Wittgenstein showed that philosophy, yes in it's entirety, consists in language on being on holiday. And that's it really. It supposedly ends in quietism. — Wallows

He argued for that. But to what he extent he "showed" that to be true is another matter. There isn't consensus among philosophers that he was correct. Some agree and others have not. I don't believe what he argued rises to the level of proof. So it comes down to whether Witty's arguments make one's metaphysical itch go away.

But if not experience, then - it's not clear what it could even mean to extend the problem of induction to logic and math. — StreetlightX

Which gives logic and math a kind of atemporal, aspatial quality. Which is odd, given that we inhabit temporal, spatial universe of change.

A problem is only a problem if you think it's a problem. — A Seagull

No, that's not how problems usually work.

What are these destructive conclusions of which you speak? — A Seagull

The undermining of knowledge. Biting the bullet is admitting that the ancient skeptics were right.

I'll put it another way. Someone could come along and argue that all we have our words and not reality. So proper philosophy would be to recognize that our words aren't describing reality. They're just words, after-all! There is no reality independent of the words. Or the words make the reality. And yes, we did have at least one person who did argue along those lines, and they were quite good with words.

The problem is that the existence of words entails creatures who speak. And speaking is based in a biological reality. So it can't just be words, since the words depend on the biology of mouths and vocal cords and what not to be spoken.

Same with philosophizing. In order to do philosophy, there has to be something real that makes the philosophizing a possibility. Philosophy doesn't just exist. It exists in response to a world by creatures who are puzzled by their place in the world. Probably because their models never quite fit.

I (and others) haven't arrived at this belief because it's the way the world seems to us to be, We've arrived at it becasue of a failure to feel satisfied with any objective criteria for distinguishing objects. So If you've got such a criteria, then we can ditch the whole idea of model dependent realism. Say an alien comes to earth, they don't even see in colour like we do, they detect some other part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and maybe the Weak Nuclear Force directly, maybe they have completely different model of how evolution and DNA works (afterall, we had a completely different model 200years ago). Give me an reason why they would still recognise you as one thing and me as another. Or even you as one thing and the chair you're sitting on as another. — Isaac

Ahhh, so you're a meriological nihilist. That still leaves the fundamental stuff. Our alien visitors agree on the electromagnetic spectrum it seems. That's a starting point. And if they agree on EM, then they probably agree on chemistry.

Here's my point. The fact that pattern matching occurs means there's some sort of objective organization that results in pattern matching. Model Dependent Realism doesn't exist as a philosophy if nature doesn't produce creatures who do philosophy.

It's easy enough to imagine the universe without any philosophy taking place. Just have the physics be a little different.

I cannot have your pain. I can most certainly have my own. If we know what having pain consists of... then it doesn't make much sense to say that having pain is inaccessible, does it? — creativesoul

It's accessible in the sense that we do have similar experiences as human beings, but not entirely. What's inaccessible is each of our own personal experience. We're walking along the street. You realize I'm deep in thought. What am I thinking? You can't read my thoughts, so the best you can do is guess. And you didn't realize I had a headache, or that I'm color blind and see the world a bit differently than you.

I can share all that with you to an extent. But it's not something you can access yourself. We can't just peer into someone else's minds and watch their experiences like some kind of haptic VR setup.

This becomes even more the case with animals, since we're not dogs or bats, and don't interact with the world quite the same. Imagine having the body of a cephalopod and being able to activate thousands of light emitting cells on your skin to signal other animals. What would that be like?

What does he mean when he says that a feeling goes beyond what is sayable? — Harry Hindu

Perhaps that language can't fully capture experience, or do proper justice to how one feels on occasion.

We still don't even have a really good model of what light is. It doesn't seem to be quite a particle or quite a wave but something that exhibits properties of one or the other in various situations. — Terrapin Station

Same applies to matter. Maybe it's all some kind of field.

Representationalism can't do this, because per its claims, we can never directly access the world. The best we can ever do is conjecture. — Terrapin Station

It does leave itself open to skepticism.

What if we said that we directly perceive some aspects of an object, like it's shape and location, but other aspects. such as its reflectivity to visible light are indirect?

We can see this with eating shrimp. We can know things about the shrimp from putting it in our mouth, like size and solidity and that it's an animal, but we don't know about its chemical makeup from the taste, without developing a science of chemistry first.

The camera is coloring it, sure. The issue then is whether we can know this or not. Direct realists say we can. Representationalists say we can't know it. — Terrapin Station

Direct realists tend to say objects are colored, that's why we see color. Indirect realists are fine with perceivers coloring in the world. We can know this through scientific inferences. Thus objects have shapes, but probably not colors, although they do have reflective surfaces.

