I wanted to take a short break before I answered. I'll get back to those questions later. — Astorre

Of course, no hurry.

For Harman, the hammer is revealed in its use—we see only one aspect. I propose to refine this: "hammerness" as a property is revealed in an act of participation, an act of encounter, and depends on the participants in the interaction — Astorre

This is a welcome improvement on Harman, as I understand him. (I'm still balking at "hammerness as a property," but that's secondary.). Your version allows the observer to bring whatever concepts and agenda they may have to the encounter. As you say, it's not a one-dimensional "hammer or nothing" situation. Among other virtues, it gives us a way of understanding how an ordinary object like a hammer can become an art object. (See the "What Is a Painting?" thread.)

One question I would raise: This schema is Kantian in structure -- "the subject doesn't create properties; it co-participates in their actualization." How would you differentiate "modality" from "noumenon"? Can Kantian phenomena be understood as a series of co-created properties?

(Whatever translator you're using is doing a great job.)

but rather an affordance for perception such that people perceive it differently. — Moliere

Yes, and as @Astorre has proposed, the affordance (or "mode", in their terminology) provides a realist-friendly link with the external world.

That said, we probably need to do some work on "affordance" or "mode" to make sure we're not just employing placeholders.

Fair enough. I wonder if the so-called human sciences might offer some options. Some versions of psychology, for instance, offer themselves as hard explanatory science, yet don't limit their explanations to physical causes.

Yes, because my attempt to treat the set and the property as one and the same object seems to have failed.
— litewave

But I hope you see that your intuition - that having the property of being red and being a member of the set of red things say much the same thing - remains valid?
. . .
I think the intuition in the OP is quite right — Banno

Yes, this is what I was getting at, or trying to, when I said:

"There's an intuitive rightness to what you're proposing -- that our language for talking about something like "red" can be simplified through analysis and discovered to be largely redundant -- but is "property" the right flag under which to fly this idea?"

And I join @Moliere in appreciating the fact that you can pull back from your original position and freely acknowledge its defects. Not many can do that. Look how much we've all learned as a result!

And here's a 60s blast: remember "Douglas Traherne Harding," by the Incredible String Band?

Ever run across Douglas Harding 'On Having no Head'? — Wayfarer

Yes! Haven't thought about it in years. And I'm sure you're right that "being in the head" is learned (with some help from the proximity of the sense organs of sight, sound, and smell).

@Janus @Ludwig V I find that fascinating because, as y'all have pointed out, it seems irresistible to me to locate my self or "I" within my head. Or perhaps a better way to say it is: I can't help locating the part of consciousness which thinks, perceives, and imagines as being within my head; but that leaves open the possibility that spirit or soul should be identified with breath, heart, or guts. So a deeper or more cosmic "I" is not necessarily conceived as mental.

But then there's the Third Eye, which opens in . . . the head.

John Deely is a better place to start even if I think there are some flaws in his treatment. His "Dialogue With a Realist . . . " — Count Timothy von Icarus

Getting back to this . . . Is this the piece you're recommending?

Didn't Aristotle say that the mind resided in the heart?

Redness, then, is not inside the apple. It is born from the interplay of all three participants. This makes the property contingent: for a different observer (say, someone with color blindness), or under different lighting conditions, redness may not manifest at all. — Astorre

I like your approach, which has the virtue of preserving realism (the mode is an actual internal structure of the apple) while recognizing that the property is contingent on the other factors you name.

On this view, does the property happen in a specifiable location? We require apple, light, and observer in order for the redness to manifest itself; do you want to say that this happens in or to the observer?

That makes sense to me, but it seems like a criteria for "who gets a hearing" not which positions are accepted. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree. I took it as read that weren't trying to answer the question of what is just, but set up the parameters for how to discuss it. My own view is that the question doesn't admit of a definitive answer; you perhaps see it differently; but on either view, "Who is closer to the truth?" can only come into play once we have "entered the room" of this particular practice, or communicative action. (I use Habermas' term not to be pedantic, but because I like the way it emphasizes how thinking about something is a process that happens among people, it is a doing. When we think, we are always part of a community, otherwise our concepts would be meaningless.)

