Comments

  • The Hypotenuse Problem (I am confused)
    Here's what Euclidean space is. My reference here is for example Calculus on Manifolds by Spivak, page 1 — fishfry
    I don't doubt that such sources are authoritative in their own right. I think that such treatment is a little outdated in style, because the mathematics skip a little modern abstraction, in pre-Russellian (pre-Frege) manner of thought. I do not oppose the dot product and metrization you provide. It indeed fits the axiomatic requirements. Affine spaces can be defined over n-tuples (as both point and product spaces) and that Cartesian coordinate systems can simply be rigid transformations over some preferred innate coordinates. However, I have something else in mind. Something akin to the Wikipedia definition. I agree that it comes from a much less reliable source, but it is what I mean.
    A Euclidean vector space is a finite-dimensional inner product space over the real numbers.

    A Euclidean space is an affine space over the reals such that the associated vector space is a Euclidean vector space.     — Wikipedia
    Inner product space over the real numbers does not imply a vector space of n-tuples, but simply that the scalar field of the vector space are the reals. That allows us to use real numbers in the Cartesian coordinate system, without worrying of the underlying units of measurement that correspond to the unit distance stride in our point space.

    The rest of what you wrote is overloaded with what software developers would call cruft. — fishfry
    I personally do not object to extra formalism, if it makes the assumptions more explicit. But I see how you may feel this way.

    There is no underlying point space, the n-tuples ARE the points. — fishfry
    Then the distance in your point space is inherently unitless, and the angles are synthetic. In the OP's case, the answer then would be that the hypotenuse length is also unitless. The units do not come from the metric, which is just a number, but from the nature of the unit vectors, which in the case of an n-tuple are just numerical. But for many applications, there are underlying units. Sure, you can informally make the association, but if you were willing to formalize it, it would be stated explicitly in the point and inner product spaces. For example, your vectors would be currency or distances, your points would be capitals or locations, etc.

    You can see how the OP assigns the n-tuples to the dollar-apple combinations. There is nothing irregular in that. But they define the dot product and metric, just as you do, and henceforth, they use the Pythagorean theorem and all associated geometrical intuitions from Euclidean geometry to their real-world interpretation. The idea of using intermediary mathematical structure is, that the affine space and its associated inner product space have no mechanical definition of inner product. It comes from the problem domain. It is supposed to exist "natively", not to be defined mechanically, like the dot product. Its properties must be verified before it can be used. So, instead of asking what does the dot product imply in reality, you have to ask what does the reality imply for the inner product. (Reminds of the famous Kennedy quote: " ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.") This is a shield against semantic errors. Nothing more, nothing less. You can bypass it, but then you have made one step in your mind implicitly that you could formally explicate.
  • The Hypotenuse Problem (I am confused)
    What's, for you, the next best thing to say? — TheMadFool
    I'm not sure I get that. You riddle me too hard a riddle there, I'm afraid.
  • The Hypotenuse Problem (I am confused)
    I assume you agree. — fishfry
    I agree with the fact that we can define the dot product as you specify, but we need inner product as well, or we are just manipulating unitless numbers that don't correspond to anything.

    Is that what you're saying, that we need the ancient geometric intuition to ground the modern analytic approach? — fishfry
    To some extent. But I was saying that there is one more hop (probably) in my mind to how this intuition translates to Cartesian coordinates. We first justify the requirements of the affine spaces with the constructive proofs, such as the properties of the inner product in the inner product space. Then we assign n-tuples to the points in the point space, proving that we preserve the inner product with the dot product. Since, in the OP's question there is no inner product, just dot product, there is nothing to preserve and no Pythagorean semantics to be had. We either have arbitrary assignment of numbers to points somewhere, in some semantic domain, or we work with numbers as our semantic domain, and those numbers have no units.
  • The Hypotenuse Problem (I am confused)
    No that's not true. We define R2 as the set of ordered pairs of real numbers. Then we define the usual Euclidean Euclidean distance, and we define the usual dot product. — fishfry
    I still want to be certain that you concur with me on the definition of Cartesian coordinate systems.

    A Cartesian coordinate system is an assignment of n-tuples to the points in a point space underlying Euclidean space, such that the dot product between the n-tuples is isomorphic to the inner product between the displacement vectors of the points from the origin. And Euclidean space is indeed a special case of affine space (something I blurred over a little here), such that the vector space is inner product space and the field of the inner product space is ordered and complete (or which would be the same - the real numbers). Other then that, the point space and vector spaces are arbitrary. That means that we have already defined an inner product (not just dot product for the n-tuples) somewhere. And we can't merely define the dot product over the n-tuples and map the n-tuples to points (mind you, by points I don't even mean locations, but objects that conform to the requirements), or we would have what appears to be considered "generalized" version of the Cartesian coordinate system. There is no geometric sense in it. It is more or less, assignment of n-tuples to points, which can be manipulated with arithmetic.

    As I said, we can also use n-tuples as the underlying inner product space and n-tuples as the underlying point space, but then we cannot talk about dollars and apples, or sensible angles and distances, because those are mechanical constructions now.
  • The Hypotenuse Problem (I am confused)
    ↪fishfry

    I know that the Pythagorean theorem can be proven with constructive geometry, with only areas of aligned triangles. This is however not about Cartesian coordinates as far as I am concerned, because it is not about analytic geometry. In fact, the irony is, that you would most likely use such constructive proofs to validate the sensibility of the assumptions of affine space to your application domain before moving to analytic geometry. You would use the constructive proof to guarantee that the inner product for orthogonally directed vectors is zero (involving also the definition of inner product through cosine of angles and distances), and then you would also get the Pythagorean theorem to your orthogonally directed vectors in the affine space, making the exercise a little vacuous. But the constructive proof requires domain-level intuition - moving triangles, aligning their sides, etc. Those are not analytic. They are intuitional.
  • The Hypotenuse Problem (I am confused)
    ↪fishfry

    I say that the Pythagorean theorem applies to affine spaces over inner product spaces, because in affine spaces any two points from the underlying point space map to a vector, and we have the requirement of distributivity for inner products, hence:
    (a + b) (a + b) = a ^ 2 + b ^ 2 + 2 a * b
    Thus, for any triangle, the square of the norm of the third side equals the sum of the squares of the norms of the other two sides plus their doubled inner product . If the sides are orthogonal to each other, the inner is zero, hence the theorem. The trick then is to guarantee that we preserve the inner product when we move to n-tuples, which we do with a coordinate system. A Cartesian coordinate system is assignment of n-tuples to points, such that the implicit basis corresponding to the strides in unit distances along the coordinate axes is orthonormal. It cannot be orthonormal, if we haven't ascribed angles and distances.

