In other words, information is a lack of uniformity per Donald MacCrimmon MacKay and Gregory Bateson. — Galuchat

It was more than a lack of uniformity for them. A difference that makes a difference also implies reciprocally the existence of differences that don’t. So signals stand out against a background of noise. But that then demands in turn a context of interpretance. Someone must be indifferent to the differences that don’t make a difference.

Thus there is an irreducible triadicy in the concept of information. At least in the way that the cyberneticists were trying to formalise a theory of information. Differences were hierarchically divided into noise and signal. That is, the indifferences and the differences that made a difference - according to some interpretive context.

Is information physical (meaningless), semantic (meaningful), or both (independently or simultaneously)? — Galuchat

The next step then is a more general physical view of information where even indifference or noise gets counted. So in the specific case, the concern was to count the signal. In the general case, the concern is to count any difference, or degree of freedom, that simply could have been a signal, under some context of interpretation.

That was Shannon’s big step, where he connected to concepts of entropy or fluctuation. A degree of freedom is the naked possibility of an action, a surprise, an uncertainty, a bare difference.

You will note how physics’s adoption of the information theoretic view is thus pansemiotic. An interpretive context is still implied - the one that can see the bare difference of noise as potential differences that make a difference. But now this interpreter is so generalised that it appears to drop out of the picture. The interpreter seems so unselective that it is as if the selection were meaningless.

Of course the second law of thermodynamics lurks here in the background. Entropification has become the cosmic purpose that provides the missing pansemiotic interpreter, the context that gives meaning even to physical noise.

So information theory now can count the meaningless differences as well as the differences that make a difference. And it does that by generalising the very notion of interpretance to its pansemiotic or cosmic limit.

Clever stuff.

What do you mean by being “part of the world”? Are you making a claim about the properties of physical objects or neurological processes?

Our conception of the physical world says wavelength and not colour is part of that world. Our conception of neurological processes is that colour is somehow part of what brains do. But that is actually quite a mysterious thing when considered as a “property”. Most folk would call it a property of the mind and not the world. This then leads to entrenched dualistic issues.

So you seem intent on bypassing the complexities of the question. That isn’t very useful.

I can guess. One is the real tree, the other it’s double image.

I gave those answers early in the thread. It boils down to a difference that makes a difference.

Good job then that the untenability of direct realism is matched by the unreasonableness of solipsism. That just leaves us to decide how to best characterise the indirectness that fills the gap in-between.

You can tag along if you like.

But you're wondering how perception can involve awareness of both mental and non-mental properties of an object. That is a good question. — Marchesk

Hah. OK. We agree on that. :)

How can perception be divided so that colour is your perception of a mental image and shape is your direct perception of the actuality?

I agree that this is an attractive position to take, But it is fundamentally inconsistent. How do you square it?

That's the reason the argument from hallucination has bite. — Marchesk

Fine. Answer that version of the same question then.

But is the tree mental when we actually perceive one (see, smell, touch, hear it fall in the woods, etc)? — Marchesk

When you perceive this actual tree, is it’s greenness also actual? Or mental? Or what?

It's weird, because I can go to SEP and it will clearly state what direct realism is about... — Marchesk

That one made me laugh. Show me the simple definition of direct realism, or even indirect realism, in this SEP entry - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-episprob/

There are 100 shades of opinion. And that ain't a dreadful thing. There is a reason Descartes is where modern philosophy finally woke up and took its business seriously. Progress on the central issue has been an arduous affair. In a deep way, it may be logically irresolvable due to its self-referential nature.

On the other hand, psychological science has been steering in a direction. Representationalism is on the wane. Embodied and semiotic approaches are increasingly popular. It is a big step towards accepting the complexity of the mind~world relationship by shifting up from a dualistic framing to one that is irreducibly triadic (the hierarchical view).

No, we're talking about the perceived tree. Is it a mental image or not? That's what direct/indirect realism comes down to. All this other stuff is confusing the issue. — Marchesk

How can it be illegitimate to talk about the tree perceived in a dream? If you can't tell reality just by looking, then direct realism is dead from the get-go.

Of course we can learn to dismiss dreams as imaginings. Folk used to believe in the reality of their spirit wandering while they were asleep happily enough. Now we categorise that kind of experience differently. But it is still just a categorisation from a hard epistemological point of view. We are not justified in taking short-cuts just for the sake of argumentative convenience.

So again, it was your OP that wanted to use machine intelligence as an argument for direct realism. You clearly felt there was an issue at stake because a doubt is in play. You didn't just ignore the doubt. You felt it worthy of that attack.

And now that you are encountering pushback, you ought to be prepared to deal with it in turn. Dream trees and experiences of colour become fair game. Where does the indirectness leave off so the directness can start?

My own arguments have gone further. I have made the case for why indirectness is an advantage. It is how a self is even formed to stand in relation to "the world".

Likewise it was interesting to me how some actual vaunted neural network project reveals the Kantian structure that must be smuggled in to get its Lockean tabula rasa up and running, recognising cute kitten faces on the interweb.

But dreams, hallucinations, illusions and all the standard stuff is still relevant if your own interest is in defending an understanding of perception where the mediation never gets in the way of the production of the mediated experience.

But is inorganic matter on a continuum with life and mind? Or is there a discontinuity there? — Wayfarer

When have I ever not flagged the critical discontinuity? It's the epistemic cut. It is only after that that life and mind become a thing.

So that then raises the question of whether there is still a continuity that is "semiotic".

The reply is that if the epistemic cut internalises constraints - this being the information that membranes, genes, neurons, words and numbers encode - then that now raises the definite possibility of constraints which are encoded or remembered externally, out in the world itself. The Cosmos might be understood as a dissipative structure, organised by its historically fixed information.

And this is what the information theoretic turn of modern physics hinges on. Entropy. Event horizons. Holography. Quantum information. Material cause no longer carries the weight of explaining existence. Instead, formal cause provides the intelligible structure.

So it is telling that you ask about a continuity that can connect biosemiosis back to "inorganic matter". You assume that real physics can't afford to let go of material causality. But physics has pretty much let go now.

