467 thoughts on “Bad Materialism”

1. Apologies for the extra work I have allowed WJM to cause me to cause others to do.

2. William J. Murray: They’re just often not the kind of points you’d prefer I make and defend.

   I’d like us both to write a program that will test the idea that psi can effect random number generators. Would you like to collaborate on that or not?

3. OMagain: I’d like us both to write a program that will test the idea that psi can effect random number generators. Would you like to collaborate on that or not?

   Why on earth would I want to do that?

4. I moved a post to guano that I thought breached the rule against personal attacks.

5. William J. Murray:
   Alan said:

   Well, the issue for me is that you never make a point.

   Of course I do.

   Technically correct and I withdraw the criticism. What I should have said is that you never make a point that you are prepared to defend or clarify.

   They’re just often not the kind of points you’d prefer I make and defend.

   William, we had a fair and honest exchange about yoghurt. Yet here you are telling me what I prefer. I really don’t mind what you want to say and whether you defend it. If I’m interested, I may comment on it. If I agree or disagree, I’m likely to say so. I have no agenda here other than defending the right and opportunity to the free exchange of ideas.

6. William J. Murray:
   EL said:

   Yes, EL. Whenever the psi effect might possibly be from some form of procedural bias, it’s “rigorous” to conclude that psi has not been demonstrated. I understand.

   Obviously not. What is RIGOROUS is to use statistical techniques and methodological checks on bias and SNR.

   If the signal is there, good methodology will make it stronger. If it isn’t, good methodology will make it weaker. That’s one of the most important checks you can do. One day, when you really do want to know what I think, instead of assuming it, ask me about funnel plots.

7. William,

   Your resistance to rigor is noted.

   It’s something you share with many other woo-meisters.

8. William J. Murray: Why on earth would I want to do that?

   Exactly so.

9. William J. Murray: Once again, the point I’m actually making is lost to the cognitive reinterpretations of those insisting I am making some other point.

   All those skeptical about your powers. You have them literally jumping through hoops. Spoon bending is for amateurs.

   Oh well, I am learning how to be “good skeptic.” Whatever that’s worth.

10. “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.”

    ― Albert Einstein

    So. Let’s hear it for energy monism. Vibrationism and Vibrationists?

11. Physicists in Japan have shown experimentally that a particle can be made to do work simply by receiving information, rather than energy.

    In this way they could gradually raise the potential of the particle even though they had not imparted any energy to it directly.

    And he speculates that molecular processes occurring in nature might already be converting information to energy in some way. “The message is that processes taking place on the nanoscale are completely different from those we are familiar with, and that information is part of that picture.”

    http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2010/nov/19/information-converted-to-energy

    Crackpottery, no doubt. These people should be banned from science before they can do real harm.

12. keiths: I call it perception because the inference is usually veridical in “real life”.

    I see you take the existence of an inference to be implied by the fact that something seems to us to be moving when it might be the case that nothing is moving. You’ve got two situations with similar neurophysiology. It seems to us in both cases that something is moving, but it’s only true that what seems to be moving actually IS moving in one of the two cases. And you take from that that our perception is inferential. But again, that’s just a matter of what you mean by that term. For example, Neil might require inferences to be conscious.

    Whether or not perception is direct is largely a matter of definitions. That’s true of philosophical positions generally: they aren’t resolved by experiments: if they could be, they’d be scientific hypotheses.

    Remind me what the red ball illusion is that you referred to.

13. Mung, the researchers are legit. The writers of the article could replace Denyse.

14. walto,

    Again, it isn’t our working definition of “inference” that matters.

    You can’t have direct perception of motion when there is no motion available to be perceived. That’s true regardless of how we define “inference”.

    Remind me what the red ball illusion is that you referred to.

    Here’s how I described it above:

    Consider a very simple motion illusion in which a red circle at position A on the screen disappears at the same time that an identical red circle appears at nearby position B. The stimulus is actually compatible with two interpretations:

    1. A red ball at position A poofed out of existence at the same time that an identical-looking red ball poofed into existence at position B.

    2. A red ball moved from position A to position B.

    Our visual systems choose #2, and that’s a good thing. Objects usually persist in real life, so it’s better on average to bet that way.

    You can find some videos of similar illusions here.

15. keiths is confused.

    We have direct apprehension of things. Like coffee cups. Motion is not a thing.

16. Mung,

    Could you try a little harder to be relevant? Thanks.

17. If “things” are stabilized in the visual field they disappear. Probably related to the constant motion of our eyes.

18. You can’t have direct perception of motion when there is no motion available to be perceived. That’s true regardless of how we define “inference”.