    And in modern math we start with a 2-dimensional coordinate system and define the Euclidean distance. — fishfry
    I don't see it that way really. We still come from the geometric perspective, to define angles and distances in one way or another, and only then we have the privilege of calling an n-tuple of points being from a Cartesian coordinate system. Cartesian coordinate systems come with semantics that need to be defined apriori. They are not just mechanical assignment of pairs of numbers to some arbitrary point space.

    There is only one sense, in fact, in which I am not correct. And it is that a Cartesian coordinate system might be a applied to the very n-tuples, with vectors being n-tuples, distances and angles computed in the usual way, etc. But then, we couldn't talk about apples and dollars, because since the underlying point space is just a mechanical bonding of numbers, it is unitless.

    Edit: That is my perspective anyhow. That is how I was taught analytic geometry at uni. But I am a software guy, so you may wish to exercise some reasonable caution and not take my word for it.
  • The Hypotenuse Problem (I am confused)
    ↪TheMadFool

    Don't you see what I mean when I say that you have only dollars and apples corresponding to pairs of numbers and no actual geometric model?
  • The Hypotenuse Problem (I am confused)
    A right angle (if I remember my high school geometry) is when you have a line intersecting another line and making equal angles on each side. — fishfry
    My point is that you need to have the concepts of "angles" (so that they can be equal), "directions" (so that you can make the points on your lines aligned, i.e. colinear), "distances" apriori, before resorting to analytic geometry. (And formally, we would call that an affine space today. Although the terminological designation would not be present historically, the ideas would be the same.) It would be backwards thinking if we started with pairs of numbers, declared them to be the Cartesian coordinate system for implicit space of entities and finally tried to infer a sensible explanation of the nature of the metrics of those entities.
  • The Hypotenuse Problem (I am confused)
    ↪TheMadFool

    The whole point is that the 2D Cartesian coordinate system is not a picture. It is ascription of coordinates to some plane of points, which points correspond in pairs to vectors, which vectors individually correspond to lengths and in pairs correspond to angles. Ok, the points are dollars-apples, but the remaining properties are not automatic. They are not provided by the Cartesian coordinate system for you, mathematically. They are provided by you, originally, so that you can justify the use of Cartesian coordinate system. Otherwise, what you have are just pairs of numbers corresponding to points, and the rest is as real as Tolkien's world.
  • Why do people need religious beliefs and ideas?
    ↪TheMadFool

    Why should theism be limited to the description of deity in the Western world? The pantheistic description specifies a deity that is omnipotent, omnipresent. Maybe omniscient, since if we talk about actual pantheism, as opposed to theistically guised naturalism, there should be some proof that the cosmic organization appears sentient with I.Q. of more than 2, according to some generalization of our measure of intelligence to abstract behavior. This is where it becomes only a hypothesis to me.

    In any case, I am reasonably passionate about dysthestic, henotheistic ideas, and would gladly subscribe to one if it was well factually argumented (without mythos). I do not support the idea that if there is some true belief in divinity, the believer has to reverent, the divine plan has to be anthropocentric and the divine being has to be in some sense (such as moral duty) antropomorphic. The omnibenevolence is as you said problematic. Why do you consider it necessary for general theology?
  • The Hypotenuse Problem (I am confused)
    If memory serves, Pythagora's theorem works only for right triangles and yes the axes that I used are perpendicular and yes there's a right triangle (3, 4, 5) formed. — TheMadFool
    How did you come to the realization that the angle is perpendicular when constructing your mathematical model of the problem domain? What property in the actual domain of application of your model prompted the idea? If you were not concerned with any domain when you constructed the model, how do you come to need to ask semantic questions now?

    Essentially, you are trying to bypass semantic questions when constructing your geometry, but you want to coerce semantics at a later date, through some synthetico-analytic magic.

    P.S. The above came off a bit tacky. Not trying to be stern or anything...
  • Why do people need religious beliefs and ideas?
    - justification for prejudice — Tom Storm
    Xenophobia and ingroup mentalities run strong in our genes. Religion is another trigger that we might not have otherwise had, but we would have found other reasons to be xenophobic.
    -Justification for bigotry — Tom Storm
    This I also believe is unjustifiable epistemic error for a sensible human being.
    -justification for violent behaviour — Tom Storm
    This appears to be gradually weeded out, albeit very slowly. I think that it is prevalent in violence-prone subcultures and strata of society, where they are practicing violence to defend all sorts of personal subscriptions.
  • Why do people need religious beliefs and ideas?
    Rather, we're prone to a variety of known cognitive biases or "features", like apophenia, patternicity, personification (abductive), autosuggestion (and the reiteration effect), knowledge-gap-filling, confabulation, wishful/magical thinking. — jorndoe
    I wish I wrote that. Even someone like Jordan Peterson, who is a hardliner cultural and religious conservative describes a lot of the religious texts as mythos. However, being a pragmatic utilitarian, he seems to perceive them as socially constructive mythos. I have never heard him express the need to have the degree of metaphysical skepticism that he himself has. His claims to be a Christian, who does not believe in God, but acts as if there is one. Or, differently put, that he is raised and remaining under the influence of the Judeo-Christian system of moral values. Being a psychologist, he has also discussed the compulsive nature of knowledge-gap-filling. It isn't something you can easily turn off, and turns on automatically whenever you are faced with the need to ascribe features to unknown parts of reality. It seems to me that certain advocates of organized theism are themselves rather aware of our cognitive biases, but contented with the population at large being a naive recipient of the religious benefit.

    We learn from accumulating experiences, interacting with it all, ...
    We might then extrapolate (induction) and formalize (for deduction), systematically do away with errors (or demarcate domain of applicability), ...     — jorndoe
    I am always coming back to the idea that we are applying induction "on faith". We can argue that our practice is confirmable, but that is also inductive retroactive argument. It only demonstrates the internal consistency of empiricism. Or similarly, with statistics, we use chances to justify our decision making. But in the end of the day, we are not actually observing chances, we are observing satisfactory outcomes and apply confirmation bias. If we consider such intuitions productive for science, can we really disallow religious intuition and biases, as possibly being truthful. As challenging as such concession might be to empirically grounded person. I would not consider asking that we accept them or not to critique their internal inconsistencies and methodological errors (such as lack of hesitancy), but still.
  • Why do people need religious beliefs and ideas?
    ↪Jack Cummins


