Why does this even need to be asked? Of course not. — frank

I think there's a relevant difference between believing literally like a fundamentalist and not believing "clearly"/in a "clear-eyed" way in the article's sense. The article is not aimed at fundamentalist Christians, it is aimed at those who believe in God and eternal punishment and nevertheless venerate/worship God. That it's a thorny and intimately felt question even by nonfundamentalist Christians isn't in question. If you worship a God who you believe tortures people forever, what does that say about you?

The answer could very well be 'nothing', however most would not say 'nothing' for admiring (pick divisive or perverse or monstrous figure of your choice). The moral force of the argument, as I read it, is pointed at a contrast. On the one hand how we would treat a Christian who believes literally in the claim that God eternally punishes with torture and worships the figure and on the other how we would treat just as sincere a believer in a mundane tormenter.

I don't buy the argument in the article, but I don't think it's bigoted and can immediately be dismissed as such. The author doesn't seem to show any prejudice towards Christians, and he goes quite a distance to provide rigorous argument and analogies. Worth looking at in depth if you don't agree with it.

I cordially invite the thread to up its game.

This is the problem with the thread. It purports to be a criticism of the doctrine of eternal punishment, but the title is"The moral character of Christians" as though no Christian has ever had the moral fibre to even consider the problem. The separation thus has to be maintained even as the difficulty is denied and puzzlement expressed at the feeble and off topic objections. and this from one who is won't to complain of the low quality of philosophy of religion on the site. — unenlightened

The 'I worship an evil God' -> 'I am evil' connection comes out more in the paper. Section 'Can we admire the believers?'. It would've been nice if more people in thread engaged with the argument. I think the difficulty and puzzlement of Christians with the faith is actually a decent point of attack on the article - not what they're puzzled about, the fact that it is a puzzle for them.

The article seems to require that believers have a 'clear headed' conception of their God's atrocities to be simultaneous with their worship in order to transfer that veneration to the atrocities of God and tarnish the believer's character.

The final paragraph references nonbelievers being understanding of believers due to lack of a clear/ unified conception of God the Benevolent and God the Eternal Punisher - salvation through cognitive dissonance or avoided thought.

I wonder whether it is even possible to worship the God of the bible in such a 'clear headed' fashion? It seems to me to have faith is to have your mind distorted around the object, rituals, practices, values, developmental environments and communities of faith. That would block the force of the argument: God forgive them, they know not what they believe. And they cannot know.

I'll drop it then. Thought it would be evident seeing as you already saw the relevance of commensurability.

Also no argument from you on the matter. Can you demonstrate that how the faithful evaluate moral actions is the same as how the faithless do?

Why would it matter - for the same reason you referenced commensurability earlier.

The way you phrased it makes it sound like how people evaluate actions is something they share, even if they disagree on which things get evalauted as good or bad. Whereas precisely what's at stake is whether how people evaluate actions morally depends upon whether they do or do not have faith. Method of evaluation, rather than result.

Well, yes, they do - because they result in actions, and these actions can be evaluated. — Banno

And if moral evaluation as a practice differed depending upon whether someone had faith or not?

So....as self-appointed spokesman for Everydayman, just let me advise you that he ain’t buyin’ it, for he has never once in his life ever realized anything of which the grounds of the discussion promises. And while I personally agree with the foundational premises of the discussion, I am in agreement with him that it doesn’t, and never will, make the slightest impact on humanity in general, who just plain doesn’t think in terms of ion potentials and energized neural networks, and therefore couldn’t possibly care less about them. — Mww

I dispute your ability to speak for the Everydayman since you are on this forum.

And you can say something similar elsewhere, but with similar issues. If I perform an act of kindness for a stranger, I don’t experience that as following the example of Jesus, for instance. I don’t know, not having experienced the alternative, but I suspect it isn’t. Categorization would be retroactive, right?*** But we’re talking about me comporting myself as someone who believes himself to be within the sight of God. That’s not just a matter of how I categorize myself or my behavior, is it? — Srap Tasmaner

I don't have any good answers here, and I'm not even sure my questions are good.

I agree with the intuition that it's not 'just' a matter of categorisation. I believe that if someone loses a faith they've grown up in and dearly/habitually held it, the loss has the capacity to change much of their intellectual beliefs and feelings about the world, in perhaps the 'adverbial' way you referenced earlier.

You could say that this is a matter of categorization, but is that all it is?

I think perhaps there's still a way of thinking about it in terms of categorisation - if you imagine a conceptual scheme as a way of putting experiences and concepts into the buckets of a taxonomy, maybe transitioning from a faith to a non-faith isn't just a 'rearrangement of extant buckets' - recategorisation given the same categories - it's 'creation' of new buckets, a 'deletion' of old ones, merging some old ones to make new ones and finally intersecting some old ones. Maybe you can't have a wank without bringing up a cluster of ideas regarding lust, punishment etc.

I think if a person has to go through a 'deprogramming' to lose a faith, or a 'programming' to gain one, faith should be expected to radically change how the world is evaluated; and that goes for moral as well as metaphysical matters.

So perhaps when considering differences in worldview:

Worldviews - I dislike the term - are not incommensurable, one with the other. We must be able to understand at least part of other views, in order to be able to recognise them as worldviews. — Banno

the assumption that the worldview of someone with a faith and someone without a faith are commensurable doesn't suffice to allow the practical evaluation of the faithful's claims to the other through any feasible use of language. In principle possible commensurability does not entail in practice achieved commensuration. IE, just because there might be a theoretical guarantee that you can talk about the same thing, doesn't mean you're ever talking about the same thing.

Perhaps a sticking point between both the faithful and the faithless in the debate is a matter of whether it even makes sense to call the entity believed in's morality into question like they're a person - as if the divine were a hypothesis the faithful cling to, or the divine were an agent.

I think it's a reasonable expectation for the atheist to hold that the faithful could articulate it that way, but it's also a reasonable expectation for the faithless to hold to actually spell out why they're not evaluating their divinity like any other inflicter of great pain - what's the resistance to that evaluation rooted in, really?

Are you doubting that it is a propositional attitude - that it is faith in something...? — Banno

I'm left with the impression that going down to a church and asking for an itemised list of things the congregation believes in rather misunderstands how they believe in the divine.

The impression I'm left with is that having a faith requires a certain necessary compartmentalisation of questions like this away from god, to the level where there's no feasible commensuration between someone who compartmentalises like that and someone who doesn't. To put it another way, moral language games involving Hell or God don't resemble moral language games without either in them. How can you tell? Well, look to use, people talking past each other...

I think that would be fine. There's been plenty of discussions before about the nature of the continuum. Just try and keep it away from the mathematical equivalent of pseudoscience.

@AgentTangarine, @TonesInDeepFreeze

Can you knock it off please? The thread title is "Infinites Outside of Math". You've turned it into a factual discussion about math. That Agent has... spicy takes of dubious correctness... on how infinite sets work is besides the point. Please feel free to take it to personal messages, though.

Agent - would it take that much effort to try to fact check what you've written if you're genuinely interested in it?

Tones - horse is dead now.

0-0.1] seems to contain less numbers than [0.1-0.99999...]: — AgentTangarine

EG: you'd find out that those repeating 9s after the decimal point become the number above in the limit. So if you write 0.999... that already equals 1, or if you write 0.0999... that already equals 0.1.

Can you break up a continuous interval, like [0.1-1], up in real points? Like 0.1, 0.2, 0.3,...,0.91, 0.92,...,0.110, 0.111,...,0.1222, 0.1223,..., 0.2111, 0.2112,..., 0.24444, 0.24445, ...0,2023432, 0.2023433, ..., 0.655555, 0.655556,.......,0.999999999999.... — AgentTangarine

There you've provided at most a countable set of countable sequences, which together turn out to at most countable.

If you're interesting in in these things, I'm sure someone involved would be happy to provide you with study materials.

