What? Perception is what we call the generation of sensory experience. It is the primary mediation in question here.

That we see the tree's appearance does not mean that the tree 'is' an appearance. It simply means we see what can be seen of the tree, itself. — StreetlightX

In what sense would our sensations be exhaustive of the tree? That’s taking the direct realist position.

Or maybe the sentence is just badly worded? You mean we see the kinds of things we can see due to our perceptual habits. Other habits might see something that appears very different. Like think of how a spider might see the tree.

Metacognition requires written language — creativesoul

Citation? Explanation?

Your experience of the world. That is why folk were talking about indirect vs direct perception.

You can google the dictionary definition if you like -https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/mediate

technical with object Bring about (a result such as a physiological effect)
‘the right hemisphere plays an important role in mediating tactile perception of direction’

Do you have an example/candidate of meaning that does not require and/or consist in/of what I just wrote? — creativesoul

Is @Sapientia messing around with people’s quotes again? :)

Because indirect perception is mediated,... — creativesoul

Perception isn’t mediated. It is the mediation. Radiant energy gets turned in colour experience. Floating fragments of organic matter get turned in the scent of a rose.

The gap or epistemic cut is between the physics of the world and the qualia of the mind. Perception is our way of talking about the fact that “we” - the linguistically constructed introspecting observer - have to accept basic experience as brute fact. That part of what our brain does - processing the world as a pattern of sensations - is hardwired.

So perception is the primary mediating step. Then secondary linguistic habits can mediate that biological level experience. We can talk about lovely sunsets and try to put a name to the particular variety of rose we might be smelling.

So, we arrive at the following conclusion:No creature without written language has indirect perception. — creativesoul

Nope. Metacognition is dealing with already mediated experience.

And crickey, why written language?

The correct answer is both, depending upon the notion of perception. If it is based upon a minimalist criterion, then it would not involve language, and it would be a more physical notion. If it is based upon a criterion that requires complex linguistic notions, including awareness of our own fallibility, then our perception would most certainly be indirect, because it would amount to the affects/effects of one's worldview and would be a more mental notion. — creativesoul

Finally you spell out a position. And I agree with the gist. It is why I say humans introspect but animals extrospect. Animal perception is direct in the sense that they have no choice but to be plugged into the here and now. Their minds are run by their immediate environment and the circumstance it presents. The capacity to detach from that is very limited - even if chimps, dolphins and ravens can do some planning, some abstracting, some deeper level of analysis.

Then humans can completely detach from the world to have a socially-constructed inner world due to the semiotic mechanism of symbolising language. Language creates an epistemic cut. Mentality gets divided into linguistically scaffolded notions of self and world. Consciousness becomes a self-consciously regulated thing. Introspection adds a further internal dimension where a “self” resides.

So it is the epistemic cut, the semiotic machinery of a symbolic code, that makes human mentality and perception indirect compared to the “trapped in the moment” directness of the biological animal mind.

Yet then, the thread is really about computers only aiming to achieve a conscious animal level of perception. DeepMind claims to replicate something of the neural architecture of brains, not the socially-conditioned being of human minds. It is only the programmers who know DeepMind is seeing cute kittens. No one pretends the machine is making a linguistic classification in unsupervised learning fashion.

So that is why your attack on my usage of “perception” was so out of place. It suggested you didn’t really understand the meaning of my language within the context of the thread.

But anyway, I also then would make the further point that animal perception is still indirect even in its directness. It remains the case that animal consciousness is also founded on an epistemic cut - the mediating semiotics of neurons.

So the whole semiotic argument applies with equal force, just at this more foundational level. That is why while it is true human consciousness is even more indirect than that of non-linguistic animals, here that is inessential to the indirect realism position.

Thoughts? — Agustino

How has that not been the case since Thatcher and Reagan. Can you think of any leader of either country winding back the neoliberal project in any meaningful fashion since then?

The wheel seems ready to turn though. Growth is stagnant. Financialisation - speculative money - has been allowed to corrupt all markets. The environmental costs of the basic industrial-era economy are coming home to roost.

Trump feels like society nervously making the first preparations to turn fascist and statist when the current economic illusion actually collapses. The winners and losers are being lined up in readiness, the social lines drawn, for when it all turns inward and nasty.

So yes. Neoliberalism remains in great health as an ideology. But the degree to which the actual global economy is then just a speculative illusion is the big question.

As well as the question of how best politically to manage the puncturing of the illusion. What system of control should best kick in there?

