You can examine brain processes all day long and you’ll find electrochemical activity but not implication, validity, or contradiction. Those aren’t things you can point to in neural tissue — Wayfarer

Why would you expect that a relation between two brain events would have to be a third brain event?

Trees make a forest, but we don't expect the forest to be a tree, do we?

It assumes that we can differentiate 'the object' from 'what we know of the object', — Wayfarer

If you see the object directly, then you don't differentiate your visual experience from the visible part of the object. Your experience is about the object, it literally is the object. But ontologically, they're separate (experience in mind, object in the world). This matters below.

The claim in P4 is that naturalism can't explain aboutness, because aboutness is not caused by physical processes.

In other words, it expects naturalism to causally explain aboutness yet denies the possibility and blames naturalism for failing.
:yawn: .

Aboutness has a couple of closely related but different senses.

(1) It's a property of the experience, the property to be about an object. It arises with the experience from physical processes in the brain.

(2) the relation between the experience and the object.
Arises by virtue of seeing the object. Doesn't call for other physical processes than (1) and the object.

.

.

Aboutness is a feature of mind, but the object is not. Obviously the object cannot be derived from the physical processes that give the mind its ability to identify objects.

Therefore, P4 is false! :nerd:

Find out when it is a painting, because almost anything can be or function as a painting when someone, for example the painter, identifies it as such. I think this was what Nelson Goodman meant. Art objects are a bit different from ordinary objects in this sense. We name and identify ordinary objects by conventional vocabulary, agreements etc. An artist, however, is free to Invent new works and define or redefine them. They are not like ordinary objects.

why some philosophers reason that intelligibility and intentionality cannot be accounted for under naturalism. — Tom Storm

Imagine the sense of privilege that can be evoked by the mere speculation that human cognition might have an element of something that is supernatural or connected to god or spirits or anything but the natural world. It serves the interest of theists, mystics or the like. Hence their recurring misrepresentations of naturalism as explanation of survival rather than truth.

They omit the better explanation, that in order to survive you've gotta see what there is to see, and analyse what you see, not only what you need or wish to see. How else could you navigate, test, analyse, make the decicions and act in the ways that increase your fitness?

Truth enables survival and fitness, and as the ability evolved, we gained access to platonic realities such as math, music etc. Their structures are not human constructs, they're natural, or what shapes the natural world, but we can access them and use them in our own constructions.

I'd say the argument misrepresents naturalism. There are varieties, and here's a quote from the Wiki page on Naturalism.

"Naturalism is not so much a special system as a point of view or tendency common to a number of philosophical and religious systems; not so much a well-defined set of positive and negative doctrines as an attitude or spirit pervading and influencing many doctrines. As the name implies, this tendency consists essentially in looking upon nature as the one original and fundamental source of all that exists, and in attempting to explain everything in terms of nature. Either the limits of nature are also the limits of existing reality, or at least the first cause, if its existence is found necessary, has nothing to do with the working of natural agencies. All events, therefore, find their adequate explanation within nature itself. But, as the terms nature and natural are themselves used in more than one sense, the term naturalism is also far from having one fixed meaning".

— Dubray 1911
— Wikipedia

The claim that experience constitutes reality is what Hart is arguing, but he sees no reason why naturalism can support this. — Tom Storm

Hm, doesn't seem right. How could experience constitute reality? I don't see how any philosophy could support such absurdity. For example, my visual experience won't constitute these words, I don't have such magic powers, I had to type them with my computer and click the post-button.

Back to your OP on Hart:

If minds and meanings arise from purely blind physical processes aimed at survival rather than truth, then the fact that our thoughts reliably refer to the world and track its structure appears contingent or unexplained. — Tom Storm

We survive by aiming at truth, and our success in survival shows that our thoughts reliably refer to the world.

One might ask the guy whether the supernatural explains something, anything?

Naturalism can describe how cognition functions, but it seems less able to explain why cognition should be about reality at all, rather than merely useful for navigating experience. — Tom Storm

Cognition enables us to successfully navigate reality, and that's why (or how) we know it's about reality.

In case we'd never navigate reality, only experience, then we'd be blind, and our navigation would certainly fail.

I’d like to better understand the argument that intelligibility cannot arise through purely naturalistic processes. Some naturalists will react to this idea, and I fear the discussion may end up in the somewhat tedious “how is consciousness related to a physical world?” type of threads. — Tom Storm

What is the argument? What are the premises?

