:100:

As Kant said about the noumenal world (which is the same as the mind-independent world), nothing can be said about its objects except that they exist.

But when we say of the independent objects, that they exist, we use "exist" as a property. And, we've already said, that objects are a property of "the independent world". So we have already a double layer of predication. From this perspective, we've made the predicate "objects", into a subject and we proceed with another layer of predication, concerning the objects. But we are restricted in what we can say about "the objects" by the first premise, already assumed, that these are property of a further object, the world.

The issue is that the first object "the independent world", as a united thing, is not a justifiable assumption or conclusion. This assumption cannot be made as a premise as it is not at all supported by empirical observations, and we do not have the premises required to conclude logically that there is a united object which we can call "the independent world". So there is absolutely no support for "the independent world".

By Occam's razor, we cut this first principle, "the independent world", and we start with what sensation and intuition gives us, individual objects. In Platonic terms, the first principle is "the Many" instead of "the One", then we can proceed to enquire as to what makes an individual object an individual object, in a way which was exemplified by Aristotle, and from this enquiry we can derive principles to justify the existence of "the One", as an individual, rather than as a whole.

In this way we can proceed toward an understanding of what it means to "exist". The quoted passage says that all we can say of objects is that "they exist", but this is rather insignificant if we do not know the conditions for existence. So we dismiss the united object, whatever you call it, "the independent word", or "the universe", as an unsound premise which will only mislead, and ask what does it mean to be one of the many independent objects, thus justifying the concept of "existence".

the Great Burgermeister — Janus

That got a chuckle outta me, I must say. And you know me.....everything philosophical worth repeating originated in Königsberg.

.....it seems this is the crux of the issue..... — Janus

Agreed, in principle. Whatever the name of the issue, in the form of various and sundry -ism’s, and thereafter the juxtaposition of any single -ism with its dialectical negation, or, as you say....its polemic..... the crux is always the instigation of it, which is, of course, us. We are the crux, insofar as nothing, other than sheer accident, ever happens to or because of us that isn’t determined by us.

Which is precisely the exposition given by : “What the observer brings *is* the picture”.

if we say it is "something" that defies all categorization because it is "beyond" all our categories of judgement and modes of intuition then we would not be saying much, if anything. — Janus

....just like that.

As Kant said about the noumenal world (which is the same as the mind-independent world), nothing can be said about its objects except that they exist.

Is there any way at all, to reconcile the glaring contradiction in that statement?

I wanted to bring this up the other day, but thought better of it, cuz it was so obvious to me it made me think I missed something, even while in tune with the rest of the passage. But now that it’s been presented again, as if to reiterate a point, its weight has doubled.

Forgive the monkey wrench, but, you know......inquiring minds.....

Is there any way at all, to reconcile the glaring contradiction in that statement? — Mww

I'll quote this passage in full to convey what Pinter is getting at:

In the absence of features of any kind, it is impossible to describe individual objects and characterize them. What can be done instead is to compare things with one another and define them in terms of each other. For example, a straight line looks a certain way to the human eye—a way that makes us recognize it as ‘straight’—and a heavy object makes itself known to our senses by being hard to lift. But the ideal of objectivity requires that we reject these interpretations of physical phenomena, because they rest on the idiosyncrasies of sensory impressions. Instead, we must treat the objects of study in a neutral fashion, based on the way they relate to one another. For instance, we perceive a straight line as the shape of a dangling plumb line. The path of an object in free fall is also a straight line, and so is a taut string. In order to be “neutral”, you take the notion of straight line to be an undefined concept, and record the fact that taut strings, plumb lines and the paths of objects in free fall are straight lines. If you aim for objectivity, you must then go one step further: When you speak of a straight line in science, you must suppress the image of the taut string in mind. You must force yourself to forgo any mental picture of what a straight line looks like, and instead, think of it as nothing but an empty word. When you use that word, you may hold the image of the taut string in mind, but that’s for your own benefit: It may guide your intuition but should not participate in your reasoning. In order to carry out such a program, it is essential that the basic notions (distance, mass, and so on) be treated as undefined concepts related to one another by formal relations. Within the confines of scientific reasoning, these entities must have no meaning. If you yield to the temptation to imagine them in mind with a concrete meaning (for example, to imagine a line as the shape of a taut string), you must be careful not to allow the meaning to slip into your reasoning and play a role in your conclusions. For suppose you slip, and continue to identify a straight line with a taut string. Suppose furthermore that you make use of your mental image in scientific reasoning, so the validity of your conclusion rests on the intuitive image. If that were permitted, then the laws of science would depend on the meanings we attach to concepts—on the mental images we hold in mind.

Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order (pp. 118-120). Springer International Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Where I see that converging with the meaning of 'noumenal' is in the definition of the term, which is 'In philosophy, a noumenon (/ˈnuːmənɒn/, UK also /ˈnaʊ-/; from Greek: νoούμενον; plural noumena) is a posited object or an event that exists independently of human sense and/or perception. ...The Greek word νοούμενoν nooúmenon (plural νοούμενα nooúmena) is the neuter middle-passive present participle of νοεῖν noeîn "to think, to mean", which in turn originates from the word νοῦς noûs, an Attic contracted form of νόος nóos[a] "perception, understanding, mind." A rough equivalent in English would be "something that is thought", or "the object of an act of thought". ' (wiki)

In this context, noumenon means 'object of pure thought' i.e. something known directly by reason or nous, but not by way of an image or likeness - the word is derived from 'nous'. (This is actually different from how Kant uses it, but then this is something for which Kant has been criticized, by Schopenhauer, among others.)

I do see what you're saying is a contradiction, but there's a tricky point here, which is that the noumenal 'exists independently of human sense or perception'. But that is rather different from the idea of a thing that exists independently of human sense or perception, is it not? Because, insofar as it is a sensable object, then it is (according to Pinter) a gestalt which is generated in the mind of the perceiver, not an indepently-existing object. Whereas, as Pinter is saying, the formal objects of science are defineable only in terms of undefined objects formally related (and described in quantitative terms, I would add.) As such, they are independent of sensable perception as a matter of definition, yet can be discerned by scientific analysis and measurement.

Yes, that's a fair point. Hoffman's "Conscious Realism" could be aptly labeled "Conscious Idealism." It's saying that the things we want to talk about 90+% of the time don't exist outside our minds. In my opinion, the conclusions one is forced to draw if they accept his argument are largely in line with those of idealist ontologies, at least in terms of how we should think about the phenomena of experience (including scientific observations). However, there is an important caveat that, hidden away at the ontological basement of being, there is this rather mysterious "other," we're grounding our view in.

The interesting thing is that it is empiricism and the advancement of science that leads us to this weird place. Another interesting trend is that different authors seem to be reaching similar conclusions about what the observations of science are telling us about reality from two distinctly different angles: the lens of physics and the lens of cognitive science/neuroscience.

Now, how big of a problem is this mysterious other in terms of a consistent ontology? How fundamentally different are these two different things, the world of appearances and this "other" and how do they coexist? I think these are unresolved questions and people are right to feel unhappy with the conclusions of the theory in that it doesn't give satisfying answers to them. But it's not all bad news, if you like philosophy, it shows that the field may still have some relevance yet! (And relevance to science too, as working out ways to deal with the issues highlighted could be crucial to answering some of our biggest scientific questions; that is after all the whole point of the theory).

Certainty is clearly not a requirement for acting. — Metaphysician Undercover

He means you have to be certain of something, because when you TRY to doubt EVERYTHING then you can't doubt anything

All good.

It would be counterproductive, I think, to get into the subtleties of Kantian metaphysics. That being said, the aforementioned contradiction resides in the proposition, “...nothing can be said about its objects except that they exist...”, insofar as that “they exist” says something about its objects.

The confusion arises by calling something an object of pure thought, when, from the perspective of the faculty responsible for it, it is just a thought. Understanding thinks conceptions, understanding thinks noumena, noumena is a conception understanding thinks, and nothing more. It is we that screw it all up by reifying it through conventional language use. Thus it is, that “an object of pure thought” has very different connotations than “that which understanding thinks”, yet we, as careless thinkers, use the same word to represent both.

