Are you actually making the claim that even though a NN can be emulated by a TM, the NN somehow implements semantics? — fishfry

Nope. I made the point that humans and NNs can emulate TMs. (You did claim to be familiar with the CRA?) However that doesn't make either of them TMs.

I also said neuroscientists find NNs to be biologically realistic models of neural processes. There is no reason to think brains are finite state automata. There is no reason to think they are programmable computers (von Neumann machines). There is no reason to think they are Turing complete. But - given that NNs are inspired by the biology - it is not much of a surprise that NNs implemented even as logic devices show some of the important functionality we associate with nervous systems.

So NNs are goodmodels. TMs, by contrast, are woeful models of brain function.

Can an NN have semantics or is it also just a syntactic device? Well, it all rather depends now on how you define semantics. And that is what biosemiotics concerns itself with. One would need a general physicalist theory of semantics to answer the question in some quantitative fashion.

I would say the NNs built to date aren't really semantic. They are just pattern matching systems. And they require supervised learning, so the semantics are clearly "in the mind" of their human trainers. But arguably they are getting near the abilities of an ant or cockroach.

I would say that is still only in terms of pattern matching ability. An embodied view of cognition would say that a hell of a lot is still missing in terms of an actual ability to "makes sense of the world" even at that level. NN designers haven't even got their heads around the kind of functionality they need to start implementing as the "learning algorithms" on that score.

I could say a lot more about the semantic issue, but it's way off topic for this thread.

The issue was whether maths is Platonically real or a free creation of the human mind. I argued for a third position - one which says the maths that is "unreasonably effective" when it comes to physicalist theories, is so because it describes real physicalist limits on reality.

So enough of the sideshow. You only turn anything I say back to front anyway.

Creative: "I refer you to my entire post history. Any astute reader perusing that will surely uncover the nature of my heretofore mentioned claim. (Peel me another grape, darling.)"

The usual rambling bullshit instead of any direct answer.

Click on my avatar. Click on "comments" icon. Scroll down looking for comments with this thread title. Read for yourself. Much of the discourse between Wayfarer/Andrew M and myself covers it and it's all fairly recent. All my comments in this thread would be a good place to look... I would think. — creativesoul

I think you give yourself way too much credit for clarity of writing. I didn't understand your comment so I wouldn't even know what other comments might count as the argument that supports it.

So I argued that a notion of the general vs particular doesn't make sense unless it understood how it is connected to the distinction between the essential (or necessary) and the accidental (or chance).

Generality is the essence that a collection of individuals would have in common. Their particularity would then be the accidents that are the differences that don't make an (essential) difference to that.

I illustrated this logical principle in reference to your male duck and non-laying duck examples.

If you can't make a counter-argument here, then I can only take the view you can't in fact muster one.

I find that your approach presupposes agency where none is warranted. Drop the notions of intent and purpose, then see what happens to what's left of it... — creativesoul

Why would I arbitrarily exclude final cause from nature?

That is:

* If you claim that mind is a neural net; then you must also agree that mind is a TM. — fishfry

Either you understand the difference between emulating a TM and being a TM, or you don't. Either you understand the difference between analog computers and digital computers, or you don't. Either you understand the difference between semantics and syntax, or you don't. Etc, etc.

Maybe you could start with this famous philosophy of mind argument - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Chinese_room_and_Turing_completeness

To understand my biosemiotic take on the issue, this is a nice foundational paper - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.18.1316&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Where? If so, why not cut and paste it here?

Maybe you don’t realise that snark is pretty routine on your part.

And I have investigated neural nets. Your posts on the issue reveal you haven’t really.

My understanding is that we can accommodate abstract mental constructs quite easily within physicalism. Abstractions are thoughts, biochemical processes in my brain. — fishfry

I don't believe the mind is a TM and I don't believe real-world NN's are anything other than TMs....

Bottom line, why don't you just explain to me why you think a real-world NN is anything other than a TM. — fishfry

Hmm. So what I have got from this exchange is that you struggle to keep track of your own arguments because you don't actually have a well constructed metaphysical position. And when you encounter someone who does, you bluster and ad hom. Nice.

And so here now you have diverted the discussion to something that you hope might be safe ground.

I said that mainstream neuroscience would reject the reductive materialist notion that abstract thoughts are just biochemical processes in the brain. In some fashion - still not fully understood of course - they would be considered informational and semiotic processes.

You then leapt to the idea that this meant the activities of the brain are computational processes - Turing machine computational.

I replied no, a TM is a dualistic device. The software is absolutely divorced from the world which gives it rule-bound play any material meaning. It is presumed that the hardware supporting the action has no entropic cost. It is presumed that the input and the outputs of this finite state machine are meaningful to some further intelligence outside it. So a TM is just a syntactic device. It can blindly follow rules. But at no point in its mathematical-strength definition is there any semantics included.

And then, so far as neuroscientists would consider the brain some kind of computer, it would be like a neural network. Which is different from neuroscientists thinking the brain IS a neural network. Rather, it is neural networks which are like a semiotic relation.

Neural networks are meant to learn from the world by experience. They don't have a programming language and so they don't have a set of syntactic tokens to shuffle about according to some set of computational grammar. And while they can of course emulate a Turing Machine - just like we can emulate a TM too - that doesn't mean they are TMs. It just means they can follow rules that shuffle symbols without needing to understand anything about what they are doing. Semantics is optional to blind programmatic rule following.

So you made a wild claim - thoughts are nothing more than biochemistry. Now you want to defend the opposite thesis - thoughts are nothing more than Turing computation. Or no, you realise that is ridiculous. So you want to pretend that is my position instead.

The circle of mathematics is an ideal circle, a pure mental abstraction. — fishfry

Then you don't seem to be interested in metaphysics even as it touches on the reality of numbers. It appears largely that you reject what physicalism might have to say about "reality" just because looking up "buzzwords" is such a tiresome chore ... when you already have all the answers.

I was hoping that focusing on the reality of mathematical constants might have got us somewhere. Yet it appears you haven't even really thought about the reason constants emerge as limits on material action in physical systems. So that was a waste of time too.

Oh well. I was expecting too much, obviously.

There's a marked difference between not being able to draw and maintain a dichotomy and rejecting it based upon grounds of inadequacy... — creativesoul

And your argument is...

[creative, as per usual, will fail to fill in the blank space where his argumentation was meant to go ;) ]

I find it rather interesting that an entire school of thought and belief has arisen as a means to sophisticate what is nothing more than unsophisticated language use.

"Ducks lay eggs" is not true. That's plain and simple. — creativesoul

And so you have some notion of truth that can’t make a useful distinction between the essential and the accidental.

If a female duck can’t lay eggs, that is some kind of accident. But it is still a duck because essentially - barring the accident - it would have laid eggs. As well as having all the other duck-defining feratures that count as essential. (In the end, this might boil down to a genetic disposition of course.)

And then a male duck, if regarded as part of the class of male things, would only lay eggs by some kind of accident.

It is a basic logical principle. That which is not constrained is free. That which is not essential is still possible by accident. Indeed, that which is not prevented has to happen to some degree if it is a possibility.

So you are working with a notion of reality that doesn’t pick up this essential vs accidental, or constraints vs degrees of freedom, distinction. That leads to an impoverished logical model of reality. You can’t in fact speak its truth because you can’t handle all its facts.

