The title is from a blog post by Brian Leiter. Leiter links to an article in the LA Review of books: Imitation and Extinction: The Case Against Reality. The article is written by Donald Hoffman.
We have discussed the general topic before, in several threads. So maybe this is a good time to revisit the topic.
Hoffman asks: “I see a green pear. Does the shape and color that I experience match the true shape and color of the real pear?”
My take is that there is no such thing as the “true shape and color of the pear.”
It is a common presumption, that there is an external standard of truth. Here, I mean “external to humans”. Truth is presumed to come from somewhere else. And our perceptual systems evolved to present us with what is true.
As I see it, this is backwards. Yes, our perceptions are mostly true. But this is not because perception is based on truth. Rather, it is because our human ideas of truth are based on what we perceive.
Open for discussion.
That you and Neil can’t agree on this matter was predicted in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. On his view there can’t be an answer to this question because it can’t be coherently asked.
I would agree that terms like object, solid, real, bird, rock, etc are useful terms, in that we use them successfully.
But then our vocabularies are full of obsolete words that were once useful.
Physics is the most philosophical of the sciences, and in my lifetime the trend has been toward simplification, or at least a reduction in the number of kinds.
If you are referring to 4,003, good point! 😯
CharlieM,
Illusions aren’t all like that. Here’s one where the perception itself is clearly non-veridical. Those contours aren’t really there, either in reality or in the retinal image:
Maybe.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/508376/in-a-frogs-eye/
There are color illusions in humans that originate in the retina.
I seem to have a lizard detector. Even when I had uncorrected cataracts, I could spot an anole move fifty feet away, while embedded in shrubbery. I assume there is some evolutionary advantage to such an ability.
I suspect much of our object detection is preconscious.
Bruce,
I agree, but it remains true that information flows from external reality to us.
Something is being carried by the photons in Neil’s cat scenario. That something reduces the uncertainty of the receiver. If it does so, why balk at calling it information?
petrushka,
By the ‘retinal image’, I mean the image that is projected onto the retina by the lens. The contours are absent in that image.
Neil,
And that guidance constitutes feedback from the environment. Reality calls the shots.
No matter how many people agree that rocks are food, they aren’t food in reality. Truth is not merely conventional.
petrushka,
Thanks for that very informative essay about Lettvin et al!
It’s a remarkable paper and it was influential on the cognitive science and philosophy of its time. The other co-authors of that paper have their own interesting stories. Humberto Maturana, a Chilean biologist, went on to develop second-order cybernetics and collaborated with Francisco Varela on autopoiesis. McCulloch and Pitts were among the founders of cybernetics and (among many other things) invented computational neuroscience in their 1943 paper.
So what other pre-conscious processing might be happening?
I’ve said this before, but I see no conceptual difference between learning that is the result of biological evolution and learning that occurs in individuals as a result of interaction with the environment. Our perception of named objects is learned.
One can argue that real things are out there, but the way we perceive them and manipulate them and talk about them is learned.
It may not be the only way of perceiving. How, for example, might a person view reality if raised with VR goggles that supported magical manipulations of objects?
If ants don’t view chairs as distinct from their surroundings, why would they be attempting to climb them? If you need another example: wasps will be chewing the wood from your chair, so they are capable of distinguishing the material your chair is made of from e.g, the tiles underneath it. And do you really believe that birds are capable of landing on chairs without seeing them as distinct from surroundings? Huh!
So how did you get from “If there is an external truth (external to humans), then it should be the same for all organisms” to “I have no way of knowing and neither do you”? If we can learn that animals don’t think of chairs as chairs than why can’t we all of sudden learn anything else?
I certainly noticed that I have to work very hard to get my point across, but why can’t this question be coherently asked according to Wittgenstein?
Corneel,
See 4.003! 👦
Alan Fox,
This?
Should I worry if this does not provide me with deep insights?
Because it only becomes information because of the processing by the receiver, which was Neil’s point all along. So it is not information, but magma.
Corneel,
Not at all.
In Trac, Witt advanced a theory of language, the world, and of how the two interacted. Based on that, he concluded that some things could only be shown, not said and that attempts to use language to discuss such things only produced nonsense. Among the things that could only be shown was a lot of philosophy. Which meant Trac was nonsense, which Witt readily admitted. But if one saw that, then the Trac had served its purpose.
