Is this ontology thing even the right way to think about this, or is there a better way? Perhaps making it more about language or categories? Is this just what is called a language game, or is there something more substantial to it? — S

Is your argument in the OP that ontology is confused because we need to be looking at language games instead to see what is going on when we categorize things?

If so, my response would that ontology remains relevant because there's lots of evidence in favor of reductive explanations and related patterns among various phenomenon. And that's why physics theorizes that four forces are all that's required for everything in the universe, and that ordinary matter is made up of particles that form atoms and molecules.

So there's good reason to think there is a basic stuff the universe consists of. Maybe it's fields, maybe it's particles and spacetime, maybes it's superstrings. Or maybe it's something we can only approximate. If you go back far enough, everything in the universe was part of tiny volume of space that inflated. It's not like rocks, stars and animals eternally populated the cosmos.

Is physics itself a language game? There is certainly agreed upon jargon. But the experiments themselves aren't linguistic. And those have forced scientists to revise their jargon and even replace it over time.

Atoms weren't a thing and then they were, and then they were composed of subatomic particles and light had particle properties, and all the odd QM and GR results. Also that it's heavily mathematical.

Is math a language game?

So if we didn't invent language--and specifically a language like English, then we didn't create it, we're not the originators of it. Who or what is? — Terrapin Station

A Monolith. Haven't you seen the prelude to 2001: A Space Odyssey?

But seriously, csalisbury has a point. Why build a philosophical theory of language without consulting history to see whether there is evidence humans actually acquired language that way?

It means that whatever it is, or whatever the science says it is, that doesn't mean that we have to start talking funny. — S

I voted for realism and rocks in your poll. My thinking would be that everyday objects exist more or less as we experience them (with the addition of scientific facts), but they're not ontologically primary. Something else is, which is approximated by physics.

Whatever it is, let's not throw ordinary language philosophy out with the rubbish. — S

So what does that entail? My problem with ordinary language philosophy is that it seems to stick it's head in the sand regarding the difficult metaphysical and epistemological problems. We know from science that reality can't be simply what we experience. Ancient philosophers knew that as well. Everyday objects of experience aren't enough. There's a reason why naive realism isn't tenable (and by that I mean unreflective naive realism not sophisticated attempts to defend direct realism).

Dunno how reality can be all that far removed from our human experience, — Mww

I should have specified that the ontological makeup that results in the reality of the human experience (everyday objects, time, space and what not) are pretty far removed from everyday experience.

greed; subjective idealism went out with continental German idealism, which advocated a necessary external material reality. — Mww

I don't know that reality is properly material, or even completely physical. It's something with those sorts of properties and relations, but it's not anything like what we get in everyday experience. Maybe its quantum fields with a touch of proto-consciousness or it's mathematical structures all the way down. I don't know. But it's something very far removed from our human experience. Or at least the fundamental (ontological) reality making everything up is.

I guess that means Kant was kind of right. As were the ancient Greek metaphysicians in the sense that reality had to be something counter-intuitive, even if they were mostly wrong about the actual ontology, with some exception for the atomists and Heraclitus.

Interesting. I doubt any professionals disagree with realism, but I certainly hope they don’t agree with realism exclusively. — Mww

I'm sure it's a range, as with all things in philosophy where opinions differ. Personally, I don't think subjective idealism is very tenable. It's hard to think there isn't something real responsible for our experiences, since we experience having bodies that need nutrition, air, water and were born. Also, the whole evolution of life, stars, etc. before us.

Banno has posted survey results of professional philosophers before where a large majority agreed with realism. However, I don't know if that was primarily analytic philosophers, or which group was surveyed.

the dream is there but it's just a dream!!. — Nobody

Can you die in your dream?

Isn't that essentially what humans do? How might the human ones count then if that's all the AI is doing? — noAxioms

My thinking is that we interpret the AI as playing itself in chess because we've set it up to train itself in a way that leads to self-improved chess play. But is that the same thing as actually playing chess?

Since we invented the game to play amongst ourselves, it's safe to say that humans play chess.

Oh, well that's a good question! I guess the answer would be yes, because computing a game is the same result. However, I'm open to questioning whether an AI actually plays chess against itself, as opposed to manipulating matrices or neural network weights.

The constructivist answer would be no, only the games that have been played exist.

The arrow of time is provided by thermodynamics and the initial state of the Big Bang, which is observation-independent, suggesting some kind of mind-independent physical reality. The cat might be alive or dead, but the time since the Big Bang remains the same either way. Also, the fact that there can be cats.