You're asking me which particular statement, if falsified or brought into question, would discredit my proposal. Any of them, I'd say. Falsify one of them, or bring one of them into question. — Michael Ossipoff

Out of curiosity, what metaphysical proposal? There doesn't seem to be one in this thread from you. So a link would be helpful.

Thanks for the lengthy reply.

What's true is this. Computationalism s the claim that the mind (or the universe, in a more grandiose version) is a computation. Now those neuroscientists who are computationalists believe that thoughts are informational processes; and those who aren't, don't.

I hope you will agree with me that this is a true statement about the states of belief of neuroscientists, and that this is NOT a settled issue by any means. If nothing else, if mind is a computation, what's the algorithm? When you bring me some computer code and say, "Here, this is how you implement an mind. It's 875,356 of C++. Some grad student figured it out," then maybe I'll believe you. Till then, the burden of proof is on you. — fishfry

I'm definitely not claiming computationalism - or at least not Turing machine computation as you seem to suggest. The mainstream neuroscience view - since Sherrington's "enchanted loom" or Hebbs's learning networks - is some kind of neural net form of "computation".

And more to the point, it is mainstream to emphasise that the brain is involved in informational activity, not merely biochemical activity. Otherwise why is neuroscience interested in discovering the secrets of the neural code, or brain's processing architecture? It knows the biophysics of what makes a neuron fire. But how that firing then represents or symbolises something with felt meaning is the big question. And that can only be approached in terms of something other than a biochemical materialism. It demands a semiotic or information theoretic framework. Which in turn has already considered Turing computation and found it not the answer.

So broadly speaking, neuroscientists think thoughts are informational processes and not biochemical events. At the same time, they don't think the brain is literally a Turing machine or programmable computer. That might be a helpful analogy, like calling the eye a camera. But just as quickly, the caveats would begin.

There are important things in the world that are not computations. Like mathematical truth. — fishfry

Computers are machines. They are devices that construct patterns. So yes, of course, human minds seem to operate in a fundamentally different fashion. We can grasp the whole of some pattern. We can understand it "organically" as a system of constraints, rather than as an atomistic construction.

Our abductive or intuitive approach to reasoning begins with this ability to see the whole that "stands behind" the part. We can make inferences to the best explanation. And then, having framed an axiom or hypothesis, we are also quite good at deducing consequences and confirming by observation.

So when it comes to mathematical truth, that is what we think we are doing. We notice something about the world. We then leap towards some rational principle that could "stand behind" this something as its more general constraint.

Turing machines are really bad at making such a holistic generalisation. Neural network computers are our attempt to build machines that are good at implementing this precise inferential leap.

However if you DON'T believe that mind is a computation, you no longer necessarily have substrate independence. I hope you would grant me this. — fishfry

Yeah. I don't claim complete substrate independence. But then my "computationalism" is a semiotic or embodied one. The whole point is that it hinges on a separation which then allows an interaction.

A Turing machine does not self-replicate. A Turing machine does not have to manage its material flows or compete with other TMs. But a living thing is all about regulating its physics with information. So an independence from physical substrate (an epistemic cut) is required by life and mind. But only so as to be able to regulate that physics - bend it in the direction which is making the autopoietic wholeness that is "an organism".

The only way to do that is to execute the algorithm on physical hardware. That is a physical process involving an input of energy and an output of heat. Something a physicist could observe and quantify. — fishfry

Yes, you can measure one side of the computational story in terms of entropy production. But how do you measure the other side of the story in terms of "negentropy" production? The fact that your computer runs either hotter or colder doesn't say much about whether its eventual output is righter or wronger.

Where does the algorithm itself live? Well it lived first in Euclid's brain. But isn't Euclid's mind a physical process? His abstract thoughts are physical processes, and his thoughts can be implemented as physical processes. But I don't see why we need dualism. — fishfry

We are labouring the point. If you really can't see the difference between syntax and semantics by now, things are likely hopeless.

You keep talking about the physical events as if they are the informational processes. Of course a neuron or a transistor or a membrane receptor or a speedometer can be described in terms of their "physics". But it is hardly the level of description that explains "the process" which we are interested in.

To reduce functional or informational processes to atomistic material events becomes a nonsense. Especially for true computationalism. The only time we are interested in the physics of a logic gate is when it doesn't behave like a logic gate - that is when it has some uncontrolled physical process going on.

So algorithms are extreme mechanistic dualism in fact. You don't even have to run a programme for it to "have a result". The result could only be different if the physics of the real world somehow intruded, And then we would say the computer had a bug. It over-heated or something.

And maths is kind of like that. We imagine it as transcendent and eternal truths - things that would be true without ever needing the reality of physical instantiation. Pure information. It is crazy to talk of Euclidean maths as existing in some geezer's long dead brain.

Jeez that sounds a little mystical. You're saying that Euclidean geometry is the midpoint between elliptic and hyperbolic geometry. Yes this is a true mathematical fact, but it is not mystical. — fishfry

Why do you interpret that as a mystical statement? My point was that it is not a mystery because it is what you would expect from principles of physicalist symmetry. If every kind of difference gets cancelled (as the negatives erase the positives) then what you are left with is the mid-point balance. It would be natural to expect "flatness" as the emergent limit state.

So I'm not going to try to think about this. You have to start somewhere, and perhaps we could agree that for purposes of this conversation, there is the number pi and there is a rock, and that we don't have to consider their quantum relationship to each other, if any. — fishfry

Well it is your choice to ignore what we know to be fundamental in preference for what we know to be emergent.

I can't agree that it makes for good metaphysics. And I think you just want to avoid having to make a better argument.

To a number theories, integers are as real as rocks. I doubt Wiles would agree that he's written a work of fiction. Or even give the matter any thought at all. — fishfry

Fine. The philosophical issue here is not the pragmatics of mathematical research. And I even agree that mathematical research - in being an informational theoretic exercise - would deliberately insulate itself from such fundamental metaphysical issues. Maths doesn't really want to even concern itself with geometry - the physical constraints of space - let alone with actual materiality, or the constraints of energy, the possibilities of change. So - as institutional habit - integers are as real as rocks.

Except they are then ... ideas? Constructs? Thoughts in the head?

You seem to want it both ways. And that winds up in Platonism.

That is why my own position is the semiotic one where the integers are the ideal limits on materiality. That is a formula of words that both accepts a strong difference and a strong connection between the two sides of the semiotic equation. Information is real if it is causal. And being an actual limit on material freedom is pretty clearly causal.

Ooh you are on shaky ground here! Gödel told us that math is NOT an informational process! No algorithm can determine the truth of mathematical statements. — fishfry

See earlier where I spoke about abductive reasoning and our ability to make inferential leaps. Gödel validates my approach here. The failure of logical atomism is the solid ground for the holist. It is why a semiotic approach to reality is justified.

Yes but you're going all woo-woo about a trivial mathematical fact. Well not trivial, non-Euclidean geometry was a big deal when it was discovered. — fishfry

You mentioned pi. I am just highlighting how the usual woo-woo aspect - the fact that there is just this "one number" picked at random out of all the numbers on the number-line - masks a bigger story. The woo-woo evaporates when you see there is a "material" process that picks out a value for "being flat". Two kinds of possible curvature had a mid-point balance. Pi is a number that emerges due to something more holistic going on. The fact that it emerges "right there" on the number-line is not some kind of weird magic.

It is even easier to see with other constant like e that are directly derived from growth processes. There the contrasting actions that produce the emergent ratio are in plain sight. It is funny that e should be 2.71828. But then that becomes obvious when it is realised that growth always has to start from some thing that is just itself 1. There is no reason to think of e as anything but natural after that.