What appeals to me especially is getting behind or around all the pre-interpretedness that we don't think to question (since it's almost invisible as we use it) that traps our thinking in certain loops. — t0m

I really like the way you’ve been expressing this. But I think the weakness is that it depends heavily on the metaphysical truth of some communal or shared state of being, when the phenomenal mind is so completely private and unshared.

So it is both an appealing notion - expressed in many philosophies - but also fails unless we can define the “ground state” in something other than the usual mentalistic terms.

Alluding to the divine kind of works for me if it again has nothing to do with anthropomorphic creators, or creating forces.

There is a mathematical magic at the heart of Peircean metaphysics, a self-making relation that can call forth being from its pure inescapable logic. And then that meaning-forming, structure-creating device points deeper to its own ground, its own precondition, in the “not-being” of Apeiron, of Firstness or vagueness.

So reality swims into existence. And it condenses out of neither some ur-substance, nor some rarified divine mind - ur-phenomenology. The ur-potential of the Apeiron has to be a still more subtle concept.

Yet I can see that that approach to metaphysics is by-passing phenomenal being, which is actually the basis of our particular being as humans. So to match the ur-objectivity of the pansemiotic metaphysics I just described, there is then the ur-subjective description that would formally complement that.

There is here the possibility of two complementary metaphysical projects.

Well and good, but it's a different matter to the metaphysics of meaning. What interests me, is the idea that rational and mathematical truths are real but not physical. — Wayfarer

So you want a definition of meaning. And you don’t think it useful to first have a definition of the meaningless?

Mathematical truths seem fundamental in some crucial way, yet you don’t seem impressed when two such opposed things - information and entropy - are shown to be mathematically the same?

You’re a tough crowd. :)

Do you have any kind of definition of the semantic as yet? My impression is that anytime meaning is mentioned, your mind skips immediately to the necessity of a self experiencing that meaning. That is where all he mystification begins. Meanings can’t be just acted upon. They must be felt. They are not just states of interpretation or information that constrains, they are understood, appreciated, perceived, known to be.

So a meaning encodes a point of view. Yet points of view are then by definition particular, personal, individual. That is why sharing meanings is a fraught business. Likewise any claims to be able to measure meaning in any objective or scientific fashion. Your way of thinking about meaning - as rooted in the subjectivity of the singular point of view - already defeats any possibility of all attempted objective descriptions.

You’ve set up a nice fortress of presumptions to protect your view of semantics. So you don’t need to take the generalisations of the philosophy of semiotics, or the science of information, seriously.

Even though that generalisation project is arriving at its mathematical terminus. Somehow you can hold mathematics in the highest regard, yet ignore it completely when it comes to the generalisation of semantics.

Even if this was "in" the Matrix (and it sorta is in terms of mediation), it would still be 'real' in the most emotionally relevant sense, at least for me. — t0m

I see your point better I think. There is an assumption behind idealism~realism which is about being an immaterial soul locked in a material body, a physical world. So selfhood is taken for granted. It is all about starting with the bare givenness of experience. Then we have to work out what is really real.

And a corrective to that is instead not making self primary. The real first ground of being is the communal one. We are already in a world - the social tribal one. Our first experiences as babies is human contact. It is everything. So the communal mind - in some very important sense - is there before the private self becomes individuated (and aware of being trapped in a body that is trapped in a world).

So this seems to go against Heidegger. Maybe you will correct me on that.

But it is definitely pragmatism - Peirce's ultimate theory of truth being based on "that judgement towards which a community of thinkers would eventually tend".

And it is completely in line with my social constructionist viewpoint of human psychology. We are not born selves, but become individuated beings via the shaping constraints of our family, our tribe, our culture, our era.

I would point out how it is theistic notion of supernatural spirit or soul - the Romantic notion of human psychology - which is at odds with this view. So while you talk about it in an appealing warm and cosy ways, the emotional value, that fits quite happily with a naturalistic perspective.

I have no problem at all in first experience being about the raw feelings of human contact, being drawn into the human web of relations. So first there is you. Then later I discover I.

Babies of course are also busily discovering their own hands belong to them, and that the world exists in its various recalcitrant dimensions. But the emotion of social interaction could be primary in a way that the idealism~realism debate manages to by-pass.

You could ask the question of how would that change the game?

