What’s all this, then? Can you direct me to a study about minutes-old humans understanding 1+1=2?
Sure, because if something seems self-evident you’re not used to discussing evidence for it.
But the claim was that conscioisness is not just self-evident, but absolute. They feel like different claims to me. I’m not sure you can get from one to the other.
The City of God reference is a good one, but doesn’t touch on consciousness being absolute, and that conscious experience occurs is not something I’m disputing.
Sure. I made the same point to Christoffer. What is this grand illusion being constructed for? If it’s content is observed, or at least used as an input, then it is no longer an illusion but part of processing.
Agreed, but Chalmers isn’t an Idealist. He doesn’t hold the physical to be irrelevent. He’s a Dualist. He doesn’t divorce mental experience entirely from the physical.
I understand the distinction you’re making.
But does it hold? Let’s take an example. If I think first about what my wife looks like, and then imagine her appearing in the Avengers movie as She-Hulk and throwing someone through a wall, and then start thinking about the angles of triangles formed by the trajectory of that throw, what are the differences between these three events? The first could conceiveably be classed as a sense experience, but it’s visual memory rather than vision. The second is clearly something I’ve never seen, but can imagine seeing, and the third is something I can imagine, but has no relation to visual experience at all.
As such I tend to think of the internal experience of concepts and the internal experience of sensory objects as being the same thing. Indeed I’m not sure how well an Idealist view of the mind would work if they weren’t at base the same thing. Can you really claim different rules for directly sensing the world and imagining the world, and still hold conscious experience as absolute?
My very first diary entry was the result of me encountering the idea that people spend the first 18 years of life developing consciousness, and thus couldn’t be considered fully conscious until then. As an 8-year old it pissed me off really quite strongly. So much so that I wrote a note to my future self to remember that this idea was, well, I won’t reproduced my attempts as an 8-year old to swear violently, but certainly I saw it as hypocrtical nonsense at the time.
I think human beings’ long development process is an interesting tit-bit, but what it leads to is either the idea that consciousness occurs very early and thus isn’t developmental, or the idea that consciousness grows and develops over time and isn’t complete until development is. Which would be entirely at odds with the idea that it enjoys primacy. It can’t be self-evidence and absolute if we all grow up being wrong about whether we fully have it.
The relevant passage from the essay on the Primacy of Consciousness:
As Bitbol argues in Is Consciousness Primary? ² consciousness is not an object among objects, nor a property waiting to be discovered by neuroscience. It is not among the phenomena given to examination by sense–data or empirical observation. If we know what consciousness is, it is because we ourselves are conscious beings, not because it is something we encounter in the natural world. (We may infer that other sentient beings are conscious, but only our own consciousness is immediately given to us.)
Accordingly, Bitbol considers consciousness to be “self-evidentially absolute” : the one domain of existence that is given fully and indubitably whenever it is present. By contrast, natural objects are always incompletely present, appearing only as partial profiles or “adumbrations,” forever subject to correction by further experience. (“It looked square from that angle, but now I’m nearer, it’s plainly not.”)
It’s not ‘absolute’ in the Hegelian sense of ‘the ultimate, self-actualizing totality of reality, where all contradictions between subject and object, thought and being, and the finite and infinite are resolved.’ The claim is much more modest: it is that the fact of one’s own conscious experience cannot be plausibly denied.
So what? might be the response. And the answer to that is, despite this, ‘it’ is still treated as ‘some phenomenon’ which might still be ‘explained’.
I didn’t say nor imply that infants are not conscious. Of course they’re conscious, but the human being goes through a much long period of maturation and enculturation than other species. (Birds have periods of enculturation and maturation, like the Australian magpies in my area. You can spot a magpie juvenile from a long way off, the colours it has, the way it moves about. But their process takes about 6-9 months, not 18 years.)
Just passing through, and this jumped out at me.
Might be interesting learn how those don’t contradict each other.
Effect is an observed data set. The data set might have a set of different effect results. You should link the data set into the cause by inductive reasoning or inference. One of the way the data set’s character could be randomness, which is a legitimate nature of the observed effects.
It is controlled and categorised data set, and the randomness could be embedded in the data set.
You wouldn’t imagine a heavy rain downfall, because you bought a lottery ticket. We are not talking about that type of randomness here.
When you buy a lucky dip lottery ticket, you always get 6 numbers of randomness in the range of 1 to 59. That is the type of randomness we are talking about here.
That is a misunderstanding on what randomness means in reasoning. As explained above, but in the topic here, we have a set of data content which are the perceived images of various different kinds i.e. blackbird, guitar, motor bike, a biker, sun light …etc, and we were trying to trace the cause for the perceptual events i.e. why and how those images appear in mind with no real objects in front of the perceiver.
It could be seen as random at first, but we were presuming that there might be meaningful cause for it. Randomness in this context is not meaningless, and it is not a general description as you are claiming.
The law of cause and effect don’t deal only with particular cause and effect in one to one basis. That is a classroom mind set.
In the real world, you will often have multiple set of observed effects and causes, which you must reason and link. The different effects in the set might appear random superficially, but they are within the controlled boundary of the set i.e. randomness within the observed boundaries.
And you must also categorise the causes and effects into rational manner, so they would make sense, and be presentable as meaningful theories.
Sorry Corvus, I can’t understand this at all. How do you propose that randomness could be a conclusion of inductive reasoning?
