Uncertainty on the part of whom? — Mongrel

Depends. It could be a particular inquiring mind or it could simply be the world physically.

That would be the advantage of my semiotic approach. It applies the same way in either sphere.

The question is going to be ambiguous as you can talk about it either in terms of formal logic or physical causality. And then that leads to the issue of how much the two are really the same.

To jump then to what I think is the usual confusion is that most people want entailment to be a story of efficient causes. One particular thing causes that particular thing. This step dictates that step in mechanically necessary fashion.

But the larger view of deduction or causation is the holistic story where the process is one of constraints upon freedoms (or uncertainties). So the argument goes from the general to the particular, not the particular to the particular.

If Kermit is a frog, and all frogs are green, then Kermit is green by logical consequence. That is, the general constraint of "being a frog" is a limit on the colour some particular frog can be. But Kermit could be light green, forest green, aquamarine, and still meet the constraint. The actual shade of green becomes the residual freedom, the further fact about which the statements so far appear indifferent.

So reasoning deductively is about boxing in uncertainty. Information is added to limit the scope of the (Kantian) unknown. And even physical causality has this general nature - according to quantum physics now.

Practicality, social commitments, fears, inner tensions can hinder that impulse but psycho-behavioral coherence doesn't seem like something learnt. — aporiap

Well, given that we are cultural creatures, yes "psycho-behavioral coherence" is learnt behaviour. We do have to discover a balance in terms of what we are neuro-biologically and psycho-socially.

To be psychologically coherent with US culture is very different from being different with Indonesian culture, say. And even within these countries there are huge local variations in approved cultural style.

I think there's a disconnect between individualism and authenticity. One can value communal living or strongly identify with some over-arching socio-cultural label and work to align with the norms and pressures of that. I think -if that's what one feels aligned to- then that counts as living authentically. — aporiap

That's fine if "authentic" is defined at the sociocultural level.

So one could indeed be authentically "Bostonian" or "Javanese" because there is actually a cultural recipe made explicit in local art, folklore, language, etc.

It is hard to be authentic as an individual as what do you ground that on - your distinctive neuro-genetics?

So I would agree that "authenticity" only applies qua cultural norms. And "being true to yourself" has become just such a meme - but paradoxically, one pretty much impossible to live up to literally and thus the source of a lot of modern angst.

But that web doesn't necessarily have to align with what's valued by the person in the centre. And so while there might be a more stable; more comfortable way of being, it takes energy and emotional untangling to change that. I feel like that fear and reluctance and the like comes from that. — aporiap

I agree that change is difficult - when it is viewed as radical rather than incremental. But I don't think we have to say that it is fear that stands in the way of changing habits. Habits just are hard to change by definition. That is their natural psychological status.

So what changes habits is not overcoming fears but learning the skill of mindful attention. You have to recognise that what you are doing is a habit. Then you can figure out an incremental path that could achieve the learning of a change.

So what you are expressing is the standard propaganda of modern individualist culture - the "you can be anything you want" school of thought. And part of that standard message is "only your fears stand in your way".

Of course this feels true. It is natural to dislike uncertainty. But another thing you can learn in life is that you can set big goals and reach them with many small incremental steps. Or you can even learn an entrepreneurial mindset where you are willing to throw yourself off cliffs in expectation that you will land on your feet. I mean, this is what they teach at school these days, right?

So my argument here is with the rather inauthentic way that authenticity is portrayed in popular culture (and the Romantic and Existentialist philosophy it channels).

Authenticity - properly understood - is about achieving personal balance in the socio-cultural arenas we all have to play in.

But ultimately there can be more 'stable' states that one can be in. — aporiap

But again the question is whether the goal should be to transcend sociocultural limits or to completely commit to them?

So the changing course is one thing. The real question is what is the right course? And I don't see aiming for sociocultural transcendence is likely to be a recipe for personal stability. I'm not sure there is much psychological evidence for that. (Heck, I know that the opposite is true in fact.)

So I think of authenticity as being rooted in something more innate/biological. We tend towards stability. Stability involves inner coherence. Inner coherence for a human involves alignment of action with values or strongly-held beliefs. — aporiap

I agree that it is basic to brain architecture that brains want to discover a coherent understanding of the world. So yes, of course we want to pull everything into cognitive focus.

But then humans are socially-constructed animals and so coherence is about social and cultural coherence as well. That is the world we want to play a role in. So "authenticity" is primarily about our alignment with the values or strongly-held beliefs of our cultural millieu.

All that has changed is that people used to live narrow lives in traditional communities but now must do much more work to "figure it out for themselves".

And what do you do when modern society gives you thousands of ways of "being authentic"? :)

There're values, deeply held beliefs, feelings. Acting / living / habituating oneself in accord with those -and being unafraid to express one's 'creative unpredictability' — aporiap

But acting in this fashion is learnt behaviour. So "authenticity" is another social script. And wouldn't you say that a problem in modern society is the very pressure it creates to live up to rather extreme standards of individualism?

