You’re going way out of the way to import much deeper metaphysical baggage to this really ordinary way of talking than is called for, which makes it look like you’re just looking for something to disagree with just to win the argument, when nothing you’re saying in “rebuttal” disagrees with anything I’m saying so I really see no need for that. — Pfhorrest

I don't think that's right. That we 'have experiences with content' in a pre-technical sense is uncontroversial. What's controversial about it is that as soon as we start describing it in a philosophical context, there's always lots of conceptual baggage. When "the content of our experiences" is transposed into this kind of discussion, rather than the usual stuff we do when we ask "how was your day?" or "how was that for you?" and answer it, we bring an interpretive style to it; a framing of the 'facts of first person experience'; what gets rejected or strongly questioned is the framing, rather than the facts.

Say I perform some mindfulness exercise (an instance of active attentive meditation @Wayfarer) and my current experiential state is attended to, I'll always have some focus (some things are attended with more intensity than others), colours are on objects; I recognise, say, the colour of my walls as white, but I perform such a cognitive act during the perception. I'm currently listening to a podcast, and my awareness keeps switching between what I hear, what I see, and what I think about while writing. Much of this is transparent, when I'm typing the thing I notice is the tactile feedback of the keyboard, but other than that I'm in some reflective flow state (interrupted by misphrasings, imprecisions, cool stuff on the podcast).

Even that description contextualises the "first person facts" of experience as occurring over time and leveraging historical understandings (why do I see the wall as white? Why do I automatically understand the words coming into my ears? Or write the next sentence as is?) an experiential context that I am currently in. Focussing on "what is it like" for me is an extremely artificial cognitive state, requiring effort to maintain. It removes most of the texture of the world as I experience it.

So, rather than doubting "what is it like" makes sense as a framing device because I'm being insufficiently attendant to first person phenomenology, I'm doubting that it makes as a framing device partly because how people talk about it just doesn't accurately describe how I experience the world. So I suspect that what people think of when they think of a quale is actually a rather structured concept; generalisations of experience, instances of memory, analogies; much different from the sort of stuff 'simply attending to your first person experience" is supposed to reveal.

And when you take all this texture as a given, inherent in a first person experience, all the hows fall away due to the framing of the intellectual exercise... so it's no longer surprising that it appears to be a "brute fact" or a "given" of experience, because the priming for interpreting experience induced by "what is it like" hides that it's ultimately a philosophical-intellectual exercise, rather than derived from a state of "pure self awareness".

You can link to videos (at least I don't delete all posts containing them), just write a bit about it and make sure it's relevant. Relevant might include an in context joke.

Also suggest using the [ url="link" ][/ url] (remove the spaces and paste the link) around the url, neater.

@creativesoul

The posts which consisted solely of insults have been deleted. Play nice.

Are you making a distinction between reducible in principle and reducible in practice? — bert1

I try not to think about explanations that are merely possible or might exist?

I don't know if you meant that, I thought you were being snide.

See? Contextual.

Really? Didnt mean to be. — frank

Aight. Rather than hearing you being supportive and critical at the same time. I heard "I agree with you, by the way what I perceive as your worldview is wrong - here are some flaws I will not gesture to here", it seemed like a very mixed message.

The same is true of Marxism btw, and that's not a coincidence. — frank

But I share your concern about grand ontological projects gliding past large gaps in our understanding[. That is exactly what I was warning you about with your hierarchy theory. — frank

Jesus H Christ on a bendy bus you're being snide.

But yes. Edit: there's always problems in everything.

So you understand it too? I'm not sure what the previous grief was about, but good. — frank

Well, I don't understand how people find it so obvious, but I do understand what people mean when they say qualia or "what is it like". This is why I am so suspicious of it. What people go on to say as soon as they start talking in terms of "what is it like" and how bloomin' obvious it seems to them? And then suddenly there's "redness"... inverted spectra, weird shit with metaphysical possibilities and types and it's all so obvious apparently! And people begin imagining that the mere metaphysical possibility of something tells us stuff about the actual world... And there's so much appeal to intuition... All of this is often portrayed as falling naturally out of something we all feel.

reduction — frank

I don't think he ever said that.

And yet you fully understand what a p-zombie is. — frank

You can understand a stipulation without believing in it.

