So that is the 'mystical' nature of reality, and its vague connection with experience that Wittgenstein tries to avoid discussing! — ernestm

Is this just because language is flexible and somewhat arbitrary in how we use (or abuse) it's symbols? We can have a huge debate on free will, and the terms surrounding the debate can vary quite a bit, with a huge amount of semantic dispute, as they tend to do in philosophical discussions.

But that alone doesn't mean there isn't something to the free will issue that concerns people. Which is really about to what extent we are the authors of our own choices, and what responsibility do we (or others) have for those choices.

Pointing out that the terms "free" and "will" can vary depending on context does not dissolve the underlying concern people have. Here I'm mainly arguing with the point of view that Wittgenstein's approach dissolves long standing philosophical problems.

If your wife tells you to bring something in from the car, you reply 'it is raining' because you don't want to go outside. Maybe it is not really raining and just mizzling, but if your wife agrees with you, then the proposition would be considered true for the two of you, accomplishing the goal of the communication. — ernestm

Ah, but what if your wife agrees with you because the weather report said it would rain today, but there's no water falling from the sky at all? Would the proposition still be true?

While I actually agree with what you are saying, Wittgenstein has a problem with your idea, because the statement 'it is raining' assumes there is something called 'rain.' — ernestm

There is a weather condition to which the concept "rain" is about. It does have boundary conditions (so do ships I hear). And we can use "rain "in other ways (making it rain at a Gentleman's club). But that doesn't mean there isn't a weather condition to which rain usually refers. And the other uses of "rain" are borrowed from the weather condition (money raining down.

The existence of color is mystical. MANY people object to that, but that was his conclusion. — ernestm

That's an interesting conclusion. I would say it's compatible with McGinn's cognitive closure. Funny, because Dennett really doesn't like cognitive closure, but he admires Wittgenstein.

Following up on that, if I can want to know whether it's actually raining outside, which can be had by going outside without any language at all, I might come to want to know whether my perception of rain could possibly be mistaken.

Maybe when I thought it was raining, the neighborhood kids had put a sprinkler on top of the house. Realizing that there in cases when I can be wrong about what I perceive, as the ancient Greeks did, I can then pose skeptical questions and follow those up with non-skeptical replies. In fact, Witty did spend some of his time worrying about skepticism, and proposing solutions to skeptical concerns.

I don't see that as using language incorrectly. Rather, it's noticing that we sometimes are mistaken and wondering what that entails. Even ordinary folks with no philosophical reading will sometimes wonder how they know what is real or whether they're inside a dream or simulation, etc.

Language is only a tool for communication, and epistemologically, from Wittgenstein's perspective, there is nothing else that is fruitful to define as 'the world' besides the language itself. — ernestm

Except that he does mention "the world" sometimes in a way that suggests it's independent of a language:

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists. — Wittgenstein

All that a statement does is postulate a possible proposition, and if another person acts on the proposition in accordance with the speaker's intent, then the communication is successful. — ernestm

This would entail an abandonment of propositions being statements that have truth values. The snow is white isn't true iff the snow is white. It's only said to be true if one is playing a particular language game.

But if I ask you whether it's raining outside, I'm not interesting in playing some linguistic game with the words "rain" and "outside". Rather, I'm wanting to know if I should take my raincoat. The language allows you to tell me what is the case. IOW, I want to know the truth of the proposition, "It is raining outside".

Each has rules. As TGW says, professional rigour sometimes tries to partition off ordinary language meanings from meanings in professional practice. — mcdoodle

Kind of like how the sun rises and sets in ordinary language, but astronomy would talk about the rotation of the Earth?

The point being that ordinary language can be misleading at times, and it can contain assumptions that are wrong. People did use to think the Earth was stationary, and the sun and moon revolved around it.

No, to "mirror" already assumes indirect realism. — Question

Then what would be direct realism for propositions? That propositions reach out into the world and touch objects? Or that objects are in propositions?

think we generally understand what it means for a painting to picture reality, and in many of the same ways we generally understand what it means for a proposition to mirror reality. — Sam26

There's several problems here. First, Wittgenstein is using a metaphor based on vision, which would be to picture or mirror reality. Metaphors are useful, but they shouldn't be taken literally. Propositions are linguistic, not visual. They can't literally "mirror" the world. The problem with metaphors in philosophy is that they can lead our intuitions astray.

