I will tend to violate mores, but I do not wish to seem disrespectful of the culture here. In the future I will more strictly limit the scope of the topic, but considering it was an introduction...I just wished to spread out questions from myself rather than trivia about myself.
I don’t think I am asking the wrong question. Such is the best reply I can formulate against the charge. As for my understanding of the established science, I thought I was reasonably versed, but in such a forum as this I am highly skeptical of my own consumption of available knowledge. But from experience, I am usually considered knowledgeable in fields of psychology I am familiar with the textbook junk like Skinner, Freud, Jung, etc.. and with,e.g., Daniel Dennett, Aronson, and Lakoff , but that doesn’t make me feel more or less qualified about asking the question I proposed. In astoronomy I have gone through material ranging from Chandrasekhar to Halton Arp, and the view that the stars are subject to, rather than direct gravitational phenomena is prevalent, i.e., stars act like rocks and not like living beings.
Please elaborate on how ‘realness’ is unclear in its usage. I would like to know the more acceptable language. The concept is clear in my mind and I thought the diction was commonly accepted.
If the subjects I have brought up are ill-framed then I would be happy to be directed to the more encompassing discussion.
I have browsed much of what you directed me to. The structure of this site is a bit alien to my cognitive organization, but the material contained within is highly familiar.
Alright, let’s start at the easy part concerning those questions:
Considering the psychological model of five senses we are taught since grade school is there a categorical difference in our ability to logically perceive that 2+2=4 vs perceiving the temperature is decreasing?
Yes. In a large set of possible categorical distinctions, they are in different categories. The true, most accurate answer is that they are not exactly the same. This was obvious to you before you even formulated the question, I suspect. They are at slightly different points in the large space of possible neural patterns. Whether they are “in the same category” or not depends on the purposes of the category.
This question needs to be reduced, and can be reduced in hundreds of ways from what I see, depending on whether you want to know about the source of the information, the source of our cognitive identification of the information/stimuli, etc.
The deeper question being is the realness of logic (and possibly other mental faculties not being considered here) the same as the realness of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch?
“Sight” is a large mental paintbrush handle for a large process of input and data transfer that gets turned into stimuli that gets interpreted that gets perceived and identified by other parts of the brain and so on. It is a true, real physical process of quarks moving about in certain identifiable (though difficultly so) patterns in response to an interaction of light with (some stuff, “magic”, I don’t know enough about eye microbiology to say how exactly this works). Each step of the process has material reality.
By contrast, it is experimentally verifiable—there is an external referent within reality—that two “objects” put with two “objects” will have the same spacetime configuration as four “objects”. There is a true, real physical process by which light reflected on something your mind counts as “four objects” is the exact same light that would be reflected if your mind counted the same objects as “two objects” plus “two other objects”. “2 + 2 = 4” is also a grand mental paintbrush in a different language using different words—mathematics—to represent and point to the external referent of what you observe when two and two are four.
At this point, I no longer see any mysterious “realness” in either concept. One is a reliable, predictable pattern of interactions between various particles, the other is a reliable, predictable pattern of interactions between various particles. At the same time, on a higher level of abstraction, one is seen some way to identify expected “number” (another giant mental paintbrush handle) of things, while another is some way in which our minds obtain information about the outside world and gather evidence that we are convinced is entangled with large patterns of other particles through causality.
If I’m going too fast on some things or if you dislike my potentially-very-condescending tone of writing, my apologies and please mention it so that I can adjust my behavior / writing appropriately.
The other questions afterwards become progressively much harder to work on without a solid grounding in reductionism and other techniques, and in particular for the first interrogation on a “fundamentally alive” universe, is very much at the edge of my current comfort-zone in terms of ability to reduce, decompose, dissolve and resolve questions.
Unfortunately, there are also a great many things that might get in the way of resolving these questions—for an absurd example, if you hold a strong, unshakable belief that there is a huge scientific conspiracy hiding the “fact” that outer space does not exist and everything above the sky is a hologram while earth is actually one giant flat room (rather than a round ball) that warps around in spacetime to make us believe that it’s round, then I’m afraid I would likely find myself very much at a loss as to how to proceed in the discussion.
Edit: As for the stream-of-consciousness matter, it’s not about the widespread coverage of subject(s), but more a comment on the writing style / continuity. Basically, more organized writing and words with clearer delimitation, continuation, and links between topics / sub-topics that don’t have a continuous progression are indicators of a more in-depth analysis of one’s own words and thoughts, while the stream-of-consciousness style is more difficult for the readers when engaging in conversations that seek to attain a higher degree of truth.
I understand that categories are mental constructs which facilitate thinking , but do not themselves occur outside the mind. The question meant to find objections to the categorization of logic as a sense. Taken as a sense there is a frame, the category, which allows it to be viewed as analogous to other senses and interrelated to the thinking process as senses are. In the discussion concerning making the most favorable choice on Monty Hall the contestant who does not see the logical choice is “blind”. When considering the limits of logical reason they can be be seen to possibly parallel the limits of visual observation- how much of the universe is impervious to being logically understood?
No need to address qualia.
Will try to constrain myself to more concise, well-defined queries and comments.
