I was asking you. After establishing interest, he takes it home. End of story?

I was asking you. After establishing interest, he takes it home. End of story? — Mww

Probably most people would put it in their garden, or on a shelf or something like that. (I'm not sure what we're getting at here.)

I'm not sure what we're getting at here. — Terrapin Station

Interest in the pretty rock raises the question of how the interest came about, with respect to the rock’s characteristics/properties/qualities.

Everything is phenomenon
— I like sushi

If that's the case, then the notion itself can and ought be cast aside for it cannot be used to further discriminate between anything at all. It becomes superfluous, unhelpful, and offers nothing but unnecessarily overcomplicated language use.
— creativesoul

Eventually.....maybe....we would have arrived here, at this very place. It is not correct to say everything is phenomenon, but rather, every object of sensibility, called appearance, united with an intuition by imagination, is phenomenon. — Mww

Spoken like someone who likes Kant's Noumena.

I admit Kantian epistemological metaphysics is historical...to be kind. It is, nonetheless, complete in itself, and incorporates enormous explanatory power. — Mww

Kant was my favorite for a very long time. There are serious issues of inherent inadequate explanatory power however. That which exists in it's entirety prior to humans is relegated to Noumena, and as such is grossly neglected. The problem, of course, is that we can most certainly know much about such things, just not when and if we're using Kant's framework.

If you insist on casting phenomena aside, what would take its place? — Mww

Nothing. There's no need for phenomena. We can remove it without losing anything. It's removal does not result in something missing. Rather, it results in something gained. Clarity by virtue of removing an unnecessary entity. The simplest, most basic rudimentary level thought and belief all involve that which is directly perceived. However, Kant denies direct perception of reality. Thus, Kant did not and could not draw and maintain a distinction between non linguistic thought and linguistic thought.

He also did not draw a distinction between thought and belief and thinking about thought and belief. That distinction can yield knowledge of existential dependency and elemental constituency.

I haven't forgotten about the studies. I've been doing a little bit of research into recent studies that are very similar, and a few podcasts which seem to reference the same/very similar studies. I'm particularly interested in the ones where coins are used in exchange for rewards.

They are very intriguing. Sadly though, one researcher in particular(regarding rhesus or macaques) was drawing unwarranted/unjustified/invalid conclusions that amounted to the personification of the the animals(anthropomorphism). However, not all of them did nor do all seem prone to make such mistakes.

Thanks again for drawing my attention to this...

Not all thought and belief should be deemed "a report" because some exists prior to language.
— creativesoul

Cool. Thanks.

I guess my concern, with respect to understanding each other, was to eliminate “report” as a metaphor, as in the case where, say, the senses “report” their perceptions to their respective receptors. Of course, the metaphoric report from the senses, while such machination certainly “exists in its entirety prior to language use”, isn’t a thought or a belief either, until or unless such machination is taken into account by a thinking subject. — Mww

Nada.

A worthy concern...

Nah, metaphor is poor philosophy. To say the senses "report" is to be involved in anthropomorphic thinking(the personification of the senses). I reject such talk/approaches.

I meant everything is phenomenon ‘of’ subjective consciousness. I was talking about phenomenology - where ‘existence’ of objects isn’t of direct concern (because the aim of phenomenology is specific).

Different strokes, and all... I find talking in such terms to be very unhelpful.

I see trees, not phenomenal representations thereof.

What is the aim though, seriously. Does it have a goal in mind?

Phenomenology isn’t about ‘representations’. The aim was to create a science of subjectivity - science of consciousness. Husserl’s concern was that psychologism would destabilise philosophy and the natural sciences.

Maybe I should expand on that statement about ‘representation’. The most important term in phenomenology is ‘Intentionality’, which is the mode of ‘seeing’: hence the attempt I made using ‘box’ to show that we ‘act’ in a certain mode of thought - an ‘aboutness’. One mode of thought would be to attend to perception and regard a box as representational. Such a ‘mode’ of thought is outside of the phenomenological field though because the a key point of phenomenology is to ‘bracket’ the transcendental object of perception.