Naturalism does not assume that we never navigate reality, only experience. On the contrary! The experience is the navigation of reality. That should dissolve the argument (if there ever was one).

it seems inevitable that churches will have a considerable influence on the state — Ludwig V

I don't think the state here would care about a gang of church-goers. Less than 10% of the population go to church regularily, and for others it's just a traditional ritual, e.g. some get married and baptise their children in church, funerals are held there and cemetaries are managed by the church.

It seems to me most unrealistic to expect people to keep their most important beliefs, not only about their own lives, but about the lives of everyone else as well, entirely to themselves. — Ludwig V

It's unrealistic to expect everyone else to comply to one particular religious belief. Freedom of religion means that people are free to practice their beliefs on condition that they don't violate each other.

He referred to the 1963 Bergman film, Winter Light, about a church so dead that not even God showed up. I saw the film a long time ago - it's very dry. — BC

:lol: :up:

whatever it was that drained European churches of congregants, started draining American churches of members too. By the decade of 1960-1970, protestant denominations, particularly, lost millions of members who never came back, and the losses continue. In 2026, it seems like the US has become more secular -- but not in the manner of liberal Europe . — BC

For more than a century humans around the globe have become more aware of the fact that science and technology can solve real problems more reliably than prayer. Religious beliefs, like habits and traditions, may fade slowly, but eventually they disappear.

What forces separated Sweden's Church and State? — Athena

I'd say gradual changes in how the state remains in charge until it no longer needed the church.

Already back in the 1500s the state cut its ties to the Roman church because a national church would give the state more control of its people. So the king formed a national church based on evangelical lutheranism, and although it had its own priests they were ultimately controlled by the state. Formally, the state's king or prime minister was the head of the national church.

So for almost 300 years state and church were joined, and being a citizen meant being a member of the national church.

But in 1862-63 new laws defined the role of local municipalities and congregations. This meant a change in the administration of your citizenship and place of birth. Membership to the national church was detached from citicenship and administered instead by the local congregation where you are born. So you're still a citizen and a member of the national church, but citizenship and membership are now separate things.

In the 1900s we got laws that allow freedom of religion, including the freedom to leave one's membership to the national church, and in the 1990s the state decided to cut the remaining formal and administrational ties to the national church. Administration of where people are born and where they live is nowadays handled by the tax authority.

One might add, that modernity, access to free education, free healthcare, and increased living standard also reduced the relevance of the church.

Is the separation of church and state even possible? — Athena

Of course.

For example, in Sweden state and church separated gradually in the 1800s and 1900s, and completely in 2000. Sweden is a secular state allowing freedom of religion. Most swedes would say that religious belief is a private matter.

Unlike private belief, a church is a means to practice shared belief in large groups, which then becomes an opportunity for its leaders to control people. A state can therefore use a church to control entire populations.

Right, they have also butchered 'Satisfaction' by the Rolling Stones. :cool: Their use of parody, or counter acting rythms that ruin the groove or swing of a tune are features of what the band imagines to be an ongoing de-evolution of our spieces (hence their name, Devo). Not everyone gets it, allegedly the Hendrix estate hated it.

"Not necessarily beautiful, but mutated"

We already do that--settle upon what is most functional as so called truth--as our conditioning. — ENOAH

That's not an answer to my question.

Truths are independent of entrenched habits or what is most functional etc, and may therefore unsettle the current order of things.

Its rejection serves the interests of those who don't want anything to unsettle the current order of things.

..truth is irrelevant "inside" the world constructed by history, and that what is most functional is our best bet. — ENOAH

But how could you know what is most functional, or what is our best bet, unless you have access to the truth of those statements? Without access anything goes, and you have no more reason to refer to history than to ice-cream or frogs as what constructed the world. With a selective access to words but not the world, you cannot know that there is a world and a word for it. Your rejection of access to truths (but not words) explains itself meaningless.

Addition.
I think the same problem occurs with AI. It operates on words and has no direct access to the world. Even if we give it a body with which it can explore the world, it operates via code, unlike animals who don't interact via languages but with physical phenomena (e.g. chemicals, sunlight) directly.

I'm thinking out loud about AI because it seems to have the structures that would fit neatly into the belief in its sentience. — ENOAH

Ok, what structures?

I'm writing these words because I'm conditioned to write them and their truth is ultimately not accessible (other than as a tool, a signifier of an ideal, a mechanism working simultaneously with/toward belief). — ENOAH

But if the truth of your words is not accessible, then why should anyone believe them?

With truth explained away, you still talk of the words as "tools" in some mechanism. You grant access to a part of reality where we identify words, but not the part where we can find the truth of the words. Seems like a selective rejection of access to truths, which smells funny to me.

