There are ways of apprehending or thinking about the world and our experience that dissolves emotional responses. — Tom Storm

Well put.

One has to prove God does not exist in order to prove that He did not create the universe, doesn't that follow? — FreeEmotion

Ok, what do you mean by "God"?

Existential Comics: A Dialogue on Compatibilism

The problem there is that we wouldn’t recognise patterns, let alone have neuroscience, or any science, were it not for the ability to abstract, compare, contrast, equate, and so on. — Wayfarer

Are you saying that our ability to recognize patterns is dependent on our conscious thought? If so, I think you've got things backwards.

Very briefly, it revolves around the metaphysical assertion that Ideas (whether construed as forms, principles or universals) are only graspable by a rational mind (nous) but they are not produced by the mind. They are 'in the mind, but not of it' - that is, intelligible objects. — Wayfarer

@Tom Storm

I think a more realistic way of looking at it is that human reason is substantially a function of pattern recognition occurring in our brains, and that notions like forms and universals reflect a neurologically naive attempt at making sense of the results of such pattern recognition. I think there is a reification going on, in seeing as things ("intelligible objects"), what can more accurately be understood as events subconsciously occurring in our brains (recognitions of patterns).

I suppose one mights say, as Wayf does, that "they are not produced by the mind" if "the mind" is equated with consciousness. However, from a more holistic perspective, where mind is understood as including the subconscious activity of our brains, it seems to me more accurate to think that what Wayf refers to as "intelligible objects" are in fact produced by the mind/brain. ( Which is not to say they are purely phantasms without correspondence to things in the larger world.)

Why are electrons negatively charge particles? — Michael

It's arguably because of a decison made by a relatively uninformed Ben Franklin.

It cannot work. Thinking that it works, even just a little, means that we have some ability get access to the truth, to reality, to how the world really is. — Angelo Cannata

The fact that we have some ability to get access to how the world really is, is what allowed for the construction of the internet which allows people to say such vacuous things as you say here, to others all around the world.

I hope you can learn to bark more meaningfully. Lots of other people do. Don't sell yourself short.

Obviously, an organized system of barking will never be able to master an understanding of the world. Curiosly, humans think they can, and then they are even surprised seeing that it doesn’t work. — Angelo Cannata

Well "master" might be a bit grandiose. On the other hand we are discussing philosophy with people all over the world, so maybe it works somewhat?

Anselms's ontological argument is mine, in spite of it's theological pretenses, for it is an example of a logically valid constructive argument that is 'necessarily true' but nevertheless draws a false conclusion about the world outside of logic, in spite of the argument insisting that it is referring to the outside world! — sime

Interesting example!

In other words, even ideal reasoners can be expected to draw rationally "correct" yet empirically false conclusions about the world. In which case, what is the point of AI and cognitive science? — sime

There is more to an ideal of reasoning than the ability to apply logic in a valid way. There is also the pattern recognition applied to diverse empirical observations that allow for recognition of false premises. For example the "training set" which is hugely important to the results yielded by modern AI.

I am not sure I understand what you mean here?? — Apustimelogist

I took the following to mean, "If you drop moral realism you should drop all realism."

If you drop moral realism you should drop all of it. And most people are unwilling to do that it seems. — Apustimelogist

Perhaps I was misinterpreting you, but I was explaining that I don't see a good justification for dropping all realism, on the basis of the nonexistence of moral facts.

Now, there may be people who earnestly profess to fail to comprehend morality. But I would say that if it is observable in their actions then they understand it just fine, it's just that their theory is at odds with their actions. — Leontiskos

I wouldn't say I fail to comprehend morality. I see morality as a function of evolved cognitive biases which tend to make individuals function successfully in a social group, as the following video illustrates:



Like the angry monkey, we are biased towards judging things to be wrong and acting on such judgements. There is no need for a 'moral law' to explain such behavioral tendencies - just a history of evolution as social primates.

There is no inconsistency in social primates like us intellectually recognizing an emotivist basis for morality, and yet continuing to be social primates who form and act on moral judgements. Humans can't turn themselves into Vulcans just by adopting a particular moral theory.

I know your intuitions about morality have been strongly influenced by religious arguments. So it is understandable that it would be quite a paradigm shift for you to grasp such a different way of understanding morality, but I happen to think this is vastly more realistic than your belief in a moral law and lawgiver.

I feel there is a mindset behind honesty.
Without that mindset, honesty doesn't exist. — YiRu Li

Autism?

