@Meta_U — I think we’ve reached the point where we’re talking past each other more than with each other, and further exchanges are unlikely to be productive.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think we’re as far apart as this conversation might suggest. I genuinely do think there’s something irreducible about rational agency, and I take the tradition of final causation seriously — I just don’t think the arguments you’ve offered here support the specific metaphysical conclusions you’re drawing. You clearly feel the same way about mine. That’s fine – no hard feelings.
So rather than risk the thread becoming repetitive, I’m going to step back here. Thanks for the discussion.
There are no meanings and reasons we respond to in the way you phrase them. Those meanings and reasons, the core of any discussion, philosophy etc. is when zooming out and examining our species, fundamentally about our core automatic drive trying to adapt to a tension it senses.
As humanity built society, we went from simple adaptations to changing conditions, to existential conditions that revolved around abstract problems.
As I mentioned, the system is constantly operating and when it does not encounter a tension that inform change, it seeks out such tensions.
The social dimension of exchanging ideas is still the system operating. This is a “project” that’s been going on since we developed consciousness, and it has spawned a complexity in how it functions that makes us unable to see the strings.
What you are doing, is attributing an arbitrary higher value to the concepts you frame as being “beyond this system”, when there are no such things. All concepts we are socially exchanging in discussions, philosophy etc. are the result of the system operating; we are not choosing anything; we are not able to separate ourselves from it, because we are it.
But are we this? Are we capable beyond the system? Or are we, as I said, operating our system in such complexity that the things you view as so complex it “must mean something more”, is merely a higher complexity of the system that’s evolved through operating on this algorithm for tens of thousands of years, adding dimensions and connections to it’s cause and effects.
If we can’t see the strings pulling our operation, then why would we be able to reason and have agency above that operation?
And it is this that I’m trying to convey here; you are arguing from within the system, expressing an idea of free will over this fundamental consciousness-operation; a free will to break free from it, and in our minds be able to exist as true agents of that freedom. But this is part of the illusion. We are not able to do this. Everything we do is part of the system operating automatically and the notion of freedom… even in thought… is a false sensation.
The operation runs and the nexus, the convergence point of this operation, is where our experience happens. This experience is not driving the system, it is merely an existence playing out as a recording of the system operating. Forming a few seconds after true reality. Our true consciousness operates before we experience it.
The experience we have of life, is like if we were to hack into a robot that is capable of having the same sensations as us, the same quality of experience as the one we sense. A robot that is operating on its own, with its own thoughts and reasoning, outside our control; but we would feel everything it does, we would have the thoughts it has, we would sense the same drives, fears, pleasures etc.
This robot would still be out of our control, yet, through the sum of the experience from all aspects of it, we would feel an experience of being it and being in control.
If you become the other in every aspect but control, to the point of not able to discern if the thoughts are your own or the experience of reality is your own, then how would you know your true existence?
But even this analogy with the robot is missing the point as there are no “we” that experience an “other”, the “we” of our experience, does not exist. It is a sum stream of the “now” which the system operates on and it operates out of any control.
It’s this that is the determinism and lack of free will. We’re not able to truly process reality and discuss it on the level you argue, as we are simply an operation trying to solve a tension with reality in order to adapt and change our conditions into balance with it.
You and I aren’t writing here as an agent free to examine reality; we are nature operating a function that in our experience forms an illusion of being external in thought to that nature.
What makes you say that we are such free agents in nature? What makes you think your sense of freedom in thought… is actually freedom?
The experience you have, is the only experience you know; so how can you discern that experience as truly free in thought if the parameters of that freedom is the only thing you know?
I don’t see that I am drawing specific metaphysical conclusions, that’s why I asked what are the conclusions you are talking about. I believe I am pointing to possibilities rather than to specific conclusions. You don’t seem to directly disagree with anything I say, but you don’t like the general direction which I claim the evidence points. What I am handing you as evidence of the appropriate direction for inquiry, you are rejecting as not evidence that it is the appropriate direction. I conclude that you are predisposed to dislike that direction.
Is this “direction” what you are calling a specific metaphysical conclusion? You requested that I produce an argument. But argumentation in the formal sense, is not the appropriate form of discourse in this context. Trying to get someone to see a list of items as evidence for X is more like persuasion, therefore rhetoric. If you are not inclined by my persuasion, then next time I will need a different approach.
@Wayfarer — Yes, the Aristotelian and Thomistic roots are exactly right. The idea that the intellect “becomes” what it knows by receiving the form of the thing — not the matter, but the intelligible structure — is precisely the tradition I’m drawing on. And I agree with your diagnosis that Berkeley’s idealism (and much of what followed) grew out of the loss of this participatory framework once early modern empiricism redefined knowing as the inspection of mental representations.