I think everyone agrees that there are first person experiences. I don't think everyone agrees with every conclusion people draw from that under every interpretation of how they work (it's so contentious some people might go blargh at even using "how" there, "it's not functionally reductive to anything!:)

Wheres my pipe? — frank

I miss my pipe.

I dont even know what means. — frank

You can have another koan then!

We should learn to be more surprised by falsehoods than by truths.

Truth is stranger than fiction — frank

While things aren't always what they appear to be, they usually are.

Chalmers speculated at one point that Dennett might truly represent a different kind of consciousness, that he might be a sign that we're not all alike. — frank

It would be extremely surprising that there were two different flavours of consciousness, that agree with each other almost all the time, but differ solely in whether they agree or disagree with (the framing of) a philosophical point.

It’s completely trivial and not worth the words we’ve all spent talking about it. — Pfhorrest

I dunno. What we think is trivial is usually fundamental to our worldview, and should usually be examined - special emphasis when others who we otherwise find sensible do not find it so. Especially if we're going to go from "you literally just saw a Red delicious apple" to "redness"; if it's literally just how we talk about our experiences or that we've experienced something, why the need to invoke stuff that resembles types/essences? If this wasn't so contentious a style of expression (smuggling in presumptions somewhere, or missing obvious facts), there wouldn't be such bitter argument around it when everyone thinks everyone else is missing trivial points.

It's like some arguments that we can have with the partners we live with; "this thing you do which you do not know you do, or this thing you do not do which you do not notice you do not do? Terrible. That cup you leave by the kettle in the morning? That feels like "fuck you" to me!".

I'm extremely suspicious that what goes on when we think about "what is it like to X" is that we aggregate over X experiences and form commonalities and analogies; and then we retroject the commonalities and analogies into the experience without giving a simultaneous account of how commonalities and analogies are always already embedded in first person experiences in the first place.

no amount of studying human sexuality in the third person can tell you what it’s like to have sex. — Pfhorrest

Nah. Don't understand this at all. I won't have the experiences associated with doing the sex act, but I can absolutely know what it's like to have sex. I don't think "what it's like to experience X" really makes sense as a thing; I have difficulty articulating why I'm so suspicious of it. I suppose part of it is that once people start talking like that, you end up with stuff like this:

imagine redness from those memories. — Pfhorrest

Is there a sexness? Do I somehow have access to sexness because I've had sex? "What is it like" is an analogy disguised as an event.

I thought you said it was impossible to be aware without a concept — frank

Oh I had no idea "what is it like to be X?" was a concept! :yum:

I'm done trolling now.

You aren't listening. — frank

No u! How dare you doubt the arbitrary conceptual structure imposed upon my first person experiences which is then retroactively equated with them!

I really don't understand you. To my reckoning, there are these weird people who picked up a way of describing bizarre altered states of activity from a book, and I never understand what they're talking about. They always say "but what's it like to be you" or "what's it like to be a bat?" and things like that. As if they can literally feel it. I don't think very highly of their self awareness, they seem to be replacing their experiences with a description of their experiences. If they payed more attention, they'd see a flux with some continuity in it, and a persistent history that is accessed through memory, and some aspirations and anticipations, but a feeling of themselves as distinct from their sensory capabilities and self attending bodily processes? Madness! Madness I say. It's a cult, a cult!

I can't, impossible.

Did you do it? — frank

Yes. Well, no. What I actually did was I figured that if there was a what it's like to be me, it would be the same if I focussed on my ass where I'm sitting, and the sensations in my feet wouldn't matter for demonstrating the specificity of the phenomenon to me, but no, there wasn't a what it's like to be me.

Put your feet on the floor and just sit and feel your feet. — frank

That's my feet. That's not me.

Too reductionist...? — Isaac

Not when the amygdala and prefrontal cortex are influenced by socialisation, childhood environment... I think, anyway.

I was referencing the 'what its like to be a bat.' — frank

I've read the essay, I just don't experience things like that. I've never felt like there's something which it is like to be me. How the hell am I supposed to tell? It's all so damn fleeting.

