chrisw wrote:The fact that our bodies are prerequisites for experience does not imply that our knowledge of our bodies or the rest of the physical world is invalid. Where is the logical path from one idea to the other here?

On the contrary, it seems to me to represent a validation of our knowledge of the physical world that it can describe not only the external objects we observe but the working of our observation itself and even explain the cases where that observation goes wrong.

This is surely how we know when our explanations really engage with reality - they can explain even themselves. By paying attention to our observations as we interact with the world we develop a theory that even explains observation.

Not invalid knowledge- just 'perspectival' knowledge. If all you mean by explaining the working of observation is what it consists in, then we agree, but I'm guessing you take saying what the act of observation involves amounts to a full explanation of observation. The problem I think is saying what observation, or personhood, or embodiment consists in, i.e. microbiology, assumes these categories exist in themselves. We know people are made of physical stuff, but how come we percieve people, and not objects, in the first place? Taking the intentional stance isn't simply a matter of choice, it's a presupposition. This is the kind of stuff ususally relegated to the level of interpretation in theories about the mind, but not only does the Theory-theory of intersubjectivity presuppose an intellectualist picture of the mind that embodiment was designed to dispel, there isn't even enough time between perception of a person and knowing what their expressions 'mean' for complex interpretations to take place in the brain.

Pulvinar wrote:There are a couple problems with your deductions here, the main one being that the Mary experiment doesn't help decide what "actually seeing red" means. For example, start by replacing the red object that Mary first sees with a color photo of the object. I'm sure you'd agree that she's still experiencing red. Now let's work our way up and replace the eye with an optic nerve stimulator that produces an identical pattern of nerve impulses. Is she now not really seeing red? Or maybe really seeing an unreal red? This could be moved up by replacing the first layer of neurons activated by that incoming pattern, within the brain, with equivalent neural stimulators. Still real red?

So I don't see how that shows a dependence on actual sensing. There are other problems which Dennett examines using RoboMary, which you may be familiar with.

The example you're using suggests we could probably do without the brain as well and just make do with a functional equivalent like in Dennett's story about getting a robot body in The Mind's Eye. The problem is these kinds of thought experiments end up reinforcing a view of the mind as being a kind of software living in a world of its own. I think that's a deeply counterintuitive and Cartesian way of looking at things.

Robomary I kind of agree with, as I recall it was about a robot that can put itself into any brain state and therefore has the resources to experience anything. AFAIK we're not like that, our imaginations are limited and we can't just put ourselves into any mental state we wish for. So even if Robomary fully understands consciousness, we can't, because we're not built that way. Robomary is basically a mystic, insofar as we have no way of knowing if her understanding of experience makes any sense or not without already being like her. In any case the thought experiment actually reinforces the view that we can't understand experiences from the outside - we have to be immersed in them ourselves, if the example of proprioception didn't already suggest that. It puts consciousness off-limits to purely intellectual enquiry.

Obviously, the way I've been arguing that the world we perceive is conditioned by the mind after all suggests that I myself think we're stuck in a mental world of our own with no access to the real world. I think that's only half true, my point is more that we observe a real world, but that this world in some sense can't be accounted for. Asking why we perceive it the way we do - seeing things as having intentionality, not to mention colour and sound qualities, etc - is like asking why there's something instead of nothing. Why does the world consist of these categories and not others? In the end, it's a rhetorical question.

Hence the consciousness problem being different, but related, to the mind-body problem.

Krull[ wrote:

Pulvinar wrote:There are a couple problems with your deductions here, the main one being that the Mary experiment doesn't help decide what "actually seeing red" means. For example, start by replacing the red object that Mary first sees with a color photo of the object. I'm sure you'd agree that she's still experiencing red. Now let's work our way up and replace the eye with an optic nerve stimulator that produces an identical pattern of nerve impulses. Is she now not really seeing red? Or maybe really seeing an unreal red? This could be moved up by replacing the first layer of neurons activated by that incoming pattern, within the brain, with equivalent neural stimulators. Still real red?

So I don't see how that shows a dependence on actual sensing. There are other problems which Dennett examines using RoboMary, which you may be familiar with.

The example you're using suggests we could probably do without the brain as well and just make do with a functional equivalent like in Dennett's story about getting a robot body in The Mind's Eye. The problem is these kinds of thought experiments end up reinforcing a view of the mind as being a kind of software living in a world of its own. I think that's a deeply counterintuitive and Cartesian way of looking at things.

I don't see any of your connections here. I assume you mean a processor running software (software doesn't do anything by itself). The processor wouldn't be in a world of its own if it interacts with our world. If my view is counterintuitive that wouldn't make it wrong. And I have no idea how you see anything I've written as Cartesian.

