John Page

Ierrellus:

Hmmm, I wonder if this points to a mind/body definition that the mind is that which dreams, the body is that which does not. But sharks do not sleep (not with the same behaviour pattern as humans, at least).

I wish I' paid more attention as to source but I read about an experiment on cats that removed the motor inhibitions that normally accompany sleep. The cat raced around chasing, presumably, mice that it was dreaming.

Normal? Hard to say. Only by neurotransmitters? I don't think so - I find that my emotional state influences my (perceived) clarity and ability to concentrate.

Cheers, John

A3

Hi Excreationist
Things said in here have been known to pickpockets since we have pockets.

Regards
Adriaan

owleye

John....

"Signal, of course!! It's a term used to describe how information is transmitted from one place to another. How else would the representations of the planets get to our minds?"

I think this is terribly confusing. Rather than go into an elaborate analysis of all the confusions in the above, let me merely suggest that a better term than 'signal' would be 'sign' as a mental representation of the number of planets. Since '9' can be considered a sign representing, among other things, the number of planets, it does make some sense to consider signs as representations. However, calling it a sign (or for that matter a signal) doesn't signficantly clarify it, since it doesn't reveal much more than what being a representation is.

I leave for another discussion the value of bringing in 'information' into the discussion.

owleye

John Page

I think signal was the term introduced to denote the "physical" manifestation of the representation of the planets. The actual token or whatever we are going to call it would be encoded within the signal/s or signal sequence.

However, let me distinguish between a representation and a token. A representation is a likeness, a direct image if you will, from which can be unpacked the characteristics of what is being represented. A token, on the other hand, is an arbitrary symbol used to denote the "thing". So, if the letter "a" here is the thing being represented, this "a" here could be a good copy shifted in space. We could use "A" to represent the original object in upper case form. We could continue this game by using "x" as an arbitrary token to denote the general case of a letter of the alphabet etc.

Hope the above helps - I'm aware it may be confusing because letters are symbols to start with but the keyboard's all I have right now.

In the example above, I would consider "9" as being the symbol that represented the quantity of things that fit the abstract axiomatic concept "planet" contained in the mind.

Sure, you might wish to look at Information Theory if you're not already familiar and the way that telecommunications systems are practically organized to covey differnet types of information from one place to another.

Cheers, John

owleye

John...

"Why? The "whatevers" (impressions of the planets) are abstractions in the mind, not the planets!!"

I think you are falling into a quagmire. This suggests that we cannot count the planets, only the impressions we have of them in our mind? Moreover, you seem to be suggesting that impressions are abstractions, which I would dispute. The notion that when we perceive something an impression is created in our mind is due to Hume. Hume would not, however, have called this an abstraction. An abstraction is what reason (our intellect) makes of a number of comparable impressions, drawing out the relevant features that allows what it is an impression of to be recognized for what it is. The abstraction is a product of our intellect and is what is referred to as a concept by other thinkers.

"No, the impression merely exists, it doesn't do any thing, let alone count."

This use of 'count' is not what is implied by my use, though there is, of course, some relationship to it. Since it appears to be foreign to you, I'll try not to bring it up again.

"The notion of quantity conforms or realates to a countable set."

Why limit it the "notion of quantity" to a countable set?

"How can we count things before they've been identified (in the mind) as belonging to the set in question?"

I suppose I will have to live with your use of 'set' here, but if it more or less means the same thing as 'collection' or 'aggregate' then I suppose I can't complain. (My general impression is that 'set' is the term mathematical logicians use in what is known as 'set theory', and as such carries a lot of logical baggage with it.)

"Ergo, counting takes place afer identification. I can send you a paper with diagrams on the engineering part."

Based on your theory this may be true, but in my experience children learn to count long before they can identify things that can be counted.

"Yes, a judgement is in the mind. Mental acts take place in the mind. I believe that the mind is the abstract manifestation of the brain/nervous system (but do not discount that the processes of mind might occur in other organs also). Where do you conceive that a judgement is formed?"