Obviously, this clearly isn't an argument for moral realism but it is an argument against the case that moral realism is inherently different to any other kind of realism. If you drop moral realism you should drop all of it. And most people are unwilling to do that it seems. — Apustimelogist

I think there are evolutionary reasons that our thinking is biased in ways that tend to make us successful as a social species. I don't see a reason to think such moral biasing (or similar biasing) of our perspective would bias our perspectives in all regards.

Again, cut to the chase please. — I like sushi

It appears to me that playing this silly game is Corvus' whole point with this thread. Why would he want to cut to the chase?

I dont understand the problem. — AmadeusD

That's ok. My question was directed @Gnomon.

Materialists like to belittle the "Hard Problem" by implying that philosophers... — Gnomon

Do you understand that "materialist" is not a distinct category from "philosopher"?

Your writing frequently suggests that you don't understand this.

However, it is an odd shoe-horn to then ask how well language makes truth-conditional statements, or if that is even the real function of language. Rather, the biology recenters these debates away from truth-finding, and more about evolutionary-biological, species-apt theories. — schopenhauer1

I'm late to this discussion and haven't looked into what other responses there may have been to this. So please excuse me if this is redundant.

Having spent some serious time thinking about and debating against Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN), I think a strong case can be made for human linguistic ability being evolutionarily adaptive, on the basis that it does provide humans the ability to communicate truths to each other. Undoubtedly partial truths, but a degree of truth that has historically been adaptive for humans. I think I would say that biology does recenter, and in the process expand the fields of knowledge that are relevant to the discussion. However, I'd emphasize that that is far from saying that humans commmunicating truths is out of the picture, given naturalistic evolution. (As Plantinga suggests.)

The obvious alternative is to follow Alfred North Whitehead in 1919-1920, and abandon classical Euclidean topology for a 'point-free topology' that refers only to extensionally interpretable "blobs", namely open-sets that have a definite non-zero volume, whose intersections approximate pointedness . Then it might be possible to extensionally interpret all such "blobs" in relation to a fixed basis of topological description in a more constructive fashion, meaning that extensional ambiguity is handled directly on the logical level of syntax, as opposed to on the semantic level of theory interpretation. — sime

Very interesting post, although I don't have enough mathematics background to follow all of the details. Could you provide a link to a 'Blobs for Dummies' article?

As best I can tell, the notion of "essences" doesn't refer to anything, and the use of the term often seems a matter of feigning knowledge where recognizing ignorance seems more warranted.

I'm not really interested in arguing the point though, and I just wanted to point out that there is relevant knowledge to be gained.

Carry on.

So specifically, I am searching for arguments, preferrably complete, even more preferrably in syllogistic form, for the belief that the self persists. Otherwise, I will remain in doubt, and in absence of any evidence of permanence, I will default to the position that it does not stay at all, and that we are constantly as always dying, as the comic posted in the first page depicts. — Lionino

What is relatively persistent, by comparison with with most cells of bodily organs, is neurons and the neural networks structures that supervene on them.

As a brain develops, young neurons strike out, seeking to form synaptic connections across brain regions, Harris said. If they fail to make those connections, they “commit suicide by consuming themselves.” And even if they survive this first cutthroat wave, they can “get pruned, like plants.”

In the first trimester of pregnancy, neural growth is exponential: about 15 to 20 million cells are born every hour, Harris said. Only about 50 percent of these original cells survive. If, for example, there are too many of one type, causing an imbalance, the excess will die off. Or, if some seem to be serving a pointless task, like those attending a shut eye, they’ll move on. Why waste precious neurons?

After the early period of growth, suicide, and pruning comes to an end, adult neurons survive for a lifetime. And unlike those of a cat, they remain malleable for several years. This is one reason kids are especially adept at learning new languages, and why procedures to correct neurological dysfunctions, like a lazy eye, have higher chances of success early in life.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/05/a-tour-of-the-growing-brain-complete-with-upside-down-vision/

Notice I asked the additional question, why the emphasis on animal welfare? Is that part of your programming? — Wayfarer

Good questions!

I would be surprised, if even without the ethical biasing, ChatGPT would have come up with an accurate answer. I suspect something like what @Jonathan Waskan is suggesting would be required, to result in the ability of a more advance AI to recognize that a jack-o'-lantern isn't particularly problematic for a mouse.

What I'm most curious about is what deep learning will develop when an AI is embodied in a sophisticated robot body. (With learning developed from observing and exploring the world.)

If anyone desires it, I can tie this in to grade-school mathematical reasoning—explaining how mental matchsticks and the like can keep arithmetical, algebraic, and geometrical LLMs over their targets—but for the moment, my bet has been placed. — Jonathan Waskan

I'd be interested in hearing more details of your hypothesis if you have the time.

