who [...] has had a clearer understanding of what mind is and its relationship to brains [...] why what someone else thinks about this relationship could be better than mine or anyone else's? — Harry Hindu

I'm an informationalist, or relationship/process philosopher. — Harry Hindu

Call it what you will, Harry, but your "informationalist" position as expressed here suggests introspective illusionism (i.e. naive platonism) to me.

Unfortunately, in philosophical circles it sometimes is. — Banno

There is that, yes. There's no accounting for folk...

So we can on your account consider (almost?) any point in the chain of events as the object of consciousness. — Banno

With one important caveat. We talk for reasons, so our talk is subservient to those reasons. Some cut-off points would not serve any of the needs we have, the reasons for talking. Many would totally get in the way.

A considerable amount of philosophy (in my opinion) is composed of things we could say without any reason why we should.

I'm not suggesting you think otherwise, Isaac, but I suspect that there might be those who erroneously think your account provides succour to such views. — Banno

Yeah. There's no doubt about that. I'm not that well versed in philosophy so my explanations are often lacking, and I'm afraid I am rather prone to saying things like "there's no flower". Call it a kind of active inference Tourette's.

Perhaps demonstration might be better...

Here is some work using the idea of perceptual features. https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2019/1/niz012/5566576 (an interesting paper, but just a random example really). Now, they describe the first node outside of the Markov boundary as a 'hypothesised stimuli', I use 'hidden state'. The question for the "when we talk about the flower, we are talking about the flower and not some odd construct" position is...are they wrong to do this research? Are they wrong about what they're discovering, wrong about their modelling assumptions? Basically, the trouble I have understanding the position you espouse (which does differ from mine on this point, I think) is exactly where you think people like Friston have gone wrong.

I totally get that in normal language games it's be ridiculous to say "pass me the set-of-hidden-states-that-I'm-currently-modelling-as-the-jam would you". I can even go as far as to understand why a more in depth linguistic analysis might want to deal in flowers, bulbs, light and nervous tissue, rather than models.

Where I struggle is in philosophy of mind and epistemology where I can't seem to accommodate what is, at the moment, the prevailing model of perception . I don't currently see how it can take into account that model without getting into Markov blankets and hidden states.

If we extend our causal chain further seed>flower>retinal ganglia>visual cortex>action(pick the flower), we see that in terms of proximate causality, your reaching out to pick something is stimulated by the message from your visual cortex (there are complex backward-acting suppressive messages too, but we'll ignore those for a minute). So the properties (spatial location, texture etc) that form your reaching strategy are those properties the visual cortex delivers. Additional properties (what flowers are 'for', the fact that there might be hidden thorns...) that your reaching strategy is modified by are those delivered by (well, a very complex set of brain regions, but all triggered by the ventral stream of processing from the visual cortex). The point is, if we want to understand your reaching strategy (behaviour), then it's the information entering your sensorimotor regions that determine the strategy, not 'the flower' near the beginning of our chain, any more than 'the seed' right at the start of it

So. To say "we reach to pick the flower, not a model of the flower" is fine until you want to explain why we might make mistakes, or how influences other than the flower affect our strategy (which is where my research was). If we can only talk in terms of reaching for 'the flower', then I can't distinguish other influences. I suppose I could say that we reach for the flower+additional-models, but that seems like a clumsy compromise.

Suggestions welcome!

I can think of a deflationary answer to why we shouldn't be conscious of the seed - because while the seed and its growing environment is a distal cause of the flower's behaviour in the environment we're perceiving in, it doesn't form part of the system of proximate causes that our perception is responding to in our current environment. Seed caused flower to be there, wind's making it move, we see the movement. — fdrake

True, but that assumes no distal causes can intervene in the perceptual process does it not, no neuronal noise, no transmitter suppression en route? If we break the chain at the seed because it's influence on the flower is only distal, then is there some way we can distinguish the many influences from inside the brain on the route between retinal ganglia and conscious logging such that they're categorically different from the way the environment affects the seed? I can' draw it properly by it might go...

seed>(plus stochastic external influences)>flower>retinal ganglia>conscious logging

- and we're troubled including the seed because of the stochastic influences which muddy it's causing the flower. But considering that we actually have...

seed>(plus stochastic external influences)flower>retinal ganglia>(plus stochastic external influences)conscious logging

...the stochastic variables don't seem to be a distinguishing feature of the seed>flower step.

Which I think might be what you're saying with...

Maybe if I can steel man a bit - maybe the point you're making is that it's unclear exactly how to extend what we are conscious of into the system of proximate causes of our environment when the causal network that leads to our perceptual acts is ambiguous - how do you chunk it up into nodes, and which parts are perception? Definitely agree with the presence of that ambiguity. If what the object of perception is, is equated to the antecedent step to the conscious logging event, then I think it's quite clear that the retinal ganglia firing event is the object of perception. — fdrake

...?