    I don’t think anybody would disagree with that, anyhow.

19. But when the same perception of motion is produced veridically, would you call that “direct perception”?

    If the presence or absence of motion itself makes no difference to the perception, how can it be anything but indirect?

20. keiths:
    Mung, Could you try a little harder to be relevant? Thanks.

    I’ll do my utmost to follow your shining example. So no.

21. keiths:
    But when the same perception of motion is produced veridically, would you call that “direct perception”?

    If the presence or absence of motion itself makes no difference to the perception, how can it be anything but indirect?

    Direct perception is about what it means to perceive something. Backers understand that there are countless intermediaries between Mung’s coffee cup or your person walking behind the fence and the seeing of those things. But they deny that any of those intermediaries, in spite of their importance to the causal chain, are themselves perceived. Their opponents insist that we DO actually perceive things like “sense-data” that are REALLY THERE, but aren’t “out in the world.” Direct realists usually deny that there are any such entities entities in the world as what their opponents call “sense-data.” Thus, in cases of hallucination, they’re inclined to say that NOTHING is actually seen.

    For this argument, what matters is what is actually (in a vision example) seen. For these motion illusions to be evidence against direct perception it must be obvious, not that something is THERE that is moving (or not moving, as the case may be), but that this something is actually seen and is operating in the manner of a premise in an argument rather than “behind the scenes” as part of the causal chain. The objects must be “epistemically relevant.”

    It’s a philosophical matter, more about how words and language work than about the mechanics of perception. Basically, it’s about whether “thing words” are essentially intentional. As I said before, if an experiment can be designed, it’s looking for the wrong thing. In a word, that’s why philosophy doesn’t progress much–and maybe why people are so often disappointed with it.

22. walto:
    It’s a philosophical matter, more about how words and language work than about the mechanics of perception.

    If you and KeithS are going to revisit some old discussions, then how about this one with me?

    Specifically, I’m still not convinced that a firm philosophy/science dividing line can be drawn between conceptual analysis of words/language and understanding causal mechanisms through science. ( I’m assuming conceptual analysis to be closely related to KN’s constitutive explanation in the linked quote).

    It seems to me that the scientific, causal analysis will inform and change the concepts being analyzed in philosophy.

    As an example, in this book the author tries to resuscitate the adverbial theory of perception by grounding it in neuroscience instead of language.

    I would take that as showing that the philosophical analysis can make progress by incorporating new ideas from science, which argues against separating the two or claiming that they have completely distinct types of explanation.

23. philosophical analysis can make progress by incorporating new ideas from science

    That seems to me like it could be right.

    … which argues against separating the two or claiming that they have completely distinct types of explanation.

    I don’t see that, though. Philosophers couldn’t argue about the ontological status of, e.g., quarks until scientists found evidence of quarks. But that’s like painters not being able to paint black swans until somebody found one.

24. BTW, the philosophical literature on color is absolutely swollen with scientific papers from the literature on optics, and has been for a long time. I’m interested in color, but am reluctant to enter that fray largely because of the huge number of scientific papers I’d probably have to read (let alone understand).

25. walto: Philosophers couldn’t argue about the ontological status of, e.g., quarks until scientists found evidence of quarks.

    Sure, there is that flow from science to philosophy.
    I think you can also make the case for a flow in the other direction, although at a higher-level, more like helping to make the case for new research direction e.g. through joint papers of philosophers and scientists. I’m thinking of some of the enactivist stuff that KN references in many of his reading lists.

    My problem is I still don’t have a good understanding of why constitutive versus enabling explanation is a strong distinction between philosophy and science.

    KN says in the previous conversation

    “Constitutive explanations tell us what criteria have to be satisfied in order for a concept to be applicable”

    When you say “[philosophy of perception ] is more about how words and languages work”, then I relate that to KN’s point by understanding you to mean, at least in part, that philosophy is doing analysis of the concepts used in words and language in order to provide constitutive explanations.

    But once we go beyond ordinary language concepts which are often based on wrong intuitions about our perceptual experiences, we find that concepts depend on the enabling explanations of science. I’m thinking of corrections to intuition uncovered by experiments in change blindness, blind spot fill-in, masking experiments.

    So why is this constitutive/enabling a good separation of explanation in philosophy versus science?

26. walto,

    It’s a philosophical matter, more about how words and language work than about the mechanics of perception.

    No, it’s scientific as well as philosophical.

