I was feeling around (guessing) what you were talking about with the while ice cream business. Clearly I got what you were trying to convey wrong if what I posted made no sense and/or seemed irrelevant. — I like sushi

I offered actual examples that supported your claim, and actual examples that clearly did not. This gives us sound reason to conclude that that claim is inadequate, and was/is in need of additional qualification/quantification. Some. Not all.

If we hold that it is only the case that we can 'subjectively' know and yet not know how we know, then we are neglecting the situations where we not only know, but we also know how we know. Note also, that there was and is no need to invoke subjectivity here. It adds nothing but unnecessary confusion caused by an inadequate framework. Not to mention, the claim is false when taken at face value, as the examples to the contrary confirm.

I have almost no idea what you were or are talking about. We don’t possess knowledge from an objective position - meaning like some omnipotent being - we possess knowledge as a subject of a world. The ‘world’ is the means of objectivity (aka intersubjectivity).

We’re talking right past each other here.

Does the fact that we're always working under assumptions entail that the coral does not have a true perimeter? I don't think it does. The error we make depends upon there being a true coral size as well as there being a fallible modelling process applied to it. — fdrake

Nice example, particularly given the ecological relevance of coral studies.

I would agree that the coral has some unknown definite length according to our own arbitrary increments, whatever they may be. I'm ignoring the constant change, of course. For practical purposes(tracking the increase/decrease in the size of coral reefs), we can get close enough to the actual coral size by virtue of the modeling techniques you've put forth for determining the average. The goal is to determine if coral reefs are in decline or not.

However, we cannot know what the actual(true as you've put it) size of the coral is at any given time as a result of it's constant change and the limits of our own measurement capability. That does not stop us from being able to know that there is an actual size. It also does not stop us from knowing whether or not our coral reefs are in decline.

Modeling thought and belief is not nearly as straightforward though.

I have almost no idea what you were or are talking about. We don’t possess knowledge from an objective position - meaning like some omnipotent being - we possess knowledge as a subject of a world. The ‘world’ is the means of objectivity (aka intersubjectivity).

We’re talking right past each other here. — I like sushi

Perhaps we are. Perhaps one of us is.

Perhaps you'd gain a better idea of what I am taking about if you would pay closer attention to the words I'm using. You've been saying all this stuff about what we don't do that I've never said we did.

To be blunt, I reject the very dichotomy upon which much of your worldview and/or position hinges upon. I've offered ground for that rejection throughout this thread. They've been sorely neglected in lieu of all sorts of other stuff that I've not mentioned.

Say you measure the perimeter of a bit of coral's by taking a photograph at it and drawing a line around its border. You can draw lots of lines, and it's a really irregular object, and you don't get the same line each time.

If your measurement of the coral's perimeter is LL, and the true perimeter of the coral is TT, you can write (assume a model):

T=L+eT=L+e

where ee is some error. If we knew the true measurement TT there'd be no need to form LL in the first place. But this is also true for ee, if we knew what the error was exactly, we'd be able to add it to LL and recover TT exactly.

But what we can do is take a bunch of measurements, draw a bunch of lines, straighten them out to get a length. Say we've taken nn measurements. Then you can add all the length measurements LiLi together and divide by nn to get the mean length:

L¯=1n∑ni=1LiL¯=1n∑i=1nLi

The virtue this has is that when you take their mean , the mean is known more precisely than any of the individual estimates (under some assumptions about ee). — fdrake

Could we imitate this technique with the different models of thought and belief(mind)?

Naturally, the only thing we have to go on, in order to compare/contrast our models of mind with minds is the behaviour of candidates that have one. Another problem is that our models of mind are not comparable to the standard of measurement. With the coral, our mean is the average based upon everyone using the same standard and/or standards that are amenable/translatable/convertible to one another. This also seems to be a sticking point between the different models of mind.

On second thought, there are also brain imaging and neuroscience that could help us with comparing/contrasting our models of mind with mind. That stuff is aside from behaviour of creatures with minds.

Similar to, if not taken from, The Coastline Paradox, L. F. Richardson, 1951.

