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Re: Are there any SIMPLE books refuting what Bernardo calls "The materialism of qualities"?

Posted: Wed Sep 29, 2021 2:16 pm
by Jim Cross
AshvinP wrote: Wed Sep 29, 2021 12:51 pm
Jim Cross wrote: Wed Sep 29, 2021 12:23 pm
Ben Iscatus wrote: Wed Sep 29, 2021 11:52 am Jim, perception can mean more than apprehension by the senses - it can also mean apprehension by the mind (understanding). Some dictionaries extend the definition.
In the context of naïve realism, which is the context this is being discussed,it is clearly about perception by the senses.
In philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind, naïve realism (also known as direct realism, perceptual realism, or common sense realism) is the idea that the senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they really are.[1] When referred to as direct realism, naïve realism is often contrasted with indirect realism.[2]]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism

1. Jim perceives-conceives of his senses as sound, smell, taste, sight, and touch.

2. Through this unexamined naive conception, Jim fails to recognize senses of thinking, warmth, balance, and several others and their perceptual content. (Note one can perceive thought-forms not generated by one's own thinking, in case that wasn't clear).

3. Jim thereby refuses to consider any inner-endogenous perceptions as either (a) existing and/or (b) relevant to any scientific inquiry.

4. Jim is a naive realist with regards to senses.


That is my argument and it is compatible with the Wiki definition you use above (although I prefer Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy for all these terms). You are involved in a generally more extreme case of naïve realism here. In more milder case, the person naïvely regards what is perecived via senses as real. Here, you are failing to even perceive the senses in the first place. You are naively regarding the non-existence of certain senses as real, only because you fail to perceive them, even after they have been pointed out to you, and not on any reasoned grounds (hence naïvely).

My initial criticism was that you were falling for common trap of limiting the understanding of this modern prejudice so that it excludes your preferred worldview, as you hold to it, from its purview. With modern prejudices generally, people like to assume it applies to everyone but themselves. There was a time not so long ago I held to idealist understanding that also incorporated naive realism without knowing (for ex. "alter" is held as a naively real perception-conception for most). Also, the reason we can say "perception-conception" is that the two are inseparable, as all modern cognitive science has demonstrated.
Thanks for demonstrating my point precisely.

You don't understand the meaning of naïve realism. You've made up your own definition.

Actually thinking about it, I can see why you fall for idealism. By your worldview, you can made up what you want and it can all be true. And everyone else's view can all be wrong.

Re: Are there any SIMPLE books refuting what Bernardo calls "The materialism of qualities"?

Posted: Wed Sep 29, 2021 2:47 pm
by AshvinP
Jim Cross wrote: Wed Sep 29, 2021 2:16 pm Thanks for demonstrating my point precisely.

You don't understand the meaning of naïve realism. You've made up your own definition.

Actually thinking about it, I can see why you fall for idealism. By your worldview, you can made up what you want and it can all be true. And everyone else's view can all be wrong.

And thank you for the very well-reasoned response :)

The overall point is, modern philosophical arguments of the sort you illustrate here have lost all connection to concrete reality. What is the purpose of the critique of naive realism? It is to highlight the unexamined assumption that one can understand aspects of Reality, such as modes of perceiving the world ("senses"), without thinking through the principles underlying them. You simply assume "senses" is whatever immediately pops into your mind and nothing else. If you want to call that something other than "naive realism", like "naive failure to think through phenomenon", that's fine with me... actually I am all for making the terminology more precise and concrete.

I notice you dropped the "Hoffman's ITP is perfectly compatible with physicalism" argument after my quote of Hoffman, so at least that is settled. As naive realism applies to physicalism, BK said it well in The Idea of the World:

This, in essence, is what physicalists do, whether it is philosophically justifiable or not.4 Their consciousness conceptualizes self-portraits within itself. Sometimes these self-portraits take the form of electrical impulses and neurotransmitter releases in the brain (Koch 2004). Other times, they take the shape of quantum transitions or potentials (Tarlaci & Pregnolato 2016). Whatever the case, their consciousness always points to a conceptual entity it creates within itself and then declares itself to be this entity. It dismisses its own primary, first-person point of view in favor of an abstract third-person perspective.

Kastrup, Bernardo. The Idea of the World (p. 210). John Hunt Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Re: Are there any SIMPLE books refuting what Bernardo calls "The materialism of qualities"?