Setting that a side, how do we know that a proposition matches up with things in the world? That would assume that our perception reveals things as they are, and not simply as we perceive them, which would seem to imply a direct form of realism.

What Wittgenstein needs is an account of how we justify knowing that perception and conception get a things as they are such that propositions "mirror" the world when they are true. He needs to defend a direct realist version of perception. And perhaps beyond that, a form of essentialism, because "mirroring" would presume that we carve nature at its joints when we form true propositions. A Kantian would not agree with Witty here.

Summary: an account of perception and concept formation is needed to justify propositions matching up with things in the world. You can't skip over that by simply analyzing language. Language doesn't tell you how we know about the world.

That is, the correct report of my experience is that I saw a green apple that appeared red due to the lighting. — Andrew M

Sure, but what if I ask whether green is a property of the apple? Why do we care? Because we want to be able to get at an objective view of the world. When you ask me the mass of the apple, that mass doesn't depend on any sense modality humans have. Presumably, Martians with X-Ray vision will measure the apple to have the same mass, once we convert from their units to ours.

Color is a lot tricker than taste. Nobody is a taste realist, I take it. Nobody thinks that the apple objectively tastes sweet. It tastes sweet to animals whose taste buds detect a certain amount of sugar content. But what if we didn't' have a sense of taste or smell at all? Maybe we detected chemical content via spectroscopic eyes or some other sensory organ.

Do you think information has an objective, mind-independent existence?

I have my doubts. I think maybe the mind creates information about the world. The world exists as it is, but we derive information about it as we interact with the world.

It was as if after all the digging around I did in philosophy, there was a man who had found the ground from the soil, which in the process made philosophy clean and austere instead of dirty and confusing, — Question

By pushing the dirt under the rug of analyzing language, or brushing it into the closet of the mystical. But he did have a lasting influence, and made great contributions to philosophy. However, his clean & austere approach to philosophy is not the only modern one of great influence.

I don't think that the analytical approach dissolves the fundamental problems of metaphysics and epistemology. They are still with us in the 21st century. Just open the closet or look under the rug.

Perhaps an alternative way of framing the issue to the usual subjective/objective framing. — Andrew M

It is an alternative, but it prevents us from speaking of the world when humans aren't around, which would be most of the time, since humans only occupy part of the surface of one little pale blue dot for the past 50 thousand years or so.

So, the experience is not just a firing of neurons but reaches out to the external objects and state of affairs that set the content of the experience. The internal experience that you have is, in this sense, inseparable from the external object or state of affairs that you experience. — jkop

That works for perception, but what about dreaming or imagination? What if your visual cortex is stimulated by a magnet or electrode and you see color?

Bricks? — jkop

If in the future we fully simulate vision, would the software have color experiences? Is there a way of arranging the bits such that they are conscious?

Only under the assumption of property dualism: the dubious idea that the colour wouldn't be a physical pigment for instance but some mysterious entity lurking inside your consciousness. Hence the appearance of a "hard problem" of consciousness. — jkop

A physical pigment of what, though? I take it you don't think rocks have color experiences. That would be panpsychist.

Only under the assumption of property dualism: the dubious idea that the colour wouldn't be a physical pigment for instance but some mysterious entity lurking inside your consciousness. Hence the appearance of a "hard problem" of consciousness. — jkop

So then where is the color we experience? Is it identical with some biological process, or does color supervene on the entirety of visual perception?

But how on earth could anyone know that every single version of physicalism fails to account for consciousness? He even looks like a christian rock musician O:) — jkop

The argument is really simple, actually. Physical concepts are objective. Conscious concepts are subjective.

It really goes back to Locke and his primary/secondary property distinction. If you use only the primary properties to describe the world, your explanation will leave out the secondary ones.

You don't get color, smell, etc from shape, number, etc. This isn't a problem until you need to explain the mind, since it's part of the world.

That's why it's a problem for physicalism.

