An amoeba?

An amoeba? — creativesoul

Does it have sensory organs and a nervous system?

It's a living organism that has some form of rudimentary physiological sensory perception.

You tell me.

I'm just trying to delineate. I'm not feeling objectionable at the moment.

I'm just trying to delineate. I'm not feeling objectionable at the moment. — creativesoul

Well, in the context of subjective experience, humans, since we know that for ourselves. Most likely other animals, given similar enough biology and behavior. But we don't have a means of being sure. Thus "what it's like" to be a bat.

But we can stick with humans as perceivers.

Well, in the context of subjective experience, humans, since we know that for ourselves. Most likely other animals, given similar enough biology and behavior. But we don't have a means of being sure. Thus "what it's like" to be a bat.

But we can stick with humans as perceivers — Marchesk

That's the only starting point.

I've expressed my own well considered opinion regarding the purported lack of means. We have a means. Language use. Not just any language use, mind you. Rather, language use that picks out the right kinds of things to further consider.

It's a crying shame that - given our remarkable extraordinary advances - convention has still not gotten our own thought and belief right...

@creativesoul @Marchesk @Isaac @fdrake @Mww

What is there to say about ancient people’s assuming that our vision ‘shone outward’ rather than light ‘shining inward’? Now we know different and to suggest to think otherwise is counter intuitive goes against what we know historically. From this can we rightly assume that the natural human instinct is to view our ‘seeing this tree or that table’ as projected outward rather than as given by external illumination?

What I am getting at here is that when we ask “What is it like to experience X?” how can we possible start talking about how light comes into the eye when we don’t actually experience sight as ‘light coming into my eye and sending signals to my occipital lobe’. The scientific evidence for this does nothing to alter the initial experience of ‘seeing’ prior to this scientific attitude.

Also, in terms of language, if I talk about the sunrise do you experience the sunrise. Of course you don’t, yet language almost convinces you that you’ve just experienced this said ‘sunrise’. Talking about something is the experience of talking about something not the experience of said ‘thing’.

Along these lines if we talk about ‘what it is like’ what does that sentence mean? The ‘like’ is a redundant word because we’re not really asking about ‘likeness’ at all. To be a bat is to be a bat, and to be human is to be a human. Start by asking what it is to be human as you’ve got a little more insight into this yet no doubt you’ll find yourself equally as stumped when it comes to articulating what it is to be a human assuming the question is redundant because you are one.

There's a distinction which I either keep failing to explain properly, or people don't generally seem to think useful, but it's crucially important to model-dependant realism, that is between reality having structures and reality being composed of the structures we divide it into.

I've used this example before, so apologies for the repetition if you've been following the whole thread, but it's like the constellation Orion. It definitely is in the shape (vaguely) of a hunter with his bow, belt and dagger, it's not that such structure isn't there, but it's also on the shape of just about anything else you could draw between those points, maybe not an infinite number of things (I'm not myself sure on this point), but certainly more than the one structure we impose on it out of that range of possibilities.

So to your point about reality having structural regularities which are 'real', yes, I think such regularities are not only only real, but necessarily so. If reality were homogeneous there would be no random direction to entropic forces and so no probability gradient against which the free-energy reduction would work. What I don't see is any reason why those structures must exist uniquely defined. So when you say "wavelengths picked up by the retina are coming from reality" I don't think there's any reasonable way we could disagree, but 'wavelengths' are themselves a concept, they're just one way of dividing energy among others. We can't even determine if wavelengths are a wave in a field or a particle, not that we've 'seen' either because both are just models interpreting numbers on a computer (which are the only thing we actually have 'seen').

Another metaphor might be to think of reality as a multi-dimensional contour map, it definitely has hills and valleys (ie it definitely exists and had variable structures), but which dimension should take precedent in determining what features are 'hills' is an arbitrary decision, or in our case, probably a pragmatic one limited by the biological hardware we've managed to evolve.

Really interesting point about reaching indeterminism in our models and what that means for how fundamental they are. I'm tempted to agree with you that indeterminacy cannot be further reduced, and so if we had it right this would not be one-pattern-among-many but would truly be the entity out of which patterns are made (like finding the actual stars in my Orion example). I'm wary to commit to it though because we'd have to remember that all this is within one huge Ramsey sentence about quantum physics, the first 'If' of which may well be wildly off mark.

