Yes, but some of the constituents of the matter we can feel and see are matter you cannot feel and see, but can detect the effects thereof.

what convinces you that “Socrates” is a noun? Same.

What do you have in mind as counter-example? For example, "I believe that I'm special". Would that count as a belief that is not about a statement? — Marchesk

I gave what I thought of as a counter example earlier. When you record where people's eyes move about on faces while forming a stable image of them - if someone's fixated on a facial feature, where they tend to look next is where they expect another facial feature to be. Those expectations and actions come out so fast no statement like "Given that I am looking at their nasal septum, I believe that if I rotate my eyes up and left a little bit my eyes will land approximately where I expect an eye to be, given what I know about faces in general and this face" enters the process, but that's the kind of thing that goes into a perceptual expectation informing eye movements promoted to explore someone's face.

Since no statements come to mind during that activity (brief fixations regularly last around 0.15 seconds), and certainly not any of the required complexity to state the event, it seems whatever intentional state the body is in during that time cannot be directed towards a statement; statements about the face are not within the scope of the exploratory process at the time. If perceptual expectations counted as beliefs, they'd be beliefs that aren't intentional states directed towards statements.

Those perceptual expectations get called beliefs. In the absence of necessary and sufficient conditions for a mental+behavioural state to count as a belief (help, @Banno?), here's a list of things perceptual expectations look to satisfy that beliefs also satisfy.

(A) Perceptual expectations inform actions.
(B) Perceptual expectations can be used to explain actions.
(C) Perceptual expectations can cause actions.
(D) They do all the above in functioning as dispositions toward actions "He was hungry so he made a snack" vs "he expected to see an eye there so he looked".
(E) Perceptual expectations can be more or less accurate; if I expect to find an eye to fixate on on a face by moving my eye pupil one degree upwards from its current position, I'm more right if the eye is located at 1.1 degrees than I am if it is at 1.2 degrees. Correcting for inaccuracies is already part of the process (if your eyes overshoot something you're looking for, they move back); so inaccuracies are already part of the process.
(F) Perceptual expectations are information carriers; if you see a glowing red ring on the hob, you infer that it is hot. There's something modelling-y or representation-y about them.

They look a lot like beliefs to me in terms of the functional roles they play and the properties they satisfy. Maybe they don't count all count as beliefs, maybe beliefs can count as perceptual expectations: "I believe that my cup is behind my laptop" - where else is there to that than expecting to perceive my cup behind my laptop if I looked?

I disagree that "The snow is white" is as simple as it looks. — Marchesk

Yeah....don’t need no thinkin’ no mo’. Just listen to what yer tol’...poof...snow is white.

Ok, thank you.

The other way I tried to approach it with @Banno is: if you believe snow is white, is your belief directed towards snow or the statement "snow is white"? Is your belief about snow, or about words?

The other way I tried to approach it with Banno is: if you believe snow is white, is your belief directed towards snow or the statement "snow is white"? — fdrake

The snow, unless it's during one of these discussions.

So what your'e saying in the previous response is that perception involves all sorts of beliefs about the world, but they're mostly not the sort we put into language when acting.

So what your'e saying in the previous response is that perception involves all sorts of beliefs about the world, but they're mostly not the sort we put into language when acting. — Marchesk

If it's appropriate to call those perceptual expectations beliefs, yeah. I think there's some intuition that a belief labels an "entire" state of mind, a unified disposition of an agent towards a thing which can be expressed as a statement. I just think it's a case of using words to talk about things and forgetting that "how the statement expresses the belief" isn't the same thing as the statement; "snow is white" is about snow. Words aren't the things they're about.

The snow, unless it's during one of these discussions. — Marchesk

That's my intuition too. I believe snow is white, language competence does the chunking things into related bits with labels on them for me - what counts as snow, what counts as white, what it means to describe a thing as white and how that's wrapped into the "is" - but what I've got the intentional state toward is snow.

I enjoyed your counterexample, but I'm not convinced that the facial exploration expectations should qualify as beliefs. I learned recently how we work out where to position ourselves to catch a flying cricket ball or baseball.

If a is the angle of elevation of gaze from the fielder to the ball, then the acceleration of the tangent of a, d2(tan a)/dt2, will be zero if, and only if, the fielder is standing at the place where the ball will land.

But all this maths is unconscious. It would be straining things to say that the fielder believes that the acceleration of the tangent of a will be zero if he's at the right spot. The purported beliefs in your counterexample are subject to the same criticism.

