A thread at UD that was just beginning to get interesting was unfortunately cut short when Elizabeth departed.
As is oh so typical over at UD, those silly IDiots were appealing to obvious truths and the primacy of logical reasoning. Elizabeth, in contrast, was championing her empirical methodology.
During the exchange, Elizabeth made the following statements:
My method is the standard empirical method.
If you can’t establish the truth of the premises how can you know your conclusion is correct, however impeccable the logic?
My question to Elizabeth was simple. How did you arrive at the truth of that statement [assuming it’s a rhetorical question] using the standard empirical method?
I’d really like to give Elizabeth an opportunity to answer.
For reference:
A deductive argument is said to be valid if and only if it takes a form that makes it impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion nevertheless to be false. Otherwise, a deductive argument is said to be invalid.
A deductive argument is sound if and only if it is both valid, and all of its premises are actually true. Otherwise, a deductive argument is unsound.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/val-snd/
Given the above explication of valid and invalid arguments and sound and unsound arguments, does Elizabeth’s question even make sense? IOW, logic does not and cannot tell us whether the conclusion is “correct.” Logic can only tell us whether an argument is valid. Logic cannot and does not tell us whether an argument is sound.
How do we discover these facts/truths of logic using Elizabeth’s standard empirical method? If they cannot be established as facts/truths using the standard empirical method, should logic be abandoned? If so, why?
Don’t you? But you do! If “perception” is not derived from physical senses, nor any physical commodity at all then of course rocks can dream! Unless you can think of a good reason, logically they can! And I know you like logic.
What petrushka said. I suppose it’s the same as asking if “perception” is not derived from physical senses then why don’t we occasionally develop new senses that are internally self consistent and logical?
If you don’t need ears to hear why do men have nipples?
Yes, exactly.
This stuff gets put to the test rather frequently.
We know, for example, that damage to a specific region of the brain can not only eliminate color vision; it can eliminate memory of color vision. It can eliminate the concept of color vision and make the concept of color vision incoherent to a person.
Possibly. What DO you mean by “the primacy of mind”?
I didn’t tell you that you have to have the capcity to perceive before you can perceive. I said that ONCE you have the capacity perceive, one of the things you can potentially perceive is the perception itself. A simple organism might be able to perceive food out of a background of non-food. A more complex organism, using that same equipment, might perceive other organisms perceiving that food out of a background of non-food and get in quick. An even more complex organism might perceive itself as a member of the set of “organisms perceiving food from a background of non-food” and thus open the way to perceiving itself as a perceiver of other organisms perceiving food from a background of non-food,and thereby to perceiving not only the perception of others, but its own act of perception.
Thus is born experience and consciousness;
And Mind.
You are confusing the map with the territory. Models don’t have to precede the modeler. In fact, they can’t. And just because we can model the the origins of our own mind doesn’t mean to say that those origins can’t have existed in the absence of us and our ability to model them.
No, because your logic has some errors.
And without neurons, muscles, sensory organs and the need for fuel to continue to exist you wouldn’t have perception.
I don’t know if they can be, or cannot be. I’m saying that logically we must assume they are in order to make rational appeals to rational agents and expect them to be able to objectively adjudicate the arguments (according to a sound arbiter – logic) and implement the valid conclusions into their views. Otherwise, all we can be doing in principle is attempting to physically brainwash the other person to think more like us.
By having at least some mental capacity that is free of bottom-up causation and is able to devise methods, physical and/or mental, of determining if sensory reception/interpretation/representation is flawed.
EL:
That is the model you have constructed in your mind based on your perceptions about what “perception” is and how it is achieved. Mind is primary in the chain of reasoning that leads from perception to the model you have described.
A just so story 😛
EL said:
No, I’m pointing out that without the map, you have no way of discerning which is the map and which is the territory. The map is primary because it determines not only what is map and what is territory, but how the map represents the territory and what the relationship between the two is. Also, the map describes the territory, and that is the only knowledge you can have about the territory. At the end of the day, all you know about the “territory” is written on a map. Without the map you have nothing.
For the conscious, subjective human agent, “the territory” is and can be nothing more than a conjectural mental construct based on how we interpret perceptions. The “territory” may or may not actually exist “out there”.
