We can obviously resist what a culture wants us to believe. — praxis

Roll that rock, Sisyphus. :)

I asked how it was relevant to any position I've advanced. You can't explain. Oddly that is tiresome.

Where's the problem with one thing's general being another's particular.

Put these various items in hierarchical order - cat, Fluffy, animal, persian, mammal. It's not hard is it?

Telling the truth now, eh? Get over yourself dude.

There's no hope because the way general beliefs about the mind are socially constructed are socially useful. You can't fight what culture wants you to believe as part of its own self-preserving mythology.

Talk about consciousness is a way to fix individual humans within some social state of conception. If we think of ourselves as freely choosing souls or rational beings, separate from our gross animal physicality (or Freudian unconscious), then that is exactly the myth by which we will learn - get into the habit of - acting. If you think about the nature of consciousness in the conventional fashion, then society is assured you will behave within the scope of that conventional construct.

Or your conception of consciousness demonstrably impotent.

But so what? If you think this somehow impacts on any position I've expressed, please explain why.

And does medicine treat that as spooky woo or does it search for the mechanistic explanation? Wouldn't you like the docs to be sure whether you happen to suffer curare muscular poisoning or a brain stem lesion?

Wow. This is news! Next you will be telling me you can think of things, but not do them.

Well my point was consciousness is a confused folk psychology term. And that is why neuroscience tries to sharpen things by tieing what we sort of mean in the standard socially constructed folk view to constructs, like attention and habit, which are defensible as the objects of laboratory research. When we talk about attention, there is an information processing argument to explain what that is and identify it with actual brain architecture.

That is why it is better, in my opinion.

As to habit being often conscious, that just confirms the haziness of consciousness as an explanatory construct. There is a good reason why the word is barely used in neuroscience research. You might as well be talking about souls or res cogitans.

Of course what gets done by habit can also be the subject of our attention and become reportable - fixed in working memory and contemplated as something that just happened. Yet that demonstrates the essential dissociation. We act fast and automatically as that is efficient when we know what we are doing. And then "consciousness" or attentional level reportability comes that split second after the fact. We can introspect and form a memory of that automatic action we just performed.

And as I have also explained, the actually important relation between attention and habit is that attention produces some general state of intentionality ahead of every moment of action. So it creates some general state of mental constraint - I want to get around this next corner in my car to reach my destination - and then all my well learnt driving habits can slot into place in automatic fashion.

I don't need to have reportable awareness of exactly what to do to coordinate my hand on the gear shift, my foot on the clutch. Fuck the detail, let it take care of itself. Achieving the goal, getting the next step to where I'm going, is what I need to focus on.

So the folk psychology term of consciousness has huge problems once you try to apply it in science. It confounds biology and sociology in believing things like introspection to be a biological function rather than a linguistically structured skill. It makes the big mistake of thinking awareness to be a running realtime representation of reality rather than having this complex internal temporal structure. It makes a big mistake in creating this homuncular self that is then witnessing the representation.

So consciousness - and all its crew: unconscious, non-conscious, subconscious, preconscious, semi-conscious - is a very familiar social construct that just ought to be junked so we can start over again on a better metaphysical and scientific basis.

But no hope of that of course.

For crying out loud, I was addressing a specific point - "van Inwagen suggests that an explanation for why human-oriented horrors exist is because there is no "cut-off" line to be drawn that isn't arbitrary."

My reply was your intuitions might make more sense if they applied the right statistical model.

We are used to thinking of statistical systems that are in fact bounded to create cut-off lines. We can adjust the parameters - control the degrees of freedom - so the system arrives at some mean equilibrium state. Fluctuations exist, but they are confined in Gaussian fashion to an actual averageness.

However this would conflict with a God that has a reconciliation plan. God basically wants to set the system up with a bunch of humans who enjoy complete and unbounded freewill. Good luck with that. But anyway, it then becomes inconsistent to start poking your fingers into this creation to cancel out the extreme horrors that will occur ... just by ordinary statistical variation.

If God wanted only a Gaussian level of nastiness, he should have added a governor device to the boundless freedom of the human imagination. But that would be a different story. Far more contrived, far less grand and universal.

As you say, Inwagen put those outside the bounds of his argument. So I'm not sure why you want to change the goal-posts.

However the same argument does apply to nature as a whole if it is meant to be a free system. If you regard meteorites as a horror, you should expect them to come raining down over all scales. Planet-crushers may be rare, but - barring particular Godly intervention - their size lacks an upper bound.

But Ingwagen is already accepting that God wants there to be freewill at that point. That must be some ultimate good. And so the price you pay for that is having humans making bad or mad choices.

Ingwagen says:

If God simply “canceled” all the horrors of this world by an endless series of miracles, he would thereby frustrate his own plan of reconciliation.

So once you accept this general plan of reconciliation, then the question of statistical means and expectable degrees of variation come into play.