Where I’d want to be careful is with the word “participatory,” because it can be heard in two quite different ways. On one reading, it means that knowing is a genuine contact with reality — the knower receives the intelligibility of what is, and in that sense participates in the being of the known. That’s the Aristotelian sense, and it’s what I’m defending. On another reading, “participatory” slides toward “co-constitutive” — the knower doesn’t just receive intelligibility but partly produces the intelligible structure of what’s known. That’s closer to the Kantian/enactivist direction, and its what I’m resisting. So I want to hold onto the participation while pushing back a bit on the co-constitution.
As for recent representatives — I always struggle to make recommendations. Many are working within the Christian intellectual tradition, so you have to be prepared to get a dose of theology when you read them, which turns most people off. That said, you could take a look at D.C. Schindler, Robert Sokolowski, David Bentley Hart and John Deely. Outside of the Christian tradition, thinkers like Roy Bhaskar, Iain McGilchrist and John McDowell are closing in on similar themes from very different directions. If you are willing to look back to the early/mid 20th century, there’s Przywara, Lonergan, Coreth, Marechal, Maritain and Gilson, along with Peirce and Polanyi – though many of these will prove very difficult for a modern reader to grapple with. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of secondary literature to help bridge the gap.
(EDIT) — @Wayfarer, I see that you have removed the section about Wheeler from your post, so I have decided to remove my reply regarding that section as well.
I don’t think that’s what he means. Objects, real physical things, exist independently of sense, no matter which theory we use to explain the experience given from them. And insofar as all our knowledge is of representation alone, thus never of things as they really are, we’ve already incorporated a form of skepticism in the proposed method of knowledge acquisition, but such skepticism is both inevitable and impossible to avoid. Hence the critique of the system’s main authoritative structure, from which warnings about and guards against are provided, such that skepticism to diminished in order to not ruin the process.
Kant, in admitting his own dualistic nature, opposes his transcendental idealism to empirical realism. What he’s saying in the passage is the transcendental cannot be used in explanations for realism as such, at all, insofar as space and time, which are themselves mere transcendental deductions, cannot belong to the real existent things that appear to the senses, as intrinsic properties thereof. The proverbial Copernican revolution says so.
(I don’t know how to divide paragraph subjects in this new format)
A good example of the Critique’s warning is in the judgement, “the world is not only mind created”. The world is that by which a general class is represented, the class of all real existents susceptible to possible experience. Given that condition, it is quite clear the world can never itself be an appearance, hence in not under the purview of all that by which appearance becomes experience. From which follows necessarily, that for which experience is impossible but for which the conception it represents is perfectly valid, is entirely an object of the cognitive system itself. Technically, this and its like are transcendental cognitions, a product of reason, which can be called, albeit loosely, mind-created.
I’d also take exception with the unspecified notion that the empirical domain is not wholly objective. The empirical domain of all possible appearances is necessarily objective in its entirety, in that it is comprised of nothing but objects and their relations, whereas the empirical domain of the cognitive system in general, insofar as that system belongs to a systemic intellectual agency, cannot be entirely objective.
First of all, objects are not structured in experience; the representations of them, are. That being said, in order to be a realist, doesn’t one necessarily assume objects exist fully formed? That we don’t immediately know what a thing is, and we may never know the entirety of what a thing is, and we may even revise what we think a thing is, it doesn’t follow that the thing isn’t all there.
While we never had the right to assume Saturn had rings before we knew of them, that is no reflection on the right to assume that Saturn in its entirety must encompass all representations which do not contradict those by which its identity is obtained.
(Para break)
Which gets us to, whether we wanted to or not, the notion of intelligibility belonging to objects. I think that it does is not wrong, but that it doesn’t, is more right. I figure the intelligibility of a thing is the measure of an intellect’s capacity to relate to it. The thing just is whatever it is; if it is intelligible to us just indicates our intelligence is sufficient for discovering something about it. Why does it need to be any more than that?
Disclaimer: I acknowledge you guys are much more well-read than I, which limits my comprehension of your collective arguments. I won’t beg forgiveness, but I might ask for tolerance.
I’m not sure you need to explain it a different way. What would help is to address the specific point being made directly rather than reply with another variation on the same description.
Let me sum up.
You appear to be desribing these levels of abstraction:
a) Physical neurology
creates and runs
b) Algorithm of adapability
produces and creates
c) Sensation of conscious mind
You further state that decision making is confined to a) and b) making c) an illusion/byproduct/passenger.
So far so consistent. But then you say that c) is necessary, and it’s absence or inconsistency with decisions actually made would lead to mental breakdown.
That represents a contradiction.
Because an illusory c) can not, in any form or in any way, impact the operation of a) and b). If it does, it is not an illusion. It’s malfunction can not impact a) or b). It’s absence can not impact a) or b). It not correctly tracking a) or b) can not impact a) or b).
If either a) or b) is impacted by c) in any way, then c) is an input to a) and/or b). It has a functional role. It is no longer an illusion but part of the system. Something can not both be an illusion and necessary.
I’d further point out that something can’t be an illusion and an evolutionary adaption. By the very definition of an illusion, the system would work just as well without it, so it can not be selected for.