The reason that we can meaningfully talk about red apples is because our physical sensory systems are, in the relevant sense, the same. But they need not be, as considering how one would communicate the idea of red apples to a blind person demonstrates. — Andrew M

Here I might disagree. The reason we can talk meaningfully about our experience of red apples is because we have red experiences. It's true that our visual system, which is understood in physical/chemical/biological terms is key to our ability to experience red, but we are not communicating the facts of how our perception works or the optics of light bouncing off an apple. We're communicating an experience that those with color vision have.

And it's this experience that is missing from the physical/chemical/biological facts of perception, light or the object itself. That is the entire point of the OP.

Whether our experience of red is radically private or not doesn't change the fact that we don't know why having red experiences would accompany an explanation of perception.

Nagel's way of putting this is that science provides objective, third person explanations. But experiencing red is first person and subjective. So something is left out with any objective explanation. That explanation can be scientific, mathematical, computational, or functional and it will still leave the experience out, because all of those are objective explanations.

The SEP article on physicalism suggests that the question of consciousness and physicalism might be a question about objectivity in disguise. The real fundamental issue is around what's objective versus what's subjective, and why we understand the world fundamentally in terms of both concepts.

Chalmers is a dualist, recall, and the alleged puzzle arises from taking dualism for granted.

You don't get to talk about a hard problem of consciousness with people who don't take dualism for granted. — jkop

I've read Chalmer's entire book on consciousness, a couple of his papers, and seen several videos of him talking about consciousness, so I have a pretty good idea what he's arguing for and why.

He states in his book that physicalism is a very complete and satisfying account of the world, with one exception, and that's consciousness. Chalmers then provides reasoning for why he thinks every single version of physicalism fails, which is why he says he was led to endorse a form of property dualism.

You might think his arguments go wrong, or his intuition leads him astray, but I don't get the sense at all that he started out dogmatically as a dualist. Chalmers has no need to endorse dualism, other than finding physicalism to be inadequate.

Chalmers isn't like a theist arguing for God. Now Dennett and some who agree with him strike me as possibly being wedded to materialism or functionalism, and that leads them to argue the way they do.

Or maybe they simply aren't convinced by the likes of Chalmers, Nagel, McGinn, Block, Searle, etc. And that's fine, if so. I honestly can't tell who's right. No explanation for consciousness has ever totally convinced me from any side.

That cannot be right. I wrote "subjective experiences," but that's a tautology - I should have just written "experiences." Experiences are perforce subjective: they occur in a subject and are confined to a subject. — SophistiCat

But they do deny the inner, private part. Experiences can be individual, but not inner or private.

His beef is technical, having to do with specific philosophical analyses of experience, and to understand his case one must understand the context in which he makes statements such as "qualia do not exist." — SophistiCat

Right, but quining qualia amounts to redefining consciousness as having a functional/behavioral role only. Dennett did say in a recent talk I watched on youtube that we are the equivalent of p-zombies. There is nothing going on in our heads in terms of consciousness.

Also, just to be clear, Dennett is not the pope of physicalism. There are many philosophers making arguments on both sides of the issue, or rather, on many sides of the issue, because there isn't even a general agreement as to what qualia are and what kind of account physicalism owes to them. — SophistiCat

Sure, and Chalmers discusses several versions of physicalism. Physicalism might be the case, but questions of consciousness and intentionality still remain puzzling.

Well. let's see: does the world consist of anything "ontologically" that it does not otherwise consist of? — tim wood

That just means is there something fundamental the world is made up of, like water, matter, math, ideas, etc.

If so, is there a way we can know this to be the case? Is there a way we can know anything about the world? Were the ancient skeptics right? What does it mean to know?

But you're right, qualification is always needed, although the terms ontology and epistemology are well established in philosophy, and shouldn't need to be debated.

Wittgenstein had a lifelong obsession with solipsism that appears never to have left him before his death. There's some speculation that his worries over privacy, the nonexistence of subjects, and the linguistic inefficacy of private experiences were a result of his poor theory of mind, since he was likely somewhere on the autism spectrum. Early on he even tried to dissolve reference to psychological subjects in belief reports. — The Great Whatever

I feel like he's not the only philosopher who had a poor theory of mind. What is your view on language, subjectivity and the ability to communicate our private experiences?

And how did the Cyrenaics think we communicated if it was all subjective?

