but again completely different from ours. — Mersi

What's so completely different?

Now the question: Do we share at least the fundamental logical rules of inference with these beings, who perceive so differently? — Mersi

Yes. If these beings acknowledge that every thing is what it is and is not what it is not, they will have the same logic as us. (If they didn't acknowledge this basic fact they would have died out quickly, assuming that their nervous system would even allow them not to acknowledge it, which seems doubtful.)

So they would acknowledge the basic logical principle of identity/non-contradiction. Thus they would identify different objects and their similarities, their different and shared properties, and would be able to group objects based on their shared properties. By communicating with each other, these beings would form propositions affirming or denying that certain objects have certain properties.

I think the questions in your OP lead to the problem of psychologism, this may interest you: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/psychologism/

Personally, I agree with Kolakowski when he says that this dispute is unsolvable, since the question: “Does logic reflect some given, a priori structure of the world, or does it merely reflect how the brain of us humans works?” is beyond the realm of any possible experience.

Do we share at least the fundamental logical rules of inference with these beings, who perceive so differently? — Mersi

A drive-by of Wikipedia indicates there's been an attempt to draw an equivalence between logic and hypotheses and just as the latter is subject to revision based on empirical testing, the former too should be. This would mean logic is dependent on experience (senses to be specific).

Prima facie it seems a reasonable position to hold but dig a little deeper and such a point of view comes apart at the seams. Logic exists precisely because the senses are unreliable; after all it's sole purpose is to test/analyze what our senses report in order that we may distinguish between truths and falsehoods. As a good example :point:



Any insect that relies on its senses is doomed!

This mantis is,
1. To the senses: A harmless flower (falsity)
2. To logic: A deadly predator (truth)

Logic has little to do with experience, sense organs or the external world.
It is the way human mind works from the faculty of mental processing called reason.

Logic is learned behaviour, and therefore leans heavily on experience.

An infant's brain learns that, with certain learned movements, it can bring things to its mouth. Later, the logic goes:

"I'm want to eat."

"I can eat what I bring to my mouth."

"I must bring this object to my mouth."

From there, other learning experiences teach the brain about similar situations, and from there are derived empirical formulations about eating. This applies to winning and retaining friends, driving a vehicle, shopping, finding an interesting book to read, passing time when bored, solving riddles, doing crosswords, etc.

Let us assume that life has evolved elsewhere in the universe, but different from ours. It also develops from a simple to a more complex state, sense organs arise and a sort of a central processing system, but again completely different from ours. Let´s assumethat the sensory impressions these beings receive does not at all overlap with how we perceive the enviroment. With one exception: like us these beings differentiate between an outside world theire conception of it.
Now the question: Do we share at least the fundamental logical rules of inference with these beings, who perceive so differently?
If not, that would mean that even most fundamental building blocks of thinking are dependent on experience and experience itselfe would in turn depend on the way sense organs developed.
But if we share the same logic with these beings regardless of the experience we have, the question arises as to where logic comes from?
This could mean that even the most specific factors that determine our thoughts are inherent (so far undiscovered) properties of the matter we are made of.
Both conclusions don`t really get us anywhere. What objections are possible? — Mersi

The most fun thing about philosophy is the questions that are asked. I want to applaud you for asking such an interesting question.

That said, I think what would make a difference is not a difference in the ability to perceive, but rather a difference in what is perceived. We have a very simple earthly example. The Mongols originated in a very harsh environment where survival very much depends on cooperation with others and hunting. Deadly storms mean locking someone out of your shelter could lead to that person's death, and next time it could be you needing shelter in a storm, so it is important everyone agrees to help each other survive. Stealing and lying can also be serious survival issues, so the punishment for either is death.

Genghis Khan thought city people were very immoral. He saw the difference in wealth and poverty as intolerable and leading to lying and stealing. Cities developed where life is good and with a little effort farms produce an abundance of food. The farming mentality is very different from thehunting mentality. Genghis Khan stopped killing everyone and razing everything to the ground when a man from China taught him to harvest the cities like a farmer.

Genghis Khan was aware of a sky god who just assume kill pathetic humans. While in the valley where cities first developed people believed in a goddess/god that takes care of them. Genghis Khan thought that was a pretty silly idea, and he continued to prove the Mongols were mightier than their God. If the people refused to pay him tribute he left a message about the will of God. Leading to Christians fearing it was the will of God that sent the Mongols to punish them for their sins and making them even more powerless to defend against the Mongols.

