Are we beginning to see a major paradigm shift, steadily moving away from the prevailing physicalist, materialist.mechanistic mindset?
Integral theory is one attempt to move beyond any narrow,exclusive views of reality proclaimed by representives of science, religion, philosophy, spiritual traditions or whatever. Jennifer Gidley writes about integral thinking and the evolution of consciousness here
There are periods in human and cultural evolution when humanity passes through such fundamental transformations that our reality shifts and new patterns of thought are required to make sense of the unfolding human drama . . . The profound transformation we are now witnessing has been emerging on a global scale over millennia and has matured to a tipping point and rate of acceleration that has radically altered and will continue to alter our human condition in every aspect. We must therefore expand our perspective and call forth unprecedented narrative powers to name, diagnose, and articulate this shift… Integral philosopher Ashok Gangadean in the opening quotation encapsulates what many integral theorists have been voicing over the past decade. It is this integral research on emergent movement(s) of consciousness that I am referring to as the evolution of consciousness discourse This research points to the emergence of a new structure,stage(s) or movement of consciousness that has been referred to by various terms, most notably, post-formal integral and planetary.
Jude Currivan says that instead of big bang we have the big breath. The “outbreath” that gives rise to the physical unverse. Matter and energy are the products of information. The physical universe is in-formed as she puts it.
She discusses her views here in “Restating and reunifying reality: Our in-formed and holographic universe”.
This is part of an annual Mystics and Scientists conference promoted by The Scientific & Medical Network
The metaphor of the big bang conjures up images of a destructive explosion leading to chaos. But we should imagine the universe as a birth of order and organisation and this is more in keeping with a breathing process by which we communicate compositions of song, poetry and prose. Evolution is the creation of order out of chaos.
So are we seeing a movement to a more integrated, holistic understanding of reality where, rather than being a mere by product of a particular arrangement of matter, consciousness plays a primal, central role? The cosmos is breathed into existence, the out-breathing Word, the Logos, creates the living universe. Consciousness is the alpha and omega.
To judge it as not new you would first have to make some sort of sense of it. Can you be a bit more precise and explain in what sense you think it makes no sense?
In relation to an integrated, holistic understanding, can you give us an example of two or more conflicting viewpoints?
From a more conventional scientific perspective would you say that Newtonian physics and quantum physics are in conflict or are they complimentary?
If you feel that it will take too much time and effort to give satisfactory answer to my first question I will understand. We must use our time as we see fit and we all have to prioritise.
BruceS,
I’m quite satisfied that there’s a real distinction between engineering questions and etiological questions, and that while scientific methods can be used in addressing both, it will involve different branches of science.
I’m not as convinced (as others seem to be here) that the use of “how” vs “why” in posing the questions reliably tracks the distinction between the engineering questions and the etiological questions. It seems too easy to imagine deviant cases where one poses an engineering question with a “why” or an etiological question with a “how”.
But that might be a problem with my English comprehension.
I believe that cooperation and respecting differing viewpoints is preferable to conflict and an “us and them” attitude
Which is ideal for applying our technical skills to inanimate physical objects. But more than this is needed when dealing with living creatures where the simple rules of cause and effect are far less applicable.
I see it as being reductionistic in the sense that an attempt is being made to reduce life to physics. Life has rules and properties that have not been explained by physics.
A promise to have an explanation at some unspecified future time is not a scientific explanation.
It’s not a question of overcoming mechanism. It is a question of recognising its limitations. Goethe did not analyse plants to discover mechanisms so that they could be manipulated for selfish ends. He studied the plants becoming, its metamorphosis in order to gain an insight into its being. What was the plant telling him? Politely asking Nature rather than forcing Her to bend to our will.
Our senses only give us an experience of its separate stages in its becoming. By using the power of our minds to unify this becoming into an integrated whole we come closer to understanding the plant in its true nature. It is not put together mechanistically like a machine. It is a whole functioning organism whether it is a sprouting seedling, a leafy stem or a branching apple tree heavy with fruit. It is not due to the plant’s nature that we see only the physical specimen in front of us. This is due to the limited nature of our sense experience. In this regard we are time limited beings. Our conscious rational thinking is a spiritual process by which we can transcend these time limitations. There are no other earthly organisms so free of their physical nature than humans.
