Wake me up when you've ready to answer on your definition of mental correlations and mental ongoings.

Our methodological approaches stand in stark contrast to one another however. — creativesoul

Yep. Me scholar, you crackpot. Me cite sources, you complain the world doesn't understand.

Specifically speaking, the framework will limit or delimit what can coherently be said according to it. — creativesoul

Who would'a thunk? Social constructionism 101.

Nothing I've said requires citations. I'm not referencing anyone else's work. — creativesoul

That's how crackpottery starts. Right away, I can't take you seriously.

So, in order for either of us to understand the other, we must understand what is meant when either of us use the term perception. — creativesoul

Well I can point to any standard psychology textbook. If your definition is all your own work, then unless I develop telepathy, you are going to have to do a lot better job of explaining yourself.

Simply put, on my view, perception is not equivalent to mental correlations. Whereas you fail to draw and maintain that distinction, I draw and maintain that perception is one necessary but insufficient element of mental ongoings. You're not alone though. It is an historical shortcoming pervading the whole of philosophy, philosophy of mind (psychology) notwithstanding. — creativesoul

Great. You've just come out with a bunch of your private definitions and tell me it is not just me that is wrong, but the whole of philosophy and science.

The crackpot-ometre is reading off the dial right now.

So what's a mental correlation? What's a mental ongoing?

However, I would note that the notion of "recollect" above presupposes recollecting to someone or something. — creativesoul

Clearly it is the self doing the recollecting. Clearly that is also a potentially homuncular way of putting it. Clearly then, we don't want to be led into a hard claim about a self that both recollects experiences and experiences those recollections - a rather overdetermined position to take.

So your "big insight" here seems merely well-worn commonsense. It itself is a feature mentioned in any sensible, citable, theory of how language makes a difference to human mentality. Take Mead's Symbolic Interactionism for instance. We are born into a world where we find everyone talking grammatically in terms of I, you and them. And from there, a notion of "being a self" gets learnt.

Philosophy and psychology then have to go along with those grammatical conventions, just to get things said in a way people can start to understand. It doesn't make it impossible to turn around and expose the homuncularity of those conventions. That is exactly what Symbolic Interactionism and other such schools of psychology did.

You would know all this if you read the books.

But for that notion to have any bite, in order for it to be robust, we must have a relatively good grasp upon what our awareness of the world is without language. — creativesoul

Great. And I have a very good grasp on that having written a number of books on the subject (that were in turn based on the vast amount of relevant research that exists).

If they have anticipatory imagery, then they must have the ability to generate such imagery. — creativesoul

Do I sense a linguistic notion of selfhood creeping into your thinking just there? You say "they" must have the ability to generate. Is there a "they" without linguistic scaffolding? Isn't there just the brain doing its thing in Bayesian brain fashion?

Surely what you meant to say was that with animals, there can be no socially-constructed self that can imagine itself being at the control of a flow of anticipations. The animal mind is extrospective, not introspective. There is no linguistic self to turn attention away from the world and direct it towards an internal world of rumination and day-dream.

You would know all these things if you read the right books.

I suggest that you spend less time thinking about me personally and more time addressing the substance of my posts... — creativesoul

Sure. Is that substance arriving any time soon? Have you done attacking both my ignorance and the general ignorance of all philosophy and psychology?

But it's not especially relevant for the metaphysics of meaning as I understand it. — Wayfarer

Well I explained why in fact it is. If you can quantify, you can do science. So Shannon clears the decks for the assault on semantics.

At the start of the thread I cited the way that information theory, and indeed its "ugly twin", entropy theory, are being employed to make sense of life and mind - material systems that are clearly "all about the meanings". So you have Shannon information-based metrics, like mutual information, self-information, ascendency and dozens of other ways of now measuring the semantic content of material systems.

My favourite model of the way the brain works - Friston's Bayesian brain - jumps right over to the entropy view. It talks about brains being systems to minimise free energy. So what that does is convert neuroscience into thermodynamics.

We already know that thermodynamics explains biology in a general way. And biology explains psychology. So this is making that relationship mathematically precise. Something we can now go out and measure in those terms.

I don't want to pretend that I've kept up with the direct realism debate, but I think this would be an issue only if it's assumed that what happens when we hallucinate or dream is exactly what happens when we're not hallucinating or dreaming... — Ciceronianus the White

But that misses the whole point by talking about the process rather than the results.

The epistemic concern is whether the world itself is how we perceive it. Once we know there is a process to perceiving, then the distinction between appearance and actuality arises. If there is a process, it could get it wrong. It could even invent. It could all be an invention so far as we could ever know.

