To be fair the term "metaphysics" confuses everybody. I still am not 100% sure what it is despite studying it as a profession for several years. You are in good company.

It would be a kind of miracle if what we experience is all there is - a kind of evolutionary freak accident. So, I highly doubt that there is not more to the world than what we experience.

But - we can't know much - if anything, about it.

We have kings of a sort, those who manage the world: the people who go to Davos and are found in Wall Street and The City of London, etc.

They're kings metaphorically, but they yield far more power. But the mistake we keep committing is believing that a king (or leader) is what we need. They know no better than people what they need.

Indeed, a good part of the reason why we are burning the planet, committed to forever wars and inching closer to nuclear annihilation is because people in power think they know more than they do.

We don't have a democracy; we have fractured republics. I can't say what we should think, because there are too many topics.

We've had a good row, and I see no significant issues remaining to clear up at the moment. So, I think we are good here M. :cool:

I think I follow. True one needs other people to activate consciousness "beyond simple animal enactive awareness." But what other people do is stimulate, provoke, give something to bounce off, in our minds. The interaction comes from others, but consciousness is inside us.

We do and it ought to be evident. I think the simplicity of an act of free will can get obfuscated by big questions pertaining to who we are, regrets, life and death decisions and the like. But that's inflating the trivial and putting in a host of complications that obscure the phenomenon.

So, there is a clear and massive difference between raising your leg and a doctor tapping your knee with a hammer, and then the leg going up as a reflex.

One we control easily, the other we can't control - it just happens.

If that distinction is taken to be true as it should, because it's so trivial, then you can begin amping up this example to other cases (but not all).

Turning a right instead of left is the difference between living a normal life or being a paraplegic for the rest of it as another car slams into yours.

Going to that trip may be the difference between a relaxing vacation or getting a promotion at work. And you can expand this in all ways. I can continue writing, or I can stop. I can't do both at the same time, that much is evident.

But yeah, that you can do something because it is in your power and that you do something because you can't control it, is the difference between free will and necessity.

. Maybe the autonomic system would still work, but the cognitive system wouldn’t for lack of direct sensory input, and the aestetic part wouldn’t work for lack of feelings about things of sense, so it looks like none of what is called a priori, like your “pure thought”, would be available. But hey….probably wouldn’t be dead. — Mww

Being not dead is good. Unless you are an anti-natalist. Which if you are, well, good riddance. I suspect you may be right, there'd be almost nothing going on inside.

Again, don’t know, but given the otherwise fully equipped human, I’m convinced all thought is absent language. — Mww

I'm a big fan of the a priori. To problematize it as unscientific looks quite silly to me. You may be convinced, and I share the intuition, but I can't say what it is. Saying it's a priori is fine, but it leaves me uninformed. And when you begin to explain the a priori, you use language. So, it's a sticky issue.

Even so, I haven't been able to pin down a describable form of pure thought, as it is called by the metaphysicians, a priori. — Mww

I think that makes sense. And maybe we can say little more than this.

But when she gave her public talks, many found her bookish and limited. Maxim Gorky, perhaps unkindly, called her affected and spoilt. Someone speaking of God's disapproval of revolution in a stilted and learnt way rather than with any worldly wisdom.

I know all this from researching these kinds of "parables" and what they reveal about the socially-constructed and language-scaffolded nature of the human mind. They illustrate exactly how language – as semiosis – plays a central role in structuring what we "phenomenologically experience". — apokrisis

It is quite remarkable how much language is tied to thought. I haven't read Keller in a long time, so the critiques may be true to some extent.

But it's still a stunning, the human capacity to be able to speak at all absent eyes and ears. I suspect that people who are deaf-mute may be touching on thought (whatever it is) in a less complex way than we do, maybe getting closer to whatever thought may be absent language. But as you point out, it also impoverishes output.