So either c) is an illusion, in which case it can play no part in the function of a) or b) whatsoever, or c) is not an illusion, in which case it has a functional role. It can not both be an illusion and play any kind of functional role, including warding off mental breakdown.
The only way I can see to resolve this contradiction is if c) shares an identity with b) (or a), but let’s go with b) as the smaller change). If b) and c) are the same thing then c) can be necessary to one’s mental health, and it’s absence or misalignment can cause mental breakdown. But then if b) and c) are the same entity, then we very much are making decisions, and our consciousness experiences are not removed from decision making in the way you describe.
It can’t feedback, or form a feedback loop, unless it is an input in the process it is feeding back to. If it’s an input it’s not an illusion any more, because it has a functional impact on the process.
So which is it? Does c) have functional impacts on a) or b), or not?
Your position is that c) is an illusion, so such an action is impossible. Yes, b) could theoretically change c) deliberately, in this case by changing the depth of awareness of an action, but it can’t balance c) because it can’t retrieve information from c). If c) is an illusion it can’t be an input to b), in any way. You even speculate they may not operate in the same timeframe.
If it is part of an input into future decision making then it isn’t an illusion.
This feels like special pleading, the construction of a cordon sanitare that serves no functional or explanatory purpose other than to try and exclude consciousness from decision making.
If our conscious experience is part of something that is stored and used as an input in decision making, then how is our conscious experience any less of an input to decision making than any other part of the decision making process? Our memories, habits, personalities, sense experience and so on are all used as inputs to decision making. Given that you’re proposing a determined process, they aren’t really seperate from the decision making process, and it could be said that they between them determine the decisions made. If conscious experience is part of that process then how is it different from any of the others? And if it isn’t any different from any of the others, if the decisions are being made by memory, habits, personality, sense experience and conscious experience, then surely it’s accurate to say that conscious experience is part of ‘I’, is ‘me’ and is as much part of the decision making process as anything else.
At this point we descend into neurology. And while I’m quite happy to go there, I appreciate not everyone has the background for it.
Why? That we can predict with reasonable accuracy what we are likely to decide to do doesn’t suggest that we aren’t deciding to do it. Being able to predict who will win the vote in the next election doesn’t suggest voting is not causally effective.
Well, we can. We can also operate at awareness speed. As I said before, operating while being aware of what we do has different performance characteristics to acting automatically. It uses different neural circuits, has different strengths and weaknesses and generally takes longer.
Not at all. Only parts of the system need to be automatic. Indeed if operating with or without awareness has different performancce characteristics, it would be maladaptive to have only automatic systems.
Depends what you means by ‘automated’. There’s plenty of evidence that we operate at different levels of awareness, which have different performance characteristics, different neural wiring, and are used for different tasks. That’s what the entire field of Attention and attentional focus is about. So in that sense there is plenty of evidence that not everything we do is automated, that in some cases we are consciously aware of what we are doing as we are doing it, and that those cases have different neural wiring to things like automatic reactions and other time-stressed actions.
Of course you can say that everything is just different types of automation, if you wish to deny the existance of any other kind of decision making. Such a claim isn’t falsifiable, and thus can’t have evidence for or against it.
That is neurologically unlikely. People can react to and describe their own subjective experiences faster than that. You’d also need either an invisible or non-physical system to propagate the signal after the relevent neural activity ceased.
Yes. Is that a problem? If so, why is it a problem? I appreciate it may seem intuitively obvious, but actually articulating the problem is far harder.
Sure, the relevence of quantum mechanics is not that it provides a rare exception to an otherwise determined universe. The relevence is that it appears to show that the universe isn’t determined.
A claim of sui generis would rely on Meta_U’s contention being a rare or sole exception to the normal way the universe operates. Hence the relevence of Schrödinger’s cat is not that his contention could be achieved through quantum indeterminancy, but rather that the normal way the universe operates does not obviously preclude what he is suggesting.
Hence my first question - why is his suggestion a problem? If the answer is because it violates the principle of Determinism, then the obvious response is that such a principle is false. Those who support Libertarian Free Will tend not to support Determinism. (cf Incompatibalism)
We’re definitely drifting off the original topic though. Being new here, I don’t know what is normally done?
To begin, I like a lot of what you said in some parts of the post. My gripe, my consternation, arises from the claim “objects are not given apart from conditions of disclosure”. I rather think the conditions for disclosure with respect to objects, is nothing but perception, that by which objects are given to us, and the necessarily connected sensation, that by which we are affected by those perceptions. This relates because the follow-up truth claim, “nothing is known except through acts of knowing”, doesn’t apply to the givenness of objects, iff the conditions of disclosure are so prescribed.
So the first is trivially true, because no object is given to us at all that isn’t perceived, not because of any knowledge of it.