I'm still trying to fit all this into @litewave's very interesting conception. If the "set of all just things" is indeterminate, and even contains contradictory elements, it needs another name. "Set of all things called just" won't do; this set is more discriminating than that. What we can say is that the uncertainty about the property of being just is reflected in the uncertainty about what to call the set, so that may be a point in litewave's favor.

In the end, I think we're likely going to abandon the whole "property" notion for justice, and conclude that, even if some things are properties, "being just" isn't one of them.

I agree. A key problem is how we know that a subjective experience is being had in the first place. We posit such experiences for everything from other people, to animals, to (for some optimists) AI . . . What version of science can help us with this?

My reply above was a groaner, wasn't it. — litewave

I admit, I did some head-scratching! :smile:

However, I think that these two properties are not really different; they are one and the same property, just described differently. — litewave

This is similar to your response about being equilateral and being equiangular. In the case of triangles, I was ready to allow the possibility, due to the logical equivalence. I'm less sanguine about saying that the difference between "being X" and "being a member of set X" is one of terminology. (What is the equivalence between a color and an individual in a set?). Your subsequent exchange with @frank brings out some of the problems. (I realize it's ongoing, too, and likely to cross posts with this, so sorry for any confusion.)

I can't help but feel that the term "property" is responsible for some of this. @Banno has raised some important issues here. There's an intuitive rightness to what you're proposing -- that our language for talking about something like "red" can be simplified through analysis and discovered to be largely redundant -- but is "property" the right flag under which to fly this idea? I don't know, and can only say that I'm uneasy about properties in general, and wish I had something clearer to suggest. I also wonder -- and again, there are folks on TPF who know much more about this than I do -- if the issue can be described more fully in Logicalese, which might give us a more precise handle. Volunteers, anyone?

I agree with Chalmers that we'll need to reassess our concept of "3rd person objectivity" in order to make progress with the Hard Problem.
— J
Does Chalmers say how this can be accomplished; what it means 'to reassess our concept of "3rd person objectivity"'? — Patterner

I'm not sure. The problem seems to hinge on whether we can speak objectively about experiences that can only be had subjectively. A lot of traditional science would rule this out.

If you meant [the study of life] as a way to begin Chalmers' reassessment, I would say life is being studied extensively, and has been for some time. I take it you mean in a deferent way? Or with a different focus? — Patterner

Not so much. More that we ought to say, "If we can do that with the phenomenon of life -- which is also intensively subjective -- why not with consciousness?"

My point is rather that there seems to me be some significant daylight (sometimes a great deal) between "who is currently said to be wise (in our preferred context presumably)" and who might actually be wise. It does not seem to me that the two must coincide, or even that they must inexorably progress towards coinciding. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right. None of this is cut and dried. What Habermas calls "communicative action" is never a simple process, if engaged in good faith.

So then the standard would really be "what philosophers of repute" take seriously. But I wonder if this really works well for all contexts. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I can imagine some contexts in which it wouldn't. But my version of "repute" doesn't have to mean "acclaimed by colleagues." I'm struggling to find a term that describes people who "know the subject," as I said earlier. Perhaps there isn't a single term for that. Or is it "expert"? But then I know quite a few subjects while not considering myself an expert. Maybe it's more like, "If you can read an article in a contemporary phil journal, understand the discussion, have read many or most of the references, and are familiar with the issues that have arisen about the position being espoused, then you deserve a respectful hearing in reply." But even that admits of exceptions, of course.

a standard based on the opinions of those with current repute seems to rule out, by definition, any radical critique until that radical critique has already been accepted by those of repute. — Count Timothy von Icarus

A radical critique need not be accepted in order to gain a hearing. The acceptance involved is "a seat at the table," as described above, not agreement with the critique.

