It is denying that knowing is direct correspondence , representing or mirroring between knower and world. Scientific and other forms of knowing, far from being the epistemological representing of a reality independent of the knower, is the evolving construction of a niche. We are worldmakers rather than world-mirrorers, whose constructions are performances that pragmatically intervene in the world that we co-invent , changing it in ways that then talk back to us in a language responsive to how we have formulated our questions. — Joshs

I think people on that forum as a whole don’t know enough about science to really cite it. The amount of misuses of quantum physics is already too many. — Darkneos

Though what did you mean by skin deep though? — Darkneos

We share about half our genes with those trees, and more than half with the squirrels and deer. Is that not extraordinary enough? — Srap Tasmaner

wonderer1 is that what you think is going on in the links? — Darkneos

How about the idea that our individual hypotheses designed to anticipate events are validated or invalidated by the way those events transpire, with the catch being that the events we compare our hypotheses with are themselves derived from our constructions? — Joshs

I probably haven't quite answered your question, about the "light touch." Maybe I have. — Srap Tasmaner

Why not then just say what you mean rather than ask dumb questions and expect me to take them seriously.

On your actual argument, the simple reply is think more carefully about what I said. Black and white are useful to the degree they bound all the possibilities that constitute grey.

As absolute values connected by a reciprocal relation, they would in fact make all shades of grey measurable as specified mixtures.

So science is founded on this analytical move. It is how the dynamics of nature can be measured in terms of precisely articulated theories.

This is how we “map language and reason onto the world”! — apokrisis

I don't have a wonderful alternative, but I'm not comfortable with this sort of "reality is whatever we agree it is." I get the impulse, and I think there's a kernel of truth there, but I also think that kind of formulation is probably incoherent. — Srap Tasmaner

↪wonderer1 Why are you pretending not to understand? — apokrisis

It may very well be that there are activities complex enough that no human is ever able to give an analytical account of their actions while so engaged -- just too many variables, too many feedback loops, and so on. — Srap Tasmaner

But there's another category where people believe there is a kind of judgment that cannot be reduced to analysis even in principle. — Srap Tasmaner

Do you believe it or do you doubt it? How are you going to proceed here so as to minimise your uncertainty? — apokrisis

That's fair, but I don't think they throw it about casually. There is a clear pattern of behavior in their posts that hints at something. — Darkneos

Pragmatism roots itself in the logical consistency of the dichotomy. We could either believe or doubt. Each extreme is logically rooted in its “other”. Together they simplify your options by excluding all other less polarised options. — apokrisis

...it might be worth looking at the phenomenological approach maybe? Especially when talking about our experience, knowledge and perceptions of the world in context of individual perspectives. — I like sushi

Just curious if I should Google the atomic weights of water, helium, and Hanover… :chin: — 0 thru 9

Pandas, hippos, iguanas, lemurs, owls, seagulls, ocelots, pigeons, horses, yaks — 0 thru 9

I am taking the notion of intellectual intuition to task. Intellectualism gives undo privilege to cognition, and the term cognition, like all terms, is an artificial structure imposed on the world to talk about it, manage it, have discourse on it, and so on. — Astrophel

But the original whole out of which this categorical thinking issues remains what it is. It is all of what we might say, and yet none of these: certainly logic is not about nothing, nor is affectivity; but concepts like these that quantify and divide experience, because they are categories, do not represent the original uncategorized primordial whole.
The idea here is to put at bay the knowledge claims that spontaneously spring into play when we experience the world. Such a suspension delivers the world from the imposition of abstraction that the primacy of the intellect has brought to philosophy. And affectivity is no longer pushed into irrelevance.

The question then is, what does affectivity "say" in the setting of being restored to its place? — Astrophel

And how are we to define a "true essence" of "pure intuition"? — Astrophel

Pikachu gets stabbed by a Jamaican man and then asks why?
The Jamaican man replies he just wanted to poke a mon. — Amity

I have no issue with paradigms shifts and an evolving understanding. But there is an untested assumption in all of this, in whatever scientific field you choose (even the science of getting up in the morning. The world is a science laboratory) that it is not all, in the exhaustive analysis of it, "made". There is a confidence that science is "about" something, even if that something is implicit and elusive. It is here I wish to elucidate. — Astrophel

Science has no idea how brains produce consciousness. — RogueAI

Well, you have just admitted to having intuitions. You find this kind of thing anathema among analytic philosophers, for it implies something directly apprehended, free of interpretation; and if this is what you mean by intuition, then you are making a very strong claim, the strongest, namely, that the world, through intuition, discloses its nature or essence. This stands apart from science's paradigms that are open to theoretical "progress"" one is already there, in possession of something of the same epistemological status as, say, the Ten Commandments. An absolute. — Astrophel

Yes, there is: foundational intuition. If it can be shown that there is such a thing, then all of our serious knowledge claims, while certainly not being thereby true absolutely, will be seen occurring, while still "at a distance, within the "play" of an absolute. — Astrophel

By the way, it's your model so I don't know what to do with this, but it might be worth bearing in mind that something that is invariably unarticulated might not be inarticulable, but simply not hooked up to the speech-producing system. — Srap Tasmaner

This discussion has gotten me thinking back over a set of related experiences I've had.