Prof Sonia Contera agrees with you in the sense that she agrees with the claimed failure of the reductionist program in genetics (as she describes that program). But her answer is not consciousness, but rather complexity theory (so I guess NonLin is in the right ballpark, at least in terms of her or his username).
Here’s a video of her making that argument with lots of neat movies of molecular machines in action, zoomed to the atomic level.
I see her as arguing for modern versions of mechanisms, based on non-linear dynamics for the components of the mechanism. This is a well known way to justify downward causation which does not violate the constraints of physics. That is, it does not require the emergence of forces beyond physics. Which makes it still physicalism in my view.
I guess it depends on what you mean by “explain”.
Here’s an example. GR tells us that mass leads to curvature of space-time. But it never explains how mass does that. It is something observed but not actually explained.
I’m not an arch-reductionist. I’m not any kind of reductionist. I just accept that nothing is really explained, other than how to manage our own behavior so as to best cope with the world as we find it.
Neither theology nor philosophy provide ultimate explanations. They just make up stories. Science also makes up stories. But at least the stories from science come with useful equations.
Your first post attempt seems to have been flagged as spam. I’ll delete it, since your second attempt got through.
Yes, when we explain something, some things will be left unexplained. But that very fact on its own does invalidate GR as an explanation. GR tells of how spacetime and mass/energy interact so that we can predict not only the orbit of Mercury and the bending of light near the sun, but also surprising phenomena like gravitational waves and black holes. Because it explains, it also allows us to control novel situations successfully, such as making accurate GPS systems.
I’m saying two things:
1. The very fact the science allows prediction and control of novel and counter-factual situations, including especially ones we have never yet observed, means that it must build explanations. That cannot be done with explanations.
2. The fact that explanations will also be incomplete in some way does not on its own invalidate them as explanations.
Well, theologians might disagree. But that’s O/T.
Answering that would get into the philosophical analysis of scientific reduction, in particular the epistemic variety of reduction. That would not be useful given our past exchanges on philosophy and its value. So I won’t.
My previous post addresses the “nothing is ever explained” phrase as I understand you.
I am focusing on scientific explanations which go well beyond coping with the everyday world (although that too may involve explanations embedded in our shared culture).
My previous note addresses at a high level why we need explanations in science.
For a particular proposed explanation, it is up to the practices of the relevant scientific community to determine whether something even qualifies as a scientific explanation for the domain of science that community addresses, and then to pick the best candidate. I’ve pontificated at length about those practices in other posts, eg on methodological naturalism, so I will stop there.
Whether or not that’s true, I’m not talking about the views of most scientists. I’m talking about the general attitude. It has been a popular view that reductionist science is the only way to view reality. And, for the most part, our western educational systems are founded on a reductionist view when it comes to science and mathematics. It is from this perspective that, from an early age, we are taught to view reality.
Steiner explained it in great detail. And many others have claimed to have access to similar spheres of reality.
He also explained how any person can ascend to the level of reality in which the creative principles can be known. A path is laid out here. It begins with an attitude of veneration, not of any person or system, but of truth and knowledge.
Anyone who follows the path must do so of their own free will and not for any selfish reason.
It is only out of ignorance that anyone would call this bullshit.
Bullshit
Yes. But space-time is a human construct. So these “explanations” help us better control how we use our own constructs. But they don’t explain anything about reality.
But I guess that’s just a version of Kant’s point — that we have no direct access to the world in itself. All of our science, perception, etc can only deal with the structures that we build to help us cope with reality.
Define “reductionist science”.
That gets us into our arguments about scientific realism. No need to revisit that exchange.
I’ll leave comments on the current status of Kant and neo-Kantian thinking to KN.
ETA: Your views seem to be of a piece with Hoffman’s view that we don’t access reality, since evolution rewards cognitive mechanisms promoting successful action, not truth. (Hoffman is called a present day Kantian at Leiter comments).