But I don't see panpsychism as a problem - just a mistake, generated by the philosophical fondness for exaggerated generlization. — Ludwig V

:up:

How do I know that I am perceiving a physical thing in a real world and not just dreaming or hallucinating or being tricked by an evil scientist who has my brain in a vat and is stimulating my visual cortex with nanomachines?

This question seems relevant to the discussion. — Michael

How do you know?

Don't you think that might be asking a little too much? It seems to me that Ockham's Razor suggests it's fairly reasonable to chop off the evil scientist as unparsimonious.

Anesthesia seems fairly direct.

...while Mind is "unrealistic" in the sense of literally intangible & immaterial, hence not something you can directly manipulate for real-world purposes. — Gnomon

Sounds like something, that someone who didn't want his attempts to manipulate people's minds to be recognized as such, might say.

What makes you think that minds can't be manipulated for real world purposes? Do you actually believe that?

As I made clear in the OP, I am not denying the existence of the world at all. I am interested to see the arguments and logical reasoning on what reason or ground our belief in the existence of the world is based.

Could it be only reasoning? Or could it be some other mental events and activities? Or as Hume says, could it be our customs, habits and instincts to believe in the existence of the world? — Corvus

It involves other aspects of cognition the development of which are a prerequisite to our being able to engage in logical reasoning. For example pattern recognition:

In psychology and cognitive neuroscience, pattern recognition describes a cognitive process that matches information from a stimulus with information retrieved from memory.[1]

Pattern recognition occurs when information from the environment is received and entered into short-term memory, causing automatic activation of a specific content of long-term memory. An early example of this is learning the alphabet in order. When a carer repeats ‘A, B, C’ multiple times to a child, utilizing the pattern recognition, the child says ‘C’ after they hear ‘A, B’ in order. Recognizing patterns allows us to predict and expect what is coming. The process of pattern recognition involves matching the information received with the information already stored in the brain. Making the connection between memories and information perceived is a step of pattern recognition called identification. Pattern recognition requires repetition of experience. Semantic memory, which is used implicitly and subconsciously, is the main type of memory involved with recognition.[2]

Pattern recognition is not only crucial to humans, but to other animals as well. Even koalas, who possess less-developed thinking abilities, use pattern recognition to find and consume eucalyptus leaves. The human brain has developed more, but holds similarities to the brains of birds and lower mammals. The development of neural networks in the outer layer of the brain in humans has allowed for better processing of visual and auditory patterns. Spatial positioning in the environment, remembering findings, and detecting hazards and resources to increase chances of survival are examples of the application of pattern recognition for humans and animals.[3]

There are six main theories of pattern recognition: template matching, prototype-matching, feature analysis, recognition-by-components theory, bottom-up and top-down processing, and Fourier analysis. The application of these theories in everyday life is not mutually exclusive. Pattern recognition allows us to read words, understand language, recognize friends, and even appreciate music. Each of the theories applies to various activities and domains where pattern recognition is observed. Facial, music and language recognition, and seriation are a few of such domains. Facial recognition and seriation occur through encoding visual patterns, while music and language recognition use the encoding of auditory patterns.

It shows that the ability to infer images from brain activity doesn't really amount to 'mind-reading' (impressive though it might be.) — Wayfarer

I don't see a good reason to look at it in a binary way. It makes sense to me to see it as an impressive but limited degree of mind reading, just as it involves an impressive but limited degree of brain reading.

I suspect most philosophers wouldn't touch the subject, because it's so closely associated with *pth! pth!* icky girls. Beyond sexual attraction, one of the strongest human bonds is between mated pairs, and one of the fiercest kinds of love is maternal. I think they just didn't want to sully their grand theories with the feelings of and toward women. — Vera Mont

:lol:

For me the attribute which is often left out is how love makes you feel. Ineffable, subjective, a bit of a qualia problem and therefore for some people, intangible or BS. — Tom Storm

That is a good point. The ineffability makes it problematic to try to encompass it with language.

There is also variation in people's capacity to feel love. I've dealt with psychopathic people who just didn't get love, and like all of us, interpreted others from the context of their own subjective experience.

We're discussing here a system which is trained by recognising responses and inferring similarities between them and further responses, and which by so doing can re-construct images from neural activity. But there are much more subtle elements of mental operations which I don't think could be susceptible to such a representation - basic ideas, like 'the same as', or 'greater than'. Of course even simple calculators can recognise such relationships between numbers, but the general idea, which a human will understand without any particular difficulty, would be impossible to represent pictorially - so how could be be captured by those means? And the mind is constantly using those comparisons and judgements in its activities. — Wayfarer

I certainly agree that there are a lot of limitations to what can be learned with the current state of the art. MEG (the technology used by Meta) has much better temporal resolution than fMRI, and in some respects, better spatial resolution than EEG, but still has a lot of limitations in its ability to capture the details of what is going on in our brains.

