Doesn't seem to say anything about what we can or can't talk about. — Michael

...only accessible first-person. — Andrew4Handel

That's not me, that's Andrew. He says that it is "only accessible first-person"; only "I have a pain", no "He has a pain" and no "Andrew has a pain".

Yep.

I'm not saying that only I can refer to my pain. You can refer to my pain as well. — Michael

Yep. That's why your pain is not just a thing inside your head that only you can refer to. If it were, no one else could talk about it.

That's the problem with @Andrew4Handel's proposal that "the experience is private and only accessible first-person" - it implies that only he can talk about such an experience.

See

This is a basic problem first of even knowing whether similar/the same phenomena are experienced the same way because the experience is private and only accessible first-person. — Andrew4Handel

If "Only accessible first-person" means that one can only talk about it to oneself, then it is private in the requisite sense, and drops out of consideration.

But we do talk about red and pain, so they are not private.

So they are not "only accessible int he first person"

You can talk about my pain. Pain is not just "in my head". It is public, shared, part of the world. Sure, you cannot feel my pain, but that's just what it's being my pain means.

I'm not saying that there's a language that only I can understand. I'm saying that words can refer to things that only happen inside our heads. — Michael

:grin: If the words only refer to things inside your head, then it's private. As in, If only you can refer to your pain, then I cannot refer to your pain. And if no one else can refer to your pain, then you are " using a language that only (you) can understand".

I dunno. Can't see why you are not following this. It's certainly not equivocation.

I can talk about something that only happens inside my head. — Michael

Of course you can. So it's not private. That's the point.

A private language is one only you understand.

Just because it only happens inside my head isn't that I can't talk about. — Michael

But if you can talk about it to others, then it is by definition not private.

And so, since we are talking about it, it's not happening only inside your head.

Oh, Michael. The first is by way of assumption in the reductio of the beetle argument that shows the second to be problematic. If one sets up a private thingie, one becomes unable to talk about it. Hence there can be no private thingies in our little chat.

I was shown a copy of what is in your box. — Michael

Ex hypothesi, this cannot be done. You can't show me a copy of your pain, or your red qual.

Irrespective of how I use the word, it refers to and means something to me. — Michael

Even if you can refer to it, and that is not clear, it does not refer to anything someone else can refer to, so it drops out of the conversation.

And how could you tell that what you are referring to, by "x", now, is what you were referring to when you christened it "x"?

By private phenomena I don’t mean phenomena that can’t be talked about. I mean phenomena that “happens” to one person but not to another. — Michael

This seems to me to be the same as the beetle. The beetle "happens" to one person but no other, and as a result drops out of conversation.

So sure, my pain is felt by me. That's why we call it "my pain". I said that above. What of it?

Problems occur when someone makes claims such as that "you cannot know what my pain is like". Happy to talk about that on the other thread, but here, can we go back to Hoffman, or at least to why synaesthesia might be problematic for Wittgenstein?

Edit: continued on Problems studying the subjective

A private language is a language that someone else cannot understand. Hence, if something is private, the it is not available for discussion.

Yet synesthesia, and pain, and the colour red, and so on, are available for discussion. Hence they are not private.

So there is something deeply problematic in philosophical discussions that propose private "phenomena" that they then proceed to describe in detail.

Anyway, that's a side issue to your suggesting that synesthesia is problematic for Wittgenstein. Have you droped that view?

I'm also not keen on behaving like Mww and Meta by discussing material that does not address the OP. Can we move back towards Hoffman? There's another new thread relating to Private Language, we can go there if you like.

Far and away the biggest problem with "studying the Subjective" is that it is very unclear what "the subjective" is.

Because if something is available only to you, and to no one else, then it cannot be a useful part of our conversation.

You may not be familiar with this:

293. If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word “pain” means a must I not say that of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?

Well, everyone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case! – Suppose that everyone had a box with something in it which we call a “beetle”. No one can ever look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. a Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have some- thing different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing con- stantly changing. a But what if these people’s word “beetle” had a use nonetheless? a If so, it would not be as the name of a thing. The thing in the box doesn’t belong to the language-game at all; not even as a Something: for the box might even be empty. a No, one can ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.