If nonsense is limited to statements on a level of "justice is a fish," then it seems to keep out very little though, right? But "nonsense" was originally the criteria for what deserves to be taken seriously, no? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think we both fell into using "nonsense" without being clear what we meant. I agree that a position can be safely ignored even if it isn't literally nonsense. How do we learn to discriminate? By engaging in the practice with others and watching how they do it, and why.

I can see the confusion in context. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Good, I wouldn't want you to think I was deliberately blowing smoke. My position is that "knowledge of" doesn't have to start with a lexical identification, so we should resist that. I thought you were placing untoward emphasis on a "definition first" approach, but as you say, the issue raised in the OP is difficult.

I don't think the difference substantial. Again, after Davidson, I'd suggest that we have overwhelmingly agreement as to what things are just and what are not, developed over time and use, but that we focus on our differences because they are more interesting — Banno

I wish that were true! For me, the question of what sort of economic system can be considered just is the great ethical question of our time. I don't find any agreement about this within philosophy or outside it. Is it just that some people are born in poverty, others in wealth? Is property ownership just? Even such simple questions have no agreed-upon answers, because we haven't decided whether economic justice is a real concept, and if so, where it belongs in liberal democracies. But I go astray . . .

Really? In those words?

Have you read the New Athiests? . . .et al — Count Timothy von Icarus

I haven't read the New Atheists because I wasn't aware they were taken seriously as philosophers. Nietzsche and Russell, sure, but my question stands: Terms like "nonsense" and "sophistry" evidence more than disagreement; they in effect repudiate the user's qualifications to speak at all. Do you find this in the writers you mention? Do you think it characterizes what good philosophers do?

You think "might makes right" is nonsense but not Thrasymachus' claim that justice is "whatever is to the advantage of the stronger?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

But that's just it -- I don't think it's nonsense. It's a position that needs refutation, unlike the position that justice is a fish. My question was, Why is Plato willing to give us the conversation between Thras. and Socrates, but not to bring in some rando who thinks justice is a fish? And my answer would be, Because although we (and Socrates) are ignorant of the ultimate nature of justice, we nonetheless know quite a bit about it, enough to know what counts as a good question.

But then why do traditions that put forth nonsense not recognize this then [an innate knowledge of what is nonsense]? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Are there really philosophical traditions of nonsense? Which ones do you have in mind? And no, there's nothing innate about being able to tell nonsense from insightful discourse. We learn it by joining the conversation. It's the "building the boat on the ocean" idea. We aren't handed a set of rules. We learn what the conversation is about, and what questions respected predecessors and colleagues are pursuing and think worthwhile. I suppose one could step back and ask, "But how do I know all of this isn't nonsense?" It depends how literally one means "nonsense," I think -- whether it's shorthand for "views I don't find defensible." But I don't want to overcomplicate this.

Who is "we?" That particular take has had a great resurgence on far-right circles that have a good deal of sway these days. I imagine that Bronze Age Pervert has sold a good deal more copies than any academic philosopher in the past decade. — Count Timothy von Icarus

(I like that epithet!)

I have no idea what sort of philosophy the far-right circles may be espousing. By "we," I meant philosophers of repute, those who know the history, the questions, and the difficulties.

That's how intellectual investigations operate, over time. Less plausible, less defensible positions are weeded out, and newer, stronger possibilities are broached. And the discussion goes on.

Is this something like a "law of history," inexorable in the long term? — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's a good question, and perhaps highlights something unique about philosophy. Yes, I believe there is philosophical progress, but it has to do with clarifying questions, not producing definitive answers. I wouldn't say there's anything lawlike about it; it just seems to describe (one version of) the history of philosophy. I think we're better able to discuss ontology than Aristotle's contemporaries were, but that doesn't take away anything from his brilliance at showing how the questions might be laid out.

J's usual straw man to the effect that if one mentions knowledge of the relevant subject (i.e., justice, health) as the measure of expertise or wisdom, one must necessarily be appealing to a "Great Philosophical Definition in the Sky." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I feel bad that this could be seen as a straw man, as it suggests I didn't give you a generous enough reading. I truly believed you were focused on definitions rather than knowledge, and claiming that without a definition of, say, the good, we wouldn't know how to recognize good things. My apologies if that led me to construct arguments that weren't to the point. Perhaps you could say more about how the quest for a definition of a concept relates to what we can know about it?