But all this maths is unconscious. It would be straining things to say that the fielder believes that the acceleration of the tangent of a will be zero if he's at the right spot. The purported beliefs in your counterexample are subject to the same criticism. — Daemon

I think it's true that whatever modelling process a human does won't resemble how we'd calculate things on paper. People do calculus at high school but catch balls as children. I think the trick there is that the world tends to develop in patterns, and however our bodies are wired is very good at guessing what comes next given an input pattern and what we need to do with it.

Sorta like a thrown ball "needs" to fall in a way that roughly resembles a parabola, our bodies "need" to guess what happens next given what we've learned about how balls fall. Perception as less of a manual calculation we'd do - more like perception as a way of adapting to nature's next move based on her play.

The other way I tried to approach it with Banno is: if you believe snow is white, is your belief directed towards snow or the statement "snow is white"? — fdrake

I don't presume to answer for @Banno, but I'll tender my own. If I believe snow is white, I necessarily believe 'snow is white' is true. A distinction may be drawn between the two beliefs, one about an actuality and the other about a statement or proposition, but they are inseparable; that is, it is impossible (consistently, if at all) to believe one while disbelieving the other.

The "snow is white" example almost makes the point that not all belief is regarding a statement; that not all belief has propositional content; that not all belief is an attitude towards a statement/proposition. The problem with the example is that it is not a belief that can be had by a language less creature.

Some belief is about what happened, is happening, or what will happen. Some belief about that does not consist of language, nor is it existentially dependent upon language. The fire example serves to make the point better.

A language less creature can learn that touching fire causes pain. The belief that touching the fire caused the subsequent pain is not an attitude towards the proposition "touching fire caused pain". It's a belief about what just happened. The proposition/statement is a part of our report, not a part of the creature's belief. All belief is meaningful to the creature having it. This crucial point gets glossed over and/or outright neglected far too often. We always attribute meaning, and form meaningful thought and belief(conscious experience as a result) by virtue of drawing correlations between different things. In the fire example, the creature draw correlations between the fire, the touching, and the pain. It has conscious experience of being burnt by fire. It learns, and subsequently believes that touching fire caused(causes) pain.

There is no language necessary in order for this to actually happen. No propositions. No statements. There is meaningful conscious experience, thought, belief, the attribution and/or recognition of causality. And... the belief is true(corresponds to what happened). Touching the fire did cause the pain. We know that, as does the creature, despite the creature's inability to say it. It formed meaningful, well-grounded, and true belief about what happened.

Expectation(the kind that is of interest here) is belief about what has not yet happened, belief about what's going to happen, and it's based upon belief about what has happened, and/or is happening. It's a good direction to go in, particularly regarding language less creature's beliefs. It's not always belief regarding statements/propositions.

A proposition is a state of affairs. — frank

I've seen the term rendered as such before. I find it tenuous. A proposition is proposed, it seems. As a result, it requires a creature capable of proposing something; language use. While I do not care too much for rendering with "states of affairs", it seems pretty clear that they do not require language users. At least, not all of them.

But what is a similar experience to vision, for example? — Daemon

I don't understand this insistence - from you and from others. What similar experience could you have to my looking at a tree? You could start by looking at a tree.

No. I'm just saying that phrases can have different senses depending on how they are used. Practical contact is going to be different in some sense for a human than it is for a robot, even though the same phrase might be used for both. — Andrew M

I'm still unclear on the distinction.

Experience is a term that applies to humans but not to robots. Not because humans have Cartesian minds (where they have internal experiences), but because humans have different capabilities to robots. A human's practical contact with the world instantiates differently to a robot's. — Andrew M

You said that the phrase "practical contact" might be used for both humans and robots, so why couldn't the term "experience" also apply to both humans and robots? What different capabilities do robots and humans have if it's not "internal experiences"?

From Lexico, touch means "Come into or be in contact with." while feel (in this context) means "Be aware of (a person or object) through touching or being touched."

If I felt someone touch my shoulder, then I have become aware that someone is there. That's my experience of the world.

What I felt was not "in my mind", it was in the world. It is only the introduction of a Cartesian theater that makes what I felt internal to a container mind. — Andrew M

I understand that the Cartesian theatre indicates having an experience of an experience, but I don't think that I or other Qualists need to commit to any such thing, as the non-Qualists here like yourself have suggested.