They grew up in institutions where their experience was about limited to their internal spasms of hunger or cold, and the rough touch of the hands cleaning and feeding them. Years of training could get them to the level of dressing themselves, feeding themselves, using the toilet. But nothing much beyond as any grammatical structure must be connected to some matching semantic world of lived experience. — apokrisis

There seems to be a crucial development window in which children can develop "the language organ", which, if missed, renders language virtually impossible.

Incidentally this seems true of other human capacities. If a child gets no visual input by 4 or some age like that, they won't be able to see.

So consciousness is not an innate or singular property, but a learnt and developmental process. And in humans, we develop the set of neurobiological habits we would share with any large brained animal. Then we add a socially-constructed realm of language-scaffolded ideas and intellectual habits on top. — apokrisis

I don't see how it's not innate. That it requires learning, only means it needs stimulus, but it comes from inside the creature. The world doesn't "teach" us consciousness, it sharpens and refines what we already have.

"The unit of speech is a proposition," he declared. "We speak not only to tell other people what to think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is part of thought." — apokrisis

Absolutely. And we can tell in ordinary life, when we ask someone "what are you thinking", we expect propositions, not the "blooming buzzing confusion" that is happening inside our heads all the time.

If mind is computational and computation is a physical process then it would seem to follow that the mental is really a function of the physical. — Janus

And I agree with that. I do think mental stuff is physical stuff. Just like gravity is physical stuff or anything else is physical stuff. I don't see a metaphysical difference between these things.

There is no mental vs. physical. If you want to talk about something analogous in modern terms, I think it makes sense to speak of the experiential and the non-experiential. And then the question becomes, how can non-experiential stuff lead to experiential stuff?

Difference is good―I don't think we want this place to become an echo chamber. I also agree with you on not wishing to create a substantive difference between the mental and physical, even though I think the distinction is useful in some of our thinking practices. — Janus

Absolutely.

It would be boring if we all agreed on everything. Keeps the discussions alive and interesting and it keeps one sharp too, forces one to think clearly about things one may overlook or has trouble explaining.

So can we even say there’s any such thing as being comatose throughout? — Mww

Well, far from comatose, we do have examples of people like Hellen Keller, who managed to become a wonderful writer while being deaf-mute.

It's more so, what would a human be like, if they never developed senses, either by genetic mutation, or accident or some other scenario. I'd wonder if there's "something that it's like" to be that, from a phenomenological perspective, "pure thought", absent language.

Tested comatose patients were not comatose throughout, though. — Mww

That's what's interesting, philosophically.

I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between what I’m doing when I introspect and what I’m doing when I think. Notice, though, through the ages of dispute over the original, no one’s taken “introspectro ergo sum” seriously enough to argue for it. — Mww

In part because, outside of language, we don't know what non-linguistic thought is. But few would say that thought is anywhere near exhausted through language. Introspection can be explained to some degree, but it doesn't tell us as much as we'd like. For reasons you've articulated elsewhere.

I'm going to respond with another quibble. You are again referring to what we cannot introspect as "mental", whereas I think it most plausible to consider that what we cannot introspect is 'neural', and that it is precisely it's character as non-mental that makes it impossible to introspect. — Janus

It may be neural. It may be computational - below the level of the neural, as Randy Gallistel suggests. There are some who think neurons alone don't suffice to explain mental activity, hence proposals like Hameroff and Penrose who speak of microtubules.

There's also the linguistic component discussed by Chomsky a very intricate unconscious model which we can tease out into consciousness to discover its form.

But unless you want to say something, I enjoy talking with you, I think your use of mental is not problematic, as I said it's a caveat, and I mention it because I feel hesitancy to create more distance than there is between the mental and the physical. It's more monist issue.

One may even wonder why we introspect at all, it reveals little of what we would like to know...

I think what you say here supports my view. What we say is preceded, it seems most plausible to think, by neuronal processes, brain processes of which we cannot be aware. So I don't think it is right to refer to them as mental processes, given that I think the term is most apt when applied to what we can be conscious of — Janus

I get that. And that sounds to me to be a reasonable definition of "mental". All I'm pointing out is that without these unconscious processes the mental would not arise. So, it's not easy to disentangle them.