Yes, Kant treats noumena differently, in that for him, they are merely not logically impossible, the existence of them being beyond the capacities of our system, or of any rational intelligence similarly predicated on intuitive representations, to cognize.
————

there's a tricky point here, which is that the noumenal 'exists independently of human sense or perception'. But that is rather different from the idea of a thing that exists independently of human sense or perception, is it not? — Wayfarer

The tricky point is existence, of which you hold a different perspective than I. I consider both noumena and ideas as non-existent, hence their existence independent of sense is moot. Noumena and ideas do have the commonality of being conceptions having their origins in understanding alone. Ideas, though, with a sufficient aggregate of empirical knowledge, may eventually have conceptions inferred as belonging under them, whereas noumena can never have that end. Kant shows that, by such as “the idea of space”, “the idea of justice”, the “idea of an ens realissimum”, but not once ever enounces an idea of noumenal object.

Strokes....folks.

All good.

Oops, answered the same question twice!

Hegel says in his Greater Logic:

"This only perhaps can be remarked, that hitherto the determination of quantity has been made to precede quality and this as is mostly the case, for no given reason. It has already been shown that the beginning is made with being as such, therefore, with qualitative being... It is easily seen from the comparison of quality with quantity that the former by its nature is first... The qualitative determinateness, on the other hand, is one with its being: it neither goes beyond it nor is internal to it, but is its immediate limitedness. Quality therefore, as the immediate determinateness, is primary and it is with it that the beginning must be made."

This is from the beginning of phenomenology. What your senses immediately perceive is reality. We are attached to the world through our bodies and psyches. To reject the world as having no being is to deny the reality of the body which you are. What we sense is first in knowledge. We cannot doubt the world's existence without first knowing the world. That's the consequence of being born. This results from our understanding of truth. Even if we were all just minds like Bekerley said, the idea of truth would be a correspondence of our thoughts with reality, although the reality is purely immaterial. It wouldn't be thought to thought without any reality involved. But we know we are inof this world, so that first thoughts which bind all our others is that we are a part of a world which has true existence

That got a chuckle outta me, I must say. And you know me.....everything philosophical worth repeating originated in Königsberg. — Mww

Right, but you didn't answer the question as to whether it was a quote from or paraphrase of the Meister... :smile:

Which is precisely the exposition given by ↪Wayfarer
: “What the observer brings *is* the picture”. — Mww

I think where he and I might disagree, at least in terms of emphasis, if not substance, is that I don't think the observer brings the whole of the picture, in fact I would say the observer is just one part of it, or to put it another way, the observer emerges as one frame out of the (living) picture (or perhaps "movie" would be a better term). (But again, probably more a matter of emphasis than substance).



:up: I'm all for it if some new interesting ideas might emerge.

I found an electronic version of the book, but I am yet to delve into it. Too much on my reading list, and too little time to read!

I shelled out for the Kindle edition. But as I said before, it's a very concise book, I found it very easy to read, it doesn't get bogged down in a lot of speculative analysis. I wrote to him to tell him I liked his book and got a nice reply. His site is here https://charlespinter.com/

Cheers.

Another problem of considerable interest to me is the fact that animal vision is invariably in the form of comprehensive, integrated perceptual groups or scenes — never of isolated single objects. In fact, when vision of extended displays fails, this is a token of severe pathology. This aspect of animal vision — the fact that multiple objects are perceived simultaneously — is profoundly mysterious, and has been almost entirely neglected in current research. — Charles Pinter (personal website)

There are intractable problems in all branches of science; for Neuroscience a major one is the mystery of subjective personal experience. This is one instance of the famous mind–body problem (Chalmers 1996) concerning the relation of our subjective experience (aka qualia) to neural function. Different visual features (color, size, shape, motion, etc.) are computed by largely distinct neural circuits, but we experience an integrated whole. This is closely related to the problem known as the illusion of a stable visual world.

We normally make about three saccades per second and detailed vision is possible only for about 1 degree at the fovea. ...There is now overwhelming biological and behavioral evidence that the brain contains no stable, high-resolution, full field representation of a visual scene, even though that is what we subjectively experience. The structure of the primate visual system has been mapped in detail and there is no area that could encode this detailed information. The subjective experience is thus inconsistent with the neural circuitry. Traditionally, the neural binding problem concerns instantaneous perception and does not consider integration over saccades. But in both cases the hard problem is explaining why we experience the world the way we do. As is well known, current science has nothing to say about subjective (phenomenal) experience and this discrepancy between science and experience is also called the “explanatory gap” and “the hard problem”. There is continuing effort to elucidate the neural correlates of conscious experience; these often invoke some version of temporal synchrony as discussed above.

There is a plausible functional story for the stable world illusion. First of all, we do have a (top-down) sense of the space around us that we cannot currently see, based on memory and other sense data—primarily hearing, touch, and smell. Also, since we are heavily visual, it is adaptive to use vision as broadly as possible. Our illusion of a full field, high resolution image depends on peripheral vision—to see this, just block part of your peripheral field with one hand. Immediately, you lose the illusion that you are seeing the blocked sector. When we also consider change blindness, a simple and plausible story emerges. Our visual system (somehow) relies on the fact that the periphery is very sensitive to change. As long as no change is detected it is safe to assume that nothing is significantly altered in the parts of the visual field not currently attended.

But this functional story tells nothing about the neural mechanisms that support this magic. What we do know is that there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene. That is, enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience. So, this version of the neural binding problem really is a scientific mystery at this time. — Jerome S. Feldman, The Neural Binding Problem

Note that what is referred to above as the 'stable world illusion' is what we generally and uncritically think of as 'reality'.

Ok, fine. It was quoted verbatim, but before my feet get held even closer to the torturous fire, I must admit the original context is in regard to the schools (that raise a loud cry), whereas my context is the theoretical science community.

He means you have to be certain of something, because when you TRY to doubt EVERYTHING then you can't doubt anything — Gregory

I don't see the logic. Why not just doubt everything? There's no problem with that.

Do you doubt that you doubt?

If you're doubting everything, of course you'd be doubtful of your doubting. Where's the problem?

The difference between an accidentally infinity and an essential one is pertinent. A mind conceiving an essential infinity recurs back upon truth when doubting or saying truth is non-objective. How can you have consciousness if you are an infinity of doubts?

I don't see how infinity is relevant. Your proposed "infinity of doubts" is unwarranted, and a person's consciousness may simply be a doubtful, or uncertain consciousness, i.e. the skeptic.

Well you are God to your thoughts

But who will doubt that he lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows, and judges? For even if he doubts, he lives. If he doubts where his doubs come from, he remembers. If he doubts, he understands that he doubts. If he doubts, he wants to be certain. If he doubts, he thinks. If he doubts, he knows that he does not know. If he doubts, he judges that he ougth not rashly to give assent. So whoever acquires a doubt from any source ought not to doubt any of these things whose non-existence would mean that he could not entertain doubt about anything. — Augustine, On the Trinity 10.10.14 quoted in Richard Sorabji Self, 2006, p.219

It's paradoxical that Cartesian radical doubt (imagine that!) leads to, suprise, surprise, absolute certainty. Isn't that like being the worst criminal makes you the best cop?

Cogito ergo sum. — René Descartes

Take that Agrippa, Pyrrho, and all skeptics!

Reminds me of Laozi! Maybe this a formula which we can apply to everything! :chin:

If he doubts, he knows that he does not know. — Augustine, On the Trinity 10.10.14 quoted in Richard Sorabji Self, 2006, p.219

It is a mistake to classify doubt as a type of knowing. Doubt is a form of uncertainty, and knowing is a form of certainty. So in relation to any particular subject, one effective excludes the other. Uncertainty, doubt, is a lacking, privation, or want of knowledge, and it is absolutely false to say that the person who is deprived of knowledge must know oneself to be so deprived. That is contradiction at its most fundamental level. This is the common mistake of all such arguments, to classify doubt as a type of certainty, and insist that the uncertain person must be certain of one's uncertainty. But that is nonsense which completely mischaracterizes, and demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of uncertainty.

To properly understand uncertainty and doubt, we can look at the behaviour of children, babies, and other creatures which have not developed the certainty of epistemic knowledge. This gives us a far better understanding of the uncertainty which ought to be associated with radical skepticism, and radical doubt. The issue is with the understanding, or interpretation of meaning. If a person is unsure of what a word or combination of words means, that person will have real doubt with respect to the proposition. And if the person is uncertain of the meaning of all words, then that person has doubt about everything which is expressed in words.

So we cannot portray radical doubt, (or foundational uncertainty as I prefer to call it, in opposition to those who insist on a form of foundational certainty) in the way that Augustine does here. A person does not need to know oneself to be uncertain (doubtful) in order to be uncertain, and this is a very important fact about the nature of knowledge, which Socrates did an excellent job of demonstrating. Knowing-how is prior to knowing-that. So Socrates went through the entire range of human activities, from artists to craftspeople, to manufacturers, to mathematicians, scientists, lawyers, and theologians, and demonstrated that in all forms of human activity people were doing things who could not explain, or understand what they were doing. Doing precedes the human capacity to understand what one is doing. Consider as examples, a child learning to talk, or at the other extreme end of knowledge, the activities of quantum physicists.

The fact that we learn how to do something before we learn what we are doing, demonstrates the priority of uncertainty, because knowing-that involves a higher degree of certainty than knowing-how. And, it shows that it is not required that the person who doubts, knows oneself to be doubting. To portray uncertainty in this way, such that the person who is uncertain must be certain that oneself is uncertain, is a mistaken and profoundly incorrect representation of the nature of knowledge. Contrary to popular belief, knowledge is not based in certainty, it is supported by uncertainty. As Socrates said, wonder is the base of philosophy. And we know that wonder is a form of uncertainty. and philosophy is what supports knowledge. So we can conclude that knowledge is itself supported by uncertainty, the support being distinct from that which is supported.

You do understand that everything you wrote here is beside the point, don't you? (On second thoughts, please don't try and explain it further.)

Actually, it's what you posted which is beside the point. Look, Augustine demonstrates that one "ought not" doubt such things, just like Wittgenstein claimed to have demonstrated such doubt to be irrational.

So whoever acquires a doubt from any source ought not to doubt any of these things whose non-existence would mean that he could not entertain doubt about anything. — Augustine, On the Trinity 10.10.14 quoted in Richard Sorabji Self, 2006, p.219

The point though, is that claims that we cannot have this sort of doubt, it is logically impossible, because doubting, it is claimed, presupposes certainty. And that is what I objected to, the claim that doubting presupposes certainty, so that such doubt is logically impossible. That someone might demonstrate such doubt as irrational, or another might claim that one ought not doubt some specific things, is beside the point. The point being that such doubt is a very true aspect of reality, whether it's irrational or not, as many living beings, humanity included, commonly do irrational things.

, because doubting, it is claimed, presupposes certainty. — Metaphysician Undercover

You miss the point again, which is simply that to doubt there must be one who doubts. You've so far wasted 750 words obfuscating this simple observation, I am not going to indulge you any further.

You're just restating the same point, that one ought not doubt everything, such a doubt is irrational, because "to doubt there must be one who doubts". But as I said, showing that such doubt is irrational does not demonstrate that it is logically impossible. Therefore it is you who is actually missing the point by refusing to accept that this sort of irrational uncertainty is a very real part of human life.

And, as I explained with those 750 wasted words, the point you are missing is very important epistemologically, as Socrates demonstrated. Because you miss this point, you will continue with your belief in platonic realism, falsely assuming that some non-temporal, intelligible objects of absolute certainty, underlie all our knowledge as a foundation to it. And, you'll be attracted to faulty theories, like the theory of recollection expressed in Plato's Meno, to support your false belief.

Ha, so you were more correct about Hoffman than I. I had read about 90% of The Case Against Reality by this point, before getting distracted by Wilczek's The Lightness of Being.

In the first 90% of the book, Hoffman is making an argument against physicalism from a physicalist perspective. He keeps pointing out his commitment to the existence of the noumenal. I got distracted because, like many popular science books, it turned into a literature review of famous studies, showing how each supported his propositions. Good backup to produce, but it can get a bit dull, especially after the opening arguments had been so interesting.

In the last small bit of the book he radically switches gears and proposes a totally idealist ontology. It's a mathematical model that has finite conscious agents as its ontological primitive. Each agent posseses a measurable space of different possible experiences and decisions it can make, which can be described probabilistically. This allows theories based on the model to be tested empirically. Decisions by any agent change future options for decisions it will have, and agents interact by changing each other's options and experienced, so these units are Markov Kernels in the model.

A key point to recall here is that, while of course we observe unconscious things like rocks, i.e.things that are not conscious agents, the fact is everything we observe is unconscious. When we observe another person, we observe our icon of them. The icon is not sentient, it is our representation.

The ontology recalls "It From Bit," in some ways to, with the idea that complex conscious agents with a wide menu of possible experiences and decisions would be composed of simpler agents. For example, the odd behavior and experiences of people with split brains is because a more unitary agent has been separated into something closer to two agents in many ways. At the ontological bottom of the model would be agents with just a binary selection for actions, and binary information inputs. This allows for the possibility of a neat tie in to information theoretic versions of physics and the participatory universe concept.

His claim is that such a model can make empirical predictions, and could serve as a basis for working up to our laws of physics, and describing evolutionary biology. That's a big task, but I see how it seems at least possible in theory.

In the last bit, he gets into the concept of an infinite conscious agent that could be described mathematically. This infinite agent would have little in common with the anthropomorphic deities of many religions. Such an entity could actually be described mathematically, but it would not be omniscient and omnipresent, etc. Rather, it has an infinite potential number of experiences and actions. He poses the possibility of a scientific theology of mathematical theories about such infinites. This, to me, sounds like the Absolute, and he does mention Hegel by name in the chapter.

Neat stuff. A bit jarring to have it at the end, although I get why he did it that way. If he started with it many people would drop the book, and there is value in his critique of current models even if you think his model is nonsense. It's a little disappointing though because I'd rather have more material on the theory at the end, but I also see how creating such material is incredibly difficult. It's likely a task akin to the heroic (and somewhat successful) attempts to rebuild the laws of physics without any reference to numbers, totally in terms of relationships. If anything, his idea requires an even larger rework of how we think about things, but the payoff could be considerable if it allows us to make new breakthroughs in the sciences.

So, you were right, I was wrong. I do still like his initial framing, which keeps the noumena, more in some ways. It seems way more accessible to the public at large.


Side note;
Like Katsrup, he denies that AI could be sentiment. I don't know why this bothers me so much. But it seems like, if we get AI that can pass a Turing Test, which we may well get to this century (GPT-4 is coming soon), this standpoint is going to open a huge philosophical can of worms. I don't see why an idealist ontology that can allow for new life being created through sexual reproduction should necessarily have such issues with life being created synthetically. Because, even if we never get to fully digital AI, the idea of hybots, AI that uses both neural tissue and silicon chips, could get us there. We already have basic hybots, for example, a small robot that moves using rat neurons. But then you'll end up with the question of "how much of the entity needs to be composed of neurons versus silicone for it to be sentiment," which seems like it will lead to arbitrary cut offs that don't make sense.

All in all, I am not totally convinced by his solution to the problem he diagnoses, but I like it way more than the Katsrup model in the Idea of the World. I need to take a break from these sorts of books, they're going to end up converting me.

he does mention Hegel by name in the chapter. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Hegel, following Schelling, had a philosopher of nature. He believed the world was real, not a simulation. The real world comes from the spiritual Absolute but matter is matter for Hegel. If Hoffman is correct, then all of science has been refuted and so why follow science at all anymore? As far as I can see that is the conclusion.

See this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBonZ5suKuU

The world may be infinitely complex, but the brain is part of nature and where the intellect and storage capacity is cannot be permanently found if matter is infinitely divisible. You just take it to the quantum level and than below this to infinity. Or the above video has a point that consciousness emerges from brain and is it's own entity with laws that we can never pin down. It's a philosophical assumption that the building blocks can explain what emerges from it.