But I suppose the implication is that if you only have access to words, which is also the case for LLMs, then you might see the same "structures".

..yet I cannot escape my conditioning, my belief. — ENOAH

So are you writing those words because you are conditioned to write them (regardless of their truth), or because they are true (regardless of your conditioning)?

If we can't escape believing what we're (supposedly) conditioned to believe, then how could we tell fact from fiction, truth from lies, or find reasons to revise false or obsolete beliefs? How could you criticize misconduct? Any criticism could be dismissed as yet another case of conditioned belief. A disregard for facts would become systematic, like in political campaigns or wars.

Not so in science, philosophy, arts or in most ordinary life situations. But this seems a bit off topic.

But it is not the existence of AI sentience that I would question. In fact, I think the existence of AI sentience is almost certain. However, that thing we will come to accept as AI sentience will take hold not because it is real or not, but because it is a functional fiction which we will believe to be true. — ENOAH

I think it matters whether it's real or not in order to know whether statements about it are true or false.

You say many things, for example, that the existence of AI sentience is almost certain, but you also say that it's a fiction, and that it will be true because we will believe so.

But fictions are false, they describe what doesn't exist, that's why they are called fictions. Santa Claus doesn't become true if we just believe it. Nor will AI sentience.

As I said, it matters whether it's real or not, for example, if an artificial pilot is truly sentiment or if we merely believe the pilot is sentiment (e.g. based on Turing test).

..AI will be sentient because we will believe AI is sentient... — ENOAH

Well, money exists because we believe it exists, or as long as we comply to the belief. But you don't find money in nature. Sentience, however, doesn't depend on us first believing in its existence. We find it in nature as what enables animals to identify things, form intent, and behave with agency.

Granted that we don't know much about how sentience arises, so people have different beliefs about it. Some reject it entirely, believing that the act of finding the phenomenon is illusory, or dependent on beliefs.

But you could let an agnostic research-robot scan the contents of a lake, for instance. Its spectrometer can distinguish between mineral and organic things, and among the organic things its motion and pattern recognizing device can distinguish between things that have agency (animals) and others that have less or no agency (plants).

The existence of animals doesn't depend on having the belief that they exist. Nor does the existence of their nerve systems, brain events, and the capacities and agency that distinguish animals from plants, minerals etc.

I was prompted to start this thread by witnessing how people can be manipulated by hate... — Questioner

Hate is foolish, love is wise (B. Russell). But whenever a power struggle won't be solved in a good way (e.g. by agreement or respect for shared rules, argument etc), the candidates must either give in or use other means, such as manipulation, bribes, smear campaigns, and ultimately desinformation, violence, fear and hate.

Fear is an emotional response to a potential threat. Hate is an attitude (contempt) for the threat. Like most animals, humans focus on threats as a function of survival, our brains are wired that way. This is exploited by the news media, insurance companies, defence and entertainment industries, and certain political movements thrive on it.

Also love can be used as a means for other interests, but unlike hate, love is not an attitude but an emotional response. Unlike fear, love is about something desirable or admirable.

If Alice judges her human friend Bob to be sentient, then does her judgement concern properties that are intrinsic to Bob, or does her judgement merely express her relationship to Bob? — sime

Let's say Bob is a pilot and Alice is a passenger who's afraid of flying. Alice's judgement that Bob is sentiment then concerns not only his ability to appear sentiment (e g. he can maintain a verbal conversation). It also concerns intrinsic properties such as instincts, reflexes, or shared human traits and behavior (e.g. self-preservation, sacrifice) expressed in possible situations of an emergency.

The “Earth system” to which we belong, generates life, diversity, intelligence, and other emergent properties. My purpose is to debate the long-term trends of this Earth system and examine how we, the humanity, must adapt to them to avoid instability, or potentially catastrophe. — Seeker25

In biology adaptation may result in balanced and stable systems, but all systems are not biological. We're part of many different systems: natural, artificial or socially constructed, good or bad etc. As long as they're intelligible, we can find out what to do.

But what is a larger "Earth system"?

A system is a group of interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole. — Wikipedia

Since there are many different smaller systems, based on different laws, some contradicting each other etc it seems implausible that a larger system could be intelligible as a system.