Robomary I kind of agree with, as I recall it was about a robot that can put itself into any brain state and therefore has the resources to experience anything. AFAIK we're not like that, our imaginations are limited and we can't just put ourselves into any mental state we wish for. So even if Robomary fully understands consciousness, we can't, because we're not built that way. Robomary is basically a mystic, insofar as we have no way of knowing if her understanding of experience makes any sense or not without already being like her. In any case the thought experiment actually reinforces the view that we can't understand experiences from the outside - we have to be immersed in them ourselves, if the example of proprioception didn't already suggest that. It puts consciousness off-limits to purely intellectual enquiry.

Yes, off limits to a purely intellectual enquiry, which luckily scientists aren't restricted to-- they are making progress towards being like Robomary.

Obviously, the way I've been arguing that the world we perceive is conditioned by the mind after all suggests that I myself think we're stuck in a mental world of our own with no access to the real world. I think that's only half true, my point is more that we observe a real world, but that this world in some sense can't be accounted for. Asking why we perceive it the way we do - seeing things as having intentionality, not to mention colour and sound qualities, etc - is like asking why there's something instead of nothing. Why does the world consist of these categories and not others? In the end, it's a rhetorical question.

I wouldn't call it rhetorical since our evolution provides a reasonable answer: it's a good solution for generating survival behavior.

Pulvinar wrote:Yes, off limits to a purely intellectual enquiry, which luckily scientists aren't restricted to-- they are making progress towards being like Robomary.

How?

I wouldn't call it rhetorical since our evolution provides a reasonable answer: it's a good solution for generating survival behavior.

What would the world be like in the absence of those categories? How could we ever know?

I don't see any of your connections here. I assume you mean a processor running software (software doesn't do anything by itself). The processor wouldn't be in a world of its own if it interacts with our world. If my view is counterintuitive that wouldn't make it wrong. And I have no idea how you see anything I've written as Cartesian.

It's in a world of its own because it is never actually in contact with the world. Brain-in-a-vat thought experiments, along with Dennett's own example that suggests we don't even need brains, are intended to make us think of ourselves as living in a sort of virtual reality. "I think therefore I am" etc. It's a way of understanding everyday experience as a kind of dream, rather than viewing dreams (and brains in vats) as an exception. But we're obviously in contact with the world all the time, not just in the sense that we physically depend on it for our existence (not something we could ever know for sure if we're really like BIVs), but because we literally see it, not simply copies of it that exist in our brains.

Krull wrote:

Pulvinar wrote:Yes, off limits to a purely intellectual enquiry, which luckily scientists aren't restricted to-- they are making progress towards being like Robomary.

How?

Neuroscience: examining the organization and operation of brains like ours, or even our own while in action.

I wouldn't call it rhetorical since our evolution provides a reasonable answer: it's a good solution for generating survival behavior.

What would the world be like in the absence of those categories? How could we ever know?

I'm not sure what you're asking, but let's pick a category, say sound. If we weren't able to categorize a sound as a dangerous sound (say, of a predator approaching) apart from other sounds, we'd be less likely to survive and pass on our traits than those who could. This doesn't mean there aren't other categories or whole senses that are absent in us: we certainly know we don't perceive radio waves directly (barring the odd tooth filling).

I don't see any of your connections here. I assume you mean a processor running software (software doesn't do anything by itself). The processor wouldn't be in a world of its own if it interacts with our world. If my view is counterintuitive that wouldn't make it wrong. And I have no idea how you see anything I've written as Cartesian.

It's in a world of its own because it is never actually in contact with the world. Brain-in-a-vat thought experiments, along with Dennett's own example that suggests we don't even need brains, are intended to make us think of ourselves as living in a sort of virtual reality. "I think therefore I am" etc. It's a way of understanding everyday experience as a kind of dream, rather than viewing dreams (and brains in vats) as an exception. But we're obviously in contact with the world all the time, not just in the sense that we physically depend on it for our existence (not something we could ever know for sure if we're really like BIVs), but because we literally see it, not simply copies of it that exist in our brains.

It sure seems that way, doesn't it? It's what a conscious brain excels at: turning all of that sensory input into a simplified, useable description of how things are, so it can decide how to improve things to its advantage.

Try my inner/outer voice experiment in the other thread and tell me just when you are "literally hearing" your own voice.

Pulvinar wrote:Neuroscience: examining the organization and operation of brains like ours, or even our own while in action.

The scientists still need to understand what they're looking at, which involves using their imaginations. If the only way to know what a brain state feels like is to be in that state, you haven't really explained consciousness objectively. We want to know what 'being' a brain state or a body actually means.

I'm not sure what you're asking, but let's pick a category, say sound. If we weren't able to categorize a sound as a dangerous sound (say, of a predator approaching) apart from other sounds, we'd be less likely to survive and pass on our traits than those who could. This doesn't mean there aren't other categories or whole senses that are absent in us: we certainly know we don't perceive radio waves directly (barring the odd tooth filling).

It's not simply a case of categorizing raw sense data - we don't experience raw data anyway most of the time, and even if we did, the experience of a sound as sound needs to be explained. It's the whole primary/secondary quality argument - we assume the real world is soundless, colourless etc, but we've got to get from that world to the world we percieve. But the world we percieve is the only world we really know about, hence why most philosophers don't defend primary/secondary qualities anymore. Primary qualities end up being beyond experience, like God.