A problem for this interpretation is that the necessary cosmology, astrophysics, geology and evolution would have to be dependent on future observation, even though consciousness depends on having bodies that evolved because of those conditions being met.

which with the other Abrahamic religions is fundamentally intolerant and exclusive, and therefore necessarily antagonistic to any proposition which would appear to cast doubt on its tenets. — Ciceronianus the White

Plus the focus on this life that Stoicism and Epicureanism offer, which is more grounded and reasonable than focusing on sin and the afterlife.

Its just that we have to throw out the 'view from nowhere' , the God's truth', the idea of linear progress, and replace these notions with a more mobile idea of consensus. — Joshs

But we don't have to, if we don't agree with Nietzsche's perspective, particularly on science.

Superstrings, branes, parallel universes, wormholes, singularities, gravitons, pilot waves and any other postulated physical entity that lacks empirical validation.

If diminishes truth in the world – and therefor diminishes trust
If one believes truth and trust are good – things that diminish them are bad

The liar is treating those lied to as a means to an end

Lying makes it harder for those lied to to make an informed decision

Lying corrupts the liar - (a gateway moral wrong to other moral wrongs) — Rank Amateur

Lying in the real world isn't exhausted by the above. We lie to protect other people's feelings, to provide boundaries for ourselves, to protect ourselves and others from the possibility of physical harm, and as a lubricant for social interaction.

Is anyone going to actually in real life tell a murderer where their friend is in order to uphold some principle of truth telling? The answer is no.

As such, it's a pointless conundrum. Even if we still consider it immoral to lie in such a situation, who cares? Our friend gets to live, and that's what matters, not whether we upheld some abstract principle.

From this we realize that other people's well-being matters more than upholding principles. So yeah, you should lie, be disloyal, blow the whistle, tattle, etc. when the welfare of others comes into conflict with doing the principled thing.

People matter more than principles. We could even make that a principle. Do the right thing except when it harms others. Asimov's zeroeth law for humans.

That's a sort of Wittgensteinian or pragmatic position to take, but it's not realism, since realism is concerned with things as they are, not as they appear to us.

If we can't perceive things as they really are, then direct realism is impossible, since realism is concerned with things as they are, not as they appear to us. But I take it you're an indirect realist.

the selfish gene springs to mind, but when you think about it, examples multiply. — Wayfarer

The selfish gene evolving the meme machine producing the intuition pump, including multiple drafts, but no theater.

I, personally, coined the lovely expression ‘rogue metaphor’ here on this very forum. But nobody noticed — Wayfarer

Do you have an example of a rogue metaphor?

That’s the best you got? Isn’t this a ‘philosophy forum’? I mean, what’s the point of talking philosophy with The Hulk? — Wayfarer

Do you think it's possible for metaphors to be misleading?

Continuing along those lines - if mind is what grasps meaning, then what is it grasping? — Wayfarer

That language makes me squirm a bit. Grasping is a metaphor. It makes it sound like the mind is an animal reaching out to concepts.

I mean it obviously wouldn't be veridical under the BIV or Matrix scenarios. — Janus

Those scenarios were just meant to illustrate what an indirect realist means by being aware of a mental image instead of the physical object itself. And to lend credibility to the idea that it's the brain generated experience that we're aware of when having a conscious perception. Because the senses are performing the same roles as a vat in that they're stimulating the regions of the brain to have those experiences.

What would it mean to say that perception is veridical according to you? — Janus

Empirically verifiable, unless we start out knowing what is the case, such as with BIVs and Matrices.

is just the same as to say that it is thought to be direct or indirect depending on how we think about it, isn't it? — Janus

Depending on one's philosophical interpretation of perception.

You haven't tried to address my point that our knowledge of the brain would be altogether bankrupt if perception were not veridical, — Janus

I didn't say perception wasn't veridical. I said it's not direct when we're conscious of a perception.

It's the experience of dreams that's relevant, because it demonstrates that it's possible to have a perceptual-like experience where the content is clearly mental. A dream tree is an idea in my mind (or however one would prefer to state that).

The brain is central to experience because it's the one component of the organism which is necessary for experience. Remove your eyes and you can still have color experiences. Remove your visual cortex and this becomes impossible.

The BIV and Matrix scenarios are plausible in the sense that we can already stimulate the brain to have experiences that seem real, but which aren't veridical perceptions. This can be done with drugs, meditative states, imagination, dreaming, electrodes in the brain, etc.

But just because it's not amenable to empirical disclosure can't mean that it isn't real. What Dennett argues, is that what we interpret as subjective experience, is really the result of the unconscious competence of billions of cellular automata that give rise to the illusion of the subject. — Wayfarer

Dennett's response to Strawson was that of course he doesn't deny consciousness, he's merely denying what certain philosophers make of consciousness. Which sounds good until you take into account the implications, which is that we're conscious in the same way that a philosophical zombie is conscious.