Posted: Wed Sep 29, 2021 3:06 pm
by Jim Cross
AshvinP wrote: Wed Sep 29, 2021 2:47 pm
Jim Cross wrote: Wed Sep 29, 2021 2:16 pm Thanks for demonstrating my point precisely.

You don't understand the meaning of naïve realism. You've made up your own definition.

Actually thinking about it, I can see why you fall for idealism. By your worldview, you can made up what you want and it can all be true. And everyone else's view can all be wrong.

And thank you for the very well-reasoned response :)

The overall point is, modern philosophical arguments of the sort you illustrate here have lost all connection to concrete reality. What is the purpose of the critique of naive realism? It is to highlight the unexamined assumption that one can understand aspects of Reality, such as modes of perceiving the world ("senses"), without thinking through the principles underlying them. You simply assume "senses" is whatever immediately pops into your mind and nothing else. If you want to call that something other than "naive realism", like "naive failure to think through phenomenon", that's fine with me... actually I am all for making the terminology more precise and concrete.

I notice you dropped the "Hoffman's ITP is perfectly compatible with physicalism" argument after my quote of Hoffman, so at least that is settled. As naive realism applies to physicalism, BK said it well in The Idea of the World:

This, in essence, is what physicalists do, whether it is philosophically justifiable or not.4 Their consciousness conceptualizes self-portraits within itself. Sometimes these self-portraits take the form of electrical impulses and neurotransmitter releases in the brain (Koch 2004). Other times, they take the shape of quantum transitions or potentials (Tarlaci & Pregnolato 2016). Whatever the case, their consciousness always points to a conceptual entity it creates within itself and then declares itself to be this entity. It dismisses its own primary, first-person point of view in favor of an abstract third-person perspective.

Kastrup, Bernardo. The Idea of the World (p. 210). John Hunt Publishing. Kindle Edition.
I guess you missed my quote of Hoffman.
Although the interface theory is compatible with idealism,
it is not idealism, because it proposes no specific model of objective reality,
but leaves the nature of objective reality as an open scientific problem.

Re: Are there any SIMPLE books refuting what Bernardo calls "The materialism of qualities"?

Posted: Wed Sep 29, 2021 3:13 pm
by AshvinP
Jim Cross wrote: Wed Sep 29, 2021 3:06 pm I guess you missed my quote of Hoffman.
Although the interface theory is compatible with idealism,
it is not idealism, because it proposes no specific model of objective reality,
but leaves the nature of objective reality as an open scientific problem.

Jim,

I keep pointing this out and you keep ignoring it. Maybe you feel like your ego is at stake here, so surrender is no longer an option. You are sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting "I can't hear you!" I wouldn't bother with this at all if you just stopped misrepresenting Hoffman's position every chance you get, which is very easy to do... just stop. One last time, you said:

viewtopic.php?p=11856#p11856
Jim wrote:Hoffman's Interface Theory of Perception is perfectly compatible with materialism.

And that is what I have been refuting this entire time, most recently with this quote from Hoffman:

Hoffman wrote:Science is a method. It can test and discard ontologies. If our perceptions evolved by natural selection, then, according to the FBT Theorem, we should discard the ontology of physicalism. We should recognize that spacetime and objects are the perceptual interface used by Homo sapiens. They are our first-person experiences. The scientific study of physical objects in spacetime, even when conducted by large teams of scientists using advanced technologies, is necessarily a study of first-person experiences.

Hoffman, Donald. The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes . W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

So please, put the ego aside and just stop misrepresenting him. You can disagree with him without misrepresenting him. It's very simple.

Re: Are there any SIMPLE books refuting what Bernardo calls "The materialism of qualities"?

Posted: Wed Sep 29, 2021 3:25 pm
by Jim Cross
AshvinP wrote: Wed Sep 29, 2021 3:13 pm
Jim Cross wrote: Wed Sep 29, 2021 3:06 pm I guess you missed my quote of Hoffman.
Although the interface theory is compatible with idealism,
it is not idealism, because it proposes no specific model of objective reality,
but leaves the nature of objective reality as an open scientific problem.

