. I would argue that meditation and music don’t undermine this structure; they presuppose it. — Esse Quam Videri

How does meditation and music presuppose this? When I listen to music, or meditate, I lose awareness of the object, and focus on the phenomenology. The phenomenology becomes the first-order subject of perception, the object secondary, if it is present at all. And so your idea of object-first perceptual structure must explain this. It certainly receives no support from it.

We are able to flexibly attend to phenomenology, or to object. But our attentional stance does not speak to the epistemological relationship between phenomenology and object.

. That is to say, the object-that-is-chiming is presented as determinate in existence, but indeterminate in sense or meaning. — Esse Quam Videri

When we hear environmental sounds we have an impicit, hard-wired understanding that these sounds represent something. Our interest as organisms is in what the sound is of. But you seem to be elevating this biological and contextual feature to a philosophical importance it does not have.

The world-directedness of perception is a stance. It is a default, but it is not exclusive. One can take a meditative stance, and focus on the phenomenology, not the object. Or, in other contexts the phenomenology itself is what is important, and what we are attuned to by default. I already mentioned music as an example of this.

The point is that the phenomenology and the object are distinct. The fact that we, organisms in a threatening world, are object-oriented does not obviate this.

The phenomenology of the event is such that the chiming is presented as of something else. The observer hasn't yet identified what this "something else" is, but they've clearly grasped that the chiming as-such is not it. The chiming is not presented as a self-standing object of perception, but as the manner in which some other (yet to be identified) object is presented. — Esse Quam Videri

You are conflating "self standing object" with "self standing object of perception". The chiming is the latter but not the former. Chiming indicates something it is not, a doorbell or chime. Yet it can be discussed, contemplated, appreciated on its own, independent of object.

The best example is music. People don't spend thousands of hours and dollars on music because of some distal object it might represent. The music itself, the phenomenology, is what is attended to and enjoyed.

What is directly perceived?
DR: doorbell (D) as-chiming (Ch)
IR: chiming (Ch) — Esse Quam Videri

Can you "directly perceive" D without knowing you perceive D at all? This seems to strain any notion of directness. The observer knows they perceive Ch. If you ask them what they perceive, they would reply, "a chiming sound, I'm not sure what it is." But they do not know they are perceiving D, a doorbell.

Either, your notion of directness must surmount this disjunction, so that both are directly perceived. If so, you are working with a very different notion of directness than we are. Or, you must deny (as I suspect) that Ch is perceived at all. But, this contradicts how we speak of, and understand, Ch. You are forced to refute this folk understanding that would say, "I perceive a chiming sound". But I have not seen this explicitly done.

But I think there is a bit more to be said about how and why the debate arises and why one position or the other is more attractive to adherents. — Ludwig V

For sure. Couldn't it just be that we tend to favor one perspective over the other in our daily lives? That one of them is viscerally lived, while the other is more intellectual abstraction? I am an indirect realist. Perhaps as a reflection of introversion, I tend to think of myself as a conscious subset. I am the entity residing behind these eyes. I am these thoughts, I am the self which undergoes sensations and feelings. Only at rare moments do I have a more holistic conception of myself. Maybe I am just unenlightened.

Perhaps those with a more integrated default feeling of selfhood tend towards direct realism. How about you?

Sorry, away for a few days. What stands out about this (excellent) breakdown is that neither interpretation is obviously wrong or incoherent. Now, I'm wondering if this entire debate hinges on the question, "what counts as the subject?"

Subject-as-organism: Nothing inside the organism can mediate between the organism and the world. These interior features are a part of the organism that does the perceiving. Direct realism follows.
Subject-as-conscious-subset: The environment of this subject is an environment provided by the brain. The brain itself, in particular phenomenal states, stand between this subject and the world. Indirect realism follows.

Neither of these perspectives on the subject is intrinsically wrong. Am I the organism, or the conscious agent? They are both valid ways of looking at what counts as the subject. And so neither direct nor indirect realism is intrinsically wrong. If so, the debate will never end until both sides understand this fact.

This brings up an interesting point. There are some questions which are not subject to one definitive answer, call them "Type A" questions. I.e. Is the bag heavy? Which coordinate system should be used? Is the picture of an old or young woman? It is wrong to insist on one answer to Type A questions.



Then there are "Type B" questions, where errors indicate misunderstanding or mismeasurement: How much does the bag weigh? Which coordinate system is being used? Is the picture also of a squirrel? It is wrong to allow for multiple answers to Type B questions.

I suspect direct/indirect realism is a Type A question. But how do we know? In general, how do we know if we are dealing with a Type A or Type B question?

Indirect realism requires more than ontological distinctness and reflective attendability; it requires that phenomenology be what perception is of in the first instance, and that access to the world be achieved by way of it. — Esse Quam Videri

Lets examine the case of ambiguous sensory input.

You are in a friend's apartment while she is away. You hear wind chimes. You are puzzled, the apartment is on the 10th floor. Could that be her phone? No, she wouldn't leave it behind. Ah, it must be her door bell. You open the door, and indeed someone is waiting.

Do you agree that in this case:

* The phenomenology, the sound of wind chimes, is ontologically distinct from the distal object, the doorbell.
* Awareness of the phenomenology is distinct from, and prior to, awareness of the distal object.
* Awareness of the distal object occurs through awareness of the phenomenology, by way of inference.

To be clear, you would not argue that there is no ontological intermediary between the emotion and the observer? Plainly, the voice and body of the angry person is that intermediary, right? You are claiming that, unlike the body, phenomenology lacks the capacity to fulfill the role that the body plays in my example?