With Ramsay’s help, Witt realized his theory of language in Trac was wrong. He started over again.
Some consider Witt to be the Steiner of the 20th century. But that is likely going too far.
https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/wittgenstein/
Historical tidbit: Witt invented truth tables.
Heh, that’s lovely. I missed how self-referential that proposition was.
I think I also see now what Walto was getting at. Thanks.
Because attributing information solely to the environment does not capture the meaning of the word as it is used in science or philosophy.
I have not checked the dictionary because I don’t consider that relevant.
Walto is not always serious lately at TSZ, but when it comes to Trac and Spinoza, he usually is. Usually….
Corneel:
Heh. That’s exactly what it feels like.
keiths:
Bruce:
Who said anything about ‘solely’? I’ve never restricted information to the environment alone.
Not really, no. But for a bit more context: in Tractatus Wittgenstein is arguing that a statement is meaningful or has a sense only if it conforms to logical principles and ‘points to’ (“pictures”) a fact (an actual state of affairs). The propositions of ethics, metaphysics, and aesthetics don’t do this, so they don’t really have a sense. The TLP was very influential on the logical positivists, though the respect was one-sided. When the Vienna Circle invited him to one of their meetings, Wittgenstein read the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore.
Though I would add that Sellars’s own contribution here is to show how cybernetics can be used to rescue picturing from Wittgenstein’s own pragmatist critique of his earlier self — by taking picturing, not as a theory of linguistic meaning, but as a theory of information processing.
Sellars text is also mystifying to the uninitiated, like me. So they have that in common too.
Thanks for the detail in the rest of your post.
But they are there in the concept triangle. Reality is the concept/sense percept as a whole. I am not saying it is the concept plus the percept, rather it is we who have taken the reality and divided it this way into percept and concept
There are no perceptions that give us full reality. All of them are incomplete. We only get reality when our perceptions are combined with the appropriate concepts. By adding concepts and percepts in this way we are restoring a reality that has always existed. It is we ourselves because of the way we are constituted that have separated reality into these two domains.
Our sense perception gives us an incomplete image of two equilateral triangles, but as it is in our nature to try to restore wholeness to the separate images of our senses we can actually see these triangles. And here I mean seeing as in the unity of concept/percept. We need to come to an understanding of the whole, but we need to do it in the right way.
In the book Goethe’s Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature edited by David Seamon, Arthur Zajonc, Henri Bortoft writes on page 286:
We do not have the right understanding of the whole if we imagine it to be a thing among things.
I know that in reality there can never be such physical thing as a triangle or a straight line or a point, so all pure sense perceptions are in that sense illusions. But they are only illusions for our expectations. The illusion you provided gives us approximations of triangles just like any other physical triangle we look at.
Of course it is. You should try a spell as a passenger in a car I’m driving.
The main point of the Tractatus as I understand it is that the propositions like those Corneel and Neil are trying to make here can’t be made in an “ideal language”–i.e., a language in which there are no self-referential messes made. In such a language, first-order statements (object languages) can only refer to the world, first-order metalanguages can only refer to statements in an object language, second order metalanguages can only refer to statements in first order metalanguages, etc. During that period of Witt’s work (and perhaps throughout his life–that’s controversial), he–and his positivist followers–believed that, in common with the paradoxes Russell talked about, the only solution to intractable philosophical problems is a coherent theory of types. The thing is, metaphysical statements (like those that Neil and Corneel have been making) can’t be put in an ideal language. So they’re windy mysticism, unlike the self-admitted mysticism in Witt’s book, which is not windy. Think about it–how are you going to talk about whether/how your talk is categorizing reality without getting into use-mention difficulties?
I discuss this (to me, fascinating) matter in detail in a paper called “Metaphysical Realism and the Various Cognitive Predicaments of Everett W. Hall.” That’s in a (widely unread classic) book of mine called “The Roots of Representationism: An Introduction to Everett Hall.” It’s available on Amazon, but, sadly, it costs more than anybody is (and probably should be) willing to pay for the no doubt limited value of its contents.
Alas.
Interesting link!
It is one thing to have activity of the sense organs, it is another thing to have the product of those activities come to the attention of conscious awareness, and yet another thing to retain memories of those products.