You and Kant. He was wrong. You're wrong. Euclidean geometry's not special. It's just something we seem to have an intuition of. — fishfry

But I am not Kantian, except in a loose sense. I'm Peircean in the way Peirce fixed Kant.

And I'm arguing flatness is special as the mid-point of opposing extremes of curvature. It has physically important properties too. Only flat geometries preserve invariance under transformations of scale. That is a really important emergent property when it comes to things like Universes.

It's true that it's the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter is pi, but if it were 3 or 47 or 18, you'd be asking why it's that? It's just what it is. The only really interesting thing is that the ratio is always the same no matter what size the circle is! That's the real breakthrough here, that was a great discovery once. [Edit - You made the point that this is only true in Euclidean geometry. Point taken]. — fishfry

And as I repeat, it is very important metaphysically that absolute scale invariance only appears at a particular numeric value of pi. That is how a Universe is even possible.

So you are focused on the triviality of pi being given some particular position on the number line - look guys, its 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286 208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408 ...

And that is what makes folk go woo. It seems both weirdly specific and weirdly random. There seems no natural reason for the value.

But it's a ratio derived from the radius being granted as the natural unit. Let's call the radius 1. Let's get a grip on this weird thing called curvature by starting with the "most natural part of the story" - a line segment. That gets to be "1" on the number-line.

Well, as I say, once mathematicians woke up to the fact that flatness was a rather special case of curvature, and once physicists in turn woke up to the fact that scale invariance was essential to any kind of workable Universe (its called rather grandly the cosmological principle), well, maybe it is the ratio that should be called "1". A straight line segment is only a natural unit in the context of an already flat space which supports unlimited scale transformations. It depends on the emergent fact of parallel lines or infinite rays being an actual possibility.

You are really into pi mysticism. What I mean is, what you wrote here is pretty word salad-y. I have to repeat, I only picked pi because it's a good candidate to make the point that numbers are abstract and not physical. I could have made the exact same point with 3, but people have a harder time understanding that 3 isn't any more physical than pi. — fishfry

I am being anti-mystical in pointing out the very physical basis of pi as a number. It is a ratio that picks out a critical geometric balance.

The number 3 is trivial by comparison. Well there are physical arguments for why the geometry of universes are optimal if they have just three orthogonal spatial directions. But 3 as a member of the integers has no numeric specialness by design. The special or natural numbers are 1 and 0. We see this in the symmetries captured by identity operations. There is something basic or universal when we hit the bedrock that is a symmetry or invariance.

You would call it a mystical fact perhaps. I see it as quite reasonable and self-explanatory.

* So to sum up:

- You are arguing from a computationalist point of view, but I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. Looking back I see that now. Even if I agree with you that mind is computation, there are still numbers and rocks. I possibly did not follow your argument. — fishfry

Nope. At least not your notion of computation as Turing machine/programmable computation.

I take an information theoretic perspective. And more specifically, a semiotic one. In technology terms, neural networks come the closest to implementing that notion of computation.

And numbers vs rocks is a distinction that relies on a classical metaphysics - one in which the divide between observers and observables does not present an epistemic difficulty. The epistemic cut - the necessary separation of the information from the physics - can be treated as an ontological fact.

So my positions on both "mind is a computation" and "reality is classical" are the same. Semiotics starts from the view that there is no fundamental ontic division of observers and observables. But that is also the division which must emerge via some epistemic cut. It is the basis of intelligibility. And even the Universe can only exist to the degree it hangs together in intelligible fashion.

Hence why maths tends to be unreasonably effective at describing the Universe. Or being in general.

- You are wrong that math is a computation. And like many computationlists, you underestimate or ignore the importance of non-computable phenomena in the world. Remember even Tegmark distinguishes between the mathematical universe hypothesis and the computable universe hypothesis. Computationalism is a very strong assumption. — fishfry

Labouring the point still, but I'm sorry. I'm not a computationalist in the sense you are hoping for. Indeed, that was what I was accusing you of. You seem to believe reality is a machine. An account of physical events is sufficient.

But yes, you also seem to say the opposite. This is a symptom that your metaphysics is "commonsensical" and not well thought out.

* Mathematicians do math, not philosophy. My sense is that the vast majority of working mathematicians never give any thought to philosophy. When an engineer is building a bridge, do you want him spending his time contemplating the fact that there is no difference between him and the bridge? Or do you want him calculating the load factors according to state of the art engineering principles? — fishfry

Again, bully for mathematicians. Bully for engineers. Bully even for most physicists (as very few are employed in frontier theory construction).

But it is curious to be complaining about metaphysics where metaphysics is appropriate.

And so far you haven't put forward any clear exposition of your own epistemic position, let alone given a clear justification for it. You just hoped to be able to label me with some obviously weak ontology that I spend most of my time arguing against.

As others have said, this is simply a false dichotomy, an over-simplification.

To be conscious here means to be a mental act that itself is now reportable as a mental act. So it is overt at the level of attention and working memory. It is something that has been "done" and so can be repeated as an action. It has a definite form. It is some phrase just said, or some image just conjured up.

But then all such mental acts have to begin in some pre-conscious fashion. They must develop from some vaguely felt generality into some specifically articulated form. You can call this the unconscious gestation, but you can also pay attention and catch a comment or image while it is still just a vague "urge". So it is not strictly unconscious. You can be vividly conscious of some thought having just been on the tip of your tongue.

And then all mental acts, if repeated often enough, can become themselves habitual or automatic. So now they are "unconscious" in a different way as you just emit them in learnt rote fashion without need of gestation or attention. You don't have to make an effort to produce the completed form of some familiar phrase or image. It will just flash into your mind of its own accord due to contextual cues.

So thinking lives on both sides of this supposed borderline. And so far as is possible, the brain wants to turn every mental act into a habit. It wants to be as "unconscious" as possible - as that is the only way for thought to be efficient.

But then, by definition, we need to "think through" mental acts that are to do with the novel, the dangerous, the significant. That is why we have a prefrontal cortex. That is why we have selective attention and working memory. And that is the kind of thought we think of as actually consciously thinking. We feel we can claim "I" was there as it happened.

Yet this "I" in turn is a habit of social self-regulation. Layering complexity on complexity, to introspect on the forming of mental acts - to make them the subject of a further act of self-report - is something we all learn to do because society wants us to be accountable for when our thoughts turn into behaviours. So we invent this notion of the "conscious self", this "I that was there", as part of the machinery of thought.

It is an intricate ecosystem and the attempt to make sense of it with a simplistic binary - like conscious vs unconscious - is way too crude.

Doesn't justice recognise this by accepting that liability is on a sliding scale?

The law must reach some binary decision - guilty or innocent. The accidents are varied in their degree of blameworthiness. Hence there will always be borderline cases - decisions that could go either way.

In practice, maybe the law even errs on the side of letting drivers off?

Between 2010 and 2014, there were 3,069 crashes with pedestrians in the Twin Cities and its suburbs. 95 were killed. 28 drivers were charged. But many of the deaths weren't even judged worth a traffic ticket.

http://www.startribune.com/in-crashes-that-kill-pedestrians-the-majority-of-drivers-don-t-face-charges/380345481/

So the general moral take-home would be that society expects us to be in "reasonable" control of our actions. And we know that "reasonable" is then tough to define as there is always so much more we can do to prevent accidents or slip-ups. So at a social level, some kind of trade-off between the effort required and the potential damage that might be caused, has to be agreed.