Paraphrasing:

"Of course colors, sounds, tastes, dreams, hallucinations, inner dialog, etc. exist. They're just not what they seem to be. They're actually just this physical description of brain activity, or the result of this evolutionary process."

That sounds rather like elimination to me. So when Dennett says that yes, we're conscious of seeing a red object, he means that the right sort of color discrimination is going on in the brain. But that misses the point.

If I'm wondering whether a computer program is conscious, I'm not asking about how good it is at discriminating colors. I'm asking whether it has an experience of red, green, etc.

Similarly, when Siri say it's "Brrrrr, 20 degrees out", I don't suppose that Siri feels cold. But if Siri were a robot that could detect temperature similar to us on it's synthetic skin, then I would wonder whether this was just a function, or actually accompanied by experience.

Thanks for that. Dennett's response is typical Dennett:

I would never have dared put Strawson’s words in the mouth of Otto (the fictional critic I invented as a sort of ombudsman for the skeptical reader of Consciousness Explained) for fear of being scolded for creating a strawman. A full-throated, table-thumping Strawson serves me much better. He clearly believes what he says, thinks it is very important, and is spectacularly wrong in useful ways. His most obvious mistake is his misrepresentation of my main claim:

So what theory of the mind do you subscribe to? — Walter Pound

I don't have one. You?

I don't think the mind is a thing. It's the result of brain activity in addition to the context of an animal or human in their environment. So for us that means social, cultural and linguistic contexts in addition to our brain activity.

Oh, i see. That makes sense. I'm not willing to go there.

The "hard problem" of consciousness really revolves around what the nature of consciousness is and if physicalism is undermined by it. — Walter Pound

Yeah, although Galen Strawson in the link I posted above makes an interesting claim about physicalism (distinguishing it from the science of physics) that permits consciousness.

I have long been convinced of the pointlessness of the question 'Is perception 'really' direct or indirect?'; whether perception is thought to be direct or indirect is just a matter of perspective, or different ways of talking about the same thing, isn't it? — Janus

No, I don't think so. Consider a brain in a vat, or Neo in the Matrix. Now regardless of whether we think such a scenario is feasible (whether the vat or Matrix could actually be built), we can conclude that BIVs and Neo inside the Matrix are not perceiving objects directly. Rather, their brain is being stimulated as if they were perceiving objects via their physical organs.

Now the indirect realist is saying something similar about actual perception. Which is that the brain being stimulated via the senses results in a Matrix/BIV-like experience in that it is brain activity that creates consciousness. As such, we're aware of a mentally simulated world.

The direct realist denies this. For one thing, it has skeptical connotations about how we can really know there's a world out there, or even that we're not BIVs with no actual bodies. It also makes idealism an attractive alternative.

And direct realists have their own reasons for thinking representations or ideas are faulty concepts.

But I can't get away from the fact that it's brain activity which results in colors, sounds and what not. The fact that BIV, Matrix or Boltzmann brain scenarios sound plausible (to an extent anyway) and that we have dreams, hallucinations, imagination, inner dialog and what not strongly suggests that all experience is brain generated, and that's what we're aware of. So why would perception be different?

When I'm dreaming, I experience seeing stuff, hearing stuff, my body moving around as if it were actual perception. That's why dream skepticism exists at all, and how sometimes I can be temporarily confused upon waking up as to what's real. I just don't see how the experience is somehow different (setting aside the ridiculous structure of dreams). Only the origin of the experience.

I think that however one views the self- as a real thing or not- will determine how they explain the experiences of color or whatever else. — Walter Pound

I think Dennett would call himself a pseudo-realist about the self. It depends on what kind of stance you're taking, which means what sort of explanation you're using at that moment.

Anyway, you are aware of your perceptions. So, what is this awareness, if not consciousness? — Number2018

Well, it depends on what's meant by awareness. A computer program could be said to be aware of its inputs. A simulation of perceptual awareness could be built into a robot.

That's different from having a conscious perception.

Just found this response to Dennett and others of similar persuasion:

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers/

I guess it's supposed to complement Stove's Worst Argument in the World with the Silliest Claim Ever Made, although Stove's argument isn't mentioned.

One of these days you'll say something I agree with. ;-) — Terrapin Station

I'm sure one of these days I'll be wrong about something. <insert deadpan face>

Also, this is easy to prove.

Take the totally naive view of vision. It seems like we're looking out onto the world through the eyes. But we know this can't be true. Light comes into the eyes. It's the opposite. But we didn't know this until we had some science of optics and vision.