Be VERY clear here that ‘transcendental’, in this sense and the Kantian sense, doesn’t mean ‘spiritual’ or woo woo. We’re talking about the transcendent as the naturalistic and Husserl was trying to draw back to the grounding of rationality/logic/science/consciousness, hence the term ‘Transcendental Reduction’ meaning to take the givenness of the world and strip away naturalistic assumptions. He does throw out some fairly contradictory ideas and over time he shifted his positioning. He once said something akin to ‘concluding is a failure in the phenomenological investigation’ - some (that I’ve come across) took this to mean ‘just imagine what you like’, but that isn’t the point at all. The point is to abscond from everything except the task of, if you forgive my word-smithery, depreciating representations in favour of exploring what lies beneath (which is an infinitely endless task, yet not one that doesn’t offer rewards).

Also, understand that Husserl (“The father of Phenomenology”) was logician. He was very wary of historicism and psychologism. He aimed to bring the ‘subjective’ into the field of play for rational work. He felt quite strongly, so it appears, that the natural sciences we’re set up against subjective consciousness on firm yet not infallible grounding.

For further background on where he was coming from, he was clearly opposed to dualistic thought. He praised Descartes for starting up something yet glossing over the “I” “thinking” part of his philosophical disposition. I think it was Damasio who said it would be better to say “I doubt therefore I am” in his book ‘Descartes’ Error’, but I may be mistaken?

In terms of the contemporary attitudes of today, and even the past century (at least!), I’d say there is something to be said for our political, scientific and cultural regard for ‘subjectivity’ and the polarisatiln of ideologies becoming more prominent due to a lack of grounding for a ‘subjective science’.

Did Husserl have success? No. He did have some success, and I’m pretty sure the point is to find a means to remain constantly on guard against ‘concluding’ and/or ‘success’ as a finality of scientific/philosophical thought.

Personally I see Phenomenology as a bridge between the historical opposition of Idealism and Realism. Phenomenology doesn’t have a dog in either fight, yet it has a dog in both fights too only at a distance so as not to be heard barking let alone felt biting. I should say I don’t actually view ‘idealism’ and ‘realism’ as polar opposites, merely stating the philosophical history of this back and forth, tit-for-tat debate that has rung through the ages - with great discoveries.

Secondly, I'm not necessarily arguing that non- human primates have an abstract concept of fairness/justice like ours. For a start I think it more likely we'll find our concept isn't quite so abstract and top-down acting as we think, not that chimpanzees have topgdown acting abstract concepts, more that we don't. — Isaac

I agree with that general sentiment. It's a matter of finding the common denominators between their thought and belief and our own. Consider evolutionary progression and ours must begin simply anyway. Theirs must and does as well. Senses of fairness are rather complex results from rather complex thought and belief.

An important consideration in support of the quote above...

Top down techniques require language use, as do bottom up techniques. Those are two names for two different techniques of reasoning. Both are existentially dependent upon common written language. Non-human primates' thought and belief cannot be. Non-human thought and belief does not - cannot - consist of either.

Is the tree I see a phenomena?

No. The tree you see (with your eyes) is a transcendental object of experience. The point of transcendental reduction is to bracket out your concern for a tree ‘being there’ (as it may be a dream). To do such is to shift your intentionality away from the naturalistic world and move to the ‘mode’ of actively investigating the phenomenon of subjective experience. In terms of visual objects, as mentioned, you can explore what the constituents of ‘subjectivity’ are - ie. some natural transcendent object possesses ‘parts’ and ‘aspects’, you can remove ‘parts’ of tree yet not ‘aspects’. In this sense I can certainly see why many fixate upon the worded exposition; we are trying to commune after all! That aside, you can snap a branch off a tree yet it remains a tree, you can draw a tree, yet it is still a tree, you can touch it, lick it, climb it, etc.,. What is so obvious is that it is a tree, yet what it is that makes it ‘obvious’ is the ‘aim’ of the phenomenological investigation.

With the ‘box’ example I went straight down to the spacial essence. A tree with ‘no height’ is not a tree. A tree with no mass is not a tree (yet phenomenological disposition of tree isn’t concerned with empirical measurements per se, meaning an ‘image’ of a tree - a drawn picture - has naturalistic transcendence as an object of thought.)