(Plato’s “knowledge OF/knowledge THAT”, and Russell’s “knowledge by acquaintance/knowledge by description” aside)
If the conditions of disclosure are the conditions under which we access intelligible structure, it is immediately presupposed there is a structure to access and it is intelligible. By what right can the “…undetermined object of empirical intuition…”, which just is the thing that appears, be presupposed as having intelligibility structure at all? To grant a knowledge claim to the undetermined, as in this or that belongs to or represents that thing, is a epistemic contradiction.
The rejoinder is usually that if an object is to be known it must have both, but the mere appearance of an object to the senses doesn’t entail the knowledge of what it is. We know this from experience, in that sometimes a common occurrence, e.g., a sound, is perceived, the cause of which escapes our understanding. It seems as if intelligibility and structure belonged to the thing that appears to the senses, we’d have to have another method for not knowing what it is, outside of and different from that by which we actually do know what things are.
All that to say this: it is my contention/opinion that the move from one to the other should be resisted, because, on the one hand they are irrelevant with respect to each other, and on the other neither of them sufficiently explain the content or origin of their objects. Nevertheless, while your third path doesn’t work for me, I can see how it might for others.
@Togo — I see what you’re saying, but I’d push back on a couple of things.
First, this isn’t about violating determinism, it’s about ruling out every form of intelligible explanation (not determined, not chance, not physically constrained stochasticity) and then treating this as a positive account of agency. “Something we can’t explain at all” is not the same as “immaterial causation.” It’s just a mystery with a label on it.
Second, I don’t think appeals to quantum indeterminacy are relevant in the way you suggest. The fact that the universe isn’t fully determined shows that determinism isn’t a universal constraint — agreed. But we still need a positive account of how the agent acts in a normatively guided way (“selecting from possibilities”) while being completely free from all prior causation. That’s a much more specific claim, and the mere falsity of universal determinism doesn’t get you there.
But you’re right that we’ve drifted pretty far from @Wayfarer’s original topic. If you’d like to continue this line of discussion I’m happy to start a new thread on free will and causation — it’s a good topic in its own right and probably deserves its own space.
“We shall not cease from exploration / and the end of all our exploring…” — well, you know the rest.
I think you’re largely right about science, and your fourth point is probably the most important one. Science did institutionalize self-overcoming in a way that philosophy mostly hasn’t, and that’s a genuine achievement. The peer review process is clunky, the incentive structures are often perverse, and plenty of bad science gets through — but the basic commitment to exposing your claims to systematic empirical challenge is exactly the kind of norm that keeps inquiry from collapsing into ideology. In that sense, science really is the hermeneutics of suspicion done right: it suspects its own conclusions methodically, rather than suspecting everything except its own suspicious stance.
Where I’d hesitate is with the claim that science is “most of what philosophy ever aspired to be.” I think that’s true for a large swathe of what the ancients called natural philosophy — and the fact that physics, biology, chemistry, etc. eventually split off and became wildly successful on their own terms is, in a sense, philosophy’s greatest achievement. But there’s a residual set of questions that science’s own self-overcoming process can’t address, because they’re questions about that process rather than questions within it. Questions like: what makes empirical evidence evidential? What’s the relationship between mathematical structure and physical reality? Why does self-correction tend toward truth rather than just toward different errors? These aren’t anti-scientific questions — they’re questions that arise precisely because science works so well and we want to understand why.
Your point about science and the uncanny is interesting too. I wonder if part of what makes science hard to “digest” culturally isn’t just disenchantment but something almost opposite — the discovery that reality is far stranger, more layered, and more resistant to common sense than anyone bargained for. Quantum mechanics, general relativity, evolutionary biology — none of these are disenchanting in the sense of making the world boring. They’re disenchanting in the sense of replacing one enchantment (the mythological) with another (the deeply, almost absurdly, counterintuitive). And maybe part of the cultural indigestion is that we expected science to make the world simpler and more managable, and it did the opposite.
On Sellars — he’s one of my favorites — and yes, you should read PSIM. But you already knew that was coming.
Again, though, why are those the only options? On what basis are you saying that something that does fit those three categories is unintelligble? Particularly since those categories do correspond to a species of determinsim.
A naturalistic account of free will by a non-philosopher would something along the lines of ‘the ability to choose without prior constraints’. This would be entirely ruled out by your categories.
On what basis are you ruling this out? If it’s not to be simply an a priori assumption there needs to be some kind of rule or principle at stake here, not just a feeling that an account is hard to understand or explain.
Agreed, but that something is not explained to your satisfaction is not in itself a reason to reject it, or else much of modern science would also be lost. There are plenty of unexplained things in science. There are also plenty of things that are not readily testable using science, even in theory. You can’t, for example, observe whether something is axiomatic.
How does an atom radioactively decay? How does an air molecule decide which way to move? We don’t have positive accounts of such things.
They appear to be free from prior determination. I’m not sure that either they or free will needs to be free from all causation - influencing other people to do things is an unreliable sport to be sure, but fairly central to human social behaviour. They just need to not be determined by a prior event for free will to be causally effective.