Do you think it's right to say that the conscious logging event is part of the perceptual process, or is it an external process which perception just 'writes to' once it's finished? Perception makes a package, sends it to conscious awareness, done. Or is it like 'perception is online, sending live feed to conscious awareness as part my internal function' - is conscious awareness a 'receptor' of the output of the perceptual process - a terminal node - or is it an interior node of the process of perception? — fdrake

Can I be really annoying and say both?

Perception is a process involving feedback (reaching out into the environment to 'test' hypotheses, or even to make the environment match hypotheses) so we must include the conscious awareness that logs very short-term events as those will without doubt be brought back into the process a few seconds later (there's also non-conscious versions of this, such as the loop between the V2 region and the Hippocampus, for example - consciousness is not required).

However, it would seem perverse to say that all of the thousands of mental events that are triggered during a perceptual process (as if we could break that up into chunks either!), should be considered as part of the process. we'd only ever have the kind of radical holism that can't investigate anything for failure to commit to boundaries.

I think, if we're to investigate perception we have to learn to be happy about identifying a main stream of events in the causal chain and accepting that we've cut-off a whole load of more minor tributaries from our investigation. Much of conscious logging goes out the window by that means, for me.

I personally make a stink about perceptual intermediaries in part because of the above ambiguity - going strongly against construing conscious awareness as a terminal node/passive receptor of data. Could be wrong there though. — fdrake

No, I think you're entirely right, but it's only that an actual investigation must set it's boundaries. It has to draw some arbitrary lines around what is actually a continual process affected by just about every part of the brain, body and environment at some level. It would be impossible to proceed with any interrogation of that massive network without making those boundaries. Sometimes that boundary is at some arbitrary logging point (usually the subject verbally acknowledging that they've 'seen' X).

Which I think is also your criticism here...

Another, perhaps deeper criticism, is that while it's possible to construe perception as a causal chain with components, as an overall process it takes environmental or bodily states and 'maps them' to inferred values ; which makes it functional or relational, so more of an bidirectional arrow (reciprocal/feedback relationship) than a node. — fdrake

...?

with whether the constituent processes are part of the body's process of perception (under the conception that conscious logging isn't a terminal node) you get: seeds aren't, flowers aren't, retinal ganglia are, conscious logging events are. In that regard it looks like:

(seed->flower) = world states
(retinal ganglia->conscious logging event) = body states

IE it looks like:

world states -> body states

and there's no 'intermediary' between the body's perception and world. — fdrake

Yes. I like this.

...the problem though (sorry) is with the feedback within the body. Take language. If I say "rose", the whole process, up to the sound exiting my mouth, is an 'in body' one. So to say that I picked the word 'rose' because there's a world state equating to 'rose' would be to break your own boundary distinction. I clearly picked the word 'rose' as a result of internal stimuli - body states. Since the signals triggering my speech centres were internal. Speech isn't a part of perception (another of our artificial boundaries), so we cant say it's all part of the body state response to the world state {rose}.

So if we have...

world state{there's a rose}>body state{perception of rose}>body state{I think I'll say "rose"}

...then we picked the word rose because of a body state, not because of a world state.

A final point of contention is that if perception requires environmental foraging, and exploratory acts are treated as part of the perceptual process (eg, adjusting to a load due to perception of heaviness), the exploratory acts are proximate causes of changes in environmental hidden states (where the weight is held), and thereby in direct contact with environmental objects - as proximate causes. Shift the weight, therefore proximate cause of weight movement. — fdrake

I agree here too, but the same caveat applies - do we include speech in this exploratory act? Is non-exploratory action (like picking the flower for a loved one)? Is remembering the scene five minutes later? Five hours later? I think we must draw arbitrary lines, perhaps different lines for different purposes.

And when you name the rose, this naming is anchored in a public domain.

So we could say that perception is something whole cultures do. (Just to expand the number of ways we could define it)

And when you name the rose, this naming is anchored in a public domain. — frank

It is now, but was it always?

It is now, but was it always? — Mww

If we're in a dream right now, that question is dubious. What's your answer?

A photographic image of a tree is obviously a physical trace of a seed, but just as obviously not a photographic image of the seed.

A retinal image of a tree is obviously etc.

It is now, but was it always?
— Mww

If we're in a dream right now, that question is dubious. What's your answer? — frank

If we’re dreaming we wouldn’t be in a public domain, so we can say the question isn’t dubious, right? At least for that reason anyway.