What's fascinating about indeterminacy at the heart of the whole thing is that it might make our estimates of noise truly Gaussian (rather than just the assumption of Gaussian in our models) by the , at a fundamental scale, which is a point I think @fdrake made about central limit theory.

There is something significant in the phrase 'what it is like', but this significance isn't picked up on by thinkers like Nagel and Searle. Nagel means to highlight the supposed self-enclosed subjectivity accompanying a creature's perception of the objective world, and so he uses 'like' to point to this unbridgeable privacy of subjectivity as that we can only use metaphors to get at in someone or something else's private experience. But the deeper significance of 'like', lost on realists and idealists alike, doesnt involve comparing one being's subjectivity to another's , as if they are two objects, but rather the very structure of subjective experience as metaphorical in and to itself. To experience anything at all is to see that experience in terms of the particular way in which it is both alike and different from our previous experience. The 'intrinsic' meaning of a perception is nothing outside of or other than this always new and unique way in which it is alike and differs from what came before in it in our immediate experience.
So a bat wouldn't know what it is like to be a bat except in terms of what it is like to experience each new moment, and it only know what each moment is like by moving from that moment to the next. This phenomenological structure defines consciousness as intrinsically built of 'likeness', of the experience of the now as a comparison and a transtiion, a familiarity and a novelty. The now of consciousness is mediate rather than immediate. This radical mediacy at the heart of the supposed pure self-aware subjectivity of consciousness destroys the realist's dream of the purely empirical at the same time that it deprives the subject of its independence from the objects it perceives. Subject and object become only subjective and objective poles of an indissociable interaction in which there is no longer a subject that it is someting like to BE, nor an objective world independent of that subject which it engages with fro out of its solipsism.

What are logical forms taking account of? — creativesoul

Illogical thought; irrational reasoning.
The difference between reality and knowledge.
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Would you agree that "that which exists in it's entirety prior to common language" is a category? — creativesoul

Yes.
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(...) grounded in pure reason.
— Mww

Pure reason? As in reasoning from an armchair? — creativesoul

No, that’s just plain ol’ run-of-the-mill thinking, or, practical reason. No one consciously thinks in terms of merely theoretical pure reason, armchair-bound or otherwise. That’s why pure reason is the ground, the antecedent rather than the consequent.

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The objective/subjective distinction is rendered inherently inadequate in that it's use cannot take proper account of what all experience consists of.

Discard it. — creativesoul

Fine. Go ahead. Try discarding it. You’re going to have to replace it with something, because it seems to be the case that the human rational system is entirely predicated on it. Besides, something can be inherently inadequate without being a complete failure.

So......shall we discard the physical state of affairs that represents the coolness of the room, or shall we discard the sensation of too cool that represents the physical state of affairs? Can’t discard both, because it is the distinction between them claimed to cause the problem, so elimination of the distinction should solve it.

Still, if you’ve got an alternative.....(once again) lay it on me.

Our armchairs await.

From this can we rightly assume that the natural human instinct is to view our ‘seeing this tree or that table’ as projected outward rather than as given by external illumination? — I like sushi

Yes, that's how we experience vision.Which is why naive realism doesn't work without a sophisticated philosophical defense. It can't just be asserted or assumed as the premise, since it's been challenged since pretty much day one once people started reflecting.

But back to consciousness.

Along these lines if we talk about ‘what it is like’ what does that sentence mean? The ‘like’ is a redundant word because we’re not really asking about ‘likeness’ at all. To be a bat is to be a bat, and to be human is to be a human. — I like sushi

The "what it is like" is just a way of saying that a bat may have a kind of sensory experience that we don't because bats make use of sonar. If not bats, there are plenty of other examples in the animal kingdom. And anyway, why should we expect human experience to be exhaustive of all possible experience?

From this can we rightly assume that the natural human instinct is to view our ‘seeing this tree or that table’ as projected outward rather than as given by external illumination? — I like sushi

Perhaps, but if that were the case, how would we account for knowledge with respect to that which we don’t project, or, which is the same thing, has nothing to do with sense? If we deny non-empirical knowledge, the science of mathematics would be impossible.