The issue is what buttons does God leave himself to fiddle with to put some upper bound on horrors. Well, either he defeats himself and does away with freewill and its unbound growth, or he has to live with the fact that such a system will deliver horrors over all scales of human possibility.

I'm not entirely sure why van Inwagen thinks such a minimum line does not exist. — darthbarracuda

I would say van Inwagen could be justified like this.

Our initial intuition is that a line could be drawn accurately because there is some average degree of horror that would be consistent with God's grand plan of eventual reconciliation. Like a school room, you can tolerate a certain average degree of naughtiness, but then a clear line can be drawn that will have only the usual bell curve, or Gaussian, statistical error. There will be a line with a bit of noise, a bit of fuzz, yet it is constrained narrowly enough so there is as little variation as possible.

That is how we normally think about the statistics of systems ruled by some global constraint - ie: God as an expression of the central limit theorem in regard to the horrors of existence.

But also there is a separate and more fundamental pattern of nature - the powerlaw distribution. In a system that is characterised by free growth in contrasting directions, you get instead an outcome that has no actual mean. When accidents or errors happen, they happen evenly over all possible scales.

This is familiar from anything fractal or scalefree. There is no biggest or smallest fluctuation any more. Instead the only thing constant is the amount of power being expressed at every possible scale of being. So with a wave, instead of some comfortable average height, you get a ton more very small waves than you might expect, and also there seems no limit to how giant the occasional freak wave becomes. Or in human economic terms, there are billions of people living on $2 a day, yet also a few billionaires like Bill Gates whose income beats small nations. It is just a different statistical pattern for reasons that are easy enough to understand.

So applied to van Inwagen, if we look at humanity as this kind of self-organising growth story - two rival tendencies in interaction - then we can still get some kind of system minimum average in the weight of horror being created at every scale. But the scale itself has no top or bottom. It must be the case that you get a whole lot of surprisingly trivial stuff - all those paper cuts and net flames - and then no upper limit on the completely off the chart rape-mutilations. The upper bound horrors still are constrained - there is only enough system energy for the occasional horror to be delivered at that top end scale. Yet still, such horrors are to be expected - without that being a problem to the general claim that God's will is in effect.

So if humanity is imagined as a static situation - no growth - then it ought to conform to a Gaussian minimum of horror. But to the degree that humanity is an open system, freely growing, then it ought to conform to a powerlaw statistics on all things.

And of course, saintliness should show the same scalefree behaviour too. It would have its Bill Gates equivalents simply by the vagaries of chance.

There's still something odd about that zone in the middle. Any thoughts? — Srap Tasmaner

Did you mention that exactly halfway is where the rate of increase peaks, so is also exactly where the rate of decrease first starts?

The middle section of a logistic function only looks odd in the sense that we can't really see much going on in terms of big change, but a big causal-level change is happening. Naked growth is giving away to constrained growth.

And while models of growth within limits might make you think that one more, or one less, can't be a big deal, a more accurate modelling of a sand pile would probably be one that includes system correlations (the drag of global limits) from the start. So the kind of non-linearity that explains phase changes, like where water turns to ice once some threshold between molecular thermal jitter vs inter-molecular electrostatic forces is breached.

With the Sorites sand pile, we are basically asking when the emergent global property of "acting like a pile" appears. And that requires some dynamical definition. A pile should be some heap that has some characteristic global cohesion. Shaking it about or adding more stuff shouldn't change its basic mathematical form. It would still look the same in whatever critical way you think defines a pile.

So adding or subtracting a grain of sand to a box of sand doesn't really make any difference until the box is actually full. And that is what your intuition tells you when viewing a logistic growth function because you are not thinking about any critical shift in the rate you are able to add or subtract those grains.

But if you are instead thinking about a sand pile as having globally cohesive behaviour that emerges once there is a sufficient weight of inter-grain correlations to outweigh a matching weight of individual sand grain freedom, then single grains do start to make a clear difference at the critical threshold of any such phase change. There comes a point where the whole first started to be greater than its parts.

Actually, you said that intentionality is formed by "attentional" focus. — Metaphysician Undercover

Actually I said a state of intentionality.

And when I was talking about a generalised intent, I was explicit about that meaning a general constraint in regard to the particular actions to be supplied by rapid habit level machinery. The point being that intentionality of course cashes out as finality, and hence the causality of constraints.

You lost me with your claim that attention and consciousness, habit and non-conscious, cannot be related. Just too contrary.

The 'inside vs outside' or 'immanent vs transcendent' division doesn't have to be understood in terms of a sky-father, indeed in Platonist philosophy it generally was not understood in those terms at all. — Wayfarer

Yes, Platonism, or better yet Aristotelianism, is more sophisticated. Instead of just being anthropomorphic, the larger cause of being is assigned to top-down formal and final cause. Or what in the systems approach we would call constraints. Forms and purposes place limits on the scope of accidents.

But still the transcendent vs immanent distinction remains central. Platonism wanted to place the forms in a transcendent realm of ideas. Aristotle was striving after a more immanent naturalism. Modern holism would talk about form and telos - as the globalised constraints - being what evolve and so emerge to regulate their worlds in determinate fashion. Law grows as its shape is already logically necessary.