So you are simply avoiding the issue in question.

Hallucinations and dreams come into it as "objective" proof that we could be trapped inside a fantasy even though normal waking experience feels so undoubtedly real. They are the counterfactuals (the counterfactuals SX wrongly says aren't available) which fatally undermine simple realism. The question then becomes - in a rigorous philosophical sense - how do you apply the brakes before slithering all the way to the other extreme of idealism?

So some real work needs to be done here. It can't be glibly dismissed.

Well if you can make sense of what a thing looks like when there is no looking involved, then be my guest. — StreetlightX

Great quotes from Thompson and Bergson. But doesn't that sophisticated view about "points of view" arise from trying to respond to the way that the good old idealist vs realist argy-bargy made some basic sense?

Embodied cognition, or autopoiesis, or whatever, is a historical response to a question taken seriously. It surely cites that as its starting point. It would say it is a better view than say, cognitive representationalism.

So while I agree there is much that is incoherent at root about the classic framing of the issue, there was something essentially reasonable about asking the question of how sure can we be that what we experience is as direct as it appears ... once we realise that it does just appear.

Science attempts to be creature independent, and describe the world as it is. That's why we arrive at theories like QM. — Marchesk

I think that is an important point. What realism is after is the God's eye view. Naive realism supposes we just have that already - we look and we can see those colours and shapes which just are the objective facts of the world. There is a disinterested theory of truth relation that can support human beliefs about "how things really are". And threatening that with idealism - introducing a whole set of potential confounds into any truth claims - is deeply disturbing for many.

It just shows how soaked in analytic philosophy the Western mindset has become. The world has to be able to function as the truth-maker in the way propositional logic requires. Otherwise the whole house of cards could come down. There are real philosophical stakes motivating direct realism - real in the sense of being an existential threat at least. :)

Of course, I've already explained how pragmatism sidesteps that. It doesn't expect the mind's relation with the world to deliver truth, just functionality.

But anyway, science is then meant to be the way that realism escapes its discovered subjective limitations - the fact, as SX says, it is always a point of view. Science is meant to be the way to take the objective, all-seeing, God's eye view.

And then it is, but it isn't. You need to note how the ambition to see reality more clearly in terms of physics results in us thinking of mathematical formula and then reading numbers off various dials and instruments. Instead of "reading off" what our eyes and ears tell us "directly" - colours, sounds, etc - we add a whole bunch of mediating instrumentation that converts energies to numbers. Values that equations can understand.

So to get more real about reality, we in fact retreat even deeper from it into a realm of pure modelling. Our knowledge about the thing-in-itself becomes even less substantial, even more purely conceptual - even more idealistic in being all a bunch of ideas secured by the highly constrained perceptual act of not making a mistake when reporting the numerals visible on a dial.

There is every reason to be fascinated by the idealism vs realism issue. It is foundational to philosophy. It is the basis of epistemology. It is also fundamental to ontology at least in the context of philosophy of mind.

So I don't agree with SX's too easy dismissal, even though he is quite right that the best psychological account is the one he presents (well, once you add the semiosis that explains the autopoiesis, naturally).

However, it seems apparent that you and I have incommensurate notions regarding what counts as perception. — creativesoul

You’d have to explain how. I’ve asked in the past and you haven’t explained.

I’ve made the point that human language changes the way we are aware of the world deeply. Yet also we share the same basic brain biology.

So for instance, I am happy to talk about pigeons recognising, but I wouldn’t believe they can recollect. They have memories and can categorise experience. But they don’t have the structure of language that would allow for a narrative or autobiographical use of those memories.

Likewise they would have anticipatory imagery. They could search their environment with an expectation in mind. But not having language, they couldn’t have what we mean by imagination - the ability to generate mental imagery that is not closely tied to what the world around demands.

So the difference that language makes is an issue I’ve written books about. It is perfectly familiar to me. I’m not getting why you’ve got your knickers so in a twist about me talking about pigeon perception in a routine psych 101 way. Yes, in psych 101 they do skate over the difference that language makes. But that is excusable as talking about the general biological case before getting into the qualifications of the specifically linguistic human case.

What bugs me about your approach in this thread is that you keep using your own weird neologisms without proper explanation and you fail to provide grounding citations for whatever position you think you take. So it is hard to discuss the issues with you rationally. You are coming across as a crackpot. Yet I also think you are trying to make the same point as I also make. So that remains confusing.

They become aware of and recognize the differences between kinds of cell structures. — creativesoul

Does that not cover perception?

All of it also clearly lends support to direct perception. — creativesoul

Really? After wasting so much time on irrelevancies, you seem to have forgotten to address the OP.