↪fdrake Well, it might best be described as Banno's understanding of Davidson. Then if I have it wrong it's not his fault, and if I have it right he can take the credit. — Banno

:up:

Any chance I could get you to zoom in on this bit:

More formally, there's Davidson's question concerning the scientific validity of any such equation. Suppose that we identify a specific neural network, found in a thousand folk, as being active when the door is open, and hence conclude that the network is roughly equivalent to the propositional attitude "I believe that the door is open". If we examine person 1001, who claims to believe that the door is open, and do not find in them that specific neural network, do we conclude that we have not identified the correct specific network, or do we conclude that they do not really believe the door is open? — Banno

What is it about the concept of a neural network that makes it seem very specific and individually variable?

What challenge does the individual variability of neural nets play with the equation of a belief state with a type or behaviour of a neural net? (Token vs type identity questions here. )

Lastly, I'm really interested in where you got those two possibilities from in:

If we examine person 1001, who claims to believe that the door is open, and do not find in them that specific neural network, do we conclude that we have not identified the correct specific network ( possibility 1 ), or do we conclude that they do not really believe the door is open (possibility 2)?

Why is it the case that possibility 1 and possibility 2 seem to follow from the hypothetical scenario, and are there other possibilities?

Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression there's "something it's like" to have faith, something not describable as holding certain opinions but something that saturates your experience. — Srap Tasmaner

Something like a conceptual scheme?

I think this argument shows that there is a difference in kind between proposition beliefs and neural nets that mitigates against our being able to equate the two directly, while admitting that there is nothing much more to a propositional attitude than certain neural activity. That is, it is anomalous, yet a monism — Banno

Nicely done. Do you believe that's reflective of Davidson's position (since he proposed that term "anomalous monism"), or is it more Banno's than Davidson's?

As a rather selfish request, can you please provide more words and citations for these positions. By the sounds of it you're writing largely from Chalmers' perspective on things? To my knowledge it's rather contentious that consciousness goes 'all the way down' with functional properties if one is a functionalist. It's also ambiguous whether you're using 'all the way down' to refer to a panpsychism or whether bodily functions are conscious 'all the way down'.

More words please.

Though I should say, I have (from reading the papers you cited) some grave concerns about the route Chalmers takes to get here (if here is indeed where I think he is - I suspect my ability to understand what he's on about is substantially less than yours). I'm not sure that the modality is actually a viable approach if he's trying to get at the way we actually think. There's too little scope in a kind of 'this else that' model where I think It's more 'this until further notice', but I may have misunderstood. — Isaac

I'm not comfortable with the use of modality either, though I'll put my charity hat on. I'll assume that at least part of this discomfort regarding modality is rooted in the idea that models of neural networks don't seem to compute possibilities, they tend to compute probabilities.

For a reader that isn't clear on why that matters, something can have probability 0 and still be possible. Like picking the number 2 randomly out of the integers. Further, assigning possibility to a state value given another state value is a much different idea than assigning probability to a state value given another state value, the latter shows up in neural networks, the former doesn't.

Anyway, I'll put on my charity hat for why it's okay.

<Charity>

I don't know if employing modality as Chalmers does for studying the mind is really aimed at questions of how the mind works - like descriptions of processes or attempts at modelling the modelling process. I think it's aimed one level of abstraction higher - on the types of descriptions of processes or 'modelling the modelling process' attempts which could in principle make some kind of sense. EG epistemic content is posited as a type of mental content, not any specific means of ascribing epistemic content to an intentional state. The specific means that someone attains epistemic content of a specific configuration in practice are left uncharacterised in the paper. To my mind he had to introduce parameters for the scenarios he analysed to suggest the appropriate content. 'water' and 'xyz' as names in the twin earths one with water, arthritis and tarthritis in the other one.

So I don't think Chalmers needs to be judged on whether his papers produce descriptions which cash out in procedural descriptions of people's perception process and how consciousness works in general, I think they ought to be judged on the crucible of whether they're tracking the type of entities which are successful in those theories.

</Charity>

I'm not really convinced by that reasoning, but there you go.

Were there other reasons you thought that employing modality as Chalmers does might not be okay?

So, there's these strong connections which neuroscientists (to my knowledge) have yet to fully work out the function of between early areas of sub-conscious cortices and the hippocampus, an example might be the V2 region of the visual cortex. Usually a connection to the hippocampus is involved in consolidation of some memory, so it seems odd that such early regions would be strongly tied to it. One idea is that there's some higher level modelling suppression going on even in these early centres, like - 'is that likely to be an edge? Let me just check'. I think (though I can't lay my hands on any papers right now) there's one of these connections into the cerebellum too. — Isaac

This is super cool. Paper I linked seemed to indicate something similar to that, eg the microsaccades having directional biases towards required coloured stimuli. Assuming that the content of the attentional template of a microsaccade has its information being passed about the brain in the way you mentioned, anyway.

Would the intentionality in saccades best be called 'belief' or 'expectation'? — Janus

I think that's a big rabbit hole.

although not present to consciousness in propositional form, could be rendered as such? — Janus

I don't think the majority of eye movements can in principle be logged to consciousness - at least not in the standard way you would expect for a statement involving account of propositional content. When you see a person, the pattern of eye movements which elicited that information is quite clearly directed towards informative subobject features (or areas where they are anticipated/'believed' to be etc) which then get synthesised/combined into the distinct perceptual features we can then consciously identify in our visual field at the time. If the saccade movement has content which can be explicated, it doesn't resemble anything like the intentional state of belief directed toward the visual content the saccade helps elicit (the representation/image/look of the person). Eye movements haven't seen what you've seen, because they are how you've see what you've seen.

You can tell what Terry Pratchett referred to as 'lies to children' about the content of saccades in terms of propositions, though. EG, someone might 'look at a chin to provide more information about the orientation of a face', but there's no conscious event of belief or statement associated with what the saccade's doing at the time, the speech act which associates the propositional content with the saccade is retrospective.

Analogy, it's like saying the content of this pile of Lego blocks is castles because Lego in general can be used to build castles.

If the criterion you're going for with 'the content of the saccade is propositional' is 'the content of the saccade can be set out as a proposition the agent is conscious of at the time', then it's false because we're not conscious of most saccades at the time. If it's 'the content of the saccade can possibly be set out as a proposition by a conscious agent after the fact', I'd be more inclined to agree that the content is propositional, with the rider that someone who accepts that criterion seriously strains the connection between propositional content and intentional acts - since propositional content and intentional acts no longer need to occur together in the same event for the retrojected content to count as the target of the intention at the time... Or alternatively if someone were to state that all beliefs amount to in total is a language game of telling 'useful lies to explain our behaviour' and didn't really care about their literal truth, I'd buy that too.

There are reasons why people describe saccade content like this: "During the search phase (visual exploration for an object), subtask relevant features are attentionally prioritised within the attentional template during a fixation', even when they're speaking about a specific sub part of a perception (a single time the eyes still).

Last time I went through that with @Banno, I recall falling into the trap of providing 'lies to children' examples to flesh out what the author was writing about from their example, which was turned into proof that I could explicate the content. This time I would advise any reader to guess precisely the object the person was searching for and what the 'subtask relevant features' and 'attentional template' are based on that.



(Proof I'm not making shit up about the eye movements and features).

Do they have to believe in non-determinism of some sort? After all, our bodies have not been around forever (though mine sometimes feels like it has!) — Isaac

I think being a content or vehicle internalist is independent of non-determinism. If determinism is the claim that mental content or mental vehicles have their behaviour completely determined by prior states, or past events, that leaves the type of relationships possible between mental contents and how mental vehicles work largely untouched. Similarly, if someone's an externalist, they could believe the environment is has some entirely random states in it. Determinism/non-determinism regarding mental events to me seems like a question of to what extent past events constrain present events, rather than a question of which events together count as mental or how mental stuff works.

A move which gets taken is to massage the notion of dependence and the type of content. You could 'bite the bullet' of whatever externalist argument you like which was dedicated to mental content of type X and say "Yes, type X as a whole has some external dependence, but type X1 which is a subset of X does not", I think that type of mental content gets called 'narrow'.

