"The notion of optical illusions is incoherent if we don't know what's really there contra the illusion." — Terrapin Station

We don't need to know anything about what's 'really' there, we seem, just as a species, to be fundamentally interested in variance minimising. There appears to be a white square when the black circles are (what appears to be) behind it. As soon as the black (what now appears to be) pacmen are removed, there no longer appears to be a white square. We want to reduce this variance, we prefer a model which has either a white square or not. Not a model which has a white square one minute but none the next. So we choose one to be 'accepted' and label the other 'illusion'. Rather than doing so randomly, we do so by minimising variance with a whole host of other models too. The white square being the 'illusion' does this best. At no point in the whole process do we need access to reality nor even to care which is which.

I'm not 100% sure I get what you're saying here, so I may go off on entirely the wrong tangent, but...

What I was trying to say to Sushi in the comment you quoted was that any phenomenal investigation based on introspection (of the sort being described with the box) cannot even begin without the structures already in place we're supposed to be investigating. We've already decided what a 'box' is prior to our investigation of its essential properties, otherwise we wouldn't know what the parameters are to our imagination.

Can I imagine a box with no sides? Well I can certainly imagine something with no sides, so is that a box? It becomes linguistic, not phenomenological.

I can definitely see how phenomenological investigations can be useful with experience, but objects seem more of a community resource which therefore comes down to a linguistic investigation.

I'm simply explaining. — Terrapin Station

Ha. You're simply 'explaining' what is the case, as opposed to what I think is the case. As I said...

I'm struggling to see any more depth to your argument than "things are not the way you think they are, they're the way I think they are". — Isaac

Obviously there isn't a square. — Terrapin Station

But you see a square. People can be genuinely fooled by optical illusions, they really see a square, it has right angles, straight sides, the lot. So where are those properties? What are they properties of?

What happened to addressing what I said about optical illusions and fallibility? This is the second time I'm asking you. — Terrapin Station

You said artists see things as they really are. I answered that they don't. What more do you want me to address?

That mathematical view of time is just an abstraction. — Terrapin Station

Yet...

T1 is the changes or motion that are/is happening from some frame of reference (as opposed to the changes or motion that happened or the changes or motion that's yet to happen). So it's not an "infinitesimally small point" from most reference frames. — Terrapin Station

...and this isn't an abstraction?

I'm struggling to see any more depth to your argument than "things are not the way you think they are, they're the way I think they are".

Yes, you did--that's a well-known optical illusion and you're asking about it. — Terrapin Station

No, I specifically asked you about the square you see, not the optical illusion as a whole. I want to know what the objective properties of that square are and in what they obtain.

Visual artists are not immune from optical illusions. As I've said you are experiencing one right now. There are two small blind spots in front of your eyes through which no light rays pass. I know this because if I put an object there in people who have damaged eye muscles (restricting movements of the pupil) they cannot see it. The image you see there is made up by your brain to fill in the gap. Your peripheral vision has no colour, do artists see all peripheral images in black and white? No, they make the colour up like the rest of us. Does the number 5 emit red light? No, so why do synathetes see it as red, do 'artist' synathetes see it black like it 'really' is?

Saying what is like at T1 (and L1 (location 1)) is knowing something about (and saying something about) @. — Terrapin Station

T1 is an infinitesimally small point, so I don't see how it can coherently have any data attached to it. Even so, properties of some object at some past time were not what you were referring to with regards to 'objective properties'. "Here is a coin", you said, not "there was a coin".

You'd have to support that claim. — Terrapin Station

So I have to support claims where you get to say "it's what the world is like" without further evidence. The justification that we do not directly observe light waves are the numerous optical illusions where what we are convinced we observe are actually retinal negatives, polarisation, inferred colour in the peripheral region (which can't even detect EM wavelengths) and downright hallucinations.

The notion of optical illusions is incoherent if we don't know what's really there contra the illusion. — Terrapin Station

I didn't ask about the notion of optical illusions though did I? I asked what the properties of the square you see there really are.