    I could have made better case. The advantages of organized religion:
    • Social currency
      Religions provide people with notions that they can use to relate their experiences to each other uniformly and bond.
    • Self-reflection
      The teachings are open-ended, which provokes inner reflection.
    • Prescriptive ethics
      People are motivated to behave pro-socially, by using reward, punishment, acclamation of merit.
    • Uncontested authority
      Religion can arbiter some of those disputes, where social interactions fail to decide the collective interest, on the authority of perceived institutional supremacy.
    • Humility
      Secular culture merits people by competitive performance and can leave someone feeling marginalized. Religion shifts the perception of value. Most people think that they can deal more successfully with successful marriage, care for your offspring, being helpful to your relatives and friends. They become engaged more productively and better social contributors.
    The disadvantages are:
    • Conformity
      People express themselves in the same conceptual terms and forget to apply their personal flavor to their world view.
    • Lack of objectivity
      People loose perception of the non-interpretative ways of describing reality.
    • Lack of agency
      The prescription of ethics removes the individual from the discourse.
    • Unaccountability
      The institutions are declared partially infallible and cannon texts undoubted.
    • Demerit of ambition
      The satisfaction from the classical modes of being means that anything beyond that is ether depreciated overall or ascribed to one gender.
  • Why do people need religious beliefs and ideas?
    ↪Jack Cummins

    In contrast, I was brought up in undecided environment. I remained self-determined Christian till I was in my middle teens, with little encouragement from family if any. (I would say Orthodox Christian, but my religious wasn't scholastic.) Then I became unconventional monotheist for a period of time, and currently am on a wide spectrum of theist philosophies - i.e. skeptical possibilianist.

    Even so, I am not without bias. From my current theist inclination, if any, you will infer that my attitude is not to be religiously organized and to differentiate between sources of existential origin and ethical approbation. Here is an amalgamation that I would consider to be my most likely theist subscription (sorry for the terminological show off):
    • religiously liberal (opposed to religious cannon, ritualistic worship, institutionalization, I am possibly anti-religious, although I wouldn't support officially secular anti-religious state policy)
    • misotheistic (lack of moral alignment with the central deity, judgement and disapprobation of its objectives)
    • dystheistic (the central deity has their own agenda, which does not conform to human morality, or human understanding; no antropocentrism)
    • naturalistic (laws of nature are sufficient explanation for everything accessible to people, which is generally opposed to revelation and deism, although deism may be compatible in the pantheistic variant of theism)
    • panpsychic (matter carries its own potential for the emergence of consciousness, as opposed to dualism; you could say panpsychic emergentism)
    • possibly henotheist (natural phenomena might sometimes act to our benefit in some organized fashion, which is not a very sound hypothesis, but since I do not personify such agencies, or at least not in the same sense in which I think of human personalities, I am allowing myself such speculation; if that were the case, I would be monolatrist - I would be reverent to only some benefactor forces of nature, while still being disapproving of the central deity)
    • spiritualist (in the sense of the extended mind thesis, I believe that history and interactions transfer part of the essence between lifeforms; after cessation of their personal embodied agency, beings remain a dispersed part of a conceptual organism, through the remaining footprint of their actions and their historical role, but not necessarily in a sense compatible with spiritist experiences; I consider mourning perfectly justified, since the focused individual expression of life was lost)
    • absurdist (probably there is no rational, i.e. analytic, justification for life)
    • pantheism (hylotheism - the universe and the central deity are the same, possibly pandeism - the deity transformed so that the universe began its existence, or panentheism - the universe is part of the central deity, but the latter is not entirely accessible to cognition; needless to say, I don't subscribe to a antropomorphic deity necessarily)

    This brings me to an important point. We should distinguish religion and theism. The former is a social phenomenon with organized practices - frequently scholastic, institutionalized, ritualistic. Bare bones theism can be conceived under plurality of philosophical considerations, and then remain fluid, whereas religion is concerned with prescriptive philosophy. Religion is politically active, whereas personal theism is merely passively political. The social role of organized religion was summarily both supported and criticized in True Detective (well for a TV show anyway). Marty Hart argued that it pacifies the human condition and restricts it from getting chaotically deviant, whereas Rust Cohle argued that it masquerades certain human and personal deficiencies and makes identifying and curing them harder.

    I do not feel personally divergent to the ethical stipulations of some of the religious texts (albeit only overarchingly, not in every detail), but I also do not think that morality needs to be justified theistically, or that religious theism should be the normative source of our personal ethical development. Whether the religious metaphysical claims are correct or not, I think that we should strive to help the individual to determine their ethical convictions on their own, by educating people in their pragmatic humanistic self-interest, from which they could derive the reasonable boundaries for their responsibilities and privileges. In other words, I believe that human beings are already sufficiently social and intelligent to be relied for sensible behavior, if they are provided with proper secular upbringing, which unfortunately is a very complex issue. Religion, on the other hand, would be a rather crude bypass of that issue, if that were its purpose.

    I realize that theism cannot be criticized purely rationally, because most of our beliefs (including empiricism and logical reasoning) are rooted at unargumented intuitions. Convictions begin partially spontaneously, even if they are consequently continuously mentally and experientially evaluated. We cannot deprive spontaneous believers of their opinion, but we are not obligated to adopt it if it contradict our own, because that would retract us from the discourse. Neither does admittance of subjective belief prohibit the use of argumentation when observing inconsistencies or methodological issues. For example, I do not disallow the possibility of a single central antropomorphic benevolent transcendent entity, but the specificity of this proposition and the spectrum of alternatives demands that there should be hesitancy to assert such narrow claim, based purely on methodological grounds.

    I personally am against attitudes that oppose critical thought, censor counter-argumentation, isolate themselves from opposition, and do not make effort to achieve holistic explanation that reconciles with our success in our epistemic practices. Certain positions have had little growth and openness to critical discourse, which I believe is methodological error, no matter what the metaphysical truth is.

    Lastly, I believe that theism has psychological explanation, even if it weren't true. Namely, people are species that need objective in order to function rationally. The most basic of these is survival, but it is internally inconsistent, as I have stated previously in the forum. Everything in nature is ephimeral. This creates intellectual vacuum that the rational brain needs to somehow resolve, or it will become stagnant and despondent (depressed, suicidal). The solution is to hypothesize a hidden objective for being that is beyond rationality and observation. This motivates life, but you might ask to what end. No end, logically speaking. If critical thinking overcomes the hypothesis and there is no remaining goal (hedonism, pragmatism of some kind, personal ethics), life stops. There is no destination towards which to plot life's course and the brain surrenders. And then, other life takes your place. Life which has sufficient remaining motivation. So, a cerebral idealist needs theism in a certain sense, or they enter a self-defeating mode of being.
  • "The Government"
    Government = The consequent system of humanity's free and successful interactions per individual. — Gus Lamarch

    This statement presumes that success in interactions is bilateral. In actuality, we compete for reasons such as attention and control. For example, your announcement is call for attention and attempt to solicit social energy towards a proposed course of action. Someone, like, for example me, contends. We have many intraspecies confrontations stemming not only from resource scarcity, but from need for arbitration between our opinions, ideas and plans...
  • The Hypotenuse Problem (I am confused)
    ↪TheMadFool

    I would like to give a little clarification on the answer provided by @tim wood. The application of the Pythagorean theorem is intended for spaces equipped with distances and angles. More precisely, for any affine space with associated inner product space or even a module. The theorem there follows simply from the properties required of the inner product, which then makes the statement a rather unhelpful fact. Essentially, the theorem is axiomatic.