Around 15 years ago I had designed some logic, recognizing its efficiency compared to what my employer had done in the past. Sometime later my boss was asking about the functionality of that bit of logic, and checking to make sure I had done it in the approved historical way. I told him I hadn't done it the historical way, and he asked me to explain how I had done it. I didn't have a good way to explain it to him except by drawing a schematic. I'm guessing he realized fairly quickly that I wasn't going to be able to convey an understanding of the design as quickly as he could develop his own understanding from looking at the schematic. So he had me bring him the schematic. I gave a brief explanation of what various submodules do, and he looked at it for a minute or so, and said we should have gotten a patent on that.

I don't really know what it was he saw in the schematic but I suspect it is things that I wouldn't recognize until much later. My boss was one of those guys who went to university studying physics when he was 15 years old, and was the star of the math team even though he wasn't a mathematics student.

I think now, that he likely recognized a mathematical elegance to the design which, at least in some regards, I did not recognize at that time. There is a fairly simple mathematical equation which conveys the gist of the logical process occurring in the design, and I think that I had an intuitive recognition of the mathematical elegance 'driving' me to design the logic as I did. However, I didn't think in those terms when doing the design.

As best I can recall, when designing the logic I focused on a design which would efficiently use 'space' in an FPGA as well as DSP clock cycles, while doing the job the logic was intended to achieve with much greater accuracy than we had any practical use for. As I said, I think in retrospect, that intuitive subconscious recognition of the mathematical elegance played a role in what I designed. However, I don't think I can say that I consciously recognized the relevant mathematical equation. I would say it was more like I trusted the part of my mind that did recognize the elegance, even though that part of my mind wasn't able to 'speak into consciousness' except in a vague way motivating me to design what I did.

Anyway, I really didn't start this thread to talk about me. I greatly appreciate the way you've gotten me to think about things in ways I haven't before.

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. — Srap Tasmaner

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." — Srap Tasmaner

When Capablanca played chess, someone said, it was like he was speaking his native language. — Srap Tasmaner

Given that physics is the science of matter (hyle), then the question is, what is the science of form? (morphe) — Wayfarer

https://philosophyofbrains.com/2016/05/11/hylomorphism-and-emergence.aspx — Eugen

All you say may be true, that you fully comprehend without having an easy way of showing that to others by reducing your thoughts to conveyable language, but would not that still make you a complicator under your use of the term? — Hanover

I imagined a complicator or simplifier to be someone who offers information to others for clarification purposes, but if you're imagining those terms to describe a person in terms of what goes on internally for their self-clarification, then that would be a difference in how I considered the terms you presented. — Hanover

And in that model nothing is synchronized enough to be called 'the present'. If you see a bird flying in the sky near the sun, the light that bounced off the bird hit it a fraction of a second ago, but the rays coming for the Sun left it eight minutes ago. That is, what you perceive as contemporary is not – the Sun might have suddenly ceased to exist four minutes ago, long before that bird even got near you. Your perception 'the bird flies when the sun shines' would be false in that case.

The same goes for all your senses, of course. If you step on something sharp, you feel it about 0.3 s after the fact. If you think that you have heard something at the exact same moment - you did not, as your auditory impulses are also delayed, but less than touch. And of course both stimuli occurred even earlier, before they were processed by your brain. What you perceive as 'the present' is a jumble of of various occurences that have already happened at different times. 'Reality itself' it is not. — Jabberwock

I think everything you posted is right, and comports with what I understand of the two systems model; thus we can continue to use the word intuition just to mean something like very fast, largely unconscious, habitual thinking, problem solving, recognition, and so on. — Srap Tasmaner

Now my impression, as someone who's studied a bit about human mind/brain issues, is that it's highly reasonable to think that there are variations in brain organization that bias people towards one of these perspectives or the other. (Obviously there are social factors as well that play a huge role in which perspective one takes, and there are likely factors of brain organization that influence the degree to which a person adopts the view of those around them, or strikes out on their own in searching for the truth. It's all very complicated with regard to the nature/nurture question.)

Anyway, one way of looking at how people's minds work differently is, looking at whether they have a bias towards intuitive (pattern recognizing) cognitive processes, or logical thought. Now both aspects of human mental processing can be of great value, and both aspects can produce misleading results. And I'm inclined to think an ideal is to use both intuition and logic in a synergistic way, but anyway, that's somewhat tangential.

Back in the early days of AI, Herbert Simon did a lot of work on chess and concluded that intuition is in some sense a myth, that it is just experience, and chess masters have vastly more experience than amateurs, have a huge stock of positions and patterns committed to memory and can draw on those to evaluate positions, find variations and so on. — Srap Tasmaner