    From Direct Perception by Michaels and Carello:

    This approach is labeled direct because a perceiver is said to perceive its environment. Knowledge of the world is thought to be unaided by inference, memories, or representations. Conversely, a second family of theories conceives of perception as mediated—or, to contrast it with Gibson’s theory, indirect— and is so called because perception is thought to involve the intervention of memories and representations. The latter view, which has enjoyed nearly unanimous support among contemporary psychologists, implies that perception involves the embellishment or elaboration of inadequate stimulus input. Gibson, on the other hand, holds that stimulation is extraordinarily rich and provides such a precise specification of the environment that a perceiver need only detect that information, not elaborate it.

    And:

    Perceptual theories that can be labeled indirect begin with the assumption that the senses are provided with an impoverished description of the world. That is, the input does not provide accurate or complete information about objects and events. Perceptions, however, are recognized as being very rich, elaborate, and accurate. We know a great number of things about our everyday world. On the assumption of imprecise or equivocal input and on the act of meaningful, accurate perceptions, it must be assumed that perception involves a complex set of elaborations upon that input to make it rich. That is, it is assumed that the nervous system provides a variety of additions to its stimulation. Such a view lies at the heart of what is termed indirect perception or, in its current methodology, information processing. The latter term, information processing, rejects the accepted notion that stimulus information must be processed: cognitive operations must intervene in a constructive way. Such a theory is a necessary consequence of the view that input is inadequate “as is.”

27. One of the “additions” the nervous system provides is a built-in assumption of object persistence, which is why we perceive scenario #2 in the case of the red ball illusion (below). Note that this happens even though scenario #1 is actually a better fit to the sensory input.

    Consider a very simple motion illusion in which a red circle at position A on the screen disappears at the same time that an identical red circle appears at nearby position B. The stimulus is actually compatible with two interpretations:

    1. A red ball at position A poofed out of existence at the same time that an identical-looking red ball poofed into existence at position B.

    2. A red ball moved from position A to position B.

28. keiths,

    FWIW, I don’t agree with those passages from Michaels and Carello. And, as indicated I don’t think your last post has anything to do with what I call (and what has traditionally been called, since Moore) “direct perception.”

29. walto,

    Science and philosophy have moved on since Moore’s time.

    Direct vs. indirect perception is a scientific issue as well as a philosophical one. This isn’t just the idiosyncratic opinion of Michaels and Carello.

    The situation is similar to what you described for color perception:

    BTW, the philosophical literature on color is absolutely swollen with scientific papers from the literature on optics, and has been for a long time. I’m interested in color, but am reluctant to enter that fray largely because of the huge number of scientific papers I’d probably have to read (let alone understand).

30. All philosophical issues will become science issues, or will necessarily conscilient with science. Assuming autonomous robots continue to improve, they will necessarily shed light on things like perception, intention, and free will.

    Philosophy hasn’t had to confront reconciling different kinds of awareness. It’s a bit like asking what is life having only one sample.

31. BruceS,

    I’d taken up that distinction between “constitutive explanation” and “enabling explanation” from an old paper of McDowell’s, in which he introduces it as part of criticism of Dennett. I don’t think anyone has done much with that distinction since, though McDowell makes a similar distinction in more recent work of his.

    The distinction between constitutive and enabling explanations is, roughly, a contrast between what can be done “from the armchair”, as a matter of ordinary-language philosophy, and what can be only be done in the lab or field. (It is worth stressing, I think, the immense importance of Ryle for Sellars, Dennett, and McDowell.) But while ordinary-language philosophy (and its close ally, phenomenology) are, in my view, indispensable, they are not the whole of philosophy. Rather my goal, following Sellars in this particular respect, is to understand how the epistemological priority of ordinary-language philosophy and phenomenology is compatible with the ontological authority of empirical science (including here the natural and social sciences).

    So, I’m reluctant to use the distinction between constitutive and enabling explanations to ground anything too substantive about the difference between philosophy and science. I think there are many different relationships between philosophy and science, and that philosophy both informs and is informed by science in many different ways. Sometimes philosophy informs science by way of conceptual analysis, and sometimes by way of metaphysical speculation; sometimes philosophy is informed by science by taking over the new form in which old problems are presented when those problems are informed by scientific results, and sometimes it is informed by science by taking over scientific results as a point of departure.

32. KN, I can think of several transforming ideas from the past couple hundred years. The oldest is geological uniformitarianism, which enabled the next, evolution. Then there’s the Trinity of quantum theory, relativity, and big bang cosmology.

    All of these have impinged on theology and philosophy. Is there some biography of these ideas that would illuminate how the originators of these ideas were inspired by academic philosophy? That would be useful and interesting.

33. petrushka,

    With some digging (and asking around) I could find something on philosophical influences on Darwin. (Not “academic philosophy”, as that didn’t really exist in Victorian England.)