And yeah, I'm aware that @creativesoul and a few others will take issue with that. But this is where the qualia argument gets started. Because there are reasons to think that some prosperities of our experience are mind-generated, while the other properties are good for scientific investigation.

To further your analogy in context of my replies to Banno, if your camera then adds a filter along with some metadata to the picture, then that extra stuff are not properties from the object itself. That information is generated by the camera.

What gets added or explained by bringing qualia into the already complex story? — Banno

Sure, so we could stick with perceiving properties of things. Then that can lead to questions over whether all those properties belong to the things perceived, or whether some belong to the perceiver. And then from there you have Locke and can bootstrap your way to Nagel, and then you're a short step from Chalmers.

I'm confused as to how patterns can be recognized or in error if there is no pattern matcher or mind or self or whatever we want to call the organizing principle that makes sense of the flux (finds patterns).

That's not quite the same as a "what it's like". — Banno

Maybe. You're taking issue with the language usage. I take it you think that leads to a problem that might not be a problem.

Dreams are also directly perceived. They are just different things we are encountering. To see dream dragon is to encounter a different thing to my house. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Are you saying that the contents of dreams are real? Your use of perception in dreams is highly non-standard. In any case, dream experiences mostly don't originate with the use of the sensory organs.

Differing abilities aren't a problem either. Each object itself is multiple. It is what anyone perceives of it. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I'm not sure what you mean here. Are you asserting idealism? This sounds like some TGW philosophizing.

went through this earlier in the thread. Just because I don't believe in any objective division of the world into parts, doesn't mean I think it's homogeneous. — Isaac

So the world is a heterogenous flux allowing for seeing different kinds of patterns. And this flux on occasion produces pattern matchers?

I'm asking how the pattern matching occurs in the flux of things. In any case, that sets up a dichotomy between the flux and the pattern matching, because we can ask how our patterns match up with the flux of the world.

I'm not convinced that there is a "what it's like", for bats or otherwise. — Banno

Do you think bats have experiences that might differ qualitatively from ours in some aspects? If not bats, then dolphins, dogs, chimps even other people?

As a direct realist, maybe you can explain what the problem is supposed to be, because it's not clear to me what Wallows was thinking. — Terrapin Station

I understand it to be that since direct realists deny the contention that we're aware of some mental idea or representation when perceiving (instead of the physical object itself), then there isn't some inaccessible mental content that can't be shared. Instead, we're just talking about the objects themselves.

However, there are experiences in addition to perception such as dreams, and the problem of sharing those experiences comes up. Also, there are going to be issues even for direct perception between differing abilities. If you're a super taster and I'm not, then my ability to understand your taste experiences will be somewhat limited (inaccessible).

Yeah, this part I don't entirely get. If I were a direct-realist, then there wouldn't really be unsharable content in my mind. Let me know why would you think otherwise? — Wallows

What is meant by "unsharable content" in this thread? That you can't talk about it? Or that other people can't directly access it?

Even direct realists have dreams, which they can talk about if they remember, but someone telling me their dream doesn't mean I get to experience it. I can imagine what the dream was like, but it's not the same thing as having the dream myself. And so it goes for every other experience. But the point of dreams is that they're not perceptual, and thus direct realism is irrelevant to them. So there are experiences outside of direct perception to deal with for this kind of discussion (whether mental content is shareable).

And so the problem still presents itself for direct realists, because it's not just about perception, but all subjective experience.

So close, it's hardly worth quibbling, but I don't think other people exist either. I think the real world, all that is the case, exists. Any division of that into separate objects, forces, etc are just models, just one way of subdiving things, among other options. — Isaac

Yeah, that is definitely worth quibbling over! So, do you exist?

Yes, only I don't see how there can possibly be a way the world really is. Any 'ways' it could be require distinction (shape and form, even if only figurative) and I cannot see any convincing way in which distinction can be the case without anyone doing the distinguishing. — Isaac

But then how does the subdividing happen? What's making the distinctions? Is it "your" mind? Based on what?

Parmenides started this whole business by arguing that despite appearances, change was impossible and the world was really a sphere. My biggest issue upon hearing that is what makes the world appear like it does change, and it's much more than a sphere?

We can ask the same sort of think of a Kantian. What gives the mind the ability to categorize the noumena into the phenomena we experience? Doesn't that imply a pre-existing order?