All thought/belief consists of mental correlation(s) drawn between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or the agent itself(it's own state of 'mind' when applicable). — creativesoul

Coherence also has a part to play. Concepts can be justified on the grounds of their rational coherence. So it is not just a correlation between generals and particulars, or ideas and impressions. The internal rational coherence of a thought is another grounds for belief. (Kant might have had something to say about that.)

Correlation presupposes the existence of it's own content. — creativesoul

Coherence kicking in already?

'Objects' of physiological sensory perception are external to thought/belief. — creativesoul

The big assumption. It seems necessary for the sake of logical coherence. Observation of correlations give it inductive weight. Or otherwise.

All meaning is attributed by virtue of drawing mental correlation(s) between that which becomes symbol/sign and that which becomes symbolized/signified. — creativesoul

Signs mediate interpretations. So semiotics. But so far you are talking dyadically and not triadically. A weakness is emerging in the world being interpreted via signs is now left out of the equation, removing the functional constraints (the fact that the whole show has to work in terms of achieving some real world goal beyond mere "representation").

All philosophical positions presuppose the existence of an external world. — creativesoul

They presuppose coherence, intelligibility, rationality. That is the first place it starts. So the self is presupposed as much as the world. For there to be externality, there must be internality. And so to get to internal/external, the very coherence of the logic of dichotomies must be the true pre-supposition in play.

That is why we can indeed doubt the internal/external as an actual thing. Though Descartes' cogito is decent argument for protesting "there is a self". Although - being a linguistic claim - you run into new difficulties with animal selves, or foetal selves.

Thought/belief is not existentially contingent upon language. To quite the contrary, it's the other way around.

Thought/belief formation happens prior to language. Thought/belief is accrued. — creativesoul

Err, nope. Sure, animal brains can perceive and conceive. Chimps and ravens can do smart, intentional and planned things. But given you seem to want to make a hard distinction out of human "thought/belief" in your discussions with me, the evolutionary story would have to be more the other way around.

Language is a new level of semiotic code that just doesn't exist for animals (in the wild). So if we are pointing fingers at the cause of the crossing of this intellectual Rubicon, the development of the new constraint of syntactical speech has got to be the prime cause of something becoming different with humans.

Thought/belief begins with drawing rudimentary correlations(think Pavlov's dog) and gains in complexity in direct accordance with/to the complexity of the correlations drawn between object(s) and/or self. — creativesoul

The slippery slope fallacy. No amount of complication would have changed the animal mind. Dolphins have huge brains. Chimps too. But nothing new to report there. Just an increase in what was already going on.

With Homo sapiens, quite different. And that can be explained by pointing to what was new in a semiotic sense. Speech as a new level of encoding the signs that underpin the mental business of correlating and cohering, or differentiation~integration.

This is too rich. Pots and kettles. I'm not interested in your rhetoric apo. — creativesoul

Evasion, evasion, evasion.

You've been haranguing me for definitions. I've given them. To the degree I could given your refusals to clarify what it is exactly you might question about those definitions.

And now - as has always been the case - you run for cover when I insist on some kind of sensible definition of your own terminology.

I'm actually fascinated in a horrible car-crash way. I want to see what you come up with eventually.

Vanishingly constant or constantly vanishing? — Janus

All quantum mechanics can tell us is that it sure started small yet intense.

But then under a thermodynamically extended view of QM - decoherence - we could predict that the joke/applause will indeed evolve state from the vanishingly constant to the constantly vanishing. It will spread, yet dilute, as time passes.

Ah physics jokes. Surely the best!

Actually, the "latest/most recent" was me. — Sapientia

Oh right. So I was punk'd on that one. :)

Apologies to Creative there. But it was so believable...

An astute reader can look to the above example that apo has somehow judged to be rightfully applicable to the situation at hand, and clearly see that it is an example that doesn't apply to what I've written. Kant's explanation looms large... — creativesoul

But where is the astute reader who can make sense of your linguistic quirk? If Kant is there beside you, can you put him on the line?

Otherwise, I can only call upon you again to stop being bashful and explain yourself at last.

Vanishingly my dear planck. — Janus

Ah, but the more localised the applause, the more immense is its energy. Heisenberg's principle rules.

Indeed, the grand and only use of examples, is to sharpen the judgement.

Given you don't seem to take Kant's meaning here, the point is that you do have to internalise the proper habits of conception. Just being able to parrot words is meaningless. You have to come to understand them in a way that is intentional.