My answer is no, naming isn’t always in the public domain. After the first naming, yes, if repeated or recorded as such. Before it, no. Unknown natural thing, first discovered, then named, at the discretion of the discoverer. Usually.

Think man-made objects that don’t exist in Nature until constructed or invented. As it is for that, so it is for everything.

Pass? Fail?

I think human will necessitates little leaps of faith all the time — Kenosha Kid

Well, the phrase has two elements: the leap, and the faith. Leaping is not like walking, a steady, methodical progress from one place to another. Leaping is taking the distance covered by many steps at once; we cannot make our steps bigger, so to pull off such a feat we must actually leave the reassuring solidity of the ground and take to the air, at least for a moment.

It is a choice sometimes forced upon us. When our walk brings us to a ditch or a small stream, there are three ways forward: there is an imaginary way straight on from this side to the other, as it would be if the ditch were not there; there is a way under, down into the ditch or stream and then up the other bank; and there is a similar way over, through the air, above where we would walk if only we could.

If we generalize this situation, the ways under and over are not always available. We can imagine thinking as traversing an obstacle course. (In everyday life, there is often a timer ticking, but not in philosophy and only for external reasons in science.) An obstacle blocks the methodical progress forward; it may offer a simple way over (a small ditch to be leaped over), a methodical way over (like a climbing wall) or under (you may have to crawl under something), and so on. Some obstacles may offer a choice — slog through the water or swing across on a rope. Some may offer a false choice — attempt to slog through a deep mud hole, which you will not be able to do, or jump over.

This is one way of situating leaping: it is a solution to some obstacles but not others, when it was not our preferred way forward. If, on the other hand, you already preferred leaping, because it is faster, and chain leaps together one after another, we don’t call that ‘leaping’ but ‘running’.

But are we sure it’s leaping-over-an-obstacle we’re interested in? There’s another idiom that seems similar, which is ‘jumping to a conclusion’. If you compare them, it’s clear that we disapprove of jumping to conclusions because it is not a response to an obstacle; you had the option of continuing to make steady, methodical progress but, out of impatience, gave up traveling methodically, selected a destination and simply teleported there.

No one feels any compunction about leaping when it is called for. But when we are thinking, how do we know when our leaps are a solution to a genuine obstacle — the intuitive leaps of a Copernicus or an Einstein — and when we have simply become impatient and jumped to a conclusion?

To know, then, whether we should leap, we need to know whether we face a genuine obstacle. That leaping “works”, that it moves us quickly from one place to another, is not in question, but if we did not have to leap, where we land might not be where we wanted. But how do we know where we want to land? Because this is in the nature of an obstacle: an obstacle is something you are one side of or the other. You do not need to see the whole course; you do not need to know what destination you are headed for; you only need to know that it is on the other side of each obstacle you face.

And here is at least one place where we might see a role for the second part of the phrase, for faith. How do you know the destination is on the other side? Perhaps you don’t; perhaps you only have faith that it is. And I think this is just how people tend to use the phrase “leap of faith” (whether it has anything to do with Kierkegaard or not). That it is precisely a leap to an unknown place. It will be some place, but whether it is is the place we hope for is unknown — as, in the simple case, you might hope each obstacle on the course is the last.

(That some destination worth reaching is on the other side of a series of obstacles, of problems to be solved, has become an article of faith in philosophy. Even Wittgenstein, who makes noises about there being no genuine philosophical problems, implies that he has such a faith in PI 107, the “rough ground” speech.)

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. To put all this rambling back into context, before abandoning it again, the question is whether there is a genuine obstacle to taking our everyday experience at face value. There is a long history of philosophical objections to such naivety, and a considerable body of recent scientific objection. But related though they may be, there are two different issues here: one about the facts on the ground, that is, about how we get along in the world; and one about how we are to theorize how we get along in the world. If you object that we have no ‘direct access’ to things — whatever that means — that is a claim of theory, but it is a claim about how we get along, and implies that there is an obstacle between ‘us’ and ‘the world’. Whether you, or your mind, or your brain, know anything about this obstacle, it’s there to be responded to somehow. On the other hand, if you find the claim that there is such an obstacle compelling, that becomes a different sort of obstacle — how can I take my experience at face value, given everything I know about how, say, perception works? You can then say that the theoretical objection is no obstacle at all, but the end of the line; if you leap over it, you'll leap to nowhere. But at the same time, you can acknowledge that this is not the same obstacle that you (or your mind or your brain) face all the time, and *that* one *must* be leapt over. I take it this is close to your position; maybe there's nothing answering to "perception" or "knowledge" as traditionally understood, but we must behave as if there is to get along in the world, and we'll call that a kind of "pragmatism".

