1,372 thoughts on “Why does the soul need the brain?”

1. Bruce,

   6. Downward causation via constraints on the phase space of the trajectories of the lower level dynamics may be exemplified by the reverse of the spatial map example: the possible spatial maps resulting from a PEM explanation will constrain the available attractors which realize them. An example from thermodynamics: the Past Hypothesis (ie the universe started in a low entropy state) constrains the dynamics Newtonian dynamics in order to explain what we see macroscopically.

   Could you elaborate? Neither of those sounds like a genuine example of downward causation to me.

2. keiths: If you think my position is wrong, you are welcome to explain why.

   Does the thought frighten you?

   If you think your position is right, you are welcome to explain why.

   Does the thought frighten you? IS the effort just too great for you to take your disjointed and jumbles assertions and turn them into an actual argument?

   Which of your statements should I take to be your premises, and which to be your conclusion? Do you even know?

   The ideal tetrahedron is real, therefore it exists. So there.

3. Mung,

   The ideal tetrahedron is real, therefore it exists. So there.

   Where does it exist, and how do you know that it does?

4. Kantian Naturalist:

   That’s clearly right, as far as that contrast goes. But selection history isn’t irrelevant, either. I think we need to take selection history here precisely because there’s a real danger that predictive processing is too Kantian: you’ve got the priors and hyperpriors generating the model, and the model is corrected whenever the prediction errors are too great to be ignored. But what counts as “too great to be ignored”? And how systematically biased are the priors?

   I agree that the answers to those issues involves the relation of an organism to the niche it has evolved to fill. But first comes an understanding of that niche and how the organism fills it, which is based on current causal powers; then that understanding can be used develop ideas of how the relation of causal powers and niche might have been shaped by natural selection, among other factors. So if function is defined aligned with the processes of best science, current causal powers, not history, is the way to go.

   I worry that the more that predictive processing is held captive by a conception of the brain as a Kantian agent, the more it will be vulnerable to Nietzschean criticism of Kant. That’s the argument I run rather quickly towards the end of the paper.

   It’s flattering that you think I have any idea what you are referring to in the “Nietzschean criticism of Kant”. But after a quick Google tutorial, I suspect it has something to do with Nietzschean concerns with Kant’s transcendental idealism and his related separation of phenomenal and noumenal.

   I understand that criticism in terms of the controversy regarding cognitive penetration and PEM. Macpherson summarizes how different versions of PEM align with cognitive penetration. She does say some readings of Clark indicate he sees PEM as implying cognitive penetration at all levels of eg vision processing. But it is also possible to use neuroscience to claim the first 100 ms of vision processing do not involve any top-down influence and so avoid complete penetration, even while using PEM for later processing.

5. keiths:
   Bruce,

   Could you elaborate?Neither of those sounds like a genuine example of downward causation to me.

   Quick answer. Yes, it is not something that one might consider downward causation if one is looking for something that is strongly emergent.

   For more details, take a look at Hooker’s “On the Import of Constraints in Complex Dynamical Systems” where he says:

   ” In the self-organisation cases, by contrast, a new existent doing new physical work emerges in consequence of a new constraint emerging.”

   and he footnotes that sentence as being an example of downward causation. The point is that it is "real" causation because it leads to a new existant doing physical work. But your ontology may vary.

   Another paper which is wholly dedicated to that approach is Bechtel's "Explicating  Top-­‐Down  Causation  Using  Networks  and  Dynamics "

   Sorry for no links; I'm TSZed out and anyway your Google skills are much better than mine.

6. walto:
   Bruce, fwiw, I really think you should consider trying to publish some papers

   That’s a kind post, but the reality is I don’t have original ideas, only my limited understanding of those already in philosophy papers I have recently read.

   And even my inclination to use SF examples is well-trod ground, eg Philosophy of the Matrix.

7. Bruce,

   Quick answer. Yes, it is not something that one might consider downward causation if one is looking for something that is strongly emergent.

   I’m interested in hearing about anything that qualifies as genuine downward causation, regardless of whether it is strongly emergent. An earlier thread didn’t yield any persuasive examples.

   I’ll take a look at the Hooker and Bechtel papers you recommended.

8. keiths: Where does it exist, and how do you know that it does?

   It exists “where” all such things exist, and no, you won’t find it on a map. And I know it exists because without it no particular instance of one would exist.