Depends where ‘there’ is. There is, I would agree, a certainly level of spooky woo beyond which this does indeed become a Sui Generis claim, just as you said. I don’t think that simply fulfilling the requirements for free will is enough to get us there, nor do I think that claims that it lies beyond science is enough to get us there. But certainly we can agree that simply declaring free will to be an unsolveable mystery is begging the question rather than answering it. It lacks explanatory power.
This is literally my third day here. I’ll follow your judgement. I’d warn you that I don’t see causation and determinism as even related to each other, so that may be a more precise place to start, assuming that’s a conversation you want to have.
We are basically on the same page. Those names you mention are very much the ones I’m interested in, although not that there‘s enough time in the world to read all of them. Yes, ‘participatory’ might be a problematic term, but the broad idea is penetrating the ‘illusion of otherness’ which is the existential plight of modernity. I’m not at all averse to Christian philosophers and have read at least some of those you mention. (I’ve often quoted an essay by Maritain, The Cultural Impacts of Empiricism, in support of the indispensability of universals, about which I too am convinced.) I think where we might differ is that I’m overall less committed to scientific naturalism as the arbiter of normativity.
(I deleted the comments about Wheeler as I thought it too great a digression. Physics refs are often thread derailers.)
When ‘zooming out’. When seen ‘from the outside’. Viewing philosophy as ‘an adaptation to environmental conditions’. Everything to be understood in terms of the assumptions and pre-requisites of the objective sciences.
Whereas, a philosophical analysis is intended to respond meaningfully, and to ameliorate, the plight of existence. There are inummerable sources of angst, anguish, loss, anxiety, fear, doubt and pain attendant on the fact of having been born and that come with the knowledge of death and loss. I don’t think a genuine philosophy will seek to ameliorate this ‘from the outside’, through scientific analysis.
Sure, 100%. I acknowledge that at every step. But neither does the world exist in the mind-independent way presumed by naturalism.
Not at all. Your exegesis of the great Sage of Konisburg are always welcome as far as I’m concerned.
Digressions are endemic in online philosophy discussions, they often drift from topic to topic. Bound to happen, when a bunch of interested minds begin to talk about such subjects. And I am interested in what you have to say, although I think the discussion of causality and determinism is tangential. (Have a look at a discussion I started on the previous forum, Logical Necessity and Physical Causation. I’m still interested in this topic and may start another thread on it here.)
I think we are basically on the same page in this regard. Those names you mention are very much the ones I’m interested in, although not that there‘s enough time in the world to read all of them. Yes, ‘participatory’ might be a problematic term, but the broad idea is penetrating the ‘illusion of otherness’ which is the existential plight of modernity. I’m not at all averse to Christian philosophers and have read at least some of those you mention. (I’ve often quoted an essay by Maritain, The Cultural Impacts of Empiricism, in support of the indispensability of universals, about which I too am convinced.) I think where we might differ is that I’m overall less committed to scientific naturalism as the arbiter of normativity.
(I deleted the comments about Wheeler as I thought it too great a digression. Physics references are often thread derailers.)
When ‘zooming out’. When seen ‘from the outside’. Viewing philosophy as ‘an adaptation to environmental conditions’. Everything to be understood in terms of the assumptions and pre-requisites of the objective sciences.
Whereas, a philosophical analysis is intended to respond meaningfully, and to ameliorate, the plight of existence. There are inummerable sources of angst, anguish, loss, anxiety, fear, doubt and pain attendant on the fact of having been born and that come with the knowledge of death and loss. I don’t think a genuine philosophy will seek to ameliorate this ‘from the outside’, through scientific analysis.
Sure, 100%. I acknowledge that at every step. But neither does the world exist in the mind-independent way presumed by naturalism.
Not at all. Your exegesis of the great Sage of Konisburg are always welcome as far as I’m concerned.
Digressions are endemic in online philosophy discussions, they often drift from topic to topic. Bound to happen, when a bunch of interested minds begin to talk about such subjects. And I am interested in what you have to say, although I think the discussion of causality and determinism is tangential. (Have a look at a discussion I started on the previous forum, Logical Necessity and Physical Causation. I’m still interested in this topic and may start another thread on it here.)
I think its important to distinguish between “intelligible” in the sense of already understood versus “intelligible” in the sense of able to be understood. When I say the object has intelligible structure that we access, I don’t mean that perceiving a thing already amounts to knowing what it is. I mean that the thing is the kind of thing that admits of being understood. This is implied by the belief that inquiry into it can succeed or fail, that there are right and wrong answers about what it is, and that this is a feature of the thing-itself, not merely of our cognitive operations.
Your sound example is actually helpful here. You perceive the sound but don’t know what caused it. On your reading, this shows that intelligibility doesn’t simply belong to the appearing thing. On mine, it shows something slightly different: that the thing has an intelligible structure you haven’t yet grasped. The very fact that you can subsequently investigate and discover the cause — and recognize your discovery as correct — suggests that the intelligibility was there to be understood, not constructed by the act of understanding itself.