This fails to tell me what being "in the mind" is. I can understand that fish reside in a lake or that peas are in a pod, but I don't understand what it means for a judgment to be "in the mind." This I believe is crucial to the question you wish to ask about the boundary (border) between the mind and the body. (Of course, I also object to your use of mind as an abstraction.)

"Truths can contain an element of subjectivity yet still provide practical benefit."

I suspect this sort of statement will cause you to argue in circles.

"By way of example, there are three men standing in front of a window made of reflective glass." (A mirror?)

"One man says the glass is green, the second says yellow and the third says it definitely has some kind of color but he cannot determine what."

Let me assume that the first two men are making objective judgments. If so, at least one of them will be wrong. Neither would be wrong, of course, if the judgments were subjective. I presume the third person is being objective with respect to the glass having some color (presumably as opposed to being clear).

"The first man moves to where the second is standing and vice versa and they acknowledge each others’ views."

I take it this means that both of them would consider themselves wrong if they had originally made an objective judgment about the color of the glass

"The third man declares that there is an inexplicable difference in the colors."

This would probably be better "declared" by his regarding the different judgments of the others as unexplained (rather than unexplainable).

"The first two men continue to investigate their differences and discover that the refractive properties of glass give rise to different perceptions depending on one’s standpoint, explaining the contradiction."

Presumably they are now in a position to make another objective judgment (that could be wrong as well). However, there is quite a bit left out of this (since it seems to depend on a common understanding of the 'refractive properties' of the glass and the color that is perceived). (BTW, I think the use of 'contradiction' is misplaced here -- 'opposing' is probably a better term.)

"The third man is unreconciled and cannot understand how yellow can be green."

This seems overly dramatic. Most folks have little difficulty with the idea that mistakes can be made in judgment.


"The spirit of Reconciliationism is to observe all five persons (the three above plus yourself and an imaginary god)."

I'd label this so much claptrap (adding to my feeling that a house of cards is being constructed).

Despite that this is an example of what you mean by the value of the subjectivity of truth I confess not seeing the connection. What judgments were true in the above and what made it so?

"I should clarify. I'm refering to sense data at the border of the mind, this would be an exact image of external reality at that point in the process of perception. Perhaps when I used the word literal I meant actual."

Here again i don't know why you need 'external' as a modifier of reality (notwithstanding that this is part of your theory), but are you imagining that the reversed image in the back of the retina of the eye is not part of "external reality?" Would this image be the kind of image you are speaking about? Is it a two-dimensional image?

More significantly, however, since input to the eyes is brought to us by way of light waves and that images (presumably as impressions) are formed somewhere (say in the brain), what constitutes the output of this process? There doesn't seem to be any, unless, that is, you think the mind is a Cartesian theater which projects that image onto some screen and this is what we see. If this is anything like your model of the mind, it seems to resemble a camera, with a film that captures what its lens is exposed to, but with some mysterious other capacity to see what it records.

"Oh, but it is very deliberate with an ontology and epistemology requiring no a priori assumptions."

We'll see.

"I'm not sure where the issue is here. Non-concrete, agreed."

I'm not sure you understand what being concrete is though.

"Definition #2 runs into problems though - I don't consider an abstract entity as arbitrarily apart from a specific object or instance, what purpose could this serve?"

This may only mean that you don't think (mind-independent) abstract objects exist. Its meaning, however, refers to properties considered generally and without consideration of their specific instantiation.

"Information is abstract, it phenomenally exists but its comprehension is contextual, i.e. you can't tell exactly its meaning without knowing what it represents."

This is obscure. Information, considered generally, is abstract. Information about a specific entity, however, is concrete.

"What does the judging here, either its real or its not?"

We do the judging. If you don't like this, I could regard the intellect (to the extent it is involved in recognition and discrimination) as performing this. (Since 'mind' is what you have in mind, I would concede this also fits.)

"Of course we can lump everything into the category real (and indeed I do!)..."

This is unhelpful, I think, and contributes to the house of cards I think you are constructing.