9. Mung,

   It [the ideal tetrahedron] exists “where” all such things exist…

   Where is that, exactly, and how do you know it’s there?

   And I know it exists because without it no particular instance of one would exist.

   Are you claiming that non-ideal physical tetrahedra couldn’t exist if the ideal tetrahedron didn’t exist in its mysterious location? If so, why? Why should the existence of a non-ideal tetrahedron depend in any way on an ideal tetrahedron whose existence you can neither demonstrate nor support?

10. CharlieM: For these reasons

    For what reasons? You have given none.

11. BruceS: I agree that the answers to those issues involves the relation of an organism to the niche it has evolved to fill. But first comes an understanding of that niche and how the organism fills it, which is based on current causal powers; then that understanding can be used develop ideas of how the relation of causal powers and niche might have been shaped by natural selection, among other factors.So if function is defined aligned with the processes of best science, current causal powers, not history, is the way to go.

    That makes perfect sense to me — thank you for articulating it so clearly!

    It’s flattering that you think I have any idea what you are referring to in the “Nietzschean criticism of Kant”. But after a quick Google tutorial, I suspect it has something to do with Nietzschean concerns with Kant’s transcendental idealism and his related separation of phenomenal and noumenal.

    That’s just the icing. The real meat of the criticism has to do with whether there’s anything like a single universal form of subjectivity. Kant assumes that there is; that’s the key to how he thinks he can avoid all the problems of previous metaphysics. Nietzsche’s response is to point out that our conceptual frameworks are historically and culturally varied; we have no evidence that the categories of the understanding have the universality that Kant attributes to them.

    And Nietzsche recognizes that this is true of animals as well: different kinds of animals will perceive and cognize (“interpret”, he would say) the world based on their past causal histories, ecological niches, developmental constraints, and energetic requirements. Or, put otherwise, he recognizes that since this is true of animals, it’s also true of us.

    I think that all of these issues work against the naive assumption that a predictive processing system can track hidden causal structures with any more reliability than is necessary to allow the animal to reproduce and the species to avoid extinction.

    I understand that criticism in terms of the controversy regarding cognitive penetration and PEM. Macpherson summarizes how different versions of PEM align with cognitive penetration.She does say some readings of Clark indicate he sees PEM as implying cognitive penetration at all levels of eg vision processing.But it is also possible to use neuroscience to claim the first 100 ms of vision processing do not involve any top-down influence and so avoid complete penetration, even while using PEM for later processing.

    I’m aware of the cognitive penetration issue as a problem for PP but I haven’t tracked down any sources yet. Thanks for this link!

12. walto:

    CharlieM: For these reasons

    For what reasons? You have given none.

    I think I can tease out some reasons from what Charlie wrote:

    Any physical tetrahedron is limited in size, imperfect in the exactness of its edges, planes and angles and changes over time. This physical tetrahedron you consider to have a reality which is greater than the ideal tetrahedron which is not physical but is perfect in form and not limited in size. It remains the same for all time.

    For these reasons I would say that the ideal tetrahedron can be considered more real than any physical tetrahedron.

    He is claiming that

    a) a potential thing that is not limited in size is “realer” than something that is limited;

    b) a potential thing that is perfect is “realer” than something that is imperfect; and

    c) a potential thing that remains forever the same is “realer” than something that changes.

    Those reasons don’t make any sense to me, and counterexamples are easy to come by. Perhaps Charlie will elaborate.

13. CharlieM: Any physical tetrahedron is limited in size, imperfect in the exactness of its edges, planes and angles and changes over time. This physical tetrahedron you consider to have a reality which is greater than the ideal tetrahedron which is not physical but is perfect in form and not limited in size. It remains the same for all time.

    I’m always fascinated by the conviction that the changeless, eternal, perfect things are ‘more real’ than the changing, temporal, ‘imperfect’ things.

    It’s an assumption that gets into Western philosophy with Parmenides, and then responses to Parmenides by subsequent Greek and Roman philosophers.

    What strikes me as funny about it is that there’s an entire philosophical tradition, just as ancient and rich based on the exact opposite view: that the craving for permanence is a source of misery, and true liberation from misery lies in recognizing the reality of impermanence.

    It would be one thing if Western metaphysicians and theologians had grappled with the challenge posed by Buddhist thought — but very few have, even today.

14. KN,

    I think that all of these issues work against the naive assumption that a predictive processing system can track hidden causal structures with any more reliability than is necessary to allow the animal to reproduce and the species to avoid extinction.