There is a social norm when it comes to a duty of care, whether it be driving your car, doing heart surgery, or carrying a cup of coffee across your living room. Then justice is about making some black and white judgement on an individual instance. It has to be because there also needs to be a specific action that follows. You can't half lock a bad driver up.

The justice system of course has appeal courts and community service penalties, etc. But the principle would be that there has to be some social-level norm as a generality. And then to particularise this generality - apply it to some individual case - a line has to be drawn across the world. On one side is social responses - the system of penalties or sanctions that can be imposed. On the other is your personal response - your freedom to think about what you just did in anyway you like. You might well have rather a strong response to killing a pedestrian even if it was judged "a complete accident".

So essentially this is the rather abstract Enlightenment view of humanity in action. Social norms are encoded in laws. They are treated by society as the statement of absolute constraints. Then by the same token, what is not forbidden becomes your personal freedoms. They are also just as absolute. The Enlightenment machinery would also recognise some basic freedoms as rights. This goes further in saying society can't write laws that impinge on these freedoms.

Being human becomes a highly abstract affair on both levels. Actual humans are taken out of the equation as much as possible so that we become creatures of an abstract system.

Of course societies don't apply this model with complete rigour. Social networks and community standards mean who you know, what power and status you have, can affect outcomes. People get away with what others will let them get away with.

Abstract justice systems operate in a real human world. So a kind of meta-judgement needs to be made. Given the trade-off issue - the effort to enforce a strict rule of law vs the cost of that effort - it could be that a society is doing a "reasonable" job in being pragmatically relaxed. Or it could in fact be just socially corrupt.

You were asking more about the notion of personal responsibility. Getting back to that, my reply is that there is good reason for the judgements of justice to be binary - the Enlightenment model wants to draw a clear line between society's constraints and your freedoms. The norms it encodes in law then do recognise a sliding scale in terms of just how much effort we ought to have to put into regulating our own behaviour.

But deciding how general laws apply in a particular case is always going to encounter complex borderline instances. And a judgement still has to be made - either in favour of social sanction or individual freedom. However the effort and cost of applying "blind justice" is a meta-consideration for society. Is perfection ever itself a reasonable aim?

I was thinking about how the humanities departments justify their existence given the push for STEM funding there. They do seem to have to justify their existence these days.

Art, philosophy, literature, or music are much less about technology and more about an individual reflecting on the realities of his times. — Bitter Crank

So they would be technologies of the self, technologies of social advance, surely? The humanities are suppose to point the direction of desirable cultural change.

Perhaps the question mark might be about the “progress” aspect. But there is evidence like Pinker’s claims about the diminishing levels of human violence. And individual freedom has increased in many ways.

Of course, McJobs, obesity, consumerism, inequality, etc, etc. But those haven’t been actively promoted outcomes when it comes to the humanities.

So I don’t see a problem with finding a historic progressive trend in philosophy as the technology of the self/the technology of social being. And the arts are about inventing ways to be new.

If the argument is that they are not getting better, I wouldn’t be so sure. I’m impressed by whole new areas of expression like video art, graphic novels, grafitti art and challenging TV dramas.

I don't see it as up to you to deliberately determine what is significant for you. That task has already been accomplished the moment you experience any event. You find yourself attending to something before you consciously will it. — Joshs

Yes. The "you" I have in mind is not some conscious being. This is about the cognitive architecture of brains. So what catches our attention is what fails to be dealt with at a habitual level of processing. A lifetime of experience serves as enough of a filter so that most of every moment can be left to automatic pilot. Attentional resources are reserved for the differences that make a difference at a habitual level of response - the ones that can't be assimilated to the similarity that is ... a habit.

And what is relevant to you is that entitiy that is not so similar in relation to your construing history that it will not be noticed, and not so other that you will fail to assimilate it. The 'too other' is what is experienced via affectitites of fear, anger,etc. that paralyze our ability to go on. — Joshs

Yep. Things could be too outside of normal experience not to be assimilable even by attention-level processing. But even then, eventually we reach some kind of adjustment. We "conquer our fears" by forming some construct to which a class of events can be assimilated too.

So the general principle applies. The mind doesn't build constructs by focusing on what thing have in common. Concepts are constraints on variety. They are about learning the differences that can be ignored, so as then to highlight the differences that are then key.

Concepts are filters rather than collectors. They separate signal from noise.

Maybe this is the difference between hoarders and minimalists? One can't bear to throw away anything - it all matters. The other is selective and finds order in becoming disinterested in inessential variety. :)

Bateson shared some things with Kelly, but I prefer Kelly's phenomenological stance to Bateson's behaviroistic model of causation. ' — Joshs

How do you mean Bateson's behaviourism? I would have thought his informational/hierarchical feedback approach was pretty anti-Behaviourism.

Behaviourism treated nerve networks as chains of physically triggered nodes. Sensory energy gives a network of poised physical connections a jolt, then that shot of energy just rattles around the circuit in mechanical fashion.

But cybernetics stressed the informational aspect of neural action. And seeing networks as hierarchies again completely changes the paradigm. Now a jolt of sensory energy can only disturb the state of the system to the degree the system lets it. Through top-down constraint, it can damp the "input" just as readily as it amplifies it.

Do you just mean that Bateson was overly physicalist by comparison to Kelly? That could be so. I only mention Bateson because he coined some good phrases, not because I find him totally reliable on all matters psychological. Clearly, as with schizophrenia, he could really screw up.

And I've only faint familiarity with Kelly. But checking Wiki, I see his approach is exactly the dichotomy-based approach to categories that I take....

Kelly defined constructs as bipolar categories—the way two things are alike and different from a third—that people employ to understand the world. Examples of such constructs are "attractive," "intelligent," "kind." A construct always implies contrast. So when an individual categorizes others as attractive, or intelligent, or kind, an opposite polarity is implied. This means that such a person may also evaluate the others in terms of the constructs "ugly," "stupid," or "cruel."

So you find a person cruel to the degree that the person is not kind, and vice versa. That is, an individual or particular is located on the spectrum of possibility created by a complementary pair of generalities. This is that to the degree it is not the other.

So a construct would be the spectrum that allows the binary judgement - an assimilation of a particular instance to one or other generality. But still, generalities are constraints, in my book. They assimilate the particular by ignoring irrelevant differences rather than collecting together the sufficiently similar.

Is a three-legged rabbit still a rabbit? Why not if every rabbit has got some kind of difference and the loss of a leg doesn't make any essential difference. But maybe a race of three-legged rabbits exists. They are known as ribbits. Now it matters if our candidate was born one way or the other.

The point about a constraints-based approach is that it demands the least work. To pick out the sufficiently similar is a lot of work. Each individual has to be inspected according to some checklist. They will always be different and so it is going to be a judgement whether the difference matters anyway.

But it instead it is presumed that everything is the same until something critically different manifests, then that makes for efficient processing. And a dichotomous or bipolar construct spells out what "critically different" means at the level of absolute generality. It is the exact opposite of whatever pragmatically defines "sufficiently alike".

Every beautiful person is a little bit ugly. But rather than fuss about the classification problem that appears to cause, we just take a broad-brush approach of accepting every person as beautiful until - in binary fashion - a person seems to fit better the folk who are in the class of "every ugly person is a little bit beautiful".