It sure seems that way, doesn't it? It's what a conscious brain excels at: turning all of that sensory input into a simplified, useable description of how things are, so it can decide how to improve things to its advantage.

It doesn't seem that way since there's no alternative to 'seeming'. We might as well assume we perceive the real world, because the alternative is that reality is always beyond what we can know about.

Krull wrote:

Pulvinar wrote:Neuroscience: examining the organization and operation of brains like ours, or even our own while in action.

The scientists still need to understand what they're looking at, which involves using their imaginations. If the only way to know what a brain state feels like is to be in that state, you haven't really explained consciousness objectively. We want to know what 'being' a brain state or a body actually means.

Part of a full explanation certainly involves explaining how a brain works as viewed from the outside. From there one can correlate different experiences with their causes, which may include direct brain stimulation such as TMS or probes. And also see how experience physically changes the brain by direct measurement (when possible) to see where a given experience resides. Beyond this, a fictional view of what form the explanation should take will never be fulfilled. It requires tearing up that dead-end street.

I'm not sure what you're asking, but let's pick a category, say sound. If we weren't able to categorize a sound as a dangerous sound (say, of a predator approaching) apart from other sounds, we'd be less likely to survive and pass on our traits than those who could. This doesn't mean there aren't other categories or whole senses that are absent in us: we certainly know we don't perceive radio waves directly (barring the odd tooth filling).

It's not simply a case of categorizing raw sense data - we don't experience raw data anyway most of the time, and even if we did, the experience of a sound as sound needs to be explained. It's the whole primary/secondary quality argument - we assume the real world is soundless, colourless etc, but we've got to get from that world to the world we percieve. But the world we percieve is the only world we really know about, hence why most philosophers don't defend primary/secondary qualities anymore. Primary qualities end up being beyond experience, like God.

An explanation of this starts with explaining how pattern recognition and associative memory work, how different forms of learning work, etc. You shouldn't expect to get a satisfactory answer without knowing the details.

It sure seems that way, doesn't it? It's what a conscious brain excels at: turning all of that sensory input into a simplified, useable description of how things are, so it can decide how to improve things to its advantage.

It doesn't seem that way since there's no alternative to 'seeming'. We might as well assume we perceive the real world, because the alternative is that reality is always beyond what we can know about.

It means we need to use additional methods to test the reality of a given piece of information. The progress of science tells us to not expect to find an ultimate reality.

Krull wrote:

chrisw wrote:The fact that our bodies are prerequisites for experience does not imply that our knowledge of our bodies or the rest of the physical world is invalid. Where is the logical path from one idea to the other here?

On the contrary, it seems to me to represent a validation of our knowledge of the physical world that it can describe not only the external objects we observe but the working of our observation itself and even explain the cases where that observation goes wrong.

This is surely how we know when our explanations really engage with reality - they can explain even themselves. By paying attention to our observations as we interact with the world we develop a theory that even explains observation.

Not invalid knowledge- just 'perspectival' knowledge.

Observations are perspectival, knowledge needn't be. I can measure the distance from the Earth to the Moon in many different ways, from many different perspectives. But the answer is a non-perspectival fact. Of course facts aren't little pictures of the world that "resemble" reality (if they were they would have to be perspectival!) nor are scientific models or simulations. But facts can be correct, they can represent knowledge. They can explain.

If all you mean by explaining the working of observation is what it consists in, then we agree, but I'm guessing you take saying what the act of observation involves amounts to a full explanation of observation. The problem I think is saying what observation, or personhood, or embodiment consists in, i.e. microbiology, assumes these categories exist in themselves.

I don't have to believe the academic subject of microbiology exists in the same way that a microbe exists. Or do I? I don't care either way, to be honest.

We know people are made of physical stuff, but how come we percieve people, and not objects, in the first place?

I don't think we can precisely pin down what the object of a perception truly is like that. I'm not syaing that physical objects are what we really perceive and that this is proof of their reality. We can perceive the word in many different ways and at many different levels.

But physical descriptions seem to uniquely stand apart from other types of description in the following way: we believe that a physical duplicate of the world would be a duplicate of the world in all respects. Nothing would be missed out because we "only" copied its physical qualities. Once you have the physical facts everything else seems to come for free. So physical descriptions seem to have a comprehensiveness that is lacking from any other type of description. We have to be careful not to be too reductionist in how we sum that up or what conclusions we draw from it but all the same, it is not a fact we can ignore. Physics cannot be dismissed as just another way of describing the world.

Obviously, the way I've been arguing that the world we perceive is conditioned by the mind after all suggests that I myself think we're stuck in a mental world of our own with no access to the real world. I think that's only half true, my point is more that we observe a real world, but that this world in some sense can't be accounted for.