A narrow content of a particular state is a content of that state that is completely determined by the individual's intrinsic properties. An intrinsic property of an individual is a property that does not depend at all on the individual's environment. For example, having a certain shape is, arguably, an intrinsic property of a particular penny; being in my pocket is not an intrinsic property of the penny. This is because the penny's shape depends only on internal properties of the penny, whereas the fact that it is in my pocket depends on where it happens to be, which is an extrinsic property. The shape of the penny could not be different unless the penny itself were different in some way, but the penny could be exactly the way it is even if it were not in my pocket. Again, there could not be an exact duplicate of the penny that did not share its shape, but there could be an exact duplicate that was not in my pocket. Similarly, a narrow content of a belief or other mental state is a content that could not be different unless the subject who has the state were different in some intrinsic respect: no matter how different the individual's environment were, the belief would have the same content it actually does. Again, a narrow content of an individual's belief is a content that must be shared by any exact duplicate of the individual. (If some form of dualism is true, then the intrinsic properties of an individual may include properties that are not completely determined by the individual's physical properties. In that case an “exact duplicate” must be understood to be an individual who shares all intrinsic nonphysical properties as well as physical ones.) — SEP on Narrow Content

Phenomenal stuff, what is it like to be you stuff, can be thrown into the narrow content category. I'm clearly not sympathetic with that, but it's a clear idea. If there are instrinsic properties to some mental content, those aren't relational properties, determination is a relational property, so those intrinsic properties aren't determined, but that means some part of mental content is not determined by external states since whatever 'internal states' determined that content suffice to... determine it. Not sympathetic, but...

There is less ineffable/radical way of interpreting narrow content - like afaik Chalmers does. Recall that content externalism was the claim that every mental state's content is determined in part by some non-bodily or otherwise external cause, and internalism was the claim that that not every mental state's content is determined in part by some non-bodily or otherwise external cause. That lets you nominate a type of content and perhaps a type of determination to be an internalist regarding. So an internalist can be an externalist regarding most if not all types of mental content, but still be an internalist in some regard because they are an internalist regarding some type of mental content. Externalism says all, internalism says not all.

An ambiguity in that ambiguity clarification (sorry) is that if internalism regarding content regards content independent of state which the content is of, then it's quite different from considering content as part of state. EG if you have a qualia of the smell of your coffee, the overall state of smelling it stands in a relationship to the stimulus (and thus might be thought of as 'being wide') but the particular qualia profile of your coffee can still be intrinsic and thus undetermined. If you slice up the content of experience, you can partition out the intrinsic from the non-intrinsic bit, and the intrinsic bit is narrow, even if you wanted to say that all states are broad and that people are 'in the world'. I don't know how popular that is as a move, or how important that wrinkle is.

Anyway onwards, IEP has a summary of a point Chalmers has made about a candidate type of narrow content, what he calls epistemic content in this paper. I won't even pretend to understand the guts of the argument. Here's the IEP summary:

David Chalmers builds on this conceptual role account of narrow content but defines content in terms of our understanding of epistemic possibilities. When we consider certain hypotheses, he says, it requires us to accept some things a priori and to reject others. Given enough information about the world, agents will be “…in a position to make rational judgments about what their expressions refer to” (Chalmers 2006, 591). Chalmers defines scenarios as “maximally specific sets of epistemic possibilities,” such that the details are set (Chalmers 2002a, 610). By dividing up various epistemic possibilities in scenarios, he says, we assume a “centered world” with ourselves at the center. When we do this, we consider our world as actual and describe our “epistemic intensions” for that place, such that these intentions amount to “…functions from scenarios to truth values” (Chalmers 2002a, 613). Epistemic intensions, though, have epistemic contents that mirror our understanding of certain qualitative terms, or those terms that refer to “certain superficial characteristics of objects…in any world” and reflect our ideal reasoning (for example, our best reflective judgments) about them (Chalmers 2002a, 609; Chalmers 2002b, 147; Chalmers 2006, 586). Given this, our “water” contents are such that “If the world turns out one way, it will turn out that water is H20; if the world turns out another way, it will turn out that water is XYZ” (Chalmers 2002b, 159).

(SEP also has one in its 'narrow mental content' article linked previously)

It might (IEP clarification) be an analogue to the 'Markov Blanket' idea as you use it to 'veil' the world from perceptions for the purposes of explaining mental states ((Chalmers paper on some related and underlying notions). As I read it and try to shoehorn it into this conversation, if you fix all the external states (facts, possible world truth evaluations) of a scenario and leave them unobserved at time t, you imagine all the internal states at time (t-1) just before they come into contact with the external states, and imagine the kinds of predictions that the internal states of the person can provide before being exposed to the current batch of external states - that system of predictions will completely rule out some things from occurring (as we think anyway, we might be wrong) and largely endorse some things, it will split up 'epistemic space' into what's plausible, irrelevant, implausible etc. But what splits up the predictions is arguably solely determined by non-external properties, since you just fixed them.



I imagine you maybe have some sympathy with a view like that? Because it seems you're quite happy to fix an instance of the perceptual chain and treat the current 'content' of the 'write instruction to memory' as what is said to be perceived, in a manner where the antecedent internal states determine what is logged or not logged to memory (arguably a form of paritioning epistemic space coincident with the write instruction).

This is intriguing, do we have some examples? If I've understood it right, could my theories about the role of social narratives fit here (always looking for interesting new ways to frame this stuff)? — Isaac

It fits as a form of content or vehicle externalism. If social stuff or processes count as determinative of mental content, and they are outside the body or brain, then that's (at least very close to) an externalist thesis regarding the relationship of social stuff to mental content. Similarly if social processes act as some kind of distributed mental process - cf Lakatos' term for reasoning with people 'thinking loudly' -, then social processes are vehicles in that regard. The latter seems like an extended mind thesis towards the social milieu.

I think essentially we'd be remiss if we didn't include our intentions toward an object in the act of perception, but again if we're not to prevent ourselves from being able to say anything at all, we have to be able to draw a line somewhere. I may be oversimplifying, but is there any reason why we shouldn't draw the line at the decision to act? If we're asking the question "Why did you hit your brother?" we might well include intentionality in the perception "he was about to hit me", did our aggressive intention have some role in the perception of the shoulder going back, the fist clenching - probably. But at the point of the message being sent to the arm to strike - that's the point we're interested in - not because it's got some ontological significance, but because that's what we asked the question about. At that point, there was an object (a brother threatening violence) which was the result of some perception process (plus a tone of social conditioning) and the object of an intention (to punch). I don't think it matters that the intention (to act aggressively) might have influenced the perception (a person about to hit me). We can have our cake and eat it here. We can talk about the way in which the intention influences the perception of the object before the question we want to ask of it and still have the final version* be the object of the intention we're asking the question about. (*final version here referring to the object on which the move to strike was based). after the action in question, the whole process will continue seamlessly, the perception might change a bit as a result of our interaction with the object, our intention might change and so affect the perception..., but we marked a point in that continuous process, simply to ask a question (why did you hit your brother) and to answer that question we need to 'freeze-frame' the movie to see what the object of perception was at the time the intentional decision was made. — Isaac

Think we see eye to eye there.

Like saccades, perhaps? Yes, I think there must be cases where this is true, but again, probably just some, not all. We'd be missing something if we wanted to model perception and action this way, but we'd be kidding ourselves if we didn't have such a model to explain things like saccades. — Isaac

Yes I see it as implausible that intentionality isn't right down in the motor functions considering the directedness of visual foraging, that it's not conscious, and that it's salience+causal relevance+information density based. I recall having a long argument with @Banno about whether the intentionality in saccades counts as a form of belief that wasn't propositional (I argued that it was not propositional), so that might be another point of tension with someone who's quite strict about the relationship of mental content to statements and truth conditions.