If you are urging the need to be "unafraid" of something, that should be your clue as to what most people might have a deep seated natural inclination to avoid doing - actually standing apart from the herd.

Your argument relies on a representationalist view of perception - one where the brain "displays data", leaving open the question of "to who?".

Any modern neurocognitive tale would instead want to take an ecological or ennactive approach where there is no such homuncular set-up. There is no entity experiencing the experience. There is just the process of experiencing via the process of entification. What "we" experience is a discrimination of a self from a world.

Well because the nervous system controls movement and bodily processes, and so does consciousness. — darthbarracuda

What? Do they take turns or something?

Certainly I am supposing the phenomenological experience of being a self of sorts. But I don't really have an ambitious metaphysical structure of the world. I find idealism to be theoretically satisfying but not entirely believable in some sense, while I see a real, external world as probably existing in some form or whatever. A giant abyss of darkness, with matter bouncing into matter on the macro-scale and random events happening on lower levels. But basically I hold a position I suspect most people do: the universe is a spatio-temporal container and we are one of its many contents. — darthbarracuda

So your ontic commitments amount to a bob each way. Cool. :-}

Well, I said that then existence of a nervous system would be a starter. — darthbarracuda

Yes. But why? What difference does that make?

And you of all people should know that "naturalism" is such a vague buzzword that it literally is meaningless outside of esoteric circles. — darthbarracuda

Did you mean outside philosophical circles? Being immanent and not transcendent, being holist and not atomist, seem to be fairly clearcut and familiar ontic commitments to me.

Where, according to your pan-semiotic theory, does qualitative experience reside? — darthbarracuda

Let's not jump ahead of the game. You have yet to understand why this question doesn't even make good sense in terms of the ontic commitments of pan-semiosis.

I am questioning your use of words like "my experience", or "experience residing". You are simply presuming the dualistic mind~world framing that becomes the locked cage of your thoughts.

My argument is that to start unpicking that paradigm, a good place to start is to seriously address the issue of what might make life and mind actually different in your scheme of things? As a biological process, where does any claimed divergence in terms of causality arise?

You seem at least persuaded consciousness is a biological phenomenon rather than a theistic one. So you should be happy enough that this question is legitimate even within your ontological framework.

So again, what's your own answer? If you understand life according to some notion of causality, is there some essential difference that marks it off from mind? And if so, what is it?

To simply repeat "subjectivity" is to retreat back into Cartesian dualism and abandon your tentative naturalism here. And even in the end to reject naturalism, you would first have to demonstrate understanding of its best case.

Rather I am saying that there is a distinct difference between the firing a C-fibres firing (an outdated theory nowadays but one that continues to be used out of tradition) and the experience of pain. Whatever is going on in the brain when I experience something is different than the experience itself.

The point being, however, is that a numerically-distinct experience can only be experienced by one subject at a time. A teleporter kills me because the copy of me at time t+1 is not identical to me at time t.

Only one mind can exist in a single perspective at a time, just as how only one object can exist in a single space-time location. Access to the mind would be akin to access of the exact same perspective as another person at the exact same time - impossible. My head cannot co-exist with your head at the same time. The perspective I have is unique. Of course, you can make perfect copies of my mental experience, just as you could make perfect copies of the perspective I inhabit at a certain time. But they would not be identical - it would not be true access, but rather access by "cheating". — darthbarracuda

Everything here you are arguing to be true per definition. You don't seem to realise that. So that is why I have tried to focus your attention on the issue of definitions. How could we more fruitfully frame the dichotomy so as to not talk past the differences that might actually make a difference?

I of course have repeatedly said that the way to make sense of mind~matter duality is to re-frame your inquiry as one based on the semiotic symbol~matter distinction instead. That then allows you to see how - causally - mind is just life. A more complex version of the same modelling relation. And even material existence can be accounted for pan-semiotically.

So I certainly have my own deflationary answer.

But not at the same time nor place, i.e. perspective. — darthbarracuda

That just ignores the thought experiment I described. I specified that the "perspectives" would indeed be exactly alike. I offered a "plausible" mechanism - you might be having the "real" experience, I might be hallucinating all its features. But that doesn't really matter as you already admit in the OP that your own perspective of the world could be an idealist illusion. So you can't both allow for such disembodiment in your own arguments, yet insist on the facticity of embodiment when it comes to mine.

Well, it is this kind of inconsistency that is indeed rife right from the OP.

So mind just "arises" out of structure/process? This doesn't explain anything really. Just seems all hand-wavy and actually kind of poetic. — darthbarracuda

That is not what I said, was it? I said rather than talking about the structure - the materials from which brains are composed - let's talk about the processes taking place, the dynamics of the organisation.