It's not so much the brain (though of course if we lack it, we might not be thinking in high quality), more so what comes alongside consciousness and thinking, which is an obscure apparatus - we cannot introspect into how we do what we do with the mental. But this is just a quibble.

Your definition is fine and I don't deny its usefulness.

You seem to be misinterpreting me to say that other animals see things in the same way as we do. I'm not saying that at all―I'm saying they see the same things we do but in different ways according to the different ways their sensory modalities are structured. — Janus

And herein lies the difference between us. I seem to be on the side that our differences are more pronounced than our similarities. You seem to say that though of course there are differences, we have some structure in common. I don't understand what you mean by structure on these levels. Are we speaking of the seemingly concrete nature of rocks, or that certain food seems to be liked by many animals?

Or is it something more abstract as in, the outline of a rock or a tree is perceivable to certain species.

As for the first case, I'd agree with it to some degree sure. It's the second option that is obscure to me.

Dare I say it? I’ve no experience with being comatose. Even the deepest sleep doesn’t turn off senses, although it’s unlikely I’d exercise my taste buds. Sure my eyes are shut, but they haven’t been debilitated; they’ve just been removed from their objects. — Mww

Ok but, there is a big difference between once having developed your senses, losing them for a while (comatose) and never having developed the senses at all, blind or sensory deprivation at crucial development times, etc.

The question here is, what would a human being's thought pattern be like if they were comatose all throughout? Would they be completely blank? Would they be able to from minimal computation as in 7+5=12? Hard to say. Fascinating though.

But we both know there isn’t a real “I”; no where in the skull can there be discovered some thing or other identifiable as such. Just as there no such thing as reason, judgement and any of those other metaphysical-ly things these words are used to represent. Hell….we’d be hard put to find even one of those representations we have insisted upon since forever. — Mww

Ah, yes. The damnable problem of confusing something that is publicly observable with what can be verified. We all have reason (to some extent I'd guess) but we can only see signs of reason in others, we only are acquainted to a limited extent with our own.

To doubt the manifest, funny beings these philosophers...

I’m afraid to inform you, Good Sir, it is inescapable NOT to have a horse in this fight. As you say, as soon as verbalization occurs, one or the other, or both, hands are active, and even though proofs are always absent, at least we can take refuge in that for which an end is possible. — Mww

I have a horse, or several, I have no illusions of being "objective", though I try to be charitable and polite - sometimes failing.

Thing is, I'm not sure what I'm betting on at the moment, so I'd don't know whether to call, raise or fold.

Yeah, right. See the contradiction? Neurotransmitters and synaptic clefts did indeed produce metaphysics, and even if there’s no proof of how, it remains that formerly determined nowhere, happened. — Mww

Not so much a contradiction as just limits of the type of knowledge we have. This would be no issue if we were angles, or God, or at least the merely mysterious would be idle banality at such otherworldly heights. We just happen to stand on two legs and believe we see further than we do.

I personally don't find the hard problem to be the hard problem. Just one of many we have to live with.

(**loosely translated as….dude, you brought a knife to a gun fight???)

If we couldn’t have some kinda fun with this, why bother doing it. — Mww

Great quote!

Maybe the guy with the knife is just crazy enough, that others might pause long enough to be puzzled and by dint of hesitancy get killed. Or maybe knife-guy just gets shot. More likely anyway. . . .

I am not understanding what you are wanting to say with your 'alien' example. I think neurophysiology clearly shows us what reasonably counts as brain and what does not. — Janus

You may have loosed what counts as brain when you say:

"the manifold of sensitive body, nervous system and brain plus the environment which acts up it."

The nervous system is then a component of a system of which the brain is a part of.

My alien example is simple, but the particulars are hard to imagine (since we are human beings, not Martians).