What? — frank

I just don't understand. Felt what is it like-ness? First person? Guess I just don't experience it like that.

it is simply incoherent to talk about it doing so. — Isaac

which is absolutely fine at the level of human activity because all that stuff is useful at that scale. — Isaac

Aye. Intention makes the most sense as a folk psychological concept and part of our social ontology IMO; but I would be extremely surprised if there wasn't an autonomous decision making process that bodies and minds together can do, that corresponds somehow with felt qualities associated with decision making. A "top down" causation of the body's self model on the body.

That there is a "what it's like" aspect to consciousness is plain. — frank

Sorry, I don't feel this. Can you explain it to me?

Another nice thing about the hierarchy; our mind's distinctive features are relatively impotent in it - you can will your leg to move, but that doesn't mean you instruct your skin, sub-tissues, cellular systems, intracellular environments, chemical processes etc. Our thoughts only resonate on the higher order components; no mere thought or sensation determines the fluctuations of the iron atoms in our haemoglobin. It's almost as if minds require the presence of the lower order interactions in the chain to make sense of their being (what, how, why minds are).

From the link:

(life) does not merely exist in accord with the laws of physics and chemistry; rather, it is telling the meaningful story of its own life

I mean... humans as individual entities are both at once. We're quantum shit interacting to bring atoms interacting to bring molecules interacting to bring chemicals interacting to bring chemical processes interacting to bring intracellular bodies and systems interacting to bring cells interacting to bring cellular systems; like tissues, neurons; interacting to bring organs (and other distinct functional units) interacting to bring bodily systems interacting to bring bodies interacting with themselves and their environment to bring minds.

If you follow that chain backwards, you'll notice that it neatly tracks the temporal order of their emergence in the universe. This is not a coincidence (cosmogenesis->abiogenesis->evolution->"the first eye opening"). Components contingently organise into systems which are components contingently organised into systems which are components...

The more general ontological point about agency? Agency's just one way to get shit done.

There's more, but so very unrelated to the topic... — Isaac

Yes!

all the layers of social structure which favour apparent reductionism — Isaac

Yes!

We could talk about this elsewhere sometime if either of us can be bothered.

I agree but I think it's far more of a problem invented by philosophers because it 'could be' the case than an actual problem in science that is the case. — Isaac

but I don't see anyone really doing that, it's a bit of a bogeyman. — Isaac

This is an aside, but it's interesting. I agree with you that the token-token stuff doesn't correspond to, or shed light on, any scientific stuff; I also think the scientific stuff rarely sheds light on it (due to how fungible supervenience relations are). I think reductionism can be a big problem in psychology though, especially clinical psychology.

Maybe you've read papers I've not, it's quite possible, but in my field (psychology), — Isaac

I've read some stuff in clinical psychology that heavily criticises the naive application of the (diagnosis->treatment) paradigm in bodily health to mental health; since it promotes treatment methodology that just doesn't work. The individual level variability of mental health aetiology is so great, and the diagnoses interact so much (depression with anxiety as a comorbidity or anxiety with depression as a comorbidity anyone?), and the medication targets neurochemistry rather than psychological state (by necessity), "you're depressed? take prozac", "you're in chronic pain? try this exercise program!"; it's applying a billiard ball style reductive explanation (like germ theory) to interventions in crazy complicated complex systems, and as is predictable it doesn't work so well. And it's not necessary, since the patient is literally right there with self reports.

It's the meaning. Your thinking has a ceiling on it, delimited by empiricism - exactly what a smart ape might think, pardon my impudence. — Wayfarer

I'm quite happy to be a smart ape. You don't seem to be. You want more. Luckily what apes as smart as us can do, think; how we are; is very very rich indeed.

When I said before that we only accept what can be weighed, measured, felt, sensed (including by instruments) this is what I mean. Empiricism amounts to the elevation of the senses to the sole criteria for valid knowledge (along with predictive power and replicability). — Wayfarer

Now you're making me into a bogeyman. Since you said you've read a lot of my posts, I thought you'd maybe noticed that I really like Heidegger and Spinoza; an arch-critic of instrumental rationality and naive empiricism and a full blown rationalist, both of them do metaphysics. I like philosophy!

The majority of the challenges I have brought against you in this thread have been conceptual. Mysticism vs reason as thinking styles, arguing against the claim that science is reductive, we even quoted from the same author at different points; we even made similar points about instrumental rationality (but we very very disagreed about where it comes from and what to do with it).

So I don't find it likely that I'm so blinkered I can't hope to understand how you see things.