You would be accessing a duplicate copy of my brain state, not my brain state. — darthbarracuda

So what makes it yours?

Do you want to point to something material ... like nervous systems and physical locations? Or did you have in mind a soul?

Let's get to the bottom of what you actually think you are claiming. What does "access" even mean in your book?

If I were to suddenly flash into your exact state of mind for a moment - due to some extraordinary brain blurt, say - then how is that not accessing your state of mind?

What else would access look like according to you?

My mind does not seep into the world, or at least I don't think it does (re: externalism). It doesn't come out of my ears. Mind is the one thing that I am certain about having, yet I cannot locate it in the world I assume surrounds me. — darthbarracuda

So doesn't that make it more phenomenally accurate to say that the world seeps into your mind? And the same world seeps into my mind? So we both share access to the same world. Thus again, the critical issue is not that I can't access your mind. If our current accessing of the world happens to be indistinguishable at some instant, then we are of one mind.

So a better analogy would be that I have my own container filled with stuff only I have seen. You can take an x-ray and get a general idea of what is inside. But you cannot actually see the contents. Only I can see the contents, only I am allowed to. Nobody else is allowed inside. Mind is subjective. Like a Liebnizian monad. — darthbarracuda

It is this resort to physicalist conceptions of substance to explain states of mind that seems so muddled. You can't both describe the mind in substantial terms while simultaneously rejecting that same substantialist ontology.

Well, you can. It's called Cartesian dualism. :)

So it is an analogy. But a completely question-begging one.

If we look at the brain, we can presumably see the structure of fatty tissue and analyze the various synapses and whatnot going on. We can dig through the whole brain, but we'll never find mind. There's hair, skin, scalp, skull, brain tissue, then skull and scalp and skin and hair again. So where is the elusive mind? Where is it located? — darthbarracuda

Again you are thinking like a physicalist and trying to capture the essence of the mental.

You have to start thinking like biologist and see structures as processes. Mind is not located in stuff but in action and organisation.

I mean, you are familiar with Ryle's ghost in the machine category error argument? It's pretty slam dunk.

I don't think the explanatory gap shrinks more than it is just flat-out ignored. — darthbarracuda

Do I seem to ignore it? I'm showing you why its importance is greatly exaggerated because people like to bypass the question of whether there is any real metaphysical difference between life and mind.

Dualism depends on the presumption that animals can be dumb automata and humans are inhabited by a witnessing soul.

Great. Everyone loves an interesting hypothesis. Now support it by showing that life is not already mindful from the get-go in any useful definition of mindfulness. Where does this claimed metaphysical duality first arise in nature?

And the question can't even be addressed until you have meaningful definitions of both phenomena so that they may be compared and constrasted in counterfactual fashion. (That's the actual explanatory gap here.)

The point was that the reference point that we inhabit ourselves - mind - is inaccessible to anyone else but ourselves. It is our personal, private sphere. — darthbarracuda

It in fact seems an important point that consciousness has this character of being a highly particular point of view.

So you are presuming that makes it "inaccessible". But think it through.

Even for ourselves, to be in some particular brain state at this very moment is not to be in a near infinity of states we might also have been in. With a few trillion synapses, there's a lot of potential neural patterns. And yet one brain state is picked from that universe of possible states (or more accurately perhaps, all the other states are suppressed or inhibited by competitive feedback mechanisms).

So being highly located as a particular point of view, a particular mapping of a sensory and intentional state, is what makes even all the alternative states of mind we might have had now inaccessible to us (to go along with the homuncular language that is unfortunately conventional in these kinds of consciousness discussions).

Now following that same logic, I could conceivably be in exactly the same brain state as you right now. I could be accessing your private point of view by exactly mirroring your neural activity. Of course there are all sorts of practical difficulties to do with the fact that I would have to be hallucinating your surroundings and falsely remembering a past that is identical to yours. But given that you are easy going on conceivability, we can say that I could indeed physically access your subjective point of view in these exceptionally unlikely circumstances I've just outlined.

So again, a little biological realism can go a long way to changing the tenor of the questions. If we take a deflationary view of mind - treating it less like an ectoplasmic substance and more like a complex state of world mapping - while also giving rather more credit to the actual biological complexity of a brain with its capacity for picking out highly particular points of view, then the explanatory gap to be bridged should shrink rather a lot. Earlier concerns will start to look redundant as more meaningful questions are revealed.

I'm having a mental cramp over it. — Question

Just keep chanting "all branches of the wavefunction are equally real" until you are a paid up member of the cult of MWI. That way you will never have to trouble yourself with real metaphysics ever again.

As far as I can tell, anything lacking a nervous system cannot have a mind. — darthbarracuda

Well. And why is that? What is causally significant about a nervous system?

There must be something or else why else have you just singled it out?