How does that happen?
And where is this disembodied sort of determination ever seen?
Glen Davidson
No, dreams are not perception (IMO).
I’m not so sure. I think dreams activate the same neurons involved in perception.
ETA:
I’m winging this from memory, but it’s a good test of my understanding.
I think the artist who lost his color vision also lost the ability to dream in color. To borrow from another thread, perception is integrated. However the sensory system works, perception is an integrated function, and would use the same neurons in dreaming.
Evolution and mathematics are primary in the chain of reasoning that leads me to my current view of mind and perception.
GlenDavidson,
I’m making a logical argument about the assumptions necessary as a foundation for rational argument and the expectations one has in conducting a rational argument with other presumedly rational agencies.
I’m not attempting to prove those assumptive commodities actually exist, nor am I going to attempt to advance a theory on how they work. None of that is necessary to my argument that without assuming they exist, our arguments are all absurd attempts to physically brainwash other people into thinking more like us by emitting series of sounds or letters that somehow cause a chain reaction that gets the other organism’s brain state to change so that they agree with us.
Unless logic is held as an objective standard, an arbiter of true statements, what are we appealing to when we employ what we call “logic”? Or “reason”? If evidence is not held as an objectively valid interpretation of facts in favor of a theory one holds in some sense to be objectively better than any other theory, why are we bothering to argue with others about it? If one’s mind is simply a physical system that processes sounds and sights via chemical affinities and and molecular regularities, and has no independence from such causation, then we will conclude whatever molecular affinities and regularities and stochastic processes happen to represent output – whether it is logical or not, or true or not, has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Without assuming primacy of mind, a capacity of reason independent of physical causation, and access to an objective arbiter of correct thought/true statements, all we are doing here can be, in principle, correctly represented as monkeys flinging feces at each other attempting to gather up allies.
I think one thing that’s missing from William’s scenario is the way in which logic is honed by perception, action, and learning.
Of course we have only uncertain minds to determine whether or not we have uncertain minds, which makes it impossible to determine correctly at times (schizophrenics frequently have the problem that they find nothing wrong with their thinking/perception), but it’s because we’re very much embodied minds that perceptions and logic tend to become honed to make reasonably correct assessments of our world.
It’s a bit like evolution, in fact, that good reactions survive (in the individual’s mind) and bad ones do not. That is, iterative corrections of processing of perceptions within the environment can produce capable judgments, decent speech, and spatial logic. And indeed, without the proper learning the capacities upon which we depend do not become competent.
Glen Davidson
Neil Rickert said:
When you reach a conclusion not arrived at through the processes of mind, let me know.
Glen Davidson said:
All of which are conclusions and descriptions engineered and checked for validity by … your mind.
Which evolved to deal with an environment containing many regularities.
Glen Davidson
And then those conclusions are tested against reality. Against teeth.
Here’s a fun take on the Signature in the Cell.
http://www.theonion.com/blogpost/i-believe-in-evolution-except-for-the-whole-triass-11313
OMagain said:
You can’t check them against reality. You can only check them against your mental concept of what reality is and how it behaves, because that concept determines how you set up your tests and interpret the results.
GlenDavidson
Or so your mind interprets, conceptualizes and concludes.
Mind is primary. There is nothing that you can assert about the nature or origin of your mind that is not the product of your mind and must rely upon an assumed objective capacity to discern true statements from false.
Presumably partly rational agencies.
And if this were the fourth century BC I might be impressed. But this is not Plato’s Republic, we do not rely upon absolute perfection in order to decide things, and we can easily enough come to ideal standards via abstraction and reification.
That’s what keeps you from looking at what actually occurs during the development of a partly rational mind. You’re apparently not concerned about the lack of evidence for your own assumptions, or the lack of evidence that your assumptions actually operate, you’re merely repeating your own assumptions.
Actually, get rid of the pejorative and highly negatively slanted outlook, and it’s about right. As in, partly rational agents discuss things, hone each other’s thinking, and often come to agreement. That’s why we have discussions about these things, because we’re already somewhat informed, somewhat able to think things through, and yet may have lacunae in both knowledge and thinking. By learning from others, we can become more competent to judge (it can go the other way, too).