And if there is a pre-existing order, then we have some basis for inferring it.

This doesn't follow. A belief that the distinction of another mind is just a model is not the same as saying that only I exist. I'm quite convinced the external world exists (I actually think it is impossible to genuinely doubt that), I just don't agree that the distinctions we draw are real outside of our minds. — Isaac

So what you're saying is that other people exist, it's just that our talk of other minds is itself a model, and the model can be disputed. You're disputing the model that the experiences of other minds is inaccessible. That subjectivity is fundamentally different from objectivity. And thus you disagree with the hard problem of consciousness, that it's a "hard" problem.

Alright, fair enough. I think there's some room there for debate over exactly how "hard" the distinction is between subjective and objective. It could be that the distinction is only a human one due to a limitation of how we think, or based on how philosophy and language has developed into the current debate, or just that science hasn't quite caught up yet.

What I'm noting is that this distinction goes all the way back to the beginning of philosophical inquiry, so there's something fundamental at least in terms of human knowledge. The distinction being one between the appearance of the world to us, and how the world actually is. The current consciousness debate is just the most recent development of the long argued problem of perception and skepticism that arose a long time ago when people started asking questions about sticks looking bent in water and people having different experiences of sensation (perceptual relativity), and how animal sensory capabilities can differ from our own.

If I recall correctly, Parmaneides argued that since nothing does not exist, change is impossible, because otherwise things like the past would cease to exist (become nothing which is impossible).

Lucretius used nothing to argue that something cannot come from it, otherwise anything would come into existence, which we don't observe. Therefore atoms must have always existed.

Note: the dichotic utterance of ‘inner’ and ‘external’ has always been a hazardous field of play - hence dualistic notions and no logical means to claw our way around such attitudes and keep a reasonable dialogue flowing. — I like sushi

Right, but we could reframe the debate to be how I experience the rock and how the rock is, assuming they are not the same thing. If we have good reason to suppose that rocks are more than our experience of them, then that raises the possibility that rocks differ in some way from how we experience them. And so on for the rest of the world, including our own bodies and other people.

So we end up with some kind of dichotomy, however we want to define that. And it's as old as philosophy itself, even if the terms and nature of the debate have changed over time. And there are many reasons for supposing this dichotomy exists, or at least appears to exist.

If so, I guess he's arguing with himself to sharpen up the model? I didn't get to read through the entire thread so I'm not sure where that part of the arguments took place.

I'm just happy to be part of someone's world.

Right, and I'm obviously not disputing that fact. I'm disputing the implication drawn earlier in the argument that this means we should accept 'experiences like pain as being subjective, inaccessible to third parties. — Isaac

The experience itself is inaccessible, because you don't have someone else's pain. But you might very well find out someone is or was in pain, and have empathy or recall a similar painful experience. So yes, the mental phenomena has related effects. But we can't always know what they are, or infer the correct mental states.

Luckily we share a similar biology with other humans, so often enough we can understand other people's mental states. But not always. Men can't know exactly what it's like to give birth. And we never know fully what it is to be someone else. Everyone has their own subjective experience of themselves and the world.

This goes back to a dispute over meaning. You seemed to be arguing for a behavioral view that pain is understood as something objective and not the experience of pain itself, because otherwise how could have learned to identify pain? To which I say hogwash, pain without the experience is meaningless.

Therefore, we understood pain to be something experienced that often but not always has observable effects, like hopping around and yelling. And it's something that can be faked.

What reason have you got to think this? — Isaac

Because it would be used by courts and doctors.

Even if we were to simply assume the two sensations were similar enough, you'd be positing a mental sensation which had absolutely no effect on you whatsoever.

I didn't say there was no effect, just that we can't always know what it is in other people. Of course at minimum there is neural activity. But it's not like we have super accurate brain scanners. We don't have anything that's good enough for court to determine truthfulness. Lie detector tests aren't terribly accurate, and neither are juries, police or even shrinks when it comes to reading people.

Also, you haven't tried to answer my questions. How would you know that what you're experiencing is called 'pain'? How do you know you're using the word correctly? — Isaac

The sensation correlates with other human behavior enough of the time in situations that are often painful to use that word for it. There's probably edge cases where I wouldn't be sure whether to call it pain.

Yes. My not noticing the signs and there not being any signs to notice are two different things. — Isaac

Yes, but we also don't have any method that will allow us to always read the signs.

It's a fact I dispute, a fact I'm asking for your support of, your empirical evidence for. — Isaac

Alright, so have you ever found out someone was feeling discomfort when you didn't realize it, or vice versa?