Indeed, agreeing that the proffered definitions of justice are inadequate presupposes agreement concerning what is just and what isn't. — Banno

I would put it differently. We (and the Greeks) already know quite a bit about justice, and quite a bit about why drawing a line under the subject is difficult, and quite a bit about the history (and conundrums) of the question. We don't have agreement on what is just; what we do have is agreement on what will count as sensible contributions to the question, "What is justice?" That is ample for keeping the conversation nonsense-free, and for refuting inadequate definitions.

It's all very "building your boat on the ocean," isn't it? And yet we manage not to drown.

This is red herring, like the "definition of justice in the Great Dictionary of Philosophical Terms." I said "knowledge of health" (or "knowledge of justice") not "the definition." Do advances in medicine and the development of medical skill not involve knowledge of health and disease? — Count Timothy von Icarus

OK, fair enough, as long as "knowledge of X" can be acquired without necessarily being able to define X.

There are, however, professional philosophers or scientists who publish in philosophy who make claims and counter claims about how each other's traditions are nonsense and sophistry — Count Timothy von Icarus

Really? In those words? I'd say that was comparatively rare. Good philosophers tend to be much more interested in understanding and, sometimes, refutation, than in name-calling. Is there some publication or passage you have in mind?

Why not? Why doesn't "anything go"? Why doesn't aporia lead to intellectual anarchy? See the Republic.

Which part exactly? — Count Timothy von Icarus

No one in the Republic suggests that "Justice is really a fish." Why not, if they don't know what justice is? Why doesn't their ignorance open the door to nonsense?

Positions like "might makes right" were popular enough to warrant in depth responses from figures like Hegel (when he was already famous). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, and look what happened: We no longer consider such a position viable. That's how intellectual investigations operate, over time. Less plausible, less defensible positions are weeded out, and newer, stronger possibilities are broached. And the discussion goes on.

Even the extravagant set that Moliere has mentioned above is something in addition to the pebble and the sentence, and this something is a property that the pebble and the sentence share. It is an unimportant property for which we have no word, and being in that set means having that property. — litewave

This is interesting but confusing. Is "Being in that set means having that property" different from "'Being in that set' is a property of the pebble"? I thought we didn't want set membership to count as a property.

For me, "snake oil" is another way of talking about "nonsense" or "anything goes," so my response is the same. There are reasons why snake oil isn't taken seriously as a nostrum -- reasons that have little to do with knowing how to define health -- and likewise, whatever the equivalent of "justice snake oil" would be, doesn't get a hearing in serious conversations about justice. Why not? Why doesn't "anything go"? Why doesn't aporia lead to intellectual anarchy? See the Republic.

All I can do is appeal again to our actual practice. The fact that we may be puzzled about key aspects of a subject doesn't open the door to any discourse whatsoever. Can you think of a discipline in which that actually occurs? Rather, certain perennial, plausible positions are questioned and refined. By what standards? That's what we talk about, along with the positions!

litewave's response was that, when we have different sets, we have different properties (i.e., different justices, plural); however I think one could retain the notion of a property as a set without necessarily having to be committed to this clarification. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. I don't see this as a defeater to the OP's thesis.

Isn't it possible that people might consider properties all sorts of ridiculous ways? I don't see a mechanism here for dismissing Tom's opinion on the grounds that it is "nonsense" when we have already opened things up to every possible set configuration. Yet this would seem to make "everything to be everything else."