And a completely straight infinitely long line is one objective standard for much of what is done in geometry. Doesn’t exist, but it’s a good ideal for conceptualization.
It’s why arguing ID tends to end in frustration and nothingness. It’s not even so much that anyone denies the evidence, but that the IDists who will accept evidence of non-poof evolution of honeycreepers on the Hawaiian Islands based on the apparent common structure plus modification of DNA will deny that the same type of process produced similar evidence when it indicates common ancestry and modification of DNA in the phyla appearing in the Cambrian.
Only if one doesn’t accept that computers can be programmed to operate according to logic with often-reliable output, rather than that output being viewed necessarily only a result of mildly-interesting variations of electricity flowing through semiconductors.
Obviously, humans often do appear as apes that are doing little more than trying to shift opinion to produce more allies. Since, however, we have to deal with 3-D space, linear progressions, and binary decisions, we have evolved the capacity to deal with spatial relations and logic. Even so, miss the proper interactions with the environment, and these capacities do not develop well at all.
Glen Davidson
OK, so let’s take the assumption you are making as a given. There seems to be bit of tautology here, and I’m trying to lay out what you are saying.
Are you saying that ONLY IF immaterial minds are separate from their substrate could [i.e would it be rational to expect] rational agents use logic to evaluate arguments and, on that basis, to modify their views accordingly?
Yes?
William, you already conceded that logic alone could not be an “arbiter” of true statements – that it could only be applied in combination with “sensory input”.
And by the way, did you ever explain what you meant by “sensory input”? I asked a while back, either for a description or for an example.
This is a non sequitur.
The fact that “There is nothing that you can assert about the nature or origin of your mind that is not the product of your mind and must rely upon an assumed objective capacity to discern true statements from false” does not tell us that “mind is primary”.
To be honest I’m not even sure what you mean by “mind is primary”. Primary what? What is secondary, if mind is primary?
The fact that we cannot think about thinking without thinking does not tell us that Mind is separate from its substrate.
It could just as easily tell us that without a substrate that underpins mind we cannot think about anything, including thinking.
Not all of them.
Piano strings will resonate to ambient sounds. But we don’t call that “piano playing” even though the same strings are used.
Allan:
William:
That’s quite irrational. There’s no need to make that assumption, William. It’s reminiscent of the error you make in assuming the existence of objective morality.
A more rational approach is to regard cognition as provisionally reliable based on our observations.
Could we be wrong about its reliability? Sure! That’s why I say that absolute certainty is a myth. Even God, if he exists, can’t be certain that he isn’t being fooled by faulty perception and cognition.
No, but pianos aren’t brains!
I’m not going to split hairs over this – I think it’s reasonable to reserve the word “perception” for what we think we see or know about stuff in the outside world we are currently attending to, and to use some other words, such as “remembering” or “imagining” or “dreaming” when we are attending to stuff that isn’t currently present.
But petrushka is basically right, I think. Perceptual processes do elide into both memory (backward models) and imagination (forward models), which is why Edelman uses the phrase “the remembered present” to talk about consciousness of the present experience.
In both the visual and auditory systems, perception not only takes time (tens to hundreds of milliseconds) but integrates information over time, by drawing on memory to make a prediction about the immediate future. “The mind’s eye” is involved not just in remembering and imagining stuff that isn’t there, but also in actually perceiving what is.
To take the visual system – at any given instant, light from the external scene is focussed on the retina, but our eyes are in constant jerky (saccadic) motion relative to that image – yet we do not see everything in a blur. Not only that, but the only part of the image that our neurons can transmit in detail or colour, is the 2 or so degrees of arc that subtends the fovea. The rest of the scene stimulates neurons specialised for movement detection, and things with low spatial frequency. The reason we can see anything at all, is that the systems are coordinated so that things that stimulate our peripheral vision elicit an eyemovement to that location so we can foveate it. Not only that, but to prevent us from seeing a “smear” as the eyes move (really fast – several degrees of arc in 20 milliseconds, ballistically) the system “anticipates” from incomplete information, what neurons will be stimulated when it gets there, and primes them, as it were, so that they only need minor correction when they arrive. It not only does that, but factors in the fact that the eye movement was responsible for the shift, so that we perceive the world staying still, even though the retinal image has moved by a huge amount. You can prove this by physically moving your eyeball (through your lid!) with your finger – because there is saccadic command, you see the world move instead.