An inferential process does not by itself introduce an intermediary object of awareness; at least, not in the way required by indirect realism. — Esse Quam Videri

Why not? If there is an inferential process, there must be something upon which the inference is made. The precise characterization of the ontological status of phenomenology is difficult to resolve. But does indirect realism need to make this characterization? I say it only needs to claim that phenomenology has ontology, distinct from the distal object it stands in relationship to. And, that it can be attended to, distinctly from attendance to the object.

Seeing something as blurry or sharp, red or orange, looming or distant are not things you perceive first and then infer the object from. They are ways the object is given—features of the perceptual episode that can be thematized only upon reflection, not items that perception is directed at per se. — Esse Quam Videri

Might you be confusing the phenomenological impression of immediacy with actual immediacy?

For instance, consider an angry person. Their jaw is clenched, their brow furrowed, their face is reddened, their speech is loud and clipped. When a (neurotypical) observer sees an angry person, they don't think to themselves, "Hmm, these facial features, this tone of voice, is signaling anger to me". Rather, the anger appears immediate. Only on introspection can the observer articulate how they apprehended anger. But, this does nothing to disprove the ontologically indirect relationship between the observer and the anger. The observer apprehends anger only through apprehension of physiological cues, whether or not this apprehension is consciously visible to the observer.

A "mode of presentation" cannot do that job. To say that phenomenal experience is a mode of presentation is to say that it characterizes the presentation of something else. This makes it derivative, non-intermediary and non-inferential. — Esse Quam Videri

Is there an example you can give of this kind of "mode of presentation"? A TV is a "mode of presentation" of something else. Yet it also fulfills all the criteria for indirect realism you outlined.

The question is whether this "something" is an "object" or a "mode of access". — Esse Quam Videri

I'm not sure why this is the question. Suppose we conclude that phenomenal experience is a mode of access. What is changed?

I look at a stone. I am aware of the stone, and I am aware of the visual experience of looking at the stone. Either awareness can be discussed. Ontologically the two are clearly different.

The indirect realist would then claim that the awareness of the visual experience is prior to the awareness of the stone. That awareness of the stone occurs secondarily, by way of, awareness of the visual experience . Is this move invalidated if the visual experience is deemed a mode of access?

The very fact I can talk about your headache is proof I am not talking about something available only to you. — Hanover

It is available to me directly, and to you, indirectly. To me, it is immediate, to you, it is accessed through discourse and behavior and your own prior experience of headaches.




.

That commitment raises questions about how such items are individuated and talked about. At some point in the discussion it was stated that sensations do not satisfy public criteria for "objecthood"—re-identifiability, persistence conditions, or independent checkability— and, therefore, are not best understood as entities in any robustly ontological sense. — Esse Quam Videri

And yet, I can talk about my headaches just fine (which is not talk of behaviors, norms, etc). Whereas, ChatGpt simply cannot. ChatGpt can perfectly reproduce the verbalization of someone talking about their headaches. But, it cannot talk about its headaches, because it has none.

If I can talk about my headaches, and ChatGpt cannot, there seems to be something I have that I am talking about, that ChatGpt will always lack. If that something can be discussed, and it is mine alone, this seems enough to talk of this something as an entity, if not a physical "object".

Because the word "understanding" has more than one sense. Having the experience may be necessary for empathetic or imaginative grasp, but not for semantic competence. — Esse Quam Videri

But in this sense, ChatGPT understands "headache" just as well as we do, at least in the purely verbal domain. But this cannot be the relevant sense in a discussion on direct realism, can it?

How could something that you've described as being "essentially private" serve as a standard for correct and incorrect use in an essentially public practice (language)? — Esse Quam Videri

The sensation is private, but the associated behaviors (furrowed brow, clutching the head, expressions of distress) are not. These behaviors, like the word 'headache', indicate the private sensation without being it.

Words that refer to private sensations are comprehensible because we all share these (presumably similar) experiences. By linking past experience with another's present behavior, it is possible to understand what headache means. Whereas if someone had never experienced a headache they might never understand what people are complaining about.

Do you agree with this last point? If sensation-words don't refer to private experience, then why does it seem that having the private experience oneself is necessary to understand the word?

Oh please. FDR and Lincoln, two of our greatest Presidents, went far beyond Trump in terms of suspensions of civil liberties and executive overreach. — BitconnectCarlos

Yeah, during the civil war and WW2. Is that what the Trumpies are saying these days?

The Treasonous Tard is creating his own civil and world wars that us plebs must now suffer through. You must be proud.

So when you say "my headache" and you mean the actual pounding you're feeling right now, how am I to know what you're talking about other than how you use the term consistently with others who I have seen use the term, which must be related to behaviors and the use of other terms I am already familiar with. — Hanover

How do you distinguish the case of someone who knows the behaviors and rules surrounding the use of the word "headache", who can use the term competently, without having ever experienced a headache, from someone who does have the experience?

The meaning of "headache" is surely not the behaviors. Someone can be perfectly stoic about their headaches, yet still have them. The meaning is the experience. Which is epistemically private, but not strictly private, since others have the experience, and we infer they have the same experience, rightly or wrongly.




@frank

As you can see, we approach and answer these questions in significantly different ways. What do you think of this? — Esse Quam Videri

Let me push back a little.

A representation is something that can be assessed for correctness, truth or fidelity. Raw sensory qualities are not the kinds of things that can be correct or incorrect; they simply are what they are. — Esse Quam Videri

Compare this with words. "Dog" represents dogs. Yet, the word "dog" in itself, is not correct or incorrect. It simply is what it is. But, when placed in a larger context, for instance, pointing to an animal, and uttering "dog", then the word can correctly indicate the animal pointed to, or not.