Suppose Martians existed and that they have more sophisticated or refined sensory and intellectual capacities. The way they conceptualize the world is different from ours. For them, what we call a "brain", is misleading slicing of what we take to be the organ responsible for thought.

On this view, one could suppose that for them a brain may be a human head, that is to say, not only the organ "brain", but also the eyes, the ears and so on, which, without these additions a brain would not be able to work properly. So they could carve out organs in a different manner- maybe radically so, I can only point to examples I can imagine, not one's I cannot.

I guess we'll have to disagree on what would be the most reasonable scope of the term 'mental'. The idea that some process could be mental and yet be impossible for us to be aware of in vivo, so to speak, just doesn't seem tenable. — Janus

What about language use? We literally do not know what we are specifically going to say prior to saying it (or typing it.) Clearly we have a vague meaning, which we can express through propositions, sometimes expressing what we wanted to say, sometimes we just get approximations.

The point is that certain unconscious processes - willing, judging, spontaneity, creativity - are things that come out of us without us being consciousness of them until they happen. And I think that without these processes, we wouldn't have consciousness as we understand the word.

Other multicellular organisms have sense organs, organs of sight, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling just as do, even though their organs may not be configured in just the same ways as ours. We also know that other animals visually detect the same structures in the environment as we do―it is evidenced by their behavior. — Janus

Yeah we have been stuck on this point before if I recall correctly. I am skeptical that they do. Not that they necessarily experience things COMPLETELY differently from us in all respects, but in some respects they do. Dogs with olfaction have access to a world we barely imagine. Mantis shrimp have 16 color receptive cones which renders the experience they have of the world very different from what we see.

There may be overlap. But I fear excessive anthropomorphizing may be limiting what we can say here.

Is reading The Blue Book necessary for this?

There’s dozens of definitions for experience, but I personally favor the one that says experience is knowledge of objects through perception — Mww

That's fine. But what do you in a hypothetical scenario in which the traditional five senses aren't working, say a coma, but there's reason to believe there is still consciousness?

Consciousness is represented by that to which it belongs, the “I” or the transcendental ego, while experience on the other hand, nonetheless a statement concerning the condition of a subject, it is so only from the sum of his perceptions, having no concern with the subject’s condition relative to his moral disposition or his aesthetic feelings in general. — Mww

I use experience as synonymous with "consciousness" because this word has been used in so many ways and brings about different prejudices that I want a neutral term.

As for the "I" that accompanies consciousness. That one is tricky. Using only myself as an example (pun intended or not) I'd say a lot of the time there is an I, for which the conscious experience happens.

But there are rare times, daydreaming or random thoughts in which and "I" is not present. Of course, as soon as you verbalize it gets reintroduced. But I'm not 100% settled on the claim that an "I" accompanies all our consciousness all the time in every possible conscious variation or circumstance, even if it applies, say, in 95% of the cases.

Don't have a big horse in that fight either way.

Thoughts? — Mww

I mostly though that Galen Strawson's use of the word - introduced in Mental Reality - was very useful. No more than that.

So thinking about climate change might cause one person to think depressing things, but cause another person to think of the girl he had a crush on in the class he took on climate changed. But in both cases, thinking of climate change caused the next thought — Patterner

Of course, I think there are instances in which we enter trains of thought which are real and causal, otherwise I don't know how we could think rationally.

People vary wildly, but that they also find themselves in circumstances in which a pattern of thought arises for each person looks accurate to me.

There's also plenty of random thinking too. And maybe here we don't find connective causes.

The difference is, the synthesis intuition uses in the construction of phenomena, re: matter and form, is very different from the synthesis understanding uses in the construction of thought, re: the schemata of relevant categories, or, conceptions. — Mww

That's probably true when seen from a more micro-scale. But I'd suspect that both acts are creative - in the broadest sense of the term. They create something - phenomenon through matter and form and understanding - applying categories (etc.) - which did not exist as we now acquire them, prior to interaction. These things, while being quite different in specifics, create something from very poor sense data, photons and other particles.