Bottom line, it would be our environment that leads to different logical conclusions, not a difference in the ability to perceive information.

What`s so completely dirfferent?

Perhaps completely differnt is the wrong notion. What I mean: Given all nerve cells have developed from first primitive sensory cells, it probably makes a differnce to which stimulus these first cells had to react. Even the structure of the nerve cells of our hypothetical aliens could be different. Then it would be obvious that the rest of the nervous system would also build up differently.

PS: I once heard a lecture on the philosophy of space that mentioned a thought experiment, I believe it was by P.F. Strawson, which was about Hypothetical creatures with only one sense (a type of hearing) and they are living in a world dominated by acustic beacons. The quetion was how such beings would perceive space. Unfortunately never found this essay again.

Personally I agree with Kolakowski ..

If Kolakowski is right, the quetion arises as to how (and if at all) progress in the field of epistemology is possible. Because then we would never know when nor why our ideas of the outside world coincide with this outside world.

If Kolakowski is right, the quetion arises as to how (and if at all) progress in the field of epistemology is possible. — Mersi

Kolakowski just says we don't know if psychologism is correct, and cannot ever know, since in order to answer the question we would have to apprehend reality from a non-human perspective in order to judge whether “reality” matches with what we perceive and apprehend intuitively, which is impossible.

So as you say, what we see as “progress” could be merely illusory, it could be that for instance we can't help believing that the Law of Contradiction is true, and yet the Law is in fact false, in which case there wouldn't be any progress.

Because then we would never know when nor why our ideas of the outside world coincide with this outside world. — Mersi

If our ideas of the outside world coincide with the outside world, that means our logic reflects some given a priori structure of the world, so that logical principles such as Modus Ponens and the Law of Contradiction existed before we humans begun to exist on earth, not being merely a creation of our brains. But the problem, as I said, is that we can't ever tell a scenario in which psychologism is false from one in which it is true, since they both appear identical.

How could we apprehend the world from a non human, non biological perspective? By dying? But then we would not be able to apprehend anything.

How could we apprehend the world from a non human, non biological perspective? — Amalac

If you and I stand a ways apart, and between us there's a red car and a blue car, the red car closer to me and the blue closer to you, from my perspective the blue car is behind the red car and from yours the red car is behind the blue car. Which is true?

Obviously both are true, because "behind" only makes sense given a particular perspective. Insofar as the plain statements, "B is behind R" or "R is behind B" appear to contradict each other, it is only because each statement carries presuppositions that have not been made explicit. Rather than being contradictory, they turn out to be not only equally true but equivalent once you've made those presuppositions explicit. (If from this side B is behind R, then it had better be true that from the other side R is behind B.)

There can be bad angles -- I'm thinking of baseball, for instance, where the umpire at second base may not be able to see from his angle whether the fielder's glove is actually touching the runner's leg. From another angle it will be perfectly clear. But the umpire's might be the only perspective from which you can see whether the runner's foot was touching the bag, so to get the whole story you may have to combine the views from more than one perspective. We have no trouble doing this, because we believe the world was in exactly one state at the moment in question, and each perspective shows us some of that state.

That's all pretty boring, but it's how we usually talk about perspective, and it's how we learn to take it into account when trying to say what state the world is in. I am not a prisoner of my perspective but fairly adept at swapping it for another, imagining another, or even "factoring it out" altogether. This last can't be imagined clearly, because the mind's eye needs a perspective, but I can define and work with whatever relations are invariant over the changing of perspective.

I say all this to ask if you can connect the talk of "human" perspective to this more mundane understanding of perspective.

If you and I stand a ways apart, and between us there's a red car and a blue car, the red car closer to me and the blue closer to you, from my perspective the blue car is behind the red car and from yours the red car is behind the blue car. Which is true?

Obviously both are true, because "behind" only makes sense given a particular perspective. Insofar as the plain statements, "B is behind R" or "R is behind B" appear to contradict each other, it is only because each statement carries presuppositions that have not been made explicit. Rather than being contradictory, they turn out to be not only equally true but equivalent once you've made those presuppositions explicit. (If from this side B is behind R, then it had better be true that from the other side R is behind B.)