I think we can account for it perfectly. The onus is on those who think we have got it wrong to explain how we could be incorrect. Short of extreme sceptical hypotheses how is it possible we could be wrong?

Asking why we perceive it the way we do - seeing things as having intentionality, not to mention colour and sound qualities, etc - is like asking why there's something instead of nothing. Why does the world consist of these categories and not others?

Because the world really is that way. This is the only plausible answer to the fact that all our knowledge hangs together so well. Unless we are being very elaborately deceived.

Pulvinar wrote:Part of a full explanation certainly involves explaining how a brain works as viewed from the outside. From there one can correlate different experiences with their causes, which may include direct brain stimulation such as TMS or probes. And also see how experience physically changes the brain by direct measurement (when possible) to see where a given experience resides. Beyond this, a fictional view of what form the explanation should take will never be fulfilled. It requires tearing up that dead-end street.

Well, if you think all an explanation of consciousness needs to consist in is a correlation between brain states and experiences, you won't get any complaints from me. I am inclined to say it is an unsatisfying explanation, however.

Krull wrote:It's not simply a case of categorizing raw sense data - we don't experience raw data anyway most of the time, and even if we did, the experience of a sound as sound needs to be explained. It's the whole primary/secondary quality argument - we assume the real world is soundless, colourless etc, but we've got to get from that world to the world we percieve. But the world we percieve is the only world we really know about, hence why most philosophers don't defend primary/secondary qualities anymore. Primary qualities end up being beyond experience, like God.

An explanation of this starts with explaining how pattern recognition and associative memory work, how different forms of learning work, etc. You shouldn't expect to get a satisfactory answer without knowing the details.

These kinds of explanations amount to a description of what pattern recognition etc consists in, not what the world would be like if we didin't percieve it the way we do. Finding the necessary conditions for experience is one thing - thay's easy, we know it's the body - but it still leaves us with a world that's always 'for us'.

chrisw wrote:Observations are perspectival, knowledge needn't be. I can measure the distance from the Earth to the Moon in many different ways, from many different perspectives. But the answer is a non-perspectival fact. Of course facts aren't little pictures of the world that "resemble" reality (if they were they would have to be perspectival!) nor are scientific models or simulations. But facts can be correct, they can represent knowledge. They can explain.

Well, as you say further down it could all be a mass delusion. But the point is that intersubjective knowledge is still 'for us', no matter how useful it is. We never touch reality 'in itself', because subjectivity is always a precondition for knowing anything.

I'm not syaing that physical objects are what we really perceive and that this is proof of their reality. We can perceive the word in many different ways and at many different levels.

But physical descriptions seem to uniquely stand apart from other types of description in the following way: we believe that a physical duplicate of the world would be a duplicate of the world in all respects. Nothing would be missed out because we "only" copied its physical qualities. Once you have the physical facts everything else seems to come for free. So physical descriptions seem to have a comprehensiveness that is lacking from any other type of description. We have to be careful not to be too reductionist in how we sum that up or what conclusions we draw from it but all the same, it is not a fact we can ignore. Physics cannot be dismissed as just another way of describing the world.

I think in light of holistic understanding of subjectivity, where the mind is just the whole body, we're at a stage where physics no longer studies the whole physical world. Reductionism clearly misses out certain features we perceive to be real, things like intentionality. That doesn't make these things any less physical, it just means they're not captured by lower levels of description. In a way, it wouldn't matter what their underlying substrate was - which is why robots are plausible, unless we have massive philosophical convictions against them. Multiple realizabiliy means it doesn't matter what's going on behind the scenes in our internal organs, so long as the outcome is a functioning, embodied subject. Which is why physics is just another way of describing the world; reductionism might help us control things better, but not necessarily understand them.

Krull wrote:Asking why we perceive the world the way we do - seeing things as having intentionality, not to mention colour and sound qualities, etc - is like asking why there's something instead of nothing. Why does the world consist of these categories and not others?

Because the world really is that way. This is the only plausible answer to the fact that all our knowledge hangs together so well. Unless we are being very elaborately deceived.

Well, lots of materialistic theories do say we're being elaborately decieved, about the existence of folk psychology, free will, having a complete visual field etc. I don't expect you have much time for them, but it's clear that the reason philosophers and scientists are prepared to go to these lengths in denying the 'manifest image' is because they find the alternative baffling. The alternative being that we have no real evolutionary account for how higher level stuff emerges, in a way that makes it more than an interpretation on our part, like Sellars' "myth of Jones". We have no real reason for believing categories like 'person' (or subject, or whatever), 'intention', 'expression' and so on, actually carve nature at the joints. But this seems to be what you are assuming.

Krull wrote:

Pulvinar wrote:Part of a full explanation certainly involves explaining how a brain works as viewed from the outside. From there one can correlate different experiences with their causes, which may include direct brain stimulation such as TMS or probes. And also see how experience physically changes the brain by direct measurement (when possible) to see where a given experience resides. Beyond this, a fictional view of what form the explanation should take will never be fulfilled. It requires tearing up that dead-end street.