So Greek metaphysics was largely organic and immanent in spirit. The early dudes spoke about logos and flux, peras and apeiron - or regulating constraints and chaotic degrees of freedom. Being became determinate by potentiality becoming self-restricting or shaped by a common trajectory.

But then Plato stood apart in asserting that the forms of nature did not emerge in time, rather they stood apart as eternal. And somehow from there - Platonia - they managed to shape the Chora, the materiality that was somehow the receptacle or whatever could take such an impression.

That doesn't makes sense. Although it does start to make more sense once you start talking about emergent structure mathematically - as symmetry-breaking maths does. So that does cash out Platonic form in a self-organising way. Once you have constrained dimensionality to just three spatial dimensions, there are only a limited set of completely regular polygons or Platonic solids. It is just a timeless inevitability that cubes, tetrahedrons, etc, will emerge given a temporal process which limits the dimensionality of chaotic being to flat 3D space.

So we can work our way back to Plato. But only by showing how forms are emergent and therefore immanent rather than transcendent. They come after the fact as an actuality, even if they were already present latently at the beginning as an as yet unexpressed potentiality.

So it should be clear that it was you making the category error, not myself. You talked about how "intentionality", and "a generalised intent" forms from attention, but when I took exception to this, you insisted you were talking about particular intentions. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are still not getting it. I said the process of attending leads to a particular state of intention. So it brings intentionality - our general long-run state of orientation to the world - into some particular focused state. And then in doing that, the particular attentional/intentional state should be understood not as something already fleshed out and action specific, but instead a fixing of limits, a production of a state of generalised constraint on action.

From that generalised constraint on action, a habit level of performance can take over. Strict bounds have been set that allow the lower brain to fire off automatically and unthinkingly. Permission to fire has been granted the frontline troops. Attention then gets reserved for monitoring performance in terms of being there to pick up errors, problems, significance, or whatever else might prompt the need for a re-focusing of the prevailing state of intent.

I appreciate this is a dynamical and complex tale. But that is how it is. The general and the particular are always going together as this is a hierarchical systems view of causality.

Attentional level thought and intention forming is there to deal with time horizons of seconds to minutes. Habit level emitted responses are there to deal with action by the split second. So attention creates the mindset. Habit takes that as its context and does its rapid fire thing. Attention then kicks back in to refocus as much as seems necessary when habit generates an alert telling that it is either faced by the unexpected or it has come upon something already flagged as important.

All of that flying along and making sense of the world from a self-centred point of view is what we would call intentionality. It is not a function of the brain but a characteristic of life and mind.

However we can talk also of intentions - some focused mindset that exists at some point of time. That would be intentionality particularised.

No I don't see any problem here. It is quite clear that intention develops from the more general toward the more particular. I'm hungry, I intend to eat. I look in the fridge and see some ground beef, so I intend to eat hamburger. I decide to turn on the BBQ and intend to eat grilled hamburgers. Intention is always there, whether it's in the more general, or more particular form. — Metaphysician Undercover

But you yourself said you had to notice that you were hungry. So attending to a feeling was a first step. And from there flowed an action plan, an intention to actually do some particular thing. Choices can only form following attention. Although faced with the same situation often enough, those choices do become habits. I know its confusing.

I take it we are in agreement then. It is incorrect to say that intentionality, or generalized intent is formed from attention. It is correct to say that things like attention and habit are formed with intention. So when I find you speaking in this incorrect way in the future, you should not object when I correct you. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, I'm not yet getting you understand a word I say.

No the anti-thesis is that causes are necessarily contingent, only probabilities, contingent events that could have always been otherwise, that's all that is available to us. — Cavacava

Yes. Naturalism would oppose supernaturalism as immanence vs transcendence. So the first cause or prime mover would have to be understood as a self-organising tendency arising "within", instead of some externally imposed agency.

Thus it makes more sense to talk of a first accident rather than a first cause. Or in modern technical parlance, a first fluctuation that spontaneously broke a symmetry. An accident clicked and turned out to be the first step in a chain of events - like whatever random thing happened to tip a first domino and send the rest rattling flat.

This still leaves the question of creation rather unsolved. But it is a better place to start. Instead of needing the overkill of an all-powerful supernatural agency - a big daddy in the sky - it says the first cause was the very least of all things, a random fluctuation. Zero agency, zero identity. Any slight push of any kind could have done the trick because ... "things were poised".

Maybe the cat's tail brushed the waiting dominos. Maybe it was a puff of breeze or the rumble of traffic. The point is that it never mattered and is antithetical in being non-agential - merely the kind of accident that was inevitably going to happen.

I just wanted to mention that there is a body of scientific and philosophical opinion that attention and consciousness overlap, but are clearly dissociated. — mcdoodle

I would say this "dissociation" is a function of how we choose to approach the task of explanation. Talking about consciousness is really coming at things in terms of phenomenology - what seems reportable as the contents of experience. And then talking about attention (and habit) is talking at a mechanistic level about the brain mechanisms that might produce those "contents".