Not much I can say if you can’t work out your problem.

You are still thinking that Shannon was talking about the meaning of a message. He was instead talking about its quantity.

As I said, he derived a fundamental measure by assuming the message to be maximally meaningless - just some random binary sequence. So that means no matter how meaningful (or otherwise) your message, Shannon information defines the logical space it takes up in the world.

Meaningful messages can be pretty compact as a fragment could be used to deduce the whole. Contextual knowledge could be applied. But what Shannon was tackling was the problem of being sure your incoming message hasn’t been corrupted by noise.

So the strictest test of that is the accurate reception of a message where each symbol is random and completely unpredictable from the others before and after. The risk of uncertainty is the greatest. Therefore solve the noise issue there and you have your limiting case. You can quantify the worst your uncertainty would be. You know the limit to which a message may have been disordered.

On your other point, the tight connection between information and matter is something more recent. It is with the holographic principle that now spacetime can be viewed as imposing informational limits on material being. That is what the SciAm article is about.

Zing!

My question was about the equivalence of thermodynamic and logical entropy - the 'equation' which you referred to. — Wayfarer

From that article I cited, this might help....

Thermodynamic entropy and Shannon entropy are conceptually equivalent: the number of arrangements that are counted by Boltzmann entropy reflects the amount of Shannon information one
would need to implement any particular arrangement.

The two entropies have two salient differences, though. First, the thermodynamic entropy used by a chemist or a refrigeration engineer is expressed in units of energy divided by temperature, whereas the Shannon entropy used by a communications engineer is in bits, essentially dimensionless. That difference is merely a matter of convention.

Note also that Boltzmann's entropy is based on probability theory foundations - statistical mechanics. The point about energy/temperature relate to the earlier classical entropy equations of Clausius - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(classical_thermodynamics)

You would have spotted that wrinkle in the criticism section that occurred to you.

In classical thermodynamics, which is the study of thermodynamics from a purely empirical, or measurement point of view, thermodynamic entropy can only be measured by considering energy and temperature. Clausius' statement dS= δQ/T, or, equivalently, when all other effective displacements are zero, dS=dU/T, is the only way to actually measure thermodynamic entropy.

It is only with the introduction of statistical mechanics, the viewpoint that a thermodynamic system consists of a collection of particles and which explains classical thermodynamics in terms of probability distributions, that the entropy can be considered separately from temperature and energy.

So it is why the conclusion is....

Ultimately, the criticism of the link between thermodynamic entropy and information entropy is a matter of terminology, rather than substance.

Information entropy is exactly about semantic content, isn't it? It's how many bits can be lost before the information contained in the string loses its meaning? Yes or no? — Wayfarer

Note the "message" is a random set of data. Quite deliberately a meaningless pattern. So you can't cheat by posting A, B, C,.. The test is a transmission of symbols of maximum uncertainty. One shouldn't give you any information about the next for free.

However one question that occurs to me about the purported equivalence of thermodynamic and logical entropy is that there is no concept of temperature or energy in the discipline of information entropy. — Wayfarer

Oh that occurred to you? It's also mentioned in the criticisms section on the page. ;)

As a really crude example, you could encode the same information in a string of granite boulders, each of which weighed 1 tonne, and also in bits on a hard drive. — Wayfarer

The physics comes into it as enough granite boulders would form a gravitational field so strong they would collapse to create a black hole. More bits could thus be stored in a volume of space if they were scratched on grains of sand. And even more if they could be dents in microscopic flakes of silica.

So you see where this is going. Eventually there is a plankscale limit on the possible information content of a volume of space. See this good SciAm article -
http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~bekenste/Holographic_Univ.pdf

While a pigeon may very well be quite capable of being trained to pick out malignant formations, the pigeon doesn't recognize them as malignant formations. — creativesoul

Well, that is stating the bleeding obvious. The point of the pigeon research is that animal brains can in fact categorise to quite a human degree ... when linguistically-scaffolded in human fashion. So that shows both that our biology of perception/conception has much more in common than most might expect, but also that language then really makes a particular kind of difference we can add to the discussion.

There's a certain "objectivity" in a great art. It resonates for a culture. It concretizes that culture's ideals. ... We can see measure the proportions of a culture's ideal woman. But I don't see why we would measure our understanding of cultural ideals only in a quantifying manner. We don't just want to manipulate and predict. — t0m

Yeah. I'm not arguing that art should be doing science's job somehow. My position here is about how art is employed in the social construction of what it means to be a modern Western mind. A painting is exactly like a bicycle in making it obvious how you are meant to view your world. It is another part of the technology that Heidegger was talking about.