Well, if you think all an explanation of consciousness needs to consist in is a correlation between brain states and experiences, you won't get any complaints from me. I am inclined to say it is an unsatisfying explanation, however.

Except that you won't be able to know if the explanation is satisfactory until you experience these correlations. You don't know what all you don't know.

Krull wrote:It's not simply a case of categorizing raw sense data - we don't experience raw data anyway most of the time, and even if we did, the experience of a sound as sound needs to be explained. It's the whole primary/secondary quality argument - we assume the real world is soundless, colourless etc, but we've got to get from that world to the world we percieve. But the world we percieve is the only world we really know about, hence why most philosophers don't defend primary/secondary qualities anymore. Primary qualities end up being beyond experience, like God.

An explanation of this starts with explaining how pattern recognition and associative memory work, how different forms of learning work, etc. You shouldn't expect to get a satisfactory answer without knowing the details.

These kinds of explanations amount to a description of what pattern recognition etc consists in, not what the world would be like if we didin't percieve it the way we do. Finding the necessary conditions for experience is one thing - thay's easy, we know it's the body - but it still leaves us with a world that's always 'for us'.

I don't see what you're getting at. We're the sum of the experience we've been able to experience. If we had a different set of sensors (different types, or some other body) we'd have recorded a different set of sensory experiences, and then that would be the world the brain knows, and the position of 'me' within that world it knows.

Krull wrote:Well, as you say further down it could all be a mass delusion. But the point is that intersubjective knowledge is still 'for us', no matter how useful it is. We never touch reality 'in itself', because subjectivity is always a precondition for knowing anything.

I don't get what you mean by "reality in itself".

You are still doing the Cartesian thing of starting from subjective experiences and trying to deduce an external world. Instead we should start with the world. For the embodied approach to cognition the nature of the physical world is never in doubt. We can't explain cognition by a precise analysis of our (physical) bodies and senses and their environment and then arrive at conclusions that cast doubt on our understanding of the physical world. The theory would then be self-refuting.

But it isn't self-refuting, it's self-supporting, in a Quinian, holistic sort of way.

I think in light of holistic understanding of subjectivity, where the mind is just the whole body, we're at a stage where physics no longer studies the whole physical world. Reductionism clearly misses out certain features we perceive to be real, things like intentionality. That doesn't make these things any less physical, it just means they're not captured by lower levels of description. In a way, it wouldn't matter what their underlying substrate was - which is why robots are plausible, unless we have massive philosophical convictions against them. Multiple realizabiliy means it doesn't matter what's going on behind the scenes in our internal organs, so long as the outcome is a functioning, embodied subject. Which is why physics is just another way of describing the world; reductionism might help us control things better, but not necessarily understand them.

That doesn't make physics just another way of describing the world. Everything supervenes on the micro-physical facts. That makes physics fundamental. Physics doesn't directly explain everything but it underpins everything. It is the answer to questions about what reality really, ultimately is. Though perhaps such questions aren't very important.

Well, lots of materialistic theories do say we're being elaborately decieved, about the existence of folk psychology, free will, having a complete visual field etc.

I don't see any deception there. Things aren't always what they seem but this shouldn't make us retreat into scepticism. The fact we can make a distinction between "are" and "seems" shows that we are equiped to figure out such stuff. Cartesian scepticism requires the world to actively resist our attempts to understand it (e.g. evil demons or scientists). Our efforts to understand fail because they only succeed in discovering a fake world that has been specially constructed to deceive us. I think it's narcisistic to assume that the universe is specially arranged to trick us. It's too much of an un-Copernican idea for me to take seriously.

I don't expect you have much time for them, but it's clear that the reason philosophers and scientists are prepared to go to these lengths in denying the 'manifest image' is because they find the alternative baffling. The alternative being that we have no real evolutionary account for how higher level stuff emerges, in a way that makes it more than an interpretation on our part, like Sellars' "myth of Jones". We have no real reason for believing categories like 'person' (or subject, or whatever), 'intention', 'expression' and so on, actually carve nature at the joints. But this seems to be what you are assuming.

I just can't see what the problem is here. What exactly are you saying is unexplained? How emergence works?

chrisw wrote:You are still doing the Cartesian thing of starting from subjective experiences and trying to deduce an external world. Instead we should start with the world. For the embodied approach to cognition the nature of the physical world is never in doubt. We can't explain cognition by a precise analysis of our (physical) bodies and senses and their environment and then arrive at conclusions that cast doubt on our understanding of the physical world. The theory would then be self-refuting.

Post-Kantian philosophy did just that, and it ended up concluding that the world and mind are inseparable. Berkeley has never been refuted - the world is still contained in the mind - phenomenologists like Heidegger simply added that the opposite is also true, that the mind is in the world. At which point the terms inside/outside no longer make sense, but the fact remains that it is always going to be a world 'for us', and from this vantage point the emergence in time of the 'for us' is incomprehensible. We cannot conceive of a time before consciousness without making it into a time for consciousness, so we end up presupposing what we wanted to explain.