If the intelligibility were contributed entirely by the knower, it would be difficult to explain why inquiry is hard — why the sound resists our initial attempts to make sense of it, why some hypotheses about its cause fail, and why the successful explanation has a character of discovery rather than invention. The resistance of the object to our interpretive efforts is, I think, evidence that we’re engaging with a structure that has its own integrity independent of our cognitive contribution.
Now, I want to be careful here because I suspect you’ll point out — rightly — that the “undetermined object of empirical intuition” is precisely undetermined. We can’t say what belongs to it prior to the application of concepts. And I actually agree with that in a limited sense: we can’t articulate the intelligible structure of a thing without conceptual resources. Articulation requires concepts.
But I’d distinguish between the articulation of intelligibility and the source of intelligibility. The concepts we bring are the means by which we articulate what we understand. But the constraints on which articulations succeed — the fact that some conceptual determinations work and others don’t — that comes from the side of the object, not from us. The concepts are ours; the success conditions are not. Otherwise it’s hard to see how we could ever be wrong.
So when you say that intelligibility and structure can’t be presupposed as belonging to the appearing thing, my response is that we don’t need to presuppose it. We discover it, progressively and fallibly, through the process of inquiry. And the fact that this process converges, self-corrects, and yields increasingly adequate understanding is itself the best evidence that there’s something intelligible there to be understood.
That said, I recognize that this won’t satisfy a strict Kantian, because for Kant the very notion of “convergence toward the structure of the thing” already illicitly transcends the bounds of possible experience. But I think Kant’s restriction is too severe — it purchases epistemic humility at the cost of making the success of inquiry permanently inexplicable. And I’d rather have an account that explains why knowing works than one that, on principled grounds, insists it can’t.
I want to suggest that the underlined sentence might be true, but it sits somewhat uneasily in this paragraph. It might seem to require only a line or two of argumentative support—something like “the eye cannot see itself”—but I want to question that. And I think the rest of the paragraph actually sets a pretty high bar for what argument would be needed to carry the day.
Reading the rest of the paragraph, the first thought that comes to mind is surely that, if you want to know something about science, you should point the methods and institutional practices of science at it. Instead, it is claimed that to know something about the most successful system of knowledge production we have, you should not—in fact, cannot—use that system, but must use some other system that we have reason to trust far less.
I think that much of the questions you have are answered in my answer to Wayfarer. And in order for the discussion not to derail into nitpicking details, I’ll point out where there are errors in interpretation that may inform the other objections.
The illusion has more to do with our sensation of the process; that it feels like a free experience when it is not. The sum total of the experience is simply feedback to the prediction, adjusting its efficiency and forming a foundation for adapting. It would be similar to you filming an object with a video camera, and then this filmed material is being watched, changing how people think of the object you filmed. The feed of video itself is an illusory representation of reality; it is not reality itself and only a fixed stream of data that is still able to update the system of understanding the object.
The stream is being stored in memory for the purpose of predicting, similar to training data for an AI, only constantly happening and not fixed.
Just because something is illusory doesn’t mean it can’t be registered. You can film the illusion of water in a desert; it is still an optical illusion. And the illusion here is the sensation of the experience being real, when it is merely an echo of the system operating.
This is not how predictive coding works. Predictive coding is closer to how an AI system operates in predicting the next moment in time and how a cohesive sense of reality is formed. It’s the reason why optical illusions happen. It is about using stored information to predict the next moment in time and sensory data grounding these predictions. It’s about how our brain is hallucinating as the standard operation, and that sensory information binds this hallucination into stability.
And it is the foundation for the deterministic nature of our consciousness. That the experience we have is happening after reality has happened. It is closer to watching a live event video stream and the stream lagging behind what is actually happening.
If you were to put yourself into a VR setup that streams audio/visual data from the outside of it with a lag of a few seconds. How would you be able to operate normally? You can’t.
This is closer to how consciousness works; the system operates on its own and your experience is lagging behind. You would not be able to operate in reality without this automation being faster than your sum total experience of reality.
Therefore, your sense of “now” and sense of doing things in the present is an illusion; it is a lie because it’s just a lagging experience of the operation itself, not the operation itself.
This is part of why you misinterpret me. It’s an outdated view on how the brain works.
The core concept I’m talking about is that we are operating on an algorithmic automated system that is constantly updating parameters for this automated process. And it is within the feedback between the operation and the update of the parameters that we experience reality. This is the byproduct sensation and experience we have.
You are not reading this; your system is reading this and updating its parameters. You are only experiencing this update process, and it gives you the sensation that you have control over the entire system.
If you study someone’s consciousness and do tests, you are getting the result of the system, not the experience of that system. The system’s operating parameters have a lot of different functions, but what I’m talking about is the overarching total of it. I’m not speaking of the individual parts of a car doing things in different ways; I’m speaking of the entire car itself and how it relates to driving. A self-driving car still has parts operating like a normal car and analyzing it would yield the same results between both. But driving a car and sitting behind the steering wheel of a self-driving car believing you are controlling it are two very different things.