I feel like I've missed the broader point. Please set it out. I hate missing important stuff.

The perimeter is always from some (set of) spatiotemporal location(s), per some concept of what it is to "measure the perimeter" (since especially for something like coral a number of decisions are going to have to be made about what counts as measuring it versus what details can be ignored). — Terrapin Station

There are lots of ways coral size could be measured. We fixed a concept for what it means to measure the perimeter of the coral; a photograph of it from above has a line drawn around its outmost extent within the photo. The line is then measured. Broadly considered, this type of thinking crops up in model uncertainty and the design of a measurement procedure.

In my book, we can aggregate all that into modelling concepts; what notion of size we use for the coral is another assumption. We can make another one, a better one might be taking the coral and immersing it in water and measuring the volume displaced, but that destroys the coral.

Fix the background assumptions; there's still a true perimeter of the coral in the photo, the one of the photo. If there weren't, the equation $T = L + e$ probably would not work?

I did write a little bit about what assuming the boundary of the coral is a fractal would entail, but decided it wasn't relevant. The fractal dimension isn't a particularly good measure of anything like volume or length or area. If you put two Sierpinski triangles next to each other, one two times the height of the other, they have the same fractal dimension, but different convex hulls (the smallest triangle which contains all points of the fractal is bigger for the one which is scaled up).

decided it wasn't relevant. — fdrake

Yeah, fractal curve lengths tend to infinity, which hardly works for measuring coral boundaries.

I like your attitude on assumptions. We all got ‘em, we all make em. We all live by ‘em.

You’d have to ask fdrake for his broader point, but for me, it was his highlighting assumption and fallible modeling processes, with respect to them.

The curse and the beauty of human cognitive power.

And the phenomenological approach would be to investigate the subjective requirements we hold to in order to talk about this ‘thing’ called ‘size’.

This probably touches close to what Mww and Isaac hit on with prefer not to ask ‘what does it mean?’, and instead opting for ‘what is it like?’. So what is it like to experience ‘size’?

Ah. Gotcha. That much, assumptions and fallibility, are inevitable. Thus, the aim to reduce the likelihood of error built into methodological naturalism.

Recognizing the assumptions are key I think.

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! — fdrake

Reminds me of the rabbit-duck.. Despite the geometric identicality, it presents differently depending on what's perceived as anterior vs posterior. I think it's surprising that in spite of knowing this, you can't really perceive it otherwise, or at the very least it's incredibly difficult to see it simply as squiggles.

Recognizing the assumptions are key I think. — creativesoul

Indeed. But often is the case, that assumptions involve an unrecognized categorical error, in that this theory/model/logical conclusion doesn’t necessarily follow from that assumption.

I was under the impression methodological naturalism was created to circumvent the likelihood of error, by restraining investigations to measurable domains? What error do you consider built in to it? The fact it is humans doing it?

...often is the case, that assumptions involve an unrecognized categorical error. — Mww

Are such errors determined by categories of our own choosing, or categories that exist in their entirety prior to our naming and descriptive practices?

Kant can't help here my friend, as much as I'd like to believe otherwise.

:meh:

And the phenomenological approach would be to investigate the subjective requirements we hold to in order to talk about this ‘thing’ called ‘size’. (...) So what is it like to experience ‘size’? — I like sushi

Does phenomenology hold with “categories”, have them in its doctrine? I understand subjective requirements we hold in order to talk about things, just wondering what your name for those requirements would be.

May I ask what it really means to ‘model experience’ - in terms of a subjective experience rather than some extended intersubjective experience. Also, what is there to gain by such ‘models of experience’? Of course I understand the use for broadening knowledge especially in the area of cognitive neurosciences.

As a means to cut to the quick of subjective experience what can ‘modeling’ do for us? Are we necessarily bound to ‘models’ based on accuracy of naturalistic experimentation? To be clear I am thinking more along the lines of pure mathematics and how that ‘science’ operates ‘beyond’ (fro want of a better term) natural sciences, yet also contributes a great deal of relation to the natural sciences and actually works in tandem with them to a large degree.