So my thoughts on this are that, since mind appears to be so wholly different than ordinary material objects and processes..., — darthbarracuda

But now you are immediately back in the weeds because as soon as you mention nervous systems, you just as quickly abandon them to repeat the claim that the mind "appears wholly different" from "ordinary processes".

The nervous system is an "ordinary biological process", no? And yet you agree that nervous systems - on any reasonable view - are at least a necessary condition of phenomenal states.

So how is the nervous system different from other ordinary biological processes in your view? Surely the answer to that should go a long way to solving the dilemma you express?

Then there's also the question as to what purpose consciousness actually serves to an organism. Presumably everything necessary to survive could have been done without the use of subjectivity. — darthbarracuda

Why on earth would consciousness serve no purpose? Is that your own experience? You function just as well in a coma or deep sleep? Does paying attention rather than acting on automatic pilot not help you learn and remember?

A decisive, yet accidental, mutation in genetic information created an organism that accidentally happened to live alongside more simple organisms. — darthbarracuda

Again, where is there any scientific or commonsense evidence for these wild assertions? Doesn't everything already point to degrees of consciousness associated with complexity of nervous systems? Can't we tell that just from the way animals of different sized brains behave - their apparent liveliness?

Again, as I said at the outset, the only way we have judge the probability of consciousness in others is the degree to which they seem living. Is their behaviour complex and interesting?

The rise of complex, sentient creatures was entirely unnecessary and accidental, not inevitable, but happened anyway thanks to goldylocks luck. — darthbarracuda

More rambling unfounded assertion I am afraid.

As you may have noticed Occam's razor flies out the window when confronted with the infinite amount of realities in the world. Everettian QM is an elegant solution when confronted with apparent infinities, which supersedes Occam's razor. — Question

Well something sure flies out the window once you deny the measurements that might locate you in some actual world rather than leaving you to fluff about in a sea of infinite possibility.

The point of the OP was that the phenomenological experience of being a black box is in friction with a universe that is seemingly open to observation, and vice versa. — darthbarracuda

Fine. So now try to answer my question.

I'm drawing attention to a presumption your OP embodies. The way to understand it is by considering why you might seem to think that "merely being alive" does not result in phenomenology.

If you have a good causal grounds for making this kind of categorical distinction, then great, wheel it out.

So far as I know, the only reason why you would look conscious to me is that you would look alive to me. If you could explain why and how the two are in fact ontically disconnected in the fashion you appear to presume, then I might think the OP had a better actual point.

Mind is of life, but life is not mind. — darthbarracuda

OK. That's your claim. Now make sense of it causally. What is the mechanism that underpins your categorical distinction?

It's a question. Do you find mind problematic for physicalism but not life? If so, why exactly?

The point of the question is that the origin of life must mark some kind of causal divergence in your
notion of physicalism. So have you in fact understood the nature of that divergence in a way that says it doesn't also explain the divergence you claim as problematic - that of mind?

If you can quickly say why life and mind are different in ways that make sense, we're good. Otherwise your presumed dualism already founders.

The question - and I'm channelling the biologist Robert Rosen here - is whether or not this type of system has a rich enough 'entailment structure' to model the world in it's entirety. — StreetlightX

Yep. Rosen did a great job on highlighting the logical impossibility of "computing nature". And the holographic principle now shows that it is materially impractical as well. The speed of light creates absolute event horizon limits so the world itself doesn't even have the physical resources to nail down every event in super-deterministic fashion.

And then there is the flipside to the issue of modelling the world. It is not just that computation can't nail every event down - Rosen's issue of incommensurability. But instead, modelling is based on the principle of nailing down the very least amount of information possible. The aim of modelling is not to simulate the world - re-present it in some veridical sense - but to reduce an "understanding of the world" to its simplest possible collection of habits.

So less is more when it comes to modelling. And that is what the practice of creating physical laws follows. That is why the mechanics of Newton, and all the other varieties of mechanics that came after, feel so pragmatically right. The messy dynamical world can be reduced to the simplicity of timeless universals and particular acts of measurement. You measure how things begin, and then the equations predict how they will unwind forever.

So the current computational bandwagon - the digital physics - is wrong both in believing the entirety of the material world (including its fundamental indeterminism due to holographic limits on decoherence) is actually computable, and wrong also even in presuming this kind of veridical simulation would be "a good thing".

Instead, for modelling minds, it is clear that efficiency arises from the opposite of being "completely consciously aware of every detail of the world." Minds actually arise as a "orthogonal subjective dimension" because of an an ability to pretty much detach from such detail. And that detachment is based on the materiality of the world being reduced to a well-worn system of sign or habit.

Then this biosemiotic insight - this efficiency principle - can now be extended to the physical world in general. That is pan-semiotics. Quantum decoherence is an expression of the same thing. The world is seeking its simplest informational states. Classicality is what emerges as its simplest self-model, the one that minimises the messiness of the causal tale it is telling in terms of its own evolving temporal history.