A few things perhaps unrelated to each other...

1. Obviously we'd be talking about a situation where we're comparing two participants both in A's place, just at different times, experimentsttry to eliminate variables so, place is a really obvious one to start with.

So to follow through you'd have to say that @ at t1, when A is there, was different (had different properties?) from @ at t2, when B is there.

But if this is the case then we cannot say anything at all about @ because all we know about it is what it was like at t1.

2. The jump from the situation of two observers to say "we can just talk about A and B as locations, without people. The same thing would be the case." is unjustified. The table seeming to be some way is an activity of the observer. The best we could speculate is that it would seem that way if someone were to stand there. We still haven't escaped the fact that we do not access light waves (which themselves are just a model of what we observe on other devices, but let's not go there). We are only aware of visual representations after they've been presented from the occipital cortex, they've already been subject to modulation from backward acting neural connections, and filtered through architecture built by prior experience. The light waves bouncing off the table are a barely related trigger.

What are the properties of a Kaniza square? Are its corners 90 degrees, are its sides straight? How so if when you take the marking circles away there's no square there at all?

How would we be able to know this without knowing what the world is like sans modeling for comparison? — Terrapin Station

We determine anything by reference to deeper models, things like consistency and non-contradiction. We know (by reference to these) that observations is model mediated because we can manipulate those models and observe changes. We could, I suppose, theorise that reality actually does change somehow resulting from our manipulation of these experimental conditions, but it seems more parsimonious to assume the variations are internal.

If two people give differing, contradictory accounts of some state of affairs, it seems reasonable to assume neither necessarily has clear access to the state of affairs both are trying to describe. We don't need ourselves to have access to that states of affairs to evidence this, it is sufficient that we assume both cannot be the case and so if one can be wrong (which one must) then so can the other.

You're not just observing models are you? — Terrapin Station

No, I presume I'm observing reality, but observing is a model-mediated process. I don't 'observe' without modelling. I see what I expect to see to a certain extent. That's what the whole load of neuroscience I've been talking about seems to show.

Everything I think is some model or other of the reality I'm thinking about, so there is no question that I can answer outside of some model or other. You asked about 'objective' properties, ones that pertain outside of any of my models. Notwithstanding the fact (one that I did try to communicate at the time) that I don't think it's possible to answer such a question from outside of a model, the closest I can possibly get to an answer would be from a model of how models obtain. That's why I chose that one.

Consider if you asked me in the middle of a chess game "can I take this bishop home?", Id' be crazy to answer from the perspective of the game, "no, bishops can only move diagonally and then only within the confines of the board, so there's no way you can move the piece all the way to your house". I'd presume we were talking about pieces outside of the model of 'how chess works' and in a meta model of spatio-temporal positions which the chess board is just a piece in. The rules of chess don't matter in this model, the 'reality' of the edges of the chess board as a constraint on the movement of the pieces no longer applies.

It's like that with questions about objects and properties. In one model I define objects from reality, I define properties from all the processes around them and I determine that those properties belong to that object. Another model then treats these objects as real fixed entities, like the boundaries of the chess board, and my behaviour assumes them to be.

You asked me a question about the first model , the one which defines and assigns properties.

If you were answering from the perspective of models earlier, and you have a model where there are other people as objects, etc., then why did you answer only from the model where there aren't other people as objects? — Terrapin Station

You'd have to reference the exact question for me to give you a comprehensive answer, but as to the topic in general, it's obviously one about the nature of our models, so I don't think it would have explained my position accurately at all to simply answer from within the model which I think is the very one in question.

You can't presume there's another human being if there's no object that's another person.

There can be no object that's Eric Corchesne, no objects that are six-month old babies, etc. on your view. — Terrapin Station

As I just tried to explain. One model for one type of behaviour - philosophising - no objects. Another model for another type of behaviour - relating to people, talking about who they are and what they said - objects.