Many people have commented that ‘mathematics’ and ‘theoretical physics’ are pretty much feeding one another constantly to the point of being attributes of a singular pursuit. It seems to me that the key difference is one is directed more toward a predictive function whilst the other has no real direct concern for causality preferring to explore atemporal consequences, relations and patterning in a wholly abstract sense - a rather ostentive sense (pointing out obviousnesses within a set parameter of play). The point being here is that in an abstract sense the ‘accuracy’ is non-existent. The application to some given ‘existent’ - predictively - is necessarily always one set up in unknown bounds (the accuracy is always an estimate of the abstract certainty set up against the presupposed existing world of the natural sciences).

Note: I am not concluding anything here just digging into the depth of the problem for the grounding of natural sciences. I do have a vested interest here by what I’ve been trying to outline in regards to the direction of the ‘sciences’ (in the broadest sense) and our assumptions.

I cannot speak with any universal authority on the matter. I am trying to express my understanding from the perspective of Husserlian phenomenology (Transcendental Reduction).

There is a pretty strong inclination among most people concerned about items like consciousness in understanding and accepting the underpinning principle of ‘intentionality’ - that is why I am a little taken aback by the misrepresentation of the term that is so commonplace.

In simple terms (incase the term is unfamiliar) ‘intentionality’ is not about intent in the everyday sense of the word. It means that we are ‘conscious of an object’ not that there is an ‘object’. We experience, all experience, is ‘of something’ not of nothing.

In this sense the ‘category’ would be the ‘aboutness’ of experience. Meaning if I hear a sound I don’t hear a sound, which I realise sounds needlessly obtuse as the means of communicating this is by words so charity is necessary and it is a damn strong reason Husserl used ‘adumbrate’ to get this across. I hear ‘a sound of something’ not a disembodied sound floating in some ether. That hopefully expresses better what is meant by ‘intentionality’ if you weren’t quite familiar enough with the term already.

So, you tell me in this light what ‘category’ means for phenomenology? I don’t really know. In terms of the different threads of investigation (especially in terms of hermeneutics) the investigation necessarily narrows in whatever direction people take it - it’s seems fairly clear to me that post-modernism is a further extension if this too, but I wish to stay on track.

This may or may not be helpful. The idea of a doctrine is perhaps a little misapplied here. Generally speaking I’d have to say the interest is in the pursuit of ‘pure subjectivity’ much in the same light as the natural sciences are in pursuit of ‘pure objectivity’. That said I am not suggesting either believe there is such a ‘pure x’ in either case it is merely that Husserl saw the lack of grounding to logic that essentially underpins the natural sciences. It’s sometimes tricky to know what he means as he developed his ideas and amended them over his lifetime and he sometimes means ‘science’ as we think of it and sometimes ‘science’ in reference to pure maths and logic.

I guess you could say ‘word concepts’ are the necessary categories that we have to apply. Depending upon our ‘mode’ of thought each word concept contracts and expands, in one field of perspective it seems ‘universal’ and in another it may seem ‘chaotic’. The more applicable the terms across fields (albeit in differing guises) is something hermeneutic phenomenology prioritises - but I’m personally not convinced by that route although, as with every route, there is use.

Sorry if that is too longwinded and/or unhelpful/confusing. I doing my best :)

often is the case, that assumptions involve an unrecognized categorical error.
— Mww

Are such errors determined by categories of our own choosing... — creativesoul

The categories don’t determine errors, and we don’t choose them. Errors arise from irrational or illogical associations the subject thinks, and categories are merely the theoretical conditions which make cognition possible, so they exist in their entirely long before we give them names. Obviously, because we always cognize first, speak later, and never the reverse, about any one thing.

The idea of categories solves a problem, If you think it just causes another one, that would be on you, wouldn’t it?

Good synopsis. Thanks.

I’m ok with intentionality, subjective requirements, pure subjectivity/objectivity. Not too keen on categories being similar to, or synonymous with, “aboutness” of experience; I see them rather as that which makes experience possible.

Different strokes, same game.

Me neither. The problem I find repeatedly is ‘pointing out’ something without literally having a concept to reference.