The symmetries that account for the fundamental forms of reality - the symmetries of spacetime and particle physics - are the part of existence that feel hard, definite, crystalline. They have the force of mathematical necessity.

The "action" that then animates this mathematical pattern must still be part of the physicalist story somehow. But now it feels like the mysterious ghost in the machine. The metaphysical puzzle has been reversed. Matter seems the most immaterial part of the modern physicalist equation.

Check out ontic structural realism to see how current metaphysics is trailing along in the wake of this particular turn of events.

I think that 'soul' might be productively interpreted as a metaphorical expression for the subjective unity of consciousness; it is the principle by which the being hangs together, physiologically, psychologically, and even spiritually (which is also very close to Aristotle's meaning). But when you ask, 'what is this principle' or 'where is this principle', then that is a reification. But it's also not simply non-existent. This is the point that I think perplexes everyone in this conversation - as soon as you name it, you reify it, and then ask 'can it exist'? But that's a reification and therefore a category error. — Wayfarer

You can name constraints. They really do things causally.

And when we talk about consciousness, that normally cashes out as attentional-level processing. And attention in turn is all about constraint - the limiting of awareness by a focus, or spotlight, or filter, or bottleneck, to use the usual metaphors.

So the soul - in the sense Aristotle seems to be striving after - would be a limitation on material possibility. It is not a substance, but the organisation that gives material possibility its rationally organised form.

And Aristotle wanted to insist that this constraining organisation was physically real and not ghostly or immaterial. He just lacked the modern knowledge to make full sense of that. We now know that the constraints that create bodies with intellects are physically real. They are the information that our semiotic machinery encodes. DNA really exists. Neurons really exist. Words really exist. That information gets made flesh. Animate matter gets its soulful form from a system of symbols interpreted as a state of organisation.

There are only two broad types of phenomena which I think embody 'interpretance', namely, organisms, and minds. — Wayfarer

You really only need organisms. Life and mind are just different levels of the same semiotic modelling relation.

As a stand in for all sorts of things from rudimentary seeing and hearing to complex linguistic conceptions... — creativesoul

A lot of familiar psychological terms are poorly defined. But we'll live. We can talk about the biological commonality with the laboratory animals into which we plunge our electrodes while also reminding of the particular difference that linguistic scaffolding makes to everything happening in a human mind.

So I'd agree that the standard jargon ought to reflect the distinctions better. Perhaps that is what you think you do with "thought/belief" and suchlike. I'm still waiting for you to explain. Somehow you never do.

Let's make this really, really simple. What is the result of visually perceiving a tree?

A. Seeing a mental image.

B. Seeing the tree.

I'll let your unsupervised neural network categorize the two. — Marchesk

Are we talking about a dream tree? How does your own unsupervised neural network categorise those?

And is the greenness of this tree - either real or imagined - something true of the actual tree or a property of the mental image. (You seemed to agree that colours were A, but that shapes would be B.)

So good luck with your ambition making things really, really simple. These are deep philosophical issues, and not merely language games, for a reason.

You could argue that a neuron simply responds to an electrical charge from a connected neuron. — Marchesk

No neuroscientist could accept that simple account. Neurons respond to significant differences in the patterns of connectivity they are feeling. And that can involve thousands of feedback, usually inhibitory, connections from processing levels further up the hierarchy.

So mostly a neuron is being actively restricted. And that constraint is being exerted from above. The brain is organised to that ideas - expectations, goals, plans - lead the way. The self-centred indirectness is what we see when we actually put individual neurons under the microscope.

The brain has to do be able to recognize a shape somehow. It's not magic, and shapes don't float along on photons into the eyes and travel from there on electrons into the homunculus sitting in the visual cortex. — Marchesk

Of course. I'm not defending any caricature story here. No need to put these words in my mouth.

No philosopher is going to defend a totally naive view of vision which involves an object showing up in the mind magically. There has to be a process. — Marchesk

Yep. So now again we must turn to why you insist this is better characterised by "direct" than "indirect".

If your argument is that the brain has the goal of being "as direct and veridical and uninterpreted as possible", then that is the view I'm rejecting. It is a very poor way to understand the neuroscientific logic at work.

But as you say, I wouldn't then want to be batting for good old fashioned idealism. We don't just imagine a world that is "not there".

So I am carefully outlining the semiotic version of indirect realism which gives mediation its proper functional place.

The question is whether the process of perception creates an intermediary which we are aware of when perceiving, or whether it's merely the mechanics of seeing, hearing, touching, etc. — Marchesk

That is no longer my question as I reject both direct perception and homuncular representation. My approach focuses on how the self arises along with the world in experience.

The surprise for most is that both these things in fact need to.

But you could use a camera stationed anywhere, and see what sort of objects an unsupervised network will learn to categorize. — Marchesk

Sure. The AI labs will want to keep improving. But a computer that can actually do human things might have to start off as helpless and needy as a human baby. Would you want to have to wait 20 years for your Apple Mac to grow up enough to be useful?

It's a two edge thing. Yes, it would be great to identify the minimal "Kantian" hardwiring needed to get a "self-educating machine" started. But then that comes at the cost of having to parent the damn device until it is usefully developed.

So - philosophically - neural networks are already based on the acceptance that the mind has Kantian structure. Awareness is not direct. So to replicate awareness in any meaningful fashion, it is the mediation - the indirect bit - we have to understand in a practical engineering sense.

The unsupervised learning is then the flip side of this. To the degree a machine design can learn from an interaction with the world, we are getting down to the deep Kantian structure that makes biology and neurology tick.

And as Michael points out, step back from the "computer just as fascinated by internet cat videos" nonsense used to hype DeepMind, and you can see just how far the AI labs have to go.

DeepMind's "reality" actually just is a hex code string, magnetic patterns on a disk. It is forming no picture of the world, and so no sense of self. It is the humans who point and say golly, DeepMind sure loves its YouTube cat clips.

So I agree it is an interesting experiment to consider. I just draw the opposite conclusion about what it tells us.

Locke's primary properties, like shape, would be directly perceived, while color would be the means by which we see shape, even though it belongs to our visual system. — Marchesk

Yep, that is the line that direct realism tried to defend back in the 17th century. It would give up qualitative sensation and insist on the directness of quantitative sensation.