I presume you disagree with that characterization of your views. If so, what’s different about your views from his?
I disagree with the part that starts “since evolution …”.
We don’t “access” reality because we cannot. We interact, in some sense. But everything that we know about reality has to be a constructed on the basis of that interaction.
I’m not attempting to cast doubt on what we take reality to be. I think we do a pretty good job in our construction. But it is helpful to try to understand how it all works.
OK, thanks for the clarification.
If KN is around, I’d be interested in his thoughts on Kantian thinking today. In the mean time:
The Predictive Processing Paradigm has Roots in Kant
That comment puzzles me enough to ask about it.
I am puzzled because I thought you said we cannot know anything about reality.
ETA: Guess on your explanation of the quote: For you, knowledge is always know-how and never knowledge-that (ie something in the neighbourhood of JTB).
That looks to be a very interesting article you linked to above. I intend to give my opinions about this, but I’ll need to have a careful read of it before I comment further.
I’ll just reply to you Neil that IMO we can have access to reality.
I’ve only skimmed it so just to note that it assumes knowledge of PP, eg references to hyperpriors, generative models, and all the PP jargon.
Did you follow the Hoffman thread? He also thinks the world is consciousness in some sense or other. Lots of quantum talk is part of it.
” In consequence, I propose a formal theory of consciousness—the theory of “conscious agents”—that takes consciousness to be fundamental, rather than derivative from objects in space-time. I use the theory of conscious
agents to solve the combination problem of consciousness, both for the combination of subjects and of experiences. I show that entanglement follows as a consequence of the combination of conscious subjects. I then discuss the relationship of these findings to the account of entanglement given by quantum-Bayesian interpretations of quantum theory.”
— https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eWG7x_6Y5U&
I’m linking stuff like this and Bohm to make the point you can start with science and still end up at some metaphysical viewpoint that looks superficially like some of the things in your OP.
(I am not saying I agree, BTW: I think Hoffman is a quantum woo crank who is philosophically naive. Bohm OTOH is just incomprehensible to me)..
When we look at what we say we know about reality, it is actually what we know about human conventions (conventions on how to deal with reality).
Yes, that’s about right.
When it all boils down, we are animals. And, as animals, we learn ways of behaving in the reality where we find ourselves.
We then invent language to talk about that behavior and to better coordinate it.
Certainly, our behavior is tuned to the reality where we find ourselves. So, in some reasonable sense, our “knowing how” is implicitly about reality. But people tend to assume that our speech behavior is explicitly about reality.
If you had asked people, say 100 years ago, they might have said that Newton’s laws were our best knowledge. We replaced that with relativity and QM. If that knowledge were really about reality (about the world in itself), then you could not replace it so easily. If the knowledge were about effective human conventions, then it is easy to see that we can replace conventions when we find new conventions that are more effective.
Knowledge, such as Newton’s laws, is all about abstractions. And abstractions can only exist by virtue of human conventions.
Again, to be clear, I am not arguing for philosophical skepticism. My point is that if we want to understand human cognition and consciousness, then we need to understand the role of human conventions and we need to understand how humans go about establishing these conventions.
Our present political world, with the arguments over what is fact between the right and the left, can be seen as a kind of laboratory for studying this (for studying the ways that social conventions evolve).
I could address what I think is right (and wrong) in Kant, as I see it.
I do very much like that article, about the PP roots in Kant. But I don’t see that as a strength of predictive processing. I see it as inheriting many of Kant’s flaws — it is simultaneously too rationalistic and too empiricist.
I’ll send a private message with my thoughts about that. I don’t want to derail CharlieM’s thread.
Could you post it in Sandbox in case Neil is interested?
I have not read the article yet, to be honest; it came up when I was searching for another and looking interesting enough to keep for future possible reading.