So there is a duality that pervades all these levels of discussion - the matter~symbol distinction - for a reason. There is a single causal mechanism at work that links it all from quantum to mind.

But that mechanism is also irreducibly complex or triadic in involving the third thing of an axis of development - the vague~crisp distinction.

The matter~symbol distinction is pretty easy to understand. But the vague~crisp distinction is far subtler in being "beyond standard logic" as well as "beyond standard physics". :)

The OP displays a basic epistemic confusion which is indeed fairly widespread in physics since it has jumped sides and gone from a materialist ontology over to an informational ontology. This bedevils all "interpretations".

This passage from Howard Pattee is a typically lucid analysis of the epistemic issues - and an introduction into how a pan-semiotic metaphysics (one that sees physical existence in terms of matter AND symbol, nor matter OR symbol) is the path out of the maze.

This matter-symbol separation has been called the epistemic cut (e.g., Pauli, 1994). This is simply another statement of Newton’s categorical separation of laws and initial conditions.

Why is this fundamental in physics? As I stated earlier, the laws are universal and do not depend on the state of the observer (symmetry principles) while the initial conditions apply to the state of a particular system and the state of the observer that measures them.

What does calling the matter-symbol problem “epistemological” do for us? Epistemology by its very meaning presupposes a separation of the world into the knower and the known or the controller and the controlled. That is, if we can speak of knowledge about something, then the knowledge representation, the knowledge vehicle, cannot be in the same category of what it is about.

The dynamics of physical laws do not allow alternatives paths between states and therefore the concept of information, which is defined by the number of alternative states, does not apply to the laws themselves.

A measurement, in contrast, is an act of acquiring information about the state of a specific system. Two other explicit distinctions are that the microscopic laws are universal and reversible (time-symmetric) while measurement is local and irreversible.

There is still no question that the measuring device must obey the laws. Nevertheless, the results of measurement, the timeless semantic information, cannot be usefully described by these time-dependent reversible laws (e.g., von Neumann, 1955).

http://www.academia.edu/3144895/The_Necessity_of_Biosemiotics_Matter-Symbol_Complementarity

So the gist is that the "space" in which maths or computation takes place is physically real - in the sense that material spacetime is a generalised state of constraint in which all action is regulated to a Planckian degree of certainty ... except the kind of action which is informational, symbolic, syntactic, computational, etc.

Physics can describe every material characteristic of a symbol ... and none of its informational ones.

And in being thus an orthogonal kind of space to physical space, information is a proper further dimension of existence. It is part of the fundamental picture in the way quantum mechanics eventually stumbled upon with the irreducible issue of the Heisenberg cut or wavefunction collapse.

So the mistake is to try to resolve the irreducibility of information to physics by insisting "everything is computation", or alternatively, "everything is matter". Instead, the ontic solution is going to have to see both as being formally complementary aspects of existence.

Aristotle already got that by the way with his hylomorphic view of substance.

So nature keeps trying to tell us something. Duality is fundamentally necessary because there is nothing without a symmetry breaking. But then we keep looking dumbly at the fact of a world formed by symmetry breaking and trying to read off "the big symmetry" that therefore must lurk as the "the prime mover" at the edge of existence.

The logic of the principle of sufficient reason fools us into believing that only concrete beginnings can have concrete outcomes. Therefore if we see a broken symmetry, then this must point back to an equally physical (or informational) symmetry that got broke.

But that simple habit of thought - so useful in the everyday non-metaphysical sphere of causal reasoning - is what blinds almost all efforts at "interpretation".

The duality of existence will never make sense until your metaphysics includes a third developmental dimension by which beginnings are vague or fundamentally indeterministic.

Clinging onto a belief in the definiteness of beginnings, the concreteness of initial states, is just going to result in the usual infinite regress stories of creating gods or universal wavefunctions. Folk are very good at pushing the question they can't answer as far out of sight as possible.

So is there a difference between life and mind in your book? Is one "just physics" and the other "something else"? Or does life start the swerve away from the brutely material. Is it a good philosophical place to start looking for the answers you seek?

Under realist no-collapse quantum mechanics, measurements are no different from any other type of interaction - they are reversible. — tom

Well, at least they are reversible all the way back to the first instant of the Big Bang and any other such event horizon. :)

So you are appealing to an infinite regress and I guess some God eventually provides you with the measurement basis you need to define your universal wavefunction.

You can tell if certain physical laws are deterministic just by looking at them. In particular, if they are time-symmetric, then they are deterministic. — tom

Yep. Our physical laws are constructed by excluding change or spontaneity. That aspect of existence is instead the job of measurement. We are left to measure variables like initial conditions and plug them into the "computable" models.

So time symmetry in equations is the way we construct the no-change that a measurement can then meaningfully break.

Scientific modelling is based on this epistemic dichotomy. We work to separate the symmetries and the symmetry-breakings. The laws are the frozen view. The measurements are how the laws are animated.