But psychological science has obliterated that line - even though I agree most people haven't really noticed.

Of course there are other flavors of direct realism that might say something different about color. Some would even be color realists, although I have a hard time seeing how that can be defended. But they do try. — Marchesk

Great. You seem persuaded that colour experience is definitely indirect - mentally constructed in some strong sense.

I can see why you might then protest that the shapes of objects are just self-evident - unprocessed, unvarnished, direct response to what is "out there". It seems - as Locke argued - realism can be secured in some foundational way. A shape is impossible to be misrepresented. It therefore requires no interpretation. Our experience of a shape is unmediated.

But as I say, psychology has shown just how much interpretation has to take place to "see a shape". The useful sanitary cordon between primary and secondary sensation has evaporated as we've learnt more.

A sign is an object which corresponds to a representation. — Galuchat

A more causally-explicit way of saying this would be that a sign has the function of constraining an interpretation.

So the actual physics of a sign falls away - even though a sign, as some kind of mark, is always also physical.

The causally important things going on are that signs are intended to have meanings. A purpose must exist. And signs then have an effect in terms of constraining or limiting some form of freedom or uncertainty.

The relation is causally stronger than a correspondence or association. It narrows a mind - an interpretation - in a fruitful fashion.

The physics then re-enters the picture because an interpretation results in some action in relation to the world. When the light turns red, the car stops. When enemy ships appear over the horizon, the signals back to headquarters lead to cannonballs blasting into the air.

The same message, transmitted in different codes (physical information), through different physical channels or mediums, conveys the same representations/meanings (semantic information) to a recipient (a psychophysical organism) who has knowledge of the codes used and their corresponding representations. — Galuchat

Again, terms like correspondence and representation are problematic because they arise from a passive, information-processing, metaphysics.

Semiotics makes more sense because it emphases the active and purposeful nature of what is going on. And it does that without falling into a mechanical or deterministic view of causality. It takes the probabilistic approach where information constrains action.

So what gets transmitted through a variety of transmissions is not the actual information, like some precious substance or cargo. It is the constraints that would limit another mind's state of interpretance. It is the container rather than the contents that get delivered.

When Amazon posts you a novel, they don't send you the experiences that are the story. What you buy is an artfully constructed set of constraints on your imagination. You expect your thoughts to be limited to some specific parade of imagery. And the mental picture you might have of the main character is hardly likely to correspond to the author's, or any other of the millions of readers.

Information of that kind only has to be conveyed to the degree that the constraint on your interpretive freedoms make a difference.

So Peircean semiosis is a paradigm shift in a number of very important ways.

So on Aristotle’s account, although the soul is not a material object, it is not separable from the body. — Wayfarer

The soul would be the form of the body - the particular way its material organisation is constrained.

So in one sense, hylomorphism recognises that any object can't actually be separated in terms of its material and formal causes. To be an object is to have some organisation.

But constraints are also transmissible - due to semiotics. Genetic information means the "human-shaped soul" can be passed down from generation to generation.

Each actual person is a unique material interpretation of this information. Even twins are not identical. But still, the essential information that makes a biological person is now known to be separable as a physical fact.

But Aristotle is more right than Plato or Aquinas. What gets transmitted by a code is not the contents but the container. So the soul here is not the interpretation - the mindful bit. It is the shape that is getting passed along as a particular way to constrain some set of material freedoms, some heap of fleshy metabolism.

The paradigm you are applying demands the transmission of some substantial essence. Information is its meaning. It is the content that must be passed along.

But semiotics says what gets transmitted is the organising constraints needed to limit material variety. Communication is about the rebirth of functional states of interpretance. Every rebirth will be interestingly different. No two interpretations are ever going to be the same. You never step in the same river twice.

But that is understood. Constraints only need to signal the differences that make a difference.

Which is what information theory measures all the way down to a foundational material level now.

Again, you want information to be a substance - a semantic content. That just seems obvious because matter is its opposite - a meaningless content. The paradigm shift is understanding the shaping role that containment plays. That is the other aspect of a hylomorphic reality.

So semantic information is not a rival substance - a second material. Talk about information is our physicalist recognition that constraints are causally real. We need to include them in our picture as complementary to material causes.

And so there is no mystery when it comes to the "missing interpreter" when taking the information theoretic approach. The interpreter doesn't have to ride along with the transmitted information to underwrite its precious meaning, stop it leaking away. Instead, states of interpretance are the third thing - the actually substantial thing - which emerges when formal constraints and material freedoms come together in an act of interpretance, or a sign relation.

So enactivism? — Michael

Correct. I said that.

Presumably these neural networks simply recognise patterns in the magnetism on the hard drive... — Michael

A good point. The system has no eyes. It is just fed 18x18 chunks of pixels - strings of hex code.

It might be worth checking the paper - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.6209v5.pdf

Our deep autoencoder is constructed by replicating three times the same stage composed of local filtering, local pooling and local contrast normalization.

In our experiments, the first sublayer has receptive fields of 18x18 pixels and the second sub-layer pools over 5x5 overlapping neighborhoods of features (i.e., pooling size). The neurons in the first sublayer connect to pixels in all input channels (or maps) whereas the neurons in the second sublayer connect to pixels of only one channel (or map).

While the first sublayer outputs linear filter responses, the pooling layer outputs the square root of
the sum of the squares of its inputs, and therefore, it is known as L2 pooling.

The system seems pretty Kantian in terms of the amount of a-priori processing structure that must be in place for "unsupervised" learning to get going.

I'd note in particular the dichotomous alternation of filtering and pooling. Or differentiation and integration. Followed by the third synthesising step of a summating normalisation.

In doing their best to replicate what brains do, the computer scientists must also build a system that pulls the world apart to construct a meaningful response - one that separates signal from noise ... so far as it is concerned.

Still using those "direct" and "indirect" terms - as if they really mean anything, Apo? — Harry Hindu

Did you notice the thread title or read the OP?

Your experience is part of the world, no? — Harry Hindu

Your experience is your world, no?

Something to do with thought/belief I take it? LOL.