We share the particularity of our different associations and responses to red, but we fail to quite touch the beetle in the box, because the beetle has been defined to be the purified essence of privacy. We have talked of individuality, of subjectivity, in relation to our response to red, but you want to say that this is not the experience of red: the quale always escapes - by definition. But if you strip out every association, every response, is there in fact anything left, some other, unsharable secret? — unenlightened

I think Wittgenstein was wrong about the beetle in the box. We can somewhat share our subjective experiences because we have them in common by virtue of being human. We're not a mix of bats, lions and aliens with different sensory modalities trying to communicate.

My experience of pain isn't a behavior. It's a feeling. It's true that I've learned the language of expressing pain to others in a community of language speakers, but that doesn't remove the fact that my pain is mine and not shared by anyone else. I stub my toe and you don't feel it, although you could empathize and say it looks like that hurt. But then again, maybe I was wearing steel toed boots and just pretending to be in pain.

It's obvious that we each experience things a bit differently. Notice how several people in a room will complain about the temperature being wrong. One person might say it's a bit chilly, and the other that it's warm. I might find it to be just fine. And yet we can communicate our feeling on the temperature and whether it needs to be adjusted, despite each person's experience of the room's temperature being private. It's private in that I don't feel your chilliness or warmness. I only feel what my body feels.

You might argue that I can know you're cold by your behavior. But that's only when you have behavior accompanying your feeling, and your behavior isn't deceptive, or open to interpretation, which it often can be. I might not be able to tell that you're cold, because you're not shivering, and you choose not to complain. Or you might shiver because you felt like someone walked on your grave, and I thought that meant you were cold, when you felt something else entirely. And so on and so forth.

But strip away all the associations and responses that we clearly can talk about because we just did, and there seems to me at least, to be nothing left that is the quale itself. The box turns out not to have much of a beetle after all. — unenlightened

If this were the case, then we'd be able to share color experiences with people blind from birth, and what's it's like to be a bat would have no meaning at all. We wouldn't wonder whether a machine could be conscious, or just programmed to fool us.

It seems that your enquiry has more to do with why we experience colour, rather than how we experience colour. That question could be up there with why anything exists. — Luke

Right, well if we asked why water has the properties it does, we can see why this is so from the chemistry and physics of water. But if we asked why certain biological processes results in experience, it seems utterly mysterious. You're right that we can get at the how. By why anything material would have an accompanying experience is the hard problem. And why just some brain processes and not digestion or rocks or machines. (Or maybe machines can be conscious?)

If it's not too late, what exactly do you understand "Metaphysical Position" to mean? — tim wood

A metaphysical position would be something like what the world ontologically consists of and how we know that.

Hahah, David Brin tells a circular version of that, starting and ending with the physicist.

Maybe it is math all the way down. Still leaves the mental a problem. Not sure how Tegmark accounts for consciousness in his mathematical universe.

What is an example of realist or physicalist / materialist literature in which the reality of biological facts would be rejected? — jkop

There wouldn't be, but those facts would be either reducible to physical facts, or they would be emergent/supervenient on the physical facts. The physical facts are what determine the biological ones.

The question is whether this can work for mental facts.

Here is the part of the colors episode that discusses Homer:

Why isn't the sky blue?

What ontology would do that? I suspect you are talking about some ideology passed for "physicalism". — jkop

Are you not aware of the philosophical literature on physicalism or materialism?

It's weird being in a philosophy forum where poster pretend that terms like realism and physicalism aren't well established terms in philosophy.

I don't make this stuff up. I wish I were that clever!

What exactly do you expect them to learn? Would they be seeing a grey toy truck until they learn to use the word 'red'? :-} I don't think so. — jkop

I'm not so sure about this anymore, after having listened to an episode of Radio Lab in which a scholar of Homer noticed that he almost never used the word blue, and in fact used other colors to describe the appearance of the water, sky, etc. And after examining other works of antiquity, came across the same lack of mention for blue.

The hypothesis was that the ancients did not have blue pigment to color things, and blue is only rarely found in nature, with the exception of the sky or water on a clear day. So maybe they lacked the color discrimination for blue.

As a test, he intentionally omitted teaching his young daughter about blue, and then when she was old enough to speak, started asking her what color the sky was.