Other than that.......good stuff.

If we deny non-empirical knowledge, the science of mathematics would be impossible. — Mww

True, but we use our experiences to draw the inferences that make most sense of all the empirical data, and form explanations around that. Thus we come to know that vision works differently than how we experience it, which resolves a lot of problems that were noticed a long time ago, such as sticks bent in water.

I wasn’t suggesting we should deny it, just that it isn’t our natural/instinctual appreciation of ‘the world’ thus more telling of our subjective faculties prior to scientific knowledge being laid on top of them.

It seems very much like asking what it is like to be dead or what it was like before you were born. The evidence is secondhand and/or purely speculative.

I’d also say it’s a little like what someone means when they talk about ‘computer consciousness’ without a body - I wouldn’t call that ‘consciousness’ because I have no real means of comparison.

If we can in some way communicate with a bat then we’ll get some insight. Without a means of communication the bat may as well be a rock (note: we can have some form of minimalistic ‘communication’ with a bat).

we use our experiences to draw the inferences that make most sense of all the empirical data, — Marchesk

We do use our experience to draw inferences about something possibly derivable from it, yes. But not always. Sometimes the inference comes first, and experience is then called upon to verify them. Or falsify them.

isn’t our natural/instinctual appreciation of ‘the world’ thus more telling of our subjective faculties prior to scientific knowledge being laid on top of them. — I like sushi

Telling, but maybe not more telling. But I was responding to empirical conditions, like seeing a table or a tree. Appreciation is not an empirical condition. Our natural/instinctual appreciation of the world gives rise to and sustains the other half of our subjective faculties........feelings.

Right, Nagel's point is we can't know therefore science (or objectivity) can't tell us everything.

Block made a similar argument with androids and nations.

So a bat wouldn't know what it is like to be a bat except in terms of what it is like to experience each new moment, and it only know what each moment is like by moving from that moment to the next. — Joshs

Correct. But anthropomorphic. All that allows us to characterize a bat, is ourselves.

how can we possible start talking about how light comes into the eye when we don’t actually experience sight as ‘light coming into my eye and sending signals to my occipital lobe’. — I like sushi

We do though, to some extent. If a car is racing toward me at great speed, my whole experience of the event might be a blur, and my body moving, little else. But if the car approaches more slowly, some part of that experience will be "that's a car", I might even recognise the make, bring to mind some facts about it, feel some repulsion to its colour etc.

Similarly, I don't see why some neuroscientific model of perception could not now form part of my experience of perceiving. To do so would require access to memory and higher cortex functions, so it's unlikely in fleeting stimuli, but no less a part of my experience when the stimuli is more drawn out.

Also, in terms of language, if I talk about the sunrise do you experience the sunrise. Of course you don’t, yet language almost convinces you that you’ve just experienced this said ‘sunrise’. Talking about something is the experience of talking about something not the experience of said ‘thing’. — I like sushi

Actually, they're mentally very similar. The same parts of the brain are involved in both, we're really just pasting on top of that an additional piece of information that tells us we're just imagining it. Obviously you're right, that additional factor makes it a different experience, but it says something about the idea of knowing "what it's like", there's not something so radically different going on in the 'experiencer', to that in the 'imaginer'

you’ll find yourself equally as stumped when it comes to articulating what it is to be a human assuming the question is redundant because you are one. — I like sushi

Yes, Hacker makes the same point in his dismissal of Nagel's argument.

Its idealist in a particlar way, but not anthropomorphic if we have reduced the anthropos to a process of temporalization in which the human disappears along with animals and 'natural' constituted world as a whole. Husserl made this move with what he called epoche, abstracting away all empirically relative facts to arrive at minimal conditions for any experiencing whatsoever. Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Derrida followed him in this direction to various extents, recognizing a prmordial gestalt temporal relationalty as fundamental in talk about any experieincing of a world, prior to constitutied empirical beings.