    Selective pressures will favor traits, including accurate predictive systems, that lead to improved fitness. But don’t misinterpret that as meaning that such predictive systems can’t deliver benefits above and beyond what’s necessary for survival and reproduction.

15. keiths: Your mistake is pretty obvious. Your rejection of physicalism, while retaining naturalism, puts you in an awkward dualist position. It requires you to posit some magical means by which non-physical norms exert a causal influence over the physical. It’s very similar to substance dualism, and it fails for the same reasons.

    I don’t know what “the physical” means here. There are two distinct meanings, and I worry that a failure to distinguish between them is causing problems here.

    Physical-1: concrete (not abstract) particulars (not generals) with spatio-temporal existence.

    Physical-2: the posits of fundamental physics and whatever is reducible to them.

    I’m quite happy to say that everything is physical-1 — even norms and values. And if by “physicalism” you mean “everything is physical-1” then we don’t disagree.

    But you seem to want more than that — you also want to say that everything is physical-2. That seems crucial to your defense of reductive physicalism.

    So we can put my position this way: not everything that is physical-1 is also physical-2.

    That’s why I put the emphasis on getting a clear handle on the idea of “reduction” and (as you like to say) “in principle reduction.”

16. keiths: Selective pressures will favor traits, including accurate predictive systems, that lead to improved fitness. But don’t misinterpret that as meaning that such predictive systems can’t deliver benefits above and beyond what’s necessary for survival and reproduction.

    Depends on what the “can’t” means here, though. Cognition, like all metabolic functions, uses energy and time. The question for me here is, “how likely is it that evolution will give rise to a cognitive system that uses more energy and time than strictly necessary for achieving an organism’s goals?”

    I don’t take this to be a knock-down objection to cognitive neuroscience. I just think it’s something that needs to be considered.

    In fact, I think there’s a good response to this question, to be found in the vicinity of understanding the evolutionary function of play, curiosity, and imagination.

17. KN,

    I’m quite happy to say that everything is physical-1 — even norms and values. And if by “physicalism” you mean “everything is physical-1” then we don’t disagree.

    Then you’ve reversed yourself. That’s good, because your earlier position didn’t make a lot of sense, as I explained above.

    Just to be sure that I understand your new position, could you confirm that you no longer stand behind the three statements I quoted earlier?

    But you’re right that physicalism would be empty by its own lights, because it would have to say that there are no genuinely normative phenomena — no values, no meanings, no thoughts.

    And:

    The worry is that the physicalist’s ontology is a world of what is the case, whereas values, meanings, and thoughts are involve what ought to be the case.

    And:

    I take physicalism about as seriously as I take theology — which is to say, not very.

    It now appears that you not only take physicalism seriously, you are a physicalist. Just not a reductive physicalist. And you now accept that a physicalist ontology can include values, meanings, and thoughts, contrary to your earlier position.

18. keiths: It now appears that you not only take physicalism seriously, you are a physicalist. Just not a reductive physicalist. And you now accept that a physicalist ontology can include values, meanings, and thoughts, contrary to your earlier position.

    It would all depend on how “a physicalist ontology” gets specified — an anodyne anti-supernaturalism (which I would happily cash out as a process ontology) or as something more demanding.

    Do you see a difference worth making between “physicalism” and “naturalism”?

19. keiths:

    It now appears that you not only take physicalism seriously, you are a physicalist. Just not a reductive physicalist. And you now accept that a physicalist ontology can include values, meanings, and thoughts, contrary to your earlier position.

    KN:

    It would all depend on how “a physicalist ontology” gets specified…

    It follows directly from the meaning of “ontology”. A physicalist ontology includes all of physical reality (and nothing else). You’ve conceded that values, meanings, and thoughts are physical. Therefore values, meanings, and thoughts are part of your physicalist ontology.

    It’s simple logic.

20. keiths: A physicalist ontology includes all of physical reality (and nothing else). You’ve conceded that values, meanings, and thoughts are physical. Therefore values, meanings, and thoughts are part of your physicalist ontology.

    They’re physical-1. But it seems to me that you want to use “physicalism” to mean something a lot more than physical-1. Physical-1 is just nominalism.

21. KN,

    Do you see a difference worth making between “physicalism” and “naturalism”?

    They’re equivalent when applied to me, since I believe that nature is entirely physical. When applied to someone who believes otherwise, the terms are distinct in meaning.