Is there something about this multiple model idea you're not understanding? (and, yes, the very idea of models and multiplicity is itself a model, we can't escape this and look at it from outside)

You don't even think there is an object that's another person. So what are you asking about? — Terrapin Station

I'm asking about the placeholders in my model, the same model I presume you have since were both human beings and I think such basics as object permanence are fairly hard-wired (though work by Eric Corchesne with six-month old babies may call into question whether that's pre- or post-natal). there's a difference between beliefs in different contexts. As I've said before, a belief, for me, is just a predisposition to act as if some state of affairs were the case in one's model of the external world (external to oneself). But we use different models for different circumstances. This is what the whole work with mental inference has tried to demonstrate. so when you say to me, in a philosophy forum "are there real object in the external world?" I have to select which model of the external world to use. Here it's a very loose theoretical one and in it I can't honestly see how objects could be defined objectively, so the answer is no. When speaking to, or dealing with people in my social life, I act as if they were independent real objects, because in that context I'm using a different model. The first model would be next to useless in that context, and I learnt as much in the first few months of life.

Sorry, typo. I’m NOT denying ... — I like sushi

Ahh, that makes more sense.

removing the ‘shape’ of a table being impossible if we wish the table to be concrete object of experience, yet we can remove a leg and the table remains a table. — I like sushi

But look at Ramachandran's self-awareness experiments. Does the table have sensory receptors which link to our brains? Typically no. Two minutes of priming perception prior distributions and suddenly it does. There's no essence of table, there's what we currently perceive which is mediated by what we expect to perceive which is mediated by experience of what we have perceived, plus the architecture of the computational system it's put through. Then there's a whole host of other sensory inputs and memory inputs related to the table, none of which necessarily agree with each other. What we actually experience is then the current best guess as to the cause of those inputs. It changes from second to second sometimes, illusions can be created where the interpretation switches rapidly between one option and another.

I think a phenomenal approach can be really helpful. As I said, it's one necessary half of any psychological or neuroscientific analysis, but we have to be aware of the limits it's answers give us. We cannot reduce down the current experience into it's component parts without accepting that the act of such reduction is itself mediated by the very biases and preconceptions we're trying to investigate.

So your wife and kid are just creations of your mind in your view.

Did you tell your wife and kid mind-creations this? — Terrapin Station

Well not just creations, I never said anything like that. I'm personally quite convinced there's some external reality, but if we're just talking about the division of that reality into this object and that object then - yes, and yes. I'm sure you're aware the we completely alter our actual cellular make up, so I presume you're not associating other people with their material matter. You know we can be primed to think even the table is a part of ourselves, so presumably you're not working on some consistent self-image. People with Capgras syndrome regularly do re-invent who their wife and kids are. So where's this going? What are you trying to say that my wife and kids (there are two, let's not be excluding anyone) are that is there in the external reality?

I’m denying that you can speculate about some extradimensional box, but you cannot ‘see’ it. — I like sushi

Exactly, so where's my role in this phenomenal investigation? You say "let's just investigate what it is we actually experience, let's use that as our measure...", I say "I experience a feeling of being able to imagine such a box", and your immediate response is "no you can't!".

Can you imagine a box with no sides? As in create an image in your head of a physical box. — I like sushi

I'm questioning both the accuracy (in terms of language use) and the usefulness (for our investigation) of that connection. I don't think "can you imagine" is limited to "can you form a mental image of", and even if we did impose such artificial limits, how is our thus shackled investigation of any use to us now?

.... obvious way — I like sushi

I don’t need to point out... — I like sushi

... pretending... — I like sushi

... doesn’t occupy subjective consciousness. — I like sushi

This is all just another tired old variation on the same lame arguments we had against the "what it's like" objection. "it's obvious...", "you really do know...", "you're just pretending..."

Consciousness it seems is supposed to be completely unassailable by third parties...except apparently, when someone claims to have an experience of it which doesn't fit with preconceptions, then it's apparently open access as to what's 'obvious', and what's 'pretend'.