We can of course add intermediate categories - the people who are just middling. But a constraints-based principle is still the low-effort approach. It doesn't demand every detail be judged for similarity. Only some general weight of "poor fit" has to be judged. Then the categorisation can flip over to its other pole.

Or a difference that makes a difference.

Truth by tautological similarity has all the familiar problems. But if similarity is defined in terms of the set of differences that an observer feels don't really matter, then you have the basis of a useful construct. Now the differences that make a difference pop right out.

That is the Batesonian paradigm that has more traction in psychology these days I would say.

The world is ripe with differences. Everything is different or individuated in some fashion. So the art of cognition is learning how much difference you can afford to ignore. That way, only the significant differences reach your attention.

That is the kind of "Helmholtzian" cognitive architecture that an anticipatory neural network or Bayesian brain seeks to implement.

When one says beliefs are concepts, it sounds like some explanation has been offered. — Banno

The dispositional view of Pragmatism emphasises the way that an adequate concept has to bring with it an adequate measurement. So a belief has this dichotomous structure. The idea is separate from its confirmation. However the idea also does itself tell us what kind of confirmation is suitable.

So truth-telling can't transcend its own grounding conceptions. Yet also, the business of truth-telling can improve over time as it becomes measurably less subjective by being measureably more generic and public.

From a nice review of that Misak book...

This might seem rather surprising, given that Ramsey is usually associated with a redundancy or proto-deflationary theory of truth. But Misak argues that, after about 1926, Ramsey saw that an adequate account of truth needs to do more than note the equivalence of “p” and “‘p’ is true”: if one has a disposition toward a dispositional account of belief, as Ramsey did, then it’s natural to ask what sorts of dispositions, in general, go along with believing that p is true.

Ramsey came to much the same conclusion as Peirce: the belief that p commits one to giving reasons for p and considering the evidence for and against it. Thus, on Misak’s reading of Ramsey, “if we unpack the commitments we incur when we assert or believe, we find that we have imported the notions of fact (vaguely conceived), experimentation, and standards for good belief” (230).

Pragmatic approaches to meaning and truth thus offer a tidy, mutually-reinforcing package that is an attractive alternative to the more typical combination of a representational theory of meaning with a correspondence theory of truth—while also offering a meaningful extension beyond the truism at the heart of deflationism.

[Review: Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein, by Cheryl Misak - John Capps]

This is a deep mystery. Our abstractions are telling us something about the world. We're not sure what.

I don't think you and I disagree all that much. — fishfry

Great. I respect that you are strong on the mathematics. So I was hoping for a more productive discussion.

Maths is unreasonably effective. It’s abstractions are more than mere intellectual accidents. There must be a reason for their Platonic seeming necessity. So therefore that is why the nature of mathematical truth remains so central to physicalist inquiry.

If we are not sure, we still ought to be exploring with an open mind.

My understanding is that we can accommodate abstract mental constructs quite easily within physicalism. Abstractions are thoughts, biochemical processes in my brain.

But thoughts are still different from rocks. Thoughts and rocks are both physical processes, but they have a different character. One doesn't need dualism. — fishfry

Neuroscience believes thoughts to be informational processes, not biochemical ones. To use the easily abused computational analogy, the "material physics" explains nothing. You could implement the logic of a Turing machine in some system of tin cans and bits of twine.

So a science of the mind definitely does need a dualist physicalism of some kind. There has to be some ontic difference between information and entropy, even if they also arise in some common (mutual) fashion.

But putting that aside, the issue here is the epistemic one of a distinction between observers and observables. Classical physics just presumes that observers are free agents, able to make measurements of reality without disturbing that reality. And this supports the idea that thoughts and rocks are unproblematically separate. Not only are our conceptions of reality a free invention of the human mind, but so do our perceptions of reality enjoy a matching freedom from our ability to invent.

That is, we invent the physics of rock motion. Then rocks have a motion which we can - without getting entangled and changing anything - concretely measure. There is no epistemic concern about the line between what is our ideas and what is reality.

However we now know better. A clean break between observers and observables looks to have become fundamentally impossible.

This epistemic shock doesn't seem to have registered with the mathematical community as far as I can see. The ontological options are still either that maths is a free invention or a perception of Platonic reality. Maths doesn't have to prove itself in the court of the real world, only in the court of logical opinion. It has to conform to the rules of an informational process - the syntax that is grounded in set theory, or category theory, or whatever other fundamental notion of a closed syntactical system happens to be in vogue at the time.

Our brains go quite comfortably back and forth between the real and the unreal. Yet sane people alway know the difference. — fishfry

There is nothing so comfortable as a useful habit. Sanity is not having to think, it appears.

But that is simply advising people to give up on physical inquiry. Quantum mechanics is true but seems insane. So don't think about it.

There's some mathematical constant pi "out there." — fishfry

Yes, it is out there as a ratio capturing a primal relation of a physical world with some kind of limit-state perfect symmetry. Let that world be not perfectly flat, let it be non-Euclidean, and the value of pi starts to wander accordingly.

Between the hyperbolic and the hyperspheric, there is only one geometry that is absolutely balanced enough that the value of pi is as stable as far as the eye can see. Whether your circles are big or small, now pi remains always the same.

Whoops. Are we talking about the reality of relations here? How physically abstract. Whoops. Are we talking about the presumed scale-invariance of observables? How mentally abstract.

So pi pops out of reality, out of nature, not by accident but because the very possibility of a "physical relation" has some emergent invariant limit. It arises out of the broken symmetry that is a perfect orthogonality. :)

Thus on the one hand, pi - as a position on the number line - looks the purest accident. Why should it have that exact value? On the other, pi is the identity relation when it comes to a limit notion of orthogonal dimensionality. We might as well just give its value as 1. Everything else that is less perfectly broken can be measured as some difference to that.

The pain in my foot is not the same as the pain in my throat. The sensation in my back - is it a pain, or just a twinge?

These "states-of-mind" share little more than that we use much the same words for them. — Banno

Yup. Either that or the same ontic categorisation of reality into self and world.

My foot, my throat, my back ... and my pain.

Things only get confused when I see you slice open your foot and feel something of your pain.

I said no such thing. Circles and numbers are abstractions. Limits have a technical definition and I would never use that word imprecisely in a mathematical discussion. This is not the first time you've quoted me as saying something I never said. — fishfry

I offered a statement to see how much you might agree with it. The clue was in the question-mark. So when it comes to formal precision, grammatical conventions appear above your paygrade.

Surely I don't have to explain to you the difference between abstract and physical objects. You're just being disingenuous. — fishfry

So perhaps you can explain the difference. You might discover that it is not as secure as you want to pretend.

Mathematical forms are real, they're just not physical. — fishfry

Yep. They're mental. Or something.

Oh lordy.

But of course electrons are right on the border between the physical and the abstract. I do understand your point that saying that physical things are "really there" is a stretch once we get into the higher realms of physics. Still, one can distinguish between a number and a rock, one being abstract and the other physical. Even you would agree to this distinction, yes? — fishfry

Right. So you accept that when we really get down to brass tacks - fundamental particles - suddenly all this idea vs reality ontology feels insecure. We are right on the border - of a different metaphysics.

But hey, let's get back to the safety of classical atomist ontology. Let's go back to the world as we originally chose to imagine it.

Sounds legit. No one could get confused about things at the level of everyday commonsense, could they?

Oh lordy.