    The problem for such a person is that while they might be a naturalist, they are also a dualist, with all the problems that creates.

22. KN,

    They’re physical-1.

    Right, and things that are physical-1 are physical. They are therefore part of a physicalist ontology.

    Again, it’s simple logic.

23. keiths:

    Selective pressures will favor traits, including accurate predictive systems, that lead to improved fitness. But don’t misinterpret that as meaning that such predictive systems can’t deliver benefits above and beyond what’s necessary for survival and reproduction.

    KN:

    Depends on what the “can’t” means here, though. Cognition, like all metabolic functions, uses energy and time. The question for me here is, “how likely is it that evolution will give rise to a cognitive system that uses more energy and time than strictly necessary for achieving an organism’s goals?”

    The answer is “extremely likely”.

    Let me explain this from two different angles:

    1. Evolution works from what it has. It’s a tinkerer, not a from-scratch designer. So the odds are minuscule that it will stumble upon an absolutely optimal cognitive system that uses no more resources than are absolutely necessary for a given organism’s successful survival and reproduction.

    2. The cognitive skills that promote survival and reproduction are useful in other contexts. It’s extremely unlikely that a cognitive system will restrict its own application to those situations — and only those situations — in which its use can promote survival and reproduction.

    A restrictive mechanism like that would itself be cognitively costly — an expense that can only be justified (evolutionarily) if the resulting savings outweigh it on average. Any such restrictive mechanisms will therefore not be optimal and will not rule out every “wasteful” cognitive detour.

    Take human curiosity. Too much of it is obviously deleterious, as is too little, so its range is restricted to a Goldilocks region in normal, healthy people. The person who is too incurious to look before crossing the street will be at a fitness disadvantage. So will the person who is so curious that she stops in her tracks in order to read the advertisements on the bus that is bearing down on her.

    But does the exclusion of the two extremes mean that human curiosity is exactly optimal, and that curiosity is never “spent” on things that are irrelevant to survival and reproduction? Of course not.

24. newton: if it is not a concession for you why would you imply it was for Walto?

    I took walto to be looking for credit for his comments here about the Christian funereal.

    Sort of like claiming that he has some good friends that are black when he is being accused of racial insensitivity.

    newton: No Fifth ,what made Walto’s innocuous comment so infuriating was his earlier comments.

    communication is always context dependent.

    The context in this case is walto’s making fun of Christianity and the things Christians hold dear for no good reason that I can tell.

    I expect it hit me hard because I hold him (and you) to a higher standard than most here.

    newton: It seemed more of a review

    That is not how I saw it. We weren’t discussing funerals. We were discussing identical brains and physicalism.

    For some reason he felt the need to point that the funeral was nice except that it was Christian.

    There was simply no reason to bring this stuff up and I would bet that the family would find it to be insulting.

    I’m a big boy I know that mockery of what I cherish comes with the territory here but I sometimes get my hackles up when I sense that others like me are being belittled.

    newton: You seem to be “ the folks” who can’t leave Walto’s choice of funeral alone.

    I did not belabor the point or even complain about it. I simply asked a question that I thought might help him realize how his comment would sound to a person associated with that Church or a random Christian who read it.

    Now I’m defending myself against accusations that I was being uncivil because I defended folks who aren’t here to do so themselves.

    One of the reasons I participate here is I support Elizabeth’s goal of civil discussion with those we disagree with.

    There are a few posters here on the other side that seem to share that goal. I would include you in that number.

    It would be a shame if that was lost.

    peace

25. fifth, to newton:

    The context in this case is walto’s making fun of Christianity and the things Christians hold dear for no good reason that I can tell.

    He had a perfectly good reason for stating his opinion: he was describing the kind of funeral he would like, which was Orthodoxish but without the Jesus talk.

    I expect it hit me hard because I hold him (and you) to a higher standard than most here.

    What higher standard? Walto is entitled to describe the kind of funeral he would like, regardless of whether it offends you or any of the other Special Snowflakes here. He is entitled to be skeptical of your religious beliefs, again whether or not it offends you or any of the other Special Snowflakes.

    Your standard is ridiculous. It’s also hypocritical, since you freely state opinions that others find offensive, such as your claim that we all believe in God.

    I support your right to say those things even though they are offensive to others. Don’t be a hypocrite by trying to deny walto, or anyone else, the corresponding right.