    The introduction of this abstraction in the first place aims to eliminate the need for making any point the fixed origin, and any orientation automatically vertical, horizontal, etc. However, because angles and distances are defined, you can make use of Cartesian coordinate systems by choosing one point arbitrarily and one orientation (the abscissa) as reference, allowing you to express the other points and directions using numbers produced by the metric and norm in the affine space. (In fact, for the Pythagorean theorem, you don't need to use numbers, but say booleans with conjunction being multiplication and logical exclusion being the addition. You don't need to fix the unit of your quantities at all for non-unitary module either. No dollars, no euro, just abstract monetary value. But that just complicates the intuition here.)

    This trick is sensible only because the dot product between the n-tuples matches the inner product between the vectors. This can proven using the axioms of the affine spaces and the fact that the two basis vectors are orthonormal - perpendicular and unitary (for modules they can be chosen to be of identical magnitude, and the two products are not equal, but homomorphic). The other properties are also consequently preserved in the translation process - the Pythagorean property (I don't call it a theorem, because it stems axiomatically), distances computed using the Pythagorean property (ironically, but it is already preserved), the tangent (being the ratio in two dimensions) between the coordinate vectors and the abscissa, etc.

    What I am getting at is that we are first taught coordinates at school. We start with the description of numeric pairs and move to their correspondence to points in space. Unfortunately, this introduces angles and distances generically, by working out some arithmetic with the coordinate numbers. Affine spaces reinforce the notion that you can't derive such concepts mechanically. They are ascribed to the space semantically, and only then they become numerically expressed.

    In your particular case, you have two axes and you assume that they are perpendicular, i.e. that there is meaning to the angle between them. What does this angle express? You will find out that the main requirement of the Pythagorean theorem, the rightness of one angle, is untenable in your case, because the appearance of orthogonality between your basis vectors is only the remnant of some pedagogic intuition. As tim wood pointed out, the distance is not specified either, aside from strides along the coaxial directions. In summary, we can create a pair of numbers from virtually anything, but that does not confer the necessary structure for a Cartesian coordinate system corresponding to a choice of origin and orthonormal basis in some kind of affine space.
  • A few thoughts from a layman philosopher - Method for countering bias
    ↪EusebiusLevi

    It seems to me that the idea of truth you subscribe to ultimately requires simultaneous conviction in the same interpretation of sensory experience and the obviousness of some logical ideas by all interlocutors, which isn't automatic. For example, you are suggesting that statements are either corresponding with facts or not corresponding with facts, which implies that the properties of the universe cannot be counterfactual and we don't know this for sure. A probabilistic world, for example, may at least be admitted the possibility of counterfactual definiteness of its propensities, even if their actual form cannot be concluded with certainty.

    Other types of statements are methodological and stem from an existential point of view. They are justified by being and believing. I would dare say, the very claim you make can be considered rather unfalsifiable and thus reliant on spontaneous agreement of convictions. Which doesn't mean that it is unsupported by experience, but some part of it can only be confirmed case by case by degree of satisifaction of outcomes in the future. A lot of claims are like that. They are indefinitely arbitrated by nature.

    Also, precise justification is not always feasible for the sensibility of abstract claims. Its validation stems not from logical consistency, or representational accuracy, but its applicability, particularly its usefulness as a model of reality. And whether some theory is useful approximation will vary with the projected uses. Again, an evaluation to the constructiveness in the formulation of a model can be a good cause for the epistemic effort, but can it ever be irrefutably justified. A question on the forum is asking in what sense does the square of the hypotenuse equal the sum of the squares of the legs for a right triangle. This claim is axiomatically justifiable, but is it a good claim in an ontic sense?

    Finally, some questions stem to bias. I could make a case that debates should expose and inform, not resolve truth disputes. Or maybe a debate should intentionally polarize a subject, so that its qualities can surface, rather then submerge in anonymity. Or sometimes we need to digest information to its proper conclusion, and derive a consensus about its significance, as you suggest. It isn't evident, unless we assume something about the context.

    I will read your expose part by part over time. It appears to have some length to it, but seems also rather informative. Thanks for the contribution ..to the debate.
  • The Problem Of The Criterion
    I see what you did here — SophistiCat
    I wouldn't have noticed. It happened accidentally.
  • The Problem Of The Criterion
    Pointing to dogs and uttering the word "dog" is an act of providing instances to the audience (here Possibility's daughter) and if that's all that's being done, leaving the audience to figure out what the word "dog" means i.e. it's the audience's job to abstract the essence of a dog from the instances provided. — TheMadFool
    This will always be ‘fuzzy’ to a certain extent - a definition seems to be just a linguistically-structured summary or reduction of these patterns. — Possibility
    To define something - to state or describe exactly its nature, scope or meaning; to mark out its boundary or limits - is a reductionist methodology that discards qualitative variability or ‘fuzziness’ in the information we have about that something. — Possibility

    I am not saying that propositions are inferred from example instances for each specific proposition, but by dividing the instances of experience into suitable classes. Only when it comes to synchronizing the vocabulary and learning through normative (compulsive) and authoritative (convincing) sources, the classes are acquired second-hand or through especially representative examples.

    I am not saying that someone will point dogs to a child until it is coerced to learn the concept dogmatically. I am saying that a child will see several dogs and cats, and will be able to use its own discretionary capacity to derive that "this is one thing, and that is another thing". Its mother might convey to her/him, that we call the first a dog and the second a cat, but the conceptualization of the species is already present. And I pointed out that we are not merely speculating about the possibility of such classification, but that there are ways to specify the problem precisely and to solve it with available techniques.

    Obviously, there is fuzziness, because the subject has influence on the parameters of the task. A child might decide that koalas are a kind of bear. Which they are not. But for a child's purposes the distinction is inconsequential. That is why the intentions and needs will factor themselves in. The child will only rectify its concept under coercion (they might be simultaneously provided convincing justification), because it has no need to do so on its own. Many parameters will depend on the subject - the completeness of the description, i.e. known features, of the instances, the crudeness of the classes, or clusters, the total sample collection (have they seen enough canines, felines, bears, marsupials, aliens, sledgehammers, quantities of things, lengths of things), and how they metricize the feature space (i.e. how they define the distance between objects/situations/qualifiers in consideration of their biases, attachments, goals, etc)
  • The Problem Of The Criterion
    That there are different definitions of truth (correspondence, paragmatic, coherent, etc.) is suggestive...hints at some degree of arbitrariness...something I referred to in the OP. — TheMadFool
    I was concerned with the possibility of solving the issue as specified and wanted to propose that we break it down into aspects of smaller complexity. I may have come off as assuming some lack of familiarity with the intricacies that are involved.