So what I would object to in Montemayor/Haladjian's approach (and Koch/Tsuchiya) is that they are trying to turn the quest for consciousness into another part of the brain mechanism story. They are collapsing the phenomenal level to the functional level. They are buying into the dumb representationalist idea that consciousness is indeed "an output", a display of data once all the information processing is done.

Now I've been defending the science that approaches the brain as an information processing device. It wants to pull the machine apart and identify the mechanisms that serve the functions.

So attention is the selective filter that enhances or amplifies or focuses states of information. Habit is the short-circuiting of this extended processing that instead sees fixed routines being emitted when triggered by simple cues. It is all very clunky, but it is also a way to attempt to tie the functional and the phenomenal levels of explanation together. We can point to some very concrete lab data we have constructed by jabbing electrodes in a kitten's head, and then say this was what was going on as the kitten seemed to be making a conscious discrimination in some behavioural task.

So this is the way mind science proceeds. It is forced into a dissociation where it tackles the brain with the baldest mechanical metaphors - the information processing paradigm - and then hopes to connect that back to a phenomenal account, the "first person" point of view.

Naive neuroscientists and philosophers of mind then start protesting that the science is revealing all this information processing machinery and yet not giving us the further thing of the display of the information processed. Therefore more machinery remains to be discovered. We need to have seperate neural mechanisms to do the processing and the displaying.

I am trying to speak instead to an organismic paradigm - one that is founded now in semiotics or a theory of meaning. Life and mind are understood in terms of a modelling relation. Consciousness is embodied or enactive in being in dynamical interaction with a world. Instead of being dualistically split in the usual way - treating the mind as both a phenomenal substance and a bunch of brain circuits at the same time - it is a holistic approach that treats everything as "sign processing". :)

So I do defend the scientific understanding that has resulted from 100 years of treating consciousness as elaborate information processing. Reductionism employing mechanical metaphors has produced a ton of concrete results that tell us "what is going on in the brain".

But then you have to understand the conceptual limitations built into those same results. And seeking to reduce consciousness to brain representations - claiming you have discovered a dissociation that needs to be corrected by further mechanistic reduction - is the opposite of what you want to be doing.

So I am instead with the semiotic camp who seek to shift from an information processing paradigm to a sign processing paradigm.

I had a quick look at Montemayor/Haladjian's stuff and it felt like something out of the 1970s. I saw Haladjian is indeed a recent student of Zenon Pylyshyn and that made me smile, Pylyshyn being a famous information processing hardliner during the mental imagery war of the late 1970s.

If I see the apple as a rigid, defined object and not as a swirling whirlwind of indistinguishable matter, I am better suited for the world. My point being: (1) I agree with you that reality as we observe it is reducible to what we can agree upon, and (2) there is no reason to believe that the data we have in our heads offers an accurate depiction of the world. — Hanover

This is the way to look at it. It is the rational argument as to why our experience of reality would be functionally limited, not the thing in itself.

And also that very way of looking at it says there has to be a reality for us to be having our pragmatically simplified view. So it is an argument for indirect realism and not solipsistic idealism.

Another way to phrase it is that we are attempting to look through the flux - the blooming, buzzing, confusion - to see the Platonic forms. The tree, the apple, the whatever substantial entity we claim to apprehend, is ourselves viewing our ideas having managed to filter away all the clutter and detail that seems to stand in the way of a sharp act of object recognition.

So we can apprehend the buzzing confusion. But always we are striving to go beyond the unexamined reality of a sensory flux to arrive in a modelled realm of just us and our Platonically sharp objects of perception.

So you are meaning by semi conscious to be asleep and not meaning an automatic or habitual level of responding? What gives?

In case you didn't notice, I'm talking about the general thing, intention, not particular intentions. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes but I was talking about intentions. And it was my usage you were attacking. If you want to talk about intentionality, then that is a different subject. Making the point that life and mind are characterised by intentionality is just making the point that they are telic being. And that is explained by a systems understanding.

In regards to habit or attention, they are both intentional or goal directed in a general sense. One is just intentions learnt and fixed while the other is the forming and particularisation of intentions.

Of course I cannot really name the general intention from which the particulars are derived, or else it would no longer be general, it would be something specific, named. But I can describe them in general ways, like the feelings of anxiety, anticipation, discomfort, etc., which all seem to exist in forms which attract my attention. — Metaphysician Undercover

So something vague like a discomfort leads to the intention to look closer. And yet something vague like a discomfort attracts your attention so that you might develop a suitable intention.

Hmm. See your problem?

Obviously my point is that brains do have the general intent of focusing on what needs attention. That is why some very complicated machinery exists to make that switch if your thoughts need interrupting.

And then shifting the spotlight - to use the popular metaphor - allows the nagging discomfort to develop into some fully consider intention. An act or action plan that would be the right response. You find your arse itches and so you scratch.