I'm talking about the time when you claim it is hidden. Again, it is not a 'fact' simply by your declaring it to be one. — Isaac

I drink too much the night before and wake up with a mild hangover. At the office I talk to coworker and do my work without saying anything. Nobody asks me about my hangover or offers some aspirin.

I don't know what more to say other than it's a basic aspect of our experience that we don't always know what our fellow humans are feeling, including pain, nor can they always tell what we feel. It's part of of our daily interactions, it's in our language, it's all over fiction.

You seem to be arguing that we should always be able to tell whether someone is in pain.

Again, I'll ask, how would you possibly know what 'pain' is (which of your many feelings is the one correctly called 'pain') if you could not identify it at all times in others? — Isaac

But we don't and we can't always identify what someone else is experiencing. That's just a fact of our existence. We only have partial access to other people's minds though their behavior and what they choose to tell us. We simply don't always know whether someone else in pain.

Pain always results in some behaviour to the effect of demonstrating the pain, — Isaac

But it doesn't. People can choose to ignore minor pains. I have a headache, but if it's not severe, I don't have to say anything or hold my head. I can just ignore it and focus on something else. How much pain one can endure without reacting in pain depends on the individual.

If there was even one circumstance where the correct feeling to call 'pain' was hidden from you completely, how would you know that some other feeling you're having is actually also called 'pain', afterall, it might be the one that's been hidden from you? — Isaac

It's not hidden from me because pain is a subjective experience that can be accompanied by behavior, but not always. And if that fact doesn't square with a certain view of meaning acquisition, the so much the worse for that view.

I don't think there's any reason to think supernagic is real, but it's meaningful. That's why we can create fictional stories with supernagic in it.

The show Supernatural has the more powerful beings just snapping their fingers. Interesting that Q on Star Trek would do the same thing, but his race wasn't considered supernagical.

The polling questions aren’t very well done. How can you answer yes or no to a binary choice between two options that aren’t yes or no? Why can’t Both be an answer? — Mark Dennis

Sounds rather continental.

That was informative. I agree that subjectivity is not measurable. but it's the way we experience the world.

However, that still leaves related ontological and epistemological questions unanswered.

Right, so actions in one context=pain, actions in some other context=pretending. This is still all externally identifiable. — Isaac

But it isn't, or we'd always know whether someone was in pain. There's even medical situations where a patient will complain about a condition their doctor can't see a symptom for, resulting in the suspicion that it's psychological. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it turns out the patient was right.

But in either case, the point is the patient experiences some form of discomfort that isn't objectively identified.

No, that's not how mirror neurons work, they only mirror intentions related to behaviours, they can't magically distinguish different intentions from identical behaviours. — Isaac

But some animals, humans in particular, do develop a theory of mind where we can look at the context of someone's identical actions and infer their intentions. But yeah, we do have to learn that, which partly comes from other humans like parents or older kids teaching us, and in part from just interacting.

I'm not really sure where this is going. You're not defending behaviorism, right? You're defending a Wittgenstenian understanding of the term pain.

How did the people who told you they were pretending find that out? — Isaac

Ultimately because at some point primate/monkey ancestors developed mirror neurons and were able to formulate some theory of mind to understand other people's actions. And one of those kind of actions would be deception.

By watching people pretend and being told they were pretending, then doing the same thing myself.

How would you know? — Isaac

How would I know that people can pretend to be in pain, like actors or liars? Is that really going to be your argument?

Instead a see the same old repetition where people get bogged down in arguments about dualism, reality, and naive realism. — I like sushi

So how does phenomenology help avoid those topics? So we start with our experiences of being in the world. But at some point don't those old questions rear their heads?

Yes, but why does it have to be a subjective experience for this to be the case? 'Pain' we all learn, is the word we use to indicate whatever it is that motivates us to those particular sorts of actions. — Isaac

That's not why I use the word pain, but okay, maybe the rest of you zombies use it that way. I use it to refer to feeling pain, not my resulting actions.

I could be a robot and still learn to label the tweaking of my diodes which causes me to writhe about and cry 'pain'. — Isaac

But only because humans who do feel pain first coined the word. But okay, let's go with the p-zombie robot world with no humans. They coin a word pain-z which means writhing about and crying when diodes are tweaked. That isn't what we mean by pain.

Why not? Because I can writhe around pretending to be in pain, or maybe for some other reason like a seizure. Or I might be stoical about it. Not all pain manifests in some observable action. Behavior itself is not enough.