You want to say that a feeling is of something "in the world", and not of something "in your mind". Okay, but you are either aware or not aware of being touched, and it is the awareness (or not) that makes it a feeling (or not). You are aware of the experience; you are not having an experience of the experience. The same thing could be said of the awareness of the colour red or of the taste of coffee (or of some property of those). It needn't be some homunculus viewing red on the mind's stage. Otherwise, you would be committed to the same homunculus viewing feeling on the mind's stage.

What about the feeling of pain - is that a feeling of something "in the world"? If so, then what is the distinction between the feeler of pain (i.e. the person) and the world? Do you consider a person to be identical with their physical body?

Given the discussion's recent linguistic turn (assuming the discussion is still about qualia), I thought I'd try and revive my earlier point:

If we take the point of Wittgenstein's private language argument to be that our words cannot get their meanings from anyone's inner private experiences, and if we further assume that we have inner private experiences, then the flip-side of the argument is that our inner private experiences must be ineffable because language cannot refer to them, so we cannot use language to speak about them.

Related:

It is worth pausing to consider the seriousness of the problem of knowing others. While some draw a parallel between the problem of gaining knowledge of the past and of another mind, there is an important asymmetry to be noted here: in the case of the past it is at least logically possible that there should be direct knowledge, while in the case of another mind such knowledge seems to be logically ruled out. — SEP article on Other Minds

Sure, it's not impossible that we have the wrong understanding of what constitutes matter. But it does seem vanishingly unlikely, given the predictive success of quantum physics, that it could be completely wrong — Janus

Still, we don’t know what matter is. We only know the forms it takes.

Yep.

Yep. — Banno

You agree that qualia are ineffable?

"Qualia" is an empty concept, if it is completely private and ineffable.

Oliver's post about someone not knowing what matter is. They say they know the world is material because they were told that by their teacher. — Marchesk

( emph added)

It’s not someone... it’s everyone.

↪Olivier5 I see the mind as being an activity of the body. — Janus

Or vice versa, in the sense that the body without the mind becomes vegetative.

You agree that qualia are ineffable? — Luke

Short answer, Yes.

There is a way of talking about qualia that is not ineffable, but it appears to be no different to our talk of tastes, sights, fellings and so on - all quite adequatly dealt with without reference to qualia.

So see the conversation from and ; As soon as an effable sense of qualia was admitted, March went straight back to the ineffable version. That's happened repeatedly, with various folk, over the course of this thread.

That is, the effable sense of qualia leads down a philosophical garden path.

Same way you know Khaled. — Daemon

I don't

— Daemon


I don't understand this insistence - from you and from others. What similar experience could you have to my looking at a tree? You could start by looking at a tree. — Banno

The idea, now lost in the mists of time, was that you couldn't explain what vision is like to someone who lacked vision.

It's like being able to feel stuff at a distance.

Here:

This seems to be the perennial trick of the idealists and woo-merchants. To point out that empirical data has flaws (subjectivity, the necessity of an observer etc) and then for some reason assume this counts as an argument in favour of alternative methods of discussion. — Isaac — Olivier5

Really? I'm not sure I can help you if your comprehension is genuinely that bad, but I'll have go.

First of all that sentence says that subjectivity is a flaw, not that it itself is flawed, secondly it is attributing such a view to a rhetorical opposition, not claiming it as my own, and thirdly it is claiming an equality with other approaches, which negates any context in which I would claim any superior approach exists (not that I wouldn't).

Perhaps, next time you're going to argue against your own invented cliches you should do a little more work constructing them than simply to look back over the thread for any sentence in which the key words appear regardless of their syntactic role?

It's like being able to feel stuff at a distance. — Banno

Same as sonar, and hearing and smelling then?

That's my intuition too. I believe snow is white, language competence (piggybacking off object recognition/segmentation/categorisation) does the chunking things into related bits with labels on them for me - what counts as snow, what counts as white, what it means to describe a thing as white and how that's wrapped into the "is" - but what I've got the intentional state toward is snow. — fdrake

Yeah. This is perhaps more difficult to see in "the snow is white" than in "the pub is at the end of the road". If I walk to the end of the road when wanting to go to the pub, I clearly have a belief that the pub is at then end of the road, but it is necessarily (in its execution) tied to beliefs about roads and pubs and 'ends' and walking and the consistency of the world in general, the continuity of physical laws... None of which is captured in the proposition "the pub is at the end of the road", which it is claimed constitutes the same thing as my belief that it is, as evidenced by my tendency to act as if it were.

@Banno
The translation of my belief (tendency to act as if) into a proposition does a lot of simplification. If they were one and the same thing, then what would it be simplifying?