If the system operates and you just experience things after it happened, how would you know? If the experience we have is part of the feedback stream back into the system after actions have already been taken by the system, it doesn’t matter if an external device records anything because it is observing the automatic operation that drives that person, not this person’s internal experience.
The problem here is that you confuse agency and experience. What I’m talking about is the entirety of us as an automated system that operates beyond the first person experience we have.
Your system is talking before you are experiencing it, based on the predictive coding process forming a response to the outside world on its own. The experience you have, the emotional response, the sense data is a construct grounding mechanism that is streaming back into short-term memory to update the efficiency of the automated system. At any given moment, “you” are operating on outdated information, and the recorded result feedback from the real world informs slight adjustments to the parameters in order for the next action to be taken.
What I’m trying to convey in this topic is that the experience, the first person experience we have, is the experience of this information converging into a nexus point summary as it moves into short-term memory.
That the first person experience of reality you actually have is just the summary of feedback data after all actions have been taken. And how this leads to the conclusion that we are a perpetual self-programming algorithm rather than a being capable of actual agency. Always operating with automatic reactions rather than what we think of as conscious choices. That what we believe is a “thoughtful choice,” thought over a longer time, is just an internalized version (simulation) of the same feedback operation that is being done against reality, running until an actual action is taken into the real world.
And when you compound each thought and action at any given moment of time, the parameters of the algorithm become so complex that we don’t see the strings pulling. And since it’s a constantly updating system, there’s nothing that feels automatic as the parameters that shape the automatic actions constantly change.
The experience of this feedback stream becomes so complex that you are not able to sense that it’s driven by a prior automatic function, so your experience feels like agency.
And this is why the question of determinism vs free will is so closely linked to first person experience. If we had the ability to direct ourselves instantly, we would have free will, but we’re not. We’re algorithmically directed by a composite of previous information driving a prediction of action that decides the action we take.
It is there to bridge the speed of the system to the speed of reality. If the system needs processing time to take action, we would die in an instant.
And this is what we evolved. It comes from the instinctual programming of previous species; able to react from such programming. The difference is that we’re self-programming, but we can’t move away from the basics of the system.
It evolved from previous systems of other species; we didn’t magically evolve an entire new composition of brain that had never happened before. The evolutionary change was a part of how the system functions, utilizing instinctual programming in a self-programming way. Able to update the response to reality in a malleable way rather than a generationally fixed way.
But without the proper reaction speed in reality, it wouldn’t function. The system needs to operate automatically in order to survive.
The system is therefore not operating from the conscious experience; it is automatic, using a prediction algorithm to change the parameters of approach in any given situation. This prediction needs to be updated, and it is the summary of feedback from reality that updates this prediction algorithm that is the stream of experience we actually experience… and this lags behind the entire system as it is the last step that causes the system to change an approach.
Fundamentally, the first person experience we experience is us existing within the stream of feedback that flows back into memory storage. The sense of time we feel is the stream moving through.
We essentially do not exist anywhere, we’re an internal perception of a stream of data that we are not in control of. We, for lack of a better phrasing, are experiencing the feedback stream of a “robot” going through a reactive behavior towards reality itself. We are not in control of anything, we are passively experiencing an automatic system that updates its parameters of operation.
I went back, in review, to see how our conversation, which seemed productive at the time, went off the rails. I was thinking about it, and couldn’t understand how things went sideways so quickly.
This is what is revealed to me through review. When I talked about a dead end to a certain kind of explanation, I took this as an indication that another type of explanation is required. I offered “immaterial causation” as that alternative. You interpreted that I was claiming that the limitations on the physical explanation are proof of immaterial causation. And you asked me to support this conclusion.
I was not making such a claim. We both recognized the dead end to that type of explanation, and so I offered the route of immaterial causation as a well studied, and documented alternative, currently in practise. What I did was offer an alternative type of explanation.
You, on the other hand, suggested that we redefine “explanation” instead. You said we need to “reconceive what explanation looks like”. And, you suggested “statistical mechanics” as an example.
I argued that this would compromise the nature of “explanation”, because statistical analysis does not provide an explanation at all.
Do you agree with me, that this is where our differences lie?
I’m not sure if I interpret you correctly here, but why should philosophy ameliorate? I don’t ascribe to philosophy just being a strategy to lessen the burden of living; it’s a practice of logic and reasoning to reach truth or a notion of truth when sciences fail to give a complete picture.
I can’t ignore the physical reality of our being when trying to decode what it means to have a cognitive first person experience as a living creature. And if my reasoning about consciousness does not also remain accountable to physical evidence, relevant theory, and logical consistency, then I no longer see it as reliably tracking truth.
But since I know you’re not ignoring the science or the logic behind this philosophy; I’m wondering what you are referring to?
Isn’t the history of mankind filled with things people had supposedly ameliorate ideas about that filled them with an almost spiritual awe, only to later be explained into facts and knowledge that formed a rigid understanding of how they actually were?