I just can't see what the problem is here. What exactly are you saying is unexplained? How emergence works?

I was under the impression you thought it didn't need explaining. I asked you why we percieve certain things as exhibiting intentionality, or posessing the kinds of properties people label qualia, and you replied that that's just the way the world is. But this suggests you take the 'manifest image' at face value. Why do you think people are prepared to go to such lengths to deny that this is the case - that the appearance of these qualities is a grand illusion? The whole point of attacks on folk psychology, or Dennett's hamfisted attempts at "Quineing qualia" is that the way things seem to be is compatible with them being completely different. All the evidence I've seen from philosophy of embodiment and the phenomenology which inspired it points to a rejection of those ideas for being hangovers from Descartes. Brain processes conspiring to create folk psychological 'fact' are just the new evil demon.

For the embodied approach to cognition the nature of the physical world is never in doubt. We can't explain cognition by a precise analysis of our (physical) bodies and senses and their environment and then arrive at conclusions that cast doubt on our understanding of the physical world. The theory would then be self-refuting.

It isn't clear to me what you're saying here. What's all this about:

I don't get what you mean by "reality in itself".
...
Physics doesn't directly explain everything but it underpins everything. It is the answer to questions about what reality really, ultimately is.

Metaphysics is bullshit, "reality" is too vague to designate anything meaningful in light of this. In any case, I maintain that the multiple realizability of emergent properties means that no level of description is fundamental. Obviously you need some kind of physics underlying events, but there's no reason to suppose things need to work like our universe at the level of particles or even cells in order for beings like us to exist. Events at that scale are more like the display on a monitor screen - it can be LCD, CRT or anything even stranger and still show the same image.

Pulvinar wrote:Except that you won't be able to know if the explanation is satisfactory until you experience these correlations. You don't know what all you don't know.

I don't know what you mean here. You seem to be saying we don't know if a brain state is conscious or not unless we're in that state, which implies we can't 'decode' brain states back into experiences unless we're already familiar with the way they feel. And I'd be inclined to agree.

We're the sum of the experience we've been able to experience. If we had a different set of sensors (different types, or some other body) we'd have recorded a different set of sensory experiences, and then that would be the world the brain knows, and the position of 'me' within that world it knows.

And it would be a very different world. Potentially so different, we might not even use the same maths to describe it.

Krull wrote:

We're the sum of the experience we've been able to experience. If we had a different set of sensors (different types, or some other body) we'd have recorded a different set of sensory experiences, and then that would be the world the brain knows, and the position of 'me' within that world it knows.

And it would be a very different world. Potentially so different, we might not even use the same maths to describe it.

Would it be a different world?

I experience the same world with all my different senses. I can see the edge of the table, feel my finger run along the edge of the table, hear my finger run along the edge of the table.

People sometimes say that we can't imagine what it must be like to be a bat, using sound to detect objects, but I can hear a car going along the road outside, the bat is just a more accurate and precise version of that.

Again people talk about an insect with faceted eyes seeing a faceted world, but that's a mistake isn't it?

It's true that the world only appears to us as it does because of the senses we have, but it's also true that our senses are the way they are because of the nature of phenomena in the world.

The way we experience the world is also massively affected by our intelligence, our ability to create a diversity of objects which have practical and symbolic meaning for us.

If we take that out of the picture and just think about simpler animals, I don't think the world of the bat is going to be all that different to that of the rat.

Krull wrote:

chrisw wrote:You are still doing the Cartesian thing of starting from subjective experiences and trying to deduce an external world. Instead we should start with the world. For the embodied approach to cognition the nature of the physical world is never in doubt. We can't explain cognition by a precise analysis of our (physical) bodies and senses and their environment and then arrive at conclusions that cast doubt on our understanding of the physical world. The theory would then be self-refuting.

Post-Kantian philosophy did just that, and it ended up concluding that the world and mind are inseparable. Berkeley has never been refuted - the world is still contained in the mind - phenomenologists like Heidegger simply added that the opposite is also true, that the mind is in the world.

They can't both be true.

I think it's clear that Berkeley was wrong (there are so many reasons) . No one even bothers to argue this any more because he has no supporters.

That leaves mind supervening on matter (and not vice versa). This makes sense. The world makes sense viewed in this way.

At which point the terms inside/outside no longer make sense, but the fact remains that it is always going to be a world 'for us'

Not really because this world wouldn't be any different even if we were different. It would superficially seem different if we had different senses but ultimately we would discover the same world because science allows us to transcend the limitations of our particular biological senses, to augment our senses with instruments of any design we choose. We would not expect aliens to discover different laws of physics to us however different their biology.

and from this vantage point the emergence in time of the 'for us' is incomprehensible. We cannot conceive of a time before consciousness without making it into a time for consciousness, so we end up presupposing what we wanted to explain.