At first she looked at him weirdly. He kept asking every time they were outside on a sunny day. Her answer went from confusion to black to white, and then finally she identified it as blue. His conclusion was that we don't see the individual color until our brains learn to discriminate it from other colors. At first his daughter was confused because the sky was a big nothing. Then it was some light color, and finally she realized it was blue like other blues in the environment, since we can produce blues and color things with it.

Being complex and of no interest to fundamental physics isn't a failure to be "real" (Hilary Putnam). — jkop

Which doesn't address the question of whether physics is the correct ontology of the world as physicalism claims.

Talk of physical facts tend to leave out things which are not so relevant in physics, such as biological facts. How is that a problem for "physicalism"? — jkop

It's only a problem if biology isn't necessitated by physics. Physicalism is the modern version of materialism, which is an ontological monism. Matter is all there fundamentally is has been replaced by physics, which means that matter-energy, fields, spacetime is all there is.

It's an updated version of atoms and the void.

She can still acquire it indirectly by other means, via our division of linguistic labour, a use of colour meters and so on. That's how we get to know what things are like in places we haven't experienced ourselves, and a lack of direct experience is no good reason to reject the knowledge. — jkop

Right, but let's say we want to know what bat sonar experiences are. We can only know about bat perception indirectly, since we're not bats and don't utilize sonar. But would any amount of indirect facts tell us what bat sonar experience is? Maybe if sonar experience is similar to vision (as Dawkins has suggested), then we could be noticing similarities in bat neurophysiology, but if not, it would seem we're out of luck.

Mary's in the same position regarding color until she leaves the room. I wanted to modify it to apply to all humans with regards to explaining why we have color experiences at all. If we don't perceive color as an objective property of light or objects, then there is a problem for physicalism, since all the physical facts leave out the color experiences.

Therefore, there are no "physicalists," as you construe them, because no one in their right mind denies having experiences. — SophistiCat

The problem is that some people deny that experiences are subjective, and thus there are only objective facts. That's why Mary's room, the p-zombie argument, the mind/body problem, etc exist and philosophers debate both sides of the argument. Chalmers, Dennett, McGinn, Nagel, etc have written books on this topic.

Dennett has stated that we are p-zombies and qualia do not exist. All of his arguments amount to subjective experience being an illusion.

So the hammer is real, but my pain when I hit my finger is not? — Cavacava

Your pain is real, but pain is dependent on creature with nervous systems existing. It's not a property of the hammer. The question of what's real comes up when we want to know what, if anything, exists independent of human perception, conception, language, cultural conventions, etc.

Everyone agrees that unicorns aren't real. But the idea of unicorns and their cultural representations do exist. But unlike horses, the existence of the unicorn depends on human beings.

Now if one doesn't accept the existence of mind-independent world, then horses could also be said to be ideas in human minds, although we perceive horses and not unicorns as living animals. However, the question can easily be asked why horses can't have minds too.

So anyway, the question of color realism is whether color is like pain or color is like shape, in that shape is taken to be a property of objects themselves, and pain is not. The hammer doesn't feel pain when I hit myself with it, but the shape of the bruise it leaves on my face is related to the shape of the hammer.

To paraphrase the ancient Cyrenaics, I am pained* but I am not hammer shaped. Am I colored or is the hammer?

*I am sweetened was the perceptually relative way the Cyrenaics would put things.

Right! I should have just said that in the OP.

That's a good defense of color realism, but the physical facts about perception still leave out the experience of color. So you're left with #3 or #4. In order for the physical facts of perception to include the color experience, further argument is needed to show how they are identical, supervene, emerge, etc.

So physicalism has a monopoly on the meaning of being a realist? I think Subjectivity has just as much a claim to ontological reality as what is mind independent and but subjective reality cannot be fully reduced to objective/physical reality. — Cavacava

No, physicalism has no monopoly. It's just that realism entails mind-independence, whatever the ontology of that reality is. Subjectivity isn't mind-independent.

Thus, dreams are real, but they're not realist, because they have no existence independent of dreamers.

Physicalism. Stating that some things can't be described, they have to be experienced supports experience being something additional to the physical.

Why? Because the physical is an objective description of the world.

hey might say that certain physical facts cannot be learned by reading a book or listening to someone speak; they must be seen. — Michael

That doesn't help.