I don't think the "opinion based flexibility" works with the modal expansion. And something like "all possible opinions that aren't 'nonsense,'" seems to ignore that there are many possible opinions about what constitutes "nonsense." This is made more acute by the modal expansion, but I would say it applies just as well for what you've said, since there is the question: "who decides what is nonsense?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

These are two somewhat different objections, I think. To the first, we can't call the ascription of a property "ridiculous" but also accept the OP's thesis. So if I understand you, you want to stick with the ridiculousness and abandon the thesis. I would lean that way too (though there are difficult logical issues involved in @litewave's idea that I'm still pondering). But the other option is to stick with the thesis and deny that any set is ridiculous. This is in the spirit of litewave's reply to me, above:

Even the extravagant set that Moliere has mentioned above is something in addition to the pebble and the sentence, and this something is a property that the pebble and the sentence share. It is an unimportant property for which we have no word, and being in that set means having that property. — litewave

I have problems with this, but I'll save them for a direct reply to litewave. In any case, that's a comment on your first, "ridiculous property via modal expansion" objection. The second objection concerns the familiar question about what entitles us to call one opinion nonsense and another insightful, if we lack a definition of the terms involved. I would appeal to our practice. Reading Locke or Hobbes or Rawls, we don't compare what they're saying to a previous definition of justice upon which we agree. Rather, we decide they deserve a hearing based on their familiarity with, and competence with, the questions about justice, including the previous conversations that have occurred in the various traditions. They "know the subject," we say -- and this is what Nonsensical Tom probably lacks.

So the answer to the question, "Who decides what is nonsense?" is not "The person who looks up the definition of justice in the Great Dictionary of Philosophical Terms," but instead, "The group of people who are competent, by virtue of study and practice, to interpret the question of what justice is, and understand how it connects with other key philosophical issues."

On this account, we don't have many different claims about what justice is, but many different justices. It's a positive metaphysical claim to say that justice just is the set of things each individual considers to be just. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If Tom, Rawls, et al. each make a claim about what justice is, and we don't think any of them can be supported, what is the situation? Do we say, "Each of these people has a different justice. So for them, justice just is what they consider just." No, we say, "None of these people has been able to tell us what justice is. I don't know either, but I don't have to know in order to understand why the proposed definitions are unsatisfactory." This is Socrates' position, more or less. This, I think, rules out the "positive metaphysical claim"; the question is whether @litewave's thesis can also rule it out.

If there is such a thing, we're sure having a difficult time finding it. Partly because it is undetectable by our senses and technology. Do you have any suggestions? — Patterner

We are indeed having a difficult time, but our quick successes with various aspects of the Easy Problem lead me to be optimistic. It's like nibbling around the edges of something, discerning it by creating its negative outline. More practically, I agree with Chalmers that we'll need to reassess our concept of "3rd person objectivity" in order to make progress with the Hard Problem. Dennett, who I find mostly off-track about this stuff, at least had the idea of "heterophenomenology," which is an attempt to fill this need.

Maybe the model here ought to be the study of life in biology and chemistry. I'm not up-to-date on the science of life, but it seems that investigators have found a way to discern and specify the object of their study without requiring that they first comprehend some incommunicable experience of "being alive."

All that said, I'll repeat what I said to @Wayfarer, above: We know so little about the subject of consciousness that my confidence in anything I'm suggesting here isn't high.

But doesn't this mean that there would be many different versions of the same property? So there would really be "justice(Tom), justice(Greg), justice(Sandra), etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. I know you probably don't care for that conclusion, but I think it's exactly what happens. There are indeed different construals and attempts at definition for an abstraction like "justice." But, to anticipate your objection, that doesn't mean that anything goes, that some nonsense from Tom deserves to be taken as seriously as "justice(Rawls)." The fact that we cannot define something doesn't mean we can't know anything about it, or can't tell a promising clarification or interpretation from one that isn't. Look at the Republic. Justice never gets a satisfactory definition, but it would be hard to read the book carefully and not believe you've learned something about the subject.

I supose that ↪this answers your question? — Banno

Yes, you and @litewave both crossed posts with me. But I still have questions, above, about the identification of property with set, for litewave to consider.

Now I do not think that there is general answer to the question of why we group some things together. — Banno

Right. The "bleen people" group as they do (choosing bizarre intersections of "green" and "blue"), and while they are doing something we find impractical and hard to parse, they may have their reasons.