By that I am clawing at saying something like ‘categories’ are investigated. This comes in the sense I‘vepreviously mentioned regard ‘pieces’ and ‘moments’ - pieces can be removed from an item, but ‘moments. cannot be removed (as with the examples of a shape without form, a triangle that has no angles, or a sound that has no tone). Just checked the terminology, he actually says there are two ‘parts’, ‘moments’ and ‘pieces’ (I previously referred to these as ‘parts’ and ‘aspects’ instead of ‘pieces’ and ‘moments’).

There is also a distinction he uses called noesis and noema, the ‘light’ and the ‘lit’ is the best analogy I’ve seen used to convey the basic meaning here. There is certainly more than a hint at the distinction between ‘act’ and ‘object’ yet they are more like different sides of the same ‘object of intentionality’. I kind of step away when it comes to the strange idea of ‘poles’ he uses, but I do find it interesting even though I don’t grasp what he meant/means exactly.

Basically it interests me because before I came across this I lacked the terminology to express my own thoughts and since reading more I’ve found some useful ways of getting a step or two closer to articulating my thoughts - I’m probably not bright enough to make the kind of conceptual leap I’d like to though (maybe I’m just looking down the wrong street, but I don’t think so just yet).

There is, once extended, a while mirage of ideas that can lead nowhere, but often enough they offer (at least for me) a peek into the possible beginnings of a fresh perspective.

Do you believe that we can be mistaken about that which exists in it's entirety prior to common language use? — creativesoul

Depends what you mean by mistaken. Do you mean have the wrong model, or do you mean have a model which is not identical to reality? If the former, yes, some models seem better for us than others, if the latter then definitely yes, the model is not reality and therefore cannot be accurate to it. But to be honest I'm flailing because I have no idea what you mean by "that which exists in it's entirety prior to common language use".

You claimed that you do not believe other people exist. You're now speaking about believing a range of things in different contexts, and not believing a single thing...

Are you familiar with the notion of performative contradictions? — creativesoul

Yes, but I don't see how it applies here, you'd have to flesh the argument out. Are you suggesting that, in order for me to be arguing that there are no objective distinctions in reality I must believe in objective distinctions? I'm not sure how that works. I can have subjective distinctions and act on those whilst still believing there are no objective ones. I can still choose vanilla ice cream whilst maintaining a belief that choosing vanilla is not the thing everyone must do in this situation. I an say that I believe each man should do his duty and yet when some duty arises change my belief to 'each man for himself'. I can at a psychological level believe we are prone to cognitive biases yet fall for cognitive biases. I don't understand why you'd be suggesting that I cannot forward some model of how we think without preformative contradiction, just because I must think to do so. That would disable all philosophy, one could not forward a knowledge claim about what sort of thing knowledge claims are, one could not use language to discuss how language works, one cannot discuss a way one ought to think because one must already have thought hat one ought to discuss that...

We are capable of rationalising in theoretical models despite the fact that we are caught within them, the whole of clinical psychology is predicated on the idea.

The error we make depends upon there being a true coral size as well as there being a fallible modelling process applied to it. — fdrake

Not necessarily. Could we not do the same thing with some complex function and our predictions of what it's solution might be prior to calculating it? Our T would be the calculated value of the function but it could be some function no-one has ever written before, so no-one knows what T is that data is nowhere in the world, our L would be distributed around our priors about the parameter for function a bit like that (maybe we'd look at the constants and the presence of any factorial functions etc), and our e would be distributed around the extent to which we're prone to miss key elements of a function which determine it's range of solutions. (there's more, but that's a sketch)

The mean of estimates L, would still be a more accurate estimate of T (under the same assumptions about e), but T is not true (in a correspondence sense), it's a mathematical fiction, a consequence of the function it is expressed by only if you follow the rules of mathematics, which, since no-one has yet calculated that function, does not yet exist as T, it only exists as potential T after following some rules.

Could this not be the case the with the true coral perimeter?