That is to say, if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of ‘object and name’, the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant. — Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

So why is that evidence that he means something different by the words “red” and “green” but the person who tells me that the number 7 is red is evidence of synesthesia? — Michael

It isn't evidence at all, of any private unsharable phenomena.

His experiences, the things he talks about, definitely are private; I can’t see them for myself. I just have to take his word for it that things are as he says they are. — Michael

Sure, but that does not mean you have no idea of what he is talking about. We do understand when someone else talks of their pain, despite not being the one experiencing it. And we do understand what synaesthesia is, and we understand that it happens to them but not to us. I rather think that if you hold it to be private, then it's up to you to explain how you are using the word.

But let's look at what we agree on. We agree that some folk have synesthetic experiences, but that I am not amongst them – are you? We agree that there are a variety of such experiences, from sounds associated with colours through to feelings associated with seeing someone touching someone else.

So, going back to your question, how does any of this pose a problem for Wittgenstein, or for Davidson? It seems to me to reinforce his point, that what we talk about is public, and if it is private it drops out of our conversation.

And that is pretty much what I would offer as "what I mean" by private and public.

In order to know what a pulsating headache is like you have to have had one. — Andrew4Handel

What's a pulsating headache like? Well, it's pulsating...

So you don't have to have had one to know what it is like.

Likewise if I read a list of pregnancy and menstruation symptoms I would still not know what the experience was like because I am male bodied. I can't experience having a uterus. — Andrew4Handel

You won't have experienced it, sure, but it doesn't follow that you know nothing about what it is like.

I am comfortable in the notion that my pain/experience is similar enough to other people's pain/experience — Tom Storm

Also, consider mirror-sensory synaesthesia

just as I can’t tell that someone sees the number 7 as red — Michael

Yeah, you can, because they can tell you. Indeed, that's how we know about synaesthesia. It's not private.

They are referring to some aspect of their experience that, perhaps in principle, I am unable to access for myself. — Michael

Sure. You do not have my pain. That's just a fact of the way "pain" works – of the grammar of "pain". There's nothing "in principle" that prevents my feeling a pain in your toe, except that that is what we mean my my toe and your toe.

...quite literally... — Michael

How could you tell they see the water as green? Ex hypothesi, there is no distinction here. What difference would there be between the critter saying "There is a good quantity of water" and "the water is green"?

What does "private" mean here? Sure, I don't see red when I hear C♭, but I do see red and I do hear C♭. We have a common language for a shared world in which the synesthete apparently has curious experiences that we can discuss.

I have some sympathy for where you are trying to go, but I suspect that you will not be able to formulate the problem clearly.

I don't see a problem here. Are you suggesting that synthesis is private? No, it isn't since we can talk about it.

For example, an organism tuned to fitness might see small and large quantities of some resource as, say, red, to indicate low fitness, whereas they might see intermediate quantities as green, to indicate high fitness. — green flag

Yeah, odd. So applying, just for a discussion point, Davidson's radical interpretation, how would one know that the posited creature was seeing green, and not seeing quantity? The critter would say "the water is green" when there is the right amount of water, and "the water is red" otherwise; so a better account would be simply that for the critter, "red" means the wrong quantity of water in that creature's language, while "green" just means "the right quantity of water". That is, one cannot divorce the meaning from the use.

Yes, another rookie error.

If two people have headaches there is no way of comparing whether both of them are having the same type of pain. — Andrew4Handel

But that's not right...

Migraine

pounding
pulsating
“sick” headaches (due to associated nausea)
throbbing sensation
Tension headache

squeezing
tightness
vise-like
Cluster headache

horrible
severe
suicide headache
worst pain ever
Indomethacin-sensitive headaches

jabbing
jolts
lightning bolts
shock-like
stabbing — Here's How to Accurately Describe Your Headache to a Doctor

and so on.

So the premise of your argument is misplaced.

This is a basic problem first of even knowing whether similar/the same phenomena are experienced the same way because the experience is private and only accessible first-person. — Andrew4Handel

No, they are not. All such phenomena are public: we can and do talk about them. The Private Language argument applies here.