If even in quantum physics the notion of an observer-independent reality is problematic, then this holds all the more for consciousness — which is even less tractable to purely objective analysis. — Wayfarer

Well, yes, but nonetheless physicists get on with the work, even given this conceptual unclarity -- and progress is made. Couldn't the same thing apply with regard to consciousness? I'm resisting the idea that whatever issues about mind-independence might arise are such as to halt investigation in its tracks, on methodological grounds. That doesn't seem right.

Also, we're homing in on a difficult fraction of scientific practice, where the very nature of what is physical comes into question. My comments about scientific intersubjectivity address the much more common practices of the majority of science, where questions about mind-independence make no practical difference in what scientists study, and can agree on.

That couldn't be more wrong. — Wayfarer

I beg to differ. You're talking about interpretation, not about what (non-theoretical) physicists actually do. One of my friends is a physicist, and delights in discussing the issues you name. And, he freely admits that it makes no difference whatsoever to his daily pursuits in the lab. "Shut up and calculate."

"object" is ontologically loaded. I'd include "property" there.

A set is a collection of individuals. They need not have anything related to one another, or share anything at all -- the individuals are the set and there's nothing else to it. The pebble on the ground and the sentence I say 5 miles away can form a set. — Moliere

Yes. So what, if anything, would we want to say about identifying such a set with some property? I take it you don't want "being in set X" to count as a property -- nor could it, on the OP's proposal.

As long as it is possible (logically consistent) for an organism to have a heart without a kidney, or vice versa, then the set of all possible instances of having a heart is different than the set of all possible instances of having a kidney, and thus these two properties are differentiated. — litewave

I think this replies, with a cross-post, to part of my question, thanks.

I've expressed it as "a set is a collection of objects -- where objects are logical objects (any name whatsoever) -- that need not share anything in common other than being in that collection of objects" — Moliere

Would that mean that "being in that collection of objects [or individuals, per @Banno]" is a shared property? Can an object "wander in," so to speak, and partake of that property? This may not be a question about your definition so much as an expression of uncertainty about "property".

Good OP!

Identity can be defined extensionally using substitution, and without circularity. That's how it is done in modern logic. — Banno

This -- and the earlier queries of @Count Timothy von Icarus and @Hanover -- is where my attention is drawn as well.

The extension, let's say, of all beings with kidneys is the same as that of all beings with hearts. (I don't know if that's true, but no matter). We can also say, The extension of all triangles with equal angles is the same as that of all triangles with equal sides. But if we were to decide, as the OP recommends, that we have identified the properties of having a heart and being equilateral by pointing to their sets, how do we deal with the problem that the reason why the respective sets are co-extensive is different in each case?

In the case of the triangles, it's not implausible, as you point out, to declare that being equilateral and being equiangular are two ways of describing (or should it be "naming"?) the same property. That's because the two descriptors are logical equivalents -- to assert the first is to assert the second, a priori. But hearts and kidneys are different. A posteriori, it turns out that there are biological reasons (again, as we're supposing) for beings with kidneys to have hearts, but that is not a conceptual or logical equivalence.

Does this matter, on the question of whether we're zeroing in on a property, in each case? I'm not sure, because I'm not sure how you understand "property". Are you recommending a new use for the term "property," or a new, improved analysis of what "property" has always meant?

Also, @Count Timothy von Icarus's query is a fair one: Yes, we can define identity in the usual way of modern logic, but the OP is asking us to stretch. Is that kind of identity really intended to be the same? Your answer was: "I mean that the property is the set." That "is" deserves expansion. If all you mean is what @Banno means -- the "is" of logical identity -- fair enough, but we want to be sure.

Scientific objectivity has customarily been grounded in the notion of the 'mind-independent object' without taking into account the Kantian insight into the mind's constitution of the object. — Wayfarer

This is an interesting observation; I think it's both true and not. A scientist doing science is not going to worry about whether an atom of hydrogen is "really out there" or not. As you say, the working assumption is that, if we act as if the atom is mind-independent, we can learn what we need to learn about it.