"...but in agreeing that observations are made subjectively,"

I would concede only to the idea that judgements to the extent that they are observations can be subjective but they can also be objective. In describing them, we can usually tell them apart from the language used: objective language is largely propositional (e.g., such and such is the case) whereas subjective language is largely probabalistic (e.g., such and such seems to be the case).

"...are you willing to concede that there is a "something" that contains the subjective view?"

To regard a "view" as subjective merely means that the subject's view is not to be taken objectively. When a view is declared to be subjective it would come as no surprise that others would have differing views. It is only with objective views that real disputes can arise.

"The "something" is what I am calling the mind."

I have no quarrel with the idea that a subject has a mind or that a mind cannot exist except in the sense in which its acts are attributable to a subject.

"Well, the process of the mind at least. Saying it is rational requires additional definitions and is a subjective opinion."

The reason for drawing in rationality had to do with your introduction of mental laws. Rationality is often associated with (on the one hand) acting in accordance with principles or rules of conduct and (on the other hand) having beliefs that are logically consistent. (i.e., being logical is a pre-requisite for rationality).

"I'm a little uneasy that "direct knowledge" covers indirect knowledge until its discovered to be indirect."

I don't believe this is inconsistent with what I said.

"I guess I'm puzzled that I'm having difficulty communicating that the concept number can only be known indirectly through the concept quantity and below that the concept of type of thing."

I would suggest not using a model that depends so much on temporal/causal dependencies. I think you would benefit by trying to understand the linguistic or semantic dependencies. For example, the relationship between numbers and quantities would, for you if I understand it, be:

Numbers are quantities. (You should go on to tell us what kind of quantity numbers are, if as part of your theory not all quantities are numbers.)

I haven't read where you've told us about us about 'type' so I can't put it in context.

"What I'm proposing is not a "Russellian" ready categorized universe. I'm proposing that each mind categorizes and navigates its environment using layers of increasingly abstract concepts."

I don't think this is Russell's view. In any case, what a ready-made categorized universe might be is what our culture (by way of our parents and other teachers) transmits to us. This is not inconsistent with what you propose, but it seems your theory would have to provide a way for the mind to organize the world in consideration of the cultural context.


"Thus, the concept "infinity" is more abstract than "number" et."

What makes it so that 'infinity' is in a greater layer of abstraction than 'number'. In some contexts, infinity is a number, making number more abstract.

owleye

owleye

excreationist...

"These concepts are encoded using a neural network."

No doubt this is the case, but what have we learned about a concept from this association.


"These concepts are 'patterns'"

This is not more explanatory than calling them 'templates'. What the debate is about is whether these patterns are represented descriptively or pictorially (or both). You apparently think neither is the case. As such I think you owe an account of how a pattern is represented in a neural network and, from that representation, what can be said about it.

"The word "triangle" is what represents (or symbolizes) our template for a triangle."

I'd say the word 'triangle' is a symbolic representation that english speakers use to refer to either the general concept of a triangle or to instances of triangles. However, I will consider your view as indicating that individual instances of triangles in turn merely represent the general concept. This doesn't tell us much about what I consider to be the tricky question of what the representation of the general triangle is.


".. the template itself would be a series of "weights" in a neural network."

However, the question is more specific than this. From your theory, what may I expect from this neural network given that it has learned what a triangle is?

owleye

owleye

excreationist...

"In any case, what does the study of the brain tell you about the mind?"

"Well they've found out many things - e.g. we can become unable to recognize faces (only the components of the faces) if a certain area is damaged ..."

Let me assume that all of what you wrote can be summarized by suggesting that we have learned that the mind is a product of the brain and different brain states produce different states of mind. This may be more than what you intend, but it doesn't really matter to the point that the knowledge gained about the relationship of the brain to the mind depends on a first person account of what the mind is undergoing. If we merely looked at the brain without ever having checked in with a mind that was produced by it, we could in no way make that correlation. Indeed, even though anesthetists know a great deal about how to make someone lose consciousness, or dentists know how to relieve pain, that which is lost or relieved remains an utter mystery in physical terms. Indeed, from a physical viewpoint, we can only localize or isolate areas in the brain as affecting other areas in the brain. The association of an area to some mental activity depends entirely on first person accounts (though behavior may of course be involved that is similarly suggestive of mental activity (or not), but which is not different in kind from neurophysical behavior).