And there are comparable features in auditory perception as well, and indeed in “intentional binding” as that article my commentary piece was on shows.
There are certainly differences though – one brain region, the precuneus, often described as “the mind’s eye” “switches off” during attention to an external stimulus, or at least becomes less energy consumptive. But electrophysiology suggest that it doesn’t really “switch off” at all – but possibly becomes more efficiently “tuned”, possibly to filter out endogenously generated images to the benefit of an endogenous one.
William, I’m no logician or mathematician, so I’m sure someone will leap in here, but I do think your concept of “logic” is somewhat limited by being so apparently restricted to classical logic.
Fuzzy logic is far more applicable to what we know about the relationship between neural and mental events.
And also the concept of bootstrapping, as I said. A mind that can think about a mind does not require that the mind came first.
I think Hofstadter’s original example was something like a stick insect gradually evolving such that it’s manipulators become visible to itself. That then changes behaviour, which changes the evolution of the manipulators. And so it begins.
Yes. But why should we see everything in a blur?
The saccadic motion is surely part of how we see, rather than an interference with seeing.
If you go to the supermarket, and look at those bar code scanners, you will notice that the laser beam is in constant jerky (saccade-like) motion. Do you really think that the engineers did that to blur the results and make it harder to pick out a bar code? Or maybe the did that to actually make it easier to find the details that identify a bar code.
It would be nice to have cameras that could translate motion into finer detail, rather than the other way round.
Well we don’t, but the image tracks over the retina. If it were a camera, it would blur, or whatever you call camera shake.
Yes indeed – and my point is that it only work because of forward and backward models.
The latter, because it is a laser beam. If it were a camera, it would have to find a work-around.
I don’t think we are disagreeing – I’m just saying that the eye isn’t a camera. It’s part of a system that uses directional light signals as a means for the organism to know what’s outside. And that system is both predictive and “post-dictive”. And the part of the system that makes the model can work just as well without actual input from the retina, and when it does so we see things in our “mind’s eye”.
(oversimplification alert)
OMagain,
I’ll go out on a limb and say that Asimo is on the right track.
AI-gy recapitulates evolutiony.
lol
Logic can tell you if given the premises that sentences are true or not. And both can be logically true but then logic tell you that at least one of the premises is wrong. The predictions of both statements will be better or worst also according the premises that led to the sentences and the determination of “better” can only be made by logic.
EL said:
How would you know?
I continue to be amazed at how you continue to make arguments about and pass judgements on something when you admit you don’t even know what it means in the very same post:
You should at least know what you’re arguing about before you start reaching conclusions about it, don’t you think?
I didn’t claim it did – but then, you don’t even know what I’m arguing about or what point I’m making. All you know is that whatever it is I’m arguing, you disagree with me.
Where did I concede that?
No, I don’t think I did.
William, I am trying to understand you. As far as I am concerned, I think I know what I am talking about. When I say “I don’t understand what you mean by “primacy of mind” – I am asking you to explain what YOU mean by primacy of mind.
You are making an argument – if I don’t understand your argument then the onus is on you to explain it to better. Not to scoff at me for “admitting” I don’t understand it!
I’m trying to make sense of what you are saying, and I’m trying to respond to my interpretation of what you are saying. I am “admitting” that I am not sure what you are saying. That is not necessarily because I am stupid. It could just as easily be because you are not clear!
No, William. What I know is that what you are saying appears to make little sense, and inasmuch as I can make any sense of it, I disagree with it. That might be because you are not saying what I think you are saying. Or it might because you are, and you are wrong. Either way you are not clear to me.
At UD, in the thread Mung linked to.
Well, please do. It appears to be important to your argument.
Interjecting after a long day of doing other stuff, I see the conversation has evolved in some ways . . . nevertheless, I would like to offer a few points.