Importantly, the measurement part of the deal is incomputable. One simply has to ... enter the picture as an "observer".

Realist non-collapse quantum mechanics is also time-reversible therefore deterministic. More than that, it predicts a stationary block-multiverse in which all instants and universes coexist. — tom

Fortunately the fact that the measurement part of the deal is informal and thus incomputable means we can dismiss such metaphysical flights of fancy. We already know the epistemology of the scientific method doesn't support it.

So the measurement issue in physics plays the same role as the axiom-forming issue in Godel's critique of mathematical formalism. In the end, the whole point about eternal symmetries is that as some stage they did get broken and there was something to actually talk about.

What does pragmatism have to say about two competing theories of equal plausibility and appeal? — darthbarracuda

If that is the case, then of course it doesn't matter which theory you employ. But is that a realistic scenario? How often would you get such perfect symmetry?

Of course, in arriving at theories, you almost always need two such rival approaches that capture the research communities imagination. Any well organised academic field always organises itself in this dialectical fashion. If it seems possible to be a lumper on some issue, then there will be a matching camp of splitters. This dichotomisation of the possibilities is the most efficient way of ensuring the whole of the explanation space is being canvased.

But then eventually, the aim is to find the optimal theory - usually the one that most efficiently connects a purpose to an outcome.

You say you are a realist about an external world if I remember correctly, whereas I am actually leaning towards straight-up idealism. Both are able to capture the same things. They are empirically equivalent. Realism, in my view, could be seen as a historical and biased prejudice. — darthbarracuda

Well, given that I'm a pragmatist, I'm neither a realist, nor an idealist.

Realism vs idealism is an expression of the dialectical dynamic in academia that I just spoke about. It is natural that these two extremes would be pushed in intellectual history so as to discover the most complete opposites of what might be the case.

But then the successful theory can't be some simplistic belief in one or the other - the reduction to a monism. Pragmatism is instead the acceptance that there is an irreducible triadism at work - a modelling relation. The world actually is divided not into world and mind, but world and sign. And that is the theory that best accounts for the empirical facts of human psychology.

...expecting a direct correlation between our conscious awareness of our actions or expecting to elaborate on physical processes beyond our conscious awareness is a too harsh of a demand to decide on (potential) moral competence. — Gooseone

I agree that freewill is really about moral competence or socially constructed habits of self-regulation.

Animals of course are perfectly good at making smart situational choices. They have a biological level of attentional deliberation that you could call ecologically competent.

But then humans have an overlay of language-enabled, socially-focused, deliberation where we are meant to be "moral agents". And this sets up the counterfactuality deemed to be at the heart of free-will.

We are conscious of the fact that we are indeed agents whose actions within social contexts have meanings that need to be judged. There is meant to be a balancing of self interest and collective interest. And so everything that we might think about doing is framed by the rational possibility of not in fact doing that. Our own actions are put at a distance from both ourselves, and our social contexts, to make it possible to then think about those actions in a properly weighted fashion.

So the focus on neurology, or habitual-level actions, is off the mark. All smart animals develop ecological competence. They get good at making decisions in an unselfconscious fashion that allows them to negotiate their worlds efficiently.

But humans - as sociocultural creatures - have the new thing of a culturally developed habit of self-regulation. We are trained to run all our action planning through a social filter. We have to insert the possibility of not acting in the way we are thinking of acting so as to be able to play the part of moral agents in our moral cultures.

The impulsive action deal is then about the fact that intelligent reflex-level motor planning takes about a fifth of a second to organise, while deliberative and attentive level motor planning takes more like half a second, and even longer.

So we can often preconsciously emit a response before we have time to consciously deliberate on a response.

If we are talking about tightly time-constrained action - as is usually the case in neurologically-focused "freewill" experiments - then the best that can be achieved in such circumstances is "free won't".

As the action centres of the brain brew up a quick automatic response that is ecologically competent, that causes the "broadcast" of an anticipatory sensory image - a feeling of what you are just about to do so that you will know it is you causing the sensory change about to happen. If you are going to push a button "at random", then it helps if the whole brain knows to expect fingers to be moving, buttons to be felt on finger-tips, etc, in a way that won't be sensorily confusing and alien as it happens.

And it is this anticipatory image that can be caught at the conscious attentive level as "the moment of decision". And if you set things up so that you want to block that rising impulse by a countering "don't", then that is another objective you can set yourself up primed for. You can halt an urge in its tracks, with enough prior preparation and careful attention.

So the point is that we are well set up for two levels of willing.

At the biological level, we are very good at automating smart action habits. That's how we can climb stairs or hit tennis balls with minimal attentive effort.

Then at the social level, we are very good at moral deliberation and viewing our actions through a self-regulatory lens. This is particularly so when we have a normal amount of time - seconds, hours, days - to make such behavioural choices.