ETA: I want to believe that we can use science of perception through PP to justify claims about knowing reality, but I find that challenged by the following issues, which seem related to me:
– some updated version of Kant’s themes
– the Markov blanket consequences detailed in the Hohwy/Clark exchanges
– the issue of top-down, constraints biasing perception that PP may imply
– the concern that science itself needs representations, making it circular to use it to justify perception being representative and (approximately) accurate, even if we Clark’s description of PP’s action-oriented representations, rather than the PSS version of representations
I’ll comment further if you post in Sandbox.
(Sorry for O/T, Charlie. I’ll stop)
Scientific anti-realism I remembered, but I’d forgotten you were a relativist about knowledge and truth.
I never meant for this thread to be restricted to any single narrow theory of reality. Kant has had a major influence on modern thinking on reality. And IMO any subject that deals with how we view the world is on topic.
I would rather this thread was used to travel in all the directions required to weave something of substance rather than it being used to get from A to B along one line.
I would like this discussion to be about theories of knowledge and cognition in general rather than a narrowly defined integral theory. So feel free to widen the discussion even if it does become a bit too technical for some of us.
linked to this video and then continued:-
I actually had this video open and partially watched on my desktop when you posted this. I’m not sure how much I’ll be able follow the details in the latter half of his presentation but up to that point there are a few issues I have with what he is saying.
Bohm is interesting in that his implicate order, the quantum potential he proposes is very similar to the etheric realm, the formative life force, which many believe overarches the physical world of particles and fields, of space and time.
That’s all I have time for at the moment.
I’m not really a relativist, at least in the way that relativism is usually described.
Remember that I do not view scientific theories as true.
Varieties of scientific anti-realism are a respected position, although not the majority among philosophers, I also would guess most scientists are scientific realists in the philosophical sense.
For relativism, it was other exchanges we’ve about truth and language communities that I was thinking of. I read you as having a position which sounds at times like stuff in 4.2, 4.3, or 4.4 from here. Rorty in some of his (unfriendly) interpretations, for example.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/#ConRel
ETA: For this thread, when you said
That’s fine as a description of a process we’re now suffering through. It’s relativism if you also mean that the outcome of that process is all there is to truth.
I sense those similarities too, although it may just be because the prose in all of them mystifies me.
I don’t have a problem with people believing they have mystical insights and trying to share them through prose whose literary quality I am not qualified to assess. That’s how I take a quotes you post, and the title of the conference you link supports that. If people want to take science as a starting point for mystical speculation, so be it.
But it is inspirational literature for me, not in any sense a substitute for science. If you want to replace science, you have to start by doing science, That’s what paradigm change is about. It’s not just not writing inspirational but vague (to me at least) texts.
My go to place for this type of literature is naturalized theology. Plus Watcher in the Skies, from Genesis in their peak progressive periods (my favourite time):
I’m fine with conceptual relativism. I don’t know about Rorty — I find him difficult to read.
I wouldn’t say that.
I should note, however, that I distinguish between the use of “true” in ordinary conversation, and the more technical use of “true” in, for example, logic or mathematics or some of the debates on TSZ. The use of “true” in ordinary conversation is messy.
You said nothing about philosophy which is where the action is, for me anyway.
ETA: I have to admit I don’t read Rorty, only unfriendly interpreters like Misak and Boghossian.
Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism
Small point on quantum potential:
This is a well defined mathematical quantity in the Bohmian interpretation of QM; it continues to be used today by physicists working on that interpretation. It’s very roughly the quantum analogue of the F=ma equation in that it guides the paths that the real quantum particles follow. It’s what makes the interpretation compatible QM entanglement of different particles. It’s not generally taken as real however; only the QM particles are taken to be real in Bohmian interpretation.
What Bohm is doing, which I think you have captured to a first approximation in what I quote, is to extend that physics to a metaphysical view of reality, except that rather than overarching reality, it is the reality from what the things you name emerge in some sense (I’m not sure about the ethical part though).
As I see it, the discussion of truth in philosophy attempts to cover both ordinary conversational use of “true” and technical use of “true”. I try to avoid mixing those.
I think Rorty is great and really very much worth reading. But one does need to some context for getting the most of him. His best insight is that logical positivism was grounded in two commitments, one of which was attacked by Quine and the other by Sellars. If we combine both attacks, the whole logical positivist program is done.