No, not at all, but it's what I was getting at with my clumsy introduction of stochastic resonance. What's inside or outside any Markov blanket is not necessarily the same as indies or outside a skull. That's true of our sensory receptors (for whom their first 'inside' node os actually outside the body) and it's true for our internal models (which may have nodes outside their Markov boundary - my stochastic resonance example - but inside the brain) — Isaac

I think I'm getting there now, thank you for the clarifications. I wanna put a note here about how this maybe intersects with the externalism/internalism debate on mental content.

I hope this helps contextualise some things, even if it's mostly a catalogue of ambiguities.

Broadly speaking, someone is an internalist about X if they believe X only is determined by/depends upon the body or mind of the individual which bears X. Like someone is an internalist about colour if they believe colour depends only upon the individual which sees it, literally 'it's in the eye of the beholder'.

Someone is an externalist about X if they they believe X is not only determined by the body or mind of an individual which bears X.

People can be internalist about an X in a few different ways: they might restrict the notion of dependence in some way, to allow X to be determined 'only' by the body mind in one flavour of dependence or in one subclass of the class X. EG, someone like Chalmers is an internalist about mental content, but only about a specific type of mental content (narrow content) which he construes as determinative of psychological states. Even though he believes the content of some types of mental content are 'broad' - depend upon things which aren't an individual's body or mind.

Maybe the first thing to do in terms of this debate is reframing it in terms of vehicle externalism and content externalism to nip an ambiguity in the bud:

Vehicle externalism, more commonly known as the thesis of the extended mind, is externalism about the vehicles of mental content. According to the thesis of extended mind, the vehicles of mental content—roughly, the physical or computational bearers of this content—are not always determined or exhausted by things occurring inside the biological boundaries of the individual. — SEP

The distinction between states and acts is, in the context of this form of externalism, a significant one, and the general idea of extended mind can be developed in two quite different ways depending on whether we think of the vehicles of content as states or as acts. Thinking of the vehicles of content as states leads to a state-oriented version of extended mind. Thinking of these vehicles as acts leads to a process-oriented alternative. — SEP

Mental content is not free-floating. Wherever there is mental content there is something that has it—a vehicle of content. Mental states (belief, desires, hopes, and fears, etc.) are natural candidates for vehicles of content. So too are mental acts (believing, desiring, hoping, fearing, etc.). As a rough, initial approximation, extended mind is the view that not all mental states or acts are exclusively located inside the person who believes, desires, hopes, fears, and so on. Rather, some mental states or acts are, in part, constituted by factors (e.g., structures, processes) that are located outside the biological boundaries of the individuals that have them. Thus, extended mind differs from content externalism not merely in being about mental vehicles rather than mental contents, but also in being committed to a claim of external location rather than simply external individuation. If extended mind is true, some vehicles of content are not, entirely, located inside the biological boundaries of individuals that have them. Rather, they are, partly, constituted by, or are composed of, factors that lie outside those boundaries. — SEP

If we're going to posit that the Markov blanket of an individual's perception process touches the environmental hidden states, that seems to be a form of vehicle externalism if it satisfies either form of vehicle externalism. I can't think of an easy way to relate the state version to our debate (but I'm sure it exists), so I'll ignore it. Focussing on the process based one:

I think Friston's account counts as the processed based vehicle externalism (at face value), since the environmental states do constitute part of the process of perception for him - and as we've talked about, it seems the Markov blanket of states involved in the perception processes extends beyond the body of the individual. Example, you're catching a ball, the current position of the ball (an external state) influences various sensory state nodes. Thus the external state is involved somehow in the perception process.

Maybe it could be construed that the ball isn't a 'physical bearer' or 'partly constituting' the process of perception - if you focus on what's 'logged to consciousness' as a meaning for 'what's perceived', it might be possible to argue that 'what's perceived' doesn't have an immediate dependence upon the external state values because the sensory states interface with the world and the internal states which are logged to consciousness don't. There's probably some wrangling regarding where you draw the line. If the 'dependence' is 'any sort of dependence' rather than 'proximate cause in terms of states in the model's graph', it looks to be vehicle externalist in the process sense, if it's the latter maybe it's still possible to be a vehicle internalist.

I also want to stress that this is talking entirely about dependence without talking about how content is determined. This isn't about 'what the information is' in perception, the overall values, it's about the relationships between information states - how information is passed around - in the process of perception. Topology/networking/relationality rather than individual state values/properties/qualitatives.

The latter is more similar to what content is. If the frequency of reflected light from a position in your environment is an environmental hidden state, then the 'content' of its perception might be thought of as a colour associated with a location (with usual caveats regarding priors etc).

But that doesn't do very well to bridge a gap between 'red cup' and state variables in the environment - especially because I can act to drink from a cup, but I cannot act to sip from a light frequency emanating from a location - the sensory data I act upon is never raw, so to speak. So there's a puzzle regarding bridging the 'content of a state in a neural network' with the content of an intentional act.

The content of a state in a neural network doesn't seem to be a good match for the use of the word 'cup', since using the word to refer to a cup involves a perception which consists in lots of states synergising together in a body-environment interaction - ignoring hallucinations/illusions. In the case of hallucinations and illusions maybe there's no body-environment interaction , but still in that case there's a complex synthesis of bodily states with each other to produce the hallucination - and the relationship of the cup to those states is just as mystifying. (Also probably of interest to @Banno).

Content externalism (henceforth externalism) is the position that our contents depend in a constitutive manner on items in the external world, that they can be individuated by our causal interaction with the natural and social world.

and an internalist when:

Content internalism (henceforth internalism) is the position that our contents depend only on properties of our bodies, such as our brains. Internalists typically hold that our contents are narrow, insofar as they locally supervene on the properties of our bodies or brains. — SEP

Which leaves a question regarding what mental content is. I think when we start talking about mental content in terms of desires, hopes, attitudes towards stuff... These get called intentional states, one of two things has to happen to make sense of them (though I'm sure @Banno would tell you that intentional states are directed towards statements (see here for related concepts, 'propositional attitudes' ):

Let's say I want to take a drink from my mug. I have an intentional state toward my mug, desiring to drink something out of it. I'm sure there are more than two ways of spelling out their content relevant to this discussion, but I'm going to write down two.

( A ) The content of my intentional state of wanting to take the drink from my mug is an attitude toward a mug. The mug is thought of as a synthesis of external, internal, sensory and active states all in feedback, and my intention toward the mug is actually an intention toward my current internal representation of the synthesis. Putting it loosely, the mug and my current bodily state are in a very definite and urgent collective organisation, which I then operate upon in the manner I do (I reach toward it, taste it etc).

If we think of this in terms of affordances, this puts the affordance ''for drinking'' in the mug, which I then action+intend.

( B ) The content of my intentional state of wanting to take the drink from my mug is an attitude toward a mug. The mug is thought of as a synthesis of external, internal, sensory and active states all in feedback, and my intention toward the mug is actually part of this synthesis.

If we think of this in terms of affordances, this puts the affordance ''for drinking' in the relationship between the mug and me, so perceiving it as I do now contains my desire for drinking it.

I think ( A ) invites perceptual intermediaries, since then all the different intentional states we have towards events are then separated out from perceptions. It would go external states -> representations -> intentional states(representations), rather than external states -representations> intentional states (this the same point I made regarding thinking of perception to be an arrow, here the arrow is labelled representation, rather than a node).

I think ( B ) doesn't invite perceptual intermediaries, but I think it's got other problems. I think interweaving intentionality into perception and somehow 'beneath conscious awareness' is a standard phenomenological move, Heidegger calls it 'circumspective concern', Merleau-Ponty emphasises intentionality as pre-reflective (have a quote from Phenomenology of perception regarding intentionality and sex):

“Erotic perception is not a cogitatio which aims at a cogitatum; through one body it aims at another body, and takes place in the world, not in a consciousness. A sight has a sexual significance for me, not when I consider, even confusedly, its possible relationship to the sexual organs or to pleasurable states, but when it exists for my body, for that power always available for bringing together into an erotic situation the stimuli applied, and adapting sexual conduct to it. There is an erotic ‘comprehension’ not of the order of understanding, since understanding subsumes an experience, once perceived, under some idea, while desire comprehends blindly by linking body to body. Even in the case of sexuality, which has nevertheless long been regarded as pre-eminently the type of bodily function, we are concerned, not with a peripheral involuntary action, but with an intentionality which follows the general flow of existence and yields to its movements. — MP, Phenomenology of Perception, 437

I'm inclined to let intentional states be non-conscious and let them saturate perception, I'm sure someone who thought of intentionality as directed toward 'already formed objects' like cups etc, the kind of intentionality imaginable by directing 'a desire to drink' toward a mug (which seems to me derivative of the first, but that's another tangent).