But most "freewill" research gets these two levels of action mixed up, believing freewill is somehow an aspect of biological consciousness. So the research tries to atomise freewill by analysing human action on the smallest possible temporal grain. You get the vexed question of whether conscious deliberation caused the preconscious gestation of some actual decision to press a button, or whatever.

So the freewill debate is just another example of the atomising tendency in causal explanation. It manufactures its own paradoxes by trying to analyse deliberative choice as if it were reductionistly simple.

But even at the biological level in animals, the brain is set up to balance fast unthinking habits against slower attentive deliberation. And in humans, there is a further learnt habit of negotiating between the personal and the social in making decisions - which itself has to execute on timescales ranging from the impulsive to the "however long it takes to work through all the information and variables".

So your bottom line is scepticism about hallucinations and credulity about pixies. Cool.

The fact that I am not a drug taker, do not suffer from mental illness or have any other unusual ecperiences. — John

Thus proving my point. All one can do is constrain one's uncertainty as to what might be the explanation by adding further constraining information. You can work to rule out empirical possibilities in this kind of fashion.

And yet, one can indeed constrain one's uncertainty like this. It is reasonable. And also, as I say, it starts with the attempt to eliminate the most obvious explanations, not by jumping straight to the most incredible.

In any case you are simply prejudicially assuming that the default assumption should be hallucination; — John

Yes. Of course I start with the most reasonable belief. It would be crackpot to do anything else.

rather you who are being asked to provide an argument as to why I shouldn't trust my experience — John

But that reason has already been stipulated. All your friends joining you at the bottom of the garden can see the hedgehog, but are now looking at you wondering about your sanity as you chatter away to the little pixies only you think you see.

Or maybe they slipped you the drugs and are now having a good laugh. That would certainly be a more plausible explanation rather than that you were experiencing something real, wouldn't you say?

And if you don't, then explain just why.

what would it matter if I believed there were pixies there, — John

Err....

I'm baffled which stipulated condition you think rules out hallucinations here. Your point stretching makes it clear you don't have a good argument.

The dichotomy is not between knowledge and learning but hinges on the distinction between constraint and construction.

So in Pragmatic thinking, minds come to know the world by forward modelling - creating states of expectancy. And that Bayesian probabilistic reasoning then sets the mind up for discovering what is new, surprising, hoped for, or otherwise can count as a difference that makes a difference, a signal among the noise.

So the mind forms a state of constraint. It has a positive view about future probabilities. And that is why the improbable sticks out.

But then construction also plays its complementary role in building knowledge, or habits of interpretance. Every difference that makes a difference is a new fact. Facts add up. New habits of expectancy can be learnt as a result. Minds become more skilful at constraining their uncertainty about the course of the future and so more "knowledgable".

It is all part and parcel of a Pragmatic or enactive understanding of mentality.

Pragmatism also emphasises the role of abduction and evaluation in the business of coming to know the world. Embodiment is what is important.

Meno was about the ability to see the rightness of mathematical/logical truths. Deduction was a big thing when it was first a new trick. But it's just inverse induction. So again it is about understanding the constraints-based thinking that the laws of thought encode.

So the OP appears to set up a view of knowledge as a library-like accumulation of dead, disembodied, facts. I don't see the Meno even being about that. But anyway, if we are talking about the full psychological arc that is about coming to know the world in a useful fashion through bootstrapping reasoning, that just is standard issue pragmatism. (Look it up in a dictionary near you.)

You are avoiding answering my question. What here constitutes reasonable evidence of this not being a hallucination?

Why wouldn't you conclude that this "unknown reeason" was a hallucination? On what grounds are you dismissing the hypothesis exactly?

I would believe I was hallucinating. Now what would you believe as inference to the best explanation?

Up to you if you want to demonstrate it was a serious question.

what would you believe then? — John

What do you say I ought to believe?

So I can believe there are hedgehogs living at the bottom of my garden and you can believe there are pixies at the bottom of yours. But evidentially we are on an equal footing.

Hmmm.

but prior to that you have already decided to place your faith in one line of enquiry rather than another. — John

How is that the case when the inquiry is framed in terms of two strongly counterposed views? The "act of faith" involves two complementary rational possibilities. And that then is what guides the empirical inquiry.

As I keep saying, you don't have an inquiry if you can't define your counterfactuals. Most professions of "faith" turn out to be simply vague pronouncements that could never be either supported or dismissed with any confidence.

So I am not claiming my methodology, or enquiry, is superior to yours; the truth is I am claiming is that they are, although obviously not the same, equivalent in that they are both rational elaborations of groundless presuppositions. — John

And of course I don't accept your characterisation that presuppositions must be groundless. At the very least, they have to be crisply posed in counterfactual manner. And at worst, they will already be our best "intuitive" guesses.

So it comes down to the nature of the evidence - which in my case would be public, and in your case private. I know which I find superior.