    If truth were abstracted from instances of truth this wouldn't be the case for then that which can be described as the form (Plato?) of truth would be constant, precluding, in my humble opinion, variety in the definition of truth. — TheMadFool
    It still seems to me that the criterion is not about establishing unambiguously the truth of propositions, but of designing descriptions for a proposition that matches particular experience. The problem does elicit however many considerations involved when matching the descriptions between individuals through exemplification.

    Lets consider correspondence truth first. The assertion that an object is an apple is just a statement for association with some class of objects, and different people may have different notions in this regard. A child thinks of an "apple" and so does an agricultural botanist. First, the child may have had limited experience with apples in relation to its interactions and needs. The object have been measured as fitting in the palm of your hand, the color reddish with sparse nuances of green, the taste, mostly acidic sugary or just sugary. A botanist, in contrast, knows apples of all varieties, ripe and unripe, green and red, bigger and smaller fruits, etc. It will measure the sizes in widely recognized units, not in proportion to body parts. Nonetheless, both will associate their descriptions with apple. The ambiguity stems from matching the statement and not the interpretation. (Edit: What I mean is, the statement is considered the same, even though, both parties would agree empirically that their interpretations do not match.) The botanist is at least uncontested authority in this case, which is not always a clearly defined role, and hence, the child can be informed of the class's variety through literature, expressed in references to other words, or through other examples. But people will ultimately never base their vocabulary in the same set of direct experiences. (*)

    I will use the mechanism of clustering to explicate some of the issues involved. It is not the value of the proposition which is ambiguous. The indefiniteness of the statement is the problem, which is inherent in the way in which the description is derived. The clustering algorithms will produce a solution based on the quality and variety of the sample (the objects) and the desired crudeness. Those factors will vary for different people. The feature set used as relevant discriminator will also differ. And the truth will not be binary, but will have a degree of certainty, with clear matches and some borderline cases. The confidence when dealing with uncertainty will differ, based on the needs and attitudes of the individuals.

    The same logic applies to pragmatic truth, but instead of representations, it is dealing with intents and applications. For example, what is right for the poor is not right for the rich, what is right for the elderly is not right for the young, etc. Different people will associate the truth of certain statements with different social clusters or conditions, and thus will interpret them into different propositions.

    *: This example is easily rectifiable error of conceptualization and communication due to limited observations of one party, which also shows that representational truth is inherently easier to verify. This is why it is so central to science. As you suggested, one can talk about some sense of objectivity there, although the question of bringing all experiences in alignment remains problematic. But pragmatic truth, a first-order phenomenon of cognition in my opinion, has much less sense of objectivity. It also affects debates of proposed representations, because the very criteria for making a proposition canonical can be affected. For example, some physicists would argue that a theory of should be mathematically minimal, while others will argue that it has to confer at least some explanative value.

    P.S. In summary, I think the circularity is not about ultimate truth, it is about finding effective taxonomy of the available knowledge. Even so, the process is one of continuous refinement (for example, exploration of the facts by science and redefining the concepts after some cluster of information is supplemented with new data), distributing the relevant information to all authorities on the subject, and arbitrating between attitudes and values that affect the perception of the explanative scope of the evidence, its significance relative to the individual cognitive bias, culture, social strata.
  • The Problem Of The Criterion
    The definition of truth is complex and it will be useful to tackle it separately. It raises questions beyond the above dichotomy, such as to what does it apply, whether it is a matter of accuracy of our representations or efficacy of our planned courses of action. Rather confounding issues.

    So, I will rephrase the statements as they apply to classification:

    A. We can't discern members of a class without having criterion that identifies their features. [methodism]

    B. We can't specify criterion for the members of concrete class without being presented with examples that we can extrapolate to a definition. [particularism]

    In computer science, this is the clustering problem. Given unclassified samples, we are tasked to break them into spatially contiguous groups, while simultaneously identifying which grouping produces the least internal sparsity. The solution is computationally laborious, intractable when perfectly optimal, but its approximations are reasonably efficient. The applications sometimes require human discretion (supervision as it is called) for domain-specific considerations, but automatic execution is not impossible. Solving such a problem presupposes an already established feature space, so the techniques may have to be combined with feature extraction / dimensionality reduction step. This is the step in which you conclude which qualities are most distinguishing for your samples. For the human cognition, the task may require more sophisticated mechanism, but the problem should be otherwise similar. We discover objects and situations which have closeness in some regard and define the categories that naturally emerge as the most effective classifiers.

    Having derived classes for objects or situations, and having the faculty to introduce conjunctions (thus universals), disjunctions (thus existentials), complements, modalities, etc, a human being may produce a reasonable amount of propositions. I am not sure whether thinking operates with such formality and I am not sure whether we introduce logic into the picture in precisely this way, but it offers one path to the ability of autonomous mental synthesis of statements.

    Feature extraction
    Dimensionality reduction
    Cluster analysis

    I am not sure about which kind of parsing you are referring to, but in computer science, and I believe, also in linguistics, it is the process of deciding how to split a text into its syntactical constituents and label them with their syntactical categories (ascribe meta-information to each region of letters and symbols, metadata as it is called in computing).
  • Are cells sentient?
    ↪Benj96

    Thanks for starting this thread.

    The crux of the issue of whether anything is sentient is that, to be frank, no level or detail of data/information short of directly experiencing consciousness in an other will ever be conclusive and that's impossible (as of now, I must admit). — TheMadFool
    I agree with pretty much everything you said. Philosophy aside, we routinely apply the idea that appearing human indicates experiencing yourself as human. If some ethical or metaphysical stance connects form to substance in this way, we can inquire how using appearances allows us to discern consciousness, what kind of metric separates being sentient from being insentient (number of cells in the brain, organization of those cells). If the metric implicitly exists, we can inquire for some hypothetical justification or explanative devices behind its implicit construction, and hence delve in its micro- and macro- extrapolations. If is it done purely by association with the statistically normative human form, it becomes a rather crude metric for something so decisive and a disguise for hypocritically disinterested viewpoint to me. Social/political/legal conventions are out of convenience or necessity, but while they may never be made precise in practice, we can at least dissect them philosophically.