Isn’t it the case that randomness in this context is meaningless? If it actually is random it is meaningless, but we presume there might be a meaningful cause, which would imply that it is not random. So the “meaningful cause” is contrasted with “randomness”, which is meaningless.
Again, I propose to you that your concept of randomness is incoherent and unintelligible, for the reasons I’ve already explained.
Randomness in the observed set of data is not meaningless. We are here to establish the cause for the set of the observed data which were perceived in random manner.
It is not randomness in the dictionary. It is the randomness which was observed in the perceived set of data. Therefore it is not meaningless.
I think your ideas is confined in the dictionary. You need to free yourself from the dictionary meaning of randomness, and reason the nature of the issue here.
You are not addressing the point Corvus. We are not looking at the cause of the set, we are looking at the cause of an individual occurrence within the set. That is what is claimed to be random, supporting the claim of “Randomness in the observed set”.
Look back at my example of radioactive decay. The overall set of nuclear transmutations is very meaningful, displaying the half-life. There is no question about that. But that is not the “randomness”, it is the half-life, which is not at all random. So, you need to consider the supposed randomness itself, and that is the occurrence of particular nuclear transmutations.
Do you see that we are not looking at the cause of the set, which “randomness” cannot be attributed to, and this set is very meaningful. What we are looking at is the cause of individual occurrences within the set. This is what “randomness” is attributed to.
Same here, I’ve also stated my views many times, but one has to rebuild one’s rep here. Sounds like panpsychism. It could be true, I don’t think it is. Either everything is found at the bottom layer of things, or we are privileging consciousness over everything.
As for accessible to consciousness, do you know how you raise you arm? Do you know what you are specifically going to say before you say it? I don’t know. But we have different experiences.
But wouldn’t that be more clearly understood as natural law? If you extend information processes to the simplest organism, it becomes semantic. One could end up saying something like, my local library has more thinking than my bookshelf.
Unless you extend thinking to particles or fields. Which is legitimate, but hard to show either way.
We probably won’t arrive at an agreed definition on what thinking is. Outside of language use, we don’t know what thinking is, or better yet, the aspect of thinking we can best handle is language.
It seems to me that we have good reasons to believe that there are other kind of thought that are non-linguistic.
Exactly, counting and music may be considered a kind of thinking. As for cause and effect in relation to thinking it seems to me sometimes objects cause thoughts, often thoughts just appear. Sure, it’s not from nowhere, but it’s hard to say what made a thought appear, other than saying it came from my brain, which is true, but says almost nothing.
Nuclear transmutations example is totally different category, which has nothing to do with what we are trying to find out here.
My point of randomness is that it is not a dictionary meaning of open randomness. It is the confined randomness within the observed set of data.
You seem to have misread my point here. I was not meaning that randomness is the actual result we are looking for under the law of cause and effect. Randomness is a property or quality of the observed data set in the effects.
It appears we’ve just been talking past each other. And so, I have no idea what you are talking about.
My point was that we see images in our dreams when no real objects are present in front of us. Hence there are visual perceptions happening when no visual objects exist.
What could be cause for the perception? We have random appearance of the images in the dreams, and I was asking if there would be some specific cause for the mental events, or would it be total random happenings with no causes and no explanations.
Note that no conclusions were made. It was just inferences made from the observations.
So, my analogy. Just like the nuclear transmutations of particular atoms in radioactive decay appear to be random, so the images in dreams appear to be random. Now, as I explained earlier, it’s unintelligible and incoherent to assume that they actually are random.
So, in the case of freely willed choices of the human mind we general assume an immaterial agent which chooses from possibilities. The agent is not the conscious mind itself making choices caused by conscious knowledge, because then it would be caused, and not be free. So the same immaterial agent could be active in your sleep, producing the images. Also, an immaterial agent, similar to the one responsible for free will choices, but obviously somewhat different, could be responsible for choosing which nuclear transmutations occur during radioactive decay
You need to elaborate how you came to that view and claim. Please note, the nuclear transmutations of particular atoms have nothing to do with the case we are talking about here. It is an irrelevant example.
What is the immaterial agent? Are you sure human mind is always freely willed?
There have been many well-known studies of dreams and their connection to psychology. They were an important part of Sigmund Freud’s technique where he used them to diagnose unconscious conflicts and repressed traumas in the minds of his subjects.
But asking what causes dream images to appear, or whether dream images are real or imagined - all of these are questions with no clear answer, and I don’t expect any will become evident in this thread. Better to move on.
I’m sorry but this whole post is getting things backwards.
This is a completely standard reading of Saint Thomas. Aristotle isn’t a “substance dualist,” the “secondary substance” of the Categories is not playing the role of an extrinsic Platonic form (separable substance; a position attacked throughout Aristotle’s corpus). It’s substantial form as universalized in the intellect. The primary/secondary substance distinction is itself an illustration of the two-modes doctrine. We have the same form, once in natural existence in the individual, once in intentional existence in the knower as universal.
I assume you’re gesturing at entelecheia versus energeia, but I am not sure why these are “incompatible” in a way that undermines the formal unity of the knower and the known.
Re Saint Thomas in particular, the formal object of the intellect is Truth (and of the will, the Good). These being transcendentals, they are conceptual distinctions over Being and so convertible with Being itself; so nothing is left out per se, although there are other limits on human knowledge.