26. fifth,

    I’m a big boy I know that mockery of what I cherish comes with the territory here but I sometimes get my hackles up when I sense that others like me are being belittled.

    You’re not a big boy. You’re a Special Snowflake who thinks his religious beliefs should be exempt from criticism. It’s ridiculous, particularly at a site where skepticism is the norm and everyone’s beliefs, including yours, are fair game.

    Also, you’re failing to take responsibility for your own beliefs. You have chosen to remain a Christian, despite the ridiculousness of the faith. If you choose to adhere to a ridiculous faith, you should expect to be ridiculed at a site devoted to skepticism. If a Scientologist shows up here, things like the Tone Scale and the myth of Xenu will be criticized, and rightly so. Why should Christianity be exempt?

27. fifthmonarchyman: The funereal was completely innocent and the people were undoubtedly welcoming and not judgemental but walto felt the need to critique the religious content of the service for some reason.

    Why can’t folks just leave other folks alone?

    This is getting absurd.

    HERE is the link to walto’s original comment.

    What walto said there was mostly praise for the music and setting. And then he said that thought about how nice that would be for his own funeral, if they would just take out the Jesus talk. That was not criticizing the service. He did not say that the Church should remove the Jesus talk from their regular services. He was just expressing a wish for his own funeral.

    And HERE is your initial reply. Your reply is a quote mine. You take a sentence from the beginning of one paragraph, and connect it with part of a sentence from the middle of the next paragraph, making it look as if the two were directly connected, which they weren’t. The bit about the cool setting referred to the service that walto attended. The part about taking out the Jesus talk had to do with what he imagined for his own funeral.

    I see your response as way over the top.

28. walto: Maybe do the whole thing in Ubbi-Dubbi Greek or something.

    What is “Ubbi-Dubbi Greek”, BTW?

29. Alan:

    What is “Ubbi-Dubbi Greek”, BTW?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubbi_dubbi

30. Bruce,

    Here is how I think you could add causal history to the supervenience base available for physicalism: It is a core precept of physics that information is never lost. Therefore it is in principle possible to recover the causal history of some entity from all the information (eg photons) produced in its causal history. If you accept that “in principle” as good enough for physicalism, then I think you just include that available information in an expanded definition of “supervening on the environment” (which we exchanged posts about in defining supervening for the mind).

    You ran into trouble with that approach in our earlier discussion:

    Bruce:

    If a supervenience physicalists are worried about supervenience on past states, then perhaps they would be happier to accept that the supervenience can remain on current states, as long as one allows that that base state for the supervenience can expand at the speed of light, to account for any stray photons that interacted with the subsystem of interest.

    keiths:

    The problem is far more serious than a few “stray photons”. Take the earliest relevant event in the causal history and visualize its light cone. The “base state” encompasses the entirety of the light cone up to the present. Anything within that section of the light cone potentially matters, not just a few stray photons.

31. There was also this exchange:

    Bruce:

    ETA: Actually, I will add one more consideration: Physics requires that information on the past is always recoverable from the current physical state of the universe. (Hence the Black Hole Wars between Hawking and Susskind). So in principle the causal history is reflected in the current state of the universe. Perhaps that might help the most austere physicalists out there.

    ETA 2: I understand that one concern would be that if we cannot recover the information in practice, then it does not answer the issue. That is why I mentioned the relevance of the exchange with Neil.

    keiths:

    What you’re saying above does not fit with what you said earlier:

    I am not saying that meaning does not supervene on the physical (whatever that is). For Burge scenarios, it supervenes on the brain states of the linguistic community; for Putnam and twin earth scenarios, it supervenes on those brain states and on their physical context.

    You can’t make the Burge scheme work, because “the brain states of the linguistic community” doesn’t refer to the same thing as “the current physical state of the universe”.

    You can’t make the Putnam scheme work, either, because the “brain states and their physical context” also doesn’t refer to the same thing as “the current physical state of the universe”.

    Also, you are putting yourself in the extremely odd position of implying the following: Exactly what you and Twin Bruce mean by ‘Anaximander Rodriguez’ does not depend on your brain states, or on the brain states of the linguistic community, but on something else entirely! After all, Earth and Twin Earth are in identical physical states, so any difference in meaning must depend on something else — something outside.

    Furthermore, whatever that “something else” is, its causal influence (if any) on the Earth and Twin Earth systems must be exactly the same because their states remain synchronized. The true meaning of ‘Anaximander Rodriguez’ has no causal impact whatsoever on the people using the name!