What are you talking about? — I like sushi

Whether I can imagine a box with no sides or volume depends on what I decide a 'box' is. Since I'm encountering new concepts all the time, I'm quite used to changing (or broadening) my categorical definitions. So I can imagine an object with no sides and no volume (I can't picture it, obviously, but I can imagine it being a container in some hitherto undiscovered dimension whose ability to contain other objects is not mediated by 'sides'). Whether I call that thing a 'box' or not really depends on whether other people would know what I was talking about if I did.

So the answer to your question, I suppose, is yes, I can. Not sure where that gets us as I suspect the answer to every such question will be yes.

Imagine a box with no sides or volume — I like sushi

Depends on the definition of box.

So, talk me through it, if you will. We're asking...

What ‘aspects’ or ‘parts’ of a box can be said to be the ‘essence’ of boxes? How many sides does a box need? Do we have to necessarily observe every side or edge of a box to appreciate it as a box — I like sushi

First question, what would constitute a measure of correctness for any answer?

We can then start to ask questions about items of experience. What ‘aspects’ or ‘parts’ of a box can be said to be the ‘essence’ of boxes? How many sides does a box need? Do we have to necessarily observe every side or edge of a box to appreciate it as a box (can we observe a box from every angle - the eidetic givenness of a box regardless of our limited perspective). — I like sushi

This is the essence of the problem we started with. You're making one huge assumption here - that our 'experience' delivers us a single, time-consistent, and system-consistent answer to any of those types of question. The evidence from the neuroscience I've been outlining seems to be that it does not. Don't forget one side of all neuroscience is phenomena. We can't compare anything at all with brain states unless we have one side of the equation being the answer to "what have you just experienced?".

I'll attent to it more. — creativesoul

The second paper may be more in line with what you're looking for than the first, but when attending, I should make it clear that I'm not really "invoking them as a means to support that the chimps in question work from some model of fairness/justice "

Firstly, I presented them as an opposition to the idea that the grape/cucumber experiment could be explained simply by the chimp wanting a grape. The idea was to show that many many years of research effort has gone into eliminating such obvious interpretations, so the main thing was simply to show the depth of the research, it has unquestionably gone beyond mere preference.

Secondly, I'm not necessarily arguing that non- human primates have an abstract concept of fairness/justice like ours. For a start I think it more likely we'll find our concept isn't quite so abstract and top-down acting as we think, not that chimpanzees have topgdown acting abstract concepts, more that we don't. Also I wouldn't expect chimpanzee justice to be the same as humans, we're different species with different niches. What I'm arguing is that there's no evidence (occam's razor) to justify a belief that they are in some materially different category of process, not that there's no evidence they're different at all.

You're invoking them as a means to support that the chimps in question work from some model of fairness/justice is just plain not supported by what you've offered as support. — creativesoul

Really? You're going to quote the part of the report which outlines the reason why the experiments are being studied as if it were the conclusion?

What counts as non linguistic thought and belief? — creativesoul

For me, a belief is a predisposition to act as if some state of affairs were the case in one's model of the external world (external to oneself). In neurobiological terms, that belief is the architecture of the neural network which responds to the sensory inputs relevant to that belief.

You say that similar thoughts engage different brain cortices, and, to some extent this is true, but that's only relevant if you presume the classification of these thoughts as similar (presumably on the basis of your recognising them to be so) has primacy. But that recognition is happening in the very organ we're trying to investigate, so we cannot presume it's representations as fact if we're to carry out an impartial enquiry.

Notwithstanding the above, two things. The brain is both specialised and integrated. Specialised areas are involved in certain activities. We know this because damage in those areas hampers those activities. Yet the integration of the brain results in feedback from those areas to other potentially related sites. Which sites are involved here depends, in part, on your personal history because vast quantities of these connections are made (and un-made) post-natally.

Secondly, the brain works, to some extent, probabilistically. Timings are asymmetric and very rapid (electromagnetic signalling) this essentially makes much of the brain a stochastic system but one which can, nonetheless be understood with statistical methods.