It's not. I would favor a direct scientific realist account of perception. But in any case, one could argue that smell, sound, color are how we experience the world directly. — Marchesk

How could we argue that the world is coloured as we “directly experience” it when science assures us it is not?

Sure, phenomenally, our impressions of red seem direct. We just look and note the rose is red. That’s the end of it. But science tells us that it isn’t in fact the case. There is mediation that your philosophical position has to incorporate to avoid the charge of naive realism.

But it occurred to me that if neural networks are a crude approximation for how our perception works, then they do favor realism about the patterns being detected. — Marchesk

But your argument seemed to be that unsupervised neural net learning is evidence for just how unmediated perception would be. So that might be an argument for a high degree of directness in that sense, yet it remains also an acceptance of indirectness as the basic condition.

If awareness is mediated by a psychological process, then by definition, it ain’t literally direct.

Remind me. How does your particular definition of direct realism account for hallucinations and illusions? How do I see a mental image? In what way is a wavelength really green? So on and so forth....

A pigeon can make the same perceptual discrimination. Human perception is of course linguistically scaffolded and so that takes it to a higher semiotic level.

What on earth are you talking about? — creativesoul

As usual I have no clue what you are on about. Did you think I would argue that sensory level, and then linguistic level knowledge of the world is indirect, but that scientific knowledge is direct?

All knowledge would be indirect in the semiotic sense I’ve described.

Physiological sensory perception is prior to language on my view. — creativesoul

Well of course. Animals have minds and selfhood. Our models of perception have been built from experiments on cats and monkeys mostly.

If you want to argue your case with actual perceptual examples then go right ahead.

What is direct about motion detection or hue perception I wonder? Are you going to begin by talking about the transduction of “sensory messages” at the level of receptors?

The wiki article offers a version of direct realism that is indistinct from naive realism... — creativesoul

Yep. And that is the point. The OP certainly comes off as an exercise in naive realism. You can't both talk about a mediating psychological machinery and then claim that is literally "direct".

If Marchesk intends direct realism to mean anti-representationalism, then that is something else in my book. I'm also strongly anti-representational in advocating an ecological or embodied approach to cognition.

But I'm also anti-direct realism to the degree that this is an assumption that "nothing meaningful gets in the way of see the world as it actually is". My argument is that the modelling relation the mind wants with the world couldn't even have that as its goal. The mind is all about finding a way to see the self in the world.

What we want to see is the world with ourselves right there in it. And that depends on a foundational level indirectness (cut and paste here my usual mention of Pattee's epistemic cut and the machinery of semiosis).

So this is a philosophical point with high stakes, not a trivial one - especially if we might want to draw strong conclusions from experiments in machine pattern recognition as the OP hopes to do.

There just cannot be a direct experience of the real world ... because we don't even have a direct connection to our real selves. Our experience of experience is mediated by learnt psychological structure.

The brain models the world. And that modelling is in large part involves the creation of the self that can stand apart from the world so as to be acting in that world.

To chew the food in our mouth, we must already have the idea that our tongue is not part of the mixture we want to be eating. That feat is only possible because of an exquisite neural machinery employing forward modelling.

If "I" know as a sensory projection how my tongue is meant to feel in the next split second due to the motor commands "I" just gave, then my tongue can drop right out of the picture. It can get cancelled away, leaving just the experience of the food being chewed.

So my tongue becomes invisible by becoming the part of the world that is "really me" and "acting exactly how I intended". The world is reduced to a collection of objects - perceptual affordances - by "myself" becoming its encompassing context.

The directest experience of the world is the "flow state" where everything I want to happen just happens exactly as I want it. It was always like that on the tennis court. ;) The backhand would thread down the line as if I owned its world. Or if in fact it was going to miss by an inch, already I could feel that unpleasant fact in my arm and racquet strings.

Which is another way to stress that the most "direct" seeming experience - to the level of flow - is as mediated as psychological machinery gets. It takes damn years of training to get close to imposing your will on the flight of a ball. You and the ball only become one to the degree you have developed a tennis-capable self which can experience even the ball's flight and landing quite viscerally.

So direct realism, or even weak indirect realism, is doubly off the mark. The indirectness is both about the ability of the self to ignore the world (thus demonstrating its mastery over the world) and also the very creation of this self as the central fact of this world. Self and world are two sides of the same coin - the same psychological process that is mediating a modelling relation.

Direct realism means awareness of mind-independent objects instead of some mental intermediary. — Marchesk

We've been over this before. Let's just say that your version of direct realism wants to skip over the reality of the psychological processes involved, although I would also myself want to be more direct than any representationalist. So the terms can fast lose any general distinctions as we strive for our personal nuances.

But by the same token, your claims to prove direct realism and deny Kantian psychology are weakened to the degree you don't have a hard definition of what direct vs indirect is about here.

For the record, here is Wiki trying to firm up the definitions....

In philosophy of mind, naïve realism, also known as direct realism or common sense realism, is the idea that the senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they really are. Objects obey the laws of physics and retain all their properties whether or not there is anyone to observe them.[1] They are composed of matter, occupy space and have properties, such as size, shape, texture, smell, taste and colour, that are usually perceived correctly.

In contrast, some forms of idealism claims that no world exists apart from mind-dependent ideas and some forms of skepticism say we cannot trust our senses. Naïve realism is known as direct as against indirect or representative realism when its arguments are developed to counter the latter position, also known as epistemological dualism;[2] that our conscious experience is not of the real world but of an internal representation of the world.

So for example, do you think the world is really coloured? That red and green are properties of the world rather than properties of the mind?

I prefer to argue the more complex story myself - that colours are properties of a pragmatic or functional mind~world relation. So this is an enactive, ecological or embodied approach. And it has its surprising consequences. Like the point I made about the intention of the brain being to maximise its ability to "ignore the world". We see the physics of the thing-in-itself in terms of reds and greens because such an "untrue" representation is the most useful or efficient one.

Direct realism presumes the brain just grasps reality without effort because reality is "lying right there". The thing-in-itself forces itself upon our awareness due to its recalcitrant nature.

Representationalism then points out that there is still considerable effort needed by the brain. It has all those computational circuits for a reason. But still, representationalism shares the underlying belief that the goal of re-presenting reality must be veridical. The mental intermediary in question is not the weaving of a solipsistic fiction, but a presentation of an actual world.