    I have some vague references in the back of my head about the influence of Kant and neo-Kantianism on early quantum mechanics, and Einstein himself was quite knowledgeable about Spinoza and Kant. If there’s interest I can track down specific references to how any of these philosophers influenced 20th-century science.

34. petrushka: All philosophical issues will become science issues, or will necessarily conscilient with science.

    Right. Philosophical claims must either be consistent with science or scrapped.

35. keiths:

    Direct vs. indirect perception is a scientific issue as well as a philosophical one. This isn’t just the idiosyncratic opinion of Michaels and Carello.

    To the extent that direct perception is a scientific issue, I don’t know what it entails and don’t particularly care. To the extent that it’s a philosophical issue, I’ve explained what it says. The basic idea of this philosophical claim hasn’t actually changed much since Moore’s time.

    Edit: Thinking about this further, I can’t really imagine in what way any strictly scientific conception of perception could be now or ever have been thought to be direct. Certainly not since the 18th Century anyhow. What optical theory ever makes perception direct in any physical sense? Who ever argues against a theory requiring intermediaries)?

36. BruceS: Sure, there is that flow from science to philosophy. I think you can alsomake the case for a flow in the other direction, although at a higher-level, more like helping to make the case for new research direction e.g.through joint papers of philosophers andscientists.I’m thinking of some of the enactivist stuff that KN references in many of his reading lists.

    My problem is I still don’t have a good understanding of why constitutive versus enabling explanation is a strong distinction between philosophy and science.

    KN says in the previous conversation

    When you say “[philosophy of perception ]is more about how words and languages work”, then I relate that to KN’s point by understanding you to mean, at least in part, that philosophy is doing analysis of the concepts used in words and language in order to provide constitutive explanations.

    But once we go beyond ordinary language concepts which are often based on wrong intuitions about our perceptual experiences, we find that concepts depend on the enabling explanations of science.I’m thinking of corrections to intuition uncovered by experiments in change blindness, blind spot fill-in, masking experiments.

    So why is this constitutive/enabling a good separation of explanation in philosophy versus science?

    Bruce, I hope you’re directing this question to KN, because I’m not familiar with those terms at all!

37. walto,

    To the extent that direct perception is a scientific issue, I don’t know what it entails and don’t particularly care.

    I’m not asking you to care, but my claim was a scientific one and I’m supporting it by appealing to the scientific evidence (including the motion illusions I mentioned).

    Edit: Thinking about this further, I can’t really imagine in what way any strictly scientific conception of perception could be now or ever have been thought to be direct. Certainly not since the 18th Century anyhow. What optical theory ever makes perception direct in any physical sense? Who ever argues against a theory requiring intermediaries)?

    Proponents of direct perception don’t deny the existence of intermediates; they just deny a role to specific kinds of intermediates, such as models and representations informed by memories, inferences, and built-in assumptions. Michaels and Carello:

    Knowledge of the world is thought to be unaided by inference, memories, or representations.

    And:

    For the indirect view, perceptual richness is a result of processing carried out by the perceiver; impinging stimulation is ambiguous at the outset and knowledge of the environment is a derivative of processing. For the direct approach, the stimulation specifies the environment and no elaboration is needed.

    The evidence supports the indirect view.

38. keiths: The evidence supports the indirect view.

    Could you briefly summarize the scientific differences between researchers testing a hypothesis of “direct perception” and those testing an “indirect” hypothesis. I’ve tried googling for an overview and I haven’t really found anything discussing the controversy on the net.

39. Alan,

    You’ll have better luck googling top-down vs bottom-up perception.

    Direct perception is based on bottom-up processing. Indirect perception is a combination of bottom-up and top-down processing, with both kinds of processing contributing to the maintenance of a model or representation.

40. keiths,

    Thanks for the quick response, Keith. Will this do as an introduction for dummies?

41. keiths: Direct perception is based on bottom-up processing.

    Interesting.

    My view is top down. And that’s why I’m a proponent of direct perception.

    It is hard to see how bottom-up processing could avoid being indirect.

    I guess we have very different ways of looking at this.

42. walto: Bruce, I hope you’re directing this question to KN, because I’m not familiar with those terms at all!

    OK, thanks for the input.

43. Neil Rickert: Interesting.

    My view is top down.And that’s why I’m a proponent of direct perception.

    It is hard to see how bottom-up processing could avoid being indirect.

    I guess we have very different ways of looking at this.

    Neil, what do you mean by “direct” and “indirect” in this post, and what do you think is the relevance of whether “processing” is “top-down” or “bottom-up” to the directness of perception as you understand those terms. Thanks.