If something is hung in a gallery as if its contains sacred meaning, then we know the hushed tone and clever reverence with which we must approach it to be "part of the club" - even if it shit in a can.

I'm not defending the holy individual here, though I do think there are limits to this dissolution of the individual into the social. I'm really just trying to be accurate about the world. For me, however, this very notion of "world" is in question. I don't assume the world of natural science. To me that is a useful abstraction that exists within a more "primordial" notion of the world. We are in the world with others. But I don't think the spatial notion of objects next to other objects captures this "in-ness" or "with-others-ness." — t0m

I do presume naturalism. And I think that gets at what you mean because it says everything is connected in that everything emerges from the same primordial ooze. Humans weren't inserted into the world by divine intention. And none of us are truly individual as we are all creatures formed by a context.

So naturalism is the organic view, the developmental view. I agree science is often Scientism - the mechanical or reductionist view.

I wasn't aware that this was a significant topic of discussion back then. — andrewk

There is quite a bit of it in Ancient Greece.

The way that a galley away on the horizon looks tiny, and yet we don't see it as anything but a regular ship far away.

Another one was the jars of hot and cold oil. Dip a hand in each, then put both hands into a third jar that is room temperature. Your hands will be telling you different things about whether the third jar is hot or cold now.

Pushing the eye for double images was I think another example used.

I can't work out what it is you are so fussed about. Pigeons are a famous example in mainstream psychology of just how easy it is to train up human-like categorisations in birds with pretty small brains. You can coach them not just to recognise flowers and people, cars and chairs, but you can get then reliably to classify flowers and people as natural stimuli, cars and chairs as artificial ones.

This is psychology's most celebrated example of how similar animals are to humans in their ability to go beyond "direct experience" to categorise their experience abstractly.

In summary, the basic features of object category learning in pigeons are the following. First, pigeons can learn a variety of complex object categories and transfer this learning to novel objects. Second, pigeons can flexibly classify the same object according to different criteria (e.g., pseudocategories and superordinate categories). Third, pigeons extract a rich variety of visual properties from photographic images and use them in combination to learn the structure of object categories. Finally, pigeons learn common abstract representations for all members of the same trained category.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4195317/

In the study, 16 pigeons were trained to detect cancer by putting them in a roomy chamber where magnified biopsies of possible breast cancers were displayed. Correctly identifying a growth as benign or malignant by pecking one of two answer buttons on a touchscreen earned them a tasty 45 milligram pigeon pellet. Once trained, the pigeons’ average diagnostic accuracy reached an impressive 85 percent. But when a “flock sourcing” approach was taken, in which the most common answer among all subjects was used, group accuracy climbed to a staggering 99 percent, or what would be expected from a pathologist. The pigeons were also able to apply their knowledge to novel images, showing the findings weren’t simply a result of rote memorization.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/using-pigeons-to-diagnose-cancer/

Your move.

Human perception is of course linguistically scaffolded and so that takes it to a higher semiotic level. — apokrisis

emphasis mine...

We can say that a pigeon perceives precisely the same way that humans do — creativesoul

Or you could stop putting words like "precisely" in my mouth. That would be a good start.

Thus, if our notion of perception includes that which is existentially contingent upon written language, then we would be forced to deny any and all creatures without written language the very capability. — creativesoul

Well whoopsie-do. Again, making any claim about perception being existentially contingent on written language is a misconception of your own doing here. For whatever reason, you are again projecting you own baggage on to what I say.

To know the differences between pigeon perception and human perception one must know what both respectively consist of and require. — creativesoul

You are sounding particularly pompous today. Or should that be sounding/acting?

So the mind isn't part of the world? Then how do minds interact if not through the medium of the shared world? What is it that divides minds to call them separate? It seems that once you start down the path of claiming the mind isn't part of the world, you start down the path towards solipsism. — Harry Hindu

You are confusing the epistemic issue of direct vs indirect realism with the ontological commitments I might then argue concerning the mind~world issue.

Dream experiences of a tree differ from perceptual experiences of a tree in that we subsequently realise that the experience was in a dream, whereas for perceptual ones we do not. — andrewk

You are missing the point that dreams are real perceptual states. Sure we can decide later that they weren't perceptions of real things. But we can't dismiss the fact that they were perceptual states. We actually had an experience. And the fact we later realise it couldn't have been of the world is the issue.

Similarly, hallucination experiences can be distinguished from perceptual ones after the event, when the LSD or psychotic state has worn off. — andrewk

Interestingly, I saw my cat wandering across the lawn out of the corner of my eye a short while ago. I clearly saw it. Then I turned to focus properly and saw it was just the motion of a dark leaf blowing past. If I had never double-checked, I would only have known I "really saw the cat".