Surely you can understand that my response was to someone claiming that the number pi proves that numbers are physical or have material existence. I'm not on any soapbox about the ontology of physics. I understand the traps therein. — fishfry

Hmm. But you "prove" that by claiming the reality of material being. And your view of material being is dependent on the fictions of classical physics - the world of substantial objects.

So you are on a soapbox for sure. You are waving the banner for a particular notion of physicalism. And yet you agree also that this particular notion fails when you get down to brass tacks.

A tad "disingenuous", no?

That your point?

Ok. I don't disagree.

But the number pi is a lot different from a rock. — fishfry

Again, the point is that a ratio like pi and an object like a rock can be treated as if one is a human invention, a mere accidental notion, while the other is indubitably real in being physical and material. But that is just an ontology endorsing a sharply divided dualism.

It is a highly subjective point of view in that you are happy to assign some objects to "the mind", other objects to "the world". And even the slightest questioning of this paradigm sends you into hyperventilating panic. It constitutes a personal assault.

So I am concerned with better approaches to metaphysics. And the proper relation of the forms of mathematics to the materials of physics is central to that inquiry.

Indeed, it has been ever since Ancient Greece.

Wait!! It seems you agree with me after all. — fishfry

A little desperate there?

Further, a statement is not a thing-in-the-head. The private object is avoided. — Banno

But isn't it a thing-in-the-heart according to you? Don't pretend to doubt what you believe in your heart, etc.

The belief is made up of two distinct things, the private nature of the mind state, coupled with the public acts. The belief is not private, without the public part, we would not know that there was a belief. So don't separate the two. — Sam26

The issue here, as I see it, is that the mind side of the equation is the personal. The dichotomy of private vs public presumes a basic dualism - a strict divide between mind and world. But a dispositional and semiotic approach to knowledge would stress that even "access to the private self" is in fact a development of a personal stance. We form "ourselves" in a meta-representational sense by the very act of inquiring "what is going on inside me?".

So the mental is just as much part of the construct as the noumenal. The beetle in a box metaphor is seductive but badly wrong. Well, at least it rides roughshod over the fact that introspective self-awareness is a culturally-taught and linguistically-structured skill. The interior nature of consciousness - the idea that it is another "world" - is rather an illusion on this score. Its truths seem secure, but they too depend on habits of interpretance.

The self becomes what we have to produce to make the world real. And then saying there is a beetle in the box, a state of mind that "the self" privately perceives, is a recursive linguistic act. It is using the semiotic technology of language to isolate the "true self" from the public self.

We are public creatures first in being social creatures. And then within the reality of that public language game, we are meant to discover our psychologically individuated "real selves". The possibility of private truths at odds with the public truths becomes a live issue as we develop a "modern Western rational attitude" to the nature of "our" phenomenal existence.

So yes. There seem to be inward feelings and outward actions. And each appears to speak to its "other" in some crucial relational fashion.

But you have to be able to credit a society or culture with a "mind", a dispositional attitude embodied in its language games, to see what gives our public acts their semantic truth or facticity. Our actions can be judged.

And in counter fashion, we have to take the personal "mind" a whole lot less seriously. It is not some private reservoir of feelings or facts - the objects of a self-perception that then begs the question of, well, who now is this observing self?

The private~public dichotomy implies a hard division - a metaphysical-strength one - between the psychological self and the social self. But really, selfhood is always emergent - the bit that has to be produced to make its counterpart of "a world" real.

So language anchors social selfhood. And it anchors personal selfhood. On both levels, it is producing its beetles in their boxes.

We can see how this does then create a distinction between public truths and personal truths. As Peirce argued, our best truth is the communal one - ie: the beliefs that a community of rational inquirers will arrive at as being the least doubtable in the end. But there is also the possibility of our local personal truths. To the degree that we might fruitfully be possessed by some individual goal or disposition, then we get to see the world "in our way".

Well, something has to explain artists, poets and other entrepreneurs. There is a reason why now - as a society - a personal vision has become something to encourage. :)

Words are not just labels; that is implicit in their not being just signs, and a large part of why the Peirce treatment falls short. — Banno

Where does Peirce say this? You are thinking of Saussure again.

Ain't the sociology of philosophy amusing. AP has to demonise pragmatism/semiotics to secure its prestige. It can't afford for folk to realise that it is simply repeating what has already been worked out.

If you don't read Peirce, then somehow you can't be blamed for not knowing better. You can think that a dispositional theory of truth leads automatically to metaphysical quietism - philosophy's Behaviourist phase! :D

What counts is the interaction with the world - "And when you make the right sound, the food arrives" - that's the way words work, not as labels. — Banno

Uh huh. The dispositional theory of truth. The way Peirce fixed Kant's cognitive representationalism. The theme Ramsey might have really made something of. The theme that Wittgenstein then ran off the other side of the road to great acclaim.

Nothing like a pendulum that swings from its one extreme to its other, eh? "We couldn't get logical atomism to work, so now we will believe its exact opposite."

I'm really boggled by the proposition that values are nonconceptual and nonempirical. I'm wondering if Agustino is using some Humean version of empiricism. Because surely values are not something that is "seen" like we might see a chair, but I'm not sure the rest of this follows. — Marty

It's more subtle than that. Values condition our conceptions and perceptions. They are the purposes or dispositions that give shape to inquiry. So how we think of the world, and what we accept as its facts - ie: the truths we can measure - are informed by what we hope to get out of that way of looking at it.

These values are at first implicit. They are the ground on which we stand to make a start. Then we turn around and see that they are what we had to inject into the process of inquiry to get it going. We "perceive" our values like we see a chair in forming a meta-belief about the "us" that is the self at the centre of a process of inquiry.

So the OP was striving after a triadic relational view. The stool needs three legs to sit steady. But the relation has to be understood in terms of a developing or evolving process, not one that starts from any definite existence.

The total sign relation has its three parts. There is the "self" that emerges - some habit of interpretation that is "us with our evolving dispositions or collection of values and purposes". Then there is the world - the good old thing-in-itself. And mediating the relation is the signs we form of the noumenal - our phenomenal experience.

So buried in there, you have the essential Kantian insight. The mind has get started by making some abductive guess. But the Peircean approach recognises that purposes or goals are intrinsic to this getting started. The conceptual a-prioris are much deeper than some merely physical intuitions.

And thus it is the self itself that is being developed in the forming of a sign relation with the world. It is not about a mind that already exists making sense of a world that is some unknowable state of affairs. Both self and world emerge from the more basic thing which is the attempt to relate in a fruitful or pragmatic fashion.

I'm merely commenting on the notion that if we're defining empiricism in an old fashion sense then no such values appear to us in daily observation such that they are provided by external content. Values become a projection of our own mental capacities if we view the external world as being mere physical extended images. But such a view is untenable. — Marty

So it looks like we agree. The difference may be that the Peircean approach is grounded in phenomenology and then sees "the self", "the mind", as part of what emerges via a semiotic relation. Nothing exists in some brute fashion. Truth is intimately tied to the "self that has a reason to be asking that form of question". There is no truth beyond that. Truth-aptness depends on a self coming into being with its reasons. The "world" only exists as the empirical observations that would make these truths true.

Thus it is all internalism. Almost idealism. Yet it is based on the ontic commitment of there being something "out there" worth modelling. It doesn't disbelieve reality. It just doesn't think that knowledge of reality can transcend the selfhood that has to be developed for there even to be "a view of reality".