44. walto: Neil, what do you mean by “direct” and “indirect” in this post, and what do you think is the relevance of whether “processing” is “top-down” or “bottom-up” to the directness of perception as you understand those terms. Thanks.

    The question is wrong. What I mean by direct vs. indirect is about the same as what you mean. And there isn’t a serious disagreement about the meanings of “top down” and “bottom up” as used here.

    The disagreement is about data/evidence/information or similar.

    The view that keiths takes is the dominant view in AI and probably the dominant view among analytic philosophers. That view is that data is plentiful, readily available and can be easily acquired. So all you have to do is compute with it or do induction on it.

    My view is that data does not exist by itself. What we call “data” is a human construct, though I allow that other organisms can also construct their own data.

    One of the links that keiths provided indicated that top down means that concepts affect what you perceive. For keiths, if I understand his position, this means that you start with the plentiful readily available data and use those concepts inferentially, which is how concepts affect perception.

    My point of view is that we start without data. The concepts are how we go about getting data. So the concepts affect perception, because they affect the data that we are getting.

    In science terms, this is the “data is theory laden” issue. For me, the main role of a scientific theory is to define its data. So data could not help but be theory laden. At the level of perception, this becomes “perceptual data is concept laden”. Looked at this way, there is no need to use concepts inferentially, because the influence of the concepts is already there in the data.

    Many, however, dispute that data is theory laden. As they see it, if data is theory laden, then science is profoundly biased, unreliable and eventually circular, because it is using induction to find patterns in the theory laden data to demonstrate the theory.

    My personal view is that importance of induction is greatly exaggerated. That is not how science works.

45. Thanks for your response. I did have a sense that what you and keiths were talking about was whether perception is conceptual/theory laden or non-conceptual/theory neutral, which, as I’m sure you know, is also a big and long-lasting issue in philosophy. However, I think that question is orthogonal to whether perception is direct (as I understand that issue, and as I explained fairly fully in a post above). That is, I don’t see what prevents seeing from being any of these four (again, as I use “direct”):

    conceptual—direct
    conceptual—indirect
    non-conceptual—direct
    non-conceptual—indirect

    That’s because I don’t mean by “indirect” infused with concepts or anything that I think either implies or is implied by that. I take it the conceptual/non-conceptual split is more of a Kantian thing, and I’m guessing KN has spent much of his adult life thinking and reading about that matter.

46. keiths:

    Direct perception is based on bottom-up processing.

    Neil:

    Interesting.

    My view is top down. And that’s why I’m a proponent of direct perception.

    Then what you mean by “direct perception” clashes with the consensus view among direct perceptionists and psychologists generally.

47. Neil,

    My point of view is that we start without data. The concepts are how we go about getting data. So the concepts affect perception, because they affect the data that we are getting.

    If my eyes are open and pointed in a certain direction, the pattern of light falling on my retinas isn’t conceptually mediated; it’s pure physics. Gibson called that the “optic array”. It’s raw sensory data.

48. keiths: If my eyes are open and pointed in a certain direction, the pattern of light falling on my retinas isn’t conceptually mediated;

    It also isn’t data. It’s just noise.

    Gibson called that the “optic array”.

    It was never clear to me what Gibson meant by “optic array”, but I’m pretty sure it was not what you described. I suspect that he meant the light in the general area. He saw perception as an action, not as a passive receiving of signals.

49. Neil,

    It also isn’t data. It’s just noise.

    No, there’s signal as well as noise. Light carries information about the world around us.

    It was never clear to me what Gibson meant by “optic array”…

    You could always look it up. There are tons of references.

    …but I’m pretty sure it was not what you described. I suspect that he meant the light in the general area.

    No, he meant the pattern of light arriving at a particular observation point. “Optic flow” is his term for how the optic array changes over time with the movements of the observer and the objects being observed.

50. keiths: No, there’s signal as well as noise.

    I looked at the Wikipedia entry for “signal”. And none of the suggested meanings fits, unless you want to say that it’s a signal from God.

    Light carries information about the world around us.

    For some meanings of “information.” I avoid using “information” in that way, because it leads to confusion such as you will find in arguments from Dembski.

    You could always look it up.

    That pretty much agrees with what I said. The main difference is that I tried to do it in one sentence, and your link provides a large paragraph.

    No, he meant the pattern of light arriving at a particular observation point.

    This is wrong. “Particular observation point” is too narrow, which is why I used “area”. Gibson is clear that it takes action on our part (such as moving the eye and head) to get the information we want. It isn’t just something that happens to you because you happen to be at a particular observation point.

    In any case, I’m not a disciple of Gibson. For example, I don’t agree with the way that he uses “information”.