There was a final ambiguity I wanted to catalogue.

Another distinction between the kind of directedness state relations have in a perceptual neural network and the kind of directedness intentional states have is the directedness of an intentional state might be an emergent property of the whole perceptual process. So it could be an category error to talk about how 'cup related states join with sensory/internal/active states' as if this were an intentional relationship between an agent and a cup. Or a more simple error in considered scope of the perceptual process, in taking too small a subprocess for a perceptual modelling relationship of the cup to make sense ("that ain't a directed conscious state toward a cup, that's a composite object of reflected light and thirst!").

The same too maybe holds of content - it could very well be an emergent property (or aggregate state) of the perceptual process.

Shouldn't be too hard to specify what you mean? — frank

I told you previously what I mean by direct realism - at least the version of it I defend. It's a similar use of the term to the sensorimotor theory of perception paper I linked, and also similar to the description of perception in the enactivist section I referenced earlier.

There are other word meanings for direct realism, I gestured toward the 'reading off the world' one ('naive' realism) in thread too. Any particular position will be able to tell you what they mean when asked. The problem as I see it is threefold:

( A ) lots of contrary positions with the same broad labels, this might be because perception philosophies intersect with broader theory of mind ones and philosophy of language ones to a large degree.

( B ) the content ascribed to each position depends upon which position it's viewed from - the perspectives distort each other, you'll be able to find articles quibbling about presuppositions of certain word uses/argument patterns in the field (see how much of a quibbling preamble is required to determine what is meant by "qualia", "functional property", or a perception instantiating a property vs having a property inhere in a perception etc) to try and hedge against the history of theoretical baggage

( C ) it's probably not actually a misinterpretation to be supersensitive to theoretical baggage in the field because how experience is parsed depends upon how it's described, so something like vocabulary choice (or even whether an entity is conceivable) might have adverse consequences for articulating some other theory which needs a different vocabulary choice or labels that entity inconceivable/confused/a contradiction in terms. It makes it very difficult to make theories 'meet in an honest disagreement' when so much prefiguring/ground clearing jostling needs to be done.

(maybe also of interest to @Kenosha Kid).

On this I agree. It's an anachronism, and over-simplification. — Banno

:up:

There's too many ways of being direct or indirect to get into the specifics based on those terms alone I think.

Spinoza (arguably) has a concept of a qualitative infinity right at the beginning of his Ethics, propositions 1 through 8 introduce it. Infinity as the total lack of limitations or constraints.

↪CheshireMy philosophy teacher just confuses me a lot, first he says something, but then he says another thing that contradicts the other and I just get tangled up. — DesperateBeing

Being tangled up is part of the fun, I don't think it's a sign you're 'doing it wrong' so to speak. If you're trying hard to pay attention to philosophical ideas being presented, you will notice inconsistencies and points of tension. Sometimes those inconsistencies and points of tension aren't in the ideas being presented, even, sometimes they're in how you think about things! I'd take feeling confused and tangled up in the ideas as an encouraging sign, really. : D

One thing that can make the presentation of philosophy material a bit different from material in other classes is that there's a bunch of different ways that philosophy can be presented, and a lecture or class can switch between them sometimes.

( 1 ) Presenting a dispute or cluster of ideas together. Like if you're presenting what ethical theories are, and give examples of consequentialism, virtue ethics and deontology, you'll cover a lot of ground in the summary and there'll be loads of points of tension. Which isn't surprising, people argue 'internally' in these clusters of ideas all the time, like consequentialists arguing with other consequentialists. If this mode of presentation makes these idea clusters appear self contradictory, it might be intended to do so - since it's smearing a lot of things together that actually don't fit for the purposes of presentation without much technical detail.

( 2 ) Textual analysis of an idea - you're talking about particular ideas of particular thinkers with textual support. These are questions like: "What role did the wax argument play in Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy?" - particular thinker (Descartes), particular idea (how properties and bodies work together), particular text (Meditations on First Philosophy)

( 3 ) Presenting a dispute between two specific thinkers or ideas - this would be like you take a topic that two people disagree on, you summarise their positions (maybe with textual support) and what you think they disagree on, then you maybe get to provide a take on the dispute. Like consequentialism vs deontology or Mill vs Kant on ethics.

What's the best way to learn philosophy? — DesperateBeing

To pass a class (based on philosophy A level in the UK) you'll need to be able to demonstrate that you understand ideas you're quizzed on. That might be with textual support, or as suggested by having canned responses you've made which are precise and cover the needed material. EG see this list of exam questions and its marking scheme.

Question 1 there is:

Define (a) acquaintance knowledge, (b) ability knowledge, and (c) propositional
knowledge.

With indicative answers:

Indicative content:
• Acquaintance knowledge: having acquaintance knowledge is…
• …knowing / having knowledge of X (by experience of X)
• …knowing / having knowledge of X (a place/thing/person) by experience of X (it/him/her)
• … knowing of’
• e.g. I know Jim well; I know York (like the back of my hand).
• Ability knowledge: having ability knowledge is…
• …knowing / having knowledge of how to perform/complete a task/action
• …having the ability to perform/complete/carry out a task/action
• … knowing ‘how’…
• e.g. I know how to ride a bike; I know how to tie my shoelaces.
• Propositional knowledge: having propositional knowledge is….
• …knowing / having knowledge that some claim – a proposition – is true or false
• …knowing / having knowledge that p (where p is a proposition)
• …knowing / having knowledge that something is the case
• …having knowledge that is expressed in the form of a true proposition/sentence/assertion.
• …knowing / having knowledge of a fact/truth
• …Knowing ‘that’…
• e.g. I know that 2 + 2 = 4; I know that the sky is blue
• (Students might give a definition of a proposition (eg a declarative sentence) but need not do
so)
• Do not credit knowing ‘about’ something, as this does not sufficiently distinguish propositional
from acquaintance knowledge.

Another thing you'll be assessed on is your essay writing ability. Which roughly comes down to - is your argument precisely written, how much redundant information does it provide, does it hold together as an argument and also (very importantly) can you ( 1 ) anticipate counterpoints to what you've written, ( 2 ) contextualise them precisely in what you've written and ( 3 ) respond well to them. The principle of charity is a helpful rule of thumb here - do your best to understand everyone, and steelman their arguments if you are able.

For general advice about philosophy (as a hobby anyway): learning to enjoy the tangle you're in is necessary for enjoying long term study.

Good luck!

Yes. Completely agree. And if that's what 'direct' realism is, then you can sign me up, but if so, I'm left confused as to what 'indirect' realism could possibly be. Same for Banno's use of the term. I don't think I've ever been clear on this. — Isaac

I don't think the literature is clear on the distinction either AFAIK. Proponents of direct realism seem to do one of two mutually exclusive things:
( 1 ) Believe that when you see a red cup, you really are seeing the red cup, and was red cup before anybody interacted with it. Properties get 'read off' the world and logged into perception without transformation.
( 2 ) Believe that when you see a red cup, seeing it as a red cup is a useful summary/condensation and reflection of its real properties. You see it as a red cup, but you nevertheless see it.

Arguments against direct realism seem to focus on two points - that properties like being red aren't mind independent (notice this only targets ( 1 ) ), and exposing directly seeing the red cup (perceptual state is in direct relation with red cup) to various paradoxes (argument from hallucination, illusion etc). The purpose of this second flavour of argument seems to be to undermine direct realism in support of indirect (usually indirect representational) realism, because those paradoxes are seen to have more elegant solutions when you use (representational) perceptual intermediaries.