What we need next is a better understanding of what an obstacle is. I wouldn't jump right to "how we recognize something is an obstacle", how we have a certain sort of knowledge, though that's in some sense what we want, so we can say whether there's an obstacle between us and the world that needs to be leapt over. Hopefully we can get to something like that later.

True, but that assumes no distal causes can intervene in the perceptual process does it not, no neuronal noise, no transmitter suppression en route? If we break the chain at the seed because it's influence on the flower is only distal, then is there some way we can distinguish the many influences from inside the brain on the route between retinal ganglia and conscious logging such that they're categorically different from the way the environment affects the seed? I can' draw it properly by it might go... — Isaac

There's a flower moving about. It used to be a seed. I watch it moving.

Rather than assuming that distal causes 'can't intervene in the perceptual process', I think it's more accurate to say I was assuming that the distal causes are Markov separated from the current state of the flower. If you fixed the current material constitution of the flower, how it got that way doesn't matter. we'll see how it bends in the wind as a function of its material constitution and the wind.

Generalising that from the flower to the environment as a 'system of proximate causes', those material constitution variables which are associated with the values of hidden states (which we elicit/model) are proximate causes for what we see, which are Markov separated from their past by their current configuration.

- and we're troubled including the seed because of the stochastic influences which muddy it's causing the flower. But considering that we actually have...

seed>(plus stochastic external influences)flower>retinal ganglia>(plus stochastic external influences)conscious logging — Isaac

The point I was trying to make here:

Maybe if I can steel man a bit - maybe the point you're making is that it's unclear exactly how to extend what we are conscious of into the system of proximate causes of our environment when the causal network that leads to our perceptual acts is ambiguous - how do you chunk it up into nodes, and which parts are perception? Definitely agree with the presence of that ambiguity. If what the object of perception is, is equated to the antecedent step to the conscious logging event, then I think it's quite clear that the retinal ganglia firing event is the object of perception. — fdrake

is something you just illustrated I think. The 'nodes' of the causal chain are the word labels, the arrows are the causality relation. So in:

seed>(plus stochastic external influences)flower>retinal ganglia>(plus stochastic external influences)conscious logging

Seed is a node, flower is a node, retinal ganglia is a node, conscious logging is a node. In reality there's some sort of continuous feed forward from the retinal ganglia to the conscious logging and the two processes are interdependent, right? Perception models are cyclical, what's logged now is (part of) a prior for later.

If you severed out the logging bit - imagined it didn't exist - since the retinal ganglia bit and the logging bit are interdependent, you no longer have the same process.

Which means that when you draw a causal chain like that, seed>flower>retinal ganglia>conscious logging, there's a certain amount of artistry that goes into lumping parts of the causal chain together into distinct entities which are then labelled with words ('seed', 'flower') and become stages in the causal chain.

The ambiguity regarding what the nodes of a causal chain of perception should be transfers uncertainty to any definition of "the perceptual object" which seeks to distinguish the perceptual object by its antecedent to the logging node. Since the interdependence of the two makes it difficult to break the conscious logging event out of the perception process.

There's then a further ambiguity regarding whether it's correct to say that the antecedent event to the conscious logging event is what is perceived.

...the problem though (sorry) is with the feedback within the body. Take language. If I say "rose", the whole process, up to the sound exiting my mouth, is an 'in body' one. So to say that I picked the word 'rose' because there's a world state equating to 'rose' would be to break your own boundary distinction. I clearly picked the word 'rose' as a result of internal stimuli - body states. Since the signals triggering my speech centres were internal. Speech isn't a part of perception (another of our artificial boundaries), so we cant say it's all part of the body state response to the world state {rose}. — Isaac

I think that says 'some internal states in perception have internal states as proximate causes', not 'all internal states in perception have internal states as proximate causes', in Friston's model there's both. I'm trying to highlight the realist commitments contained in 'some internal states in perception have environmental hidden states as their proximate causes', I believe you're highlighting that 'some internal states in perception have internal states as their proximate causes'. . We can both agree.

Pass? Fail? — Mww

Pass, definitely. I'm guessing that if we read Schopenhauer drastically differently, we probably also read different Kants. What is time according to Kant? Obviously we perceive it, but what's up with our apriori knowledge of it?

..

A photographic image of a tree is obviously a physical trace of a seed, but just as obviously not a photographic image of the seed. — bongo fury

I brought up the seed. Mww had been expanding perception out from the brain via the binding of cause and effect, so I just extended it further so that a single act of perception is bound up with everything throughout time.