So the facts you think significant are ones that are already accommodated.

Inasmuch as attention has an intentional (voluntary, noticeable, controllable, conscious) aspect, and an unintentional (involuntary, unnoticeable, uncontrollable, semi-conscious) aspect, it is unsuitable even as a metaphor for consciousness. It could just as easily serve as a metaphor for semi-consciousness. — Galuchat

Good thing that's just your misrepresentation then. I have stressed the complementary way that habit level and attentional level processing support each other.

Habit is there to do everything that needs to done without demanding thought. If you have already learnt the right responses (learning being what attention is for) then you can just act quickly with minimal need for analysis.

Attention is then where things get escalated because more thought and focus is needed.

So the fact that there has to be switching machinery that either gates or promotes events to the higher level is what you would expect. Your brain would not be much use if it couldn't flip between the need to keep focused on its own internal plans in the face of distractions, yet also then stop to focus on distractions when they might actually matter.

It's funny to hear you bringing up semi consciousness again as if it is a term with any relevance here. But maybe you can explain what you mean in neuro terms rather than as some handwaving metaphor, like a volume button being turned down low or something.

For the record, you are just misrepresenting my position.

Talk about attention is talk about a general faculty. Talk about intentions is talk about particular states.

Now I am trying to get away from such a mundanely mechanical framing of the debate myself. But if we have to talk in those terms, then you can see how you are confusing apples and oranges. Or the general and the particular.

Intentions have to form via attentional mechanism. And then having formed as particular states of attention, they can act as constraints on further attentional acts.

But also, this attentional machinery is design to allow those intended acts of attention to be interrupted. You might be intending to open the door and noticing odd noises coming from behind, be rapidly caused to halt and form some new state of intention.

So you've got yourself into some pointless spiral in trying to prove attentional machinery is under voluntary control and never subject to involuntary trigger. But that machinery obviously has to switch efficiently between two modes of attending - either pursuing a plan or getting a new plan started.

You can "rule" whatever you want, in any way you want, so what? Or why should anyone pay any attention? Ruling doesn't make something so. — tim wood

Are you that hard of understanding? It is the way I've ruled reality in that I'm defending. So yes, you could rule it in "any old way" and so what. But I am talking about a particular way. And you need to focus your response on that.

What have you got against the something, that I'm calling reality? — tim wood

That you are calling it reality is the point. Others (idealists) would call it experience. I am arguing the third epistemic position of pragmatism which steps back to speak explicitly of a modelling relation.

One of the critical points that emerges from pragmatism is the realisation that it is a useful thing - not a problem - that the reality of our experience is never the thing in itself. That is why a model works - by not being the thing itself.

But so far you have shown a tin ear to these epistemology 101 points.

The point between us is simply, and irreducibly, that I say there's something that corresponds to the tree, and you say there is not. If this isn't your position. maybe best to clarify here.

That is, reality, yes or no. — tim wood

Why would I go in for your idiotic simplicities? You don't even seem to realise that you just talked about a correspondence relationship between an abstraction - this Platonic tree that is the "real exemplar" - and some discriminative act, the forming of a sensory impression guided by such a remembered notion.

So you are telling me you have a general idea of a tree, a particular image of a tree, and that there is also a "real tree". But you are failing to tell me how you know about this "real tree" apart from there being your experience of some idea-conforming state of impression.

As I quite reasonably point out, this ain't a problem when such a belief is understood to rely on particular characteristics of the said experience - such as its recalcitrant nature. But still, your beliefs about a tree are not the same as some imagined unemboddied God's eye view of existence. To the degree that you assert naive realism, you will always be wrong.

You are making a category error in trying to make attention the efficient cause of a final cause.

I agree, it is hard to avoid talking like this. But I am trying to argue the more subtle systems view where what I mean by attention is precisely the development of some fleeting brain-wide state of constraint.

A clear intention comes to be in focus because all the background chatter of the brain is being suppressed or restrained. The intent thus pops into view as the efficient cause (supposedly) of the voluntary or controlled behaviour that ensues. And the effort being talked about is the effort of repressing all the possibilities that might have been to allow some particular "best fit" state of mind become fully actualised.

It makes no sense in the systems view to wear yourself out trying to isolate a first cause in such a model of neural action. If we say attention causes a state of intention, we don't mean that in a mechanical sense of there being an agent that has to pick a choice.

Instead, arriving at a state of attentional focus is a process of evolving development. It begins with the vague potential of the many different attentional outcomes that could be the case, and then arrives eventually - half a second later - at the outcome, the state of intentionality, which appears to have the best fit for whatever are the challenges or opportunities of the moment.

So as I say, you are analysing this mechanically - A leads to B leads to C. I am talking about an organic logic where a heap of potential self-organises through competition to arrive at a best adapted outcome. And in information processing terms, much of that effort goes into inhibiting or constraining all the possible neural activity that would otherwise muddy the water.