Which would be why you can't reject what you haven't mastered. You can't reject the words of scholarship because "they just don't make sense to you". You have to show first that you understood what those other guys really meant to say. And then communicate - unfortunately, also through the skillful use of language - your own "better" way of conceiving of whatever that thing was.

Philosophy and science rely on logical or mathematical language to ensure the maximum possible level of correct communication. Ordinary everyday speech carries too much ambiguity when the going gets tough.

So it really is a scholarly game with its rules for communicating. There's things you do, and things you don't do, because that is what has been found to work.

I'm calling you out for not accepting those rules ... even after posting Kant's own words.

The fact that you bolded and highlighted any passing phrases that you felt gives licence to your claim not to need to connect with active scholarship, or follow norms of philosophical writing, goes straight to your state of mind.

Kant wasn't actually whispering down the generations, "Creative, go you good thing. Stick it to the unbelievers in your special language."

It's not redundant Sap. Greater understanding results from being able to talk about something in more than one way. It increases the ability of a reader to relate. — creativesoul

So let's stack that up against a more scholarly view - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonasm

Pleonasm (/ˈpliːənæzəm/; from Greek πλεονασμός (pleonasmós), from πλέον (pleon), meaning 'more, too much') is the use of more words or parts of words than are necessary or sufficient for clear expression: for example black darkness or burning fire. Such redundancy is, by traditional rhetorical criteria, a manifestation of tautology. However, pleonasm may also be used for emphasis, or because the phrase has already become established in a certain form.

...Some pleonastic phrases, when used in professional or scholarly writing, may reflect a standardized usage that has evolved or a meaning familiar to specialists but not necessarily to those outside that discipline. Such examples as "null and void", "terms and conditions", "each and every" are legal doublets that are part of legally operative language that is often drafted into legal documents.

...as is the case with any literary or rhetorical effect, excessive use of pleonasm weakens writing and speech; words distract from the content. Writers wanting to conceal a thought or a purpose obscure their meaning with verbiage.

So any standard notion of good writing would cross out your redundant terms as being more confusing than enlightening.

You may think it is a habit that makes your thoughts clearer. But for me, the redundancy just halts the flow.

I don't know which/what word/term I/myself am/are meant/intended to/at be/am attending/focusing on/at at/on any/every particular/specific moment/instant.

[Phew. Small round of applause please.]

Once again, rather than focus upon the substance of the post (that time it was Kant) some would rather talk about others on a personal level... — creativesoul

Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You are making your own credibility central to any discussion as you admit this is all your own personal theory, your own terminology, your own concepts.

You are welcome to ad hom me. It's against forum rules but I think it is a big part of the fun. I won't complain.

However the difference is that I always have some kind of citation to show where any claim might be coming from. So if you attack my views, I don't have to take it personally. I can show you the context within which those views arise. And that is just basic scholarship. If you don't like what I say, I say well go attack these other guys. Come meet my big brother. :)

Although, I do the same thing when I want to express the same thing in multiple ways, and/or show different ways to say much the same thing... — creativesoul

So why is saying the same thing two different ways of any importance? What does that idiosyncrasy mean?

Clear that up. Then you can tackle mental correlations/mental ongoings. If you can't point towards some basis in standard scholarship when it comes to that jargon, you really do need to make an effort to explain yourself.

Join in there apo. — creativesoul

It's your private theory that the whole world doesn't understand. I remember now your recent lament that you can't seem to bring the academic world to proper account for its failings in your eyes.

So if there is a key to your code, you can just reveal it right here. I don't mind if that involves you having to go cut and paste that answer from wherever you might have done just that in your best honest fashion.

But I am tired of chasing you around in circles. This has been going on for quite a few years, hasn't it?

Yes, can anyone here explain what creative means when he doubles up his terminology. I've asked him so many times, but he can't/won't explain. (Or is that explain/confabulate?)

So we have as our example...

This seems/appears like the perfect time to allow/permit Kant to place/put apo's latest/most recent ad hom's in proper/rightful perspective and/or point of view.

Now take seems/appears. Is one the animal level of perception, the other the human level? Is that what Creative hopes to signal? Or is one the proposition, the other the truthmaker? Does one imply some generality, the other some more specified circumstance?

Why should I be forced to be kept guessing like this? Does Creative actively require that I don't understand him for some reason of his own. That is certainly what it seems/appears like to me.

What about allow/permit, place/put, latest/most recent, proper/rightful. Then now even "perspective and/or point of view".