Kant's cognitive representationalism showed that "the mind" could not know reality directly. Peirce's dispositional relationism shows that even the mind is part of the construction. An image of the world wouldn't be possible unless a purposeful self, laden with values, was something that could develop due to the existence of a sign relation.

Yes but there is no such thing as a circle in the world. The circle whose circumference divided by its diameter is exactly pi is not any object that can exist in this mortal world of ours. — fishfry

So circles and numbers are the idealised limit of physical reality? They represent perfect symmetry and to "physically exists" means always to be individuated - a "materially" broken symmetry. Therefore mathematical forms are not real. There is only imperfect matter and its approximations of these forms - always inevitably marred by "accidents". Every physical circle is a bit bent. Any collection of things may be given a number, but no two things are actually alike.

This is certainly a familiar ontological view. But it should be troubling that physicists are having such a hard time finding the "real matter" that is limited by these "unreal mathematical forms". Talk of this "mortal world of ours" is to accept a fundamental materiality to being which is proving only to be another idealisation.

To make your position secure, you need "matter" to be something that physicists can actually put their hands upon and show to be real. As it stands, that is not the case. Instead - as argued by ontic structural realism, for instance - the formal aspect of nature seems the more real when it comes to the question of why fundamental particles exist.

Materialism is in metaphysical crisis. So the old Aristotelian story on substance - the one that folk trot out to oppose Platonism - no longer works.

The story is better flipped on its head. Limits are what produce individuated materiality. And without limits, you would just have "a world of pure accidents". A vagueness that is no particular kind of thing at all.

So good old solid matter - when stripped of bounding form - becomes just a realm of "perfect fluctuation". Instead of being individuated and having efficient cause, it becomes a state of completely inefficient cause. :)

Anyway, the point is that if mathematicians don't believe form to be real, well physicists are struggling to find matter to be real. And the best way out of that bind is to look to causality and treat that as the best definition of "physical reality". From there, we can see how limits and accidents make a nice complementary pairing. Limits reduce accidents. But accidents prevent limits being reached.

Reality becomes a pattern produced by the suppression of fluctuations - a constraint on freedoms.

Are numbers real? Well it is certainly true that our models of reality are social constructions. Epistemically, they are only "a useful idea". That is acknowledged in agreeing that we are modelling.

However when it then comes to our ontic commitments as they arise from enquiry into nature, then we begin to appreciate that the materiality and individuation of the world is something we have too readily taken for granted. It just seems perceptually obvious that we exist in a world of solid objects - chockful of their own histories of material accidents. A substance ontology is what we experience, and any mathematical notions about form seem so clearly an abstraction produced by the creative human mind.

But again, physics no longer supports this perceptual belief. It went looking for the real solid stuff that is matter and didn't find it. All it could find was fluctuations bounded by symmetries.

Maybe it is time to believe the physics. :-O

Ah, no. I was talking about its prestigious cultural position, not its influence on English vocabulary.

To be in one's working memory, means that the person is consciously aware of that thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

Working memory is one step back from the attentional spotlight (granting that all these distinctions are somewhat crude and computational).

So you can only have a definite working memory having been consciously attentive of something. But having it in working memory doesn't have to mean you are currently attending to it. It is only close at hand and being held as a distinct "snapshot".

So if the person is able to hold six items in one's working memory, this means that the person is consciously aware of all six of those items at the same time. — Metaphysician Undercover

There is also iconic memory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconic_memory

This shows how we can hold "a whole scene" in mind as an unprocessed sensory pattern before selective attention gets to work on it.

So while I find the cog-sci approach clunky, the various component processes it identifies are based on solid experimental distinctions.

If you want to talk about working memory being "conscious", that boils down to its contents being easily recallable, highly discriminated, and so generally reportable.

The whole concept of "being consciously aware" is problematic as it imports an unwanted degree of binary definiteness into what is going on. It leaves us with little else except the claim neural activity is either conscious or unconscious. It is implicitly dualistic.

Yet even so, it makes more sense to talk of working memory as being what we have just consciously attended and could easily bring back into attention. It is not the bit of the world - some particular viewpoint - that is our currently experienced one.

Although as also said, attention itself can range from tightly focused to a very defocused and vague state. We can gaze off and not be thinking anything in particular. We can even switch to a deliberate vigilant state where we have cleared the decks to allow the unexpected to break through.

So attention itself can be decomposed in a variety of ways that can be explained in terms of neurological structures or paths.

That channel - https://youtu.be/_iVdy0s8ARE - has good stuff. It shows how detailed the genetics is getting and how it can clarify the archaeology.

So what is there left to debate? The interesting point could be the degree to which the mongrel English language may hold a cultural advantage in being in fact "ethnically cleansed".

There is much rightful angst about the loss of indigenous languages as those languages are the living embodiment of a culture. A whole way of life is encoded in a shared language game. So to rob a people of their language is erasing their cultural identity.

But by the same token, the loss of cultural specificity would be an advantage in becoming "modern". English is arguably the best language for developing new cultural and intellectual games because it carries less history. It has less concern for its ethnic purity - as opposed to French, for instance.

Some say German is in fact a better language for thinking really complicated thoughts. And English could also be said to carry an awful lot of cultural baggage in its rich variety of primary sources. Claiming English to be the best vehicle for modern thought is also - I agree - a stretch. We could examine the merits of Esperanto. :)

Anyway, there is a lot of interesting and new stuff here it seems to me in being able to use precise genetics to sharpen the questions we could have of social history.

Those videos made me think why is there so little Roman blood in the British gene pool, and yet one was forced to learn Latin as a kid ... as it improved one's grasp of English, apparently. Or even Greek, as the Romans themselves needed that to have access to their cultural heritage, and a real Englishman ought to recapitulate that.

Amusing really. The Poms maintained their own class divisions by learning how not to speak their native language. And even the languages of their dominant neighbours - frenemies like France and German - were pretty optional. What really defined the dominant class were the languages of their intellectual ancestors.

That’s more a measure of how many items we can hold at once in working memory. Each item needs to be processed serially or individually. That is why tests present you with a succession of items to be remembered.

In computational terms, you are talking about the mental scratchpad used as temporary storage for what you want to keep close of hand. Attention is needed to fetch them back into close focus.

You’ve mixed up that story with the other one which tests perceptual grouping. At a glance, we can see that there are one, two, three or then “many” of some object in a collection. If the objects are arranged - as a square, as a hexagon - we can then see the wholeness of the pattern and the number we associate with it. With a random arrangement, we would have to go back to some form of serial inspection.

The take home is that cognition is hierarchical. Attention is at the top of the tree as the narrowest useful view. We only want a single viewpoint defining our state of mind at any time so as to “arrive at a decision” about what we are experiencing.

So attention has to balance the conceptual possibilities in terms of lumping or splitting. It is a dynamical choice itself, not some fixed bandwidth spotlight. It can see the whole just as much as it can see the parts. It’s job is to find the particular perceptual balance at any given moment.

For me, progress would be best defined as moving away from subjectivity and towards objectivity. So the destination is the most general or abstract view of existence.

But that viewpoint also has to be concretely historic. If existence is a product of evolution or development, then that makes the “truths” of cosmology and human mental evolution a core concern.

So it is then no surprise both that philosophy has made constant progress as a culturally evolving endeavour, and that it is focused broadly on this question of disentangling the subjective and objective poles of being.

The everyday difficulty is that people tend to then split into opposed camps, failing to see that subjectivity and objectivity are complementary directions of intellectual progress.