One striking finding was that if you measure the electrophysiological activity in the limbs of expert athletes, there is very little noise. Actions are being controlled with the least effort, the most efficient set of commands to the muscles. While a novice by contrast is sending a confused blast of often contrary messages to those same muscles - a reason why their motion is choppy and inaccurate.

So to control interactions with the world, we do have to learn what to do. But mostly that becomes learning to suppress the randomness of all the things we shouldn't do.

And this is the organic constraints-based model. A system is some collection of degrees of freedom which can be organised by limiting those degrees of freedom. The result is not complete suppression of error (as reflected in the OP's concern about Freudian slips), but instead its minimisation to an average that is tolerable - pragmatically good enough to serve a purpose.

The point of the OP was this suspicion that every action has a cause and so Freudian slips have to be secretly intentional. But an organic or Aristotelean view of causality says slips can be just slips. Accidents are also still part of the game. In a sense, you are always thinking about many other things at once, its just that you are also for the minute trying to suppress them so as to be left thinking about just the one thing.

Having a mind that rambles associatively comes for free. That is the brain's accumulated degrees of freedom expressing themselves. You can call it the unconscious if you like. But it is more about what we are putting an effort into suppressing just for an instant so as to be matchingly attentive to whatever wins out as that part of current experience we can least afford to restrict to an automatic response.

Well, on your account these are realities - which you have ruled out. In particular, you (apparently) think they persist across time, but what makes you think so? — tim wood

Again, I've ruled reality in by making it a testable belief. The recalcitrant nature of some of my experience is the evidence supporting that interpretation. And by the same token, the existence of "my self" as the perceiver/experiencer/interpreter arises as that part of experience which is other to this "real world".

So I am speaking as a pragmatist and not an idealist. The practical psychological and epistemic question I am answering is how we can rightfully put limits on doubt and so have grounds to believe.

My point here is simply that to insist there's no access to reality is to be entangled with a set of arcane presuppositions that predate Kant.

I'd like to sharpen this a bit: my position is that there is a reality that we perceive, that grounds our perception, such that we can know the reality and make true statements about it. — tim wood

The big question is how the mind - as a model of reality - can have access to reality. And the answer is indirectly.

Your position seems to be that somewhere along the line, there needs to be actual direct contact with something. So it can't be interpretation all the way down. Knowledge has to be founded on actual nakedly apprehended fact.

Hence you have adopted the position of insisting that look closely enough and we will find ourselves able to see those elements of reality upon which a whole edifice of subsequent interpretation then depends.

Yet psychological science has put awareness under the microscope like this and shown that it can't be the case. The modelling of reality only kicks in once an epistemic cut (cf: Howard Pattee) has formed to allow the translation (or interpretation) of physical energies into informational inputs.

There cannot be a model of the world until there is a definite epistemic separation from the world being modelled. So the indirectness is built in as the necessary starting point of perception and cognition. The mind arises where the world is no longer in control of activity by the directness of its physical energies. Instead, the mind - as a modelling relation - is able to start to choose how it reads those physical energies as the sign of something. The sign of a "reality" as usefully conceived.

Psychological science tells us this. Red and green are vivid signals - understood as the very opposite of each other - yet the wavelengths they represent are fractionally different in energy. Sounds are only air pressure variations, but we hear noise. Molecules are shapes that can chemically bind, yet we smell an odour.

Every time we look at sensory processes, there is a translation of physical energies into meaningful signals by a framework of interpretance. And what we experience is nothing like how - as now discovered through scientific models - we imagine the real world to physically be.

So sensation itself is as indirect as everything that follows. The foundation of awareness is in fact the trick of disconnection that allows a process of world-modelling mediated by its own system of signs.

Your position looks to depend on some "proper connection" between our signs of reality and reality as the thing in itself. Somehow, we must read reality directly down there at the foundational level. Our signs, our bits of information, must be "true" and not merely learnt and developed convention - habits of interpretance.

Again, my pragmatic modelling relations approach - which is simple psychological science - makes the point that modelling can't even start unless there is a cut off imposed on the real physical energy of the world. The only way mind can arise is by shutting out the world so it can form its own regulated system of sign which permits it to insert its own self-interested point of view into the energetic flows of that reality.

As usual, what you look to be making out to be a bug is the feature. We can only be in control of reality to the extent we have constrained it as a habit of interpretation. What is foundational is the epistemic cut that puts us on the informational side of a modelling relationship with a "real" flux of material dynamics or physical energies.

I don't see how the unconscious could be linguistically structured. — Metaphysician Undercover

I was talking about using the attention~habit distinction instead of the conscious~unconscious one. And then - as we mostly study the neuro-architecture of that by jabbing electrodes into the skulls of laboratory animals - I added the rider that humans would of course have the usual linguistically structured overlay over both of those levels of processing.

Emotions and feelings arise from the unconscious which we cannot put words to. — Metaphysician Undercover

Huh? People are always talking about feeling scared, happy, hungry, whatever.