I believe it's also possible to construe ( 2 ) as a type of representation - a direct relationship of representation between red cup states and perceptual states of the red cup. Though it's a type of representation without perceptual intermediaries. I think Dennett's alluded to holding a position sympathetic to this (I can go quote hunting if required), something about body behaviours representing world behaviours without perceptual intermediaries. I'm not going to speculate further in this direction though.

I am quite sure that the forum is a non-representative sample of people who enjoy philosophy of perception. Philosophers of mind tend to be representationalist (at time poll was taken). I think the regular discussers in these threads are more likely than real philosophers to be sympathetic to embodied cognition, which seems to have a lot of overlap with ecological psychology approaches to perception, which are direct and possibly non-representational realist.

Ecological psychologists, on the other hand, deny that organisms encounter impoverished stimuli (Michaels and Palatinus 2014). Such a view, they believe, falsely identifies whole sensory systems with their parts—with eyes, or with retinal images, or with brain activity. Visual perceptual processes, for instance, are not exclusive to the eye or even the brain, but involve the whole organism as it moves about its environment. The motions of an organism create an ever-changing pattern of stimulation in which invariant features surface. The detection of these invariants, according to the ecological psychologist, provides all the information necessary for perception. Perception of an object’s shape, for instance, becomes apparent as a result of detecting the kinds of transformations in the stimulus pattern that occur when approaching or moving around the object. The edges of a square, for instance, will create patterns of light quite different from those that a diamond would reflect as one moves toward or around a square, thus eliminating the need for rule-guided inferences, drawing upon background knowledge, to distinguish the square from a diamond. Insights like these have encouraged embodied cognition proponents to seek explanations of cognition that minimize or disavow entirely the role of inference and, hence, the need for computation. Just as perception, according to the ecological psychologist, is an extended process involving whole organisms in motion through their environments, the same may well be true for many other cognitive achievements. — SEP on embodied cognition

Which can read like ( 1 ) or ( 2 ), Gibson's affordances are very similar to ( 2 ) (which afaik inspired Friston's work heavily?).

You will also find arguments between embodied cognition people (enactivists) and those who believe that perception is representational even without reference to the perceptual intermediary debate if you go looking.

Edit: meant to link this which talks about direct realism and enactivism.

No, as far as I know they're not. That was the point I was trying to make. I was giving an example of an input where the external/internal boundary made no difference in terms of being Markov separated. I could perhaps have used a hidden physiological state instead (might have been less confusing). — Isaac

I guess I don't see what the point you made is for then. It seems the following are true:
( 1 ) There are states.
( 2 ) Some stuff counts as a state, some stuff doesn't.
( 3 ) It's ambiguous when to count something as a state sometimes.
( 4 ) Neuronal noise doesn't have a state associated with its values (but it does have states associated with its precision matrix).

( 5 ) If you perceive environmental object X, X has external hidden states with it.
( 6 ) Those external hidden states are in direct contact with some internal states.
( 7 ) Direct contact means that the value of one state (external) influences the value of another state (internal) without passing through another state. A->B rather than A->B->C.
( 8 ) That means the Markov blanket of some internal states includes some external states.
( 9 ) A corollary of ( 8 ) is that the Markov blanket of all internal states includes some external states.

I think I can believe those things and draw a direct realist conclusion from Friston's work. Direct in the sense of the contact in ( 8 ), rather than perceiving reality 'unfiltered'. I don't want to conclude that we 'perceive the objects of the external world as they are' from that, I want to conclude that the values of external states actually saturate the perception process. (Box 1 here).

I think I've been playing fast and loose/using the vocabulary a bit wrongly in construing there being internal and external states, since 'internal states' are in the brain, and external states are outside of the brain - but sensory states and action states have connections to both internal and external states. I've been lumping in sensory states with internal states and action states with external states. Hopefully that hasn't done too much damage to what I've said.

Anyway, I don't think it follows from what I said above that "I perceive the state of the external world exactly as it is", just that "I perceive the states of the external world (using some model process)" and "That modelling process is in direct contact with the external world".

Yeah, this is basically the point I'm trying to make. We weigh steps differently. No-one even has a non technical name fo the activity of the retinal ganglia, but the external hidden states we call 'the world' or 'objects' or 'a flower'... we have names for that stage, it's of huge significance to us. What I'm arguing is that the most proximate stage which we weigh heavily enough to name it, conceptualise it, is what we refer to as 'mental image', 'memory', 'concept', 'motive' etc. — Isaac

Can you flesh out why from that it follows that we perceive mental images, memories, concepts etc? I don't see the connection.

OK, that works well for the flower, we can draw a hypothetical Markov blanket around all it's current states and consider that to be the first exterior node of our own perception. I'm not quite sure how that idea (which I'm fine with, as a model) fits in with how we might accommodate things like neuronal noise. They're happening 'within the body', but are surely as outside of the Markov blanket of our own perception process as the first rain the seed felt is outside that of the plant's current state? — Isaac

I don't know if noises are even uniquely associated with environmental or internal state variables in Friston's work. They're associated with functions which combine those state variables and a hierarchy level. So it doesn't seem clear to associate noises with environmental or internal states, and the 'markov blanket' of any noise term is determined by which hierarchy level it's on IIRC (see box 1 and 2 here). If you're referring to the noises at the same time as environmental states and internal states with the phrase 'outside the Markov blanket', I think that's a theoretical error since the noises aren't kept track of with state variables in the same way as environmental and internal states? They're instead kept track of with their distributional summary characteristic (the precision matrix of their joint distribution).

So, summarizing: there's more than one 'Markov blanket', if you wanted to look at 'the Markov blanket of our sensorium' that's got direct connections to environmental and internal hidden states, if you wanted to look at 'the Markov blanket of neuronal noise and environmental + internal states' it seems to me either to use more than one concept of 'state' (one for errors, one for environmental and internals) or to be a misapplication of the concept of 'Markov blanket'?

Putting it in less jargony terms, whatever errors we make in perception act upon the synthesis of sensory data rather than acting as their own sensory data. Errors are formed by the coincidence of discrepancies between emerging features of our perceptual landscape, rather than stored as their own form of sensory or environmental data (state). Part of the model are assumptions about how this error behaves in the aggregate.

The perceptual process is 1>2>3>4>5>6>7>8>9>1>2>3>4>5>6>7>8>9>1>2>3>4... where the numbers are all reals (even though I've just used natural numbers). Now we've removed the artifice of packaging up the process entirely. We want to take a 'snapshot' of the state of the system for our definitions, to answer the question "what are you looking at?" That snapshot is not going to come from an arbitrary number in that sequence, it's only ever going to come from the 9s. The conscious logging event (or maybe even the final step in it, if we come to terms with the fact that it too is a stepwise process) is not your average point in the process, it's the stopping point for any kind of third party access, we can't tell anyone what the signal from our retinal ganglia was, we can't tell anyone what just exited our V1, we can't tell anyone what photons just sped away from the flower's petals...We can't talk about any step in the process other than the last logging event. So even though that event merely feeds back into the perpetual process to become a step like any other, it remains significant to us in language, social behaviour etc. That, I think, gives the step immediately prior to it a justified priority when asking "why do we say...?" or "why do we do...?" the 'say' and 'do' parts are always going to be one of the 9s in the sequence so looking for 'why' should start at 8...regardless of an understanding that the cycle is continuous. — Isaac

If the transition from 9 to 1 could be thought of as a reset, I'd agree with the emphasis, but isn't it more that 9 provides a very strong prior for the next 1? So unless the prior effect's gone away by the time you get to the next 9, it seems to me too artificial to abstract from the process that 9 is the real content of 1. It's the proximate cause of 1's current form, in a context where non-proximate causes are still relevant - eg 9 is a filtered aggregate of 8.

Maybe a philosophical way of phrasing it, if you've got a chain like that, you can read the arrow as something like '1>2 = 1 informs the content of 2", if 1>2 and 2>3, you'd still have that 1 informed the content of 3 if that relationship is transitive.