OK, that's a fair enough answer, but we are still left with the fact that transcendence, or not, is a purely faith-based presumption either way. — John

But how is it strictly faith based in my case?

I have clearly framed the alternatives using metaphysical reasoning. I already accept that existence is teleological. And then from there, it is either going to be the case that "purpose" arises immanently/naturalistically, or it acts on us from without in some transcendent/supernatural sense.

So that next leads to deriving testable consequences. If those are the two possiblities, which appears to have the greater weight of evidence in its favour?

So really, faith or "free choice" has nothing to do with what I end up believing. That is just your wishful thinking.

The problem is, though, that in order to to do that we must already have a notion of what flourishing is, and that notion will always already be based on whether we believe in transcendence or not. Do you see then how it cannot be reduced to a merely pragmatic question? — John

Again, if you check out the real Peirce, you will see how this is handled by abduction. The necessity of starting with a guess is taken for granted. We don't have to start in certainty for certainty (as the systematic minimisation of doubt) to be what eventually develops.

The position you are expressing is that you find yourself simply believing something for no particular reason - you grew up in some cultural setting and discovered you have "a faith". And now you are unwilling to apply a method of questioning that might require you to believe anything different.

I'm not sure why your methodology is superior to mine. Surely I'm right to say I will accept the results of a properly-conducted, open-minded, inquiry rather than dogmatically stick to the first idea I discovered myself to be holding.

how are we to assess whether a belief contributes to flourishing unless we hold some ethical position which goes beyond pragmatism, about what exactly constitutes flourishing? — John

And my answer was that your presumption of transcendence - going beyond - is at odds with my presumption of ontological naturalism.

So my hypothesis - which I submit to the test of pragmatic reasoning - is that flourishing for us as natural beings would be primarily defined in terms of our biological and cultural evolution. There is no "higher purpose" as you - apparently with theistic ontic commitments - might believe. If a naturalist looks "higher", then that is when the cosmic purpose of generalised entropification comes into view.

And then I would also again remind you that you seem stuck with the populist Jamesian notion of pragmatist philosophy - the one that best fits the "American Dream" as a notion of flourishing. :)

I have always stresssed that I am talking about the original Peircean version - and perhaps should signal that by saying "Pragmaticism". But I try to avoid extra jargon as much as possible.

The big deal about Peircean Pragmaticism, as again I have endlessly said, is that it does end up being ontology as well as epistemology. It is a theory about how meaning or purpose in any guise develops immanently via self-organisation, even at a Cosmological level of being.

So Pragmaticism as epistemology leads to Semeiotics as ontology. Peirce was of course the last truly ambitious metaphysician.

I have asked apo what amounts to this question many times in many contexts and forms; and this is just where he always seems to fail to be able to respond. — John

That's a bit rich. You quoted what was a reply to your posts and then restated your own position. I was happy enough to leave it at that. What more was there to say if you didn't offer anything new?

Is truth simply equivalent to what is useful, or is usefulness the best method of obtaining truth in the correspondence sense of knowledge? If the latter, then pragmatism seems to become more of a methodology than a metaphysical theory of knowledge itself. — darthbarracuda

The advantage of pragmatism is that it makes purpose central to epistemology - there is always going to be a reason that gives some inquiry its meaning - but then doesn't presume the nature of that purpose.

So done right, it ought to alert you to the further issue of motivations. The philosophical illusion would be that inquiry is ever dispassionate - a naive pursuit of "truth".

So for instance, you are championing some particular purpose - soteriological release from rebirth. My pragmatic response is where is the evidence that this is any kind of ultimate truth? Why should we think it true in an ontological sense?

Pragmatism - done right - would separate the inquiry after truth from the issue of whose purpose is being served. It is thus as much about the self as the world. And it recognises the philosophical self is always going to be a biological and sociological artifact. Thus it stresses that truth finds its limits in a community of inquiring minds.

The issue is not how to defeat scepticism but how to use it usefully. Doubt is always possible, but doubt can always be minimised. And it is the possibility of having minimal doubt that then becomes your best ground for holding to a belief. It is scepticism which is the ultimate basis for any conviction.

And that is just to restate standard "scientific" reasoning. We advance an idea and then try hard to doubt it. If it survives the test, you're good.

The issue with philosophy of course is that there is a tendency to avoid putting ideas to real life tests. Many take philosophy to be a purely rational exercise, and so beyond the constraints of empiricism.

But then look at the actual value of pursuing scepticism in the philosophical tradition. What it has done is clarify epistemology. It in fact used to establish what we can actually hope to know, and how we should best go about doing that.

Where scepticism goes off the rails is in ontology. It might be entertaining to consider the unlikely - like that the world doesn't exist, it's all in the mind, or it's all demonic illusion. But it is not useful to pretend to believe the unlikely. You don't really doubt unless you are fully prepared to act on that doubt. At which point it has just turned into a belief.