Rorty combines that with a broader historical story in which logical positivism is the culmination of the Neo-Kantian commitment to the purity of philosophy in its isolation from all other disciplines: what makes philosophy distinct from all other disciplines is the pursuit of epistemology, Erkenntnistheorie, “theory of knowledge.”
So, he concludes, what we get when we synthesize Quine and Sellars is an overcoming of epistemology altogether — we end up doing for epistemology what the logical positivists like Carnap had done for metaphysics.
And without metaphysics and epistemology, there’s just nothing left for philosophy to be.
So, Rorty concludes, philosophy is overcome from within — to use a Hegelian term, it is “sublated”.
For whatever it’s worth, I think the major flaw in his analysis is that epistemology is limited to what 19th-century Neo-Kantians were doing. The demise of that program does not entail the demise of epistemology per se. It just means that a different way of doing epistemology is called for.
I find it somewhat interesting that the same theoretical influences (Quine and Sellars) are marshaled by Paul Churchland to call for transforming epistemology into cognitive neuroscience, rather than rejecting epistemology for cultural politics.
I suppose my own approach is that both Rorty and Churchland are right: the dimension of epistemology concerned with normative issues should be transformed into cultural politics, or what people like Jose Medina, Charles Mills, and Miranda Fricker call critical social epistemology. Yet there are other aspects of epistemology concerned with the generation of reliable knowledge that are better handled with the cognitive sciences, including but not limited to neuroscience.
As critics of Rorty, Misak is quite good and Boghossian is terrible. Fear of Knowledge has its merits but it’s dreadful as a reading of Rorty.
I confess that I don’t really understand the Markov blanket stuff well enough to comment. But it doesn’t seem to me that Hohwy is justified in extracting from the Markov blanket issue the really strong Cartesian position he wants to defend. It seems tolerably clear to me that with any information processing system, we can always take some boundary arbitrarily stipulated within the system and say that that’s a Markov blanket. (At any rate I think that was Clark’s point.)
For what it’s worth, here are my major concerns about the whole predictive processing fad:
1. the free energy principle, as a principle about minimizing entropy, is a principle about life as such — any living system will need to be responsive to its environment, and behave with respect to its environment, sufficient to maintain homeostasis. But that means it’s not going to tell us very much about cognition or mindedness per se.
2. We don’t know if neuronal assemblies are approximately Bayesian and there are worries about whether this is even computationally tractable for brains.
3. The whole predictive processing story is too empiricist and too rationalist. It is too empiricist in its naivete about how a system will update its predictions whenever it gets a prediction error. This doesn’t make biological sense. There are all sorts of conditions under which cognitive system may ignore prediction errors (if they aren’t salient to the organism), or notice prediction errors but not update the predictions. Put otherwise, organisms don’t learn from everything that happens to them. Whether or not learning happens depends on a lot more than just what the organism experiences.
But it is also too rationalist in not taking into account the ecological function and evolutionary history of the priors. The priors of a bat will be very different from the priors of a rat, because what a rat needs to be able to notice in order to thrive are very different from what a bat needs. The priors aren’t going to be just whatever is conducive to reliable knowledge.
4. The predictive processing account combines its empiricism and its rationalism as Kant did: by understanding cognition as hierarchically structured, with a ‘bottom-up’ process and a ‘top-down’ process. And that is exactly what is wrong with it. The more we study biological systems, the more we see things as mutual constraints of parts and wholes, with lots of dynamic interactions within and across levels. Most neuroanatomical regions are involved in multiple tasks, and there’s much less localization than we had assumed. Biological cognition is not so much hierarchical as it is heterarchical.
But, whether we conceptualize biological cognition as hierarchical (whether in PSS or PP architectures) or as heterarchical as in more cybernetic and allostatic approaches, it is pretty clear that Anil Seth is right about the implications of what contemporary computational neuroscience shows us: what we take to be real is what the brain constructs or hallucinates. Direct perception or naive realism, however compelling at the level of reflection of the manifest image, is not compatible with what neuroscience appears to demonstrate.