My thinking as well. Which gets us to the brain thing: there is no doubt regarding the real existence of that object between the ears, but that object is only a brain because one of us, at one time or another, said so. From which follows necessarily, while that thing may always be, and be right where it is, it isn’t a brain from that alone. — Mww

That's how I see it. More than anything, I don't take brains to be "real distinctions" in nature, it's what we happen to categorize as relevant to the mental processes of certain animals. This does NOT deny something exists, just that they aren't carved up in nature in this way.

how is it that mathematics is always synthetic cognition referencing a myriad of distinct operations, but a number is always analytic, or that conception which is called primitive, in referencing only a singular quantity? — Mww

All good questions and borrowing Hume's words (from a different problem) - "this difficulty is too hard for my understanding." I have no idea how to proceed with numbers or math.

Thus, things-in-themselves on one end, and experience on the other, stand as not mental operational constituency — Mww

I almost get that. What do you mean by "experience" here? I make no distinction between experience and consciousness.

Know what? If we follow that out to an extreme, the brain, being matter, must think, in principle, for it disguises itself in manifestations of a thinking subject.

Like I said…no need to confuse ourselves twice. Once, like this, is plenty. — Mww

Yup. But the issue keeps arising. All I say is matter is much, much stranger than what we once thought....

the interpretation of sense data as phenomena, is understanding. — Mww

That could be technically correct. My goal is more general, and it would be to say that to construct something (whether it is a phenomenon or through understanding) is to bring into being something which did not exist as (now) thought (representation, image, object, etc.).

The sticky point for others (not anyone in particular) is that they'd say objects exist absent us. I agree that something exists absent us and before us and will continue after we die. But what we call it and how we categorize that is the issue. I think physics does manage to pierce into the mind-independent structure of things.

Which satisfies the notion that mere construction of thought, while complete in itself, is never enough to obtain a systemic end. — Mww

If I follow, I agree. Sounds to me like you are speaking about something like the unconditioned, which fair enough, is granted. But I may be misinterpreting.

You know how we treat “world” as the collection of all possible real things? Why not treat “mind” as the collection of all possible human mental operational constituency? If we do that in the same non-contradictory fashion as we treat “world”, all possible human mental constituency is not a limitation to interpreting sense data, in the same fashion as “world” is not a limitation to any particular which is a member of its collection. World and mind are general conceptions without operational functions belonging specifically to them. — Mww

Possible real things? What about numbers? Those are quite pesky.

The world, as I understand it, is what there is. Yet the most reliable evidence we have for it comes through mathematical formulations which, don't seem to have worldly existence. Or maybe as Tegmark says, the world is mathematical.

To get a better idea of what you are proposing, if you could give an example of something that's not a "personal mental operational constituency", maybe I could better follow. For example, you can say, everything we think of is mental, but X is not, because X is part of the world. Otherwise, I don't quite follow.

If there is no interpretive function in the senses, no determinations as data or information are at all possible from them, which makes the notion of “sense data” empty, from which follows it cannot be sense data that the mental system interprets. — Mww

Not the senses, what we construct from the senses. Our organ's structure sense-data, we then attempt to comprehend what is given to us through our native faculties.

Why is that a human seldom allows himself to acknowledge that rote instruction regarding what he knows, and purely subjective deductive inferences regarding what he knows, is possible only from that singular mental functionality capable of both simultaneously? — Mww

That's an interesting path to follow. Strictly speaking, I think we grow (innate) knowledge, not learn, which implies getting something which you never had in any way prior. But we could get side-tracked here.

Ironically enough, the same applies to materialism, but we don’t care about that, insofar as there’s no legitimate need to confuse ourselves twice, so we grant the material world and concentrate on what to do with it. — Mww

Actually, my main concern here is to attempt to clear up the misleading thinking that says, "matter can't think in principle", which is an assertion not based on evidence.

Then there are those who say that ideas are these crazy things that need to be reduced or explained away in some future science.

Once that's cleared up, I don't know what the debate is even about. It seems to be a preference of words.