I'd like to see the abstract and/or the synopsis along with some video footage of the behaviour under consideration. That would be very interesting. — creativesoul

Here. And just for Janus who seems to be of the impression that scientists just produce experiments, randomly guess some possible answer and then just walk away - here is a meta study with some refutations of the original, some alternative approaches and a summary.

What would you even be talking about when you say things like this given that you don't think the world has any properties? Are you just talking about things your own mind creates? — Terrapin Station

Yep.

This seems to be all in the interpretation: alternatively, it could be down to a feeling of envy or a preference for grape over cucumber. — Janus

Never ceases to amaze me the lack of respect for scientists we read about here. Not science itself, the people conducting the experiments. Yes, everyone is biased, flawed to some extent, but this is just plain disrespectful. Do you honestly think deWaal didn't think of that and try to control for it in his experiments? Do you think Brosnan Talbot and Ahlgren all missed that possibility when they repeated the experiments? Do you think Brauer and Tomosello just randomly changed the parameters of the game in their experiments? Was Josep Call just taking a wild stab in the dark when he set up the experiment to differentiate between unwilling and unable reward-givers? Jorg Massen's work with Macaques just another sloppy bit of guesswork?

I don't know if you've caught up on this yet, but scientists try to think of alternative explanations and control for them. a whole raft of other scientists try to remove confounding variables, alter contexts...these people are, despite the way they're negatively painted, quite interested in how other animals think. they don't tend to just set up an experiment off the back of fag packet that any casual lay reader can spot a massive flaw in and just say "fuck it, that'll do".

And another one...

The neuroscience is beyond my comprehension. — creativesoul

Yet...

I've been waiting for them(the experts, specialists, and groupies in/of the field) to admit that there is no one to one mapping between brain activity and particular thought. Many different thoughts correspond virtually the exact same brain state. Thought and belief(thinking about stuff) involve firing neurons, and different physiological biological structures and systems, but they most certainly do not consist entirely thereof. — creativesoul

...sure, you know, I don't think they've thought of that, perhaps you better pop up to the neurosciences lab at Sussex and give them a few pointers, sounds like they need a bit of help.

Final thought on this matter before I retire for the evening. In a striking coincidence, I remember reading about some experiments with monkeys (or possibly chimpanzees), where they were trying to get them to sum quantities of different types of object (so types of types). The first experiment failed, the second had partial success. Their suggestion of a cause...the first set believed too much in the significance of the colour - their Bayesian priors let them down!

The forward/backward propagation steps in Box 3 in the Frisk paper are probably worth me reading more closely too (with the neural implementation of gradient descent through message passing in mind). — fdrake

Yeah, I think it might be what you're looking for. Now I've got to try and get my head round what you and @StreetlightX are talking about wrt concepts.

I'm afraid I use the term rather loosely and it seems to have caused some not inconsiderable concern. For me, 'concept' rather pragmatically encodes what one can do with the data (neural connections/architecture) which the label is collecting. Its all about doing, so I struggle with concepts divorced from actions. I tend to come at this from an input-response model with, if necessary, post hoc analysis into verbally mediated concept talk. Even something abstract like maths, I consider the 'doing' of maths first and the verbal translation of that behaviour secondary.

In a sense I think I'm agreeing with what you seem to be saying, but I think I would tend to frame it as some behaviour still - the 'talking about' is actually the thing that encodes the concepts behind the words, the 'doing the sum' is the thing that encodes the concepts behind the maths.

...but I'm still not sure if that's quite what you both mean.

Explaining the unity of consciousness in terms of our body's self modelling processes as realising a single action-sensation-internal state from a space of possible ones is pretty neat. We must act in some specified way, and that specification coincides with a collapse (through sampling) into a unique state. — fdrake

Yeah, I think the idea goes way back to Geoffrey Hinton in the early 90s. It also explains the self/other divide (which we know to be spurious) because one has to distinguish those actions which arose from the models from those actions which are to be input into the priors, otherwise the model becomes too self referential to be truely adaptive. M3 is 'self'.