Yes, I think that’s why I find Rorty hard to read. I haven’t worked out what he is really trying to talk about. That is to say, I am missing the context.
I think I agree with that.
We use sentences to say things about reality. And, to a first approximation, a package of information expresses a relation between entities. But there seems to be an underlying assumption that the entities are fixed and only the relations change. But entities change too.
Or, to say it differently, it is not enough to do a statistical analysis of information. You also have to be concerned about how the information connects to reality.
Well, yes, that’s kind of the point of philosophy, isn’t it? But definitely specialities will emphasize different approaches/aspects– logic/phil of math versus phil of science versus phil of language and of course metaphysics which I suppose overarches them.
I’m a bit surprised that a mathematician likes to keep things separate. Isn’t math about extracting common patterns? The advantage of math over philosophy is that math only cares about validity, not soundness.
John Horgan goes to a mysticism and consciousness conference:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/can-mysticism-help-us-solve-the-mind-body-problem/
“I just spent a week at a symposium on the mind-body problem, the deepest of all mysteries. The mind-body problem–which encompasses consciousness, free will and the meaning of life–concerns who we really are. Are we matter, which just happens to give rise to mind -Or could mind be the basis of reality, as many sages have insisted –“
KN: Thanks for a long and thoughtful reply. I suspect we could have detailed exchanges on each of the points you make. However, you, unlike me, have better things to do with your time, so I’ll just make a brief comment on each of them in case you have time to say more in reply to my point. I’ll put them in separate posts since CharlieM said he is open to extending the thread topic
On Clark versus Hohwy: I take them as in broad agreement that PP can be productively described as embodied and enactive (in the unradical sense). Also that PP can at best give us realism about (causal) structures.
They disagree over Extended: Hohwy wants to stick with agent=organism boundaries, Clark sees organisms as “re-knitting” their boundaries as they develop and human cognition being able to extend that agent bound to include cognitive support in the environment (including culture).
I think the principle is stated in terms of minimizing free energy, with the relation of entropy involving other variables, in particular “internal energy”. More importantly, while it is true that free energy is a thermodynamics concept, in PP, “free energy” refers to a technique to do approximate Bayesian inference, based on work Hinton did originally with AI and learning, eg see links at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmholtz_machine
That information/inference interpretation explains the hypothesized relation to cognition: of course, one then has to do science to justify PP models as helpful in explaining some aspects of cognition.
The equations in that AI work have a formal similarity to thermodynamic equations, which explains the name “free energy”. But one still has to justify relating thermodynamic and information usage of “free energy” in maintaining homeostasis. Friston and co-authors attempt it here:
https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/Information%20and%20Efficiency%20in%20the%20Nervous%20System.pdf
“In particular, we try to link information theoretic (variational) and thermodynamic (Helmholtz) free-energy formulations of neuronal processing and show how they are related in a fundamental way through a complexity minimisation lemma.”
Do you have a source for those concerns?
On the tractable part: I’m unclear what you are getting at, since all agree that exact Bayesian inference is not tractable for living brains or even AI; that’s the point of the variational approximations from which free energy emerges as an info concept.
On the implementation part: Although biological implementation is not my main interest, I am aware of some work on it. Here’s a high level intro (see last section)
https://medium.com/@solopchuk/intuitions-on-predictive-coding-and-the-free-energy-principle-3fc5bcedc754
And one often reads of a postulated relationship between observed hierarchies in physical neural relations and the inference hierarchies in PP models.
One big caveat in all of this: like a lot of modeling of neurons, it takes an idealized view of the biochemistry of neurons, their dynamics, their interactions, and their various types.
I’d always thought that empiricism and rationalism were at odds, so I’m unclear how PP combines the worst of both! FWIW, I don’t think it is rationalist at all, as long as one includes evolution as part of empirical learning.
PP does not say organisms always update predictions when they get errors. First, PP says organisms can take action and so update senses instead. Second, PP includes a model of attention affecting the weighting of prediction error, which is meant to capture the need for an organism to focus on relevant environmental features.