    My personal view - panpsychism and pantheism might be one and the same. I only speculate, of course. But it would be very convenient if they were simultaneously true. It would satisfy our need for objectivity, because forms would exist independently, and even if they are not complex enough to be self-aware or self-perceiving like we are, they will be inherently alive and serve as their own self-attestation. Spirituality would be satisfied, because experiences would be endemic in nature and would either not be concerned with transcendence, or might provide reincarnation by substance transfer of some kind, without violating empiricism (but by extending the known empiricism). It would satisfy theism, since form would elaborate life with scale and produce sentience of greater complexity. The emergent sentience need not have the same faculties (reasoning, ethical concerns, etc), but it will have its own merits. I don't know. It is merely some comfortable idea.
  • intersubjectivity
    ↪Banno

    I am not trolling, but you might want to read the mess again. Sorry, but my flow needs refinement.
  • intersubjectivity
    ↪Banno

    I ranted a lot in my previous post. My written English is not great, so it came out a little confused. I have edited it, but I'll summarize. We suppose that the material world can exist without us, and that this can account for the time before consciousness existed in the universe. But we have no concept of what existence is outside of ourselves, and the idea may be unintelligible. We may just be extrapolating our present experience with form, which we consider to exist through personification, whilst in actuality we don't have any idea of what existence for anything outside of the subject is conceptually. Pantheism and solipsism don't have that problem, because their subject nature is omnipresent.
  • intersubjectivity
    ↪Banno

    In a recent thread I started arguing that solipsism is incompatible with ontic materialism. My interlocutor described solipsistic materialism to me as the existence of solitary subject in a material environment. This transitioned into an argument, where I was claiming that the materialist position can only hypothesize the existence of objectively correct perception, not inanimate ontology. I argued that aside from the experience with the perception of the environment, this environment cannot even be conceptualized. Therefore, I argued, that solipsistic materialism would be indistinguishable from intersubjective materialism (edit: more properly, from solipsistic idealism, because the emphasis is the presence of just one subject, not the definition of the external world - I got confused while ranting again). (I agree with the term "intersubjective", because "shared" impresses me as a term involving the use of communication, interaction or some other form of disclosure, whereas intersubjective does not.)

    Materialism to me has only one consequence, objective reality, meaning agreement between subjects about the nature of compelling external forces. There can be nothing to agree upon, if there is only one subject. The notion of objectivity becomes meaningless to me, if there are not multiple subjects. — simeonz

    "Exist" is just another word for having a form. But the only way we define the idea of form is through the account of our interactions, through phenomenology. How can we talk about objectivity vs subjectivity of the form we perceive when there is only one subject. The two ideas are indistinguishable even conceptually to me. But I must say, I see where you are coming from. You are not asking the question epistemically at all it appears and to you the ontic difference is evident. — simeonz

    Consequently, I reviewed my earlier responses in the same thread, particularly concerning which theories I would consider meaningful (conceptually), and started to doubt myself. Namely, I claimed before:
    Some variants of dualism might be ontically distinguishable, albeit not in a way that can be corroborated. The differences might not be detectable on earth or might be perceivable only through the lenses of hypothetical psychic observer. I accept such notions, because like with solipsism, there is difference between the version of the proposed reality therein and the conventional ones, even if it fails to project into sensory experience. Such description is still irrefutable. I insisted originally that there are different categories of questions that we could ask to distinguish one theory from the rest - ontic, epistemic, ethical and antropological. Some are distinguishable only through some of these questions, but to me, all should be distinguishable in an unambiguous manner as ontic descriptions or they are synonyms to another theory. — simeonz
    I argued here that if a theory made distinct claim about the world, in a logically consistent manner, it is deserving of its title. Even if it is epistemically indistinguishable to other proposals.

    What did I mean by epistemic and ontic? The epistemic aspect is what the subject can experience. Even if they can't corroborate their accounts to others, I consider their experiences sufficient epistemic justification. For example, theories with afterlife hypotheses may not be verifiable scientifically, but are observable, at least privately. Such ideas are outside the scope of the scientific convention, but these are antropological conventionalist facets, not ontic and epistemic. This obviousness of epistemics stops when probability becomes involved. The underlying propensities can be described as ontic or epistemic in character. I wont go there. But the compatibility of those cases can be argued with combination of many ideas like ethical utilitarism (we are interested only in the overall effect for humanity), evolutionary Darwinism (we have acquired statistical inferences as innate trait), the laws of large numbers (classical and frequentist probability are compatible), etc.

    What about the ontic aspect of a theory? Is it about the subjective experience?

    When I argued against the possibility of solipsistic materialism, I implied that the only source of ontology is in the experience of the subject. But is there room for it there if the private experience is also the reason for the epistemic definiteness of a theory? I claim, for example, that while solipsism and intersubjective idealism can not be discerned from one subject's private observations, they differ by the quantity of private vantage points available. Therefore, while their distinctive features can not be given account by any one individual, they are experienced collectively. Like a person with disassociative disorder, neither one of their identities can directly attest to the existence of the rest, but the collective experience of those identities is distinct from that of a person without the disorder. In this metaphor, the multiplicity does not appear evident, but it is a fact. The subjects don't have to confer their existence to others or to witness the existence of other subjects for separation of intersubjective idealism and solipsism.

    Do I oppose solipsistic materialism, because I oppose external inanimate world of its own substance? I am not sure. I doubt the intelligibility of separate inanimate state. We have no notion of existence outside of the ourselves. Thinking about it, I think that we project being extent to the forms we contemplate, because we personify them. I am not sure if such mechanical transfer of our own qualities from the subject to the object when making a statement about the world corresponds to a meaningful proposition. Pantheism and solipsism at least construct the reality of mental fabric and the subject-object distinction is lost. I have been advertising them way too often, but I don't see enough discussions about them in the forum and their argument for the existence of the external world is supported by the subjective nature in all of the environment's constituents.

    An argument against my doubts is that reality manifests beyond the scope of our prior experience with it. For this reason, we can infer that it is separate, possibly existing in its own timeline that protrudes beyond our cognition. Both materialism and solipsism can admit that mental events can be compelled by involuntary factors. But I am not sure that we can qualify such factors as externally existing. The independence itself here is not more then epistemic. Even though the experiences we have with the world cannot be attributed to recollection or volition, they are still merely independent from our knowledge and will, and not our existence. For example, walking into a room, the influx of information and our interactions cannot be extrapolated from our encounters with different rooms, but this does not demonstrate that the room exists without our account of it.

    I think that these reflections raise some methodological questions. We can arrange notions in various combinations, project them, adulterate them, and presume that they constitute in meaningful statements. We cannot distinguish what is a proper and improper statement automatically. We have to admit all statements that might eventually have the potential to be intelligible, even if they turn out not to, because we cannot always check their intelligibility outright.