Its idealist in a particlar way, but not anthropomorphic if we have reduced the anthropos to a process of temporalization in which the human disappears along with animals and 'natural' constituted world as a whole. — Joshs

Yes, but you haven’t reduced the anthropos, insofar as you’ve included the movement of bodies and changes in time into a system, re: “a bat would have to know....”, that we have no reason to suppose incorporates them. It’s not your fault, it’s the fault of the human system; we as humans simply can’t think in any way other than the way humans think. It’s absolutely impossible.
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Husserl made this move with what he called epoche, abstracting away all empirically relative facts to arrive at minimal conditions for any experiencing whatsoever. — Joshs

Understood. I would offer that Kant did the same thing in 1787.

“...For example, if we take away by degrees from our conceptions of a body all that can be referred to mere sensuous experience—colour, hardness or softness, weight, even impenetrability—the body will then vanish; but the space which it occupied still remains...”

“...With regard to phenomena in general, we cannot think away time from them...”

“...That space and time are only forms of sensible intuition, and hence are the only conditions of the existence of things (of experience)....”
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recognizing a prmordial gestalt temporal relationalty as fundamental in talk about any experieincing of a world, prior to constitutied empirical beings. — Joshs

Dunno about all those modern guys, but I think I can dig enough significance out of that to agree with it.

Kant's subjectivization of the empirical world didn't go far enough. It left intact the notion of objectively causal world in universal space time, rather than reducing notions like objective causality and universal geometric space to the relative products of embodied correlations in experience.

Kant's subjectivization of the empirical world didn't go far enough. — Joshs

Perhaps not. But that wasn’t the intent of the Critiques, nor the Metaphysics of Natural Science. It didn’t matter to him, because even if he entertained the idea of an objectively causal world, it would still have to relate to the human capacity to understand it. If he had entertained the idea, would the substance of the Critiques evolved? Maybe, but it’s moot, because what we have of them is all there’s ever going to be.

I can’t imagine what he would do if he even knew about such notions as universal geometric space. Can’t blame him for failing to reduce them to something, if he didn’t know what they were.

Phenomenologically oriented writers like Husserl and Heidegger insist that none of the advances in modern physics(and for Heidegger that included theoeretical contributions up till 1976) depart in any significant way from presuppositions traceable back to Kant.
Husserl wrote: Physics, whether represented by a Newton or a Planck or an Einstein, or whomever
else in the future, was always and remains exact science. It remains such even if, as some think, an absolutely final form of total theory-construction is never to be expected or striven for.:"

What he meant by exact science is a science based on pure geometry of space. The innovative mathematics of space-time in recent physics is still dependent on geometric idealities. Husserl wrote copously about how geometry's origin in pragmatic activities in the world, and how it morphed into a 'ready-made' set of axioms by the time of Galileo.

probably a pragmatic one limited by the biological hardware we've managed to evolve. — Isaac

Have we actually evolved according to your view, or is that whole picture of evolution just another one of our models?

morphed into a 'ready-made' set of axioms by the time of Galileo. — Joshs

I get it. Kant used Thales, but......same principle. Wonder why the extended time frame between them. Maybe Thales’ set of axioms weren’t as complete.

What are logical forms taking account of?
— creativesoul

Illogical thought; irrational reasoning. — Mww

What about logical thought, and rational reasoning?

:gasp:

Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Derrida followed him in this direction to various extents, recognizing a prmordial gestalt temporal relationalty as fundamental in talk about any experieincing of a world, prior to constitutied empirical beings. — Joshs

I know you meant ‘came after him’ but ‘digressed from his aim’ would be more to the point.

Pure reason? As in reasoning from an armchair?
— creativesoul

No, that’s just plain ol’ run-of-the-mill thinking, or, practical reason. No one consciously thinks in terms of merely theoretical pure reason, armchair-bound or otherwise.... — Mww

The question(implied) was about the referent of the name "pure reason". To what are you referring? What is the criterion/definition of "pure reason" that you're working from here?

The objective/subjective distinction is rendered inherently inadequate in that it's use cannot take proper account of what all experience consists of.

Discard it.
— creativesoul

Fine. Go ahead. Try discarding it. — Mww

Try? That's hilarious. As if it's impossible to discard. Read my threads.

You're going to have to replace it with something... — Mww

Nah. I reject it based upon my own knowledge of all human thought and belief. I 'replaced it' with a much better understanding of all the things which are existentially dependent upon and/or consist of both the objective and the subjective. Such things cannot be taken proper account of in terms of one or the other. All experience counts as such things. As does all thought and belief...