This moves us into ‘empty intentions’ and the ‘unrevealed’ aspects/parts of some phenomenon. You never see ‘the front/back of’ or ‘the inside/outside’ as a unified eidetic experience. This is something Husserl calls ‘pregnant’, meaning phenomenon are always revealing/obscuring as they are constituted by our ‘intentionality’. You can look at a mirror as a mirror or look at what is in the mirror. The transcendent object of ‘mirror’ is identical for sensory perception, yet the ‘mode’ of looking is utterly different.

It is very much an expansive problem and one where navigation through the phenomenological approach is quite daunting, confusing and full of dead-ends. My personal interest lies more in what I cannot being into the worded sphere, that place from which new paradigms and concepts tweak human understanding from an unspoken ‘subjectivity’. The common saying of “A picture paints a thousand words” would be the best fit to describe this if we were to then ask ‘what words are yet to be crafted’ and/or ‘what words are redundant’, as well as coining ‘A subjective thought paints a thousand pictures’ showing a clear ‘bracketing’ of Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology so many prefer over Husserl’s initial birth of the field.

Minimize variance? The sympathetic nervous system dramatically throws the body out of equilibrium. The parasympathetic does also. Some systems resist change, some create it. How does that fit into your perspective? — frank

'Minimise variance' is quite specific to variance within modelled statistical distributions, not just any and all variance. One semi-closed system (say a single specialised brain cotex) may be quite at odds with another because they have fewer extrinsic connections than they do internal ones.

Looking at the sympathetic nervous system as a system its clearly trying to maintain homeostasis right? But it's a cybernetic system so it needs to disturb the internal state to respond to a equal and opposite external disturbance.

Yeah, I think we're on the same page as far as the fact that models relate, but that doesn't in itself, lead to external world properties somehow having to inform them at some point. Our models only need to infer the cause of the input from one step outside their Markov blanket. The real state of affairs, whatever they are, may well be further back than that and our own system (to minimise variance) would only ever have to have a good, low variance model of the nodes immediately outside the Markov blanket of our conscious awareness.

When we look at those causes as part of some other system (as a scientist, for example) we have a different Markov blanket to work within, so the models may be different, but there's no reason I can think of why these nodes might be heirachical, like we getting closer to the 'one true source' each step we take. Each step is just a different game with different rules and different model will best satisfy them.

Sadly though, one researcher in particular(regarding rhesus or macaques) was drawing unwarranted/unjustified/invalid conclusions that amounted to the personification of the the animals(anthropomorphism). However, not all of them did nor do all seem prone to make such mistakes. — creativesoul

I'm not so sure personification is unwarranted. We immediately personify humans we meet and it would have been grossly incongruous, for example, for me to refer to my subjects as if they were empty machines when conducting experiments. At no point do we collate a hefty, impervious bank of evidence to back up such assumptions. As long as it isn't overwhelmed by evidence to the contrary, I don't mind a range of interpretations.

Anyway, glad you found something of interest. This thread has initiated a number of really interesting tangents.

Sure, I can "visualize" a really loud noise. I can visualize a set of all sets as a container that contains all other containers. I can visualize myself as being lost. — Janus

But can't you, for example, imagine how you'd feel if you won the lottery? Surely there you'd be imagining a feeling, not an image? Even visualising yourself being lost, it's more than just the image isn't it? Doesn't it come along with feelings, thoughts you might have etc?

I really don't understand you. To my reckoning, there are these weird people who picked up a way of describing bizarre altered states of activity from a book, and I never understand what they're talking about. They always say "but what's it like to be you" or "what's it like to be a bat?" and things like that. As if they can literally feel it. I don't think very highly of their self awareness, they seem to be replacing their experiences with a description of their experiences. If they payed more attention, they'd see a flux with some continuity in it, and a persistent history that is accessed through memory, and some aspirations and anticipations, but a feeling of themselves as distinct from their sensory capabilities and self attending bodily processes? Madness! Madness I say. It's a cult, a cult! — fdrake

I would figure 'what it's like to be X' involves the totality of first person experiences X is aware of, be it unguided thought streams or sensations. Wouldn't you say it's clear you experience a stream of anticipations, aspirations, history different from me? That's enough for a 'what it's like to be?', wouldn't it? It's also what leads me to be so bizarrely confused with individuality, i.e. despite there not being a concrete feeling of 'self' and no ontic boundary between conscious agents, assuming physicalism, there is a stream of unique experiences and a spatiotemporal localization of experiences which is stable over time. What mechanism in the world would result in awareness of my particular stream of experiences and not yours?