Similarly, the smell of ammonia, in and of itself, is neither true or false. Yet, when it is experienced in an environment, the smell can correctly indicate ammonia, or not. Ammonia might be the wrong phenomenal smell, as happens sometimes with long covid. Or it might be hallucinatory.

Ordinary perceptual judgments are about things in the world (“that rag smells of ammonia”), not phenomenal qualities (“there’s a sharp, pungent, acrid scent in my olfactory map”). The former are typically referred to as “perception”, the latter as “introspection”. Introspection is second-order, reflective and derivative with respect to ordinary perception. — Esse Quam Videri

Hmm, this is not how I experience odor. The smell itself is what hits me first, viscerally and immediately. No introspection is needed. If the smell is a familiar one, I might identify it quickly, so quickly that it might even seem immediate. But if I haven't smelled that smell in a long time, it can take significant mental effort to identify it. Occasionally, I won't be able to at all, and I am left frustrated, wondering what that smell reminds me of.

Do you not relate to this?

(The third disagreement seems to follow from the second).

The first is count is the supposition that there is a useful way in which there is a "flower-as-it-really-is" or the "flower-in-itself". This idea relies on it making sense to talk of a flower seperate from our interpretation and construction of the world around us, a flower apart from our comprehension of the world. But our understanding is always, and already, an interpretation, so the "flower-as-it-really-is" or the "flower-in-itself" is already a nonsense. — Banno

Of course every understanding is an interpretation. But this does not obviate the distinction between the world as we perceive it, and (our understanding of) the world as it is. We perceive the flower as looking like this, and smelling like that. We understand the flower to typically take this physical form, to have this life cycle, to grow in this climate , to treat that disease, to attract these insects. The fact that these understandings are interpretations adds nothing. These are our interpretations of how the flower is. But to also understand the phenomenal presentation of the flower as how the flower is, is the misunderstanding at issue.

The second count is the misdirection in thinking that we see the result of the causal chain, and not the flower. We do not see the result of the causal chain, as if we were homunculi; rather, that causal chain just is our seeing the things in our world. — Banno

Yet we discuss both, which is your gold standard. How the flower appears to us, and what the flower is.

No homunculi. An object can phenomenologically appear to us in a certain way, without there being a literal gnome in our heads watching an internal monitor.

And secondly, we do not "experience the world" passively, in the way supposed. We interact with it, we pick up the cup, board the ship, and coordinate all of these activities with others. We do not passively experience the world, we are actively embedded in it. — Banno

Experience is active in that it is an active mental construction, which is indirect realism. But it feels like a passive window to the world, which is the naive realist illusion. All these actions you describe are irrelevant, we are not talking about them, we are talking about perceptions.

Out of curiosity, which of three propositions above would accept, if any? Does the distinction between casual and epistemic mediation as laid out above make sense to you, or would you qualify it in some way? I’d be interested to get your thoughts. — Esse Quam Videri

I think I understand this distinction between causal and epistemic mediation, and I like it. At first blush, I accept all three propositions. Quickly, using the smell of ammonia as a grounding example:

(1) Phenomenal qualities represent aspects of the world. — Esse Quam Videri

The smell of ammonia represents that there is ammonia in the world. The relation smell of ammonia -> ammonia is symbolic, represented with the one way arrow characteristic of symbols. The smell of ammonia points to ammonia, without the smell being a part of the ammonia itself. In the same way, "dog" points to a doggy, without the glyphs "dog" being in any way a part of the doggy itself.

(2) Ordinary perceptual judgments are judgments about phenomenal qualities. — Esse Quam Videri

True.

When I smell ammonia, I am judging that this particular phenomenal quality smells like ammonia to me. NH3 doesn't in itself smell like ammonia, it has no intrinsic smell. It is the way that smell manifests to me phenomenally, that sharp, unpleasant, pungent reek, that I associate with ammonia.

When I say ammonia is stinky, I am complaining specifically about the phenomenal quality of that smell. Not the NH3 itself. It is the phenomenal quality that makes me recoil. If the phenomenal quality were pleasant to me, I would not complain, despite NH3 being identical in either case.

(3) Our knowledge of the world is inferred from such judgments. — Esse Quam Videri

True. The smell of ammonia in itself tells me nothing about the world. I have to had experienced the smell, paired with knowledge of the substance producing it. Only after this learning event has occurred, can I infer, from the smell, the proposition "There is ammonia nearby".

To me this is all fairly straightforward. Where do you object?

That’s why I’m hesitant to say that the “primitives of perception are hallucinations of the brain.” That description already assumes that phenomenal character functions like a photograph—i.e. as the thing perceived instead of the object—whereas both Banno’s point and my own have been that phenomenal character causally constrains perception without being its direct object. — Esse Quam Videri

When you look at a photograph, you really are looking at its subject. And you are looking at the photograph. You are looking at the subject, by way of the photograph. This is indirection. We experience the ship too, by way of its phenomenal character.

Do you dispute that we experience its phenomenal character? We certainly talk about the way the ship looks, the way it sounds, the way it smells, the way it feels, all the time. Not just how it operates.

Do you dispute that looks, sounds, smells, feels belong to the brain? That they are not found on the ship itself, but are properties of the brain, which are causally constrained by properties of the ship?