Aren't these all synomynous pairs with nary a meaningful difference? Or can someone else crack Creative's linguistic code, find a rule behind it?

There is no logical link of 'non-realism' to solipsism. If there were one, it would have been published by now, — andrewk

Didn't Descartes write that book? Anyway, to the degree that doubt is possible, belief in turn becomes uncertain.

The logic is the usual reciprocal one of dialectical argument. So you are right that this is a pseudo-problem of a sort. Most folk don't move swiftly on to the synthesis - the realisation that if belief is fundamentally limited, then ... reciprocally ... so in fact must be the doubt.

They call it dependent co-arising out East. Each extreme arises only in presence of its "other". So any limitation on one is going to be mirrored in some formally true sense that further thought ought to be able to uncover.

That is the path which leads to Peircean pragmatism and scientific reasoning. We start the whole game going by just being willing to hazard a best guess. So we claim a belief in axiomatic or hypothetical fashion. Then do our damnedest to doubt it and see if the belief survives. Our degree of belief because reciprocal to the weight of inductive evidence. Our doubt and uncertainty can be quantified in those terms.

So there is definitely a logical argument to be had at the core of this important epistemic debate.

My attempt to explain this is that people who find it important do so because they believe that non-acceptance of the 'realist' (ie materialist) account logically entails solipsism, which in turn seems to signify ultimate loneliness, and that one's closest and most important relationships are a delusion. — andrewk

It shouldn't have anything to do with people's emotions - their desires or wishes.

I can see that you might suspect people of picking the philosophical side that seems to best confirm their pre-philosophical understandings of themselves. Of course folk want to be standing on the side of the right answer.

But that isn't why idealism~realism is of foundational importance to philosophy itself. Once it is accepted that somehow reality is an appearance, a point of view, for us, then a can of worms has been opened.

We can be just as sure from the outset that the doubting can't actually slither all the way down the slope to solipsism. As you say with the Matrix, even the solipsists attempts to imagine what that would be like lack convincing detail.

It sounds fine in a general way, until Berkeley has to start muttering about us all being minds within the mind of God. Solipsism is self-contradictory when you really get into its own necessary ontic commitments.

So we know solipsism can't be a final destination we could arrive at just on those kinds of logical (not emotional) difficulties. The alternative is not a well-worked out one.

But that still leaves the big issue of how we resolve the epistemic tension between doubt and belief. And what could be more mission-critical for philosophy? We actually need a robust method, a robust "theory of truth".

And if that has to boil down to induction more than deduction, dialectics rather than predicate logic, then I guess that is when we will discover how emotional the logicians can be. :)

Wake me up when you've ready to answer on your definition of mental correlations and mental ongoings.

Our methodological approaches stand in stark contrast to one another however. — creativesoul

Yep. Me scholar, you crackpot. Me cite sources, you complain the world doesn't understand.

Specifically speaking, the framework will limit or delimit what can coherently be said according to it. — creativesoul

Who would'a thunk? Social constructionism 101.

Nothing I've said requires citations. I'm not referencing anyone else's work. — creativesoul

That's how crackpottery starts. Right away, I can't take you seriously.

So, in order for either of us to understand the other, we must understand what is meant when either of us use the term perception. — creativesoul

Well I can point to any standard psychology textbook. If your definition is all your own work, then unless I develop telepathy, you are going to have to do a lot better job of explaining yourself.

Simply put, on my view, perception is not equivalent to mental correlations. Whereas you fail to draw and maintain that distinction, I draw and maintain that perception is one necessary but insufficient element of mental ongoings. You're not alone though. It is an historical shortcoming pervading the whole of philosophy, philosophy of mind (psychology) notwithstanding. — creativesoul

Great. You've just come out with a bunch of your private definitions and tell me it is not just me that is wrong, but the whole of philosophy and science.

The crackpot-ometre is reading off the dial right now.

So what's a mental correlation? What's a mental ongoing?

However, I would note that the notion of "recollect" above presupposes recollecting to someone or something. — creativesoul

Clearly it is the self doing the recollecting. Clearly that is also a potentially homuncular way of putting it. Clearly then, we don't want to be led into a hard claim about a self that both recollects experiences and experiences those recollections - a rather overdetermined position to take.

So your "big insight" here seems merely well-worn commonsense. It itself is a feature mentioned in any sensible, citable, theory of how language makes a difference to human mentality. Take Mead's Symbolic Interactionism for instance. We are born into a world where we find everyone talking grammatically in terms of I, you and them. And from there, a notion of "being a self" gets learnt.

Philosophy and psychology then have to go along with those grammatical conventions, just to get things said in a way people can start to understand. It doesn't make it impossible to turn around and expose the homuncularity of those conventions. That is exactly what Symbolic Interactionism and other such schools of psychology did.

You would know all this if you read the books.

But for that notion to have any bite, in order for it to be robust, we must have a relatively good grasp upon what our awareness of the world is without language. — creativesoul

Great. And I have a very good grasp on that having written a number of books on the subject (that were in turn based on the vast amount of relevant research that exists).

If they have anticipatory imagery, then they must have the ability to generate such imagery. — creativesoul

Do I sense a linguistic notion of selfhood creeping into your thinking just there? You say "they" must have the ability to generate. Is there a "they" without linguistic scaffolding? Isn't there just the brain doing its thing in Bayesian brain fashion?

Surely what you meant to say was that with animals, there can be no socially-constructed self that can imagine itself being at the control of a flow of anticipations. The animal mind is extrospective, not introspective. There is no linguistic self to turn attention away from the world and direct it towards an internal world of rumination and day-dream.

You would know all these things if you read the right books.

I suggest that you spend less time thinking about me personally and more time addressing the substance of my posts... — creativesoul

Sure. Is that substance arriving any time soon? Have you done attacking both my ignorance and the general ignorance of all philosophy and psychology?

But it's not especially relevant for the metaphysics of meaning as I understand it. — Wayfarer

Well I explained why in fact it is. If you can quantify, you can do science. So Shannon clears the decks for the assault on semantics.

At the start of the thread I cited the way that information theory, and indeed its "ugly twin", entropy theory, are being employed to make sense of life and mind - material systems that are clearly "all about the meanings". So you have Shannon information-based metrics, like mutual information, self-information, ascendency and dozens of other ways of now measuring the semantic content of material systems.

My favourite model of the way the brain works - Friston's Bayesian brain - jumps right over to the entropy view. It talks about brains being systems to minimise free energy. So what that does is convert neuroscience into thermodynamics.

We already know that thermodynamics explains biology in a general way. And biology explains psychology. So this is making that relationship mathematically precise. Something we can now go out and measure in those terms.

I don't want to pretend that I've kept up with the direct realism debate, but I think this would be an issue only if it's assumed that what happens when we hallucinate or dream is exactly what happens when we're not hallucinating or dreaming... — Ciceronianus the White

But that misses the whole point by talking about the process rather than the results.

The epistemic concern is whether the world itself is how we perceive it. Once we know there is a process to perceiving, then the distinction between appearance and actuality arises. If there is a process, it could get it wrong. It could even invent. It could all be an invention so far as we could ever know.

So you are simply avoiding the issue in question.

Hallucinations and dreams come into it as "objective" proof that we could be trapped inside a fantasy even though normal waking experience feels so undoubtedly real. They are the counterfactuals (the counterfactuals SX wrongly says aren't available) which fatally undermine simple realism. The question then becomes - in a rigorous philosophical sense - how do you apply the brakes before slithering all the way to the other extreme of idealism?

So some real work needs to be done here. It can't be glibly dismissed.

Well if you can make sense of what a thing looks like when there is no looking involved, then be my guest. — StreetlightX

Great quotes from Thompson and Bergson. But doesn't that sophisticated view about "points of view" arise from trying to respond to the way that the good old idealist vs realist argy-bargy made some basic sense?

Embodied cognition, or autopoiesis, or whatever, is a historical response to a question taken seriously. It surely cites that as its starting point. It would say it is a better view than say, cognitive representationalism.

So while I agree there is much that is incoherent at root about the classic framing of the issue, there was something essentially reasonable about asking the question of how sure can we be that what we experience is as direct as it appears ... once we realise that it does just appear.

Science attempts to be creature independent, and describe the world as it is. That's why we arrive at theories like QM. — Marchesk

I think that is an important point. What realism is after is the God's eye view. Naive realism supposes we just have that already - we look and we can see those colours and shapes which just are the objective facts of the world. There is a disinterested theory of truth relation that can support human beliefs about "how things really are". And threatening that with idealism - introducing a whole set of potential confounds into any truth claims - is deeply disturbing for many.

It just shows how soaked in analytic philosophy the Western mindset has become. The world has to be able to function as the truth-maker in the way propositional logic requires. Otherwise the whole house of cards could come down. There are real philosophical stakes motivating direct realism - real in the sense of being an existential threat at least. :)

Of course, I've already explained how pragmatism sidesteps that. It doesn't expect the mind's relation with the world to deliver truth, just functionality.

But anyway, science is then meant to be the way that realism escapes its discovered subjective limitations - the fact, as SX says, it is always a point of view. Science is meant to be the way to take the objective, all-seeing, God's eye view.

And then it is, but it isn't. You need to note how the ambition to see reality more clearly in terms of physics results in us thinking of mathematical formula and then reading numbers off various dials and instruments. Instead of "reading off" what our eyes and ears tell us "directly" - colours, sounds, etc - we add a whole bunch of mediating instrumentation that converts energies to numbers. Values that equations can understand.

So to get more real about reality, we in fact retreat even deeper from it into a realm of pure modelling. Our knowledge about the thing-in-itself becomes even less substantial, even more purely conceptual - even more idealistic in being all a bunch of ideas secured by the highly constrained perceptual act of not making a mistake when reporting the numerals visible on a dial.

There is every reason to be fascinated by the idealism vs realism issue. It is foundational to philosophy. It is the basis of epistemology. It is also fundamental to ontology at least in the context of philosophy of mind.

So I don't agree with SX's too easy dismissal, even though he is quite right that the best psychological account is the one he presents (well, once you add the semiosis that explains the autopoiesis, naturally).

However, it seems apparent that you and I have incommensurate notions regarding what counts as perception. — creativesoul

You’d have to explain how. I’ve asked in the past and you haven’t explained.

I’ve made the point that human language changes the way we are aware of the world deeply. Yet also we share the same basic brain biology.

So for instance, I am happy to talk about pigeons recognising, but I wouldn’t believe they can recollect. They have memories and can categorise experience. But they don’t have the structure of language that would allow for a narrative or autobiographical use of those memories.

Likewise they would have anticipatory imagery. They could search their environment with an expectation in mind. But not having language, they couldn’t have what we mean by imagination - the ability to generate mental imagery that is not closely tied to what the world around demands.

So the difference that language makes is an issue I’ve written books about. It is perfectly familiar to me. I’m not getting why you’ve got your knickers so in a twist about me talking about pigeon perception in a routine psych 101 way. Yes, in psych 101 they do skate over the difference that language makes. But that is excusable as talking about the general biological case before getting into the qualifications of the specifically linguistic human case.

What bugs me about your approach in this thread is that you keep using your own weird neologisms without proper explanation and you fail to provide grounding citations for whatever position you think you take. So it is hard to discuss the issues with you rationally. You are coming across as a crackpot. Yet I also think you are trying to make the same point as I also make. So that remains confusing.

They become aware of and recognize the differences between kinds of cell structures. — creativesoul

Does that not cover perception?

All of it also clearly lends support to direct perception. — creativesoul

Really? After wasting so much time on irrelevancies, you seem to have forgotten to address the OP.

Not much I can say if you can’t work out your problem.

You are still thinking that Shannon was talking about the meaning of a message. He was instead talking about its quantity.

As I said, he derived a fundamental measure by assuming the message to be maximally meaningless - just some random binary sequence. So that means no matter how meaningful (or otherwise) your message, Shannon information defines the logical space it takes up in the world.

Meaningful messages can be pretty compact as a fragment could be used to deduce the whole. Contextual knowledge could be applied. But what Shannon was tackling was the problem of being sure your incoming message hasn’t been corrupted by noise.

So the strictest test of that is the accurate reception of a message where each symbol is random and completely unpredictable from the others before and after. The risk of uncertainty is the greatest. Therefore solve the noise issue there and you have your limiting case. You can quantify the worst your uncertainty would be. You know the limit to which a message may have been disordered.

On your other point, the tight connection between information and matter is something more recent. It is with the holographic principle that now spacetime can be viewed as imposing informational limits on material being. That is what the SciAm article is about.

Zing!

My question was about the equivalence of thermodynamic and logical entropy - the 'equation' which you referred to. — Wayfarer

From that article I cited, this might help....

Thermodynamic entropy and Shannon entropy are conceptually equivalent: the number of arrangements that are counted by Boltzmann entropy reflects the amount of Shannon information one
would need to implement any particular arrangement.

The two entropies have two salient differences, though. First, the thermodynamic entropy used by a chemist or a refrigeration engineer is expressed in units of energy divided by temperature, whereas the Shannon entropy used by a communications engineer is in bits, essentially dimensionless. That difference is merely a matter of convention.

Note also that Boltzmann's entropy is based on probability theory foundations - statistical mechanics. The point about energy/temperature relate to the earlier classical entropy equations of Clausius - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(classical_thermodynamics)

You would have spotted that wrinkle in the criticism section that occurred to you.

In classical thermodynamics, which is the study of thermodynamics from a purely empirical, or measurement point of view, thermodynamic entropy can only be measured by considering energy and temperature. Clausius' statement dS= δQ/T, or, equivalently, when all other effective displacements are zero, dS=dU/T, is the only way to actually measure thermodynamic entropy.

It is only with the introduction of statistical mechanics, the viewpoint that a thermodynamic system consists of a collection of particles and which explains classical thermodynamics in terms of probability distributions, that the entropy can be considered separately from temperature and energy.

So it is why the conclusion is....

Ultimately, the criticism of the link between thermodynamic entropy and information entropy is a matter of terminology, rather than substance.

Information entropy is exactly about semantic content, isn't it? It's how many bits can be lost before the information contained in the string loses its meaning? Yes or no? — Wayfarer

Note the "message" is a random set of data. Quite deliberately a meaningless pattern. So you can't cheat by posting A, B, C,.. The test is a transmission of symbols of maximum uncertainty. One shouldn't give you any information about the next for free.

However one question that occurs to me about the purported equivalence of thermodynamic and logical entropy is that there is no concept of temperature or energy in the discipline of information entropy. — Wayfarer

Oh that occurred to you? It's also mentioned in the criticisms section on the page. ;)

As a really crude example, you could encode the same information in a string of granite boulders, each of which weighed 1 tonne, and also in bits on a hard drive. — Wayfarer

The physics comes into it as enough granite boulders would form a gravitational field so strong they would collapse to create a black hole. More bits could thus be stored in a volume of space if they were scratched on grains of sand. And even more if they could be dents in microscopic flakes of silica.

So you see where this is going. Eventually there is a plankscale limit on the possible information content of a volume of space. See this good SciAm article -
http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~bekenste/Holographic_Univ.pdf

While a pigeon may very well be quite capable of being trained to pick out malignant formations, the pigeon doesn't recognize them as malignant formations. — creativesoul

Well, that is stating the bleeding obvious. The point of the pigeon research is that animal brains can in fact categorise to quite a human degree ... when linguistically-scaffolded in human fashion. So that shows both that our biology of perception/conception has much more in common than most might expect, but also that language then really makes a particular kind of difference we can add to the discussion.

There's a certain "objectivity" in a great art. It resonates for a culture. It concretizes that culture's ideals. ... We can see measure the proportions of a culture's ideal woman. But I don't see why we would measure our understanding of cultural ideals only in a quantifying manner. We don't just want to manipulate and predict. — t0m

Yeah. I'm not arguing that art should be doing science's job somehow. My position here is about how art is employed in the social construction of what it means to be a modern Western mind. A painting is exactly like a bicycle in making it obvious how you are meant to view your world. It is another part of the technology that Heidegger was talking about.

If something is hung in a gallery as if its contains sacred meaning, then we know the hushed tone and clever reverence with which we must approach it to be "part of the club" - even if it shit in a can.

I'm not defending the holy individual here, though I do think there are limits to this dissolution of the individual into the social. I'm really just trying to be accurate about the world. For me, however, this very notion of "world" is in question. I don't assume the world of natural science. To me that is a useful abstraction that exists within a more "primordial" notion of the world. We are in the world with others. But I don't think the spatial notion of objects next to other objects captures this "in-ness" or "with-others-ness." — t0m

I do presume naturalism. And I think that gets at what you mean because it says everything is connected in that everything emerges from the same primordial ooze. Humans weren't inserted into the world by divine intention. And none of us are truly individual as we are all creatures formed by a context.

So naturalism is the organic view, the developmental view. I agree science is often Scientism - the mechanical or reductionist view.

I wasn't aware that this was a significant topic of discussion back then. — andrewk

There is quite a bit of it in Ancient Greece.

The way that a galley away on the horizon looks tiny, and yet we don't see it as anything but a regular ship far away.

Another one was the jars of hot and cold oil. Dip a hand in each, then put both hands into a third jar that is room temperature. Your hands will be telling you different things about whether the third jar is hot or cold now.

Pushing the eye for double images was I think another example used.