Then as I say, I take the position in-between these two extremes of "indirect realism" (Ie: the realism that at least agrees there is a mediating psychological process). And that embodied realism is what Grossberg and Friston in particular have been at the forefront of modelling. They get it, and the philosophical consequences.

So I hope that clears the air and we can get back to the interesting point that really caught my attention.

The success of neural network architectures at doing mind-like things is down to their hierarchical organisation. So in trying to define the simplest self-teaching or pattern recognising machine, computer science has found it in fact is having to hardwire in some of pretty Kantian conditions.

It may not seem obvious, but hierarchical structure - a local~global dichotomy - already wires in spatiotemporal "co-ordinates". It sets up a distinction between local transient impressions vs global lasting concepts from the get-go. Like a newborn babe, that is the order the machine is already seeking to discover in the "blooming, buzzing, confusion" of its assault from a random jumble of YouTube images.

For the hierarchal system to be indirect, our perceptual awareness would be of the hierarchy instead of the object that's being detected using the hierarchy. — Marchesk

Maybe you understand the Kantian position far less well than I was assuming?

A cognitive structure is required to do any perceiving. That is the (apparently chicken and egg) paradox that leads to idealism, social constructionism, and all those other dread philosophical positions. :)

So no. My point is that in seeking the minimal or most fundamental a-priori structure, a neurological hierarchy is already enough. It already encodes the crucial spatiotemporal distinction in the most general possible way.

The fact that it is so damned hard for folk to see their own hierarchical perceptual organisation shouldn't be surprising.

Thought places space, objects, and even time (or change) as being "out there" in the world. But why would we place our own conceptual machinery in the world as the further objects of our contemplation - except when doing science and metaphysics?

It is the same as with "qualia". We just see red. We don't see ourselves seeing red as a further perceptual act. At best, we can only reveal the hidden fact of the psychological processing involved.

As in when asking people if they can imagine a greeny-red, or a yellowy-blue. A yellowy-red or a greeny-blue is of course no problem. We are talking orange and turquoise. But the peculiarities of human opponent colour processing pathways means some mixtures are structurally impossible.

Likewise, blackish-blue, blackish-green and blackish-red are all standard mixtures (for us neurotypicals), yet never blackish-yellow (ie: what we see as just "pure brown").

So the hidden structure of our own neural processing can always be revealed ... indirectly. We can impute its existence by the absence of certain experience. There are strategies available.

But I'm baffled that you should reply as if we ought to "see the hierarchy" as if it were another perceptual object. We would only be able to notice its signature imprinted on every act of perception.

And that is what we do already in making very familiar psychological distinctions - like the difference between ideas and impressions, or generals and particulars, or memory and awareness, or habit and attention, or event and context.

The structure of the mind is hierarchical - always divided between the local and global scales of a response. The division then becomes the source of the unity. To perceive, ideas and impressions must become united in the one act.

So the structure is certainly there if you know how to look. Psychological science targets that mediating structure. And computer science in turn wants to apply that knowledge to build machines with minds.

That is why the right question is what kind of mediating structure, or indirect realism, does computer science now seem to endorse.

I see you want to make the argument that remarkably little a-priori structure seems needed by a neural net approach like DeepMind. Therefore - with so little separating the machine from its world - a mindful relation is far more direct than many might have been making out.

A fair point.

But then my response is that even if the remaining a-priori structure seems terribly simple - just the starter of a set of hierarchically arranged connections - that is already a hell of a lot. Already an absolute mediating structure is in place that is about to impose itself axiomatically on all consequent development of the processing circuitry.

Yep. I wasn't going to mention it again for the umpteenth time but the architectural approaches that particularly impress me have been Grossberg's Adaptive Resonance Theory and Friston's Bayesian Brain.

These are anticipation-based approaches to cognition and awareness. So imagination is not a tacked on extra. It is the basis on which anything happens.

Realism is truly indirect as the brain is a hierarchical system attempting to predict its input. And the better practised it gets at that, the more it can afford to ignore "the real world".

This would still be proof of indirect realism. The network, after all, still has to learn to see/recognise patterns.

Note also how the learning depends on there being an a-priori hierarchical organisation. So that rather supports Kant's point that notions of spacetime must be embedded to get the game going.

Hierarchical organisation works by imposing a local~global dichotomy, or symmetry-breaking, on the data. At the hardware level, there is a separation of the transient impressions - a succession of training images - from the developing invariances extracted by the high-level feature-detecting "neurons".

So space and time are built in by the hierarchical design. The ability to split experience into general timeless/placeless concepts vs specific spatiotemporal instances of those concepts is already a given embedded in the hardware design, not something that the machine itself develops.

So a neural network can certainly help make Kant more precise. We can see that judgements of space and time have a deeper root - the hierarchical organisation that then "processes" the world, the thing-in-itself, in a particular natural fashion.

The key is the way hierarchies enforce local~global symmetry-breakings on "data". And what emerges as a hierarchical modelling system interacts with the messy confusion of a "real world" is a separation in which both the global conceptions, and the local instances, become "clear" in tandem. They co-arise.

Perception involves being able to see "that cat there", a judgement grounded in the matching development of a generalised capacity for categorising the world in terms of the long-run concept of "a cat".

So the particular experience of a cat is as much indirect as the generalised notion of a cat-like or feline thing. Each is grounded in the other as part of a hierarchy-enforced symmetry-breaking. Neither arises in any direct fashion from the world itself. Even the crisp impression of some actual cat is a mental construction, as it is the hierarchy which both abstracts the timeless knowledge of cat-like and also locates some particular instance of that categorised experience to a place and a time (and a colour, and aesthetic response, etc, etc).

The success of machine learning should at least give idealists and dualists pause for thought. Even a little bit of hierarchical "brain organisation" manages to do some prettty "mind-like" stuff.

But the psychological and neurological realism found in DeepMind supports the indirect realist. After all, the patterns of activity inside the machine look nothing like the cat pictures.