We talk for reasons, so our talk is subservient to those reasons. Some cut-off points would not serve any of the needs we have, the reasons for talking. Many would totally get in the way. — Isaac

Yes, that was were I would have gone next; that explanations, even if in a sense arbitrary, need to be made; that cutting the flower and arranging it in a vase is a much less complicated task if one treats it as if the flower and the vase are real, as opposed to say explaining that same process in terms of the activity of neural networks. If many ways of speaking are of equal validity, the simpler way of speaking is to be preferred.

The point is, if we want to understand your reaching strategy (behaviour), then it's the information entering your sensorimotor regions that determine the strategy, not 'the flower' near the beginning of our chain, any more than 'the seed' right at the start of it — Isaac

Ok, I'm not following this. First, I agree entirely with the extension fo the discussion to acting on the world - picking the flower. The discussion is trivialised, led astray, by treating only perception. It's interaction with the things around us that is our topic.

Have I understood you correctly? you are saying something like that the flower is outside the Markov boundary of what we need to understand the behaviour?

What is time according to Kant? Obviously we perceive it, but what's up with our apriori knowledge of it? — frank

Time is nothing but the condition by which things are successive to, or coexistence with, each other. We don’t perceive time; we perceive things in relation to it. Two things can never at once occupy the same space, but two things can at once occupy the same time. One thing can never be in two spaces, but one thing can be in two times. And that’s all there can ever be for us to know about.....no things, one thing, or more than one thing.

Our a priori knowledge of time arises because we invented it. It is a purely human intellectual conception, used only to make the natural world understandable by means of the system that invented and uses it. Same with mathematics and formal propositional logic.
————-

We didn't understand S that differently, in the end. He does something like you said, but rather than some elan vital you implied, the force behind everything, he merely makes will a substitute for the unknowable, such that Kant’s unknowable thing-in-itself is removed. Problem is, he spends the first part of the book telling us what will is for us, and the second part telling us how it applies to the world, but makes no proof that the human will we know is the same as that which grounds everything. So we are still left with a thing we don’t know, except by a name that we do.

He removed will from time, in the world, but will in humans absolutely requires time. So how he decided to use human will as the way to understand the world as will, is far too long a reach for me.

A photographic image of a tree is obviously a physical trace of a seed, but just as obviously not a photographic image of the seed. — bongo fury

So, an image isn't an image of anything by being a physical trace of it. It's an image of the thing by being interpreted as being (an image) of the thing. By being made to refer to the thing, in a system of pictorial reference or interpretation.

Does the retina get to be made to refer to things?

It was only after a few eye problems that I became aware that the retina is actually part of the brain. It may play more of a significant role in consciousness than many realise. Some descriptions of sensory perception make vision, hearing and other aspects of perception, including touch appear as if they are add on features, but it may be they are the key aspects of consciousness. In connection with your post about 'images' it could be asked what are images, and whether images are simply that? The nervous system may be very complex.

It was only after a few eye problems that I became aware that the retina is actually part of the brain. — Jack Cummins

Then why isn’t the eye problem you have, a brain problem? What part of the brain got fixed when the eye did?

[reply="Mww;63201

It is difficult to disentangle aspects of the brain and sensory awareness. When I first developed an eye problem, to the point of being referred to an eye specialist; several years ago, I wondered how much came down to reading late at night, as well as overthinking. It may be that there are precautions to be advised, likreading digital devices which give off blue light at night. However,it is possible that it may go beyond this, as I was aware of struggling with negative emotions at the time of developing eye problems. This is my own experience and wonder about that,in connected with thought and the way it has effects in daily life experiences. So, brain and the role of thought may be complex.




.

Our a priori knowledge of time arises because we invented it. It is a purely human intellectual conception, used only to make the natural world understandable by means of the system that invented and uses it. Same with mathematics and formal propositional logic. — Mww

Do you actually believe this?

So we are still left with a thing we don’t know, except by a name that we do. — Mww

I think he later decided Kant was right. His "will" is an off-shoot of his determinism. A human will is a matter of what a person identifies with.

Do you actually believe this? — frank

Ehhh.....I don’t have much use for the concept of time. I can get all I want from the usefulness of it with a clock. I can defend his theory, but it is just that, a theory. Everybody’s got one.

What’s your take on it?

Well, look back at this:

My answer is no, naming isn’t always in the public domain. After the first naming, yes, if repeated or recorded as such. Before it, no. Unknown natural thing, first discovered, then named, at the discretion of the discoverer. Usually.

Think man-made objects that don’t exist in Nature until constructed or invented. As it is for that, so it is for everything. — Mww

Sorry, posted too soon

Thinking of a dreamscape is a way to imagine time as a construct, because dream time literally is constructed. The things that populate a dreamworld don't really have the origins implied by their presence.

Cause and effect fails, but only from a perspective beyond the world. You have to take logic with a grain of salt. All certainty is built on hinge propositions or actions.