The notion of "subjective", private stuff is fraught with incoherence, misguiding many a discussion. If it is private, then it lies outside our discussion. If it is part of our discussion, then it is not private.

For that matter - is the Interface Theory of Perception falsifiable, in Popper's sense. — Wayfarer

Good question. We'd need a good formulation of it to check.

It strikes me as muddled from the start, in that it says the document icon on my desktop is not the real document. It's just not clear what the word "real" does here. Where is this mooted "real" document? On RAM? On the hard drive? The printed version? There simply isn't something that counts as the real document, beyond our saying it is so.

SO to my eye the whole argument is founded on a false presumption of an unambiguous "reality".

I reckon one could give a decent defence of scientific realism as an outcome of instrumentalism; where realism is just holding that sentences about electrons are either true or false. Might think on that a bit.

We can also question just how significant the difference is between taking something 'seriously' as opposed to 'literally' — green flag

Boring, maybe, but also pretty decisive.

So the snake is... and here I'm trying to work out what it is Hoffman would say... some sort of community of interweaving conscious agents.

And yet, if the snake bites, you die. So "The snakebite is poisonous" is true even if the snake is not real? How's that?

Seems to me that instead we have two different descriptions of the very same thing, one as a snake, the other as a "community of interweaving conscious agents" or whatever – happy for any of Hoffman's defenders to set out an alternative – two descriptions doing very different things, but about the very same thing. And if that's so then the snake is as real as the "community of interweaving conscious agents".

That is, if his conclusion is that there are no snakes, then it does not follow from his argument. He can only reach a much less impressive conclusion, one that will not appeal to the boys quite so much.

He's just pushing a rhetorical point that is unsupported by his actual account, that we should treat his "conscious agents" as more real than snakes and trees and the other stuff around us.

He's playing on the word "real".

The most famous paradox in modern science is the wave/particle duality. — Gnomon

That's not a paradox. The equations of QM are very clear, and certainly not contradictor. You cannot use them as an example of accomodating a paradox. Shut up and calculate.

Because evolution is in the headset, it explains what happens in the headset.

But if it is in the headset, it's not happening in the world.

So homo erectus never really fucked another homo erectus - that's all just stuff in the headset; and so there was never an opportunity for evolution to occur - it was all just headset stuff.
— Art48

But "conscious agents" is Hoffman term's for what lies beneath the headset. — Art48

In which case conscious agents are just the trees and rocks an Homo Erectus of which we already talk, and his theory amounts to little more than a mathematical definition of something he - dubiously - claims is the same as consciousness.

My cynical self says that the editor rubbed their hands in glee. A perusal of the clientele even of this forum shows a huge market for scientism, and for scientists and engineers dabbling in philosophical issues, poorly.

If evolution is only a part of the "headset", how is it that it can explain that we are evolved conscious agents?

That's why I laughed at the piece I quoted earlier, his use of Wittgenstein:

Our penchant to misread our perceptions, as philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out to his fellow philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, stems in part from an uncritical attitude toward our perceptions, toward what we mean by "it looks as if. Anscombe says of Wittgenstein that, "He once greeted me with the question: 'Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?' I replied. 'I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth! "Well, he asked, what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?' The question brought it out that I had hitherto given no relevant meaning to 'it looks as if in 'it looks as if the sun goes around the earth. "Wittgenstein's point is germane any time we wish to claim that reality matches or mismatches our perceptions. There is, as we shall see, a way to give precise meaning to this claim using the tools of evolutionary game theory: we can prove that if our perceptions were shaped by natural selection then they almost surely evolved to hide reality. They just report fitness.
— The Case Against Realiy, p19 — Banno

Why not say "Well, what would a rock have looked like if the rock had been a community of conscious agents?"

It would look like a bloody rock. Nothing has changed. So the "case against reality" leaves everything just as it was.

Seems to me Hoffman hasn't understood the point Wittgenstein was making; and that Wittgenstein undermines the pretension that Hoffman will "change your understanding of reality".