Some scientists, to be sure, have reflected on the Kantian insight. Let's add that insight to scientific practice. What do you think would change? Are the findings of science any different? Or rather, is it the philosophy of science -- the bedrock and framework beliefs about what is real -- that will change?

I'm suggesting that the particular brand of objectivity that we call scientific objectivity -- essentially an intersubjectivity, a faith in a shared point of view -- will be unchanged. Now suppose the object of scientific investigation is the phenomenon of consciousness; not the experience, but the fact. What we want to know is, Can there be a shared, 3rd-person object of study here that is mind-independent in the same way, and not any more or less, than any other object of study? Or is mind-independence structurally impossible, given that we require minds in order to study anything? But isn't that the same kind of mind-dependence that Kant has alerted us to? How has making consciousness the object of study changed anything?

Again, it's crucial to remember that we're not asking our scientist to study 1st-person phenomenology as such -- that's what I'm calling "the experience, not the fact." We're asking them to investigate the fact of consciousness, the state of affairs that allow consciousness to be part of the world. It's very true that, without our 1st-person experience of consciousness, we wouldn't know what it is that we want to understand. Here, if anywhere, we can perhaps find that special confusion that studying consciousness creates. But I don't think it's obvious in principle that there can be no methodological separation.

Descartes could have more accurately said cogitatio est, ergo esse est — 'thinking is, therefore being is.' What is indubitable is the occurrence of thought, not the existence of an enduring ego. — Wayfarer

This is good, and relates back to a discussion on Descartes I was having with @Ludwig V a while back, based on Bernard Williams' book about D. There's a middle-ground alternative too: We can posit a thinker as indubitable, along with the occurrence of thought, without having to characterize that thinker as "an enduring ego." If I'm not mistaken, Paul Ricoeur suggests something like this, connecting the "ego" in "cogito ergo sum" with the conscious "I" and pointing out that the unconscious or pre-conscious (or even cosmic consciousness) might be what truly endures.

pretty much all the discussion of mental to mental causality in that space that I have seen actually centers around mental to physical causation (generally on the idea that, if a mental state m1 brings about another, m2, such a change is thought to also necessarily involve a physical state transition from p1 to p2). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Exactly, and I find that unsatisfactory. Even if the m's and p's are correlated, it doesn't necessarily mean that "p1 causes p2" is a good explanation of my how my thought of Plato makes me think of Socrates. Indeed, it sounds like a terrible explanation. We can't even cash out "p1" as "Plato" without some theory of how mental and physical events supervene.

So yes, that's what I want to explore, once I pull enough material together. As @Leontiskos mentions, we could just rule out the physical entirely and claim that "mental to mental causation" is the same thing as propositional entailment, but I don't think that works, for a variety of reasons I'll go into eventually. Just with this example, it's clear that "Plato" doesn't entail "Socrates" in any logical way, yet surely we want to say that the one thought, as an event in my mind, not as a proposition, caused or influenced the second. How? It can't only be a matter of neurons, but nor does it really resemble the "causality" of entailment. That's just a sample of the headaches involved in this topic.

there are also formal signs (internal, like concepts or species intelligibiles) that generate interpretants, so mental causality isn't necessarily distinct from the physical. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sounds interesting, thanks. I'll check it out.

Now if you're focused more on discourse and demonstration, that's a whole different can of worms but there is a lot of interesting stuff there. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right, that's different, though equally interesting. My problem is about how we can justify using "causality" talk -- as we do -- when discussing how one mental event leads to another. To highlight the problem, it's probably better to leave out questions of entailment or demonstration entirely, and focus on the much more ordinary linkages we discover between our thoughts.

Good, the Nietzsche passage is right on target, thanks.

The focus of the OP seems to be how one thought leads to a subsequent second thought. — Fire Ologist

Appreciate your response. What you describe would be the OP I want to write, but I need more background! This one was just a plea for help.