I don’t see PP as conflicting with that, since PP is a model of functional interactions: how they are implemented by the brain is a different matter. It could involve the same physical brain systems at different times or at different but simultaneous frequencies (analogous to how one signal has different communication channels).
In general, I find the allostasis lingo helpful when it is based on the mathematics of complex systems and how that can be used to build empirically testable models of brain/body/environment dynamics. However, I lose interest when it becomes vague and mystical.
Or at least, I lose interest in it as of any direct scientific value. It could be that many scientists find such mystical talk inspires creativity, which is how I would interpret CharlieM ideas charitably.
That’s rather woolly!
Linked to:
From this link:
I disagree that access to sense data is all that we have to figure out causes. We also have access to concepts which can be just as objective as any sense datum. And by this means the unknowable Kantian “thing in itself” is overcome. It can become knowable.
On their own our sense experiences of physical triangles will not lead us to the laws of a triangle no matter how many we perceive nor how long we observe them. Concepts do not come through the five senses, they have to be added to the external objects by the process of thinking. But in doing so we are only adding something which was never separate in reality. The initial separation was a consequence of our organisation. We see (sense perception) the pieces and then through the effort of seeing (understanding through thinking) we gain access to the whole.
The unknowable “thing in itself” is a human construction proposed to be behind the objects of perception, but imagined as if it was a sensible object. The “table in itself” is perceived by the “eye in itself and the signal is transmitted the the “optic nerve in itself” to the “brain in itself” Where do we stop? Colour in reality is said to be nothing but matter in motion, but matter in motion is as much a feature of our sense experience as colour is.
Kant has lead us up the “garden path in itself” for long enough.
We’ve had an exchange on concepts before, and I don’t have a lot to say about them that is new.
But I do agree that we have concepts and they are part of perceiving, learning, acting; that’s the top down part of PP. But where do concepts come from?
PP says that proto-concepts are part of the model (“hyper-priors”) that we inherit from evolution and then modify extensively as we develop and learn in our encultured environment. Language has a special role allowing humans to develop complex concepts, but PP is mainly developed as a theory of perception, with the language and concepts stuff more speculative.
I’m unclear on your reference to Seth. AFAIK, he agrees with PP approach and the hallucination idea is his expression of it:. Namely, that perception is not a bottom up representation of inputs, but rather a top down projection of expectations for sensory input. That project is continually updated by noting its errors, either by updating model or acting to adjust sensing to fit projections.
https://www.anilseth.com/keypapers
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022249617300962
For me, a problem with PP and neuroscience in general is the use of representation. As soon as well allow that usage, we are haunted by the spectre of Cartesian skepticism. That’s the common theme I see in the four bullet points in the post you are replying to.
Reams of philosophy about colour. I guess one could start by separating the phenomenal experience of colour from the causes of our perception of colour and its affect on our behavior (including language behavior). Which are you referring to? Or do you mean something else?
I’m also not sure about what you mean by “matter in motion” related to colour. When trying to explain the causes of our perception and action, the right place to start is electromagnetic theory, which is a theory about waves and fields, not matter in motion. Or at least, not Newtonian matter; EM stuff now replaced by Quantum Electrodynamics a al Quantum Field Theory, which unites QM and special relativity.
I do like your Canadian spelling of “colour”, although I guess we Canadians are slowing moving away from it to Americanized version “color”. That move may be part of updated NAFTA; I have not studied that document. That spelling is originally British, I guess: if that is your background, watch out for Trump demanding American spelling as part of post-Brexit free trade deal for dictionaries.
Yesterday I watched a video by Dr. Edward F. Kell titled “Consciousness is More Than a Product of Brain Activity”. He worked with Michael Murphy at the Esalen Institute where the mysticism and consciousness conference was held.
He has gathered loads of data on psi phenomena but I haven’t read any of his books so I don’t know much about the details. All I can say is that IMO these type of phenomena are fairly common, they are not rare occurrences.