I like his style!
Thanks for the detailed explanation.
walto,
LOL. That’s the first time in my life I am being accused of “windy mysticism”.
I am self aware enough to recognize that I am abysmal at philosophy and that you are probably right. But I don’t quite understand yet what made you say that.
So you are saying that I cannot phrase my arguments about the true structure of the world in a way that doesn’t use some sort of categorisation on my part, correct?
Thanks, Walt, very helpful.
Those ideas of Wittgenstein are used in the Beni 2018 book I am reading to justify why some existing structural approaches to scientific realism cannot claim that their mathematical structures succeed in representing reality. Namely, because they are cannot speak about themselves in the structural formalisms they use. Or at least that is what I think he is saying.
Somewhat like KN is updating Sellars, Beni is going to rely on structures which grounded in perception which we can take as latching onto reality because of evolution. I think his last chapter will deal with Hoffman’s issues.
On my post to Corneel: I see my troll comparing Witt and Steiner failed to hook you. Of course, I just made that bit up.
This does not make sense. Ants crawl over everything. Presumably, they are exploring for food.
I would take that as evidence that they do not see the chair as a separate object. They see the wood as the same kind of substance that they find elsewhere.
I am having trouble making sense of that.
We can only judge animal knowledge by their behavior. And sometimes their behavior is not sufficient evidence for us to answer the questions that we ask. “Distinct from their surroundings” makes sense to us as humans, but it might not make sense to other animals.
Oh, no insult intended, Corneel. The greatest and most brilliant philosophers who ever lived have just been uttering arrant nonsense according to Wittgenstein.
On that view we can say “This is red.” But when we try to get philosophical about what’s going on when we do so, we start violating the ideal language rules that positivists sought.
But don’t despair, very few people agree with that viewpoint these days.
Yeah, I didn’t like that.
The Beni book looks interesting. Too much political philosophy to read, though.
Just a pedantic point: ants rely much more on scent, touch and dead reckoning than they do on vision. Ant nests are generally underground.
Not their fault. It’s not possible for any sentient entity to understand itself. The cognitive capacity that evolves due to niche/population pressure is sufficient for sentient beings to be themselves but there is not additional capacity to understand (in the sense of deconstruct/reconstruct) themselves. (I may have made this point before.)
That’s where neuroscientists should be looking for understanding – simpler animals.
I mostly agree with that.
Sorry if the Steiner stuff pissed you off. It was no doubt yet another of my ill-conceived attempts at humour. The least I could have done was to throw in some of them emoji thingamabobs.
I don’t know if the Beni book would interest you, even if you had time for it. It’s mostly about philosophy of science combined the Predictive Processing approach to perception which it combines in a novel and weird way. I think it throws in some of the enactive stuff as well near the end of the book. The Wittgenstein reference is only a small part.
Yeah, you’re definitely a mysterian.
Well, they do. Consider this experiment on a salmon using fMRI:
https://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/
Do flies see a chair as a [chair]? Obviously not in the sense that humans can deploy sophisticated, language-based concepts as part of perception. But if we allow an animal version of a concept by basking it on its behaviour, perhaps we can say that flies see chairs as [landing spots]. As do we, based solely on our body behavior. In fact, our language concept is based in the body behavior.
So there is a family resemblance between our body concept of a chair and the flies version, using “family resemblance” in Wittgenstein’s sense (post Trac).
Not there there is that much overall resemblance between us and flies. Except maybe for some weird possibilities that a Canadian did the best job of considering.
keiths:
CharlieM:
Right. So the perceptual apparatus itself is responsible for the illusion — creating contours that aren’t really there — which in turn causes us to invoke the concept of ‘triangle’ where there is none.
BruceS,
Yes, Bruce, I saw this. What do you think we can conclude?
Not sure about that. Evolutionary processes honed our sensorimotor system. Making decisions on scant evidence can be life-saving.
You could be overinflating human cognition, here. Easy to fall into the trap of “obviously”.
Corneel:
Neil:
They distinguish the wood from the tiles, and they chew on the former but not the latter. Where the wood is in reality governs where the wasps go to chew on it. It’s an external truth.
Flies see everything as landing spots (including my nose).
Alan,
I agree with that, but I don’t see where it contradicts what I wrote: