Locke's primary properties, like shape, would be directly perceived, while color would be the means by which we see shape, even though it belongs to our visual system. — Marchesk

Yep, that is the line that direct realism tried to defend back in the 17th century. It would give up qualitative sensation and insist on the directness of quantitative sensation.

But psychological science has obliterated that line - even though I agree most people haven't really noticed.

Of course there are other flavors of direct realism that might say something different about color. Some would even be color realists, although I have a hard time seeing how that can be defended. But they do try. — Marchesk

Great. You seem persuaded that colour experience is definitely indirect - mentally constructed in some strong sense.

I can see why you might then protest that the shapes of objects are just self-evident - unprocessed, unvarnished, direct response to what is "out there". It seems - as Locke argued - realism can be secured in some foundational way. A shape is impossible to be misrepresented. It therefore requires no interpretation. Our experience of a shape is unmediated.

But as I say, psychology has shown just how much interpretation has to take place to "see a shape". The useful sanitary cordon between primary and secondary sensation has evaporated as we've learnt more.

A sign is an object which corresponds to a representation. — Galuchat

A more causally-explicit way of saying this would be that a sign has the function of constraining an interpretation.

So the actual physics of a sign falls away - even though a sign, as some kind of mark, is always also physical.

The causally important things going on are that signs are intended to have meanings. A purpose must exist. And signs then have an effect in terms of constraining or limiting some form of freedom or uncertainty.

The relation is causally stronger than a correspondence or association. It narrows a mind - an interpretation - in a fruitful fashion.

The physics then re-enters the picture because an interpretation results in some action in relation to the world. When the light turns red, the car stops. When enemy ships appear over the horizon, the signals back to headquarters lead to cannonballs blasting into the air.

The same message, transmitted in different codes (physical information), through different physical channels or mediums, conveys the same representations/meanings (semantic information) to a recipient (a psychophysical organism) who has knowledge of the codes used and their corresponding representations. — Galuchat

Again, terms like correspondence and representation are problematic because they arise from a passive, information-processing, metaphysics.

Semiotics makes more sense because it emphases the active and purposeful nature of what is going on. And it does that without falling into a mechanical or deterministic view of causality. It takes the probabilistic approach where information constrains action.

So what gets transmitted through a variety of transmissions is not the actual information, like some precious substance or cargo. It is the constraints that would limit another mind's state of interpretance. It is the container rather than the contents that get delivered.

When Amazon posts you a novel, they don't send you the experiences that are the story. What you buy is an artfully constructed set of constraints on your imagination. You expect your thoughts to be limited to some specific parade of imagery. And the mental picture you might have of the main character is hardly likely to correspond to the author's, or any other of the millions of readers.

Information of that kind only has to be conveyed to the degree that the constraint on your interpretive freedoms make a difference.

So Peircean semiosis is a paradigm shift in a number of very important ways.

So on Aristotle’s account, although the soul is not a material object, it is not separable from the body. — Wayfarer

The soul would be the form of the body - the particular way its material organisation is constrained.

So in one sense, hylomorphism recognises that any object can't actually be separated in terms of its material and formal causes. To be an object is to have some organisation.

But constraints are also transmissible - due to semiotics. Genetic information means the "human-shaped soul" can be passed down from generation to generation.

Each actual person is a unique material interpretation of this information. Even twins are not identical. But still, the essential information that makes a biological person is now known to be separable as a physical fact.

But Aristotle is more right than Plato or Aquinas. What gets transmitted by a code is not the contents but the container. So the soul here is not the interpretation - the mindful bit. It is the shape that is getting passed along as a particular way to constrain some set of material freedoms, some heap of fleshy metabolism.

The paradigm you are applying demands the transmission of some substantial essence. Information is its meaning. It is the content that must be passed along.

But semiotics says what gets transmitted is the organising constraints needed to limit material variety. Communication is about the rebirth of functional states of interpretance. Every rebirth will be interestingly different. No two interpretations are ever going to be the same. You never step in the same river twice.

But that is understood. Constraints only need to signal the differences that make a difference.

Which is what information theory measures all the way down to a foundational material level now.

Again, you want information to be a substance - a semantic content. That just seems obvious because matter is its opposite - a meaningless content. The paradigm shift is understanding the shaping role that containment plays. That is the other aspect of a hylomorphic reality.

So semantic information is not a rival substance - a second material. Talk about information is our physicalist recognition that constraints are causally real. We need to include them in our picture as complementary to material causes.

And so there is no mystery when it comes to the "missing interpreter" when taking the information theoretic approach. The interpreter doesn't have to ride along with the transmitted information to underwrite its precious meaning, stop it leaking away. Instead, states of interpretance are the third thing - the actually substantial thing - which emerges when formal constraints and material freedoms come together in an act of interpretance, or a sign relation.

So enactivism? — Michael

Correct. I said that.

Presumably these neural networks simply recognise patterns in the magnetism on the hard drive... — Michael

A good point. The system has no eyes. It is just fed 18x18 chunks of pixels - strings of hex code.

It might be worth checking the paper - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.6209v5.pdf

Our deep autoencoder is constructed by replicating three times the same stage composed of local filtering, local pooling and local contrast normalization.

In our experiments, the first sublayer has receptive fields of 18x18 pixels and the second sub-layer pools over 5x5 overlapping neighborhoods of features (i.e., pooling size). The neurons in the first sublayer connect to pixels in all input channels (or maps) whereas the neurons in the second sublayer connect to pixels of only one channel (or map).

While the first sublayer outputs linear filter responses, the pooling layer outputs the square root of
the sum of the squares of its inputs, and therefore, it is known as L2 pooling.

The system seems pretty Kantian in terms of the amount of a-priori processing structure that must be in place for "unsupervised" learning to get going.

I'd note in particular the dichotomous alternation of filtering and pooling. Or differentiation and integration. Followed by the third synthesising step of a summating normalisation.

In doing their best to replicate what brains do, the computer scientists must also build a system that pulls the world apart to construct a meaningful response - one that separates signal from noise ... so far as it is concerned.

Still using those "direct" and "indirect" terms - as if they really mean anything, Apo? — Harry Hindu

Did you notice the thread title or read the OP?

Your experience is part of the world, no? — Harry Hindu

Your experience is your world, no?

Something to do with thought/belief I take it? LOL.

It's not. I would favor a direct scientific realist account of perception. But in any case, one could argue that smell, sound, color are how we experience the world directly. — Marchesk

How could we argue that the world is coloured as we “directly experience” it when science assures us it is not?

Sure, phenomenally, our impressions of red seem direct. We just look and note the rose is red. That’s the end of it. But science tells us that it isn’t in fact the case. There is mediation that your philosophical position has to incorporate to avoid the charge of naive realism.

But it occurred to me that if neural networks are a crude approximation for how our perception works, then they do favor realism about the patterns being detected. — Marchesk

But your argument seemed to be that unsupervised neural net learning is evidence for just how unmediated perception would be. So that might be an argument for a high degree of directness in that sense, yet it remains also an acceptance of indirectness as the basic condition.

If awareness is mediated by a psychological process, then by definition, it ain’t literally direct.

Remind me. How does your particular definition of direct realism account for hallucinations and illusions? How do I see a mental image? In what way is a wavelength really green? So on and so forth....

A pigeon can make the same perceptual discrimination. Human perception is of course linguistically scaffolded and so that takes it to a higher semiotic level.

What on earth are you talking about? — creativesoul

As usual I have no clue what you are on about. Did you think I would argue that sensory level, and then linguistic level knowledge of the world is indirect, but that scientific knowledge is direct?

All knowledge would be indirect in the semiotic sense I’ve described.

Physiological sensory perception is prior to language on my view. — creativesoul

Well of course. Animals have minds and selfhood. Our models of perception have been built from experiments on cats and monkeys mostly.

If you want to argue your case with actual perceptual examples then go right ahead.

What is direct about motion detection or hue perception I wonder? Are you going to begin by talking about the transduction of “sensory messages” at the level of receptors?

The wiki article offers a version of direct realism that is indistinct from naive realism... — creativesoul

Yep. And that is the point. The OP certainly comes off as an exercise in naive realism. You can't both talk about a mediating psychological machinery and then claim that is literally "direct".

If Marchesk intends direct realism to mean anti-representationalism, then that is something else in my book. I'm also strongly anti-representational in advocating an ecological or embodied approach to cognition.

But I'm also anti-direct realism to the degree that this is an assumption that "nothing meaningful gets in the way of see the world as it actually is". My argument is that the modelling relation the mind wants with the world couldn't even have that as its goal. The mind is all about finding a way to see the self in the world.

What we want to see is the world with ourselves right there in it. And that depends on a foundational level indirectness (cut and paste here my usual mention of Pattee's epistemic cut and the machinery of semiosis).

So this is a philosophical point with high stakes, not a trivial one - especially if we might want to draw strong conclusions from experiments in machine pattern recognition as the OP hopes to do.

There just cannot be a direct experience of the real world ... because we don't even have a direct connection to our real selves. Our experience of experience is mediated by learnt psychological structure.

The brain models the world. And that modelling is in large part involves the creation of the self that can stand apart from the world so as to be acting in that world.

To chew the food in our mouth, we must already have the idea that our tongue is not part of the mixture we want to be eating. That feat is only possible because of an exquisite neural machinery employing forward modelling.

If "I" know as a sensory projection how my tongue is meant to feel in the next split second due to the motor commands "I" just gave, then my tongue can drop right out of the picture. It can get cancelled away, leaving just the experience of the food being chewed.

So my tongue becomes invisible by becoming the part of the world that is "really me" and "acting exactly how I intended". The world is reduced to a collection of objects - perceptual affordances - by "myself" becoming its encompassing context.

The directest experience of the world is the "flow state" where everything I want to happen just happens exactly as I want it. It was always like that on the tennis court. ;) The backhand would thread down the line as if I owned its world. Or if in fact it was going to miss by an inch, already I could feel that unpleasant fact in my arm and racquet strings.

Which is another way to stress that the most "direct" seeming experience - to the level of flow - is as mediated as psychological machinery gets. It takes damn years of training to get close to imposing your will on the flight of a ball. You and the ball only become one to the degree you have developed a tennis-capable self which can experience even the ball's flight and landing quite viscerally.

So direct realism, or even weak indirect realism, is doubly off the mark. The indirectness is both about the ability of the self to ignore the world (thus demonstrating its mastery over the world) and also the very creation of this self as the central fact of this world. Self and world are two sides of the same coin - the same psychological process that is mediating a modelling relation.

Direct realism means awareness of mind-independent objects instead of some mental intermediary. — Marchesk

We've been over this before. Let's just say that your version of direct realism wants to skip over the reality of the psychological processes involved, although I would also myself want to be more direct than any representationalist. So the terms can fast lose any general distinctions as we strive for our personal nuances.

But by the same token, your claims to prove direct realism and deny Kantian psychology are weakened to the degree you don't have a hard definition of what direct vs indirect is about here.

For the record, here is Wiki trying to firm up the definitions....

In philosophy of mind, naïve realism, also known as direct realism or common sense realism, is the idea that the senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they really are. Objects obey the laws of physics and retain all their properties whether or not there is anyone to observe them.[1] They are composed of matter, occupy space and have properties, such as size, shape, texture, smell, taste and colour, that are usually perceived correctly.

In contrast, some forms of idealism claims that no world exists apart from mind-dependent ideas and some forms of skepticism say we cannot trust our senses. Naïve realism is known as direct as against indirect or representative realism when its arguments are developed to counter the latter position, also known as epistemological dualism;[2] that our conscious experience is not of the real world but of an internal representation of the world.

So for example, do you think the world is really coloured? That red and green are properties of the world rather than properties of the mind?

I prefer to argue the more complex story myself - that colours are properties of a pragmatic or functional mind~world relation. So this is an enactive, ecological or embodied approach. And it has its surprising consequences. Like the point I made about the intention of the brain being to maximise its ability to "ignore the world". We see the physics of the thing-in-itself in terms of reds and greens because such an "untrue" representation is the most useful or efficient one.

Direct realism presumes the brain just grasps reality without effort because reality is "lying right there". The thing-in-itself forces itself upon our awareness due to its recalcitrant nature.

Representationalism then points out that there is still considerable effort needed by the brain. It has all those computational circuits for a reason. But still, representationalism shares the underlying belief that the goal of re-presenting reality must be veridical. The mental intermediary in question is not the weaving of a solipsistic fiction, but a presentation of an actual world.

Then as I say, I take the position in-between these two extremes of "indirect realism" (Ie: the realism that at least agrees there is a mediating psychological process). And that embodied realism is what Grossberg and Friston in particular have been at the forefront of modelling. They get it, and the philosophical consequences.

So I hope that clears the air and we can get back to the interesting point that really caught my attention.

The success of neural network architectures at doing mind-like things is down to their hierarchical organisation. So in trying to define the simplest self-teaching or pattern recognising machine, computer science has found it in fact is having to hardwire in some of pretty Kantian conditions.

It may not seem obvious, but hierarchical structure - a local~global dichotomy - already wires in spatiotemporal "co-ordinates". It sets up a distinction between local transient impressions vs global lasting concepts from the get-go. Like a newborn babe, that is the order the machine is already seeking to discover in the "blooming, buzzing, confusion" of its assault from a random jumble of YouTube images.

For the hierarchal system to be indirect, our perceptual awareness would be of the hierarchy instead of the object that's being detected using the hierarchy. — Marchesk

Maybe you understand the Kantian position far less well than I was assuming?

A cognitive structure is required to do any perceiving. That is the (apparently chicken and egg) paradox that leads to idealism, social constructionism, and all those other dread philosophical positions. :)

So no. My point is that in seeking the minimal or most fundamental a-priori structure, a neurological hierarchy is already enough. It already encodes the crucial spatiotemporal distinction in the most general possible way.

The fact that it is so damned hard for folk to see their own hierarchical perceptual organisation shouldn't be surprising.

Thought places space, objects, and even time (or change) as being "out there" in the world. But why would we place our own conceptual machinery in the world as the further objects of our contemplation - except when doing science and metaphysics?

It is the same as with "qualia". We just see red. We don't see ourselves seeing red as a further perceptual act. At best, we can only reveal the hidden fact of the psychological processing involved.

As in when asking people if they can imagine a greeny-red, or a yellowy-blue. A yellowy-red or a greeny-blue is of course no problem. We are talking orange and turquoise. But the peculiarities of human opponent colour processing pathways means some mixtures are structurally impossible.

Likewise, blackish-blue, blackish-green and blackish-red are all standard mixtures (for us neurotypicals), yet never blackish-yellow (ie: what we see as just "pure brown").

So the hidden structure of our own neural processing can always be revealed ... indirectly. We can impute its existence by the absence of certain experience. There are strategies available.

But I'm baffled that you should reply as if we ought to "see the hierarchy" as if it were another perceptual object. We would only be able to notice its signature imprinted on every act of perception.

And that is what we do already in making very familiar psychological distinctions - like the difference between ideas and impressions, or generals and particulars, or memory and awareness, or habit and attention, or event and context.

The structure of the mind is hierarchical - always divided between the local and global scales of a response. The division then becomes the source of the unity. To perceive, ideas and impressions must become united in the one act.

So the structure is certainly there if you know how to look. Psychological science targets that mediating structure. And computer science in turn wants to apply that knowledge to build machines with minds.

That is why the right question is what kind of mediating structure, or indirect realism, does computer science now seem to endorse.

I see you want to make the argument that remarkably little a-priori structure seems needed by a neural net approach like DeepMind. Therefore - with so little separating the machine from its world - a mindful relation is far more direct than many might have been making out.

A fair point.

But then my response is that even if the remaining a-priori structure seems terribly simple - just the starter of a set of hierarchically arranged connections - that is already a hell of a lot. Already an absolute mediating structure is in place that is about to impose itself axiomatically on all consequent development of the processing circuitry.

Yep. I wasn't going to mention it again for the umpteenth time but the architectural approaches that particularly impress me have been Grossberg's Adaptive Resonance Theory and Friston's Bayesian Brain.

These are anticipation-based approaches to cognition and awareness. So imagination is not a tacked on extra. It is the basis on which anything happens.

Realism is truly indirect as the brain is a hierarchical system attempting to predict its input. And the better practised it gets at that, the more it can afford to ignore "the real world".

This would still be proof of indirect realism. The network, after all, still has to learn to see/recognise patterns.

Note also how the learning depends on there being an a-priori hierarchical organisation. So that rather supports Kant's point that notions of spacetime must be embedded to get the game going.

Hierarchical organisation works by imposing a local~global dichotomy, or symmetry-breaking, on the data. At the hardware level, there is a separation of the transient impressions - a succession of training images - from the developing invariances extracted by the high-level feature-detecting "neurons".

So space and time are built in by the hierarchical design. The ability to split experience into general timeless/placeless concepts vs specific spatiotemporal instances of those concepts is already a given embedded in the hardware design, not something that the machine itself develops.

So a neural network can certainly help make Kant more precise. We can see that judgements of space and time have a deeper root - the hierarchical organisation that then "processes" the world, the thing-in-itself, in a particular natural fashion.

The key is the way hierarchies enforce local~global symmetry-breakings on "data". And what emerges as a hierarchical modelling system interacts with the messy confusion of a "real world" is a separation in which both the global conceptions, and the local instances, become "clear" in tandem. They co-arise.

Perception involves being able to see "that cat there", a judgement grounded in the matching development of a generalised capacity for categorising the world in terms of the long-run concept of "a cat".

So the particular experience of a cat is as much indirect as the generalised notion of a cat-like or feline thing. Each is grounded in the other as part of a hierarchy-enforced symmetry-breaking. Neither arises in any direct fashion from the world itself. Even the crisp impression of some actual cat is a mental construction, as it is the hierarchy which both abstracts the timeless knowledge of cat-like and also locates some particular instance of that categorised experience to a place and a time (and a colour, and aesthetic response, etc, etc).

The success of machine learning should at least give idealists and dualists pause for thought. Even a little bit of hierarchical "brain organisation" manages to do some prettty "mind-like" stuff.

But the psychological and neurological realism found in DeepMind supports the indirect realist. After all, the patterns of activity inside the machine look nothing like the cat pictures.

It is also worth noting that DeepMind extracts generality from the particulars being dumped on it. The training images may be random and thus "unsupervised". But in fact a choice of "what to see" is already embedded by the fact some human decided to point a camera and post the result to YouTube. The data already carries that implicit perceptual structure.

So what would be more impressive is next step hardware that can also imagine particular cats based on its accumulated knowledge of felines. That would then be a fully two-way system that can start having sensory hallucinations, or dreams, just like me and you. The indirectness of its representational relationship with the real world would then be far more explicit, less hidden in the choice of training data, as well as the hierarchical design of its hardware.

...thinking is purpose driven. Roughly speaking, truth is a means. We act on a map of the world. — t0m

Yep. So we agree on pragmatism and its approach to rationalism?

What is distinctive is that purpose is included in epistemology. The map is not claimed to be a map of the world, but a map of a self in relation with a world. The ontological assumption here is that even "the self" is a modelled construction.

And so pragmatism simply takes for granted the socially constructed nature or truth, incorporating it into its very epistemology. It is upfront that every act of modelling has an agenda. And this is not a problem, given that the forming of "selfhood" - both personally and collectively - is how purposes or agendas could even arise.

So analytic philosophy is characterised by its desire for objective truth - truth without messy observers projecting their wishes and prejudices on to the reality being mapped. But pragmatism is quite different on that score.

When you say that I'm not doing philosophy, this is an implicit definition of philosophy that excludes the dissonance that might otherwise be said to constitute philosophy. — t0m

I did more that assert that. I'm arguing it.

If you want to narrow "philosophy" to "metaphysics", that's cool. But metaphysics grounds "proper philosophy" anyway. Or that is the position I will argue.

But this is a map of mapping itself within the map and itself subject to the dialectic. — t0m

OK. You want to argue for infinite regress.

Again, pragmatism handles that already. Sure the sign relation is open-ended. You can build a hierarchy of maps as high as you like. But also - because pragmatism is about the feedback of "serving a purpose" - that puts the brakes on the actual building up endlessly. You would only build as many meta- levels as were proving to be useful.

So pragmatics both demands a hierarchical organisation to inquiry, and provides the rationale for it having a functional limit.

I include the deep and important matters of "spirituality" and a basic sense of sanity and self-esteem in this. In fact I think they are the center. — t0m

Fine. Sanity and self-esteem are valued social goods. They speak directly to the forming of selfhood (in relation to the physical, then the social, world). If spirituality is the pragmatic vehicle for delivering these social goods, great. If instead it is medical or psychological science, also great. We can try both and see what works best.

We agree on workable pretense. — t0m

Yes. But I'm sure we disagree about there being a hierarchy of workable pretense, with something having to be on top as it were.

Although this top might itself be a dichotomy - say the maximally objective view vs the maximally subjective one? So a clear separation of powers or modes of discourse. For me, that cashes out in being able to switch between stark scientific objectivity and being authentically part of "my world" in terms of a network of social relations, obligations and engagements.

So what I reject is that subjectivity is to be found "within oneself" - the Romantic story. But one wants to be fully part of the social world which is where one finds one's "true self" as a social animal.

So even the most objective system is arguably just a tool of maximum durability. — t0m

Yes. But "just"?

It is significant that a social animal equipped with a habit of speech could even work out what the heck was going on in the Universe in any fashion at all, let alone down to a story with mathematically logical necessity, like the Standard Model of particle physics.

But philosophy is, among other things, a criterion of criteria.The fantasy or hope is that some eternal meta-criterion can ground itself presuppositionlessly. But it would have to be self-justifying or circular. — t0m

But that is the advantage of pragmatism's epistemology. It accepts the need for suppositions - abduction - to get the game going. And it accepts also that purposes are part of the business of truth-seeking. All of this gets bundled up in the method.

Sure, it is always possible something has been left out. But can anyone point to what that is?

The circularity is avoided by hierarchical organisation. The modelling relation may rely on feedback, but theory and measurement are made as hierarchically different as possible. So the circularity is iterative and designed to converge on a limit. That limit is the limit of our indifference. At some point, we could still be wrong, but we no longer have reason to care. Uncertainty is minimised for all practical purposes. And only an analytic philosopher or romanticist would - due to the social construction of their selfhood - persist in worrying about differences that don't make a difference.

We don't stop seeing the table at a place where we eat with our family, even if we "know" that it's "really" particles, etc. — t0m

Of course. That is all part of what I've argued. The rational objective view stands in sharp contrast to the everyday business of living authentically in some actual physical and social milieu. It would be insane to mix up these modes of discourse.

You don't want to treat your family and living room as abstract metaphysical constructs. But by the same token, you don't want to claim commonsense, traditional belief, or folk wisdom, as the better base for metaphysical insight.

Switching domains is part of the charm of my theory for me. — t0m

Sure. I am arguing for that too. But I am saying that metaphysics is the ur-rational discourse. It has to be to ground maths and science. Dialectical categories like discrete~continuous, matter~form, chance~necessity, one~many, and scores more, were how the whole rational/objective view of existence got started.

And so next you might agree that metaphysics needs pure rationality, no aesthetics. But "philosophy" is big enough to accept both modes of discourse. Well, in the end, I don't think it does. I think people who argue that always have a hidden pragmatic agenda - social goals in mind.

Respectfully, I think you are being willfully "blind" in this collapsing of many thinkers into a single "PoMo." Your criticism of PoMo is itself along PoMo lines. You look into politics, legitimacy, ulterior motives. But what of your own ulterior motives? — t0m

The question of motives is built into pragmatic epistemology. So no hidden agenda on my part. I seek to legitimise pragmatic epistemology. An important part of that is showing how others - PoMo, theism, even AP - have social reasons to de-legitimate that.

But PoMo especially is a political movement. It's purpose is social change. Well, in France especially, it is a route to being a public person, with all the personal advantages that can bring. C'mon. We can all see the game going on!

Scientists do it too. They get even more "sciency" to push for their social agendas, get their moment in the social limelight.

Mathematicians are different I guess. Always so unworldly. :)

Creativity is the source, including the source of the criteria for evaluating this creativity. There is a world out there that constrains our creativity, but we are seemingly never finished creatively mapping this constraint. — t0m

Again, not an issue. Creativity is essential both for rational metaphysics or authentic daily life. I am just arguing horses for courses. Both get done better by mixing them up as little as necessary.

I suggest that personalities "compute" from a basis of liquid or fuzzy re-programmable "axioms." These are dearly held, self-esteem-grounding beliefs involving virtue, especially intellectual virtue among philosophers ('intellectual conscience.') — t0m

Again, the issue is what is one to make of your language use when it employs dialectical structure as if attempting a rational argument. It could be merely just an effect chosen for it aesthetic quality, which is what you seem to be claiming. You don’t mean to be doing philosophy. It is enough to play at sounding like you are philosophising.

That’s fine. It’s fun. It’s an art. And you then give a metaphysical justification for it. We can’t in fact know reality. Rational explanation is always pragmatic and so always just a form of workable pretence. Because I am a pragmatist, even I would have to go along with that, is indeed the strong reply you can make.

But then my reply to that is still that my position takes account of all that and indeed uses it to bolster itself.

My dialectical approach says that what is logical is only a separation towards limits. So aesthetics and rationality could only be two ends of a spectrum, not two actually separated absolutes. It is not a problem that a little of each always remains part of its other.

But by the same token, the separation is the productive thing to achieve - if the object is to objectivise. Being able to switch between aesthetic mode and rational mode is the skill to be cultivated. One can only be rational to the degree one knows how also to be its other, as being rational requires knowing the other to be in fact excluded during the time spent acting in that mode.

So while you appear to be celebrating the possibility of confused mixes of aesthetics and rationality - philosophical discourse as a poetic chain of rhetorical flourishes - my own concern is to achieve the ability to switch crisply between one and the other as modes of discourse. I might agree they spring from the same ground - the muzziness of creative speech as social performance. But then there is a reason to be able to be switch as purely as possible into the mode required for some particular socially agreed domain.

If we are speaking in the metaphysical register, logic has to win. Substance over style, meaning over rhetoric, rational structure over whimsy and political commitments.

Other agendas can be in play. PoMo may play at speaking metaphysics in a way designed to undermine its analytic authority. The politics of disruption are pretty transparent. But why would one grant that legitimacy?

So I am claiming that there is a right way to do metaphysics. The fact that it underwrites good science is no surprise. And also it is not unreasonable to suspect ulterior motives in those who seek to undermine the possibility of rational certainties.

My pragmatic approach already accepts that no truths are certain. So that isn’t even the point. However it also says that knowing how not to let aesthetics or other modes of discourse get mixed up in the discussion is crucial for making metaphysical speech anything much at all.

This spiel itself is self-referentially a tool that has worked for me. — t0m

Still, I was pointing out the degree to which any force your argument could carry would be down to its rational structure. Or are you saying that hinging your argument on metaphysical dichotomies, like aesthetic vs rational, or subjective vs objective, are merely rhetorical tropes - said for poetic effect here, and not something you believe, or that should in fact sway me other than as poetic?

It shows that we are still getting at the real property of an object, which is the apple's ripeness or rotteness, not the light, which changes, and isn't the important information you're trying to get at. — Harry Hindu

Ah. So seeing red even in bad lighting conditions is the way we directly apprehend the ripeness and rottenness of objects.

Sounds legit. Look at that ripe postbox. Look at that ripe Ferrari. Yes I see what you mean.

The fact that you can tell me about color constancy and that the color we see isn't the same as the wavelength of light, which means that you actually do know the wavelength of light compared to the state of the apple and the color we see, then tell me again how you don't have direct knowledge of all these relationships? — Harry Hindu

Direct inference perhaps?

But how is this vagueness itself not your brute fact? — t0m

I said ultimately it is. But the tiniest possible scrap of a brute fact.

Remember that quantification has fallen out of the picture, so it is the dichotomy of vague~general that is the actual brute fact. And being the pure relation of qualities - an internalist deal - there is no external "thing" in want of explanation. The usual requirement - to have some substantial first cause - is itself cancelled away by metaphysical logic. The only fact left is the fact that the logic of a dichotomy seems inescapably true. And perhaps - in some illogical way we can sort of wave a vague sceptical hand at - it might have been false.

So it is only now logically brute, rather than substantially brute. It is brute as a generality, not brute as individuated being.

So we can doubt that 1+1=2. The next time we do the sum, it might just turn out different. Or at least language allows us to voice such scepticism, even if reason itself really doesn't.

Brute fact is "God" without the mask. I suppose that's the aesthetic appeal. — t0m

Exactly. Presented with logic, you are free to turn around and simply say you reject logic. Absolutely free in fact when the rejection has no pragmatic consequences.

Assuming that your or his narrative is rhetorically plausible, is this enough for its adoption? — t0m

Rhetorical? Either it is logical and worth adopting for that reason, or it is not. Either as belief it has pragmatic consequences, or it does not.

It is not about "sounding truthy". There is an actual argument here.

Your theory may indeed prove to be a valuable tool within the sciences. I'm not qualified to say. But I don't see a personal use for it. — t0m

Fine. You don't. I do.

Or at least you say you don't. And then you argue that in terms of dialectical reasoning. My view may be scientifically objective, but yours is subjectively personal. My view may be rational and inductive, but yours is intuitive and aesthetic.

So you rely on antithesis to put the maximum possible distance from my thesis.

In short, you employ the very tool of thought you seek to deny here. So - whomfff - the sound of a house of cards falling.

I do like the later part of the theory, where order emerges in order to speed the general dissolution. That's aesthetically dazzling. — t0m

Hah. The whole discussion is just for fun. Really, having a theory about the existence of reality - even a "scientific" one - is more an aesthetic enterprise at the end of the day. It is not as if we could use the answer to do much than dazzle and entertain ourselves.

Your argument isn't easy to follow. Some of your individual points are quite digestible. But, for instance, you now seem to be recanting the minimization of brute fact and denying it altogether. — t0m

I tried to show that the minimisation is not in the notion of vagueness itself - as that still sounds like a quantifiable or substantial concept. It is in the dichotomy of the vague~general. So vagueness is a limit and not a thing, or a state, or even a lack of either of those.

Just to be clear, I don't think there is an answer to this "why." I think it's a pseudo-question, however lyrical. — t0m

Yet there has to be a reason for protesting that there is no obvious reason why possibility ought to be limited. You can't have it both ways here.

Either you are happy with laws as brute fact, or you feel it is reasonable to challenge that. And that very challenge has to ground itself in the openness of "anything might have been the case". Then from there, logically we must continue to the actual consequences of "anything being the case". Laws prove to be emergent via the symmetry/equilibrium argument.

given the particular circumstances and the laws in question, the occurrence of the phenomenon was to be expected — Hempel

That now brings in the issue of initial conditions as well as boundary conditions. And so it is explanation directed at particular being. Or individuated being. I was arguing in general terms for the emergence of regularity.

These top level laws are "brute fact." For you these brute facts seem to include some kind of random variation and the laws of mathematics at least. These variations are assumed to be quantifiable. So your'e not starting from nothing — t0m

Well no, as the initial conditions for the emergence of lawful regularity are specified as "vagueness". I'm stating pretty plainly that I'm starting from less than nothing, not from nothing, let alone something.

Vagueness is more an everythingness in being unbounded possibility. But that is less than nothing, because nothingness is an actualised absence of things. It may be an empty place, but it is still a place of some kind. It was once there, even if it is no longer there now.

And nothing needs quantification if we are arguing dialectically or dichotomously - in terms of pure metaphysical qualities. Values are being defined reciprocally or inversely - each in terms of being not its "other".

So if the dichotomy is discrete~continuous, then each is quantified as the inverse of its other. To be discrete is to be as little continuous as possible. And vice versa. To be continuous is to be as distant as possible from being discrete. So continuous = 1/discrete, and discrete = 1/continuous.

Each measures or quantifies the other. And if there is no apparent distance or difference, then the categorisations themselves become vague descriptors. There just isn't a fact of the matter whether things are discrete or continuous.

Vagueness and generality are defined in the same reciprocal fashion. You are imagining that one has to stand outside the totality of the world to see that it has vagueness as some quantified foundational quality. There must be some amount of this stuff that I'm calling a potential anythingness.

But that is just the usual habit of explaining by imagining being outside the thing to be explained. And that is precisely why attempts to account for the Cosmos and the Mind always flounder. By definition, we can't step outside existence itself to explain existence.

However we can minimise the mystery of existence by taking the internalist position. And this is what I'm doing. Or what dialectical metaphysical argument has always done. We can reason about the divisions that arise in mutually-definitional, mutually-necessary, fashion.

And so for there to be the generality of law, there must also be the reciprocally-defined thing of the vagueness of potential. Particular quantities of either fall out of it as we are talking about a self-quantifying relation. Each exists to the degree it isn't its other.

Of course I don't think it's possible to start from nothing, so that's not a fault in your system. — t0m

Again please respect that I am very clear that I don't start from nothing. I start from less than nothing. The fact that you try to put me back in that frame - talking about the presence or absence of particulars - shows that you are not really dealing with my actual argument.

There's also Hume's problem. Your system (I think) assumes the metaphysical necessity of scientific laws? But I don't know of any deduction of this necessity. It seems to be a hardwired prejudice. — t0m

The argument is inductive, or rather abductive. It is pragmatism, which accepts internalism, as I say.

So a belief in nature's laws is a hypothesis that looks well justified. It is the reasonable guess that has been working out ever since.

And of course you only have to look at the history of metaphysics and science to see that the very idea of "laws" is itself not really much believed. Physics believes in limiting symmetries, generalised constraints.

The analogy with human laws sounds too much like nature might require a "law giver". Symmetries, being emergent invariances, do away with that kind of externalist metaphysics.

But why this logic of symmetries? — t0m

Because symmetries are logical. They are the invariances that emerge as the sum or average of all possible variances.

So if you feel it is logical to ask the very question of "why not this, that or the other", then already you accept variance as your ground here. You accept the essential possibility of action that is directed and yet directionless. You begin vaguely with nothing being as yet limited.

Great. Then assuming the free expression of variation - anything can be possible - leads to the next step. Not everything can be possible at once. Interaction produces limits. Many possibilities will cancel each other out. What gets left after all conflict has gone to equilibrium is whatever symmetry state describes a reality in which differences seek to make a difference.

Freedom can't help have an emergent pattern. This is what we see in statistics. Random action leads to Bell curves.

So the argument is that if you truly believe anything could be the case (as what would stop that being so), then still global regularity must emerge. Chaos also has to be lawful. Absolute variation is also going to wind up absolutely self-limiting. Laws, or the symmetry of an equilibrium balance, just have to evolve within a system which begins in an initial state of free and undirected foment.

The laws themselves are what we would also want a "cause" for, philosophically. But this is absurd. — t0m

But the laws can be accounted for at least in terms of symmetry maths and the logical principles they encode.

So all physical laws respect a least action principle. Action takes the shortest path. Also total action is conserved. And action wants to achieve its most degenerate form.

These are all symmetry maximising arguments. So the logic of symmetries is the cause of emergent physical regularities, or the laws of nature. The laws have mathematical necessity. What would be absurd is if the actual world didn’t conform to symmetry based principles.

If colour constancy is a model, then there must be some causal relationship with the model and what caused it. — Harry Hindu

Of course. The only question is whether the state of mind is being caused directly or indirectly.

Colour experience alone shows that conciousness is mediated Interpretation. We don’t see light as it is, but light as our neurology symbolises it.

Colour constancy rams this point home. Any interpretation is relative to some judgement we are making about how some colour would look under more ideal lighting conditions.

Perception is so indirect we can experience colour as stable properties belonging to object surfaces. Which is thus both a truth and not the actual information reaching our eyes.

It is the same as distance correction. Things far away are seen as being of normal size, far away. Which is true, but not the truth of the information hitting the backs of our eyes.

All perception relies on interpretation, so is not direct but mediated by our beliefs. That sugar tastes sweet and roses are red show just how unreal our resulting reality is. We impute a useful sensory image to create a structure of experience that certainly corresponds to the world in a reliable way. It gets us around this reality, as a map symbolises a territory. But being mediated via symbols - qualia - it is not direct.

Think. Universal Turing computation.

I've asked you several times to describe how it is that you arrived at your notions of pragmatism and semiotics. There had to be a transfer of information by causal processes somewhere. — Harry Hindu

Seems like a reasonable hypothesis.

You feeling up to explaining how colour constancy supports your assertions about direct cause and effect yet?

As to Platonia, again I am arguing that maths structures our experience in a semiotic way.

So number in fact divides experience into theory and measurement. The maths strength concepts and then the values we read off dials.

So both concepts and impressions are rendered as “objectively” symbolised. Reality is understood in mathematically idealised fashion.

And that understanding is objective as it is encoded in actual material symbols. It can be written down and transmitted from one mind to another. It is replicable, and indeed evolvable, as semiotic structure.

Saying there could be primal material cause is different from saying there is primal material substance or being.

That is why I’m talking in terms of a process ontology.

And so too that would be the correct understanding of Anaximander’s apeiron, or even Aristotle’s prime matter.

Hegel is hard to parse, — t0m

You might be closer to Hegel than you think: — t0m

To be honest, I've given up trying to parse Hegel himself. But the key difference that keeps cropping up (apart from the tilting of the argument in favour of theistic readings) is that Hegel stresses the resolution of dichotomies, while I (following Peirce) am stressing the separation that results from dichotomisation.

This is why Peirce had to make a clear distinction between vague being and general being. Hegel was indeed describing the generality that results from difference being self-annihilated. But Peirce's approach shows that the resolution or synthesis lies in the thirdness of habit formation. The dichotomised become equilibrated in the form of a complex mixture. Every part of reality becomes good and bad, or entropic and negentropic, as some generalised "fractal" balance.

So generality can't be where things start. It is where things end because - once achieving equilibrium - a complexly divided systems is now in a state of generalised indifference. It is both completely composed of difference, but none of those differences now make a difference (to the overall state of Being).

This then leaves open the need to characterise the ground that could give rise to this habitual equilibrium thirdness. And that is where vagueness or Firstness - just the pure spontaneity of a difference, not as yet judged or reacted to in any way - comes in.

So Hegel - for me - failed clearly to see that generality is not any kind of ultimate simplicity. It is well organised complexity. We need a developmental opposite to this generality - which vagueness supplies.

The vague and the general then find their own resolution in secondness or actuality. The mix of irreducible freedoms (inexhaustible firstness) and constraining limits (robust emergent habits) is why there is then a material reality that forms in-between these two ontic bounds.

But then again, many passages of Hegel could be read as if he were aware of vagueness in this way too, just wasn't clear on the point as Peirce was.

The nodes in neural networks are placed there by modellers and use a message passing algorithm to update parameters linking the nodes. The nodes in gene expression networks are discovered through a kind of cluster analysis. — fdrake

I see a confusion here. Human-made machinery of course is engineered to be physics-free and so the hardware is completely generic in terms of its informational capacity. The network boils down to a collection of binary switches that represent a memory state. So there is a strong division between memory and processing. The divorce between the setting of weights and the dynamics of any "processing interaction with the world" is rather absolute.

From that mechanical basis, a neural network will then evolve some operational state. That can then be described in functional terms. Some collection of nodes, with their pattern of weights, will "act like a particular feature detector". We will want to point to that functional element of the internal model as a cluster that analyses. But really, that seems a heuristic rather than a properly motivated claim. A mathematically soft one, rather than a rigorously grounded one.

Then with real-life genomic networks, we can't even really claim that they even want to start with actual digital circuitry - the binary switches that enforce a strong divorce between memory states and dynamical behaviour. Genes may approach some kind of digitalism, and yet still be essentially "analog all the way down".

For me, this is still the great unsolved riddle of life and mind. Sure, mostly science presumes a digital ground - life and mind are just super-complicated machinery. But ontologically, I take the semiotic view where creativity, spontaneity and uncertainty are irreducible (even if pragmatically constrainable). And so confusion will arise if genomic networks are still imagined as having to rest on mechanically stable foundations - actual little hardware switches.

Generally, just a great big citation needed on the material in your post. — fdrake

Hah. Yep. I'm afraid I've deliberately steered clear of gene expression for the past 15 years, rather waiting for the science to sort itself out. But biophysics has suddenly got interesting, so gene regulation again becomes interesting for me as now it is easier to see what it actually has to control. And that has become much less due to the fact that molecular machinery does most of the hands-on regulation.

A cell isn't a bag of chemistry but itself a highly regulated, almost machine-like, network of entropy flow or dissipative structure.

Again, the hierarchy of control is becoming apparent. Molecular machinery is like a whole new level of regulation in itself, whereas before there was only a genetic blueprint and a chemical soup.

Still, you do tend to downplay the "wonder" at existence as such. That's fine. I don't think such wonder is sustainable for mostly practical creatures like ourselves. — t0m

I dispute that the wonder is something separate - mystical, supernatural, transcendent. I am certainly applying the scientific image of reality - Peirce's definition of inductive reasoning. And this follows from the presuppositions of being a natural philosopher - making the assumption the world is a functional unity, and so explainable in its own rational, immanent, developmental terms.

So yes, we may be "worlds apart" on that score.

But that doesn't mean that I just leave some aspects of life unattended. Indeed, rather than downplaying these psychological and cultural aspects of our lived reality, I tend to go after them pretty aggressively according to most people.

So explaining art or morality or whatever in naturalistic terms is not downplaying. But it is certainly an attempt to "explain away" the mystical, the supernatural, the transcendent. That is, dispel their lingering claims to be part of any totalising metaphysics.

...the desire to overcome all contradictions. — Engels

Hah. Isn't that just showing how Hegel got it the wrong way round?

My approach (following Peirce) ends up saying that bare contradiction is instead what everything is founded upon.

So it is a dialectical metaphysics. But it is the fact of symmetry breaking that is the foundation of Being, not the fact of "a pre-existing substantial symmetry".

The logical process itself is the ground, not some kind of further "indeterminate substance" - as Apeiron is often understood.

I agree this is not easy to accept as we are so accustomed to materialist ontologies. It in fact it seems pretty idealist - objective idealism - in laying so much stress on the logic of dialectics or dichotomies as how "anything can happen in the first place".

Yet I am still arguing for physicalism even though it is a pansemiotic physicalism. There is still primal material cause as well as primal formal cause. They are just now themselves to be understood as the originating "logical division which couldn't be prevented from starting to express itself as dialectically structured, or hylomorphic, Being."

This isn't the philosophical nothing, though. It's a seething chaos. — t0m

But I did say that I am talking about a vagueness - something that is less than nothing.

Your approach looks to take the form that the mind is a busy place, when it is attentive and self-consciously thinking especially. And then it can relax and go quiet. And if it kept on going it would have to be completely quiescent. It would become the nothing of the mind ceasing to exist.

Which is fine for idealists perhaps.

But I am talking as someone with physicalist ontological commitments. And so any "nothingness" has to make sense within that framework.

And as I say, my metaphysical goal is imagining the least brute fact foundation for a tale of cosmic development. So vagueness understood as "mere fluctuations" is where that line of thought arrives.

Sure, some absolute passivity seems like a better ontic candidate. Yet we must accept the fact that the materiality of action exists, along with the directionality provided by global organising form. So the best we can do is imagine the initial conditions as representing the least of both these things. A fluctuation is what that looks like.

Can we really present any philosophy as a consistent system in a single moment with all of the meanings of each of its terms fixed? I don't think so. — t0m

Yep. Knowledge has to bootstrap itself from axioms. We have to risk making a hypothesis that seems "reasonable". But hey, it seems to work pretty well.

Actually that claim is ‘transcendental realism’, in philosophy speak. — Wayfarer

I still prefer to call it naive realism in this case. Transcendental realism would surely be only a position that makes sense as a conscious opposition to Kant. So it would count as at least not being folk metaphysics. :)

To think of a genomic network as structurally isomorphic to a neural network is probably possible, but it will remove both specificities. — fdrake

That would be the research question. We do have a variety of neural network architectures as candidates. The genome could be just like of those, or something different.

I doubt, though I could be wrong, that genomic networks are necessarily concerned with message passing in continuous or quasi-continuous time like neural networks are — fdrake

Surely genomic networks would have to be very much always monitoring the state of the cell? The biophysics now makes the point that cellular machinery is always on the point of breaking down and so needing the right nudge to build itself back up.

Direct evidence that timing matters is how the most time-critical regulation - that of the respiratory chains of mitochondria - is handled right on the spot by mitochondrial genes.

So most of the mitochondria genes have migrated to the central chromosomes. The time lags are not so critical. But where fast response is needed, the genes are kept right where the reactions are taking place.

Dynamical systems theory is already being used. Street's reference to canalisation has a link to bifurcation theory. — fdrake

Of course. But this is now different if instead of the dynamics being something directly physical - the self-organising dynamics at a "chemical" level - we are talking about a dynamics-based information model.

So this is about the genome as analog computation. A dynamical description might apply. But at the level of disembodied information rather than embodied physics.

It is just the same as the problem of talking about the representation of the world in the brain. Patterns of neural activity don't just simply "look like" the physics of the world they are modelling. There is certainly some topographical relationships preserved, but also a hierarchy of functional specialisation. Activity in one small blob of the visual cortex produces our sense of colour, another that of motion.

So the old mental picture of the genome was a "flat" network at best. It was just some kind of straight transcription layer with not particular internal complexity.

Once we start talking about neural networks, we are asking just how much internal hierarchical organisation, and hence "mind-like" complexity, there is going on. A very different ball game.

Our bodies and natural selection must obey the laws of physics. If it didn't then we could all fly without the proper anatomy. — Harry Hindu

Physics certainly constrains biology. But what then isn't constrained is by definition free to happen. And this freedom is what demands further modelling.

In fact, this freedom is something we have begun to generalise by talking about computation, information, negentropy, modelling relations, semiosis, etc.

So rather than biology just being some small and accidental expression of something physics failed to forbid, we are realising that it leads to a whole realm of "mind". The fact that physics creates a hard baseline of constraints in itself opens up a matchingly definite counter-possibility of a hard superstructure of rather absolute freedoms. Information becomes a real source of causality acting back on the world in evolutionary fashion.

That is why talk of genenomic networks being like neural networks in having a "separate adaptive intelligence" makes sense. A test of how much this is the case would be to consider the resilience that genomes show if you try to knock out one developmental pathway, and yet the genome can reorganise to still produce the desired functional outcome.

One super interesting thing to bring up in relation to this - I might start another thread on this down the line - is in following Robert Rosen's contention that biology is, contrary to what is commonly thought, a more general science than physics, insofar as biological systems have a richer repertoire of causal entailments than do physical ones. — StreetlightX

Yep.

Boy, this gets complicated. I can see - half genes from mom, half from dad. Trait A from mom, Trait B from dad. But if it's a network, that's 1/2 mom's network and 1/2 dad's network. Not even that. How do you inherit 1/2 a network? Why would it fit with the 1/2 network from the other parent? I'm not arguing against what you're saying. — T Clark

That is a good point. A big constraint on the whole gene story is that there is this strong selection for the whole damn business being evolvable too. The genome both has to regulate development and also do its best to expose individual traits to the winnowing force of selection.

So while a distributed genome behaves as a processing network, it still wants to offer up traits on an individualised basis, not the whole package.

This was the argument for why we go from the simple gene rings of bacteria to the chromosomes of multicellular life. The chromosomes, with their recombination shuffling of the gene deck, look to be a mechanism that both preserves the coherence of the developmental network and allows traits to be exposed to evolution in a suitably individualised fashion.

The evolution of sex - the separation of the immortal germ-line - is another important step. It means the genome that runs the everyday body is kept out of the evolutionary fray. The trait-level view is the specialist role played by gametes, or sperm and egg.

So it can be said that the topological properties of networks constrain the types of flow that pass through it, but the level of structural isomorphism is inappropriate for the analysis of the expression of particular genes or sets thereof. — fdrake

Yes. The interesting point about genomic networks is that their internal processing structure could be - in principle - uncrackable and forever hidden. Can we reconstruct the way a neural network executes its function even with full knowledge of the weights of its nodes?

If the functionality is multirealisable, then a knowledge of some particular state of task-adapted componentry does not give a simple theory of the functional dynamics of the network.

We could still hope to model genomics at a higher level. That’s why I’m thinking of a description in terms of general logical principles. Like the repetition of units (as in segmented body plans) or timing information when it comes to regulating tissue growth and developmental symmetry breakings or bifurcations.

Colors are merely the effect of the state of the apple interacting with light and your visual processing system. — Harry Hindu

Love the “merely”.

Anyway, you are still successfully dodging the question of how an apple can still look red to us even when the light it reflects is not in the normal red frequency range. It can’t be then a simple cause and effect relationship in terms of the actual light entering our eye and the way we construe the hue of what we see. What we imagine we should see, given our model of the lighting conditions, takes over.

The point here is that the indirect perceptual route is more accurate in that it sees the apple as it would be understood in ideal lighting conditions. It is the interpretation that can make allowances because the modelling isn’t simply driven in causal fashion by physical inputs.

If you say that they are simply another model, then you are using models to explain models, which then makes the term, "model" meaningless — Harry Hindu

Yes. And why not?

Of course they are also models at completely different levels of semiosis. Colour experience is biological-level perceptual modelling of “the world”. Talk about electromagnetic radiation and wavelength is socially constructed knowledge of the world.

One model can only change over eons of evolutionary time. The other we could reinvent tomorrow.