Furthermore, the results described in the video were a function of what data about brain activity could be correlated with a limited amount of linguistic thought over a fifteen hour period. Absolutely there are subtleties to our thought that aren't captured in such a process. I don't see "greater than" as particularly problematic for such technology though, since it is easily linguistically expressible. It would depend on whether and how the topic of "greater than" came up while gathering the AI training data.

Certainly, there is a lot more going on in my mind than I can put into words, and I assume that is true for all of us. I wouldn't expect such a technological process to 'know' my subjective experience in detail. Still, for someone with Broca's aphasia, this sort of technology could be life changing if it can be made suitably portable.

BTW, I explained to wonderer1, who argued against you, by saying "these things are outcomes of the same physicalist thinking you are constantly crusading against", that being against physical thinking is irrelevant to questions rergarding technology, but he didn't bother to reply. Most probably he undesrstood that he was wrong and doesn't want to admit it. — Alkis Piskas

Well, if you really want to know, you advertise that you are a pretender, and an aphorism about teaching a pig to sing comes to mind.

For example:

I think the argument can be made that there is a physical aspect to them. What is not physical is insight, grasping the relations between ideas, and understanding meaning.
— Wayfarer

Well, they consist of energy and mass, but not of the kind we know in Physics. Yet, this energy and mass can be detected with special devices, e.g. polygraphs. (I have used such a device myself extensively. Not a polygraph.)
This detection is possibe because thoughts affect the body, as I already said. And in this way, we can have indications about the kind of thoughts the subject has --from very "light" to quite "heavy", their regular or irregular flow, their abrupt changes, etc.-- but not of course of their content. — Alkis Piskas

Scientology?

I would like you to imagine a world in which there are no minds. You will imagine our world as it exists minus the minds, and you will use the knowledge we have ( intentional content ) to infer what would be true in such a world, depending on whether you are a direct/indirect realist or irrealist and your metaphysical commitments to what exists independent of the mind

But hold on.

All you did in this thought experiment is imagine a mind less world from a world in which there are minds and languages. In other words, you mentally allocated to the world which had no minds with your mind to describe it. — Sirius

Sure, I can't imagine without using my mind.

Using your mind to describe a mindless world ( in which a mind doesn't exist ) is a wrong step. — Sirius

Then why did you ask me to make a wrong step?

(I know, I know, that's how the presuppositionalist game is played.)

1. True statements can only exist as cognitive content — Sirius

That (which exists as pixels on a screen) is not a true statement?

"Prove" is an ureasonable standard. We should look at where the evidence points though.

That science is capable of amazing achievements and discoveries, but science is also a human endeavour. The mistake of physicalism is to treat humans as objects and to forget (or even claim to eliminate :lol: ) the subject to whom the objective domain occurs. — Wayfarer

You say this sort of thing a lot, but then the effectiveness of physicalist thought about minds is shown in your OP.

Which is all to say, I find compatibalism more convincing because the evidence for strong emergence seems far more convincing. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What evidence for strong emergence?

I turned 70 this year, and again I’m thinking what an amazing time it is to be alive. Even despite the perils and obvious doomsday scenarios. I think this augmented intelligence technology - that’s what I like to call it - is an amazing phenomenon to witness first hand. Hey my grandkids don’t even know what currency looks like - when I was a kid my grandparents cooked on a woodfire oven and our milk was delivered in a pail. In the old Stone Age, it took half a million years to slightly improve a flint ax. The rate of change is simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. Even my adult son is a bit daunted by AI - he finds it threatening - but I’ve been engaging with ChatGPT since the day it came out. It’s truly an amazing time to be alive. — Wayfarer

What are your thoughts, on the fact that these things are outcomes of the same physicalist thinking that you are constantly crusading against?

The technology used is not fMRI or EEG.

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a functional neuroimaging technique for mapping brain activity by recording magnetic fields produced by electrical currents occurring naturally in the brain, using very sensitive magnetometers. Arrays of SQUIDs (superconducting quantum interference devices) are currently the most common magnetometer, while the SERF (spin exchange relaxation-free) magnetometer is being investigated for future machines.[1][2] Applications of MEG include basic research into perceptual and cognitive brain processes, localizing regions affected by pathology before surgical removal, determining the function of various parts of the brain, and neurofeedback. This can be applied in a clinical setting to find locations of abnormalities as well as in an experimental setting to simply measure brain activity.