    So in my scheme, meanings (which are really only “sorta” meanings) have causal power, while in yours they might as well not exist at all.

    Your theory just doesn’t work, Bruce.

32. keiths: The problem is far more serious than a few “stray photons”.

    I’ll respond to that since it came up in this thread. I agree that it involves more that a “few stray photons”. That is why I said it is “in principle” recoverable. But I think the idea does not conflict with metaphysics of physics. For example, the same idea is why decoherence is a For All Practical Purposes approach to quantum interpretations and in particular to a partial solution of the measurement problem.

    And as I mentioned to Alan in this thread, I agree that also challenges reconciling externalism about meaning with scientific explanations. That’s basically the same issue as the one underlying a desire to avoid causal history in defining “biological function”.

33. Kantian Naturalist: That makes perfect sense to me — thank you for articulating it so clearly!

    In case it was missed last time, I should add that I may change my mind when I get around to reading Garson , where it seems he defends a selectionist account of biological function!

    That’s just the icing. The real meat of the criticism has to do with whether there’s anything like a single universal form of subjectivity. Kant assumes that there is; that’s the key to how he thinks he can avoid all the problems of previous metaphysics. Nietzsche’s response is to point out that our conceptual frameworks are historically and culturally varied; we have no evidence that the categories of the understanding have the universality that Kant attributes to them.

    Very helpful thanks.

    I think that all of these issues work against the naive assumption that a predictive processing system can track hidden causal structures with any more reliability than is necessary to allow the animal to reproduce and the species to avoid extinction.

    OK, but I don’t understand your concern? “Reliability” might be one way of characterizing the successful action approach to misrepresentation in the PEM story.

    We humans all start with a common genetically endowed set of priors (eg those which enable language learning) but our PEM hierarchies are then shaped by our development in our cultures. So that too is necessary for survival for us.

    I do see an issue with understanding the what the causal structure of social reality is in the context of physicalism. But I don’t think the answer is to be an eliminativist about that causal structure.

    Is the source of your worries a concern with developing “true beliefs” a la EEAN?

34. keiths:

    I’m interested in hearing about anything that qualifies as genuine downward causation,

    I suspect this depends on what you consider “causation” and what you consider “genuine” which I will take as a synonym for “real”.

    I think you need to accept a counterfactual account of causation, like interventionism, to be satisfied with calling this downward causation. If you lean more towards production accounts, what the articles consider causation my not constitute causation in your view.

    For “real”, I think you need to be happy with an approach to realism like the Dennettian functionalism (real patterns) in that Wallace quote I provided earlier in the thread. In Chapter 13 of his the Big Picture, Carroll phrases that as

    “something is “real” if it plays an essential role in some particular story of reality that, as far as we can tell, provides an accurate description of the world within its domain of applicability.”

    This approach does mix ontology with epistemology. To me, if you accept it, then I think it will challenge the notion of in-principle reducibility, since that implies any explanation and its resulting predictions can in principle be phrased in the most basic physics, currently QFT. But that re-rephrasing does not seem possible even in-principle to me. That view is, however, an intuition and not something I can provide a knock-down argument for. (You might even call it an “impression”).

    Sean provides an overview of this issue in the context of related ones like emergence and objective versus subjective/constructed reality in Chapters 12 and 13.

    Speaking of constructed reality, Dan Kauffman has a post about it and phyicalism; he also discusses it in this video.

    First sentence in his blog post: “Lately, I’ve been doing some work on Physicalism and social reality , suggesting that taking the latter seriously means that the former has to be false”. That is his view, not mine.

    FWIW, I think that the reality of socially-constructed concepts is at the core of your discussions with KB on physicalism and morality.

35. keiths:
    CharlieM,

    Right.The ideal tetrahedron is a fictional entity that does not exist in reality.

    The representation is not of a physical tetrahedron, since physical tetrahedra aren’t ideal.The representation is of a fictional, ideal tetrahedron.

    The ideal tetrahedron is not a representation. Any physical tetrahedrons or any mind’s image of tetrahdrons, these are the representations. The ideal tetrahedron is apprehended by thought, it is singular and it is not relative to or dependent on anything other than itself.

    Then you have a strange definition of “reality”.The ideal tetrahedron doesn’t exist anywhere, including in our brains.All we have is a representation of it.