But yes, "emotional" valuation does take place at a rapid and instinctual level of genetically-formed habit. It is automatic and so "arises".

Yet it is also true that the evolution of the higher brain sees all the lower level habitual responding getting mapped to places in the prefrontal and cingular cortex so that they can enter into attentional level responding, become part of working memory planning. Feelings of pain, for instance, are mapped down in the brainstem. But then re-mapped in the anterior cingulate where they can then be either amplified or over-ridden, depending on the broader choices a smart animal has to make.

The higher brain can remember the pain - make it a nagging anxiety. Or it can shut down the feelings of pain if the animal is in a fight or flight situation and has to focus on executing some more complex plan of action.

So feelings can be "conscious" or "unconscious". Sometimes we can be feeling things - like that dull pain in your back while sat in your chair - without really being aware of them. We have a habitual level response but it isn't deemed significant enough to be allowed to break through ... until someone mentions it and you go looking to see if it's there. Then vice versa, a bee stings your toe and that breaks through your concentration, suppressing whatever other thoughts of urgent business that you had at that moment.

This is the sophisticated way brains are organised. They are designed to divide their effort two ways - either to deal with as much as possible with the least effort and analysis, or decide something is so significant that it needs full attentional analysis. And all day they do both things at the same time.

Saying some aspect of mentality is unconscious, semi-conscious, or whatever, explains nothing. It is saying well whatever consciousness is, there is this other stuff I rely on that isn't consciousness.

But attention and habit makes sense as two poles of a dichotomous brain organisation. We can talk about what exactly the brain is doing with each, and also why that seems the logical way for brains to navigate the dynamic complexity of the world.

Furthermore, when we think using words it is always a conscious effort. If we try to put words to the subconscious, in an effort to structure it, we must bring it into the conscious mind, so that it is no longer the subconscious which is being structured. — Metaphysician Undercover

Or rather it is like an iceberg. The whole brain is involved and the effort is divided between habit and attention. Attention forms a generalised intent (that being the novel part), habit puts that into words (that being routine skill), and then attention can sign off on the final utterance - or at least come up with hasty self-correction having spotted something wrong with the way the words just came out.

You are thinking of conscious and unconscious as two walled off kinds of mind. I am stressing their active interconnection as two complementary modes of processing - one doing the most work for the least effort, the other putting in the most effort only where it is really necessary.

...and have no access to anything but interpretation... — tim wood

My point is that you in fact have access to two things - your general theory and your particular acts of measurement. So this allows for a process of triangulation.

You have this general idea that there is a reality out there, of which a tree is one of its material objects. Such a theory of your experience then has natural consequences that can be deduced and tested. Real objects should endure in our experience even if we might wish their facts to be otherwise. And so I can test this theory about the reality of the tree by trying to walk through it, or whatever. The extent to which my beliefs are unchanged as the result of such actions rightfully goes to the certainty of my original interpretation. I have evidence of an internal model consistency even if I don't have direct experience of the world.

You can't know. But it is a hypothesis you can adopt and test.

I didn't say it was a textbook. But in fact it was being used as an
introductory text for neuroscience at my local medical school. And it did focus on the neural architecture of automatic and attentional processing.

Why be such a dick?

As is always the case in such philosophical quandaries, it is fruitless trying to achieve the grounding of an external perspective. The only epistemic route is internalism. That is, we are free to form our axioms, hypotheses, or other statements of certainty. Then we see how they fare in practice. We observe and measure to reduce our uncertainty about those grounding principles.

So normativity is fine as expressing what some community of thinkers has come to agree over time. The norm works to the degree that the community can measure or care. They find it possible to doubt in principle but not doubt in their hearts.

Truth is a measurable or quantified lack of uncertainty about some claim made in a spirit of complete certainty. You can't escape knowledge internality. But you sure as heck can get rigorous about the internal structure of belief systems.

PMed.

There you go. It was fact free waffle.

So speaking neurological, what actually is going on when you are conscious vs "semi-conscious"? What's your model in terms of actual brain processes?

That's the advantage of talking instead about attention and habit. We know how both work and how they functionally relate. It's not handwaving.

That is a tree." What does "that" refer to? Do you begin to see the difficulty? If it's another interpretation, then you never escape from an endless chain of interpretation. On the other hand, if there is something about the tree that is not merely interpreted by you, then you have a grasp of reality not interpreted. — timw

It is interpretation all the way down. But also, part of what we then experience is the recalcitrant nature of our experiences. So every time we open our eyes, the tree is still there. That is extra information we can interpret - especially if we happen to wake up and realise we were dreaming. Reality becomes defined by having the particular further property of seeming to be unquestionable.

Another commonsense point is that interpretation also bottoms out of its own accord. Eventually we lose interest as we feel that further inquiry doesn't matter. That tree could be a fake, a phantom, something other than what it presents. But if it is just part of the scenery, we weren't planning to turn it into a boat or throw it on the fire, then who cares?