In the real world it probably depends upon the weighting of steps, so probably true that step 9 'informs the content of' step 1 the strongest - there's still a question regarding where the content of step 9 'came from' and whether it's appropriate to say that '9 predominantly informs the content of 1' implies 'person perceives the content of 9'.

Regardless, it doesn't seem to me a valid inference to go from: "X predominantly determined the content of Y's perceptions" to "Y perceived X". Could be made a better inference with a theory of content determination - eg, what makes that inference true? What kind of thing can be substituted into X there?

True, but that assumes no distal causes can intervene in the perceptual process does it not, no neuronal noise, no transmitter suppression en route? If we break the chain at the seed because it's influence on the flower is only distal, then is there some way we can distinguish the many influences from inside the brain on the route between retinal ganglia and conscious logging such that they're categorically different from the way the environment affects the seed? I can' draw it properly by it might go... — Isaac

There's a flower moving about. It used to be a seed. I watch it moving.

Rather than assuming that distal causes 'can't intervene in the perceptual process', I think it's more accurate to say I was assuming that the distal causes are Markov separated from the current state of the flower. If you fixed the current material constitution of the flower, how it got that way doesn't matter. we'll see how it bends in the wind as a function of its material constitution and the wind.

Generalising that from the flower to the environment as a 'system of proximate causes', those material constitution variables which are associated with the values of hidden states (which we elicit/model) are proximate causes for what we see, which are Markov separated from their past by their current configuration.

- and we're troubled including the seed because of the stochastic influences which muddy it's causing the flower. But considering that we actually have...

seed>(plus stochastic external influences)flower>retinal ganglia>(plus stochastic external influences)conscious logging — Isaac

The point I was trying to make here:

Maybe if I can steel man a bit - maybe the point you're making is that it's unclear exactly how to extend what we are conscious of into the system of proximate causes of our environment when the causal network that leads to our perceptual acts is ambiguous - how do you chunk it up into nodes, and which parts are perception? Definitely agree with the presence of that ambiguity. If what the object of perception is, is equated to the antecedent step to the conscious logging event, then I think it's quite clear that the retinal ganglia firing event is the object of perception. — fdrake

is something you just illustrated I think. The 'nodes' of the causal chain are the word labels, the arrows are the causality relation. So in:

seed>(plus stochastic external influences)flower>retinal ganglia>(plus stochastic external influences)conscious logging

Seed is a node, flower is a node, retinal ganglia is a node, conscious logging is a node. In reality there's some sort of continuous feed forward from the retinal ganglia to the conscious logging and the two processes are interdependent, right? Perception models are cyclical, what's logged now is (part of) a prior for later.

If you severed out the logging bit - imagined it didn't exist - since the retinal ganglia bit and the logging bit are interdependent, you no longer have the same process.

Which means that when you draw a causal chain like that, seed>flower>retinal ganglia>conscious logging, there's a certain amount of artistry that goes into lumping parts of the causal chain together into distinct entities which are then labelled with words ('seed', 'flower') and become stages in the causal chain.

The ambiguity regarding what the nodes of a causal chain of perception should be transfers uncertainty to any definition of "the perceptual object" which seeks to distinguish the perceptual object by its antecedent to the logging node. Since the interdependence of the two makes it difficult to break the conscious logging event out of the perception process.

There's then a further ambiguity regarding whether it's correct to say that the antecedent event to the conscious logging event is what is perceived.

...the problem though (sorry) is with the feedback within the body. Take language. If I say "rose", the whole process, up to the sound exiting my mouth, is an 'in body' one. So to say that I picked the word 'rose' because there's a world state equating to 'rose' would be to break your own boundary distinction. I clearly picked the word 'rose' as a result of internal stimuli - body states. Since the signals triggering my speech centres were internal. Speech isn't a part of perception (another of our artificial boundaries), so we cant say it's all part of the body state response to the world state {rose}. — Isaac

I think that says 'some internal states in perception have internal states as proximate causes', not 'all internal states in perception have internal states as proximate causes', in Friston's model there's both. I'm trying to highlight the realist commitments contained in 'some internal states in perception have environmental hidden states as their proximate causes', I believe you're highlighting that 'some internal states in perception have internal states as their proximate causes'. . We can both agree.

So if I, instead of extending the chain, further dissemble it. Flower>retinal ganglia firing>conscious logging event, why can I not say the proper object of the conscious logging event is the firing of the retinal ganglia? We previously stopped the chain of causality at flower (not seed). — Isaac

Good point!

I can think of a deflationary answer to why we shouldn't be conscious of the seed - because while the seed and its growing environment is a distal cause of the flower's behaviour in the environment we're perceiving in, it doesn't form part of the system of proximate causes that our perception is responding to in our current environment. Seed caused flower to be there, wind's making it move, we see the movement.

Maybe if I can steel man a bit - maybe the point you're making is that it's unclear exactly how to extend what we are conscious of into the system of proximate causes of our environment when the causal network that leads to our perceptual acts is ambiguous - how do you chunk it up into nodes, and which parts are perception? Definitely agree with the presence of that ambiguity. If what the object of perception is, is equated to the antecedent step to the conscious logging event, then I think it's quite clear that the retinal ganglia firing event is the object of perception.

I think we've got some resources at hand to construe that 'the antecedent step to the conscious logging event' isn't an appropriate definition of a perceived object. An appropriate definition of an object which was logged consciously yeah, but there's a difference between what goes into our perception and what we experience. On pain of losing the 'unlogged' parts of the perceptual process which continually shape the emerging landscape of the content of our conscious awareness.

Do you think it's right to say that the conscious logging event is part of the perceptual process, or is it an external process which perception just 'writes to' once it's finished? Perception makes a package, sends it to conscious awareness, done. Or is it like 'perception is online, sending live feed to conscious awareness as part my internal function' - is conscious awareness a 'receptor' of the output of the perceptual process - a terminal node - or is it an interior node of the process of perception?

I personally make a stink about perceptual intermediaries in part because of the above ambiguity - going strongly against construing conscious awareness as a terminal node/passive receptor of data. Could be wrong there though. One reason for the stink is that if you label the parts of that causal chain:

seed->flower->retinal ganglia->conscious logging event

with whether the constituent processes are part of the body's process of perception (under the conception that conscious logging isn't a terminal node) you get: seeds aren't, flowers aren't, retinal ganglia are, conscious logging events are. In that regard it looks like:

(seed->flower) = world states
(retinal ganglia->conscious logging event) = body states

IE it looks like:

world states -> body states

and there's no 'intermediary' between the body's perception and world.

Another, perhaps deeper criticism, is that while it's possible to construe perception as a causal chain with components, as an overall process it takes environmental or bodily states and 'maps them' to inferred values ; which makes it functional or relational, so more of an bidirectional arrow (reciprocal/feedback relationship) than a node.

Like world<-perception->environment.

A final point of contention is that if perception requires environmental foraging, and exploratory acts are treated as part of the perceptual process (eg, adjusting to a load due to perception of heaviness), the exploratory acts are proximate causes of changes in environmental hidden states (where the weight is held), and thereby in direct contact with environmental objects - as proximate causes. Shift the weight, therefore proximate cause of weight movement.

This is just maths. Closing it.

This is just maths.

Yes, 2 is prime. The definition of a prime number is a natural number which is only divisible by itself and one. The divisors of 2 are 2 (itself) and 1. Therefore 2 is prime.

Going to close the thread.

The thread is just maths with little logic or philosophical content. If you want to discuss it, please have a read of the site guidelines and this guide of how to write an OP.

I'm sure there's something philosophical in what you've wrote, all you need to do is put in a bit more effort to make it come out. I'm going to close the thread.

I'm assuming because all objects belong to a system of value and meaning. — Tom Storm

Yes! That bit doesn't confuse me. The bit which confuses me is that objects are mini theories but don't worry about the theoretical import of the object when using it.

That's fair. Even objects are mini-theories :smile: — Kenosha Kid

Your feeling that any such concept brings with it the trace of its theoretical origins and connotations is what I'm arguing against. Things first, theories second.