If you agree with these two, its hard for me to see how this does not map to a photograph. We experience the photograph, and we indirectly experience the subject, which causally constrains its manifestation on the photograph. We experience phenomenal character, and we indirectly experience the world object, which causally constrains how phenomenal character manifests to us.

And causally speaking, there's where we can rest. The difference is not in the causal chain, but where one spreads one's Markov blanket.

So, and here we can reject much of the account Michael has promulgated, since causal mediation does not entail indirect perception. — Banno

Causal chains are not the real claim. As you, @Hanover and others point out, there are innumerable causal steps between an observer and any act of perception. If the claim was just "there are causal steps in between" it would be quite weak. Indirect realism, as @Michael points out, is aimed at naive realism, and so the target it attacks is the illusion of direct perception. The direct/indirect distinction this claim relies on is quite tricky, and the fact that people don't clearly grasp it is why this discussion is interminable. (I'm still working it out myself, which is why the topic is still interesting to me even after that huge thread a few years ago).

The physical world offers ample examples of this illusion. First, what it is not: consider looking at yourself in the mirror. It appears to you that you are directly seeing yourself. That is because you are. The mirror is an extra step in the causal chain the light undergoes, one designed to allow you to see yourself. That extra step doesn't mean you really aren't seeing yourself directly. You see yourself directly, with aid of a mirror.

Now, consider looking at a photograph of yourself. If you were naive to photography, it might be shocking to look directly at yourself, captured in a small flat square. You are not. When you look at the photograph, you are in fact looking at a square of cellulose or plastic, not yourself. But you are still looking at yourself indirectly, because there is still a causal connection between the surface of the photograph and your features.

Hopefully this example brings some clarity to the indirect realist claim. We experience the world through something it is not, phenomenal representation, just as you can experience your appearance through something you are not, a photograph. It only appears to us that all the sights, sounds, smells, shades that comprise the world, are the world. They are not, they don't belong to the larger world, but instead the world of the mind. The primitives of perception: colors, sounds, scents, are constructs of brains, and may manifest differently to different brains, almost certainly so across species. But crucially, these constructs are causally connected to the world. How they appear at any moment is causally connected to the world they are about, just as the photograph is causally connected to your appearance.

The world is real, and we are causally connected to it, through an indirect relationship like the relationship between a photograph and the subject it captured.

...the blanket is only causally isolating. Information flows across it, but that does not lead to epistemic confinement. The organism’s perceptual capacities are attuned to environmental states across the blanket; perception is an interaction spanning the boundary, not an encounter with an inner surrogate. What is perceived is the ship, not a mental image that stands in for it. — Banno

Indirect realists wouldn't generally disagree with this, except for the last sentence. Both are perceived. Indirect realism doesn't deny perception of distal objects, but direct realists seem to want to brush aside perception's mediation.

When you see a flower on TV, you are seeing a flower (in the veridical case). And, at the same time, you are seeing pixels. These two "seeings" are related: you see the flower by way of seeing pixels. The pixels represent how the flower would look if it were physically in front of you.

This same relationship holds for perception itself. You see the flower in front of you, and you are seeing
its mental representation. "See" here is used in two senses to describe two components of the same act of perception. You see the flower by way of seeing its mental representation. The mental representation is how the flower looks, to you.

refusing to accept a Cartesian picture in which perception must either be inner and certain or outer and inferential. — Banno

Perception is both. You don't know if the flower you are seeing on TV is real, but you know you are seeing a pixel image that looks like a flower. You don't know if you are truly hearing your mom's voice, but you do know that you are hearing something from your phone that sounds like her. You don't know if the mental representation you experience is truly of a flower "out there", but you do know you are experiencing the mental representation.

This does not mean we should all run and be radical skeptics. It does mean that perception is always structured as an immediate/mediated relationship, between representation and represented, between what is multiply realizable and what just is. Everyday tech objects that allow indirect perception (TVs, telephones) mirror the built in indirection intrinsic to perception (and so two layers of indirection are involved in their experience).

In contrast, when the bred and rue people draw their lines, aren't they consistent? (They always say true things about bred and rue.) Aren't they saying meaningful things? (We have no trouble understanding what they're getting at.) It seems there's a dimension missing from the art comparison, and it has something to do with "the right sort" of concepts. — J

The bred and rue concept is in one sense perfectly aligned with the world. They drew a line, a feature of the world. The concepts of bred and rue consistently sort the world according to this feature. Everything on one side is bred, everything on the other is rue. But we want to say that they chose the wrong feature. Wrong how? Some words we might use: Useless. Meaningless. Arbitrary.

But these words are subjective, meaning that their truth values are relative to subjects. They refer to properties of subjects (goals, meaning, intention), not of the objective world. What is useful, meaningful, and intentioned to one person, might be useless, meaningless, and arbitrary to another.

Tellingly, these same three complaints are the complaints one might make of bad art. Bad art is Useless, it doesn't do anything, it evokes no emotion or thought. It is Meaningless, it is all surface form, with no deeper message. It is Arbitrary, it does not cohere into a larger whole, rather its components were haphazardly plucked from the grab bag of genre-appropriate parts.

This suggests a significant parallel between the evaluation of art and concepts.

You can't say to an exponent of the theory of entropy, "Well, that's just your opinion. I like my theory better." — J

This is a notion of subjectivity that is empty of content. Lebowski's "Well that's like your opinion, man." Real subjective evaluation involves the sort of judgements l outlined above. If the theory of entropy is just the models expressed by the equations, then that might lack subjectivity. But, what is entropy exactly? Is it a feature of the universe? Is it a consequence of observers with limited information? Is it statistical? There are multiple coherent interpretations. How to choose? I think, in additional to looking a objective alignment (they all can align, in different ways) some subjective, aesthetic criteria must come into play.