    Edit -> Style changes
    Edit -> intersubjective materialism -> solipsistic idealism.
  • Comment and Question
    Event A - brain event - causes event B - mental event. Event B causes event C - brain event. — Bartricks
    I think that you suggest that the relationship between B and C (and therefore the entire existence of B) happens in complete physical transparency. Then, how would free will manifest here?
  • Comment and Question
    Likewise, my reason represents my mind to be an immaterial thing, for it says of it that it makes no sense to wonder about what sensible properties it might have. — Bartricks

    Does your mind say that it makes no sense to wonder about (derive by contemplation itself) its sensible properties, or that it makes no sense to witness its sensible properties?
  • Comment and Question
    That's just the thesis. Materialism 'just is' the thesis that there is an objective - that is, 'existing extra-mentally' - reality. — Bartricks
    "Exist" is just another word for having a form. But the only way we define the idea of form is through the account of our interactions, through phenomenology. How can we talk about objectivity vs subjectivity of the form we perceive when there is only one subject. The two ideas are indistinguishable even conceptually to me. But I must say, I see where you are coming from. You are not asking the question epistemically at all it appears and to you the ontic difference is evident.
  • Comment and Question
    It is self-evident to virtually everybody. "Is your mind rough or smooth?" makes no sense. It's like asking "how loud is 3?" — Bartricks
    It makes no sense to ask it as unaided self-reflection, but that doesn't mean that through some assisted view (externally) your mind could not see itself better.
  • Comment and Question
    ↪Bartricks

    Materialism to me has only one consequence, objective reality, meaning agreement between subjects about the nature of compelling external forces. There can be nothing to agree upon, if there is only one subject. The notion of objectivity becomes meaningless to me, if there are not multiple subjects.
    I didn't state it because it is not relevant. You can be a theist materialist, a theist dualist, and a theist immaterialist. Theism is the view that God, or a god, exists. It is not a view about the nature of the mind. — Bartricks
    I provided an option that afforded it in case you were theist, because otherwise you may not have subscribed to the others. It is related to the mind, as I said, because if matter is inherently spiritual, then it is also conscious. You cannot have soul and not mind, in a theist worldview.
  • Comment and Question
    It does not make sense to wonder what colour, shape, smell, texture, or taste one's mind has — Bartricks
    If you justify this presupposition as being evident to you, then there is little that can be said about it. It is not evident to me. Nothing wrong altogether (doesn't make us both right either), but it is a difficult debate when the fundamental perspectives of two people cannot align.

    Edit: And don't claim that my perspective is stupid. It hardly aids the discussion.
  • Comment and Question
    No, that's just confused. Solipsism is a view about the number of minds that exist. It is 'not' a view about the nature of the mind. One can be a materialist solipsist, one can be a dualist solipsist, one can be an immaterialist solipsist. — Bartricks
    If there is just one mind, what would draw a boundary between the mind simply being compelled by unnatural forces and the mind being part of a physical world? Those two options become distinguishable only terminologically. There is no other sense of distinction between them.
    What? I made arguments in support of the view that our minds are not sensible objects. No premise in any of my arguments (I gave 2, I have 14 - and what I am about to say is true of all 14) assumed a position on deities. — Bartricks
    You didn't state whether you are theist, so I provided a theist option.
    There's nothing to be said for it. It doesn't solve any problems. It's just silly. — Bartricks
    What is the problem? I thought that the problem is how can the mind exist. It solves that problem.
    I am afraid I don't know what you mean or what your faces analogy was supposed to illustrate. — Bartricks
    You said that your mind tells you that it doesn't have colors. I wanted to tell you through analogy that the mind may have features that it cannot perceive unaided. The same way we cannot perceive that we have face without mirror. (Or photo, or description from another person.)
  • Comment and Question
    When I ask for evidence that the mind is the brain, that's all I'm ever given. Yet it rests on a simple mistake: the mistake of thinking that if A affects B, A 'is' B. — Bartricks
    The problem is that if you intend to include free will, B must also affect A. We need to corroborate this, and if we cannot perceive it, then it appears to be just your axiom. Which is fine, but little can be debated here. It cannot be confirmed.
    And b) even if it wasn't a rubbish objection, it would not imply the mind is a sensible thing, so much as that sensible things are in fact made of mental states. — Bartricks
    This would be panpsychism, wouldn't it?
  • Comment and Question
    Solipsism is not a view about the nature of the mind, but the number of minds in existence (it is the view that there is precisely one mind in existence - your own). Solipsism, then, is neutral between materialist and immaterialist views about the mind. — Bartricks
    Solipsism denies an objective world. Materialism and dualism both require it.
    Pantheism is a view about God. So quite why you're raising it I do not know. — Bartricks
    It can have implication about the mind, because it spiritualizes matter, making it conscious. In other words, it can become a theistic version of panpsychism.
    And panpsychism is just silly and not implied by any of the arguments I gave. — Bartricks
    What is so silly about it? You can have mind and it can be the result of your material embodiment's innate ability for experience.
    Edit:
    You still didn't answer why you believe automatically that the mind must have inherent ability for realization of its own form? (The faces analogy.)
  • Comment and Question
    Sensible objects have colours, shapes, sizes, smells, tastes. But my reason assures me that it is positively confused to think of my mind as having any of these qualities. So my mind does not appear to be a sensible object. It may still be, of course, for appearances are sometimes deceptive. But where's the evidence?

    My reason also tells me that I have free will, yet tells me at the same time that I would not have free will - not of the robust responsibility-grounding kind that it insists I have - if everything about me traces to external causes. Yet if I were a sensible object, everything about me would trace to external causes. So my reason tells me, once more, that I - my mind, that is - am not a sensible object.

    And on and on it goes - there are loads of these arguments (I think I have about 14). They're not decisive, admittedly. But each one counts for something - each one is some evidence, prima facie evidence, that our minds are not sensible objects.

    What countervailing evidence do you have that our minds are sensible objects?     — Bartricks
    I ask many times - why dualism and not solipsism, pantheism or panpsychism? You can have shapes and colors (which are just relations of some kind, nothing brutal), while still perceiving those shapes and colors. As an analogy, when we look at other people, they have faces, but we can never see our face directly. Why then assume that self-description should be innate quality?
  • Comment and Question
    I'd be a little less polite and add "...or how it distinguishes its description even conceptually from..." ANY theory with no proof, including any conspiracy theory you could concoct. ps - I will NOT that discuss that topic here, just using it to make a point. — GLEN willows
    Some variants of dualism might be ontically distinguishable, albeit not in a way that can be corroborated. The differences might not be detectable on earth or might be perceivable only through the lenses of hypothetical psychic observer. I accept such notions, because like with solipsism, there is difference between the version of the proposed reality therein and the conventional ones, even if it fails to project into sensory experience. Such description is still irrefutable. I insisted originally that there are different categories of questions that we could ask to distinguish one theory from the rest - ontic, epistemic, ethical and antropological. Some are distinguishable only through some of these questions, but to me, all should be distinguishable in an unambiguous manner as ontic descriptions or they are synonyms to another theory.