Taking an analogy with cosmology, it would scupper useful discussion to hold that the concept of the cosmological constant brings with it the assumption of a steady-state universe _because that's what Einstein intended_. It's much clearer to have a healthy divorce between concepts (sense-data, qualia, cosmological constants) and theories. The confusion arises from hauling in the theory uninvited, not: — Kenosha Kid

This makes me very confused. Objects are mini theories, but don't worry about the theories using those objects imports to discourse?

"Qualia as phenomenal character. Consider your visual experience as you stare at a bright turquoise color patch in a paint store. There is something it is like for you subjectively to undergo that experience. What it is like to undergo the experience is very different from what it is like for you to experience a dull brown color patch. This difference is a difference in what is often called ‘phenomenal character’. The phenomenal character of an experience is what it is like subjectively to undergo the experience. If you are told to focus your attention upon the phenomenal character of your experience, you will find that in doing so you are aware of certain qualities. These qualities — ones that are accessible to you when you introspect and that together make up the phenomenal character of the experience are sometimes called ‘qualia’. C.S. Peirce seems to have had something like this in mind when he introduced the term ‘quale’ into philosophy in 1866 (1866/1982, para 223)." — frank

I mean I know what qualia are.

The canonical example there is the colour of a coloured patch, and they're 'available to introspection', if you read through PP that's exactly the framing MP is taking shots at. You have an isolated stimulus as a canonical example rather than a gestalt one, a focus on introspective scission as a fuel for quale examples (the qualities that 'together make up the phenomenal character of the experience' - together implying an individuating/atomising introspective operation to split the fire's red from the fire) rather than pre-introspective unity (all the figure ground examples, the shadow on a red example).

I thought you would be able to provide me with a relational account of individual qualia, or at least a reference to it. If there is indeed a relational account of individual qualia and they aren't born by an underlying 'sensory datum', I'd be more inclined to agree they're consistent with MP's points.

What's a holistic conception of qualia? — frank

A conception of qualia which isn't the name for the isolated 'red' of the fire, or the 'red-welcoming' mixed quale shorn from its generative environment. Which alternative conception of qualia to the one you imagined I was attacking did you have in mind, and can you give me a paper that talks about it?

To now claim that he's saying that qualia are illusions, you'd have to make this independence a necessary feature of the concept of qualia. — frank

Can you please give a source that spells out a candidate holistic conception of qualia that you're gesturing towards?

How on earth do you not see that he's saying that perception is infused with ideas? — frank

I don't. MP's a direct realist in the sense that the environment of body is the direct object of that body's perception. The 'infusion of ideas' occurs in perception, which is a relationship between that body and its environment. Because there's no intermediary or middle man, perception is in direct contact with the world - the imagining and the seeing and the actions and the feelings all get bunged together as components of a direct contact, rather than having perception itself only operate upon sensory inputs, perception itself contains the processes by which a body elicits and organises its sensory input.

It's a unit of pure sensation. Which is a category he undermines repeatedly. Pure sensation I take as meaning intrinsic, nonrelational properties of (hypothetical/criticised) sensory units. Extending the previous P176 quote:

“The light of a candle changes its appearance for a child when, after a burn, it stops attracting the child’s hand and becomes literally repulsive.2 Vision is already inhabited by a meaning (sens) which gives it a function in the spectacle of the world and in our existence. The pure quale would be given to us only if the world were a spectacle and one’s own body a mechanism with which some impartial mind made itself acquainted.3 Sense experience, on the other hand, invests the quality with vital value, grasping it first in its meaning for us, for that heavy mass which is our body, whence it comes about that it always involves a reference to the body. (P176 quote extended)

The pure quale would only arise if abstracted from the practical context of experience and the perceptual relationship a body has with its environment. Purity is construed as a lack of investment of the property in an practical or meaningful context - nonrelationality - specifically with a body - being intrinsic.

With the construal that intrinsic as meaning "deriving wholly from internal processes or its own constitution" and nonrelational means "properties that apply only to the object and are one place predicates". The red of the fire in the hearth is welcoming, the red of a house fire is not. MP is articulating a unity between the welcoming feeling and red and the panic feeling and red (and the broader experience they're embedded in).

He very clearly dunks on pure sensation, and construes qualia as the experiential properties of pure sensations - and I agree with you that he dunks on the atomisation of experience (into sense units that bear properties...).

“The perceptual ‘something’ is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a ‘field’. A really homogeneous area offering nothing to be cannot be given to any perception. The structure of actual perception alone can teach us what perception is. The pure impression is, therefore, not only undiscoverable, but also imperceptible and so inconceivable as an instant of perception. If it is introduced, it is because instead of attending to the experience of perception, we overlook it in favour of the object perceived. A visual field is not made up of limited views. But an object seen is made up of bits of matter, and spatial points are external to each other. An isolated datum of perception is inconceivable, at least if we do the mental experiment of attempting to perceive such a thing. But in the world there are either isolated objects or a physical void.”

“I shall therefore give up any attempt to define sensation as pure impression. Rather, to see is to have colours or lights, to hear is to have sounds, to sense (sentir) is to have qualities. To know what sense-experience is, then, is it not enough to have seen a red or to have heard an A? But red and green are not sensations, they are the sensed (sensibles), and quality is not an element of consciousness, but a property of the object. Instead of providing a simple means of delimiting sensations, if we consider it in the experience itself which evinces it, the quality is as rich and mysterious as the object, or indeed the whole spectacle, perceived. This red patch which I see on the carpet is red only in virtue of a shadow which lies across it, its quality is apparent only in relation to the play of light upon it, and hence as an element in a spatial configuration. ”

(P53/P54, bold and italics are mine)

Red and green are properties of "the object", what is the object? The fire. The 'perceptual something in the middle of something else' is a body's perceptual relationship inhabting the world. And its red cannot be thought of as part of an 'isolated datum', since such things are 'imperceptible' - ie, they are not perceptions, whatever the conception of red is that attributes it to an isolated datum (red quale to sense datum of fire) according to MP it cannot be perceived. IE, it doesn't form part of his perceptual theory.

(@Kenosha Kid because they might enjoy MP talking about homogenous qualities as unrealistic, like the red wall thought experiment KK wrote maybe?)

Analysis, then, discovers in each quality meanings which reside in it. It may be objected that this is true only of the qualities which form part of our actual experience, which are overlaid with a body of knowledge, and that we are still justified in conceiving a ‘pure quality’ which would set limits to a pure sensation. But as we have just seen, this pure sensation would amount to no sensation, and thus to not feeling at all. The alleged self-evidence of sensation is not based on any testimony of consciousness, but on widely held prejudice. We think we know perfectly well what ‘seeing’, ‘hearing’, ‘sensing’ are, because perception has long provided us with objects which are coloured or which emit sounds. When we try to analyse it, we transpose these objects into consciousness. We commit what psychologists call ‘the experience error’, which means that what we know to be in things themselves we immediately take as being in our consciousness of them. We make perception out of things perceived.

(@Srap Tasmaner & @Isaac might enjoy that quote because of how it bears on the use of the word model... do we use models to see, or do we see models?)

This is from the introduction, it's a ground clearing that takes place to orient MP's readers that no, he isn't talking about experience and its properties of distinct experience chunks as people seem to. In fact he articulates holist and embodied/enactive intuitions that undermine those concepts.

Can you source your interpretation now please, frank?

I don't know what kind of source you're looking for. It's explicit in the quote you provided. — frank

Which quote?

For what? — frank

For these:

MP is telling you that perception is organized around ideas. The fireplace is an idea, not something arising from visual data. — frank

MP would say that nothing that's phenomenally accessible to us has that (absolute independence) status. — frank

You're loading the term "qualia" with some sort of absolute independence. MP would say that nothing that's phenomenally accessible to us has that status.

If you insist that qualia must be this odd metaphysically independent entity, you're making the word useless for yourself and those who use it that way.

It remains an innocuous way to talk about the phenomenal character of consciousness for everyone else. — frank

Source?