It is absolutely crucial, I think, not to conflate epistemology (or phenomenology, for those who know the lingo) with metaphysics (or ontology). In the debate thus far, one deep reason why no one understands Murray — and I think that Murray’s frustration is understandable — is that he wants to talk about epistemology, and everyone else is talking about metaphysics. (Perhaps you don’t realize it, but from what I can see, you are!)
In one crucially important sense, Murray is completely right. I understand him to be saying — to translate from his idiom to mine, with all the perils that translation involves — the following: our initial description of our epistemic situation involves certain transcendental or constitutive conditions, such as: that we are rational beings capable of playing the game of giving and asking for reasons; that there are shared norms of meaning and justification, that we are conscious of both ourselves and objects, and so on.
These are, perhaps, “weakly foundational” [weakly here in the sense that what is necessary presupposed for us is itself the result of contingencies of natural and cultural history, that what is necessarily presupposed for us is not necessarily presupposed by other communities with different conceptual frameworks, and so on. There are many relative a prioris and no single absolute a priori.]
Thus far, this might seem I am on Murray’s side. Where I disagree with Murray is on two crucial points.
Firstly, I do not think — as Murray does — that the basic description of our epistemic situation reveals any primacy of “mind” (subjectivity, self-consciousness). Rather, I think that a careful, systematic explication of our epistemic situation reveals that our awareness of ourselves as subjects is tangled up with our awareness of others as co-subjects and our awareness of objects as independent of us. Subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and objectivity are a three-legged stool, and no one leg can stand without the other two. [Compressed here, lurking in the background, is how Kant’s critique of Descartes culminates in Davidson and Merleau-Ponty.]
Secondly, I do not think — as Murray seems to — that we should model our understanding of empirical inquiry after our conception of formal inquiry. (If anything, I’d reverse that!) I think that Murray has this commitment when he talks about doing epistemology in terms of foundations as consisting of premises (presumably “self-evident truths”) with necessary entailments. That’s a good description of how justification works in formal domains — when we’re proving theorems in logic and in mathematics. But that’s not how justification works in non-formal or empirical domains — in those contexts, iterative hypothesis testing against data captures how judgments are tested, revised, and considered reasonable.
Thus, on the side of epistemology, I agree with Murray that there are necessary presuppositions of inquiry that are revealed by describing our epistemic condition, but I do not think that those presuppositions reveal the primacy of mind or the primacy of logic in the ways that he is urging.
I take it that Murray is not interested in doing metaphysics — as he repeatedly says, he’s interested in the role of the necessary presupposition of objective reality for thought, not whether or not we actually have cognition of objective reality. Yet I am interested in doing metaphysics, though doing so in a way that is fully informed by empirical science and by phenomenology. I fully agree with Aristotle, Hegel, and Sellars that a fully comprehensive philosophical understanding requires getting epistemology and metaphysics to sync up.
And when it comes to metaphysics, the situation is quite different, because metaphysically, objects were here first. (At any rate, if one’s metaphysics is constrained by the results of empirical science!) In terms of a scientific metaphysics, objects (or something like objects — more on that later) were kicking around, doing their thing, for billions of years before there were any subjects to make sense of them. The evolution of life, of animal sentience, and of higher forms of animal cognition (including the peculiar kind of animal cognition that have, rational cognition) is the story of how subjects emerge from objects, metaphysically, whereas the co-dependence of subjects and objects is only true epistemologically (or, as I prefer, phenomenologically).
Thus, there are three major points of disagreement between Murray and myself:
(1) is there a ‘wall of separation’ between epistemology and ontology, or is there a more complicated mutual entanglement between then?
(2) does the a priori description of our epistemic situation show that subjective consciousness is more fundamental than our consciousness of others and of objects, or is there a more complicated relationship between subjectivity, objectivity, and intersubjectivity?
(3) does justification in empirical domains (everyday experience, the sciences) depend on the kind of justification we find in formal domains (logic, mathematics), or does empirical justification have its own inherent legitimacy? (We might also say that the relative a priori behaves differently in formal and non-formal domains — in formal domains, it functions as the constitutive rules for any procedure to count as a proof, whereas in non-formal domains, it functions as the background conditions that allow a meaningful hypothesis to be constructed and tested.)
I trust that this is sufficiently complicated to confuse everyone!