As to the issues with parameters...

It's very complicated and I'm somewhat out of my depth with both the maths, and the neurobiology, but I'll do my best to impart my understanding (most of this is from Friston's earlier work).

Neural architecture is built on three major properties - connection strength, connection heirachy (disputed), and connection locality (specialisation and integration between regions).

Memory (which, when it comes down to it, is what we're talking about with regards to priors) is primarily about connection strength in later life, but to do with heirachy and locality immediately post-natally. So parameters are mediated differently depending on when the priming sensory input (forward neural connections) arose. Your priors about cultural effects might be mediated by connection strength, but your priors about facial recognition be mediated by locality and connection architecture.

I think this is why people often struggle with neural correlates of concepts, they try to fit them to a single model of parameter encoding in the hardware (wetware) when there is actually a range of means by which parameters are encoded with quite radically different implications.

our brains seem to model and estimate at the same time. — fdrake

Yes, unlike computers with fixed architecture, our neural hardware is responsive to use, so you have forward acting connections driving processes, backward acting connections modulating responses, and connection building/pruning in response to both (pruning connections being as important as building them, of course).

I'm just suspicious that something of fundamental importance is being missed. — fdrake

Have a look at the function of backward acting modulating neural connections, you may find there the missing piece. They modulate the subsequent forward driving connections probabilistically by restriction of signal at an asymmetric pace with the forward connections. I don't want to drown you in reading material, but the idea is explained in this paper. It may answer some of your concerns.

Or perhaps they just wanted a grape... — creativesoul

Nah, Chimpanzees also favour fair (50:50 split) offers in Ultimatum Game experiments to unfair ones (80:20 split), even when the unfair split is in favour of the proposer.

I think it is more helpful to maintain distinctions between linguistically and culturally elaborated conceptualizing capacities, and the primordial somatically-based embodied cognition we share with animals. — Janus

I don't see how they can be distinguished. When a chimpanzee rejects a previously gratefully accepted cucumber as reward on the grounds that the other chimp has been given a grape, are they not using a model of justice, or fairness? We verbalise such a concept, chimps don't, but the model (in terms of expectations and behavioural response) is still in some social animals. I'm struggling to think of an example where we, as humans, might verbalise a concept which is completely absent in its entirety in other social animals.

it makes sense that the relation between our embodied minds and their environment would be an entropy minimising process in a non-incidental manner, as that's an efficient solution to acting in accord with environmental and bodily regularities - utilising both to act. — fdrake

Yes. The great thing about the free-energy approach is that it gives both a mechanism and an evolutionary story to the Bayesian modelling system which we already have a good idea the brain uses.

The specific model of form M3 which is formed at this stage is an approximate minimizer over all models of type M3 with respect to criterion C1. — fdrake

I can't find a non-paywalled version, but the paper which started all this is Ernst and Banks's 2002 paper on visuo-haptic relations. Basically, they presented a ridge-measuring task where visual stimuli were deliberately made uncertain and haptic stimuli more certain (we traditionally trust our vision more readily that we trust our touch). They modelled an estimation method using Bayes Theorem and a normal Gaussian distribution for widths of the ridge as the prior. They then tested people's actual estimates and found a really strong correlation indicating that people were somehow actually using Bayesian inference to estimate the width of the ridge in the face of visual uncertainty.

Similar experiments have been since to confirm this (Ernst and Banks didn't really set out to find this). A classic one with poor contrast moving dots where participants had to estimate the direction of movement despite not being able to see the dots clearly. Unbeknownst to them, there was a slight probability bias in favour of one particular direction. It took, I think, abut two minutes for their Bayesian model to pick up on the fact that the dots more often moved in one direction and adjust their priors for movement accordingly, even when there were really no dots at all, in fact. We do Bayesian modelling in our heads, it seems.

something interesting here is that precisely what counts as a "time step" is just... one part of the process feeding into another, the paper doesn't write it out like that, it does it in terms of dependency arrows. — fdrake

There was an experiment done on this, but I can't remember it well enough to even look it up. If I recall correctly, there are time steps involved but they're specific to the model being used (visual, auditory etc). I wish I could track down the paper, but I don't even know where to start.