Someone who declared, for instance, that all European art (including music, literature, et al.) from 1700 to 2000 was bad art would be told something like, "You must not understand how 'art' is used." — J

This is the same conflation that was endemic in the art thread. I'm perfectly free to call all European art bad art. What I cannot easily do is call it all non-art. To do this, I must be using a bad concept of art, which draws the line between art and non-art using criteria that fail for reasons like arbitrariness, meaninglessness, and uselessness.

We can agree on all this, but remain troubled about where the idea of "mismatch" could even arise. This circles back once again to whether there's a "world" -- our world, not a perspectiveless world -- which exhibits privileged structure. — J

I think privileged structure exists. But concepts don't perfectly capture it.

Coloring books are a good analogy. The numbered regions are not arbitrarily chosen; they align with the structure of the drawing. Yet, they are not intrinsically a part of the line drawing, they are something added on top. They are a tool, helping the user digest a complex picture into discrete, easily managed parts. There is no limit to the choices that could have been made, someone else might have subdivided the line drawing in different ways, and choose different colors. And every set of choices involves compromises, obscuring important differences, grouping things together that shouldn't be. No set of choices are absolute, none capture all the features of the line drawing. That is because colored regions cannot map perfectly with line drawings, they are not the same sorts of things.

Yet two of my favorite philosophers, Peirce and Habermas, insist we should regard communication as in principle converging on truth. — J

Even if this were true (our current hyper-communicative era suggests otherwise), there is not necessarily one truth to converge upon. "Which truth?" can as much a cause for disagreement as "which is true?" Especially since the two questions cannot easily be distinguished in practice.

Writing that book is indeed hopeless. But (and we shouldn't stretch the titular metaphor too far) the book Sider wants to write is a book about our world, which he believes can permit of objectively better and worse ways of being described. — J

Sider wants to nail down the core concepts once and for all. My main argument here is that forming concepts is as much art as it is science. "Existence" is just one example.

This is not to say that anything goes. There are better and worse concepts, as there are better and worse paintings (as we had discussed not long ago!). But this ranking doesn't mean that:

1) There is any limit to the number of "good" paintings, or concepts. And
2) We can ever, even in theory, agree on what the good and bad paintings, or concepts, are and aren't.

Not only the creation, but the ranking of both, in part, is subjective.

Subjectivity implies perspective. And perspective is intrinsically creative. You cannot do what Sider wants with creative subjects. Doing so is obviously absurd for paintings, less obvious for concepts. but I think it is the same problem.

Would you be open to modifying that to say "already contains intrinsically subjective aspects"? I'd be fine with that, especially if we bear in mind Sider's idea that "objective/subjective" may not carve at the joints anyway. — J

Yes, that is better statement. Not subjective all the way down, but a fusion of subjective and objective. I'm curious what Sider has in mind instead of the objective/subjective dichotomy. I suspect the subjective is ignored?

To the extent that a philosopher wants to identify themselves with the scientific project -- and many do -- then they too will try to approach the "view from nowhere." But they needn't. — J

Yeah, I think this approach is very problematic. Not only because subjectivity is a part of life that is of great interest to us sentients, but that as soon as we use concepts (which we always do, inescapably), subjectivity re-enters the picture. Reality is aconceptual. I think biology is a great example, nature doesn't care about our concepts of species, life, etc. It is what it is. We apply concepts onto it, in order to try to make sense of it. But this, the conceptualized world, is no longer reality, but rather a perspective on reality. Reality always escapes our concepts. Reality doesn't live in neat, labeled buckets, the way we want it to. Reality isn't conceptual, our minds are. And so dealing with concepts is dealing, at least in part, in minds, whether acknowledged or not.

So to summarize (I hope I'm not getting too repetitive, I'm fleshing this out as I go):

The world isn't structured in concepts. Our minds structure the world as conceptual. This is perspective, a creative act. Because of the mismatch between world and concept, there is no perfect set of concepts. This is true of "objective reality", but doubly true of "subjective reality". Here, philosophy must construct concepts and perspectives on concepts and perspectives themselves.

The space of "good, aligned" concepts is endless, including the meta-concepts we are discussing now, and we will never stop arguing about them. :wink:

We have no chance of getting to it if we continue to understand naturalism in terms of objectively causal processes which treat subjectivity as something added onto an objective world. — Joshs

I mean, in truth, it was. There was once a time when consciousness didn't exist. Time passed. At some point, reality started experiencing itself. If "added" is not the right term (after all, who or what added it?), consciousness at least arose from an unconscious world.

And so, if consciousness arose from unconscious processes, we can in principle describe how this happened. The trouble is, unconscious reality only has a third person perspective, while consciousness only has a first person perspective. We simply lack the cognitive tools to cross this perspectival gap, as we have never crossed it before.

And BTW, Sider never implies that his joint-carving candidates add up to a single true way of assessing ontology — J

But, does he admit to a mere plurality of ways? If so, then he can still, in principle if not realistically, enumerate them in his hypothetical book. Or, a boundless number of ways? In which case, the project seems hopeless, even in principle.