It’s a little clearer than what William was saying but can you say what you mean, and what you think William means, by “primacy of mind”?
EL said:
I don’t think I’ve even used the term “immaterial mind” in this discussion – certainly not to characterize any commodity I’m arguing about. I’ve said that only if we assume mind is in some capacity independent of physical causation (being made to think whatever lawful/stochastic physical processes happen to make it think) and has some working access to an independent, objectively valid means of arbiting true statements from false (logic, math, etc. as objectively existent validating commodities available to mind), and has the unilateral,”top-down” capacity to override any current physiological brain state arrangements and install new beliefs over old ones, then an “argument” can be nothing more in principle than an attempt to physically alter the molecular arrangements that represent a “belief” or “worldview”.
Once again, let me pose a hypothetical that cuts to the chase:
Let’s say you and I agree to debate whether or not god exists. Let’s postulate I have figured a long sequence of utterances that appear to be nonsensical, but affect any human being the same way: the sequence causes a physical cascade of physiological effects that will make any human believe that god exists, and also believe that they have come to this conclusion by a careful examination of the logic and evidence available.
We begin the debate. Should I utter my string of nonsensical sounds and win the debate? If not, why not?
EL said:
That you are willing to make assertions about something I say even while you admit you don’t know what my terminology means addresses a problem in your capacity to properly reason and argue. You seem to be more committed to disagreeing than to understanding.
No, I didn’t. At least not there.
It’s not.
KN said:
Well, give that man a cee-gar!!! I’m interested in several necessary presuppositions that are required for the kinds of debates we all think (I’m supposing) we are having here; one based on logic and/or evidence, driven to conclusion by reason, about whether or not one’s view is objectively right or wrong in some significant way, the meaning of which can be received as sent regardless of one’s particular molecular configuration (given enough effort), the validity of which is apprised by a neutral, third-party means discernment (logic) capable of objectively arbiting valid arguments from unsound ones, the “soundness” of which is not regulated by happenstance arrangements and interactions of molecules; the valid conclusions of which can be imposed upon the material architecture regardless of their prior resistant structure.
If mind is assumed to be a secondary effect, and decisions and conclusions are the results of how molecules happen to be moved around, then that kind of debate is not available. We’re just (in principle) monkeys flinging feces at each other hoping that it will get us what we want.
Well, to make your hypothetical half-way plausible, let’s suppose that what you were actually doing was giving me some kind of neuroleptic drug that caused me to assign unwarranted significance to the relationship between pairs of events, resulting in my belief that I had evidence for God, no, I don’t think that would be a very good idea, because you would have impaired my capacity, probably, to function as a human being.
I guess my take on how we know things is just very different to yours William. Maybe yours works for you. Perhaps for you, making the assumption that the Mind is separable from its substrate (or however you phrased it) is a functional working model of what Mind is.
For me it isn’t. It neither makes useful predictions scientifically, nor do I find it a useful way of thinking about agency, or decision making, or the process by which I evaluate claims.
No, I’m not. You seemed to be saying things I disagree with. Perhaps you aren’t saying what I thought you were saying. In which case I don’t know whether I disagree with you or not.
I was most certainly trying to understand. I think I might give up at this point.
I just do not understand this argument. KN, can you translate?
KN said:
Surely you realize that any conceptualization of one’s “epistemic situation” takes place in and is dependent upon your mind, and that your awareness of others and objects is labeled and categorized as such by and in your mind? Yes, I realize that any form of identity which is required for any meaningful, mental activity requires a self/other relationship, but I also realize that “realization” of any such necessary state of affairs occurs in my mind.
It is still mind that makes arguments and conceptualizations that insist mind is some secondary effect, and not primary. You cannot make an argument about mind that doesn’t presuppose the very things I claim are necessary to presuppose. It can’t be done, because if it could, it would turn “argument” into “physical reprogramming”.
Physically reprogramming someone, and arguing them into a sound conclusion, are assumed to be two categorically different things. Under materialism, they are not different and cannot be different things even in principle.
OK, finally I think I may understand what you are saying. OK thanks.
It’s not intended to be plausible. It’s intended to reveal the problem with materialism and “mind as secondary effect” thought.