'conscious agents' are not necessarily human beings, but might be completely unknown to us.
— @Wayfarer

Hmm, I wonder... aliens? Interdimensional beings? Dissociated alters of a universal mind? Poker playing dogs? — Tom Storm

Hoffman defines consciousness in terms of PDA loops. But further, it's not this or that thing that is conscious, but that consciousness "builds" this or that thing - the rock is your view of a bunch of conscious PDA loops. Despite this appearing to be a form of idealism, Hoffman claims it is a form of realism, since the PDA loopy thingies are real even when outside of your consciousness...

So perversely, rocks are not real but PDA loopy thingies are.

But also, rocks are just PDA loopy thingies.

I don't see why we can't just go back to saying that rocks are real. Doing so sorta cuts to the chase, if you see what I mean.

That is, it seems to me that Hoffman is abusing words like "real" and "reality" in order to make good copy.

It's worth noting that he apparently consults for advertising companies.

A similar, but more extensive, critique is found in

https://philpapers.org/archive/ALLHCR.pdf

Also mentioned above.

The Tallis article has already been the subject of discussion in this thread:

https://philosophynow.org/issues/154/An_Encounter_with_Radical_Darwinitis — Banno

Tallis' argument is clear. Hoffman claims on the one hand that "There are no such things as objects as they are usually understood as discrete items localized in space and time". But such objects are the very basis of the theory of evolution, and of science more generally. Hoffman thereby undermines the basis of his own theory.

Hoffman uses objective reality to deny objective reality.

He thinks he can do this because he thinks he can reconstruct reality. Hence his somewhat enigmatic rendering of consciousness as the PDA loop set out above, itself a rendering of his definition of "conscious agent" in terms of Markovian kernels. But exactly how conscious agents can engage in an evolutionary process that does not involve discreet individuals interacting is unclear.

If you are sympathetic, you might be able to explain Hoffman's view here.

A side note, on your suggesting that we accept paradoxes. Accepting a paradox is tantamount to accepting anything. (P & ~P) ⊃ Q. The Principle of Explosion. An explanation that contains a contradiction explains everything, and hence explains nothing. There is a reason philosophy attempts to be clear and consistent. If your theory is not clear and consistent, then it is not worth considering.

Roughly, yes.

Ah, thought you was referring to the book. That'd explain it. Past my bed time.

:yawn:

Anyone else watching the Renée Geyer Memorial?

So there are three aspects to the account:

1. Fitness beats truth
2. The interface theory of perception
3. Conscious realism

Fitness beats truth is the argument that we have evolved not to sense what is the case, but to sense whatever we need to in order to reproduce. The interface theory roughly says that the world we perceive is constructed by - not sure what exactly, but mind or consciousness or something - in such a way that we don't sense what is real, but made-up stuff, again in order to survive. Conscious realism argues that what is real are mini-consciousnesses described by the triangle above, and by some twiddly maths. And nothing but these is real.

Maybe at some point someone can set out 7 or 8 dot points summarising the gist of it. :wink: — Tom Storm

Yeah, Perhaps one of the folk who claim to understand it will do so.

Top of p100 — Wayfarer

Hmm. Don't see it. Penguin paperback?

The thing I'm suspicious about is that we don't know what is real outside our desktop metaphor. — Wayfarer

The looping consciousnesses are what is real...

Yeah, stretches credulity.

there is a reality but it's not apprehendable to humans in its 'actual form'. Is this not a version of Kant's noumena, etc? — Tom Storm

Well, what was Kant's noumena? There's not much agreement there. But Hoffman explicitly rejects comparison between his views and noumena, in that he claims we can know stuff about the ultimate reality - indeed, that's what his PDA supposedly sets out. Science can lead to a theory that is true. (Bottom p.82)

The index is a bit shit. I recall reading that, but now can't find it. Page? I thought it was followed by a back-tracking towards idealism.

Yeah, sorry it's not clearer. So Conscious Realism takes as fundamental some entity - he posits a particular quantum wave in some places - that can "act" in response to some "experience" which brings about a change in the "world" - and notice here he is already making use of intentional language. So begins consciousness. These loops interact, so as mentioned another loop can form a part of the "world", but they also may be able to take a place in the "experience" or the "action", substituting so as to produce increasing complexity.

Like Leibniz' Monads.

But these other loops can be unknowable, a bit like the thing-in-itself, and this seems to lead to Hoffman to realism, but I am not sure how to articulate that leap.