    The ideal tetrahedron doesn’t exist.It isn’t real.

    If you have a representation of a tetrahedron then what you have is not the ideal tetrahedron which I am talking about. I agree that the ideal tetrahedron doesn’t exist in the physical world, it exists at a higher level than the physical world.

    The physical world of your experience is a representation dependent on your physical senses, but objective reality is not dictated by human senses.

36. walto: For what reasons? You have given none.

    I know it through thinking. Any physical tetrahedron I see or imagine is dependent on my organisation. Through examining it and thinking I know that it has imperfections. If I carved a tetrahedron out of stone, it would be in no way tetrahedron-like to a microscopic bug that happened to crawl across it, it would be more like rough terrain. If you are saying that the ideal tetrahedron is a representative model of some physical tetrahedron then you are saying that the perfect is a model of the imperfect and I would say that your understanding of the matter is inconsistent.

37. Bruce,

    Here’s what’s puzzling me. You wrote:

    Here is how I think you could add causal history to the supervenience base available for physicalism:

    But that didn’t work for your externalist theory of meaning, as we discussed in the earlier thread. It also doesn’t work for someone like walto who wants fitness to be dependent on an organism’s causal history.

    What is the point of adding causal history to the supervenience base, then? Where can this idea be usefully applied?

38. CharlieM:

    The ideal tetrahedron is not a representation.

    That’s right. The ideal tetrahedron doesn’t exist, but representations of it can (and do) exist. They aren’t the same thing.

    The ideal tetrahedron is apprehended by thought, it is singular and it is not relative to or dependent on anything other than itself.

    It isn’t apprehended by thought, because it has no independent existence. It’s a nonexistent fictional entity which the representations depict. It’s like a unicorn in that regard.

    If you have a representation of a tetrahedron then what you have is not the ideal tetrahedron which I am talking about.

    Of course. As I’ve said, the representation is real. The ideal tetrahedron is not. They can’t be the same thing.

39. CharlieM, to walto:

    If you are saying that the ideal tetrahedron is a representative model of some physical tetrahedron then you are saying that the perfect is a model of the imperfect and I would say that your understanding of the matter is inconsistent.

    Same error as above. The map is not the (fictional) territory. A real, existing map of a nonexistent, imaginary world is not a contradiction in terms. A real, existing representation of a nonexistent, imaginary, ideal tetrahedron isn't a contradiction either.

40. CharlieM: If I carved a tetrahedron out of stone, it would be in no way tetrahedron-like to a microscopic bug that happened to crawl across it

    What if that was the perfect representation of the tetrahedron you carved in stone that day? What if there’s something exactly like that in the higher level?

41. keiths:

    walto:

    For what reasons? You have given none.

    I think I can tease out some reasons from what Charlie wrote:

    He is claiming that

    a) a potential thing that is not limited in size is “realer” than something that is limited;

    b) a potential thing that is perfect is “realer” than something that is imperfect; and

    c) a potential thing that remains forever the same is “realer” than something that changes.

    Those reasons don’t make any sense to me, and counterexamples are easy to come by.Perhaps Charlie will elaborate.

    It is not a potential thing, it is a kinetic form. Can you provide some of those counterexamples?

42. CharlieM:

    It is not a potential thing, it is a kinetic form.

    A “kinetic form”? So the ideal tetrahedron is moving? How do you know this?

43. Kantian Naturalist: I’m always fascinated by the conviction that the changeless, eternal, perfect things are ‘more real’ than the changing, temporal, ‘imperfect’ things.

    It’s an assumption that gets into Western philosophy with Parmenides, and then responses to Parmenides by subsequent Greek and Roman philosophers.

    What strikes me as funny about it is that there’s an entire philosophical tradition, just as ancient and rich based on the exact opposite view: that the craving for permanence is a source of misery, and true liberation from misery lies in recognizing the reality of impermanence.

    It would be one thing if Western metaphysicians and theologians had grappled with the challenge posed by Buddhist thought — but very few have, even today.

    I do not believe that eternity is changeless. IMO higher reality is more fluid and dynamic than this lower physical world of the senses.
    Steiner

    Parmenides therefore sets himself in absolute opposition to Heraclitus. With all the one-sidedness possible only to a keen philosophical nature, he rejected all testimony brought by sense perception. For, it is precisely this ever-changing sense world that leads one astray into the view of Heraclitus. Parmenides therefore regarded those revelations as the only source of all truth which well forth from the innermost core of the human personality: the revelations of thinking. In his view the real being of things is not what flows past the senses; it is the thoughts, the ideas, that thinking discovers within this stream and to which it holds fast!