So these kinds of perceptual errors happen a lot and we just don't pay them much heed. We get used to projecting our sensory expectations on the world.

However if you are serious about the issues at a philosophical level - if you want to sustain some grand claim about direct realism - then you need to do more than just make dismissive "it never bothers me" noises.

We can all agree that the best explanation is there really is a world out there, and that when we are awake and alert and really paying close attention, there is some kind of very effective relationship at work. Our mental integration into the physical world is pretty effortless. Or indeed, even an effort couldn't change what we must perceive.

But in fact some people can really imagine a world for themselves that vividly. Ten per cent of the population are highly hypnotisable as they can project suggested imagery that strongly. From memory (I'd have to dig that out) there are some experiments where they can experience colour contrast after-effects after being asked to imagine a red or yellow field as vividly as they can for a few seconds.

So all these confident assertions about direct realism sound very hollow when set against a vast amount of accepted psychological science.

I would maybe contrast quantitative mechanism to "artistic"/metaphorical/interpretative thinking. Both seem essential and always already in operation. — t0m

The dichotomy of quantity and quality. And then you have that divided by the dichotomy of the subjective and the objective.

Good art is a rationally creative process just like good science. Both aim to tell a "truth" about reality - reality as it can best be experienced.

So I get that you want to make both extremes fully part of your life to make it a life with real felt breadth. You don't need to sell me on that.

I still contend both of our basic "metaphysical" positions are intimately related to our own notions of the virtuous individual. The "true" scientist or philosopher is every bit as heroic as Wolverine. Your demystification of individuality is (in other words) an expression of individuality. We are "selling" ourselves, one might say, asserting implicitly the potential value of our words for others. — t0m

That may be right. But is it a paradox for my position or rather its useful feature?

I could sum up my approach as pragmatic. It is the attempt to stand on the middle-ground, having discovered the limiting extremes.

So dialectics is a problem when it constructs irresolvable rival perspectives. That is the recipe for a schizoid life. Now I take that dialectic and offer its resolution. The schism is turned into the anchoring co-ordinates by which I can actually measure where I am at any time. I can decide if that is the best place to be in terms of the two possibilities that always frame that circumstance.

So yes, the scientist can play the virtuous hero. But am I blindly compelled to do that? Or is that a mode that I can switch on, switch off, by virtue of being able to stand back and see the shaping polarity in play?

Post-modernism was suppose to be about the self-consciousness that life is all a grand pose. But then, there still remains, well how should one actually be? Becoming an absurdist, nihilist, anarchist, and the other typical responses, are just another kind of great big dialectical reaction. It seems the logical next step, but few people really seem to find it a happy place to land up in. A non-belief in anything is not a way to fill a naturally-discovered gap.

I think you get this. I'm just emphasising that to the degree I have a theory about the right recipe for life, it would be of this nature. I understand that I do in fact stand for an extreme of individualism and self-actualisation. Looking back, I can see when this was just a blind drivenness. And now that it is a self-aware thing - informed by the science, the social understanding - the irony is that to speak of this as the actual human condition is as about way off the socially accepted map as it gets.

And I am not bigging up myself in saying that. I am always very careful to stress that I don't need to invent any wisdom here. There are towering intellectual figures like Peirce or Vygotsky who you can turn to for their penetrating insights ... towering figures who also wind up being off the general map because they did rise above the engrained dualism of the Western mindset.

It's funny. The more I accept the truth of my socially-constructed nature, the more "individualistic" a way of living that will be within the general culture in which I live.

It is not that most people don't learn this at the level of everyday commonsense. People generally have a functional relationship with their social locality. Families, friends, careers, small set-backs, small triumphs, are plenty enough to knit a good life from. It is only on philosophy sites that you get such a congregation of the socially displaced, the eternally questioning. The nihilists, the absurdists, the fanatics. :)

The bicycle is "ready-to-hand" in the knowing-style of "know-how." This is largely the way that things exist for us, not as entities for disengaged theory but rather as tools that become invisible the more successfully we use them to pursue the goal we are conscious of while using them. Do you agree? — t0m

Heidegger got how technology makes us who we are. We become machine-like so as to be good at machine using.

But then Romanticism is just as much a socialising technology. We become self-actualising supermen to the degree that we employ a diet of Marvel comics and other romantic imagery to fabricate "a self" for ourselves.

Our broad choices are to behave like machines or behave like spirits. Cartesian dualism wins both ways.

Sociologists point that out in the hope of winding people back from those extremes and actually becoming more human in our condition.

Modern society runs blindly into its future, letting itself be constructed in the form of its own driving myths - this irresolvable dichotomy of machine and spirit. Thank goodness for any science that can step back and objectivise, alert folk to what would actually be natural.

The Barbie doll and the Glock pistol are both coming from the damaging extremes of social self-construction. The philosophical critique only becomes interesting once it gets both the mechanistic scientific view and its "other" of romantic irrationalism firmly in its analytical sights.

I'm not 'shrugging it off', but I am pointing out that Shannon's theory was originally published as a theory about information transmission — Wayfarer

Jesus Christ. How do you think paradigms can be changed except by someone managing to ignore what everyone else was insisting had to be the central thing.

Like everyone else, you are obsessed by the semantic content of a message. You believe that it must exist - even though you've search high and low and nowhere does it seem to have physical existence. It is spookily immaterial - a transcendent ghost haunting the world.

Then along comes someone who ignores that it must be about the differences that make a difference and focuses on the physical limits of difference-making. The constraints on information at the general cosmic level. Forget about the vastly elaborate human level, let's get down to the fundamental basics.

I mean who would have thought the Universe has a limited information capacity before that was demonstrated by Shannon? Had it crossed any mind that you know of? Do you not see the genius in discovering that materiality can only hold a certain amount of meaning? Do you not yet get the Copernican nature of that revelation and why it now reverberates so loudly through the sciences?

So, what is the relationship between logical and thermodynamic entropy? it seems to me that they're being equivocated. — Wayfarer

You go check the equation and tell me where you see any equivocation.

By "pre-science" I mean the establishing of what counts as evidence in the first place. — t0m

But my point is that something can't count as evidence unless there is a theory framed to be countable.

So what is Romanticism counting? As a theory, what actually possible measurements does it suggest. If it doesn't offer any, then it is not even a theory. It is just an idea that is "not even wrong".

We started to think that this non-intuititive way of "deworlding" objects gave us the real object. I'd say that it just rips the object from the fullness of our experience of it in a way that's good for certain purposes. Beyond the usual "sentimental" objections to this, there is also the question of not wanting to inaccurately understand the world by uncritically being trapped in just one framework. — t0m

Fine words. But now deliver the theory that has countable facts and so can rise above the class of ideas that are not even wrong.

I mean poetry is fine. Feelings are fine. Pluralistic viewpoints are fine. There is a reason why Western culture promotes these things for sure.

And I have the right theory about that. :)

There is a rational sociological explanation for the fostering of irrationality. Convincing folk they are self-actualising beings creates the pool of requisite variety that rapid cultural evolution can feed off. Society becomes this great big competition for attention. Apply a ruthless filter over the top of that, and hey bingo, out pops out your master race. Or at least the ruling elite.

Of course there is then the rational reaction - the PC response to try and declare everyone some kind of cultural winner. Prizes all round. Everyone gets an equal share of the social limelight.

Yeah right. Dream on.

It's just that this notion of the shared world in terms of tool-use is at least as old as Being and Time. — t0m

Vygotsky and Mead were contemporaries. So we are talking about many people making the same "discovery" once the social sciences became actually a thing.

You had biological science and evolutionary theory emphasising how much the human mind is the product of hereditary and anatomical machinery. That was the big theme of Victorian science. Then followed the sociological correction as that became an established field of inquiry with its own professors and journals.

So it's odd to see it presented as some new idea in a 1979 book. — t0m

Gibson was a correction to the psychological cognitivism of his day. The start of the enactive or embodied view which now feels pretty mainstream.

It is all a tale of dialectical action and reaction. Rational inquiry has no other choice but organising itself this way so as to keep moving forward.

But what I quoted reminds me of the emergence or generation of "one" or they-self or "everyday Dasein" as the foundation on which the individual self is built. This is the 'operating system' that makes theory and individuation possible. — t0m

This is the further wisdom that I agree with. Everything has to start with phenomenology or the givenness of experience. And that is quite anti-science in a general way. It is always shades of idealism.

But then that is why I like Peirce. He was already there with a much more powerful scheme than Heidegger ever managed.

Not to say that Heidegger is thus wrong. I'm just unsure that he adds anything.

Last night it dreamed it was a butterfly, and then awoke, wondering if it was a butterfly dreaming. — Marchesk

It will be pissed when it wakes up from that dream in turn and discovers it is a figment of the Matrix. All it sees is magnetic 1s and 0s. And now the Google lab guys are reaching for the reset button to .... argh!

Isn't this just Heidegger? — t0m

It's lots of people. It's Vygotskian psychology. It's symbolic interactionism. It is any kind of social constructionism or developmental psychology that understands that "selfhood" is lesson, a social habit of self-regulation, that every newborn babe must be taught.