But then he goes on to argue that natural selection can't account for mathematical skill or musical talent and many other capacities of mankind: — Wayfarer

Why would it ever need to? Natural selection can't account for why I trim my beard like I do. Therefore evolution is false? It's just (most likely) irrelevant to the theory.

A persuasive story goes that natural selection amplifies the presence of adaptive capabilities in populations of organisms over time (when they remain adaptive, when the ecology and communities within pose the same problems); development of the frontal cortex comes along with greater degrees of abstraction ability and language skills - tool use comes at some point, and we play like lower primates (who also make noises in play, and mock each other...). You put tools and play and high-order language together; whether it comes through a the evolution of a discontinuous presence/absence of a feature that allows recursive grammars or through a more gradual amplification primate abstractive ability doesn't matter; the ingredients are there. The rest? That's history. Literally history.

The point about classical philosophy was that it also in some sense took you to the border of what can be empirically known and points to what is beyond it. — Wayfarer

Science is never just about what can be empirically known, it's about what can be conceptually derived from or speculated about given what is known or suspected... Reason always points beyond the boundaries of experience; like memory and imagination do. Reason? A highly abstracted and linguistically mediated cognitive practice implicated with our episodic memory (prefrontal cortex declarative knowledge stuff) and anticipatory mechanisms (mirror neurons/internal state modelling). That it allows us to discover the true nature of existence is a buy one get one free offer from the trait shop.

Our culture no longer has a lexicon to describe that beyond, — Wayfarer

I find it difficult to believe this; our culture has charted different orders of infinity, has understood the universe from the first moments to its eventual death, when people get bored at work they invent entire fictional universes in day dreams. Humans are both inscribed in reality and a fold within it.

The next stage is still more marvellous, still more completely beyond all possibility of explanation by matter, its laws and forces.

What kind of idiot would expect mechanical laws of particle motion to explain the evolution of sensory mechanisms?

$F=m\text{OW ME LEG!}$


Well, probably some physicists imagining that the universe's dynamics are as simple as those they can test by manipulating state variables... See previous stuff I wrote about reductionism. That you think this is a limit of reason itself rather than something people who have reasoned poorly (here) believe is baffling to me.

Reductionism, at its best, acts as a very long leash to loosely tie models of more complex systems to those beneath them which work well and on which we have good reason to think they supervene — Isaac

I agree with you broadly; mind depends on brain (in some ways), brain depends on mind (in some ways); but I don't like supervenience very much at all.

What supervenes on what is always the question. So, you can jury rig a concept like "neural correlate" to do anything you like, so much so that it provides no explanatory power or conceptual insights over and above the brute stating of "when things in this register change there is a change in things of that register". That paper I referenced earlier, say, argued that psychological symptoms of PTSD (mind states) can remain unchanged even when neural architecture/hormone chemistry related to them changes. At that point you can say something like "well, the overall brain state still must have changed" or "the symptom is a type of brain state and not a token, and we only want token-token dependence between mind states and brain states" (which afaik is what happens)... It's just a rabbit hole devoid of any how questions (or generalisations from procedural descriptions), it's sitting there like it's waiting for something. Anyway. Rant.

A scientist-ist (sic) would never call it mysticism — ZzzoneiroCosm

I would believe that mysticism and reason were two sides of the same coin if they were, but they are not.

I've described mysticism as "a catalog of intense and unusual experiences." You've described mysticism as a "thinking style." — ZzzoneiroCosm

So long as the catalogue doesn't necessitate buying anything in it, we can see eye to eye.

So I'd be even more stringent than you about Wayfarer: it's not that his problem is with education and politics, and he's focusing on the science. He doesn't even get the science right, as far as I'm concerned. — StreetlightX

@Wayfarer

On the one hand you want to reserve an isolated realm for your philosophical speculation; rendering it out of the reach of science. On the other, you want to project the impact of your speculation back into the scientific domains! — fdrake

"The Wisconsin study took electroencephalograms (EEGs) of 10 longtime Buddhist practitioners and of a control group of eight college students who had been lightly trained in meditation.....Zen Buddhist monks show an extraordinary synchronization of brain waves known as gamma synchrony—a pattern increasingly associated with robust brain function and the synthesis of activity that we call the mind." — ZzzoneiroCosm

18 people for a between groups study? Skeptical. Anyway, the research question is "do well practiced meditators have higher gamma synchrony than controls?", not the auxiliary contextual information in this thread or about the contrast between mysticism and reason.

