But some idiot philosopher will say that we cannot know about the bush, only about how it seems to us; as if that meant something. — Banno

I never said only. I pointed out the difference between being sweetened and being horsed. One makes sense, and the other doesn't. Qualia is ours, but the forms belong to the world.

A pattern of behaviour is a thing in your mind? — Banno

If it wasn't in your mind/brain, you wouldn't be behaving.

Indeed, it's the idea that a quale is a "thing in the mind" that is perhaps the target for Dennett. — Banno

Where would you put the quale? I doubt you think brains work any better here.

Do you want us to conclude that, hence, we cannot not talk about the world as it is? — Banno

Sure, if we ignore the last several centuries of scientific discovery, and restrict ourselves to talk of cats, apples and the five elements ...

Because plainly, that does not follow.

If it were so plain, we wouldn't be having this debate ...

Why don't folk present arguments here, instead of innuendo? — Banno

Covid is up next. Think we can make it there ...?

he Fields are merely mathematical concepts with no actual physical properties -- only the potential for real things to emerge when activated by a mysterious "disturbance". — Gnomon

Not quite, we can see the form of magnetic field lines using iron fillings. That's how fields came to be part of physics in the first place.

Stove's Gem. We can't see the world as it really is because we have eyes. — Andrew M

Well, we don't see the empty space between or inside atoms, do we? Nor do we see the electromagnetic field holding the molecules together. Nor do we see any the vast majority of the EM spectrum interacting or passing through objects.

So no, we don't see the world as it is. We see the world as we evolved to see it. Even Dennett in some of his later talks agrees with this. He came to favor the computer desktop analogy for how we experience the world. Computer GUIs are metaphors for ease of use in interacting with computers, but files and folders aren't actually icons you click or touch.

That depends on what one's standard is for seeing things as they are. — Andrew M

That's some Protagorean level of sophistry.

How about the healthy person under normal conditions? — Andrew M

But that would just be one mode of several forming the skeptical argument. We could appeal to the healthy person, but then what about other animals? What about super tasters in humans? What grounds any one sensation as the objective true way the world is?

That's why science ended up going the route of abstracting from the subjective world of sensation to the objective one of mathematical properties, structures and functions, or Locke's primary qualities. We have reason to think those don't vary based on the perceiver.

So while I could say I'm sweetened by the honey as a normal healthy human, I cannot say I'm horsed (a saying used to counter ancient skepticism). Because the form and biology of a horse does not depend on my human senses the way color or taste does.

Maybe we can leave this at anomalous monism instead of going another couple rounds over qualia and subjectivity. Either way, there's a non-reducible psychological component.

Brexit here we come!

With that attitude. — bongo fury

Do you think we'll ever be able to reconstruct a book from the ashes of a fire, or unscramble an omelette? Some things are practically intractable.

Can you mix it in your red coffee cup the way you do bitter and sweet qualia?

Glancing over the SEP article, I've never heard that term before. But I tend to agree with what I see there.

No idea what that means. — Banno

Metaphysical beliefs? Come on now! I've been in threads where Platonism was considered meaningless because it had no empirical content to ground the claim that universals exist. Stuff like that, possible worlds, religious beliefs, beliefs about chairs on the other side of the universe, etc.

We're heading towards anomalous monism. — Banno

I don't know what that means? You mean stuff that we call physical? World-stuff? Nature?

I have an expectation that we will defeat Brexit today.

Ah, well I do not think they can succeed, because we can always state beliefs that have no concrete equivalent.

But I think they have a point about perceptual expectations.

...and concrete events can be stated; therefore any belief that ranges over a concrete event also ranges over a statement. — Banno

But they're not always, and never are for other animals (assuming we're the only language users). This way of broadening the definition of beliefs allows for the cat to believe that some better stuff is in the red container thing instead of something worth drinking.

What does a belief consist in? It consists in treating some statement as true. — Banno

This at least has to be part of what a belief consists in, since we all believe things that we do not, and sometimes, cannot act on.

It's not an account of what a belief is! Linking them to perceptual expectations would be. — fdrake

Wait, what? Why does perception need to be part of belief? I believe life exists somewhere outside Earth, but I can't perceive it. I have all sorts of beliefs like that which are not directly tied to any perception on my part, and not always tied to perception on anyone's part, such as life beyond Earth.

I also believe there's a possible world where the present Kind of France is bald, which cannot be perceived.

The other way I tried to approach it with Banno is: if you believe snow is white, is your belief directed towards snow or the statement "snow is white"? — fdrake

The snow, unless it's during one of these discussions.

So what your'e saying in the previous response is that perception involves all sorts of beliefs about the world, but they're mostly not the sort we put into language when acting.

Thanks but I've already eaten. — Daemon

Are you a black hole?

What were you getting at? — Daemon

Not really sure at this point. Something to do about beliefs, statements and states of affairs. Also, minds. I'm trying to throw a monkey wrench in the gears, but not really sure where I come down on this.

I disagree that "The snow is white" is as simple as it looks.

What do you have in mind as counter-example? For example, "I believe that I'm special". Would that count as a belief that is not about a statement?

Neutrinos?

I was responding in context of Oliver's post about someone not knowing what matter is. They say they know the world is material because they were told that by their teacher.

That makes no sense. There are different kinds of "ordinary stuff", of matter. Matter seems to be constituted by fields and particles; what's the problem? — Janus

Having the wrong conception of what ordinary stuff is made up of fundamentally. If you think it's all made of water or the five elements or just the stuff you can feel and see, then you're wrong about the world.

The point is that you cannot believe that 'x is P' is true, without believing that x is P without contradicting yourself. — Janus

Only if propositions must follow classical logic. But what if a proposition is fuzzy, or true under certain ways of looking at things, like how the snow appears to humans?

How do you know your made of matter if you don't know what matter is? — Janus

Or if you think matter is ordinary stuff all the way down as opposed to fields and particles. Meaning yo have the wrong model of matter.

Do crows do that? — frank

Ravens do that in some of Poe's poems, I think.

Thus it would be a logical contradiction to believe that "snow is white" is true while believing that snow is not white, or not believing that snow is white. — Janus

I can believe that snow appears white, but not that it is actually white. So it can be true on the ordinary language use as long as it means ?appears to humans that way" and not is the actual state of affairs, even though most people naively think it is.

I don't think snow is white. I think the Cyrenaics are right at least about this. We are whitened upon seeing the light reflect off the snow.

I don't know where that falls in Banno's Ramsey sentences. I guess my skepticism is rooted in a philosophical argument against color realism, even though most people would say the snow is factually white (upon seeing the pure snow), and not just that they believe it.

Yeah but the problem is you cannot tell me about the phenomenal character of sonar, even if you go to great lengths researching the science on it. You cannot even tell me if there is any, although it seems reasonable to suspect animals have phenomenal experiences.

You cannot even tell me how it is that our own brains produce red or bitterness. The best you can do is try and talk of some public model we tell ourselves to come up with redness or bitterness, which sounds absurd.

So what exactly is abstract thought? — frank

Remembering we're inside the cave of sensory shadows?

It may be that language and our ability to think abstractly go hand in hand? — frank

There's evidence that crows can count. So for example, if two hunters are behind a blind, and one leaves, the crows are aware that one is still back there. They also apparently can keep track of individual humans and how they've behaved.

You mean like Descartes taking Plato's Forms (the domain of the Intellect) and adding sentience to posit the Cartesian mind?

That debate has been going on for hundreds of years (if not thousands)... — Andrew M

Interesting. I had in mind the ancient skeptical Cyrenaics school of philosophy, since we had a former poster who was a fan of them.

Even if all people were to agree on the perceptual quality that some object has–for instance, that a wall appears white–the Cyrenaics still think that we could not confidently say that we are having the same experience. This is because each of us has access only to our own experiences, not to those of other people, and so the mere fact that each of us calls the wall ‘white’ does not show us that we are all having the same experience that I am having when I use the word ‘white.’

https://iep.utm.edu/cyren/#SSH2a.ii — IEP, Cyrenaics

One interesting thing about them is that they preferred to say things like, "I am sweetened, or I am whitened.", instead of "The honey is sweet, or the wall is white". And they did this because they were skeptical that we could know whether objects had a taste or color independent of our sensations.

There's much talk in modern philosophy about how language misleads. Well, the Cyrenaics would have said that our way of saying, "The cup is red and the coffee tastes bitter sweet.", is misleading us into attributing properties of sensation onto objects.

Anyway, it sounds to me like that Cyrenaics and other ancient skeptical schools anticipated much of the modern debate around qualia, minus the physicalism and neurological part. I do recall that one criticism of ancient atomism was that atoms and the void couldn't create sensations of color and taste.

Same way you know Khaled. — Daemon

It's panpyshchist robots all the way down.

@Banno

Thus, announcements by philosophers who declare themselves opposed to qualia need to be treated with some caution. One can agree that there are no qualia in the last three senses I have explained, while still endorsing qualia in the standard first sense. — SEP

Which most of the posters in this thread seem to agree with. So the question is what does qualia in the first sense amount to, and does the likes of Dennett, Frankish and the Churchlands support it, or is that to be eliminated also?

The sides have become confused recently with Banno's latest push for 100 and talk of propositional content.

Back when we were tangentally discussing quning qualia, the sides were those in favor of Dennett's intuition pumps, and those of us who were not.

A sure sign that there's no substance to the counter-argument is when a participant focuses upon the author rather than the argument being given. — creativesoul

It's a joke between teammates. The other side has done the same.

Qualia aversion is a serious condition that often goes undiagnosed. Symptoms include the need for public reassurance and an inability to introspect.

Yeah, but the thing about hard-wiring is that you can't hardwire everything about a changing environment. We can't even do this with computers. That's why humans, animals and neural networks need to learn things. So a cat is hardwired to hunt, but it has to learn about hunting. And we're hardwired to think of other minds. But we still have to learn about other humans.

That leaves plenty of room for some version of folk-psychology.

So this gets into the issue of universals, which I'm not sure this thread has covered yet... — Andrew M

We could always marry qualia to universals and really stoke the flames.

So, as a vacillating woo-merchant: I sell @Banno two red apples ...

I get that you might take a line similar to Patricia Churchland, such that neural networks are not representational. But if that view be granted then I'd just say neural networks are not about beliefs. — Banno

I wonder when we train neural networks to recognize cats on mats, what does that amount to? Or when AlphaZero learns to play superhuman chess. Can we say it has representational knowledge of chess strategy?

I also wonder whether we could pursue an eliminativist view of computing. When you look at the actual hardware, it's just moving electrons around. Where are the software programs in that? Where is the data?

Maybe just looking at neurons firing is missing the higher level view of what all that adds up to, such as belief formation. After-all, it's kind of hard to explain how humans are so adept at navigating and manipulating the environment without positing some knowledge of the world. In fact, that's an ongoing issue for improving AI. The lack of common sense understanding is one of the big remaining obstacles to a more general purpose AI. Somehow biological neural networks are able to handle that.

Can we at least agree that there is a difference between our bodies and our reports thereof? — creativesoul

Not if you're a BIV.

If you can run very fast, yes. — Olivier5

What do you suppose would be between the ears of our dear apple seller in that case?