Regarding qualia, wouldn't you say experiences involve perceptions that are distinct from whatever causes those perceptions 'out there'. I mean you can stimulate a part of the brain and shut off or induce a color of blue, or the sight of a number etc even when there isn't one. So empirically it looks like what you see is not exactly the same as what's in front of you. Doesn't that provide unambiguous evidence for first person qualia [i.e. percepts]?

Regarding qualia, wouldn't you say experiences involve perceptions that are distinct from whatever causes those perceptions 'out there'. I mean you can stimulate a part of the brain and shut off or induce a color of blue, or the sight of a number etc even when there isn't one. So empirically it looks like what you see is not exactly the same as what's in front of you. Doesn't that provide unambiguous evidence for first person qualia [i.e. percepts]? — aporiap

I never wanted to deny that there is a phenomenal character of experience. What I picked a bone with, to my reckoning, was the way people split up experiences using the word. If you are quite happy to label facets of phenomenal character "qualia", for some suitable sense of "facet", this is fine with me.

What is not fine with me, say, is an arbitrary division between "colour qualia" and "shape qualia", say, without some account of why the division makes sense. In that example, we do perceive colours and shapes differently; colourblind people can agree with non-colourblind people on the shape of objects perceived differently; but I don't think it is warranted to go from this to thinking of "colour quales" and "shape quales" as distinct facets of phenomenal character; the colourblind person and the non-colourblind people still don't see the object's colours without its shape or its shape without colours.

So, the mechanism that contrasts the two cases is based off of bodily differences in how people process visual information (which is sensible), but why would that distinction immediately propagate into (be relevant for) distinctions in lived experience of each agent between colour experience types and shape experience types?

I'm picking a bone with an inference (style of inference, really) tacitly drawn when using the phrase. It has presumptions that are worth challenging.

I never wanted to deny that there is a phenomenal character of experience. What I picked a bone with, to my reckoning, was the way people split up experiences using the word. If you are quite happy to label facets of phenomenal character "qualia", for some suitable sense of "facet", this is fine with me.

What is not fine with me, say, is an arbitrary division between "colour qualia" and "shape qualia", say, without some account of why the division makes sense. In that example, we do perceive colours and shapes differently; colourblind people can agree with non-colourblind people on the shape of objects perceived differently; but I don't think it is warranted to go from this to thinking of "colour quales" and "shape quales" as distinct facets of phenomenal character; the colourblind person and the non-colourblind people still don't see colours without shapes or shapes without colours.

So, the mechanism that contrasts the two cases is based off of differences in how people process visual information (which is sensible), but why would that distinction propagate into distinctions in lived experience of each agent between colour experience types and shape experience types? — fdrake

Well so then what do you make of mental modularity? Lesion studies, stroke survivor case studies, document highly specific perceptual defects- inability to perceive motion, inability to globally perceive colors, inability to recognize faces that is correlated with damage to specific regions of the brain. All of these seem to suggest to me there are separable elements of experience that aren't necessarily part of a single phenomenal fabric prior to being weaved into a unified conscious experience. I can imagine making an argument for qualia supported by semi-independent, parallel sensory processing units.

single phenomenal fabric prior to incorporation into a unified conscious experience. — aporiap

Yeah! I don't think perceptual features (motion detection, colour sensitivity) are generated as a unified whole. What I want is for people to pay more attention to the generating mechanisms for perceptual features, and not to do so a-priori like with "red quale". I care where the distinctions come from because I want the accounts to be right.

there are separable elements — aporiap

Definitely. So my desire is to see accounts which look like: (stimulus information types/distinctions) <=> (perceptual feature types/distinction) <=> (information processing system types/distinctions) <=> (first person experience types/distinctions); systematic inter relations between these phenomena, studied. Not:

(a priori conceptions of experience types) = > (first person experience types/distinctions)

And I certainly wouldn't like (a priori conceptions of experience types) => [ (stimulus information types/distinctions) <=> (perceptual feature types/distinction) <=> (information processing system types/distinctions) <=> (first person experience types/distinctions)]. That's such a lazy waste.