You can pick - there's no limit. Well, maybe not moral philosophy, I find that stuff a bit dull for the most part.

but it would depend on what is meant by "mental construction". We are not aware of how our perceptions are pre-cognitively constructed. The predominant neuroscientific view seems to be that our perceptions arise as the kind of "tip"―the part we can be conscious of―of the "iceberg" of neuronal process. When we refer to something as mental, is it not usually a reference to things we can be aware of? If so, 'mental construction' as opposed to 'brain process' or 'brain model' might seem inapt. — Janus

Yeah, it gets tricky. On the one hand, there's something there independent of us. I think most would agree save for vanishingly few idealists (again I know only of one - Collier). On the other hand, if I say what remains is brain or a nervous system, then I am smuggling in what I am trying to show exists absent me.

We can, without going too speculative reasonably imagine that some intelligent alien species may carve out a different kind of organs (or parts of organs) and call that a brain.

As for the definition of mental- that's very hard. I think what you say is how it's used. I'd add unconscious processes to this, but this would make me idiosyncratic.

The point is that if the brain is doing things we cannot be mentally aware of, then that would seem to indicate that it is a mind-independent functional organ or structure.

It is true that we, on the basis of neuroscientific study, ascribe the functions, but it doesn't seem to follow that those functions are not real independently of our ascriptions. In fact the obverse seems more plausible. — Janus

Yes. We may be talking at cross purposes here. And maybe as you suggested we'd have to settle on what a "construction" means. I take it as, whatever the mind does when it interprets sense data.

Something exists absent us but calling it a "brain" assumes that what we are carving out is a "natural kind", that is the way nature carves itself absent us. This seems to happen in physics, in biology the different framing of other creatures arises, I think.

What about ontic structural realism? It's true that we rely on our perceptions to reveal structures to us, so we know them only as they appear to us. This does seem to leave the question as to what they might be absent our perception of them. That question cannot be answered with certainty, but then what questions can? To my way of thinking it is more plausible to think that our perceptions reveal things about what we perceive, but that there remain aspects which we are incapable of perceiving. So, I don't see it as black and white―I don't see it as being the case that we can know nothing about things in themselves. — Janus

I prefer epistemic structural realism - that applies to physics. Does it apply to chemistry or biology? I'm more skeptical here. If limited to physics, then I think we have no substantial issues to clear up.

Likewise, dude. I learn a lot.

I use the words "metaphysics" and "epistemology" as narrowly as I can. For metaphysics I mean the world. For epistemology I mean aspects of knowledge.

In this respect I don't think there are "substantial" distinctions between mind and matter, or anything else. No more so than seeing and hearing are metaphysical different.

In some respects, it's harder to think of a bigger difference between seeing something and hearing something. But we would not say these are metaphysical distinctions, these are differences in how we interpret the world. It's the same world but interpreted in vastly different ways.

So, dualism would be a distinction in how we organize the way we think about the world.

Damn, I did not know. The exchanges I've had with him were serious and substantive, but I didn't read all his posts or follow him at all. Good to know.

All in all- and yeah it sounds like I'm being a "teachers pet" - you folks do a fine job moderating here.

While res extensa and res cogitans as such may have run their respective courses, don’t we still argue a form of intrinsic metaphysical dualism to this day? Even dropping out the notion of substance still leaves two ideas categorically different from, but necessarily related to, each other.

But I’m an unrepentant dualist in this more-modern-than-me age, so what do I know. — Mww

I wouldn't deny that we think in dualist terms - maybe mistakenly, maybe ingrained as a kind of "folk psychology" (incidentally I hate that term, it makes it sound as if folk psychology is not useful or primitive, whereas it's the way we experience the world) - but I do deny it as a metaphysical distinction.

You may want to say "property dualist" - and that's fine. I can see the appeal. But then I also see the appeal of a multi-faceted monist, which is to say, dozens of types of properties - electricity, magnetism, liquidity, plasma, etc. - all would be different properties of the same stuff.

