owleye

excreationist...

"John Page would mean that things like planets would be represented in the mind as signals - the planets aren't inside our brain! "

I'm not sure why it is necessary to say they are signals, nor why the brain needs to be referenced here, nor even what being "inside the brain" means? However, it does make sense to say that planets are represented in some way by our mind. Indeed, I suspect there are many representations of them in our mind. Let's hope that John will clarify what he is speaking about.

owleye

John Page

No, that's what I'm seeking. If its true, Yes.

Cheers, John

John Page

owleye:

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?

John Page

owleye:

I case it is helpful, I do not prescribe to "pure intuition". Maybe you could tell me your interpretation of "empirical intuition" and how this fits with "direct experience" in your philosophy.

Cheers, John

owleye

John...

"No, it doesn't mean that!! Excreationsist's comment (the planets are not in our minds) is entirely appropriate."

I should think this would prompt you to correct your bald statement where you said that: "To be countable by the process of the mind, the two "whatevers" must exist in the mind."

"A model perhaps, might help. The notion of what a planet "is" is stored in our minds. We perceive, using our senses, a number of instances of things matching that notion. We count the number of instances we perceive."

I think there is merit to this idea, though I'd prefer you use the term "counts" rather than "is" for this purpose. Thus, we know what counts as a planet and this allows us to pick one out when we observe one. In any case, I would hope you return to your claim about countability and correct it.

"I am proposing that what the mind actually does is to compare the notion of quantity to the set of planets percieved in the mind to determine how many there are."

This baffles me completely. What is "the notion of quantity" such that I can compare it with anything at all? What does "the set of planets perceived in the mind" mean? (Since you seem to want to model this in "C", and since I'm familiar with this language, perhaps you could tell the story you wish to in that language. We can then discuss whether the model makes sense.)

"What I'm trying to achieve is a systematic explanation of what happens, not a succinct but impenetrable english language description."

This sort of comment only contributes to my "opinion" that you will only arrive at a "house of cards."

"With your sentence, we're left wondering What's a homogenous unit?, how did it get there?"

Fair enough. So let's see how you "engineer" how we count.

"What I'm trying to do is paint a picture of what is outside the mind. It is only inside the mind that external reality is perceived and typed and called names - otherwise you need to explain a whole host of mis-perceptions, not the least of which is differing opinions, some other way. Our minds provide a subjective view of the outside world, do you agree?"

We make judgments about the world that are both objective and subjective. These notions you have of being "in the mind" and "outside the mind", however, I do not understand. Is a judgment "in the mind?" Why not merely say we make judgments -- i.e., judgments are mental acts.

"Our senses and perceptions are not perfect and can be deceived. Our senses can tell us cats exist in external reality but they may be wrong from time to time. Who said our minds' categorizations of reality was arbitrary? Not me. Just imperfect."

Though I would prefer to avoid the use of "perfect" and "imperfect" here, and instead use the term "veridical" and "mistaken", I would agree that any theory of mind needs to be able to account for our ability to make errors in perception. I do believe you have enough ingredients in your theory to be able to do so, but as of yet I don't believe I've seen a coherent statement on it. My only point was that your statements seemed to be inconsistent with empirical realism. That is, you seemed to be suggesting, for example, that planets don't exist, except in the mind, but of course this is not what you meant.

"You are seeking an answer I do not precisely have, and to which there may be a number of answers. Information can be stored in many ways ranging from a literal data image to a comparative image to a set of rules or a process that encodes data."

What makes you believe that information can be stored as a "literal data image?"


"All I'm proposing with the axiomatic concept is that the mind contains 'ideals' which it compares with the subject in question."

I would dispute this interpretation, and choose a different model, but I suspect it is too deeply ingrained in your thinking to change it, so I'll merely go along with it for awhile.

"What leads you state I'm constructing a house of cards?"

As I'd previously indicated, it is because you are using terms that standardly mean one thing to mean something quite different, making it confusing. However, this would not be enough to build a house of cards. What would make me believe it is because you are engaging in a construction from the ground up with its foundation fairly arbitrarily laid out.

"A triangle may seem a simple object but I think the axiomatic concept it is a compound template comprising number of points and straight lines - but reality is more complex, how do we know it is a 2d representation? for example. Again, I don't know what the representation is in the mind but argue that it must exist in order for us to understand and communicate the concept. This overall approach is supported by the existence of purely imaginary entities (e.g. Gryphon) constructed within the mind as a combination of concepts learned from external reality (cats, lions, dragins etc.)"

It was my attempt to understand what you meant by 'template'. Unfortunately, your theory hasn't come along far enough to inform us why this term is brought into use.

"Now, to the topic. You say the mind is not abstract. Then show me one."

This indicates to me that you don't know what being abstract means. My dictionary reads as follows:

abstract: adj. 1. conceived apart from any concrete realities, specific object or actual instance -- e.g., an abstract idea. 2. expressing a quantity or character apart from any specific object or instance. 3. theoretical; not applied or practical -- e.g., abstract science. 4. abstruse -- e.g., abstract speculations.