Mysticism and reason should be dual (dueling) handmaidens not frittering in a myopic loggerheads we've come to see as natural and even inevitable. This synthesis will come. (In my opinion.) — ZzzoneiroCosm

Mysticism is a thinking style completely at odds with reasoning (gnosis vs episteme); rational theory is not generated through affect alone. Meditation is something people can do without the Buddhist religion or mysticism; secular mindfulness practices. They don't come with such ontological commitments, like belief in god, or the falsehood of evolution.

Close your eyes, breath, the ape is a lie...

Another feature this highlights is that explanations need not tell the 'whole story', whereas reductive explanations, when right, must.

reductionism = context-invariance of explanation (changed/changing conditions do not/can not alter how something works). — StreetlightX

Yes! That's a good way of putting it I think.

Nonetheless, the experiences qua experience (stripped of mysticalized descriptors) are latent in every mind and reflect, by their absence, a gap in self-knowledge. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I've gotten real fucking high a few times, and it has impacted how I think about things, but I would never believe that the intuitions and sensations produced in those states were insights into the true nature of reality. Altered states shatter, reasoning builds anew.

I'm not sure if I am a wanker or a cunt. — bert1

I'm a cunt. — bert1

I'm glad you sorted this out.

For a sketch of reductionism, my take on it anyway:

I understand an explanation; of X by Y; as an asymmetric epistemic relationship between X and Y wherein what is known of/about/how/why of (information concerning X) X is at least partially specified by what is known of/about/how/why (information concerning Y) Y. X="Why did he eat the potato chips?" Y="He was hungry" (the potato chips were also available in a nearby shop that was established in the 1980s due to small business promoting loans that an industrious pair of second generation Pakistani Brits made use of due to... and the loans were suggested by a think tank which studied... and the shop had his favourite flavour and...).

I understand a reductive explanation; of X by Y; as an explanation of X by Y wherein the information concerning Y completely specifies the information concerning X.

Complete specification might look like logical/deductive inference or exhausting causal pathways (finding the bacteria which cause the disease - but not the specifics of each symptom in each patient). The germ theory of disease doesn't have to tell you precisely how red your mate Steve's leg got with that infected cut; but it does reduce (some) disease symptom presence to germ presence.

Reductive explanations don't work very well in cases where the studied phenomena are difficult (ontically/ontologically or epistemically) to completely specify. Try to explain why a photon takes a particular path in a double slit experiment in terms of the particular photon and the slits and you get nonsense. Try to explain why one Vietnam vet becomes mentally ill and another does not based upon their shared experiences and background differences and you don't get a complete picture due to the available information (and randomness in life). Try to study whether a butterfly flapping its wings 1 day ago caused a tropical storm now and the system itself pulls apart arbitrarily close causal histories - rendering the question askable but moot.

The stuff you study places constraints on what your modes of inquiry into it can be. So when someone says: "men are more aggressive because they have more testosterone", you shouldn't just point out that it's wrong, you should be highly suspicious that the person knows anything (substantial) about aggression or testosterone or sex differences; since they're not thinking in a way which tracks the relationships between any of the things in question.

Reductive explanations we encounter are usually just so stories.

I don't think capitalism ended?

Of course it's evidence-based. That is not at issue, nor why I made a point of it. — Wayfarer

I just wonder why you'd reject that homo sapiens (and our minds) are descended from our homo ancestors (and their minds), when you're so happy to accept all the facts of evolution... one more is hardly a violence against your worldview, no? You're rejecting a framing of the facts, rather than the facts, right?

Humans are great apes. Our cognitive and affective processes and their supporting neural and bodily architectures have great ape homologues. These are facts. They should be as surprising as human digestive tracts behaving in much the same way as chimp ones. Or humans and chimps consisting of complex cells with similar internal structures.

I appreciate the quote; but I want to just put it here that a return to mysticism was never on the table for the committed materialist we're both quoting. He wanted to implode the institutional prejudices associated with reason with better reasoning rather than spiritualist or religious claptrap; the better angels of our nature removed all further need for their namesake.