Either is fine, and here the domain is very tricky and up to choice.

Ehhhhh….I would be far less generous: it’s pathologically stupid to deny the existence of that external thing, the forceful contact of which is sufficient cause for a displaced appearance, subsequently cognized as a farging bloody lip!!! (Sigh) — Mww

I agree, it is stupid. But the discussion here is framed as if "idealism" and "materialism" - whatever they are - are somehow opposites. As in if we allow that ideas construct the world then matter does not exist. Or alternatively, if matter exists then ideas are these obscure mystical things. Back in Descartes time views like that made sense - there was a clear intelligible difference between res extensa and res cogitans.

We don't have that distinction along those lines anymore. Descartes was being scientific, to argue along his lines today is to force a distinction that does not look clear at all.

Obscure. Historically, British philosophers were empiricists, or at least pseudo-Kantian dualists. Who did you have in mind? — Mww

I've been reading the English Platonists. Known back then but forgotten today. The one I had in mind was Arthur Collier - who did deny the external world in his Clavis Universalis. Extremely unconvincing if you ask me, just repeated denials.

. Not to mention the serious trash-talkin’ ol’ Arthur laid on him and “those ridiculous Hegelians” in general. You know….that ubiquitous cognitive prejudice we all suffer to some degree of another. — Mww

Absolutely. I like Raymond Tallis' quip here, "Hegel is above my cognitive paygrade." He may have some interesting ideas somewhere, but that explicit and conscious verbosity and obscurity is repellent to me.

And yes ol' Arthur's roasting is sublime.

Yeah, I agree with that framing - it is quite sensible and ought to be factual- but it apparently sounds contentious for some reason. Some people get uncomfortable with the idea of mental construction, as if objectivity is thereby rendered suspect or inexistant.

The issue that arises here, then, is whether there is an external world or not. I don't know of any idealist - save for one, an obscure British philosopher - who denies the existence of the world. But I don't understand Hegel, nor am I compelled to read him.

My criticism here is that If materialism is true, then the brain is not merely a "mental construction" even if our models of it, and perhaps even our perceptions of it, are mental constructions (idealism) or brain generated models (materialism). — Janus

It may be more than merely a mental construction, but it is at least a mental construction, or we would have no way to perceive or model it. I presume you know Russell's quote on this topic, and he was not an idealist. But what he says is factual as far as I can see.

According to materialism, there would be some mind-independent functional structures which appear to us as brains, and what we experience as thoughts are on the level of the physical brain, neuronal processes — Janus

Who ascribes these functions? We do. What does a brain do? It produces consciousness, but it does many things which are unrelated to consciousness which are equally important. Why privilege consciousness over many of the other things brains do?

On the other hand according to idealism, the brain is merely one among all the other ideas which are taken by materialists to be mind-independently real functional structures, but are really, through and through, mental constructions.. — Janus

You have mentioned structures several times. I can understand epistemic structural realism in physics, but above that, say in biology and so on, I don't quite follow what you are saying.

At least you are framing something which can be discussed that materialism means mind independent structure and that idealism denies that. That's a big improvement over usual conversations on these topics.

This talk of idealism vs. materialism pops up all the time, but it is rarely defined. Or if it is, the definitions seem to me to be unsatisfactory.

Roughly speaking:

Idealism: everything is a product of mind.

Materialism: everything is made of physical stuff.

What is this supposed clash? Is the mind not coming out of a brain? Is the brain not a mental construction based on sense data?

So what prevents one from being incompatible with the other? That matter can't think? That's factually false and is relying on old (but justified at the time) Cartesian intuitions.

Or alternatively that mind is above matter? What does this even mean? I find no meaning in this assertion. The problem that can be posed is the problem of the world, either it exists absent us or it does not. That is a legitimate question, because it can be meaningfully debated.

Another question that can be meaningfully debated is how much of the world is a construction of the mind. But the alleged rift or incompatibility between idealism and materialism is merely verbal.