If you depend heavily on cause and effect and implied origins, you're bound to an in-world perspective. You can't mix that up with an out-world one.

It is difficult to disentangle aspects of the brain and sensory awareness. — Jack Cummins

Yes, but we’re disentangling parts, not aspects. Brain and eye can be aspects of something common to both without being parts of each other.

As a yankeevirgobabyboomer.....you know, everything in its proper place.

Yeah? And......?

Generalising that from the flower to the environment as a 'system of proximate causes', those material constitution variables which are associated with the values of hidden states (which we elicit/model) are proximate causes for what we see, which are Markov separated from their past by their current configuration. — fdrake

OK, that works well for the flower, we can draw a hypothetical Markov blanket around all it's current states and consider that to be the first exterior node of our own perception. I'm not quite sure how that idea (which I'm fine with, as a model) fits in with how we might accommodate things like neuronal noise. They're happening 'within the body', but are surely as outside of the Markov blanket of our own perception process as the first rain the seed felt is outside that of the plant's current state?

The ambiguity regarding what the nodes of a causal chain of perception should be transfers uncertainty to any definition of "the perceptual object" which seeks to distinguish the perceptual object by its antecedent to the logging node. Since the interdependence of the two makes it difficult to break the conscious logging event out of the perception process.

There's then a further ambiguity regarding whether it's correct to say that the antecedent event to the conscious logging event is what is perceived. — fdrake

Yep, I can see the difficulty, but do we really have no ground for our 'stand roughly there' type of line being around the 'logging event'. Consider it this way...

The perceptual process is 1>2>3>4>5>6>7>8>9>1>2>3>4>5>6>7>8>9>1>2>3>4... where the numbers are all reals (even though I've just used natural numbers). Now we've removed the artifice of packaging up the process entirely. We want to take a 'snapshot' of the state of the system for our definitions, to answer the question "what are you looking at?" That snapshot is not going to come from an arbitrary number in that sequence, it's only ever going to come from the 9s. The conscious logging event (or maybe even the final step in it, if we come to terms with the fact that it too is a stepwise process) is not your average point in the process, it's the stopping point for any kind of third party access, we can't tell anyone what the signal from our retinal ganglia was, we can't tell anyone what just exited our V1, we can't tell anyone what photons just sped away from the flower's petals...We can't talk about any step in the process other than the last logging event. So even though that event merely feeds back into the perpetual process to become a step like any other, it remains significant to us in language, social behaviour etc. That, I think, gives the step immediately prior to it a justified priority when asking "why do we say...?" or "why do we do...?" the 'say' and 'do' parts are always going to be one of the 9s in the sequence so looking for 'why' should start at 8...regardless of an understanding that the cycle is continuous.

To me that makes the answer to the question "what am I talking about...?" the nearest step I can describe (arbitrarily put a ring around) to the 'talking about' bit of the cycle. I could say that I'm talking about the very last neuronal signal prior to be making the sounds, but that's not yet something we have a social construction for, we don't know what that is. But to go back beyond our beliefs, memories, mental images...etc, all things for which we do have words, all the way back to the hidden external state to answer that question seems unwarranted. If we're looking for the nearest describable step in the chain to the latest logging event (the one where we determine to do the action we're enquiring about), then I think it's just not true to say the nearest one we can find is the external hidden state (the flower), we have much nearer steps we can still find meaningful words for.

I think that says 'some internal states in perception have internal states as proximate causes', not 'all internal states in perception have internal states as proximate causes', in Friston's model there's both. I'm trying to highlight the realist commitments contained in 'some internal states in perception have environmental hidden states as their proximate causes', I believe you're highlighting that 'some internal states in perception have internal states as their proximate causes'. And even more radically, 'some internal states are proximate causes of the values of environmental hidden states"!. We can both agree. — fdrake

Yes, definitely (even your hidden bit). I think that's the essential difference between my position and idealism (with which it is often confused). Idealism would claim the latter - 'all internal states in perception have internal states as proximate causes', I claim only the former, but I believe that the state of intent to act (speak, do) is an example of such a state as has another internal state as it's proximate cause and as such, in some modelling exercises, the internal state is the proper subject of those acts, not the external state further along the causal chain.

If many ways of speaking are of equal validity, the simpler way of speaking is to be preferred. — Banno

Yep. If only...But philosophers must earn a living I suppose.

Have I understood you correctly? you are saying something like that the flower is outside the Markov boundary of what we need to understand the behaviour? — Banno

Nearly, yes. The flower is outside of the Markov boundary for the determinates of the action on the world, but I wouldn't want to be read as saying that's all we need to understand the behaviour. I'll try to explain, but (if it's not too presumptuous of me) it'll be clearer if you read my response to fdrake above this, as it covers much of the same ground.