That makes no sense. So what if my ability to imagine a time before consciousness requires that I (now) have consciousness? That is not a paradox.

I just can't see what the problem is here. What exactly are you saying is unexplained? How emergence works?

I was under the impression you thought it didn't need explaining. I asked you why we percieve certain things as exhibiting intentionality, or posessing the kinds of properties people label qualia, and you replied that that's just the way the world is. But this suggests you take the 'manifest image' at face value. Why do you think people are prepared to go to such lengths to deny that this is the case - that the appearance of these qualities is a grand illusion? The whole point of attacks on folk psychology, or Dennett's hamfisted attempts at "Quineing qualia" is that the way things seem to be is compatible with them being completely different. All the evidence I've seen from philosophy of embodiment and the phenomenology which inspired it points to a rejection of those ideas for being hangovers from Descartes. Brain processes conspiring to create folk psychological 'fact' are just the new evil demon.

I'm not claiming everything is as it seems. But you are going to the opposite extreme in claiming that some things aren't merely not yet fully explained, requiring further investigation, but are philosophically problematic. I was trying to understand where you thought the problem was. I'm still none the wiser. For example, why is perception (or projection) of intentionality incompatible with a physicalist philosophy?

It isn't clear to me what you're saying here. What's all this about:

I don't get what you mean by "reality in itself".
...
Physics doesn't directly explain everything but it underpins everything. It is the answer to questions about what reality really, ultimately is.

Metaphysics is bullshit, "reality" is too vague to designate anything meaningful in light of this.

Then why did you bring up the notion of "reality in itself"?

In any case, I maintain that the multiple realizability of emergent properties means that no level of description is fundamental. Obviously you need some kind of physics underlying events...

Well that's the sense in which it is fundamental!

...but there's no reason to suppose things need to work like our universe at the level of particles or even cells in order for beings like us to exist.

Then I'm not sure what "beings like us" could even mean.

Events at that scale are more like the display on a monitor screen - it can be LCD, CRT or anything even stranger and still show the same image.

If there is one thing supporters of embodied approaches should be able to agree on it is that this is wrong! Physical bodies and environments matter. We are more than patterns or structures, more than abstractions. That's why we have issues with computationalism.

Krull wrote:At which point the terms inside/outside no longer make sense, but the fact remains that it is always going to be a world 'for us'.
[a world 'for aliens/animals'] would be a very different world. Potentially so different, we might not even use the same maths to describe it.

chrisw wrote:Not really because this world wouldn't be any different even if we were different. It would superficially seem different if we had different senses but ultimately we would discover the same world because science allows us to transcend the limitations of our particular biological senses, to augment our senses with instruments of any design we choose. We would not expect aliens to discover different laws of physics to us however different their biology.

wezentrommel wrote:It's true that the world only appears to us as it does because of the senses we have, but it's also true that our senses are the way they are because of the nature of phenomena in the world.

The way we experience the world is also massively affected by our intelligence, our ability to create a diversity of objects which have practical and symbolic meaning for us.

If we take that out of the picture and just think about simpler animals, I don't think the world of the bat is going to be all that different to that of the rat.

What about senses we don't share with animals, like electroreception? Is there a limit to the kinds of possible sensory organs used to perceive things? Anyway, I doubt we have any real way of distinguishing thought from perception, and even if we could, the fact that our scientific theories depend on thought suggests a different mode of thinking could lead to different theories about the world. If the way we think is as dependent on our bodies as it seems to be, we have no reason to think we could even communicate with another intelligent species. "If lions could talk, we would be unable to understand them".

chrisw wrote:
I think it's clear that Berkeley was wrong (there are so many reasons) . No one even bothers to argue this any more because he has no supporters.

That leaves mind supervening on matter (and not vice versa). This makes sense. The world makes sense viewed in this way.

Berkeley's metaphysics was just a plug to fill the holes in his theory. Kant did a much better job defending idealism and phenomenology ended up close to direct realism. But none of these philosophies have refuted the claim that the world as it is for human subjects is the only world we can know. Perhaps saying the mind is both container of the world and contained in it is misleading; it's more that the mind and world are coexistent. That's why materialism is misleading, because it assumes the view of a subject from the outside is equivalent to a view from nowhere, and that we can work inwards from the outside world to their subjective experiences. But we don't find experiences, unless you mean simply causal correspondence with the world. For example, there's a sound entering my ear and ultimately causing me to write about it now. The sound wave didn't sound like anything until it entered my ear, and we end up finding it still doesn't sound like anything when it gets past my ear. Of course, we never deal with sound waves that don't sound like anything anyway. But that's just the other side of the same coin; we want to know how motion in the air comes to sound like anything.

At this point it looks like I'm defending something like Chalmers' zombie hypothesis, since when we observe people's biology it's "matter in motion" (pl0bs, 2010) and nothing else, all the way into the brain. There's no finish line where consciousness happens, etc. But it's not as if we have trouble recognising each other as subjects. The problem is that it's just a brute fact that that's the way things appear, so from the point of view of common sense there's no question that we're physical (else we wouldn't be able to see each other), yet there isn't an answer as to why that is.