..not that visual (or auditory e.t.c.) experience is an illusion per se, but more that it is not the exact same as the object that is experienced. — Nichiren-123

Well, the word 'experience' (or 'perceive', 'aware of' etc) has two different senses. In one sense, there's this mental event that arises in your brain when your sense organs respond to light or sound etc. That's what constitutes an experience. But the experience is also about something, such as the cat that you see or hear. Your brain does not construct the cat, its features, the light rays, or sound waves etc. Your sense organs respond mechanically to the way available light reflects, or the way available sound waves propagate, depending on the physical features of the cat. The cat that you see or hear is the experience in its intentionalistic sense.

Now use the word 'experience' ambiguously between the two different senses, and it might seem as if the cat that you see or hear somehow still depends on your mental event. Indirect realism is the assumption that you never experience the cat, only your own mental representation. It's a fallacy of ambiguity.

If I perceive a cat on my windowsill then that is a mental event that is completely separate from (although far from necessarily an inaccurate representation of) something real. — Nichiren-123

The perceiving is a mental event, but the cat is not. You see the cat, not a representation. The question whether your experience is accurate, partly accurate, or inaccurate is therefore dissolved.

they are stimulus-response machines — J

Well, sure they respond to the presence of fruit and fly towards it, but they also respond to the presence of a human hand trying to chase them away, which makes them veto their first response and take a detour or stroll on the table instead. It doesn't seem so machine-like.

Well, also a fruit fly acts according to what it identifies, such as the presence of obstacles, danger, fruit etc (allegedly, fruit flies love oat meal). On a cellular level, ion channels open or close a cell's membrane according to the presence of specific ions. The ions are identified selectively, and the membrane is opened or closed accordingly. Now add more complexity, synapses, neural nets, and interactions with the environment we live in, and you might end up with a system that identifies chairs and tables, or memories of them, which in some sense are thoughts. The thought of standing up that results in standing up, is not more mysterious than a fruit fly's ability to identify an obstacle and fly around it.

We have a kind of intuitive sense of how one thought might lead to another, but when we ask how my thought of standing up leads to the action of doing so, it doesn't feel so intuitive. We know it happens, but actions in the physical world are supposed (by some) to depend on prior physical causes. So how do we make room for a mental cause? — J

To be conscious is a (more or less) continuous state in which one has a readiness for identifying the presence of things or thoughts and what they entail. So when you think of standing up, you have already been conscious for a while, perhaps identified discomfort while sitting on a chair or some other reason for standing up. That's what caused you to think the thought and act accordingly.

Do you think that your description of what happens in thought-to-thought causation also explains mental-to-physical causation? ( — J

Does it matter whether the things we think of are mental or physical?

OK, so the logical relation doesn't play any causal role. — J

Well, not in an active sense. See below.

I have to recognize or understand (not quite sure what verb to use) that the first proposition entails the second? — J

Yeah, I used the verb 'see', but I suppose the primary function of seeing, recognizing, understanding etc. is to 'identify' something.

By thinking of the proposition, we can identify its form, that it entails "B". The entailment "B" is not caused by the form (it is the form), however identifying it is caused in the same way a tree, for instance, causes the visual experience of the tree. Well, the form of a proposition is of course not distorted by distance or angle of view etc, but the causal relation is that of identification.

Your perception of the world is not the same. In fact, Your entire experience is completely different. Since You are part of the world, that means there is a difference in the two scenarios, which concerns Your experience. — bizso09

Looks like your puzzle is based on a fallacy of ambiguity between the (false) assumption that your entire experience is completely different, and the (true) assumption that you can experience what others experience.

Most of our experiences are similar, especially when they are experiences of the same things in the same world.

But "thought" also can mean that particular mental occurrence -- your thought, or mine. This is the OP's question: whether thoughts, in that sense, are causal, or whether they require a (more or less) reductive description in terms of brain states in order to be seen as causal. — J

Ok, thoughts in that sense are, like other conscious states, biological phenomena. On a physical level they consist of processes in synapses, neural nets etc. but on a biological level they emerge as conscious states which, unlike their constituent parts, enable the organism to interact causally with the environment, other organisms, and with itself even. You can't reduce a conscious state to its constituent physical processes, because they are not part of the things of which one is conscious of. So yes, thoughts can be causal in this sense.

It seems mysterious how a logical relation could do this. — J

Well the logical relation shows itself, that's about it. When you think of it you can see that its form entails "B". Perhaps one can say that the form is the passive cause for thinking "therefore B", and the thinker's ability to see and accept the entailment is an active cause for thinking "therefore B".

I think the relation between thoughts is logical, not causal. The necessity of a conclusion that follows from a set of premises is a brute fact that does not need to be thought or caused.

But thoughts refer to things, and one can learn to use a thought like we learn to use sounds, pictures, smells etc. as symbols or signs by way of which for example conditioned responses can be evoked.