There can be bad angles -- I'm thinking of baseball, for instance, where the umpire at second base may not be able to see from his angle whether the fielder's glove is actually touching the runner's leg. From another angle it will be perfectly clear. But the umpire's might be the only perspective from which you can see whether the runner's foot was touching the bag, so to get the whole story you may have to combine the views from more than one perspective. We have no trouble doing this, because we believe the world was in exactly one state at the moment in question, and each perspective shows us some of that state. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree with all that, but when speaking of non human perspective, I meant rather this: either our logic is merely a product of our brain, so that a different organism, with a different brain structure would translate (so to speak) reality in a different way than we do, to a different logic, or there's one “true” logic, which is an ontologically given a priori structure of the world, such that all beings, no matter what sort of brain structure they have, must be constrained in their thinking by its laws.

Now, supposing that the laws and principles of logic we employ are produced by our brains, then since our brain would always translate everything to the “language” of our logic, we could never apprehend the logic that in fact governs the world, unless it happened to be the same as our logic.

But we have no way of telling if that's the case, just as the brain of another animal which evolved differently could translate everything to a different logic from ours, and we could not tell if that animal would “grasp reality” correctly or not.

This all seems to go back to Kant: since we cannot know or experience the “thing in itself”, we are trapped in the egocentric predicament.

Sure, I know how the argument works. I also know "perspective" and "point-of-view" have been metaphored to mean all sorts of things.

I was just wondering if there's anything in the argument that would actually justify using the "perspective" metaphor if it weren't already to hand.

This might serve as an example: objects closer to you appear larger in your visual field than those farther away -- art-class perspective. You could metaphorically extend perspective to include the value people place on things by also metaphorically extending (visual) size to stand in for value -- a bit like the way a word cloud shows words in sizes that (approximately) preserve the proportions of their frequencies within a corpus.

I just can't quite come up with anything like that for, well, all of reality. So we have this "perspective" metaphor, but I don't know what it means.

Sure, I know how the argument works. I also know "perspective" and "point-of-view" have been metaphored to mean all sorts of things.

I was just wondering if there's anything in the argument that would actually justify using the "perspective" metaphor if it weren't already to hand.

This might serve as an example: objects closer to you appear larger in your visual field than those farther away -- art-class perspective. You could metaphorically extend perspective to include the value people place on things by also metaphorically extending (visual) size to stand in for value -- a bit like the way a word cloud shows words in sizes that (approximately) preserve the proportions of their frequencies within a corpus.

I just can't quite come up with anything like that for, well, all of reality. So we have this "perspective" metaphor, but I don't know what it means. — Srap Tasmaner

I mean, when talking about about perspective, I just used that as shorthand for what I said in my previous post, nothing more and nothing less.

Basically, we can't have access to the non human perspective of, say, a bat, because we can't “peer” into its mind while at the same time abandoning our own mind, so we can't be certain that it doesn't have a different logic, and since we can't dissociate ourselves from our brains in order to tell how reality would look or be like when not filtered by our mental apparatus of perception and reasoning, we can never give a satisfactory answer to the question whether psychologism is correct or not.

A philosopher from my country put it like this, when interpreting Kolakowski's The Presence of Myth:

The problem of knowledge can be summarized as follows: Is there something objective outside of our perception? And if that something exists, does our knowledge give a valid account of its nature, or rather does it account for the nature of our own mind? And if the mind is not (as traditional psychology, including psychoanalysis believed) a radically different instance of the brain, but is a biological-evolutionary derivative of the brain, then: Is all knowledge simply a material by-product of the brain of a mammal, but without the character of a validity that transcends our zoological condition?

The central question, as it has been posed throughout the history of philosophy, is this: Does the thing exist outside of the act of perception? For Kolakowski, the problem with this question is that although it is true that it is possible to formulate it, by means of a topological reference (the adverb "outside of"), this is still absurd since it is assumed that we are capable of seeing a “Whole”, while we remain “outside” of it and thus assess whether the thing is “inside” or “outside”.

Undoubtedly this way of reasoning seems like a mere metaphor, which does not shed much light on the problem of knowledge. Such a question cannot be formulated (more than metaphorically, I repeat) in virtue of the fact that we do not have consciousness, nor can we ever have it, of a transcendental instance: an "I" abstracted from time and space, that is, outside of all time and space.