So contradicting what I first seemed to say - objectivity is the goal - intellectual progress also includes a contribution to sharpened notions of “being a self”. The contrast of aiming for objectivity brings with it a balancing cultural focus on the issues of personal individuation.

We see this from the Socratic invention of self-actualisation and Ancient Greek theories about democracy.

And - of course I would say this :) - pragmatism is the philosophy which offers the right kind of balance between the complementary extremes of subjectivity and objectivity. Peirce fixed the solipsistic cognitivism of Kant in particular by starting in phenomenology and deriving an idealist objectivity.

AP and PoMo represent philosophical failures insofar as each tends too far towards one or other pole in unbalanced fashion. Sticking closer to a scientific and historical path finds philosophy achieving its most actual progress.

(But failure has value too. We need to know what doesn’t really work.)

I don't see what is the problem. — bahman

I get the impression you believe nature is Newtonian deterministic and therefore free will becomes a problem. But that is a limited view of causality even within physics these days, let alone neuroscience.

I am talking of a view of brain function where it accumulates many degrees of freedom - all the many things it might concretely do (and so also, not do). And then attention acts top down to constrain or bound these freedoms in useful, goal achieving, fashion.

So free will is just rational choice, voluntary action. There is a vast variety of things we could be thinking or doing at any instant. We accumulate a vast store of habits and ideas - concrete skills and notions. Then we must constrain this huge variety of possibilities during every conscious moment so that we limit ourselves to thoughts and actions best adapted to the needs and opportunities of the moment.

To speak of free will is really just to note that we have a socially constructed sense of self that lies over our voluntary behaviour - another level of filter to bound the possible variety of our behaviour. We can consciously weigh what might best suit us personally against what might best suit some wider communal identity we participate in.

So a constraints-based causality avoids the philosophical problems that a physical determinism would seem to create.

I believe that there is a doer which can initiate or terminate a chain of causality otherwise there is no free will. — bahman

But apparently you also believe you can drive unconsciously, and that consciously you are only aware of a single thing. So how does it all fit together for you if you reject a more scientific view?

When we say the river flows, is there something more than the water and the channel carved over time?

The landscape certainly has developed a habit. We can give a name to the dent in the ground that usually has water draining down it. But do the Volga or the Elber exist over and above the particular drainage function they have in their settings?

There is more to the identity of an individual brain, an individual psychology. But the basic point is the same. If we can discover a functional description that seems a true explanation of what we observe, then that is when we should be wary of the reification - the habit of language - which then demands we turn a process into an object, a verb into a noun.

If you speak of some doing, it is the rules of grammar that insist on the presence of some doer. Yet you just described the doings in a functional way where there is no object, just a process.

So again, do you believe a habit of language and insist there is some missing doer? Or do you believe the functional description that looks to have included all the causality you could find? A process is just a process. Giving the process a name doesn’t mean there is now the further thing of some object standing behind all the actions of the process.

“Oh no! The Volga flooded and washed away the village. Why did it decide to do that?”

“Oh no! Brahman decided to pick the hazelnut whirl rather than the Turkish delight from the box of chocolate All Sorts. Why did he decide to do that?”

Grammar wants us to think about things a certain way. A functional or process view - the one science is seeking to take - is the attempt not to get sucked in by the usual games of language.

You seem to be working with a homuncular notion of awareness. Language demands that we speak of the “I” who is the self behind every mental doing. And so when we are attending and consciously deciding, there is this elusive “we” now apparently an extra part of the picture. We lose sight of the fact that this we-ness is part of the process, part of the construction, part of the action. It describes the fact that the brain was doing something, and that included taking a point of view, and a point of view implies “an observer with a choice”.

So you seem to accept functional talk. There is what it is like to be behaving habitually or to be behaving attentionally. However you also want to assign a further identity to the doer of any doings. Language demands that there be an efficient cause. And you believe grammar more that you believe psychological functionalism.

Ah, so if they are entangled, we wait until they are disentangled? Eventually there is the one Bob measured and the one Alice measured? Except now we don’t know which Bob and which Alice in which world branch as we have just duplicated them under MWI.

Sounds legit.

I see you have no plans for this to go anywhere. But anyway, I’ve already spelt out the difference between Bayesian expectation and propositional structure here.

So my cat doesn't have beliefs? Or is her scratching at the door a statement of a belief - just not a linguistic one?

And a disposition would be some preceding metal state. — Banno

And yet a disposition to act "causally in the world" is critically different from one to act "in the realm of truths and facts". So to call them both "mental" - or even metal - would be the matter in question.

Does one actually serve as bedrock to the other? Or does each have a different ultimate bedrock?

First, I did not say that animals reason, but of course I'm using reason as something that takes place in language. — Sam26

That's a quibble.

You can define reason as a linguistic act. But animals have been observed to reason in terms of working out how to solve some real-life problem. Even a jumping spider can scan a scene and work out how to creep around behind its prey so as to drop down on it. So broadly speaking, animals can "think things through" in a causally efficacious sense. The normal usage of "reasoning" is broad enough that you will in fact have a problem insisting on your narrower definition. And I was only trying to bring this out in describing your position as accepting "animals can reason in a causal fashion".

I also did not say anything about causal knowledge, in fact, I said just the opposite. Knowledge is based on certain causal beliefs. I do not even think there is such a thing as causal knowledge. — Sam26

That's another quibble so far as I'm concerned.

But then I don't believe in "knowledge" as justified true belief. I only believe in knowledge as justified belief. Truth is a rather redundant term for the pragmatist, as uncertainty can never be completely eradicated from any state of belief. (A separate argument perhaps.)

I do not understand this. I would not say that evolution sorted out epistemic rules, what does that mean? It sounds like you are giving evolution an intellectual basis. Maybe there are certain causal laws that dictate certain outcomes, but rules imply something else for me. — Sam26

I doubt I could put it more plainly.

Evolution produced nervous systems that were up to the task. They embodied epistemologies that worked.

You now seem hung up on the word "rules". Clearly I'm using it in a loose sense - one that imagines biology to be implementing some kind of "program" for understanding the world. It should be equally obvious - in that I'm taking an embodied/enactive/ecological stance on animal perception and cognition - that that is only then a metaphorical use of the term "rules".

In fact, given my whole bleeding point was that rules - syntactic structure - are a product of the informational realm of being, the underlying word-play should be clear. Actual rules are the last thing you will find in the biological organisation of the brain. Or in nature generally.

So my use of the word "rules" ought to have a usefully ironic ring to it in this context. Having just highlighted the actual rule bound nature of speech acts - the reliance on "unnatural" syntactic structure - I then said, so far as biological level cognition goes, evolution then sorts out its epistemic "rules".

But I didn't use scare quotes because I didn't expect your turn of mind to be so constantly literal.

Thanks for the response Apokrisis, that took time to write out. — Sam26

Maybe now you can address my actual point - that the epistemology of syntactic speech acts may have a very different bedrock than embodied cognition.

One is fundamentally subjective. The other, I'm saying, aspires to fundamental objectivity.

Much mischief is done in "theory of truth" circles because the dichotomous, or complementary, nature of this division is not properly recognised.

How could Turing have so impressed people with his theory of Universal Computation? Why did folk feel so convinced by Platonic idealism or logical atomism?

It just seems obvious that reason can grasp at some fundamental objective principles that are "beyond nature". And is the failure then to be able to completely secure them an actual failure?

These are the kinds of questions which are really bedrock to that other aspect of our being.