echarmion

True, but little different from any other type of analysis, that was my point. Looking to underlying psychological precursors to holding a particular belief (or expressing a particular belief - not necessarily the same thing) does indeed suffer from the risks you suggest, but so does a psychology-free analysis. Selection of evidence with which to counter someone's stated belief is riddled with bias, selecting the wording used to describe that evidence is inclined to be negative or positive depending on your beliefs.

Bias and negative rhetoric are simply flaws which can creep equally into any type of analysis, even cold hard science. I can see some types of analysis being more inviting than others, but to be honest psychological analysis isn't even highest on that list. If one accuses others of, say, virtue-signalling, as here one can at least point to relatively well thought out and controlled experiments in social psychology to hint at the possibility. Where's the equivalent in, say, discussions about the logic of the Kalam cosmological argument? I think you'd be on much safer ground (in terms of removing bias) discussing the possible psychological motivations behind the beliefs of each party in such a discussion than you would just analysing the propositions for logical flaws. At least you'd have some empirical support for positions in the former case.

(11) Do not hang back and simply ask questions; if you position yourself always as the critic and the cynic, you can bolster your own beliefs simply by rejecting all others - and it is much easier to show a flaw or falsify than to get a good picture of something or confirm. — fdrake

I've made over 2,000 comments and not started a single thread. I think number 11 is my Achilles heel.

There's a certain amount of vulnerability involved in discussions that actually change how people think. — fdrake

Yeah, the problem, I think, is no matter what the mode of the discussion, the underlying subject matter is still some conflicting belief about the world and such beliefs are updated reluctantly (to say the least) so there's some lag between the mode of communication (discursive, emotional, logical, persuasive...) and the effect those methods should have. In that time you kind of know you're wrong, but are still looking around for ways to avoid that pain. That's essentially what I mean by suggesting we avoid many of the more vague 'rules of engagement'. They're simply too tempting at that fragile stage. Also your interlocutor knows you should know you're wrong ("that should have worked!") and are sometimes frustrated at the delay. I certainly learnt that one with my children, don't push for the admission of wrongness... just wait.

I think there's quite a lot of value in hearing "you're not playing by my rules", or such frustrations, as an invitation; in the same way we'd (I'd?) treat a partner's anger. — fdrake

I think I understand what you're saying here, that, like a partner's anger, we can interpret the expression as "I'm not having that kind of discussion" like realising that when your partner is having a discussion about your not having done the dishes, it is not appropriate to ask for supporting evidence (learnt that one the hard way).

The fact that thou and I have acknowledged the tendency is part of our resistance to it. — unenlightened

Possibly, but if we were resisting it would others not notice this? Yet others accuse us of being the ones who are not abiding by the rules. So the other possibility arises that we are instead using our acknowledgement of this tendency to cut short disagreement simply to preserve our own beliefs. That's what I'm suggesting is a more universally applicable explanation for the phenomena.

Flagging up the danger is not sufficient, but it is a sign of awareness of the problem, and the first step. — unenlightened

See above. It depends heavily whether flagging up the danger is used as a tool to preserve one's own world view, or as tool for self-improvement. As you say, there are no guarantees. I think we only perhaps disagree as to scale not in any absolute sense. I see 'the rules' being far more often used as ready means of dismissing uncomfortable arguments than as the intellectual hygiene @fdrake rightly advises.

I should clarify, I'm talking about conflicting beliefs here, not necessarily the verbal progress of arguments. Prefacing every proposition with "I might be wrong but..." is just a obsequious nod if one never turns out to be.

The whole thrust of my argument is that conflicts cannot always be resolved, and it at least takes a willingness to engage and attempt to be fair-minded in the knowledge that it does not come naturally. — unenlightened

I agree with the first half, but my argument is essentially that the second half underdetermines. No-one thinks they've not not been willing to engage, no one thinks they're not fair-minded, and no one thinks this doesn't result from hard work on their part. But if we are to dismiss people from our discursive environment on the grounds of rule-breaking behaviour, some of them must be wrong about that. Is their wrongness something we can stand on (like the fact that the earth is round), or their wrongness just another disagreement we have, in which case identifying it hasn't helped us resolve the conflict at all.

if you disagree with my proposals, to bring forth your better ones. — unenlightened

Fair enough. I think appeals to vague concepts such as 'fair-mindedness' and 'honest engagement' cause more problems than they solve by distracting from the actual point of dispute to dispute about those terms. They should be avoided. I do think, however, that some of the rules can be very useful - have you supplied support for empirical claims, have you taken care to review alternative hypotheses, have you at least attempted to supply an argument for your position, have you asked for clarification before dismissing other's arguments.

These are all demonstrable in written or otherwise recorded discussions.

By and large though, I think most disputes are settled by demonstration, not by debate. Debate is largely a pass time, not a resolution method.