But what would the answer to "what properties does this object have" without anyone to identify them as such? — Isaac

What? I'm not saying anything about language. What the answer to a question would be is irrelevant.

what is missing from the third party account? — Isaac

I just answered this: the perspective of being those states.

Everything is different from different perspectives or frames/points of reference.

where is that missing thing expressed physically? — Isaac

At various reference points, including the reference point of being the thing in question.

Terrapin Station is having difficulty imagining that our experience isn't parsed into properties — fdrake

I'm not saying something about concepts in that. I'm saying that your experience has to be some way or other, has to have some characteristics or other, etc.

I don't think it's incoherent at all. I think quite the opposite in fact. I can't think of what a 'property' might be without someone to define it. — Isaac

Properties are how something happens to be, characteristics it has, even if that amounts to being indefinite.

Right, but this now starts to sound physicalist about properties of experience. — Isaac

Yeah, I'm a physicalist and I was giving my personal explanation there.

"Particular dynamic state of synapses, neurons, etc" is definitely something accessible to a third party — Isaac

Not from the perspective of being those states.

Particular in the sense of general but awaiting a clear physical definition (which would decide if a particular brain state was an instance of it)? — bongo fury

Say what?

No, particular as in particular. And it has nothing to do with definitions, etc.

I want to focus on this first because I think it's more important:

Yes, but my caveat is important. We couldn't say, that anything was a property of 'it' because even the idea variation, 'lumpiness' as you put it, is suffused with our way of life. — Isaac

Again, properties don't depend on us, our ideas, etc. Whatever the world is like sans us is a matter of the world having whatever properties it has. There's no way for there to be something without properties. That claim would be incoherent.

So the colour quales and shape quales are distinguished in our experience by something which is not reflected in our experience. — fdrake

I have no idea what you're saying there in context (particularly re "by something which is not reflected in our experience" )

I want to ask: is it a disposition or ability to reflect the certain wavelength? — bongo fury

With respect to the object (the objective stuff), it's the fact that it reflects that wavelength of EMR, sure. That's not what it is with respect to our experience, though--our mental phenomena don't reflect that wavelength of EMR. In terms of our experience, it's a particular dynamic state of synapses, neurons, etc.

Just because it's in the mother, that doesn't change the ontology — Gregory

Ontologically, isn't inside of/connected to the mother different than outside of/disconnected from the mother?

Try to be less judgmental. Try to not moralize (moralizing being "commenting on issues of right and wrong, typically with an unfounded air of superiority) Most people aren't going to want to hang out with someone who regularly nags, complains, or who is regularly negatively judgmental about others. It's important to learn how to be comfortable with different dispositions, different opinions, etc.

As far as I can tell it's had no bearing on my mental health.

It positively affected my critical thinking/reasoning abilities in general, but I wouldn't say that amounted to any impact on my mental health.

It might be harder to say since (a) I've never had any significant mental health problems aside from some problems with anxiety at one point--I was getting panic attacks which seemed to be related to being hypochondriacal, although hypochondria might have been kind of ad hoc to explain the panic attacks; it wound up seeming to be more due to a lifestyle change at the time, or they could have been drug precipitated--I was doing a lot of experimentation at that time (philosophy didn't do anything to help with that--the panic attacks just gradually lessened/went away after about a year), and (b) I first started reading a ton of philosophy when I was 11 years old.

Science is asking what the problem is. Again, what is what is useful in knowing what form the bat's consciousness takes? Are we trying to get at what the bat knows, or the form its knowledge takes, or what, and why? — Harry Hindu

Presumably an important part of consciousness is what things are like experientially to the bearer of the consciousness in question. So if we can't tackle that scientifically, we have a problem with devising scientific accounts of consciousness. We can just ignore it and not care about it, but then we're ignoring a big part of what we we're supposedly addressing. An alternate track--one that many have taken--is to try to deny that there is such a thing in the first place, or at least deny that it's any different than what things are like outside of consciousness.

It seems to me that an explanation is a declaration of understanding. What is "understanding"? — Harry Hindu

Yeah, on my view, understanding, and whether something counts as an explanation, are subjective--it depends on whether someone's curiosity, questions/issues, etc. have been satiated, and of course that depends on how they assign meaning, their experiences, their biases, and all sorts of things.

Right, but what is useful in knowing what form the bat's consciousness takes? Are we trying to get at what the bat knows, or the form its knowledge takes, or what, and why? — Harry Hindu

It's underscoring a problem with developing a scientific account of mind.

Not sure what you mean here. — Isaac

How can there be an "our" if there's no "we"?

Yes, I think I'd grant that. I can see where you might be going - to say that at least something has at least one property. — Isaac

Yeah, that's a property. In fact, even a homogeneous soup that's indeterminate would be properties. Since properties are simply ways that things are.

The table thing--that was just a perfect opportunity for that. That's from the album that Lou Reed and Metallica did together a handful of years ago, Lulu. In one of the tunes, "The View", James Hetfield periodically sings "I am the table." The album was largely castigated, and people saw lines like that as indicative of its many problems. So someone made a video looping all of the "I am the tables" from that tune.