Yes. It becomes a very big "meta" problem - hallucinations get clocked in as facts (this is already happening) and other AI's use the hallucinated data as fact, amplifying its abundance and stretching its reliability.

They're slated to run out of trainable data next year, until paywalled sources open up.

I don't know man, the tools are impressive in many ways, but being forced to use it in everything can't be good. One has to imagine that this will have massive negative ramifications down the line...

To make the question more direct and concrete, what philosophy writing will make your writing survive better through the ages, what philosophy writing will receive little in the way of fame, praise, or hostility? — ProtagoranSocratist

It's hard to predict. Hume was basically ignored until after his death, he was known mostly as a historian. Not too disimilar from Leibniz who was marginalized and mocked - save a few exceptions like Kant or Schopenhauer- until Bertrand Russell brought him back from the trenches of history with his book on Leibniz.

We have Plato because we got lucky, somehow his body of work survived. I believe we lost 2/5's of Aristotle's writings, and we have almost nothing of the books he wanted to publish (in dialogue form), which were said to be "rivers of gold".

We have fragments of the pre-Socratics, again luck.

Herbert de Cherbury, one of the central antagonists of Locke, probably the one who caused him to write part I of his Essay, was because he was reacting to Cherbury. Ask if anyone knows about him today. Getting a copy of his book in English is difficult, to say the least.

Peirce we have because James and Dewey mentioned several times in writing and some people decided it was worth ordering his notes, otherwise we'd have mere articles.

C.I. Lewis, the person who brought in the term "qualia" into contemporary philosophy is barely known and he's quite interesting.

You get the idea. There are equal examples of people who were famous back in the day but are now relegated as historical curiosity. Just write what you find interesting, hope others like it. Not much more can be done. Much treasure has to be looked for, just as there is a lot of junk.

The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolaño

I guess that this may have been mentioned. One thing is AI use in this place. But damn, it's everywhere. I had to get an extension to block it from always appearing in Google searches. Getting "answers" from secondary sources (the AI using the primary source) can only lead to more "mutations" increasing errors.

AI use can be perfectly fine. But there is something to be said about too much of it all the time.

There must be a connection to certain trains of thought, otherwise we wouldn't be able to think or reason. How much of these thoughts are based on connective tissue of a previous thought as opposed to having thoughts floating in the imagination (to borrow Hume's framing) is impossible to delineate.

As for a cause- that may be different. Hitting a billiard ball causing another billiard ball to move is quite reliable, but to argue that, say, thinking about climate change leads to depression reliably, while true, is vastly more complex. There are many more variables as to what constitutes depression than the regularity in which a ball causes another ball to move.

True - though he admitted he did not have the gift for writing that Hume or Mendelsohn had.

Some of his writing in his Prolegomena is much better than his Critique material, but only in instances.

I am saying that outside of ordinary use of these words, we have no technical definitions of "believing", "knowing" or "thinking". Unless you argue that knowledge is justified true belief, which is unconvincing.

Having said this, on ordinary usage, belief and thought are different. A belief may be true or false. It has a residue of faith to it as well.

A thought may be many things and need not correspond to anything external, as in thinking about a flying mountain, which whatever else it is, is hard to argue is a belief.

That's a wonderful quote. And he's quite right.

Well - some philosophers of certain traditions seem to me to speak gobbledygook (the postmodernists: Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, Kristeva, Guatarri, etc.) so no amount of more writing - or less, would help much.

Welcome to the forum!

As for premise 1: Epistemically, belief and thought are identical.

This needs clarification. What is a belief? What is a thought?

As far as I can see you have stipulated that they are identical but have not given an argument as to why they are identical.

Once you tell us what they are then maybe we can proceed to argue about these topics.

When We Were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro

Yep! That was quite a performance - on many levels. Hadn't read a book quite like it ever.

I'm glad you are enjoying it. When you finish shoot me an @, I'd love to get your impressions. There's a lot to it.