"By "triangulation" I refer to your mind + my mind + common observations of what's in between. The third party effect can be observed in scientific experiments."

I had assumed this is what you had in mind. However, as an account of physicality, it seems to fall short.

"If there is no common reality external to the mind, what is your conception of reality - that we all exist within one single mind? Are you denying that independent of us there is a country called Canada that we can both visit and jump up and down on?"

I've indicated that real things exist apart from us. All I've been trying to point out is that nothing you've said demonstrates that.

"I'm asking about your "model" of reality."

I'm an empirical realist. What's real is what we judge to be real, empirically. It is not a model.

"If you maintain there is no physcial element to reality where does that leave the laws of physics and how do they affect the workings of the mind?"

I claimed no such thing. Real things are physical and therefore subject to physical laws (like conservation of energy-mass).

"A mental law is a law that controls the operation of the mind."

May I conclude from this that you are referring to the rationality of our minds?

"I see this as very simplistic. For example, do we experience the sun directly - no, we'd frazzle. We experience its effects at a distance and sometimes through a number of medium (e.g. reflection of light, shock waves)."

I took all this to be included within the notion of "direct." To clarify what I had in mind, I would regard these 'effects' as clues to the existence of the sun. I was discounting these 'effects' because it makes sense to do so. For example, I would say we are observing certain sub-atomic particles in a cloud chamber when in fact what we are observing are only traces of their existence. To observe an object already implies a conceptual framework around which it makes sense to count it as that object. This is all part of empirical realism.

owleye

John Page

Why? The "whatevers" (impressions of the planets) are abstractions in the mind, not the planets!!
No, the impression merely exists, it doesn't do any thing, let alone count. I don't see the need to correct my statement as to countability, why do you think so?
The notion of quantity conforms or realates to a countable set. How can we count things before they've been identified (in the mind) as belonging to the set in question? Ergo, counting takes place afer identification. I can send you a paper with diagrams on the engineering part.
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?
Your terminology may be better, although I'm not familiar with the word veridical. As to mistakes in perception, that's a wide area but here's an example from my web site.
"Truths can contain an element of subjectivity yet still provide practical benefit. By way of example, there are three men standing in front of a window made of reflective glass. 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. The first man moves to where the second is standing and vice versa and they acknowledge each others’ views. The third man declares that there is an inexplicable difference in the colors. 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. The third man is unreconciled and cannot understand how yellow can be green. The spirit of Reconciliationism is to observe all five persons (the three above plus yourself and an imaginary god)."
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.
I pride myself on not being dogmatic - the point is to have a better understanding, not to be "right". I'd be grateful if you could provide a source/issue that I should read. I think you suggested Husserl/Brentano before and I haven't had time to read that thoroughly.
Oh, but it is very deliberate with an ontology and epistemology requiring no a priori assumptions. Indeed, the ontology recognizes the issue of arbitrary starting points, especially in light of our subjective observations. This is spelled out in the paper I mentioned which I'd be happy to supply.
I'm not sure where the issue is here. Non-concrete, agreed. 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? 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.
Do the examples in this post help or do you need more?
What does the judging here, either its real or its not? Of course we can lump everything into the category real (and indeed I do!) but in agreeing that observations are made subjectively, are you willing to concede that there is a "something" that contains the subjective view? The "something" is what I am calling the mind. What do you deem it to otherwise be and what do you name it?
Well, the process of the mind at least. Saying it is rational requires additional definitions and is a subjective opinion.
I'm a little uneasy that "direct knowledge" covers indirect knowledge until its discovered to be indirect.

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. (Now we're getting to Identity theory). But then what is obvious to one person may not be so to another.

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. Thus, the concept "infinity" is more abstract than "number" et. This approach explains certain logical contradictions and is described in my paper formalizing certain aspects of reconciliationism...

Cheers, John

PS. Rigor is rewarding and I thank you for your posts.

excreationist

owleye:
Thanks for replying.

You wrote this to John Page earlier...
...In any case, the term 'concept' should be sufficient to represent what you are driving at. That you associate it with a 'template' however, I'm suspicious that you know what you are talking about. Are you thinking of a template as a kind of image, or would it be a set of rules? If it is the former, I think you will have difficulty with this...
Neither. These concepts are encoded using a neural network. I'm planning on explaining this (using my java applet) in the next day or so. These concepts are "patterns" - and neural networks are good at learning patterns - they can be given a few specific examples and automatically infer the pattern. e.g. they can be shown photos of males and females and told which is which then they can classify unseen pictures based on the patterns they have learnt.