"2", "3423", "23412", etc, are meaningless symbols unless they represent something else. i.e. quantities of a generic object or other symbols or apples or an activity or something.

This seems overly restrictive. Why shouldn't we be able to count, much the way children learn to count to 100 and beyond, without having to be in a position of counting collections of objects. You seem to be suggesting this would be a meaningless exercise.

"Well we use neural nets for reasoning. They are fairly fault tolerant. e.g. if we see a flash of black (because we're a bit blinded by the sun) we'd probably ignore it. Sometimes people can be totally wrong a lot of the time - e.g. when they have schizophrenia... but our perceptions and memory recall, etc, are only mistaken some of the time."

Ok. This tells me how we can be "totally wrong." In what sense then do our perceptions approximate reality? When we look up and see the moon, how does this provide only an approximation to reality? Is what we are seeing only approximately the moon?

owleye

A3

Hi Owleye

Would you be horrified at the suggestion that maybe the mind could be influencing the brain? We assume that the brain is there first in time, but could, at the first breath, a mind take over and become first in goal? If we knew (I don’t) e.g. that the brain cells of a certain animal species are identical to ours than we could assume that the difference of mind between animals and humans does not rest in the brain.

Regards
Adriaan

Synaesthesia

First person accounts are produced by vocal emissions coordinated by the brain. In short, they are only a convinient way of determining the brain's organizational state.

Your assumption that brains cannot inform us of mental states is clearly false. Obviously they can. In fact, (thus far) it is not possible to ascertain mental states in any way except through the brain's function. There is no such thing as direct first person access to the mind without the brain - for all purposes there is nothing BUT the brain.

John Page

Yes. What do you otherwise propose enacts the counting process other than the brain? You seem to have agreed that the planets are not actually inside the brain.
It isn't a countable set, it relates to a countable set. Consider that there is a 1:n relationship between the concept quantity and countable sets.
When I refered to the ability to identify things I did not mean to give the impression that they could be identified by name etc, merely that they could be identified by our powers of perception i.e. differentiated from their surroundings.
A judgement is a process and its result can also be refered to as a judgement. Can we agree judgements can be made within the brain?
You missed my point - the color is a subjective observation. Assuming the same physiology, all observers will get seemingly contradictory results depending on thier position.
Possibly true but not my point. If you use this example as an analogy on philosophical viewpoints and observers, doesn't it indicate a strong need to place yourself in the mind (or perhaps I should say similar brain state) of the other person? Otherwise how can you become objective about the situation?
But I liked it. Anyway, claptrap and houses of cards may be just the existential approach that is needed.
None, the truth is subjective. Truth is manufactured in your brain.
OK, how would you characterize all that is on the "human" side of the senses and all that is "outside" the senses?
I'm not sure that you will unless I send you a copy and you read it.
Please define concrete esp. viz. physical/non-physical.
Untrue, I do think they exist, otherwise how could we know them. We're arguing over form/substance as per Parmenides and Socrates in the Third Man debate where Parmenides challenged Socrates to show him where the 'ideal' man was. Socrates was unable to answer - but I am venturing that the ideal (or "axiomatic concept" although you dislike this term) is an abstract in the mind.
Where do you consider "Information, considered generally", that is abstract resides?
So, they're subjective, right?
Now this statement is a house of cards!! You seem to like Kant yet I do not think he would concur on this (Critique of Pure Reason).
I think I understand your point and partially agree, however, IMO in the final analysis semantics is a go between.
Over time, he was in many minds on how to interpret his findings. The theory of types certainly assumes that every "thing" has intrinsic properties, as opposed to properties inferred by the mind.
I concede that my comment only strictly applies in math, where Cantor defined infinity as a special kind of number.

Cheers, John