The proposal I gave would have there being more than one functional form in the M3 class; and the functional forms would interact. Less parsimonious, messier. — fdrake

I'm inclined to agree. Most work on this has been done on perception and although the data correlates well, there is some discrepancies. My guess is that the discrepancy is caused by other models in other areas of the brain interfering at a sort of meta level.

Back to the topic...the sense is that our feeling of 'an experience' is exactly this meta-model trying to put some sharp edges to the whole fuzzy procedure. We can't actually work well with fuzzy data, we can't possibly 'look behind the curtain' to actually have an awareness of the variational inference procedure going on. Why not? - Well on an ecological level, we simply wouldn't behave as efficiently as a creature which had a clear answer, on an epistemic level, how would we experience that with some means of modelling it...

Really nice summary by the way.

Sure not everything is great, but you can make it better. — Mark Dennis

As I mentioned in my other response. The problem is when your actions toward 'making it better' are the very things the next generation finds constitute 'not everything is great'.

You may want to weigh in here also, in regards to potential solutions we never thought possible. — Mark Dennis

The trouble is, there's potential solutions and there's actual solutions. The problem of climate change has been caused almost in its entirety by what were called 'solutions' to other problems - how to feed the ever growing population, how to provide white goods to poorer people, how to make whatever bigger, faster, cheaper... These were all 'problems' at the time and the 'solutions' we came up with are the very things which caused the next problem. As a thought experiment (you'll need a bit of anthropology to do this right) try to make a list of technological advances which are not aimed at solving a problem brought about by previous technological advances. The list is quite thin.

Solar cells have their indium problem at the moment, when that's solved (probably with graphene), they'll be a graphene problem that we hadn't thought of. Wind power has it's limits too (what some people don't seem to realise is that the wind is actually doing something, it's not just wasted energy, it's driving the weather)... So it's not a matter of solving any problems, it's a question of rates. Can we solve one problem quicker than the inevitable next problem (caused by our previous solution) arises. I think what we're experiencing now with climate change, mass extinction, pollution buffers filling up etc is not just another problem to solve like we did with the others, its a symptom of our solution-induced problems catching up with us, our rate of finding new solutions is not keeping up with the rate at which problems are caused by them.

Now, goals are inherently subjective, varying from one subject to another, due to the fact that they exist relative to one's intention. Intention is the property of an individual. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm not talking about any specific goal, I'm talking about the having of goal, something which is common to every intentional creature. The argument is simply that if system X is one which helps me achieve my goals it is justified that I maintain it. In order to be satisfied with that justification, one only need to also have goals and consider whether one would also maintain a system useful in helping to achieve them. It's about empathy.

Notwithstanding that, what alternative could you possibly implement? What system-less method of justification could we use instead?

The utility itself will be judged as unrighteous, incorrect, and therefore unjustified. And an unjustified utility will not justify use of the system. In fact there will be the reverse effect. The more useful the system is for obtaining an unrighteous goal, the more unjustified the system is. — Metaphysician Undercover

You're conflation unrighteous (in a moral sense) with incorrect (a technical sense). Say a criminal mastermind sets up an elaborate trap to kill millions. He has used (to achieve his evil goal) the system of 3d spatio-temporal relativity. Is that system now wrong? Wat if he calculated how many guns he'd need using arithmetic, is arithmetic now wrong?

Must it? Must everything be justified? How does that work non-circularly? If 'The Goal' is what I feel what am I supposed to do on finding that it is not justified (by your method which you've yet to reveal)? Am I supposed to now not feel that way? — Isaac


Where's the circularity? If the goal is not justified, then the means for obtaining that goal (the system) is not justified. Isn't this straight forward and obvious to you? It seems pretty basic. — Metaphysician Undercover

Because you have to use a 'system' to judge the righteousness of the goal. Must you then justify that system?