The question to answer is: the structure of what? When we inquire into what grounds what, in logic or metaphysics, what's the object of our inquiry? Is it first-order ontology understood as naive realism? No, we've rejected that. Rather, we want to understand the structure of our world, the world we encounter as humans. — J

The problem I've been graspng at is, the world we encounter as humans is not the world of stable, mind independent structures. It is the world of subjectivity, of perspectives, of concepts. You said our descriptions should be co-creations of us and the world. The problem is, the object of our description, lived human reality, is already such a co creation. We are describing that. It is a subjective perspective on something that is already intrinsically subjective. Science is a description of the world that subtracts the human, subjective element. Scientific description is the kind of co creation you and perhaps Sider might actually have in mind. Whereas philosophy is perspectives on something that is already intrinsically perspectival.

Not exactly that he mistakes philosophy for science, but that he over-values the parsimony and predictive value of current scientific concepts of the physical world. — J

What I had in mind is more what I mentioned above. The project of finding the best, most ontologically aligned description of the world, is the scientific project, not philosophy. Science is inexhaustible because that best description is forever elusive. Philosophy is inexhaustible because, by its nature, it doesn't even admit to a best description.

I think that puts it very well, as long as we add that these perspectives can be more or less aligned, can carve better or worse at the joints. — J

I absolutely agree there is good and bad philosophy. Some simply misses what it thinks it is describing, losing itself in contradiction, incoherence, and irrelevance. But, at least in principle, science has an end, a perfect description of objective reality. While subjective reality may not allow for this.

Sounds like you know more about biology than I do, so I need a better example! I thought "species" was fairly clear-cut, though sometimes fuzzy at the edges. — J

Biology, being I think the most complicated science, illustrates a parallel problem. Terminology attempts to reduce an immensely complex phenomenon to terms a mind can grasp. But the reality exceeds the minds. And so we are left with compromises and conventions, that only do their best. Speciation does seem to be a pattern. But there doesn't seem to be a way to generalize it across the entire scope of biology. Even though, this is more of what we have been calling first order ontology.

I would define hate as directed, persistent anger, contempt, and Ill will. I'm with you, traits, especially emotions, must serve a purpose.

I hate Trump, aka Ill Douchey, aka Fail Shitler. I despise the subhuman turd. Seeing that asinine face, those plump, pursed lips, those cruel, piggy, dead eyes, makes me sick to my stomach. He is a petty, noxious, malignant buffoon, not fit to run a used car shop, let alone a super power. I wish him the absolute worst, I hope he does us all a favor, strokes out, and dies in the most humiliating, demeaning, and painful fashion possible.

I'm wondering if this hatred, of perhaps the most hated man in history, points us to function: the eviction of toxic members of society. We hate the unjust, the abusers, the takers, the freeloaders, the cruel. Those who levee costs, but don't offer gain in recompense.

Crucially, true hatred endures until it is satisfied by the ruination of the hated. If the hated just injured one victim, that victim's hatred is just a vendetta, which may or may not amount to anything. But as victims grow in number, so does the resulting hatred. In principle, the victimizer can only injure so many people before their haters become impossible to resist, and their social position, or even their life, becomes precarious. Hatred in this view limits evil behavior.

If this is the case, then we can see that hatred is a failure. It is an emotion, and is too vulnerable to manipulation. Those we should hate, instead use hate, nurture it, to their own advantage. The innocent are cast as unjust, abusive, takers, freeloaders, and cruel. And so minorities are hated, migrants are hated, out groups of all kinds are hated, and victimized. Hatred, which should be cleansing, righteous wrath, instead becomes a tool of evil, itself a force which sickens all of us.

Perhaps in small scale society, hatred was ironically a force for good. The abusers, the takers, the exploiters were driven out by people under the sway of the evolutionary instinct of hatred. But today, in mass, hierarchical, multicultural society, the exploiters who should be checked by hatred, instead are able to hack the hatred instinct, twist it toward their own benefit, and compel us to hate the innocent instead.

If, while tripping, I see the usual fanfare of squigglies and trails and pulses, these are not actually "aligned with the world." The bat is doing a far better job at that than a person with chemically altered consciousness. Surely we should be honest and call the LSD experience a distortion of perception, not a mere alteration? — J

You are right, I overstated. Still, it is important to keep the nature of these distortions in mind. They are not a Disney's Fantasia illusory animation of a correct, sober world. Rather they are let you peer through the wizard of Oz's curtains to see phenomenologic reality for what it is. A gnarled old man guessing, predicting, interpolating, desperately trying to hold everything together and keep the illusion good enough. Not a mathematical projection of orderly photon data.

For instance, breathing walls are not an illusory animation. They let you see the brain's guesswork of angle and depth. Normally the brain picks one guess and locks it down, both in space and time. Psychedelics loosen this constraint and lets you see multiple plausible guesses, both in one "frame" and evolving over time.

Back to Sider, perception "carves to the joints", but far from perfectly. Sure, drugs can amplify imperfections, but they reveal a process which is fundamentally imprecise. Optical illusions show just how far from reality perception truly is. Even if we know the illusion, we often still can't correct for it, we still think we are seeing reality, and the illusion is a lie. One example. Maybe some alien can see visual reality truly. But we can't. And so even if you don't accept that there are infinite "perfect" ways of seeing the world, there are surely infinite "good enough" ways.

The same is true of concepts. There might be a perfect concept of a gluon, waiting to be discovered. But species? Forget it. All you can to is try to fail better, or fail in different interesting ways. This is 100x more true of interpretive, subjective, perspectival philosophy.