But can't you, for example, imagine how you'd feel if you won the lottery? Surely there you'd be imagining a feeling, not an image? Even visualising yourself being lost, it's more than just the image isn't it? Doesn't it come along with feelings, thoughts you might have etc? — Isaac

It's an interesting question: how do we imagine feelings without actually feeling them? Winning the lottery, being lost; of course I can imagine feelings associated with those experiences; but if in that act of imagination I am not actually experiencing a full-blown feeling then what am I doing? I would say it is akin to visualization; when I imagine the house of my childhood, it is not as though I am looking at it, or at a photograph of it; it's not as if I can look at my visualization and count the bricks, compare their colours and so on; yet I call it visualization nonetheless.

That's why I earlier referred to imagining a sound as a kind of "visualization". And I think imagined feelings,actions and thoughts are also kinds of visualizations. We experience tactile, auditory and motor, as well as taste and smell and many kinds of somato-sensory visualizations I would say. Well, at least that's my experience. I suppose it's not a given that we are all the same.

Yeah! I don't think perceptual features (motion detection, colour sensitivity) are generated as a unified whole. What I want is for people to pay more attention to the generating mechanisms for perceptual features, and not to do so a-priori like with "red quale". I care where the distinctions come from because I want the accounts to be right.

there are separable elements
— aporiap

Definitely. So my desire is to see accounts which look like: (stimulus information types/distinctions) <=> (perceptual feature types/distinction) <=> (information processing system types/distinctions) <=> (first person experience types/distinctions); systematic inter relations between these phenomena, studied. Not:

(a priori conceptions of experience types) = > (first person experience types/distinctions)

And I certainly wouldn't like (a priori conceptions of experience types) => [ (stimulus information types/distinctions) <=> (perceptual feature types/distinction) <=> (information processing system types/distinctions) <=> (first person experience types/distinctions)]. That's such a lazy waste. — fdrake

That makes sense, I definitely agree with that. Yea unless there's an acknowledgment of the hypothesized and falliable nature of an a-priori quale division, it's very dangerous to do

, it's very dangerous to do — aporiap

Which is part of why it's frustrating that people find it "so obvious". There's a whole theory of perception required just to look at what the "features" of our experience really are, and where they come from.

Edit: so just for an example. There's change blindness, like in the door study. Something that phenomenal character usually has associated with it is that we are aware of the phenomenal character or that it is somehow accessible within the experiential state. Whatever makes the guy giving directions in the door study not notice (not be aware) that the person he's giving directions to changes shows that what perceptual features are accessible; those which partake strongly in the phenomenal character of experience; are strongly context sensitive. The context down-weights the relevance of visual feature changes in the guy giving directions' environmental model because of what he's currently doing and how he's doing it. Even then, the result would not hold (probably) if the people looked sufficiently different.

So, we can't even go from "visual processing" to "phenomenal character of vision" without auxilliary contextual information. With the right context, say classifying images for presence of red, even "red quale" might make sense!

Down time for service outage.

Eventually.....maybe....we would have arrived here, at this very place. It is not correct to say everything is phenomenon, but rather, every object of sensibility, called appearance, united with an intuition by imagination, is phenomenon.
— Mww

Spoken like someone who likes Kant's Noumena. — creativesoul

Sorry, but this has nothing whatsoever to do with Kant’s noumena. I hate noumena. He made it so farging difficult to understand what he means by it, says one thing here, something else there. There is one particular definitive rendering I use for reference, because gives, not what it is, but an unambiguous place for its use, in juxtaposition to what humans usually use. And I’m human, so.......

In short, as we all know, for every this there logically is a that. Humans cognize this way, but there is logically a way to cognize humans don’t use, completely unknowable by us. Phenomena for us, noumena for those other guys that ain’t humans, but are some other kind of rational agency.
———————

That which exists in it's entirety prior to humans is relegated to Noumena, and as such is grossly neglected. — creativesoul

Humans since the dawn of the age of reason have speculated on all sorts of stuff supposed to exist long before us, so I wouldn’t think such was neglected. If you wish to term those things existing in their entirety before human as noumena, I have no problem with it, even if I wouldn’t. Maybe the Greeks did tag such things with that nomenclature....dunno. Pretty sure German Enlightenment epistemologists didn’t.