Perhaps you’re drawing off the fact science can monitor the stimulus/reaction complex, and thereby affirming the antecedent, by re-naming the stimuli as disposition to act, hence, belief. (?) — Mww

In a sense, yes, but any problem with doing so would only arise from a position that some previous definition existed whose only flaw was its inability to be thus monitored, and I'm not at all convinced that such a definition existed.

I cannot have your pain. I can most certainly have my own. If we know what having pain consists of... then it doesn't make much sense to say that having pain is inaccessible, does it? — creativesoul

It's accessible in the sense that we do have similar experiences as human beings, but not entirely. What's inaccessible is each of our own personal experience. We're walking along the street. You realize I'm deep in thought. What am I thinking? You can't read my thoughts, so the best you can do is guess. And you didn't realize I had a headache, or that I'm color blind and see the world a bit differently than you.

I can share all that with you to an extent. But it's not something you can access yourself. We can't just peer into someone else's minds and watch their experiences like some kind of haptic VR setup.

This becomes even more the case with animals, since we're not dogs or bats, and don't interact with the world quite the same. Imagine having the body of a cephalopod and being able to activate thousands of light emitting cells on your skin to signal other animals. What would that be like?

I (and others) haven't arrived at this belief because it's the way the world seems to us to be, We've arrived at it becasue of a failure to feel satisfied with any objective criteria for distinguishing objects. So If you've got such a criteria, then we can ditch the whole idea of model dependent realism. Say an alien comes to earth, they don't even see in colour like we do, they detect some other part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and maybe the Weak Nuclear Force directly, maybe they have completely different model of how evolution and DNA works (afterall, we had a completely different model 200years ago). Give me an reason why they would still recognise you as one thing and me as another. Or even you as one thing and the chair you're sitting on as another. — Isaac

Ahhh, so you're a meriological nihilist. That still leaves the fundamental stuff. Our alien visitors agree on the electromagnetic spectrum it seems. That's a starting point. And if they agree on EM, then they probably agree on chemistry.

Here's my point. The fact that pattern matching occurs means there's some sort of objective organization that results in pattern matching. Model Dependent Realism doesn't exist as a philosophy if nature doesn't produce creatures who do philosophy.

It's easy enough to imagine the universe without any philosophy taking place. Just have the physics be a little different.

The fact that pattern matching occurs means there's some sort of objective organization that results in pattern matching. Model Dependent Realism doesn't exist as a philosophy if nature doesn't produce creatures who do philosophy. — Marchesk

Yep, this seems to be a line many are taking, but it's always expressed in this manner, or similar. I agree it would be a boon to model dependent realism to have an intuitive sounding answer, but I honestly don't get the problem, so it's unlikely one is going to come from me.

I mean, why have you put the word 'objective' in there? It seems to be entirely without warrant. If there is (something we model as) pattern matching going on, then there's (something we model as) a pattern to match. Where's objective come in?

Likewise, if there's (something we model as) modelling going on, then there's (something we model as) a modeller doing that. Still not seeing how 'objective' belongs there.

I'll put it another way. Someone could come along and argue that all we have our words and not reality. So proper philosophy would be to recognize that our words aren't describing reality. They're just words, after-all! There is no reality independent of the words. Or the words make the reality. And yes, we did have at least one person who did argue along those lines, and they were quite good with words.

The problem is that the existence of words entails creatures who speak. And speaking is based in a biological reality. So it can't just be words, since the words depend on the biology of mouths and vocal cords and what not to be spoken.

Same with philosophizing. In order to do philosophy, there has to be something real that makes the philosophizing a possibility. Philosophy doesn't just exist. It exists in response to a world by creatures who are puzzled by their place in the world. Probably because their models never quite fit.

In order to do philosophy, there has to be something real that makes the philosophizing a possibility. — Marchesk

Yep, I've never denied the existence of reality, neither does model dependent realism as a whole (hence the 'realism' bit).

Philosophy doesn't just exist. It exists in response to a world by creatures who are puzzled by their place in the world. — Marchesk

I don't buy this because essentially it leads to dualism (or idealism) and I think either create more problems than they solve. I'm a physicalist simply because it seems a default for me, and I need a good reason to discard it.