I actually like the album quite a bit, but it's still conventionally considered a bomb/a big mistake, especially by Metallica fans.

I can convince your mind that the table is a part of your body in less than two minutes. — Isaac

By the way:

I can convince your mind that the table is a part of your body in less than two minutes. — Isaac

I'd definitely make a wager on that.

No, there's no 'we'. That too is just something inside our minds. — Isaac

There's no "we," but there's an "our"?

I quite specifically said I imagine a heterogeneous sea of stuff, not a uniform one. I imagine variations in many possible fields, — Isaac

Ah, sorry, I was thinking you said homogeneous. So the "lumpiness" is a way it is, no?

The fact that a "creature" has appeared is again, just a human artefact, — Isaac

But at least we're here, right? How?

All that has happened is that stuff has interacted with stuff ( — Isaac

How? According to you it's a completely uniform sea of property-free stuff. How would it "interact," especially without having/exhibiting any properties?

Do you think that humans just appeared whole cloth out of nothing, as the first thing that existed?

Let me ask you this, if a 'creature' has appeared with consciousness, where do we stop, — Isaac

Our bodies are us. That's our boundary, fuzzy though it may be on the edges on a microscopic level.

Maybe you're religious after all?

I'm asking you about something with scientific accuracy though.

So how do you think we get to creatures that impose structure on anything via their consciousness?

We have a completely uniform sea of whatever, with no properties, and then what? How would a creature appear amidst that, much less one with consciousness?

based on the arbitrary shape of its molecules. — Isaac

You don't think that there's really a shape of molecules, do you? Or molecules for that matter, shapeless or not.

None of these separate things are really separate. — Isaac

We're not saying something about whether they're really "separate."

But you're saying that they're not really a lump of water, carbon dioxide, etc. ices and then a far less dense patch of hydrogen and helium gases, etc., right?

Ok. Then it's just irrelevant. That's fine too. — StreetlightX

It's not irrelevant to what properties are.

I can't conceive of it divided up into objects in any sense at all when it's clear that such object division (and existence) can be so readily altered by our mental processes. — Isaac

So let's consider something like a comet orbiting the sun. We've got a chunk of rock--water, carbon dioxide, ammonia and methane ices, mixed with dust. Then we've got interstellar space where there's very sparse amounts of hydrogen and helium gas, etc. Then we've got the sun, a very dense aggregation of hydrogen and helium gases in a plasma state, etc.

How would our mental processes alter that?

True. But you want to say something about perception by asking it — StreetlightX

No. It's not anything about perception.

Because that's the only way I can see objects being now, — Isaac

???

Why would that be the only way you can see objects being? How would you even see that?

No, no. If there are no people then there is no perception. — StreetlightX

lol it's not a question about perception. You know, you're yet another person here in the "horrible reading comprehension" crowd.

Possibly, yes. But at the moment I'm more inclined to think of reality as a heterogeneous sea of stuff — Isaac

Why?

Ok, and "yellowness" might be a property of my experience while perceiving an object reflecting a certain wavelength? — bongo fury

Right, it's a property of that object reflect that wavelength of EMR, and it's also a property of your experience per se (which is what qualia are).

Easily, every "way or other" is a judgement we make — Isaac

So you believe that if no people existed, objects would be in what--some quantum, indeterminate state?

Oh yes, I knew that. So you assume a physicalist basis, but properties are part of it, not something you would (like Goodman) expect to construct? — bongo fury

Yes, for maybe the fifth time now, properties are simply ways that things are, characteristics they have.

We create abstractions/construct concepts about properties, of course, but that's not all that they are. It's important to not conflate concepts and what the concepts are in response to (again, for about the fifth time in this thread, and maybe the 500th time on this board in general).

Cool. Goodman was agnostic as to what we construct from what, though. Are you siding with what he would have called a phenomenalist basis, as against e.g. a physicalist one? — bongo fury

No. And I'm a physicalist, by the way.

If you bring your own booze to a restaurant, the restaurant doesn't supply the booze (that you bring, at least).

And we construct quantities from qualities, — bongo fury

If you're talking about quantity in terms of conceptions of it, sure.

We bring a great deal of ourselves to what we perceive. — StreetlightX

That's fine, and it's perfectly consistent with saying that we don't perceive that great deal of ourselves that we bring to what we perceive.

Valuation is built-in to perception. It's why we are susceptible to visual illusions, it's why people have visual disorders where they can't recognize faces even though they can 'see' them perfectly well and so on. There's a bodily thinking that is irreducible to a rational process of abstraction. Go read about the science of perception, it's interesting. — StreetlightX

Again, "perception" has a connotation of taking in information external to us, through our senses.

So if valuation is perceived, you're saying that valuations exist external to us, and we see or hear or smell or feel or taste them.

Yes but a linguistic affectation can't possess properties can it? — Isaac

Again, properties are simply ways that things are, characteristics they have.

So how could there be anything that isn't some way or other?

I see food on the table, — StreetlightX

And you're seeing properties of it. Again, if anyone is thinking that this is saying that you're seeing types/universals, "property" doesn't imply that. If one buys nominalism (as I do), every property is actually unique, That doesn't imply that it's not a property. Properties are simply ways that things are, characteristics they have.