In this sense, I suppose it is possible for a thought of a set of premises to evoke a thought of its conclusion.

:100: :fire: :smile:

Can a Thought Cause Another Thought?

When thinking of good food, for instance, it seems as if the mere thought could cause one to feel hunger, perhaps followed by thoughts of cooking or buying food. Also pictures of good food may sometimes seem to have the power to cause hunger or thoughts of buying food... These seemingly causal relations are circumstantial, they typically arise around breakfast, lunch, or dinner. But they with sufficient exposure and repetition they can literally cause, or at least influence, feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. Like the sound of a bell influenced Pavlov's dogs, or like advertisement and PR influence populations.

..as the content of the mental state is what one is perceiving - and its content is 'about' a ship and this content is satisfied in the right kind of way - then one is directly perceiving it. — Clarendon

That's a misrepresentation, because no direct realist believes that one perceives one's own mental state or some element of it.

The 'content' of a mental state is not a picture nor a sensation. It is the perceiving, not its object. More specifically, the content is formed by the way the brain responds to photo chemical processes in the eyes and the bundle of light rays reflected by the ship under certain conditions of observation. Thus your visual experience of the ship is, literally, the visible appearance of the ship under those conditions of observation.

Searle's view. It doesn't sound quite right to me, even given my revised view. For he seems to be trying to get directness out of the content of a mental state, and that - to my mind - is never going to work. All that'll get one is aboutness, but not perception. — Clarendon

I'd say Searle's view is that the content of a visual experience is set by conditions of satisfaction, such as the object's presence in the visual field. Its appearance is fixed by angle and distance of view, available light, surface properties etc. and while the observer's brain and eyes enable the experience, the content of the experience is fixed by the object and its properties. We can't detach content of experience from object's appearance, hence direct. The relation between observer and object is always direct.

..my view is that no mental state is involved. — Clarendon

My apologies, here"s the quote to which the objection was a reply.

With my view our experiences of perceiving are mental states, but the perceptual relationship itself is not. Thus cases of hallucination share with cases of experienced perception the same mental states, it is just that in the former there is no perceptual relationship there (and thus the experience constitutes a hallucination). — Clarendon

I can't make much sense of the above, hence my objection. Your opening post, however, is fairly clear. So perhaps my failure to make sense of the quote has to do with the choise of words?

By the way, are you familiar with Searle's philosophy of perception? I think it clarifies some of the mess in talk of perception. For example, he distinguishes between two different senses of the word 'experience'. In its constituitive sense (e.g. a brain state from which an experience arises) there's an experience in both the veridical case and in the hallucination case. But in its intentionalistic sense (i.e. what the experience is about) nothing is experienced in the hallucination case, only in the veridical case.

An idealist is a realist whenever he walks out the front door. — Tom Storm

:smile: Direct realism is a bit like idealism in the sense that experience and object are not separate entities. The visual experience that you have when you see a real ship is the real ship.


Ok, so one objection to your view is that the assumed "perceptual relation" between a "mental state" and the object means that the experience would be indirect.

Brain states are constituitive for having experiences, but since brain states can be shared in hallucinations and veridical experiences of a real object there is no relation between a brain state and the real object. Instead, the experience is the object.

Mind you if we what we see is phenomena not noumena then what meaning does realism have? — Tom Storm

Seeing is part of what's real. No need to split the world in one that we see and another that we supposedly never see.

As a result, everything we experience: the phenomenal world, is filtered through these mental faculties. — Tom Storm

Kant doesn't explicitly reject direct realism. His empirical realism and transcendental idealism can be interpreted as two worlds, or two perspectives. I think there's only one world that can be seen in many ways under various conditions of observation.

..Religions have had thousands of years to find the truth.. — Art48

Unlike finding the truth religions typically declare what's true by reference to scripture, priests, traditions, blind belief etc.

Objections to direct realism are typically based on arguments from illusion or hallucination. For example, a straw that looks bent in a glass of water is used as an argument against the idea that we see the straw as it really is. One is then supposed to conclude (incorrectly) that the visual experience is an illusion. Yet we see the straw as the light is refracted by the water, and the refraction is real. Turns out one sees the straw exactly as it is under such conditions of observation.

It is easy to imagine how constant hallucinations would impair your ability to live. Imagine, for example, the pleasant experience of filling your lungs with fresh air, but without the object of the experience: air. All you have is the experience, which, in turn, is artificially produced by some experience-machine. You'd be dead in a few minutes.