It is also worth noting that DeepMind extracts generality from the particulars being dumped on it. The training images may be random and thus "unsupervised". But in fact a choice of "what to see" is already embedded by the fact some human decided to point a camera and post the result to YouTube. The data already carries that implicit perceptual structure.

So what would be more impressive is next step hardware that can also imagine particular cats based on its accumulated knowledge of felines. That would then be a fully two-way system that can start having sensory hallucinations, or dreams, just like me and you. The indirectness of its representational relationship with the real world would then be far more explicit, less hidden in the choice of training data, as well as the hierarchical design of its hardware.

...thinking is purpose driven. Roughly speaking, truth is a means. We act on a map of the world. — t0m

Yep. So we agree on pragmatism and its approach to rationalism?

What is distinctive is that purpose is included in epistemology. The map is not claimed to be a map of the world, but a map of a self in relation with a world. The ontological assumption here is that even "the self" is a modelled construction.

And so pragmatism simply takes for granted the socially constructed nature or truth, incorporating it into its very epistemology. It is upfront that every act of modelling has an agenda. And this is not a problem, given that the forming of "selfhood" - both personally and collectively - is how purposes or agendas could even arise.

So analytic philosophy is characterised by its desire for objective truth - truth without messy observers projecting their wishes and prejudices on to the reality being mapped. But pragmatism is quite different on that score.

When you say that I'm not doing philosophy, this is an implicit definition of philosophy that excludes the dissonance that might otherwise be said to constitute philosophy. — t0m

I did more that assert that. I'm arguing it.

If you want to narrow "philosophy" to "metaphysics", that's cool. But metaphysics grounds "proper philosophy" anyway. Or that is the position I will argue.

But this is a map of mapping itself within the map and itself subject to the dialectic. — t0m

OK. You want to argue for infinite regress.

Again, pragmatism handles that already. Sure the sign relation is open-ended. You can build a hierarchy of maps as high as you like. But also - because pragmatism is about the feedback of "serving a purpose" - that puts the brakes on the actual building up endlessly. You would only build as many meta- levels as were proving to be useful.

So pragmatics both demands a hierarchical organisation to inquiry, and provides the rationale for it having a functional limit.

I include the deep and important matters of "spirituality" and a basic sense of sanity and self-esteem in this. In fact I think they are the center. — t0m

Fine. Sanity and self-esteem are valued social goods. They speak directly to the forming of selfhood (in relation to the physical, then the social, world). If spirituality is the pragmatic vehicle for delivering these social goods, great. If instead it is medical or psychological science, also great. We can try both and see what works best.

We agree on workable pretense. — t0m

Yes. But I'm sure we disagree about there being a hierarchy of workable pretense, with something having to be on top as it were.

Although this top might itself be a dichotomy - say the maximally objective view vs the maximally subjective one? So a clear separation of powers or modes of discourse. For me, that cashes out in being able to switch between stark scientific objectivity and being authentically part of "my world" in terms of a network of social relations, obligations and engagements.

So what I reject is that subjectivity is to be found "within oneself" - the Romantic story. But one wants to be fully part of the social world which is where one finds one's "true self" as a social animal.

So even the most objective system is arguably just a tool of maximum durability. — t0m

Yes. But "just"?

It is significant that a social animal equipped with a habit of speech could even work out what the heck was going on in the Universe in any fashion at all, let alone down to a story with mathematically logical necessity, like the Standard Model of particle physics.

But philosophy is, among other things, a criterion of criteria.The fantasy or hope is that some eternal meta-criterion can ground itself presuppositionlessly. But it would have to be self-justifying or circular. — t0m

But that is the advantage of pragmatism's epistemology. It accepts the need for suppositions - abduction - to get the game going. And it accepts also that purposes are part of the business of truth-seeking. All of this gets bundled up in the method.

Sure, it is always possible something has been left out. But can anyone point to what that is?

The circularity is avoided by hierarchical organisation. The modelling relation may rely on feedback, but theory and measurement are made as hierarchically different as possible. So the circularity is iterative and designed to converge on a limit. That limit is the limit of our indifference. At some point, we could still be wrong, but we no longer have reason to care. Uncertainty is minimised for all practical purposes. And only an analytic philosopher or romanticist would - due to the social construction of their selfhood - persist in worrying about differences that don't make a difference.

We don't stop seeing the table at a place where we eat with our family, even if we "know" that it's "really" particles, etc. — t0m

Of course. That is all part of what I've argued. The rational objective view stands in sharp contrast to the everyday business of living authentically in some actual physical and social milieu. It would be insane to mix up these modes of discourse.

You don't want to treat your family and living room as abstract metaphysical constructs. But by the same token, you don't want to claim commonsense, traditional belief, or folk wisdom, as the better base for metaphysical insight.

Switching domains is part of the charm of my theory for me. — t0m

Sure. I am arguing for that too. But I am saying that metaphysics is the ur-rational discourse. It has to be to ground maths and science. Dialectical categories like discrete~continuous, matter~form, chance~necessity, one~many, and scores more, were how the whole rational/objective view of existence got started.

And so next you might agree that metaphysics needs pure rationality, no aesthetics. But "philosophy" is big enough to accept both modes of discourse. Well, in the end, I don't think it does. I think people who argue that always have a hidden pragmatic agenda - social goals in mind.

Respectfully, I think you are being willfully "blind" in this collapsing of many thinkers into a single "PoMo." Your criticism of PoMo is itself along PoMo lines. You look into politics, legitimacy, ulterior motives. But what of your own ulterior motives? — t0m

The question of motives is built into pragmatic epistemology. So no hidden agenda on my part. I seek to legitimise pragmatic epistemology. An important part of that is showing how others - PoMo, theism, even AP - have social reasons to de-legitimate that.

But PoMo especially is a political movement. It's purpose is social change. Well, in France especially, it is a route to being a public person, with all the personal advantages that can bring. C'mon. We can all see the game going on!

Scientists do it too. They get even more "sciency" to push for their social agendas, get their moment in the social limelight.

Mathematicians are different I guess. Always so unworldly. :)

Creativity is the source, including the source of the criteria for evaluating this creativity. There is a world out there that constrains our creativity, but we are seemingly never finished creatively mapping this constraint. — t0m

Again, not an issue. Creativity is essential both for rational metaphysics or authentic daily life. I am just arguing horses for courses. Both get done better by mixing them up as little as necessary.