So religious commandments have all of the criteria you list above, or lack them just as much? — Isaac


I haven't said anything about religious commandments, I'm addressing your deceptive claim that a system is justified by its utility. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, I know. I just thought I'd get it out there now. It's the subtext behind all of your philosophy. You don't seem capable of investigating any matter without forcing it down some path which ends with "...because God".

I can’t walk and walk. Isn’t that more incomprehensible than contradictory? I didn’t think comprehension to be the proper measure of contradiction. — Mww

Two different 'that' s. I thought that might be clear from the context. All I mean is that some seemingly abstract concepts like the law of non-contradiction need not be represented in the neural architecture as a single concept at, but merely present in each model. So the spatiotemporal model would deny the possibility of being both 'there' and not 'there', the somatomal models denies both sensation and no sensation, etc...

I feel there is a difference here between unrealistic optimism and optimism coupled with realism. — Mark Dennis

Did you read the linked papers? The positive scenarios were perfectly realistic. It just seems that people who are optimistic seem to be less strongly driven to act. The more you imagine the rosy future, the more real it becomes. The more real it becomes the less of a concern it is to skip doing stuff to bring it about.

This is especially true with futurism where, for most, the stuff which needs doing is in someone else's hands.

I wasn’t describing this as things as a list of successes, but only as a list of things which previous generations would have thought impossible. Which they would have. — Mark Dennis

Fair enough, but to use them to support a "well find a way" kind of optimism, you'd have to show solutions we'd never thought possible. Just things we'd never thought possible isn't what we're looking for.

The survival of our morals, culture and diversity is up for debate though. — Mark Dennis

I don't think any of those three things has survived intact from 50 years ago, so definitely not going to survive another 50,climate change or not.

weren’t all the previous challenges we’ve made it through as a species described as impossible by many? — Mark Dennis

Define 'made it through'. What criteria are you using to determine that we've 'made it' - mere survival of the species (I expect that's going to happen anyway at some level).

I look around me and see many items we take for granted... — Mark Dennis

Basically as good a description of the problem as you're ever going to get. Success measured by number of shiny items.

Which is the better motivator to actually act and contribute toward the problem within your area of it? For example, if I was pessimistic, would I have bothered to post and ask the question? — Mark Dennis

Positive thinking about the future is strongly associated with poor performance..

research has shown that positive thinking, in the form of fantasies about an idealized future, predicts low effort and poor performance.

Here's another of Oettingen's experiments, this time with charitable giving.

She's done similar research on small-scale environmental efforts (recycling, in this case) and found negative correlation between activity and positive future outlooks, but I can't find an internet version of this one.

I'm not convinced this is helpful...I think that would better be called an embodied cognition than an embodied concept, since animals do these kinds of things just as well as we do. — Janus

Why is it unhelpful to have an understanding of conceptual architecture which does not distinguish us as well from animals? Or conversely, what is it about distinguishing us from other animals that is so helpful it must be maintained in any understanding of neural systems?

Just as I explained. — Metaphysician Undercover

You haven't 'explained', you've asserted. There's a difference.

...is not a real justification, it's an illusion of justification. — Metaphysician Undercover

- Why not? You haven't explained your main objection. Why is utility not a justification for adopting a system? All you've done so far is asserted that it isn't, not provided any explanation as to why.

It is required that... — Metaphysician Undercover

- Required by whom or what?

...this goal must itself be justified — Metaphysician Undercover

- Must it? Must everything be justified? How does that work non-circularly? If 'The Goal' is what I feel what am I supposed to do on finding that it is not justified (by your method which you've yet to reveal)? Am I supposed to now not feel that way?

So your claim that non-religious systems are more easily justified is false because the 'justification' you are referring to is not justification at all, but an illusion of justification. — Metaphysician Undercover

- So religious commandments have all of the criteria you list above, or lack them just as much?