The result is not only circular but, he says, will always culminate in the notorious “hard problem”: consciousness treated as if it were something that emerges from structural relations in objectively–existing matter, when in reality it is the precondition for identifying those relations in the first place. In that sense, it is prior to the emergence of both objective and subjective, which themselves rely on distinctions that arise within consciousness. — Wayfarer

I think it is not one or the other, it is both. Consciousness does emerge from structural relations of non conscious entities, and consciousness is the precondition for identifying those relationships in the first place. This circularity results in the hard problem, but the hard problem, like all problems, is epistemic. We, as conscious beings, may face an insurmountable barrier in explaining consciousness itself. But from this apparent epistemic barrier it cannot be concluded that consciousness has no naturalistic explanation. Just that we might never get to it.

Not quite sure what you mean here. If we stipulate that each one legitimately occurred to the person concerned, then I guess they're all valid in that sense: You can be mistaken about what an illusion represents, but not about the fact that you're experiencing something. — J

You are missing something important here. Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned LSD, but now that I did, the Hollywood trope that LSD induces hallucinations is wildly inaccurate. Pink elephants are very rare, if they ever truly occur, and would require truly heroic doses. Far more common are alterations in perception, and especially thinking. Not mere illusion. Leaving LSD aside (drugs and philosophy is a huge topic, very worthy of an op), it is clear that the way a bat sees the world is no illusion. It is a way of seeing, coequal with the way we see. And there are infinite valid ways of seeing, as there are infinite potential (and vast actual) neural architectures .

The myriad perceptions (or illusions of perception) that you mention may be valid in the sense I used, but not in the sense that they are "aligned with the world." — J

And so now I hope we can agree, while there are infinite ways of seeing that are misaligned with the world, there are also infinite ways of seeing that are in fact aligned. "One true way" is just naive realism. Once naivhe realism is discarded, one realizes that the way we see the world is a construction, one that is aligned with the world in the relevant ways. But there are boundless ways of building such a construction.

Can we even have gluons without concepts, which we've agreed must be observer-dependent? — J

I think we can. It is fanciful to say that gluons sprang into existence when they were discovered. Of course, we cannot cognitively access gluons without the concept of gluons. And, the concept of gluons can certainly fail to "carve to the joints" of the reality.

I'm beginning to suspect that "thin ontology" is just science. The examples you've shown conform to this. Could Sider be mistaking philosophy for science? I'm thinking of a view where "First order ontology" (not to argue the term, just to suggest the idea) is science: that which can be said independently of any observer. "Second order ontology" is the world of subjectivity, the world we actually inhabit (as @Wayfarer loves to point out): the world of subjective perspectives. This is the world of of inexhaustibly many valid "ways of seeing". The "book of the world" is science. There might be one grand unified theory, one way of describing the objective world that perfectly carves to the joints of the objective world. Whereas, philosophy straddles first and second order ontologies. It is about the real world, but a world that includes subjectivity and perspectives, and itself constructs perspectives upon that subjective-inclusive world. As such, there can never be a single philosophical "book of the world".

Maybe so, in philosophy. But let's not forget the leopard I brought up a while back. Biological taxonomy is a good example of doing precisely this; we have a fixed set of concepts that everyone (who knows the science) agrees on. Where it's fuzzy at the edges, work needs to be done, but the overall shape of the project is accepted, I think. — J

I actually think this is a horrible example, biology is so messy. It completely defines easy categorization. The ones we have are as much convention as anything. They try to carve to the joints, but only as best as they can, the reality is just too complex. What is a species really? Is it a population that can interbreed? Then what about asexual species? Hybridization? Non-transitive breeding? (A <-> B, B <-> C, but not A <-> C). Horizonal gene transfer in bacteria? When you move up from species, it just gets worse and more arbitrary. Even the category of life itself is problematic, and more so than just viruses (prions, mitochondria, artificial life...)

But your list of "relationships, concepts, categories" et al. seems just as much a part of first-order ontology. — J

I don't think so. These are observer dependent, and limitless, while I would take "first order ontology" to be observer independent and finite. It is clear to me they don't exist on the same order of being.

Think of perspectives, relationships between subjects and objects. For instance, a man looks at a rock. There is one man, one rock, yet even geometrically there are infinite geometric perspectives the man can have of the rock. Then, perceptually :he man can see the rock one way sober, one way drunk, one way on LSD. There is no limit on the number of different psychedelic drugs that can be synthesized, each of which offers a unique perspective. There is no limit to the number of ways all the different sentient species, past, present, future, from earth or other planets, might perceive the rock. And all of this still doesn't begin to exhaust the space of every possible perspective that can be taken on the rock. Crucially, each and every of these perspectives is valid , none are garbage, none are privileged.

Concepts too are perspectives. They are the cognitive counterparts to perceptual perspectives. They are also limitless. There is no upper bound to the number of ways to think about, compare, categorize the rock. Even for the example of 'existence', if I were patient and creative enough I might be able to cover up with over a hundred variations. Creating concepts is a creative endeavor. Part of the artistry of it is to create concepts that are somehow aligned with the world, that "carve the joints". "Cow plus electron" doesn't cut it. But unlike butchering an animal there is no upper bound to the number of ways that this can be done.

I hope this demonstrates that concepts and perspectives are not ontologically primary, in the same way a heap of atoms is. And that coming up with a fixed, finite set of these everyone agrees on is hopeless endeavor.

Is this a fair criticism of sider? How might he respond?

Not having read Sider, I have a different question.

Why is 'ontology' even the concern? This seems kind of naive, as if words really just picked out subsets of ontological reality. When in fact, words are as often dealing with relationships, concepts, relationships and categories of concepts, subjective relationships... It seems impossible to find indisputable, singular 'ontological' versions of such words.