I will tend to violate mores, but I do not wish to seem disrespectful of the culture here. In the future I will more strictly limit the scope of the topic, but considering it was an introduction...I just wished to spread out questions from myself rather than trivia about myself.
I don’t think I am asking the wrong question. Such is the best reply I can formulate against the charge. As for my understanding of the established science, I thought I was reasonably versed, but in such a forum as this I am highly skeptical of my own consumption of available knowledge. But from experience, I am usually considered knowledgeable in fields of psychology I am familiar with the textbook junk like Skinner, Freud, Jung, etc.. and with,e.g., Daniel Dennett, Aronson, and Lakoff , but that doesn’t make me feel more or less qualified about asking the question I proposed. In astoronomy I have gone through material ranging from Chandrasekhar to Halton Arp, and the view that the stars are subject to, rather than direct gravitational phenomena is prevalent, i.e., stars act like rocks and not like living beings.
Please elaborate on how ‘realness’ is unclear in its usage. I would like to know the more acceptable language. The concept is clear in my mind and I thought the diction was commonly accepted.
If the subjects I have brought up are ill-framed then I would be happy to be directed to the more encompassing discussion.
I have browsed much of what you directed me to. The structure of this site is a bit alien to my cognitive organization, but the material contained within is highly familiar.
Please help me with the questions.
Alright, let’s start at the easy part concerning those questions:
Yes. In a large set of possible categorical distinctions, they are in different categories. The true, most accurate answer is that they are not exactly the same. This was obvious to you before you even formulated the question, I suspect. They are at slightly different points in the large space of possible neural patterns. Whether they are “in the same category” or not depends on the purposes of the category.
This question needs to be reduced, and can be reduced in hundreds of ways from what I see, depending on whether you want to know about the source of the information, the source of our cognitive identification of the information/stimuli, etc.
“Sight” is a large mental paintbrush handle for a large process of input and data transfer that gets turned into stimuli that gets interpreted that gets perceived and identified by other parts of the brain and so on. It is a true, real physical process of quarks moving about in certain identifiable (though difficultly so) patterns in response to an interaction of light with (some stuff, “magic”, I don’t know enough about eye microbiology to say how exactly this works). Each step of the process has material reality.
If you are referring to the “experience”-ness, that magical something of the sense that cannot possibly exist in machines which grants color-ness to colors and image-ness to vision and cold-ness and so forth, you are asking a question about qualia, and that question is very different and very hard to answer, if it does really need an answer at all.
By contrast, it is experimentally verifiable—there is an external referent within reality—that two “objects” put with two “objects” will have the same spacetime configuration as four “objects”. There is a true, real physical process by which light reflected on something your mind counts as “four objects” is the exact same light that would be reflected if your mind counted the same objects as “two objects” plus “two other objects”. “2 + 2 = 4” is also a grand mental paintbrush in a different language using different words—mathematics—to represent and point to the external referent of what you observe when two and two are four.
At this point, I no longer see any mysterious “realness” in either concept. One is a reliable, predictable pattern of interactions between various particles, the other is a reliable, predictable pattern of interactions between various particles. At the same time, on a higher level of abstraction, one is seen some way to identify expected “number” (another giant mental paintbrush handle) of things, while another is some way in which our minds obtain information about the outside world and gather evidence that we are convinced is entangled with large patterns of other particles through causality.
If I’m going too fast on some things or if you dislike my potentially-very-condescending tone of writing, my apologies and please mention it so that I can adjust my behavior / writing appropriately.
The other questions afterwards become progressively much harder to work on without a solid grounding in reductionism and other techniques, and in particular for the first interrogation on a “fundamentally alive” universe, is very much at the edge of my current comfort-zone in terms of ability to reduce, decompose, dissolve and resolve questions.
Unfortunately, there are also a great many things that might get in the way of resolving these questions—for an absurd example, if you hold a strong, unshakable belief that there is a huge scientific conspiracy hiding the “fact” that outer space does not exist and everything above the sky is a hologram while earth is actually one giant flat room (rather than a round ball) that warps around in spacetime to make us believe that it’s round, then I’m afraid I would likely find myself very much at a loss as to how to proceed in the discussion.
Edit: As for the stream-of-consciousness matter, it’s not about the widespread coverage of subject(s), but more a comment on the writing style / continuity. Basically, more organized writing and words with clearer delimitation, continuation, and links between topics / sub-topics that don’t have a continuous progression are indicators of a more in-depth analysis of one’s own words and thoughts, while the stream-of-consciousness style is more difficult for the readers when engaging in conversations that seek to attain a higher degree of truth.
Thanks for clarifying.
I understand that categories are mental constructs which facilitate thinking , but do not themselves occur outside the mind. The question meant to find objections to the categorization of logic as a sense. Taken as a sense there is a frame, the category, which allows it to be viewed as analogous to other senses and interrelated to the thinking process as senses are. In the discussion concerning making the most favorable choice on Monty Hall the contestant who does not see the logical choice is “blind”. When considering the limits of logical reason they can be be seen to possibly parallel the limits of visual observation- how much of the universe is impervious to being logically understood?
No need to address qualia.
Will try to constrain myself to more concise, well-defined queries and comments.