I suggest that personalities "compute" from a basis of liquid or fuzzy re-programmable "axioms." These are dearly held, self-esteem-grounding beliefs involving virtue, especially intellectual virtue among philosophers ('intellectual conscience.') — t0m

Again, the issue is what is one to make of your language use when it employs dialectical structure as if attempting a rational argument. It could be merely just an effect chosen for it aesthetic quality, which is what you seem to be claiming. You don’t mean to be doing philosophy. It is enough to play at sounding like you are philosophising.

That’s fine. It’s fun. It’s an art. And you then give a metaphysical justification for it. We can’t in fact know reality. Rational explanation is always pragmatic and so always just a form of workable pretence. Because I am a pragmatist, even I would have to go along with that, is indeed the strong reply you can make.

But then my reply to that is still that my position takes account of all that and indeed uses it to bolster itself.

My dialectical approach says that what is logical is only a separation towards limits. So aesthetics and rationality could only be two ends of a spectrum, not two actually separated absolutes. It is not a problem that a little of each always remains part of its other.

But by the same token, the separation is the productive thing to achieve - if the object is to objectivise. Being able to switch between aesthetic mode and rational mode is the skill to be cultivated. One can only be rational to the degree one knows how also to be its other, as being rational requires knowing the other to be in fact excluded during the time spent acting in that mode.

So while you appear to be celebrating the possibility of confused mixes of aesthetics and rationality - philosophical discourse as a poetic chain of rhetorical flourishes - my own concern is to achieve the ability to switch crisply between one and the other as modes of discourse. I might agree they spring from the same ground - the muzziness of creative speech as social performance. But then there is a reason to be able to be switch as purely as possible into the mode required for some particular socially agreed domain.

If we are speaking in the metaphysical register, logic has to win. Substance over style, meaning over rhetoric, rational structure over whimsy and political commitments.

Other agendas can be in play. PoMo may play at speaking metaphysics in a way designed to undermine its analytic authority. The politics of disruption are pretty transparent. But why would one grant that legitimacy?

So I am claiming that there is a right way to do metaphysics. The fact that it underwrites good science is no surprise. And also it is not unreasonable to suspect ulterior motives in those who seek to undermine the possibility of rational certainties.

My pragmatic approach already accepts that no truths are certain. So that isn’t even the point. However it also says that knowing how not to let aesthetics or other modes of discourse get mixed up in the discussion is crucial for making metaphysical speech anything much at all.

This spiel itself is self-referentially a tool that has worked for me. — t0m

Still, I was pointing out the degree to which any force your argument could carry would be down to its rational structure. Or are you saying that hinging your argument on metaphysical dichotomies, like aesthetic vs rational, or subjective vs objective, are merely rhetorical tropes - said for poetic effect here, and not something you believe, or that should in fact sway me other than as poetic?

It shows that we are still getting at the real property of an object, which is the apple's ripeness or rotteness, not the light, which changes, and isn't the important information you're trying to get at. — Harry Hindu

Ah. So seeing red even in bad lighting conditions is the way we directly apprehend the ripeness and rottenness of objects.

Sounds legit. Look at that ripe postbox. Look at that ripe Ferrari. Yes I see what you mean.

The fact that you can tell me about color constancy and that the color we see isn't the same as the wavelength of light, which means that you actually do know the wavelength of light compared to the state of the apple and the color we see, then tell me again how you don't have direct knowledge of all these relationships? — Harry Hindu

Direct inference perhaps?

But how is this vagueness itself not your brute fact? — t0m

I said ultimately it is. But the tiniest possible scrap of a brute fact.

Remember that quantification has fallen out of the picture, so it is the dichotomy of vague~general that is the actual brute fact. And being the pure relation of qualities - an internalist deal - there is no external "thing" in want of explanation. The usual requirement - to have some substantial first cause - is itself cancelled away by metaphysical logic. The only fact left is the fact that the logic of a dichotomy seems inescapably true. And perhaps - in some illogical way we can sort of wave a vague sceptical hand at - it might have been false.

So it is only now logically brute, rather than substantially brute. It is brute as a generality, not brute as individuated being.

So we can doubt that 1+1=2. The next time we do the sum, it might just turn out different. Or at least language allows us to voice such scepticism, even if reason itself really doesn't.

Brute fact is "God" without the mask. I suppose that's the aesthetic appeal. — t0m

Exactly. Presented with logic, you are free to turn around and simply say you reject logic. Absolutely free in fact when the rejection has no pragmatic consequences.

Assuming that your or his narrative is rhetorically plausible, is this enough for its adoption? — t0m

Rhetorical? Either it is logical and worth adopting for that reason, or it is not. Either as belief it has pragmatic consequences, or it does not.

It is not about "sounding truthy". There is an actual argument here.

Your theory may indeed prove to be a valuable tool within the sciences. I'm not qualified to say. But I don't see a personal use for it. — t0m

Fine. You don't. I do.

Or at least you say you don't. And then you argue that in terms of dialectical reasoning. My view may be scientifically objective, but yours is subjectively personal. My view may be rational and inductive, but yours is intuitive and aesthetic.

So you rely on antithesis to put the maximum possible distance from my thesis.

In short, you employ the very tool of thought you seek to deny here. So - whomfff - the sound of a house of cards falling.

I do like the later part of the theory, where order emerges in order to speed the general dissolution. That's aesthetically dazzling. — t0m

Hah. The whole discussion is just for fun. Really, having a theory about the existence of reality - even a "scientific" one - is more an aesthetic enterprise at the end of the day. It is not as if we could use the answer to do much than dazzle and entertain ourselves.

Your argument isn't easy to follow. Some of your individual points are quite digestible. But, for instance, you now seem to be recanting the minimization of brute fact and denying it altogether. — t0m

I tried to show that the minimisation is not in the notion of vagueness itself - as that still sounds like a quantifiable or substantial concept. It is in the dichotomy of the vague~general. So vagueness is a limit and not a thing, or a state, or even a lack of either of those.

