what is mental can still be seen as material, just not in the neuro-reductionist way — Jamal

I think scientists instinctively talk this way -- "When the light from this object passes through your retina and strikes these cones, blah blah blah". A word like "vision" describes an interaction between an organism and some part of its environment, not just the internal state of the organism, interesting though that is. And you can still describe the whole tableau in naturalist terms, which doesn't change "vision" being the sort of thing we think of as mental.

Just as I have a mind, and that takes in a lot of my interactions with my environment, I have a gait -- somewhat like my father's I am told -- which is not exactly a property of mine, is not evident when I am sitting, but is a consistent feature of how I ambulatorily (!) interact with my environment. There's nothing non-physical involved in how I walk, but how I walk is only available within a particular descriptive framework, and one that necessarily involves both my body and the ground I tread.

If you mean that a non-neuro-reductionist understanding of the mind, while it does presuppose mental objects, need not presuppose internal representations, then I think I probably agree. — Jamal

I don't mean anything in particular. There's the older reflex action model -- which James describes as the singular achievement of 19th century physiology -- which is triadic: input-processing-output. The way James tells it, you have to learn to consider thinking and friends as just this middle step between sensation and action, and action -- in furtherance of life -- is the point of the whole system. But then there's the newer model, in which it's the state of the middle part that's the point, reducing its level of excitation (through action), minimizing surprise (through prediction) to minimize future excitation. (Freud's death drive but with better math.)

All I was saying is that I don't really think we need to take sides here, let alone address thorny questions of representation, to recognize that our everyday mental vocabulary is not a vocabulary about our internal states, so there's no reason to expect our everyday vocabulary to map cleanly onto whatever neuroscience discovers about those internal states.

What throws people is the identification of consciousness with the mental -- better to allow that simpler organisms may have mind but not consciousness -- because consciousness appears to be exclusively internal. Mostly it isn't, of course, else we wouldn't have it; consciousness is primarily consciousness of our environment. But there are derivative phenomena like remembering and dreaming and analysing, where all the stuff to be thought about has already been accumulated. So you go down the empiricist rabbit-hole of starting out saying sensation is the ultimate source of all of our thoughts (the thread James picks up) and end up allowing that so far as the internal state is concerned, there's just whatever's given, and you've no real way to tell where it came from.

Even worse is going on to equate mind and consciousness and self-consciousness. Even worser is equating all of those with the non-physical.

Blah blah blah. We just don't have to get into all that for the straightforward recognition that our everyday mental vocabulary is not about our internal states, so a lot of the putative problems with neuroscience are not problems at all.

The philosophical distinction between physical causation and logical necessity, and the implications of that. — Wayfarer

physical in some respects, mental in others — Wayfarer

I give up.

If you ever figure out exactly what you want to say, let me know.

Peace

The philosophical distinction between physical causation and logical necessity, and the implications of that. — Wayfarer

If I put three cupcakes on a table otherwise devoid of cupcakes, I have caused an odd number of cupcakes to be on the table.

Which one is that, physical causation or logical necessity?

I don't necessarily think that at all. — Wayfarer

Then what are we talking about?

How do you feel about neuroscientists saying things like "the self is an illusion"? --- Before answering, note that no reduction is implied; it's not a claim that the self is "really" a bit of functioning brain tissue, but that our everyday ideas about our selves don't seem to have a correlate in the brain, just as our visual field has no real correlate in the brain and is, in a suitable sense, an illusion.

when you see causal relationships between ideas, that this is distinct from the mindless processes typically invoked by physicalism. You're seeing the connection between ideas. That is a different process to that of physical causation. — Wayfarer

It's a different framework, sure. The question is why you think the existence and utility of this framework, our everyday understanding of mentality, invalidates the framework used in neuroscience and biology at large.

Neuroscientists in the lab use that same everyday framework to talk to each other and their subjects. They'll continue to say things like "I'll be right there, just grabbing my coffee," even if they're about to sit down with a nice interviewer from PBS and tell them, and the audience at home, that "the self is a myth," or something like that.

Your answer is exactly what I'm looking for — Moliere

(How can I not quote that?)

Imagine a bygone era when social roles for the sexes were more sharply distinguished. There are some paradoxes. Most households are entirely dependent on the man's income (again, unlike most households today, I believe); if anything happened to him, the wife and the kids are at least materially screwed. And yet --- if the cat gets up on the roof, who is expected to go up there and get it? I think it's not just a question of capability, but there's an expectation that the man take on this risk. And that's interesting. He is in some sense carrying his whole family up the ladder and onto the roof to get that damn cat. But that's everyone's expectation.

I can relate. I've tried to read The Catcher in the Rye a couple times and could barely get 10 or 20 pages in. I think I might have loved it at 15, but now ...

Thought maybe nobody would notice that one. ;)

I mean, there's some stuff in there that's kinda okay, or at least a start on something that might be interesting, but the style in which it is written is a dead giveaway that it's bullshit.

I've certainly known many stress tolerant women. — Hanover

I'm thinking selection bias.

Don't think I've ever seen the whole poem and it's magnificent! As a bookseller, I will cherish this.

There's always Gore Vidal:

whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies

Neal Stephenson — T Clark

The inventor of my name.

Well there's a whole thing about being respectable that's crap, of course. SF may be "the dreams our stuff is made of" now (book by Tom Disch about how sf took over popular culture), but so far as "literature" (pronounced derisively) is concerned, it's still a ghetto. Which is fine by me.

I reserve my greatest disdain for mainstream folks who figure anybody can write speculative fiction. (The way celebrities seem to think anyone can write a children's book.) They don't get it. They don't get what makes it different.

I don't generally think of writing as competitive. — T Clark

Yes, exactly that. I will try to convey what I love about Phil Dick.

I think this is true of a lot of science fiction from the 40s, 50s, and 60s. "The Foundation" and it's two successors had a big impact on me, but rereading the first recently enlightened me to how ham-handed the writing is. — T Clark

Theodore Sturgeon is often credited with pushing sf in a more literary direction from the early 50s onward. Later, there's Bester. And LeGuin. And later still there's Delany. We have some "real writers".

But I love 50s science fiction. It's the triumph of substance over style. There's a purity about those stories, the centrality of the idea, and the demand of the audience that the idea itself be the most interesting thing in a story, not the author's style.

Jolly. I withdraw the phrasing.

Is there a third option? — Tom Storm

I can't help but think the only real option is oscillating between the two, what I was gesturing at with the word 'dialectic'. The synthetic and analytic impulses must both get their say.

Alright. It's been years since I read it though, and often can't convince myself to reread things just for class.

But you know I'm always up for talking about Saint Phil.

Coulda sworn the taxonomy of trees had already been established. — Vera Mont

Probably the sort of thing I had in mind as science.

I don't understand this exchange. Is there something we disagree about? Could you tell me what it is?

I wouldn't try to convince you guys that Ubik is a great novel. I'm not sure he wrote a great novel, really. But all the work I've read is of a piece, and it makes a tapestry I find very appealing.

That said, I like Ubik a lot. I could say some things about why, but it might be hard to disentangle what I like about Ubik from what I like about the work taken altogether.

Both from The Atrocity Exhibition. Weird stuff.

But don't miss Vermilion Sands for the other side of Ballard.

universal of trees — Vera Mont

It was picturesque. I only mean that science seeks generality, else it's stamp collecting. Do trees have a common structure? How do they differ from other plants? And so on.

As for particular trees and our practical interest, I had in mind questions like, does that limb block my driveway? You don't need a scientist to answer that.

Here's a classic statement, from Raymond Chandler's "The Simple Art of Murder," published in The Atlantic in 1944, a defense of hard-boiled detective fiction and particularly of Hammett.

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.

He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people; he has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge; he is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks — that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.

The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in. Such is my faith. — Raymond Chandler

That's funny though, because you could align the theoretical and the practical the other way around, and it would make just as much sense. (Science looking for the universal of trees, practical concerns addressing this tree in all its particularity.)

@apokrisis is surely right, they implicate each other. Always this dialectic of the general and the specific, that's all philosophy is. But this paragraph is all generalities...

when processes disappear in favor of results — Baden

There's also the problem of Goodhart's law.

Here's a more controversial example because it speaks to methodology. Timothy Williamson tells a story about explaining the Gettier problem to an economist colleague, who was really puzzled by all the fuss: "So there's a counterexample, so what? Models always have counterexamples."

And your local philosopher will complain if you mention that not every tree in a pine forest is a pine.

(To quote J. L. Austin yet again, "You might almost say over-generalizing is the occupational hazard of philosophy, were it not the occupation.")

Not the same, but also not too far from the way William James uses the handy pair 'rationalist' and 'empiricist' or 'tender-minded' and 'tough-minded', as there is a tendency toward monism of principles for the former and pluralism for the latter.

I have sometimes felt bad, when sitting on the porch discussing philosophy (and politics and music and art and...) with my son that I begin every response with "It depends" or "It's complicated." --- Might be another one of those side effects of having been a competitive chess player in my youth, learning that generalities have exceptions and everything comes down to specifics. I kinda miss being more hedgehog, but you live long enough and you learn.

Missing the forest for the trees is a real thing, but a forest without trees is a castle in the air, if you don't mind mixed metaphors.

The hedgehog and the fox?

mathematical and artistic abilities can't be accounted for in terms of the theory — Wayfarer

We're the only critters we know that have math and art, and we are the way we are because of natural selection, so evidently it does account for math and art.

As someone somewhere on this forum once said, the answer to "How long would it take monkeys to compose the complete works of Shakespeare?" is about 300,000 years. That experiment has already been run.

Question: how important to the argument from reason is your unusual interpretation of human evolution?

I don’t think Srap’s criticisms come to terms with the argument — Wayfarer

That may very well be, but I have tried. I'm not even sure I've posted a criticism of the argument so much as I've tried and failed to understand it.

Apropos seeing the point, a gift:

I don't usually do hot takes but here's one: it's about risk. I doubt it's entirely a social construction, but if I suggested that male mammals are more, shall we say, disposable, that would be a just-so story. Vaguely the right place to start though, to find the material social construction has to work with.

The roles men are expected to take on -- with the usual caveats here -- that neither women nor children are, are risky. Men go to war, not just because of their aptitude for violence, but also because there is considerable risk.

The Pony Express used to run this ad: "Wanted. Young, skinny, wiry fellows. Not over 18. Must be expert riders. Willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred." As a group essential but individually disposable.

I won't multiply examples, but I'll add that it might make sense for a society to arrange itself partly in terms of risk. There have generally been dangerous things that need doing, so you probably don't want everyone doing them. Obviously today we have women soldiers, fire fighters, and so on, and we have child soldiers too. Yay.

Obviously I agree, but I'll add one more point, which might count as a sort of non-reductionism.

It seems to me a lot of our traditional "mental" vocabulary does not refer to exclusively internal states of human beings, but rather to mental rather than, I guess, bodily interactions with the environment and objects. We distinguish, and presumably have for a very long time, between chopping down a tree and looking at it, wondering if it's big enough for the beam we need. Both descriptions involve both the guy with the sharp implement and the tree, so just as <chopping down a tree> doesn't map cleanly onto postures and movements of my body alone, in the absence of a tree, so <estimating a tree's yield> needn't map onto something going on in my brain in the absence of a tree.

As it happens, representational theories of mind will map the necessary tree onto my internal representation of the tree, and you'll see often on this forum theories that claim my goal in either case to produce a certain state of my internal model. I think that's a very different issue from whether our everyday vocabulary around thinking, perceiving, imagining, remembering, and so on, not only presupposes objects for these activities but folds them into terms that are in some ways holistic.

Does that make any sense?

By giving reasons, yes? — Wayfarer

Proceed.

it's not really relevant to the argument at hand. — Wayfarer

That may be, but I assure you it was relevant to my understanding what you're talking about.

1. No belief is rationally inferred if it can be fully explained in terms of nonrational causes. — Wayfarer

Suppose I just deny this. As I understand it, Anscombe did, and argued that there was no reason you could not give both a causal and an inferential account of the same phenomenon.

I accept that the causal explanation is not the same as an inferential explanation, but I do not see why having the one excludes having the other.

How will you persuade me to accept (1)?

You're splitting hairs. — Wayfarer

Look at this way: we think of logic as normative, within limits; if P entails Q, and you believe P, then you ought to believe Q. Do people always do what they ought?

Robert Kowalski (early developer of Prolog) has been suggesting that instead of trying to get machines to think like us, we ought to consider learning to think more like machines. Wrote a book about it.

However, if I adopt a view on account of logic, then that informs my 'belief states', I am willing to accept it, and act on it. — Wayfarer

Adopt, willing, accept, act -- all of this is beyond the purview of logic. It's really straightforward. One proposition can entail another; one belief state cannot, in this same sense, entail another.

How could you specify 'content' in this sense? How would you ascertain what the 'brain state' is for some ostensible content? — Wayfarer

It was "for the sake of argument," but that branch of the discussion never materialized.

Isn't that psychologism? — Wayfarer

It isn't.

I don't have to reduce logic to psychology to point out that logic describes some relations between propositions and no relations among an epistemic agent's belief states. It's a known fact. You won't find a logician anywhere who would claim otherwise.

You seem to be taking it for granted that a pure deduction cannot be at the same time a neural process. — Janus

Not 'taking for granted': presenting an argument for it — Wayfarer

I don't think so. That's what I asked for earlier:

That's why you need an actual argument showing that if brain state A, with contents P, causes brain state B, with contents Q, that a causal relation between A and B is incompatible with a logical relation between P and Q. — Srap Tasmaner

I'm not sure there's exactly an argument here at all, and even if there is, whether it works. Certainly if the whole thing turns on libertarian free will (that "obscure and panicky doctrine" as Peter Strawson called it), that's a kettle of fish of a different color.

On the other hand, I'm also inclined, as I've indicated in recent postings, just to let it rip. Maybe naturalism does show that the sort of reasoning we think we do is a myth.

I don't think that the argument from reason is setting out to prove that reason is infallible or all-knowing - simply that it comprises the relationships of ideas, and so that can't be reduced to, or explained in terms of, the physical cause-and-effect relationships that are grist to the naturalist mill. — Wayfarer

This is the thing, though, you keep eliding the difference between propositions and epistemic agents holding those propositions true (or probable, whatever).

Logic is not the natural science of thought. That's psychology. Logic, taken narrowly, is a science of some of the relations among propositions, but includes no concept of an agent at all. You can take it somewhat more broadly, as it used to be, but then we're really looking to logic for normative guidance on what works. Decision theory kinda lands in here, and lives at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and economics.

But to reiterate: taking "logic" as we usually do these days, my believing that P does not entail my believing that Q, even if P entails Q. If there's a relation between my believing that P and my believing that Q, logic may play some part in that, but it is unquestionably also a matter of psychology, as it's my belief states that are at issue.