    Some other caveats can demerit my earlier criticisms of dualism. You asked me, why we choose materialism over solipsism in practice. Those are not ontically equivalent theories, in effect, because of the solitude vs material coexistence issue, but they are epistemically indistinguishable, so we cannot really choose between them. But because they are producing different view on the virtues of other pursuits - moral pedagogy, the scientific method - we are implicitly committing to one or the other when following those pursuits. This presents another question. Facing the many hypotheses, some of them will be adopted in practice. They will become evident when we implement institutions like prescriptive ethics, the scientific discourse, the political discourse, etc, without actually discarding the alternative theories in principle. This is slightly different then what is happening in the physical sciences, where some objective criteria can be used to select between equivalent models of the empirical data. Criteria not involving the descriptive power of the theory (accuracy, completeness). The obvious pragmatic virtues of minimalism and simplicity can justify making a theory canonical or even dogmatic. Then, the less obvious quality of continuity from previous theories can also make such difference. I am mentioning this practice of arbitration, because since philosophy tackles more complex aspects, additional criteria are in play, such as ethical neutrality, purposefulness, etc. These are not arguments of the validity and soundness of the theory, but rather factors that decide whether society adopts the stance of its hypothesis when committing social energy. Hence, dualists can argue that their views, when compatible with the observed world and sufficiently clearly explained, should be chosen for their socio-political effects (ethically pedagoic and therapeutic qualities).

    Another caveat that I should mention, which I already did in a recent thread, is that empiricism relies on intuitive convictions. Namely, in the soundness of reason (logic applies to the world), the objectivity of the sensory experience (we can corroborate and attest to empirical statements), the applicability of the inductive method (proper natural laws exist, i.e. reproduciblity remains consistent over time), the utility of statistics (statistical methods of inference are net positive effect to decision making at large). Within the materialist worldview these can be explained by Darwinism. The explanation has to be that the aptitude relying on those intuitions has supported the sustenance of the utilizing subjects and the inability or disinclination to use those instruments has resulted in some categorical extinction. Thus, like Hume, we cannot rationally or empirically justify the correctness of empiricism (even though we confirm it case by case through satisfactory outcomes), but we are compelled with innate conviction to rely on it, because this is our survival programming and nature's implicit answer. A non-empiricist, non-materialist, such as a dualist, would rightfully object that the disparagement of dualism is focused on its irrefutable presuppositions, whereas the blind convictions of empiricism get a free pass. There are multiple arguments that can defend the empirical perspective, but they are unfortunately frail. First, the scientific method is at least retrospectively confirmable, whereas certain kinds of dualism are completely untestable. This relies on the idea that precedent evidence is valuable, which a dualist might object as another inductive assertion. We could argue that the scientific method's intuitions are more compelling, literally, in the physical sense, in the Darwinian sense, in the biological sense, since they are not inferred, but are conferred by irrepressible external forces or inherited as irrepressible instincts for survival. Here, a dualist, especially a theist or spiritualist, could claim that their private beliefs are equally irrepressible for them and just cannot be conveyed logically. That doesn't exonerate ambiguity in my opinion, but for beliefs that are at least definite, each presupposition can be defended with a sense of irrepressible faith. This style of defense depends on the subjects ability to discern cognitive bias from inherent knowledge, which I doubt anyone can do. That is why I recommend at least skepticism on all matters of ideology, rather then unshaking devotion and commitment. Unfortunately, there is little more that can be said on the subject. We should barely hope that our collective efforts are in sensible agreement (fat chance) and we don't act counterproductively.
  • Comment and Question
    But is this at all necessary? Isn't it possible that dualist hypotheses with connectivity CAN be constructed without anyone asking but where is this theory in space and how can I grasp it with my fingers? — magritte
    I would claim that if a proposition is not elaborated in terms that can be experienced, witnessed somehow, we cannot truly call it a hypothesis. I concur that it may be presumptive to insist that the terms refer to material aspects of life, but if they do not, the only way in which the proposition can be corroborated (on earth anyway) is through spontaneous agreement of intuition. Which doesn't appear to be all that effective for the philosophy on dualism, because it remains a divisive subject. If the proposition is not elaborated, it can be part of the discourse, in the positive or in the negative, but since it cannot be asserted even in principle, it is not a hypothesis. Second, a theist or a spiritualist is not claiming a hypothesis, but making a conjecture, even an assertion. According to my views, even materialists do that all the time - make conjectures based on unproven assumptions - but they are at least compelled to do so from emancipated forces in the external world. (And I don't mean just empirical evidence, but also sustained practices, biological dispositions.) I fail to see the motivation of a dualist to decide against the other choices - solipsism, intersubjective idealism, panpsychism and pantheism and claim dualism in particular. There doesn't seem to be enough particular arguments for it stemming from experience, in contrast to the other choices. It appears to be based on personal bias. Thirdly, if a hypothesis of dualism makes no physically tangible claims, then I fail to see how it distinguishes its description even conceptually from solipsism. I am not saying that all variants are like that. But certain flavors of dualism, particularly theistic dualism, are not even trying to be definite. (They rely on an "either you get it, or you don't" style of persuasion. Granted, life is like that in the end, based on intuition, but apparently the message does not translate well to everybody, so we have a problem for the philosophical debate.)
  • Comment and Question
    Sure but I don't see what that has to do with anything. The emotion of love is represented differently in the brain from the concept of love. Ok.... Now what? — khaled
    The point was that you appear to think of two different references "the feeling of love" and "the synaptic activation of love" as referring to different phenomena, because they are differently expressed. I was remarking that this is not necessarily so. If it is correct that self-reflection manifests as a second order mental activity in a separate set of synaptic connections, there could be any number of synaptic expressions (and linguistic expressions) referring to the one unique original mental process, if those references are produced through different congnitive loops - internal cerebral loop, sensory loop of immediate observation of behavior, sensory loop of aided observation of the underlying physical causes. You are essentially asking, how can "the king" and "Arthur" refer to the same thing, if obviously they embody different ideas. That is because the same referrent is designated through different perspectives. And, if my neuroscience hypothesis is correct, those perspectives are second-order synaptic expressions, different from each other and the expression of the original phenomena, but amorphous. As a side note, not all animals can come to the realization that they are their image in the mirror. (Edit: I meant, that they are the object perceived through the image in the mirror. I hope that we wont have to start an argument over the semantics of the "image".) Thus, understanding that multiple references acquired though different cognitive pathways have the same referrent is an evolved feature of select number of species. (I think dolphins and guerillas or chimps, I am not sure.)
  • Comment and Question
    But my contention is that many phil. theories THEMSELVES lead to solipsism. — GLEN willows
    Having the least amount of presuppositions is the most rationally correct approach, indeed. But it is also the least useful in practice, and philosophy, albeit the most abstract of sciences, still has some interest in its utility in the pragmatic sense. It is very important philosophically to explain what the assumptions are and to investigate their significance, so I am not dismissive of solipism at all, but extreme reductionism results in absurdism. Ultimately, everything lies on some amount of blind conviction. For philosophical purposes, I contest even "cogito ergo sum" (even though I wont go there, because I know I will sound delirious), but like Hume, I don't live that way.
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