The process of perception is circular, a two way relationship between us and the world with world states being proximately responsible for body states and body states in turn being proximately responsible for world states. Hidden states of the world outside of our Markov blanket trigger mental states we're finally aware of (conscious logging) and that logging triggers behaviours which then affect the hidden states of the world...and so on.

But in this continuous cycle of steps, not all steps are equal. The hidden states of the world are super important for example. They're what we share with others, how we co-operate. The states of our retinal ganglia are not so significant to us, even though it's just as vital a step. We don't talk about it, don't share it, and most don't care about it. The behaviour (the step where we feed back to the hidden state of the world) is also a very significant one for us, not in terms of the physical effect (other people's bodies are world-states to us, so that's the same as step one), but the proximate cause, the step just before it. That's the step we use to predict people's behaviour, it's what allows us to be social beings - being able to predict the effect of our actions on others. So my claim is that in addition to the two steps already really important (not in any way trying to take away from those) - world state and behavioural action on it - I think we have a third step which is also really important - the one just preceding the action, the proximate cause of it, and that's clearly not the world state, it's an internal state.

And when you name the rose, this naming is anchored in a public domain.

So we could say that perception is something whole cultures do. (Just to expand the number of ways we could define it) — frank

Yeah, and then the fact that 'rose' is something frequently said of that flower becomes a world-state which can then be an object of perception.

Thanks for the add-on. I was wondering what I was supposed to do with the original.

Thinking of a dreamscape is a way to imagine time as a construct, because dream time literally is constructed. The things that populate a dreamworld don't really have the origins implied by their presence. — frank

I can see how it might seem that way. The content of dreams is of a different time than the content of the experiences from which the dream content arises. But it’s the same for plain ol’ conscious memory recall, too, so, not sure we’ve gained much. As to origins, I think we’re stuck with a common origin for every manifestation of human cognition, whether conscious thought, memory recall, or dream state content.
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Cause and effect fails, but only from a perspective beyond the world. — frank

Does this relate back to dream worlds as being beyond the world? So c&e doesn’t hold power there? True enough, I suppose, but then, dreams are just imagination without arbitration from reason, meaning that not only is there no proofs of the possibilities contained therein, but there isn’t any need of them. There’s no need to subject dreams to logical principles, so it doesn’t matter if c&e holds or not. I’m sure we’ve both known folks who would claim they’ve whooped Bobby Fisher. Or copied Albert’s beam-riding.
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If you depend heavily on cause and effect and implied origins, you're bound to an in-world perspective. You can't mix that up with an out-world one. — frank

Absolutely. I mean....what would an out-world be? How would it manifest? How would we even know if we were in it? If we were in it, it wouldn't be an out-world. The nature of the human intellect: for any possible conception, it’s complement is given immediately from it. The implied origin of a possible out-world is given necessarily from the fact of the in-world.

Can I getta A-MEN!!! brutha?

Hmm. This is getting too interesting to stay in this thread. I'm startin' a cause and effect thread, dammit!

OK, that works well for the flower, we can draw a hypothetical Markov blanket around all it's current states and consider that to be the first exterior node of our own perception. I'm not quite sure how that idea (which I'm fine with, as a model) fits in with how we might accommodate things like neuronal noise. They're happening 'within the body', but are surely as outside of the Markov blanket of our own perception process as the first rain the seed felt is outside that of the plant's current state? — Isaac

I don't know if noises are even uniquely associated with environmental or internal state variables in Friston's work. They're associated with functions which combine those state variables and a hierarchy level. So it doesn't seem clear to associate noises with environmental or internal states, and the 'markov blanket' of any noise term is determined by which hierarchy level it's on IIRC (see box 1 and 2 here). If you're referring to the noises at the same time as environmental states and internal states with the phrase 'outside the Markov blanket', I think that's a theoretical error since the noises aren't kept track of with state variables in the same way as environmental and internal states? They're instead kept track of with their distributional summary characteristic (the precision matrix of their joint distribution).

So, summarizing: there's more than one 'Markov blanket', if you wanted to look at 'the Markov blanket of our sensorium' that's got direct connections to environmental and internal hidden states, if you wanted to look at 'the Markov blanket of neuronal noise and environmental + internal states' it seems to me either to use more than one concept of 'state' (one for errors, one for environmental and internals) or to be a misapplication of the concept of 'Markov blanket'?

Putting it in less jargony terms, whatever errors we make in perception act upon the synthesis of sensory data rather than acting as their own sensory data. Errors are formed by the coincidence of discrepancies between emerging features of our perceptual landscape, rather than stored as their own form of sensory or environmental data (state). Part of the model are assumptions about how this error behaves in the aggregate.