So while we might never know the world in some direct and complete sense, it doesn't matter. Our habits of interpretation only need to be good enough for the purposes we have. Our lack of real concern about the nature of reality will take over long before we get that far down a chain of increasingly refined interpretance.

Wiki is useful on symbolic interactionism and its attempts to place itself - pragmatically - in the middle of the usual realist vs idealist debates.

This viewpoint sees people as active in shaping their world, rather than as entities who are acted upon by society (Herman and Reynolds, 1994). With symbolic interactionism, reality is seen as social, developed interaction with others.

Most symbolic interactionists believe a physical reality does indeed exist by an individual's social definitions, and that social definitions do develop in part or relation to something "real". People thus do not respond to this reality directly, but rather to the social understanding of reality; i.e., they respond to this reality indirectly through a kind of filter which consists of individuals' different perspectives.

This means that humans exist not in the physical space composed of realities, but in the "world" composed only of "objects". According to Blumer, the "objects" can be divided into three types: physical objects, social objects, and abstract objects.

Both individuals and society cannot be separated far from each other for two reasons. One, being that they are both created through social interaction, and two, one cannot be understood without the other. Behavior is not defined by forces from the environment or inner forces such as drives, or instincts, but rather by a reflective, socially understood meaning of both the internal and external incentives that are currently presented.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_interactionism

So you've got the best of both worlds. Humans are neither materialistic automatons programmed by social memes, nor is social information some sort of non-existent abstracta. Instead you have the fruitful co-operativity of individual psychologies being shaped by useful cultural habits developed over the long-run. Human intellect is liberated ... but in ways that are imbuded with the pursuit of general social goals.

This is why modern life is strange. Hey, we all could be anything we like - astronaut, president, bum living under a bridge. But then also we have to be that one thing pretty much. We get both huge choice and the necessity of binding ourselves to that choice.

Freedom and constraint go hand in hand. The modern socially constructed mind takes that claimed paradox to the extreme.

I was asking if society is constructed or discovered.

I think your position is that everything is constructed, except some things are mathematically inevitable.. so not constructed. Is your view contradictory? — Mongrel

Dude. So many ways to misconstrue anything I say. You keep demonstrating the grip that a socially constructed worldview has on folk's thinking.

You are talking standard reductionist metaphysics and so it has to either/or, and to suggest both implies contradiction and paradox. Instant logical fail. Go to jail and don't pass go.

But you know that the essence of holism or systems causality is about the complementary duality of two kinds of causes in interaction - upward construction vs downward constraint. So anything real is a product of both efficient and final cause. Or to put it another way, material and formal cause.

So in my view - which is pretty much ordinary social science - society is an organismic system. It is a form of holistic order that can learn and adapt. It is rightfully a higher kind of "mind" - mind being put in quotes to signal we are talking of semiotics or a generalised theory of mindfulness, and not wanting to get tied up in the usual old hat Cartesian notion of mind as a soul-stuff or sentient substance.

Social constructionism (or symbolic interactionism) is then getting into the tricky semiotic detail of how this works - again in a way that can be generalised from the social to the biological and even perhaps the physical.

I posted on the triadic nature of sign relations. And I made the point that when it comes to the "constructing", what is involved is the construction of habits of conceptual constraint within a community of minds. Through language, bit by bit, ideas can be built inside everyone's heads. Each new generation can become soaked in the schemas that best make sense of their worlds - or best make sense in a way that works to suit the purposes of the larger social organism.

It is all perfectly obvious. It is just that most people also object to this analysis of the process. An irony of the modern condition is that it is basic to the shared conceptual ideology that we should all be free and individual. So social construction is a really bad thing in that light - a threat to the supposed primacy of the self.

And that enlightenment/romantic model of humanity has of course taken hold because of its very effectiveness in achieving social goals. Fooling folk about the reality of their socially constructed state has had immense payback for the modern western techno power culture that has adopted it as its umwelt or unquestioned world model.

Now you are trying to force what I say into your traditional socially constructed reference frame. (Not necessarily a wrong thing, but definitely an example of social construction at work.)

So in my systems science/holistic/pansemiotic ontology (definitely socially constructed), I see abstracta as being concretely real ... in some useful sense. Just as I see concretely material stuff - like atoms or forces - as really convenient fictions, ideas we have about a reality formed of constituent objects.

So when a physicist goes looking for the fundamental material stuff of which everything is made, it has a way of evaporating. It turns out to be an over-concrete idea of what reality really is.

And likewise, finality really turns out to be critical to accounting for reality. Thermodynamics is not just some random idea. There really are mathematically-inevitable constraints that must emerge for anything to actually be.

So yes, it is conventional to see a sharp distinction between the real material world and the realm of human constructed notions - ideas about universities, hedgehog houses or whatever. This is what social construction has come to mean in PoMo especially. It is the basis of postmodernist relativity.

But that is why I prefer semiotic approaches that see reality as a co-construction of information and energy. That replaces the dichotomy of mind and matter with something more ontically general.