Just to be clear, I don't think there is an answer to this "why." I think it's a pseudo-question, however lyrical. — t0m

Yet there has to be a reason for protesting that there is no obvious reason why possibility ought to be limited. You can't have it both ways here.

Either you are happy with laws as brute fact, or you feel it is reasonable to challenge that. And that very challenge has to ground itself in the openness of "anything might have been the case". Then from there, logically we must continue to the actual consequences of "anything being the case". Laws prove to be emergent via the symmetry/equilibrium argument.

given the particular circumstances and the laws in question, the occurrence of the phenomenon was to be expected — Hempel

That now brings in the issue of initial conditions as well as boundary conditions. And so it is explanation directed at particular being. Or individuated being. I was arguing in general terms for the emergence of regularity.

These top level laws are "brute fact." For you these brute facts seem to include some kind of random variation and the laws of mathematics at least. These variations are assumed to be quantifiable. So your'e not starting from nothing — t0m

Well no, as the initial conditions for the emergence of lawful regularity are specified as "vagueness". I'm stating pretty plainly that I'm starting from less than nothing, not from nothing, let alone something.

Vagueness is more an everythingness in being unbounded possibility. But that is less than nothing, because nothingness is an actualised absence of things. It may be an empty place, but it is still a place of some kind. It was once there, even if it is no longer there now.

And nothing needs quantification if we are arguing dialectically or dichotomously - in terms of pure metaphysical qualities. Values are being defined reciprocally or inversely - each in terms of being not its "other".

So if the dichotomy is discrete~continuous, then each is quantified as the inverse of its other. To be discrete is to be as little continuous as possible. And vice versa. To be continuous is to be as distant as possible from being discrete. So continuous = 1/discrete, and discrete = 1/continuous.

Each measures or quantifies the other. And if there is no apparent distance or difference, then the categorisations themselves become vague descriptors. There just isn't a fact of the matter whether things are discrete or continuous.

Vagueness and generality are defined in the same reciprocal fashion. You are imagining that one has to stand outside the totality of the world to see that it has vagueness as some quantified foundational quality. There must be some amount of this stuff that I'm calling a potential anythingness.

But that is just the usual habit of explaining by imagining being outside the thing to be explained. And that is precisely why attempts to account for the Cosmos and the Mind always flounder. By definition, we can't step outside existence itself to explain existence.

However we can minimise the mystery of existence by taking the internalist position. And this is what I'm doing. Or what dialectical metaphysical argument has always done. We can reason about the divisions that arise in mutually-definitional, mutually-necessary, fashion.

And so for there to be the generality of law, there must also be the reciprocally-defined thing of the vagueness of potential. Particular quantities of either fall out of it as we are talking about a self-quantifying relation. Each exists to the degree it isn't its other.

Of course I don't think it's possible to start from nothing, so that's not a fault in your system. — t0m

Again please respect that I am very clear that I don't start from nothing. I start from less than nothing. The fact that you try to put me back in that frame - talking about the presence or absence of particulars - shows that you are not really dealing with my actual argument.

There's also Hume's problem. Your system (I think) assumes the metaphysical necessity of scientific laws? But I don't know of any deduction of this necessity. It seems to be a hardwired prejudice. — t0m

The argument is inductive, or rather abductive. It is pragmatism, which accepts internalism, as I say.

So a belief in nature's laws is a hypothesis that looks well justified. It is the reasonable guess that has been working out ever since.

And of course you only have to look at the history of metaphysics and science to see that the very idea of "laws" is itself not really much believed. Physics believes in limiting symmetries, generalised constraints.

The analogy with human laws sounds too much like nature might require a "law giver". Symmetries, being emergent invariances, do away with that kind of externalist metaphysics.

But why this logic of symmetries? — t0m

Because symmetries are logical. They are the invariances that emerge as the sum or average of all possible variances.

So if you feel it is logical to ask the very question of "why not this, that or the other", then already you accept variance as your ground here. You accept the essential possibility of action that is directed and yet directionless. You begin vaguely with nothing being as yet limited.

Great. Then assuming the free expression of variation - anything can be possible - leads to the next step. Not everything can be possible at once. Interaction produces limits. Many possibilities will cancel each other out. What gets left after all conflict has gone to equilibrium is whatever symmetry state describes a reality in which differences seek to make a difference.

Freedom can't help have an emergent pattern. This is what we see in statistics. Random action leads to Bell curves.

So the argument is that if you truly believe anything could be the case (as what would stop that being so), then still global regularity must emerge. Chaos also has to be lawful. Absolute variation is also going to wind up absolutely self-limiting. Laws, or the symmetry of an equilibrium balance, just have to evolve within a system which begins in an initial state of free and undirected foment.

The laws themselves are what we would also want a "cause" for, philosophically. But this is absurd. — t0m

But the laws can be accounted for at least in terms of symmetry maths and the logical principles they encode.

So all physical laws respect a least action principle. Action takes the shortest path. Also total action is conserved. And action wants to achieve its most degenerate form.

These are all symmetry maximising arguments. So the logic of symmetries is the cause of emergent physical regularities, or the laws of nature. The laws have mathematical necessity. What would be absurd is if the actual world didn’t conform to symmetry based principles.

If colour constancy is a model, then there must be some causal relationship with the model and what caused it. — Harry Hindu

Of course. The only question is whether the state of mind is being caused directly or indirectly.

Colour experience alone shows that conciousness is mediated Interpretation. We don’t see light as it is, but light as our neurology symbolises it.

Colour constancy rams this point home. Any interpretation is relative to some judgement we are making about how some colour would look under more ideal lighting conditions.

Perception is so indirect we can experience colour as stable properties belonging to object surfaces. Which is thus both a truth and not the actual information reaching our eyes.

It is the same as distance correction. Things far away are seen as being of normal size, far away. Which is true, but not the truth of the information hitting the backs of our eyes.

All perception relies on interpretation, so is not direct but mediated by our beliefs. That sugar tastes sweet and roses are red show just how unreal our resulting reality is. We impute a useful sensory image to create a structure of experience that certainly corresponds to the world in a reliable way. It gets us around this reality, as a map symbolises a territory. But being mediated via symbols - qualia - it is not direct.