The perceptual process is 1>2>3>4>5>6>7>8>9>1>2>3>4>5>6>7>8>9>1>2>3>4... where the numbers are all reals (even though I've just used natural numbers). Now we've removed the artifice of packaging up the process entirely. We want to take a 'snapshot' of the state of the system for our definitions, to answer the question "what are you looking at?" That snapshot is not going to come from an arbitrary number in that sequence, it's only ever going to come from the 9s. The conscious logging event (or maybe even the final step in it, if we come to terms with the fact that it too is a stepwise process) is not your average point in the process, it's the stopping point for any kind of third party access, we can't tell anyone what the signal from our retinal ganglia was, we can't tell anyone what just exited our V1, we can't tell anyone what photons just sped away from the flower's petals...We can't talk about any step in the process other than the last logging event. So even though that event merely feeds back into the perpetual process to become a step like any other, it remains significant to us in language, social behaviour etc. That, I think, gives the step immediately prior to it a justified priority when asking "why do we say...?" or "why do we do...?" the 'say' and 'do' parts are always going to be one of the 9s in the sequence so looking for 'why' should start at 8...regardless of an understanding that the cycle is continuous. — Isaac

If the transition from 9 to 1 could be thought of as a reset, I'd agree with the emphasis, but isn't it more that 9 provides a very strong prior for the next 1? So unless the prior effect's gone away by the time you get to the next 9, it seems to me too artificial to abstract from the process that 9 is the real content of 1. It's the proximate cause of 1's current form, in a context where non-proximate causes are still relevant - eg 9 is a filtered aggregate of 8.

Maybe a philosophical way of phrasing it, if you've got a chain like that, you can read the arrow as something like '1>2 = 1 informs the content of 2", if 1>2 and 2>3, you'd still have that 1 informed the content of 3 if that relationship is transitive.

In the real world it probably depends upon the weighting of steps, so probably true that step 9 'informs the content of' step 1 the strongest - there's still a question regarding where the content of step 9 'came from' and whether it's appropriate to say that '9 predominantly informs the content of 1' implies 'person perceives the content of 9'.

Regardless, it doesn't seem to me a valid inference to go from: "X predominantly determined the content of Y's perceptions" to "Y perceived X". Could be made a better inference with a theory of content determination - eg, what makes that inference true? What kind of thing can be substituted into X there?

I have been reading Daniel C Dennet on the concept of qualia. He speaks of
'how philosophers have tied themselves into such knots over qualia. They started where anyone with anyone would start: with their strongest and clearest intuitions about their own minds. Those intuitions, alas, form a mutually self-supporting circle of doctrines, imprisoning their imaginations in the Cartesian Theater. Even though philosophers have discovered the paradoxes inherent in this closed circle of ideas_ that is why the literature on qualia exists _ they haven't had an alternative vision to leap to, and so, they get dragged back into the paradoxical prison. That is why the literature on qualia qualia gets more and more convoluted, instead of convuluting agreement'.

I see the issues of metaphysics and how this is bound up with human perception as extremely difficult aspects of philosophy. The issue of what is regarded as 'qualia' seems important. However, it may be that such an area is a complex area rather than straightforward, so I raise it as an area for philosophical exploration and questioning.I wonder about the whole nature of phenomenology as part of perception, but, at the same time, questions about the nature of reality may need to take on board ideas within empirical scientific disciplines and aspects of the power of reason. It is within this context which I raise the question of the idea of 'qualia', with a view to how that may stand in relation to metaphysics, and the limitations of the human mind in understanding reality, philosophically and from a scientific approach. In this thread, I am asking to what extent is the concept useful or not? Does the idea of qualia fuzz and blur the whole area of explaining life and the debate between materialism and idealism? — Jack Cummins

The reason why philosophers have muddled the whole affair is that they refuse to acknowledge the ontological primacy of caring and its "objects". Qualia are, as Dennett, I think dismissively, puts it "pure phenomena", but what is IN phenomena? It is not the bare recognition of some "appeared to redly" kind of thing. This is awfully naïve, an abstraction from experience. But affect: the interest, desire, love, hate, fear and all the rest are always of-a-piece with qualia and it is here the apprehension of the being qua being of a thing, if you will, is discovered. The existence qua existence (not mincing words here) of this lamp on the table is IN the bare features once the cognitive dimensions are analytically removed. In other words, do a reduction to the pure sensory features in the empirical presentation, and while you may find the conceptual structure never to be reduced, the "bare" witnessing in the conceptual scheme can be pure, I claim, and here, qualia's identity is understood: in affect, existence "speaks".