Take the first problematic word you mentioned, 'existence'. Especially when you take concepts, relationships, and subjects into account, the number of 'existences' seems to explode.

Atomic existence: Does the thing have a mind independent, physical existence?
Presentist atomic existance: Does the thing have atomic existence, right now?
Eternalist atomic existance: Did the thing ever have an atomic existence?
"Block universe" atomic existence: Will the thing ever have an atomic existence?
Mind-dependent existence: Does the thing exist at all, even if only in a mind?
Recalled existence: Does the thing exist, if only in living memory?
Historical existence: Does the thing exist, if only in written record?
Local existence: Does the thing exist, and have any causal relationship with any subject?
Relative-local existence: Does the thing exist, and have any causal relationship with a particular subject?

And on and on...

Each of these is debatable. Take mind-dependent existence. Does this require for the mental object to be thought, right now, for it to exist? Or does an active potential to think something count as existence? If the thought was thought in the past, does it require a present impact to count? What if the impact is only marginal, say, it contributed slightly to another thought which contributed slightly to another, which became an enduring belief, does that marginal thought exist? Is this existence intrinsically relative, so that thoughts exist from one subjective frame of reference, and do not exist in another? Or is it the totality of human thought that counts?

Each question is a debate. "Ah, but these are not substantive", Sider might say. "There is no singular reference to this term, we have to clearly delineate what we are talking about!". But this means, for each question, we generate another term: one for the positive response, one for the negative. This exercise can be repeated for every of the variations of "existence" above. So ultimately, we wind up with 100s of "ontologese" terms just covering the natural language "existence". Is this progress?

I think the core problem is that language does not, and cannot, map to ontology in a straightforward way. Language doesn't directly deal in ontology. It deals in concepts. These can multiply endlessly, and they can all "carve to the joints". The joints of ontology, or the joints of other concepts.

Yes, but . . . isn't that what happened, more or less, with several logical languages? So it can be done, and done usefully. — J

Logical languages have basic concepts that are very well agreed upon. Ontologese would not. Everyone would have their options on what should and shouldn't be included. And everyone would have their own definitions. This would lead to either the wrangling we are trying to avoid, or an explosion of terms, designating multiple takes for each term.

amazingly enough, at least one (Dasein) has actually stuck. But his way of using those new terms . . . not easy, and often not clear, which was supposed to be the whole point. — J

Dasein is particularly opaque. But this is the general problem. The idea that all of these terms would be transparent, clear, and agreed upon seems highly optimistic.

I don't believe that this can end terminological debates. The best is that it can keep them mostly substantive.

Nice OP.

I like the thinking here, I think it captures why much philosophical discourse is insubstantive. My concern is what is advocating for is a massive jargonization of philosophy. The amount of coinages required would be immense, and ever growing. I also share your skepticism of "joint-carving". At best it is an ideal, not something that will actually be achieved. Any ideal set of terms would more realistically carve joints at the conceptual level, not the metaphysical level. Which of these is actually metaphysically apt would be endlessly debatable (but at least, substantively debatable)..

But really, it seems a fantasy that a singular set of terms, with universally agreed definitions, could ever be achieved. More likely, a sprawling, fragmentary landscape of overlapping , incompatible terminologies would result. It is not obvious at all that this would be an improvement over the current state of affairs.

I don't really see an alternative to what is sometimes done already: for individual philosophers to rigorously define their terms from the outset, as best they are able.

Information is not a metaphysically basic, because it is not ontologically autonomous. — Wayfarer

This is certainly a reasonable position. And yet, the fact that information can remain constant durung radical transformations of matter does seem to suggest a kind of independence.

If it has true independence, it would be as mathematics. At least computationally, any set of information can be represented as a single, potentially enormous, number. And if anything has a platonic existence, independent of the material world, it is math.

I imagine DNA is the first appearance of information. — Patterner

As @Wayfarer points out, what information means is quite context dependent. For the specific meaning you have in mind, symbolic or encoded information, I would say, yes! I think you are right. If life arose on earth first, DNA may indeed mark the emergence of symbolic information.in the universe.

What is interesting is how the seed of DNA birthed the Cambrian explosion of symbolic information. From chemical communication to vocal, to language, to our current lives which seem totally dominated by symbols. All this required the kindling of DNA, which launched and spread all the symbolic regimes in the universe.

The problem with 'information' is that, as a general term, it doesn't mean anything. — Wayfarer

Interesting, it certainly seems to mean something. Definitely in everyday conversation it does. And so does it in the sense we are discussing, as something fundamental in the universe, alongside matter. Of course as with so many things, pinning down exactly what it means is nontrivial.

My experience with AI systems strongly suggests they do not possess this. — Wayfarer

I don't think LLMs could function as they do without understanding in some form (of course, without the sentience connotation the word usually caries). 'Intentionality' is out, and I'm not quite sure what 'normativity' is doing here.

I'll be sure to check out the thread, I like the topic.

Nifty OP. I had pretty much the exact same revelation, though not so artfully told. It led me to a kind of dualist perspective, where the universe consists of matter in all its forms, and information. Although information seems somehow parasitic on matter, in that it needs a material medium in one form or another to exist (not withstanding "it from bit" theories, which I don't understand).

That was part of my point: information does not exist in the absence of (an aspect of) consciousness. Characters on a printed page are not intrinsically information; it's only information to a a conscious mind that interprets it- so it's a relational property. — Relativist

I think you are talking about meaning, not information. Meaning is interpreted information. Also, there is no necessary involvement of consciousness. Machines can interpret information and derive meaning from it.