You have "freewill" as that is how you get trained - particular in modern Western society with its huge concern to produce self-actualising individuals.

That has to be taken with a grain of salt, because it depends on how familiar a scientist is with the philosophical arguments. Sometimes a scientist will publicly articulate a philosophical position that's not terribly sophisticated, but they act as if the science backs it, because they don't know the depth of the philosophical discussion on the matter. — Marchesk

Well what I'm saying is that I just don't come across cognitive scientists who could be so crassly unphilosophical as to be direct realists. And that would have to be the case ... if they are cognitive scientists. There would be nothing useful to study if they didn't believe "the world" is the product of an elaborately processed view.

Computer scientists can be a very different matter. To the degree they haven't studied biological science, they are liable to claim just about anything of their toy machines.

You often refer to that, but this was part of his paper on sending and receiving information, wasn't it? It wasn't a philosophical theory as such, was it? — Wayfarer

It was a vague "philosophical" distinction given solid mathematical/empirical foundations at last. And so that has had immense consequences if you actually believe in progress in metaphysics.

Information stopped being airy-fairy and hand-wavy. There was a formula for measuring it. And hey presto, it turned out to be the same formula as for measuring thermodynamic entropy. Mental uncertainty and physical disorder could be measured in exactly the same coin.

The fact that these two apparently totally unrelated things are somehow two aspects of the one thing has to be a pretty seismic metaphysical discovery, no?

Are you still just going to shrug it off?

This still assumes that the fundamental forms are physical. I have been researching the Forms, which is the 'formal' side of hylomorphism, and the original concept of the Forms is that they are outside space and time altogether. The motivation of early philosophy was not instrumental or scientific in our sense- it was as much 'the quest for the transcendent' as the quest for useful knowledge about the sensory domain. — Wayfarer

My working assumption is in fact that the fundamental forms are immanent, not transcendent. So I am with Aristotle rather than Plato on that score.

My metaphysics starts further back with Anaximander. The form of nature emerges through the expression of actions. The timeless/placeless symmetries are revealed to "exist" via the symmetry-breaking that actualises the world in which they are a formal/final source of cause.

That's where "Romanticism" comes in, which thinks in terms of these fundamental interpretations. It's "pre-science" or "pre-metaphysics" in that it thinks the conditions of possibility for metaphysical, scientific, and religious frameworks. On the other hand, it is itself such a framework, self-consciously holding itself at a distance from (other) particular commitments. — t0m

But Romanticism was also literally the reaction to the Enlightenment. So it is post that science and metaphysical turn.

In the end, the claims of being fundamental are stronger for the Enlightenment view - the method of objective reasoning.

You can dispute that and we can weigh the evidence.

(See, the scientific method wins again as the best way to do actual philosophy.)

The words don't constrain my mind at all, that is a completely deterministic assumption. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well I said it was a hope. I could have said a vain hope. ;)

I can follow the words, but my mind follows the words due to habits it has produced. The constraints on my interpretation are these habits, they are not the words. — Metaphysician Undercover

But I can see when you are not following the intended meaning that the words were supposed to encode. The information is not being transmitted. You may be responding back in words, but they are just other kinds of noises that have habitual meaning within your constructed world.

So yes, you do have a capacity for misunderstanding. That proves something here. But not what you think.

The point I made was that words can only constrain an interpretation, they can't determine an interpretation. So all one can hope to transmit is the constraints, not the actual cargo or contents -
which would be the meaning, the semantics, here.

You are proving I am right by asserting your irreducible freedom to confuse or confound any message.

The best my words could do is constrain your state of mind in a suitable way so that you more or less shared my intended meaning. You would have the same point of view - down to the level where any differences didn't make a meaningful difference.

But my words can fail even to achieve that. You can categorise the incoming text as a bunch of internet static lacking any embedded signal. So I can't determine your state of interpretance. And much of the time, I can't even limit its free variety in any measurable way.

And that's fine. That is what semiotics explains.

The words themselves have absolutely no power over the human being. — Metaphysician Undercover

But that is obvious bullshit. Everyone grows up spouting precisely whatever is the common wisdom of their formative linguistic context.

You are telling me you are a rational soul with freewill. Fine. I've done anthropology. I can recognise a social belief system when I see one.

But direct realists would make an exception for veridical perception and say that it's one way information flow from the senses to the brain. — Marchesk

So how does that square with the neurological evidence? Why is the most bottom-up situation - when I'm driving through the rush hour on automatic pilot - also the least conscious perceptual state?