In a sense we're each our own little closed system capable of reconciliation with others to share understanding. — DifferentiatingEgg

Indeed. I'd like to understand how the closed system works, to begin with. But I'll lay out what I see as the problem in more depth, once I've found some good target literature.

Thanks for this clarification. (And yes, Owen Flanagan coined "New Mysterians" as a deliberate reference to the 60s band "? and the Mysterians".) If we agree that consciousness is, for now, a mystery, the question becomes, Are there structural or even transcendental arguments that show it must remain so? McGinn thinks so. Chalmers can be read either way, but I continue to see his description of the hard problem as meaning it can be solved, with important changes in scientific method.

Do you think consciousness has to remain a mystery in Marcel's sense -- that the presence of the inquirer makes the phenomenon irreducible to explanatory language, to "technique"?

Thanks, I'll check it out.

I'd settle for even an article, even a chapter, about mental-to-mental causation. Isn't it bizarre that the subject doesn't come up more often? We all know the experience of having a thought which then "makes us" think of something else. What's going on here? How should this be described? Simply to say "association" doesn't suffice, because what we want to know is, how can thoughts associate? Is it by virtue of their content? How does that work? And what is the relation between the "causality" of thoughts and the entailment of propositions?

you've restated a version of the well-known 'Mary's room' thought-experiment? — Wayfarer

Yes, I thought about referencing poor Mary! (Or is she poor? :wink:)

The blind spot is blind with respect to the subject to whom the data means something, the subject, the observer. — Wayfarer

Yes, at the moment. But I think you're suggesting that the blind spot is methodologically structural, that it can't be overcome in terms of objective science. I think this remains to be "seen" (sorry!). As Chalmers says at 2:20, "It may be that the methods of science have to be expanded." This is a recurring theme, for me: We understand consciousness so poorly that it makes anything we say about it, including how it can be studied, provisional at best. Must we assume that the phenomenon of subjectivity cannot be studied from the 3rd person? Must we assume that, because an investigative method depends upon consciousness, it cannot give a complete account of consciousness itself?

Again, as we've been saying, there's a fine, often indistinct, line between consciousness as phenomenon and consciousness as experience. If we take the question "What is it like to conscious?" as actually answerable, would the answer be phrased in terms that are opaque from the point of objective knowledge? Does the experience of consciousness -- the experience of being me, or you -- forever elude being known in terms other than descriptive?

I think both of us should be uncertain about this.

Does he talk about the problem of other minds? — frank

Can't remember. I took a quick look through the book but couldn't find anything. Not to say it isn't there -- the book has an unusual set-up -- a long target paper by Strawson, then replies by about 16 philosophers, then a long response to all of them from Strawson. So it's hard to find stuff, and the index didn't help. But an excellent book nonetheless.

@Wayfarer is mistaken. — frank

This is me speculating about his position. He may not think this at all.

Our worldview tends to say that intrinsic perspective (or subjective experience), is located in isolated pockets, inside skulls? Mine is separated from yours by a region of air. Could you see yourself questioning that assumption? — frank

Yes. Do you know Galen Strawson's book, Consciousness and Its Place in Nature? A very good argument for the plausibility of panpsychism.

We're talking about the most simple, center of everything sort of experience, like the ITT theory graphic:
check it out. — frank

This is a great graphic, thanks.

So right there, I'm not experiencing you as you. — frank

Yes, yet another aspect of the impossibility -- not only do we have our experiences, but we have our attitudes toward our experiences, our "experience of experience," and that would presumably be different for you and me, even if we somehow shared the 1st-level experiences.

I have more questions about how you think this relates to the hard problem. — frank

So do I! And if you've been following my discussion with @Wayfarer, you see that not everyone agrees on exactly how to characterize the hard problem. I read Chalmers as saying it's a scientific problem, hard but potentially solvable through scientific inquiry. Whereas I think Wayfarer sees Chalmers as being closer to the New Mysterian position of McGinn and others.

What are your questions about hard versus impossible?