    Like so many things that arise in opposition to a particular one-sidedness, Parmenides’s way of thinking also became disastrous. It ruined European thinking for centuries. It undermined man’s confidence in his sense perception. Whereas an unprejudiced, naive look at the sense world draws from this world itself the thought-content that satisfies the human drive for knowledge, the philosophical movement developing in the sense of Parmenides believed it had to draw real truth only out of pure, abstract thinking.

    The thoughts we gain in living intercourse with the sense world have an individual character; they have within themselves the warmth of something experienced. We unfold our own personality by extracting ideas from the world. We feel ourselves as conquerors of the sense world when we capture it in the world of thoughts. Abstract, pure thinking has something impersonal and cold about it. We always feel a compulsion when we spin forth ideas out of pure thinking. Our feeling of self cannot be heightened through such thinking. For we must simply submit to the necessities of thought.

44. keiths: someone like walto who wants fitness to be dependent on an organism’s causal history.

    I do? OK.

45. BruceS: We humans all start with a common genetically endowed set of priors (eg those which enable language learning) but our PEM hierarchies are then shaped by our development in our cultures.

    Are these the ones we are supposed to park by the door when coming here?

46. keiths: The map is not the (fictional) territory. A real, existing map of a nonexistent, imaginary world is not a contradiction in terms. A real, existing representation of a nonexistent, imaginary, ideal tetrahedron isn’t a contradiction either.

    And you don’t see any problem at all with your logic.

47. BruceS:

    OK, but I don’t understand your concern? “Reliability” might be one way of characterizing the successful action approach to misrepresentation in the PEM story.

    I think my worry is not that an animal’s cognitive maps are not reliable, but that reliability consists of (something like) ‘detecting and tracking causal regularities sufficiently well to maintain homeostasis”. That yields (I think) a rather promising alternative to “either realism or anti-realism”. The difficulty is to understand the relationship between reliable cognitive maps and likely-to-be judgments.

    We humans all start with a common genetically endowed set of priors (e.g. those which enable language learning) but our PEM hierarchies are then shaped by our development in our cultures. So that too is necessary for survival for us.

    Oh, definitely. I take it the evolution of neuroplasticity is crucial to how PEM hierarchies can be culturally transmitted from generation to generation. And yes, those will be local and contingent.

    I do see an issue with understanding the what the causal structure of social reality is in the context of physicalism. But I don’t think the answer is to be an eliminativist about that causal structure.

    Was I suggesting eliminativism about social reality? I thought I was urging a line of thought about how reinforcement learning mechanisms can get PEM hierarchies attuned to local scaffolding structures, but there cannot be any guarantee that this will be more than a local optimum as far as tracking real patterns is concerned.

    Is the source of your worries a concern with developing “true beliefs” a la EEAN?

    Yes, but not quite. Plantinga puts the problem in such a way that it cannot be solved. I’m more interested in how language allows us to escape our local optima — but only up to a degree — and how science allows us to escape even further — but, again, only up a degree.

48. keiths:
    CharlieM:

    That’s right.The ideal tetrahedron doesn’t exist, but representations of it can (and do) exist. They aren’t the same thing.

    It isn’t apprehended by thought, because it has no independent existence.It’s a nonexistent fictional entity which the representations depict.It’s like a unicorn in that regard.

    Of course.As I’ve said, the representation is real.The ideal tetrahedron is not.They can’t be the same thing.

    The ideal tetrahedron can be defined completely without reference to anything other than itself. This cannot be said for any physical tetrahedron.

49. keiths:
    CharlieM, to walto:

    Same error as above.The map is not the (fictional) territory.A real, existing map of a nonexistent, imaginary world is not a contradiction in terms.A real, existing representation of a nonexistent, imaginary, ideal tetrahedron isn’t a contradiction either.

    Define this non-existent, imaginary world you are talking about.

50. keiths:
    CharlieM, to walto:

    Same error as above.The map is not the (fictional) territory.A real, existing map of a nonexistent, imaginary world is not a contradiction in terms.A real, existing representation of a nonexistent, imaginary, ideal tetrahedron isn’t a contradiction either.

    Define this non-existent, imaginary world you are talking about.