On the other hand, you may be referring to existences in their entirety that are not physical existences, but instead are existences in thought. I see where the negative kind of noumena would enter the fray, for they are called “intelligible existences”, in opposition to existences of sense, which are phenomena. And they are neglected, because they must always lack intuitions because there are no “intelligible intuitions” to be given from the kind of existences which must give rise to them.

Now, this is the Kantian understanding. If you have a way to give noumena an otherwise respectable life, what process have you developed to accomplish it?
————————

Nah, metaphor is poor philosophy. — creativesoul

Agreed. Lipstick on a............Oh.

Never mind.
————————-

I see trees, not phenomenal representations thereof. — creativesoul

This presupposes you know what “tree” is. What do you see when you see a thing unknown to you?

We don't need to know anything about what's 'really' there, we seem, just as a species, to be fundamentally interested in variance minimising. There appears to be a white square when the black circles are (what appears to be) behind it. As soon as the black (what now appears to be) pacmen are removed, there no longer appears to be a white square. We want to reduce this variance, we prefer a model which has either a white square or not. Not a model which has a white square one minute but none the next. So we choose one to be 'accepted' and label the other 'illusion'. Rather than doing so randomly, we do so by minimising variance with a whole host of other models too. The white square being the 'illusion' does this best. At no point in the whole process do we need access to reality nor even to care which is which. — Isaac

In order to process information most efficiently, we reduce the quantity of information transmitted to the brain by applying concepts as ‘efficient summaries’ of information. So four black circles with a white box in front of them provides the same relevant information to the brain as the four rotated ‘Pac-Man’ shapes, only requiring less neurons to fire.

An artist must learn to process the information both (or perhaps a variety of different) ways, and to apply the ‘model’ or value structure according to the task at hand. It isn’t so much about ‘what’s really there’ as about the value structures we tend to apply in most situations - that is, the relativity of our value structures in relation to the ‘experiencing self’.

From a more objective standpoint, it’s not an ‘illusion’, but an alternative subjective experience of the same reality. Understanding the similarities and differences in value structures applied - without evaluating them - enables a more objective understanding of ‘what’s really there’ than prioritising one value structure over the other. Unfortunately, language (like a form of art) is itself a value structure, so in describing what we then understand, we are necessarily reducing the quantity of information transmitted by applying concepts in a particular formation in an effort to transmit the relevant information - ie. reduce information loss.

When a computer graphic artist produces work for the internet, part of the production process is to determine the most effective format to transmit the highest quality rendition of the artwork in the smallest file size. Information loss is inevitable - the trick is to ensure the relevant information is retained. Having a variety of different algorithms (value structures) to select from is a necessary resource, and only the artist will notice what subtlety of information is lost in each version (although they’d be hard pressed to describe it).

The tree you see (with your eyes) is a transcendental object of experience. The point of transcendental reduction is to bracket out your concern for a tree ‘being there’ (as it may be a dream). — I like sushi

So, for some reason or other some folk want to intentionally neglect the tree?

:worry:

What is so obvious is that it is a tree, yet what it is that makes it ‘obvious’ is the ‘aim’ of the phenomenological investigation. — I like sushi

That's what we named it? Investigation over.








I'm curious what you think...

Some people were claiming that some of those experiments offered adequate evidence for concluding that very young children and some non human primates are recognizing the existence of other minds...

I did not and do not agree with that conclusion, not based upon the evidence I'm privy to.

The experiment involved the subjects observing two specific objects being placed into a particular container/box. There was more than one container. They showed their own surprise when they looked for themselves into the box and did not find what they were expecting to find.

Then, under similar enough circumstances(I suppose), they observed another looking into the wrong box and showed that that bothered them in some way. The speaker claimed that such displays proved somehow that they recognized that the other had a mind???

I found it rather odd that they chose some experiments/games which are not even capable of showing in humans what they are wanting the same experiment to show in non humans?

I made a mistake. I thought your question was serious. Next time drop it please.

I'm not so sure personification is unwarranted. — Isaac

Attributing thought and belief unique to humans to non humans is not only unwarranted, it's also a misattribution of meaning as well.