So that I can have something to work with, what represents the template for a triangle?...
The word "triangle" is what represents (or symbolizes) our template for a triangle... the template itself would be a series of "weights" in a neural network.

excreationist

owleye:
"Back then not much was known about the brain and even less was known about artificial intelligence:"

I suspect that cognitive science makes considerable use of Husserl (and Kant), though I also understand that Hume is one of their heroes as well.
So physics makes considerable use Newton's equations, but does that mean that science should limit itself to his theories (or "laws")? I'm not saying that the ideas of those philosophers you mentioned earlier (Husserl, d. 1938, and Brentano, d. 1917) are worthless... I'm saying that their arguments need to be evaluated in light of new evidence. (They didn't have a very good understand of how dependent the "mind" is on the brain back then)

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 - or lose knowledge of who we are - or believe that our loved ones are "imposters" (because part of our brain isn't triggering the usual emotions though the person is still being recognized)... and our emotions and perceptions can be affected using drugs... (e.g. apparently with the drug DMT you can lose consciousness of yourself and have mystical journeys and see "beings" - DMT is the chemical that triggers dreams I think) There are also studies where epileptic patients had their brains separated (the corpus callum(?) was cut). Then they looked at words in from of them where one eye saw something different... they were asked what one of their eyes saw but they didn't know. Their voice could only express what the other eye could see. Their hand could write down what that first eye saw though. But I think over time they two hemispheres start communicating properly again. I've read stories about patients who had one arm trying to hurt someone and the other arm try and resist. <a href="http://members.ozemail.com.au/~wenke/illusions/colours.gif" target="_blank">Here</a> you can test the effects of left/right brain conflict for yourself. And <a href="http://members.ozemail.com.au/~wenke/illusions/scint.htm" target="_blank">here</a> is an interesting picture which was only discovered in 1994. Perhaps in the future they will be able to explain it - as they have already done with most other optical illusions.

There is also a thing that can happen in stroke patients where they are only aware of one side of things - and they can be convinced that one of their arms isn't theirs! And our perception of motion has been studied fairly well (<a href="http://www.hhmi.org/senses/b210.html" target="_blank">3 page article</a>). Near the end of that article it talks about how monkeys would believe that things are moving in a certain direction just because certain neurons were stimulated. I have only read a few articles on this - I haven't formally studied biology or anything. But anyway, I think we have learnt many things about the mind through our study of the brain. Books by materialist scientists about consciousness would have a lot more information about this.

"But people would probably benefit more from learning about more recent things, such as neurophenomenology, which takes into account the latest brain research rather than relying on the intuitions of old-fashioned philosophers."

This might be true. Perhaps you could cite some article I should be reading or some author who has some particularly important insights in this area.
Well earlier in this post I talked about some things that showed how physical the workings of our "mind" are. And how cognitive neuroscientists(?) can explain many optical illusions that we experience. <a href="http://www2b.abc.net.au/aftershock/posts/topic12497.shtm" target="_blank">Here</a> is a New Scientist article that exposes some of the limitations of our awareness and having limited awareness makes it more believable that our awareness happens using ordinary physical processes. BTW, are you a materialist or a dualist or a epiphenomenalist or what? Or are you completely agnostic?

I couldn't make out the objection you had to my criticism of John's notion of abstract entities representing something else. What was that objection? Did you understand John as saying that numbers are meaningless, or only that numbers are meaningless if they don't represent something?
"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.

Because you used "refer" rather than "represent", am I to assume that these two terms mean the same thing?
Yeah, basically "represents", "symbolizes" and "refers to" mean the same thing.

...Are you suggesting that the meaninglessness of numbers (in their general sense) is meaningless in the same way that your invented word is meaningless
I'm saying that without "2" being defined as a symbol for a pair of objects (or any other concept), that symbol is meaningless.

(or are you reading John to say that numbers are meaningful because they refer to something)?
yes.

"I think we only see an approximation of the physical world, and this approximation can be corrupted... (and be totally wrong) would you agree?"

Again, my position is not in consideration here. With respect to your "seeing an approximation of the physical world" and that such seeing could be "totally wrong" I see it as rather combining two ideas that are in conflict with each other. How do you resolve this?
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.

Ierrellus

excreationist,

Physically, dreams are a product of the neurotransmitter acetalcholine, which is emitted from neurons in the pons in the brain stem. During REM, two important neurotransmitters, serotonin and norepinephine, are basically shut down. Dopamine interrupts REM during the process.

I agree that this is an interesting and provocative brain state. It does show how information in the brain is processed when there is no feedback from sensory data. It also indicates that norepinephrine and serotonin have something to do with clarity of thought. The surrealism of dreams suggests a piecemeal collation of memory and desire.

Medical research has also indicated serotonin and norepinephrine in metally illness and has offered some stability to patients given medication that effects the quantities of these neurotransmitters at the synapse.

Is normal reality and clear thinking determined by neurotransmitters?

Ierrellus

PAX

[ June 18, 2002: Message edited by: Ierrellus ]</p>

John Page

Excre:

Cool. I'm looking forward to this. I've looked @ neural nets, taxonomers etc. going way back and am interested to see how my architecture vision maps onto this (or not as the case may be!)

Cheers, John