I'm not claiming everything is as it seems. But you are going to the opposite extreme in claiming that some things aren't merely not yet fully explained, requiring further investigation, but are philosophically problematic. I was trying to understand where you thought the problem was. I'm still none the wiser. For example, why is perception (or projection) of intentionality incompatible with a physicalist philosophy?

There's a big difference between perception and projection. The reason phenomenologists call it perception is that we don't deal with a world that isn't already loaded with meaning. We can view it as not having those properties - we can assume folk psychology is a mistaken interpretation - but taking that viewpoint never gets us back to the world we experience, in the same way assuming sound waves are silent never gets us back to the point where they start sounding like something. You end up in a situation where the mind 'interprets itself' into existence just as it postulates the existence of others. But folk psychology isn't a postulate, we really do see embodied subjects and we don't do so on the basis of a massive, subconscious conspiracy on behalf of the brain to make things appear that way. At least, that kind of Cartesianism never got us anywhere in the past, so we might as well assume things are as they seem.

Physical bodies and environments matter. We are more than patterns or structures, more than abstractions. That's why we have issues with computationalism.

Sure we need bodies, but it can't matter that much what kind of body - a good prosthetic limb can do the job of the original nowadays to the point that amputees don't usually notice the difference, except when they take it off at night. A convincing robot is just a prosthetic body in its entirety. A robot that could do anything we can do - well, whatever it takes to be considered a person - would be like displaying the same image on a new monitor. That's why I don't consider physics to be all that essential.

As for the consciousness problem:

wezentrommel wrote:I experience the same world with all my different senses. I can see the edge of the table, feel my finger run along the edge of the table, hear my finger run along the edge of the table.

It’s true that viewing the body holistically – as a single subject – solves these kinds of problems, alongside the mind-body problem of course. There is no problem of how sense experiences add up to a viewpoint on the world, since they form part of that viewpoint itself. We are left with a philosophy whose only problem is the “is” in, “the mind is the body”. “Being” words don’t yield themselves to philosophical analysis very easily. If explaining this use of the word “is”, is what is required to solve the hard problem, I’m doubtful it can be done.

Psst! Is the Elephant gone?

...cuz I thought we Matties could discuss a few things about anthropomorphism and naturalism while he's not listening.

Like what?

Luis Dias wrote:Like what?

Woo.

Seems to me that we can have two possible kinds of woo. The one that all CosmoCons seem intent on looking for is the one where our minds and our type of being are somehow important in the grinding of cosmic wheels.

One principle seems to be our being some pinnacle in an evolution that is directional and therefore capable of pinnacles.

This of course immediately implies intent. "waz it all about Man?" Answer. Man.

The second kind is the strange kind. Something we can't fathom at all or would have no access to in an empirically closed system. But there could be some vestigial evidence laying around. Penrose in his saner incarnation as a physicist talks about this.

I'm not committed to calling that kind woo. It's more like common sense.

Anyway the show stopper with me all of my life is that I abhor anthropocentric ideas. The showstopper with UE and his ilk is ideas of a material universe with no such centrism. On the surface the two opposing ideas seem like equally weighted electables.

These two incompatible ideas divide us deeply.

UE in the thread on constructive empiricism and now this one I think is trying to claim that these are equally weighted ideas...

...except for one thing. Chalmers/Block 'what it feels like to be cow'. In this area he is claiming victory. If this one thing is proven, this mind woo, then it opens the gates of hell for all this anthropic woo to come forth. This is his scale tipping bit of thinking.

I maintain that we have a scale tipper also. I never seem to get around to explaining it to my own satisfaction. I'll call it Basis of Knowledge for now and try and get to it later.

So it's all about self-importance?

Well Hitchens had it right, when he accused religion to nurture both our solipsism (self-importance) and our masochism (we aren't worth it mylord! Punish me! Punish me!).

We have both the tendency to think it's all about us, and the tendency to be slaves of that which is all about... even if that means it's conflicting...

Strange psycho soup.

Unbelievable. I just read a paper on the "hard Problem" by Chalmers. And as it turns out I had personally and quite unwittingly asked Daniel Denett about the 'hard problem' way back in 2005. 2005 was my freshman year as an international student, i was taking an interdisciplinary class on Darwinian philosophy. We were using Dennet book, darwin's dangerous idea.

The philosophy department had decided to bring denett to campus for a lecture. we were required to go there an were told that we would get extra credit for asking questions. The question I was able to ask was " from a purely evolutionary perspective isn't it only enough that we are able to perform the necessary actions required for our survival, why do we have to be conscious of these actions". I remember that he misunderstood my question as being what is consciousness, so he gave an answer about the functional aspects of consciousness. I remember talking about this the next day in class, but the details are hazy.