Obviously, we know the answer to these questions from traditional philosophy, and we also know that Immanuel Kant's great contribution to the history of thought was to show that human knowledge is not derived only from the sensible impressions generated by our mind, rather, in addition to these empirical elements, a “something else” is needed. And that something else is given by the subject, who, immersed in space and time, apprehends the phenomena, but never the things in themselves (the so-called "noumena").

From this perspective, the so-called "problem of knowledge", which has preoccupied philosophers for thousands of years, disappears in one fell swoop. And not only does it disappear, it is revealed as nonsense.

Indeed, it is impossible for a human being to think in non-human terms, from a pre- or super-human perspective, thus valuing the “primal objectivity” of a world: value-neutral, ahistorical, timeless, and also, making a judgment on how that ontological condition prior to one's own existence is.

I did think of a way that might do some of what's wanted: if you imagine objects in a grid of however-many dimensions, and each dimension is a way of classifying them, then changing which direction you look at the grid from would change which classifications were visible to you, like a projection, dropping out now this classification, now that. (You can do this kind of silliness with SQL databases and Excel spreadsheets too.)

As for bats and such, we can get pretty far falling back on metaphor, can't we? We can talk about sonar or magnetic field perception as if it's a kind of sight. (I heard an interview with a neuroscientist who learned how to "see" heat by wearing a sensor that stimulated the skin with vibrations to indicate temperatures.)

I suppose the important question is where representational and symbolic thought come into this. Insofar as that's unique to humans, I'm okay with talking about some uniquely human way of thinking we do involuntarily. But maybe symbolic thought is built up out of elements you might find elsewhere. In which case, maybe the "human perspective" is unique only in the way it marshals other forms of thought, forms we might be able to split off and examine at least analytically, if not in fact.

Just babbling, sorry, but I would love to see a little hesitation before each word in a phrase like "human perspective", just in case we don't even know what that's supposed to mean.

And that something else is given by the subject, who, immersed in space and time, apprehends the phenomena, but never the things in themselves (the so-called "noumena").

From this perspective, the so-called "problem of knowledge", which has preoccupied philosophers for thousands of years, disappears in one fell swoop. And not only does it disappear, it is revealed as nonsense.

Indeed, it is impossible for a human being to think in non-human terms, from a pre- or super-human perspective, thus valuing the “primal objectivity” of a world: value-neutral, ahistorical, timeless, and also, making a judgment on how that ontological condition prior to one's own existence is.

There is still a problem for the Kantian view. And that’s the gulf between the roel of the subject and the thing in itself. How can we be in the world if there is an uncrossable chasm between our representations of the world ( the phenomena ) and the noumenal aspect of reality?
Phenomenological philosophy proposed to solve this dualist problem by arguing that there is no noumenal reality. The world as it appears to a subject is all there is, there is nothing hidden behind phenomena. Because it is no longer necessary to assume internal representations or models of a separate outside , it is also not necessary to assume a formal logic as our primary means of access to a world. This removes the issue of whether human ‘logic’ is idiosyncratic to us and not shared by other animals. All living, self-organizing systems function according to the same general normatively oriented principles.

there is no noumenal reality. — Joshs

Then I cant see how you avoid solipsism.

If all that is, is your perceptions, then other people are just your perceptions.

Then I cant see how you avoid solipsism.

If all that is, is your perceptions, then other people are just your perceptions. — Banno

Took the words out of my mouth.

But it's more like we can't refute solipsism, rather than its being the case (if there are no noumena).

If all that is, is your perceptions, then other people are just your perceptions. — Banno

I dont know if this will help. It lays out the anti-noumenal phenomenological argument, claiming that it gives us a more robust realism than the Kantian or neo-Kantian alternatives.


‘As Husserl points out in the lecture course Ausgewählte phänomenologische Probleme from 1915, nothing might seem more natural than to say that the objects I am aware of are outside my consciousness. When my experiences – be they perceptions or other kinds of intentional acts – present me with objects, one must ask how this could happen, and the answer seems straightforward: By means of some representational mediation. The objects of which I am conscious are outside my consciousness, but inside my consciousness, I find representations (pictures and signs) of these objects, and it is these internal objects that enable me to be conscious of the external ones. However, as Husserl then continues, such a theory is completely nonsensical. It conceives of consciousness as a box containing representations that resemble external objects, but it forgets to ask how we are supposed to know that the (mis)representations are in fact (mis)representations of external objects:

The ego is not a tiny man in a box that looks at the pictures and then occasionally leaves his box in order to compare the external objects with the internal ones etc. For such a picture observing ego, the picture would itself be something external; it would require its own matching internal picture, and so on ad infinitum (Husserl 2003: 106

Representationalism notoriously courts scepticism: Why should awareness of one thing (an inner object) enable awareness of a quite different thing (an external object), and how can we ever know that what is internally accessible actually corresponds to something external? On Husserl’s anti-representationalist view, however, the fit and link between mind and world – between perception and reality – isn’t merely external or coincidental: “consciousness (mental process) and real being are anything but coordinate kinds of being, which dwell peaceably side by side and occasionally become ‘related to’ or ‘connected with’ one another” (Husserl 1982: 111).

This claim is one that resounds throughout Husserl’s oeuvre. As he, years later, would write in Cartesianische Meditationen, it is absurd to conceive of consciousness
and true being as if they were merely externally related, when the truth is that they are essentially
interdependent and united (Husserl 1960: 84). Husserl’s idealism is not a reductive idealism. Husserl is not a phenomenalist that seeks to reduce the world to a complex of sensations. His opponent is not the dualist, but the objectivist, who claims that reality is absolute in the sense of being radically mind­independent. To deny the latter, to deny that the “universe of true being” lies “outside the universe of possible consciousness, possible knowledge, possible evidence” (Husserl 1960: 84), is not to say that reality literally exists in the mind, or that it is an intramental construction, but that reality is essentially manifestable, and therefore in principle available and accessible to consciousness.”

https://www.academia.edu/34265366/Brain_Mind_World_Predictive_coding_neo_Kantianism_and_transcendental_idealism

But it's more like we can't refute solipsism, rather than its being the case (if there are no noumena). — Amalac

Phenomenology is not a solipsism , it is a radical
interactionism. You don’t solve the issue by positing a noumenal reality , you reify a form of solipsist idealism.

Phenomenology is not a solipsism , it is a radical
interactionism. You don’t solve the issue by posting a noumenal reality , you reify a form of solipsist idealism. — Joshs

I've no clear idea of how that would pay out.

Sure, all that. But if a philosophical argument reaches the conclusion that "there is no reality", that alone is sufficient to reject the argument.

Adding "noumenal" doesn't seem to help much.

if a philosophical argument reaches the conclusion that "there is no reality", that alone is sufficient to reject the argument. — Banno

I prefer to word it this way: reality is the set of constraints that are co-defined by, and respond intimately to, a constantly changing experiencing of the world.

reality is the set of constraints that are co-defined by, and respond intimately to, a constantly changing experiencing of the world. — Joshs

That doesn't seem to be the same as "there is no noumenal reality".

Is there more to the word than phenomena? I say yes. You?

Is there more to the word than phenomena? I say yes. You? — Banno

For Husserl, the phenomenon is a complex entity composed of my intention projecting forward into the world and the world pushing back on my intention by acting both as a constraint and an affordance. But how the world does this is dependent on what I project forward. The world responses precisely, but in different ways, to different formulations.


Reciprocal dependence between self as world is not the same thing as a noumenal reality. The latter seems to imply a relation of one-way correspondence between representing subject and subject-independent world.

Hmm. Then what at first looked like a difference of opinion is perhaps a difference in expression.

Where you say there is a complex entity composed of my intention projecting forward into the world and the world pushing back on my intention by acting both as a constraint and an affordance, I'll just say there is a wall.

I don't see how such a phenomenological analysis is helpful. But there's folk as seem to like it.

For Husserl, the phenomenon is a complex entity composed of my intention projecting forward into the world and the world pushing back on my intention by acting both as a constraint and an affordance. — Joshs

Can I keep the part that sounds like biology and ignore the part that sounds like ontology? Everything after "complex entity composed of" is dandy, or anyhow good enough, but the first part of the sentence is just there to keep the philosophers quiet.

Point is, there are more than just phenomena. There are also complex entities.

Like other people.

Speak for yourself. I'm a pretty simple guy.

Doubtless you are also phenomenal, in your own way.

But it's more like we can't refute solipsism, rather than its being the case (if there are no noumena). — Amalac

Refute it? Anyone who thinks themselves the only thing in existence is mad; I see them.

There's no need for refutation.