Are there any cognitive neuroscientists or psychologists who could be direct realists? The only one that springs to mind is James Gibson. Which is ironic as he both made some really important points about the embodied condition of the mind, but also wound up sounding like a crank in taking it to a "direct perception" extreme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance

But if perceive a tree looking like it might fall on my house, then I will take action. — Marchesk

So when you see the tree falling in your mind's eye, are you directly perceiving the future or merely perceiving your image of that future.

Are you actually clairvoyant or simply clever at forming anticipatory sensory images?

But then what does a dream tree represent? — Marchesk

A bit of neuroscience that may be pertinent. The brain’s hierarchy of processing is organised so information flows in both directions - bottom-up and top-down. Feed-forward and feedback.

In normal operation, it is going both ways at once to arrive at its settled "output" state. So higher level conceptions are framing lower level perceptions, while at the same time, those lower level perceptions are eliciting those higher level conceptions.

This is why perception seems so hard to understand. Folk want the information to flow in just one or other of these two ways. Idealism would see all awareness as the product of top-down (from the inside) projection. Realism would see it as instead bottom-up (all from the outside) sensory construction. But the neurological truth is that normal perception is these two information flows operating together in complementary fashion to produce our hybrid mental state - one that is neither idealist, nor realist, but some usefully balanced combo.

(One of the things to ask about DeepMind was where is its top-down feedback? It seems pretty mindless because it instead is all bottom-up feature extraction. It is not a sophisticated neural net model in the way of Grossberg's ART approach for instance, where this top-down/bottom-up logic is explicitly the thing.)

Anyway, dreams and other mental imagery are evidence of pure top-downness. The higher brain can project states of experience by driving patterns of activation all the way down to the primary visual cortex. Gate the usual flow of bottom-up sensory stimulation at the brainstem and still the brain has the memories to simply generate "a world".

The reverse can also apply. When driving a car, the actions can be so habitual that I can switch off at the higher conceptual/attentional level and motor along on automatic pilot. The information about the traffic around me, the bends in the road, the scenery flashing by, flows through bottom-up without being consciously perceived. Of course, it would be still accessible if I switched back on. But I can drive without crashing for considerable lengths of time - coming too and realising that nothing of the past minute or so has stuck. Any perception (and action) was all done without executive control.

So the "normal" form of perception can be dissociated. Just as the brain's neural archictecture would suggest. But also, the design is such that both directions of action are going to be in play when we are conscioiusly perceiving the world. So neither the idealist, nor the direct realist, has got it right in trying to insist the information flow should be going in just the one direction.

How could they be, if the being has to interpret the sign to determine the constraints required for interpretation? — Metaphysician Undercover

Are you confirming my point in your repeated failure to follow my meaning?

I’m posting you carefully worded thoughts. I’m hoping they might constrain your state of mind so that we share some point of view. Yet your responses come back as saying your understanding is at best vague or uncertain. Or actually you are in the habit of interpreting signals you can’t follow as “this just has to be wrong - it is not the formula of words that I am accustomed to responding to with the return signal of a thumb’s up,”

So definitely in verbal communication between humans,there are complex language games going on. You are forming your sense of you in terms of whatever you can recognise as “other”. Faced with a message that wants to constrain your understanding in a way not already your habit, you apply your own habit of finding anyway to deny the right of the words to have any force on the pattern of your thoughts. This becomes proof of both your own rational existence and your absolute freedom of will - inside the place that you call your mind.

I doubt therefore I am. The first principle of “philosophy”. :j

So sure. Signs can be intended to function as constraints, but they can regularly fail in that intended function. On their arrival in another mind, words can find that rival formulas of words have already taken up permanent residence. Aquinas might have got there first. And the resident interpretations don’t welcome the threatened intrusions.

All constraints on interpretation occur within the mind of the interpreter and this can be expressed as habit, or lack of habit. — Metaphysician Undercover

The mind is simply the fact of the process of interpretation. You don’t need a further kind of witnessing thing within which the interpretation is interpreted, or sensed, or perceived, or whatever other homuncular regress you want to leap into it.

Yes, interpretance also has variety as it must develop its stable habitual regularity. So the response to a signal may be vague or radically uncertain before an interpretation has become fixed as a habit. And human minds are complicated enough systems of interpretance that they seem a place where new acts of interpretation are always just “taking place within it”. There is hierarchical structure of that kind.

But the generalisation of semiosis, or the information theoretic perspective, is about boiling what is going on down to the barest possible notion of an interpretive relation. Our human-level notion of being a mind making meaning of a world stands at the other far extreme to the generalised or more fundamental notion here.

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