“Meaning”, or how the lived experience of knowledge is, is as I see it, something we have to build on top of cold knowledge, as something constructed not in opposition, but in relation to reality.
But that has little to do with the philosophy of the mind/consciousness in my view. The field cannot responsibly ignore science. The explanation of what forms our first person experience of life is drawn from the facts science tells us, from the extrapolation of what those things mean, the consequences of theories and logic. The “meaning” of the first person experience in consciousness is rather irrelevant if there’s no connection to a functional meaning in nature. A meaning beyond that may still be existentially important, but it seems less philosophically grounded and more shaped by personal or spiritual preference than by reasoning from the evidence.
And even the phenomenological perspective can’t ignore that if something explains why something happens in our mind, that needs to be taken into account for describing the experience from within.
Phenomenology may start out descriptively, but it can’t be insulated from ontological explanations if it makes substantive claims about the mind.
Without taking into account the external and the scientific facts about our mind and consciousness, you could make any phenomenological point without substantiating it as anything but a narrow description of the experience.
“Why” we experience reality in the way we do, has to play an important part in forming an underlying meaning to the experience.
Yeah, I get that, and it makes sense in its own way. Thing is, it is we that seeks to know, which implies that those conditions by which we attain to what we seek, should be part and parcel of ourselves. I mean….whether we discover through investigation, or are informed through rote instruction, we are that in which the knowledge abides.
If, on the other hand, we permit intelligibility to be something we access, we lose some of that part and parcel, because we cannot determine whether our failure to acquire knowledge is our fault or the fault of thing we’re trying to know about, in that it is somehow unintelligible. We get stuck between not knowing if the thing is unintelligible, or, the thing is unintelligible because we don’t have the capacity to know anything about it.
Another thing: it must be the case that everything we know is something intelligible to us. But what of the things we don’t know? You say we discover the intelligibility of things, which supposes even those things we don’t know about, are intelligible to us, if only we’d be exposed to them. But that implicates us, in such exposition, in the very intelligibility we’re supposing as a condition of things we discover, but in truth we have no warrant for supposing we’ll find every thing we happen to discover intelligible to us.
Ok, but isn’t this just understanding with respect to time, intelligibility being given? I agree with what you say, but notice, there’s nothing contained in those simple judgements to which understanding relates. It could very well be our own thinking that is understood or not, or may be deduce other time under different conditions. Proof positive intelligibility with respect to understanding has nothing to do with things, or the discovery of intelligibility therein.
And I retort that I couldn’t possibly tell which it is. But because it is me investigating, understanding and imbuing the conclusion with correctness, I am perfectly entitled to claim things are intelligible to me for no other reason than my intelligence allows it to be so.
Agreed, and the root of my argument. Insofar as intelligibility is itself a concept, we can only say a thing has the property of intelligibility iff we put it there. Which just is to say it isn’t inherent in the thing.
BOOM!!! (Grin)
Well, now, how can they not? If concepts are ours, and the application of them is ours, how can we distinguish whether we’ve misunderstood the intelligibility we’ve discovered of the thing, or, we’ve misunderstood the effect the thing has on our intelligence? But does it matter which it is, if both of them reduce to our way of applying concepts?
On epistemic humility, very true. All knowledge a posteriori is necessarily tentative. Hume’s dilemma, the principle of induction and all that. Even so, because some inquiry is successful it is contradictory to then propose inquiry in general to be inexplicable.
But I get your point; sometimes we can’t say how we know we were right. Enter speculative metaphysics, and the logically consistent, internally complete theoretical system of human cognition, and PRESTO!!!....now we can say with justice exactly how we know and even how we don’t.
We’ve already come to terms with our philosophical druthers, but expressing disparate persuasions methinks ‘tis more entertaining than pointless.
Thank you . Sorry I missed this response earlier in the flux of experience.
Very insightful observation, and quite difficult to answer in brief. First, it is obviously true that organisms deal in perceptual wholes. One of the books I constantly cite in this respect is a 2022 publication Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter. He designates these cognitive units of meaning ‘gestalts’, and shows quite convincingly that they are essential to the cognition of even insects. So there is no contest on that count.
But why reification is problematic is a more subtle manner. As expressed in another of my essays on Michel Bitbol
As Bitbol argues in Is Consciousness Primary? 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.
Consciousness is, he says
the self-evidential medium within which all knowledge about objects, laws, and physical reality arise (here the convergence with Kant is manifest). Any attempt to treat consciousness as derivative — as some thing that “comes from” matter — therefore reverses the real order of dependence. The world of objects may be doubted, corrected, or revised; but the presence of experience itself, here and now, cannot be disconfirmed.
The lineage of this all goes back to Descartes’ celebrated cognito ergo sum, although as noted elsewhere, this has also engendered deep problems in philosophy, precisely because of Descartes’ tendency to reify res cogitans as a ‘thinking thing’.
. Sorry I missed this response earlier in the flux of experience.