Jim,

I keep pointing this out and you keep ignoring it. Maybe you feel like your ego is at stake here, so surrender is no longer an option. You are sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting "I can't hear you!" I wouldn't bother with this at all if you just stopped misrepresenting Hoffman's position every chance you get, which is very easy to do... just stop. One last time, you said:

viewtopic.php?p=11856#p11856
Jim wrote:Hoffman's Interface Theory of Perception is perfectly compatible with materialism.

And that is what I have been refuting this entire time, most recently with this quote from Hoffman:

Hoffman wrote:Science is a method. It can test and discard ontologies. If our perceptions evolved by natural selection, then, according to the FBT Theorem, we should discard the ontology of physicalism. We should recognize that spacetime and objects are the perceptual interface used by Homo sapiens. They are our first-person experiences. The scientific study of physical objects in spacetime, even when conducted by large teams of scientists using advanced technologies, is necessarily a study of first-person experiences.

Hoffman, Donald. The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes . W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

So please, put the ego aside and just stop misrepresenting him. You can disagree with him without misrepresenting him. It's very simple.
As usual, you're talking about one thing and I am talking about another.

My comment was about ITP. My quote from Hoffman was about ITP. There is nothing in your quote about ITP.

What's more, your quote from Hoffman demonstrates the absurdity of his extreme positions. Science cannot test and discard ontologies.

Re: Are there any SIMPLE books refuting what Bernardo calls "The materialism of qualities"?

Posted: Wed Sep 29, 2021 3:32 pm
by Jim Cross
BTW, FBT is clearly wrong anyway.

Hoffman's model does not model successfully how consciousness and perception works. It is much too simple.

Re: Are there any SIMPLE books refuting what Bernardo calls "The materialism of qualities"?

Posted: Wed Sep 29, 2021 3:48 pm
by tjssailor
All of his arguments about dreams and optical illusions are easily explained by materialism as products of the nervous system and its interactions with the world. In fact, they are argument in favor of materialism. They are only arguments against naive realism.

People blind from birth don't see in their dreams. Squirrel monkeys who have had cones in their eyes altered to detect wavelengths associated with the color red can suddenly see the color. Where did the red exist before the nervous system became modified to see it? Answer: it didn't exist until the nervous system had the capability to create it. We are fooled by optical illusions precisely because our vision is a product of our nervous system which is the product of millions of years of evolution.

Bernardo should read up on how neuroscience understands vision to work.



Ultimately you can play around with rods, cones, chemicals, electricity all you want and you will never get to vision. The last step is never there. There is no transfer function between all that stuff and vision. You could never predict vision by examining the neurological activity. There is no theory or math that predicts vision either.

If you want to know about what some one is seeing you have to ask them. There are normal people with hardly any brain that evidently function and see quite well (sweep that under the rug). There are people who seem to have normal neurology who can't see. I'm seeing things in dreams with no visual input. There are blind people who see during an NDE.

It's M&L that sees.

Re: Are there any SIMPLE books refuting what Bernardo calls "The materialism of qualities"?

Posted: Wed Sep 29, 2021 4:01 pm
by AshvinP
Jim Cross wrote: Wed Sep 29, 2021 3:25 pm As usual, you're talking about one thing and I am talking about another.

My comment was about ITP. My quote from Hoffman was about ITP. There is nothing in your quote about ITP.


Ok let's make this perfectly clear then so there are no longer any excuses:

We encounter a startling “Fitness-Beats-Truth” (FBT) theorem, which states that evolution by natural selection does not favor true perceptions—it routinely drives them to extinction. Instead, natural selection favors perceptions that hide the truth and guide useful action. Without equations or Greek symbols, we explore the new field of evolutionary game theory, which allows Darwin’s ideas to be transformed into precise mathematics that lead to this shocking theorem. We look at computer simulations of evolutionary games, which confirm the predictions of the FBT Theorem. We find further confirmation from simulations of genetic algorithms, in which perceptions and actions coevolve.

The FBT Theorem tells us that the language of our perceptions—including space, time, shape, hue, saturation, brightness, texture, taste, sound, smell, and motion—cannot describe reality as it is when no one looks. It’s not simply that this or that perception is wrong. It’s that none of our perceptions, being couched in this language, could possibly be right.

At this point, our intuitions falter: How could our senses be useful if they don’t report the truth? In chapter five, we aid our intuitions by exploring an interface metaphor. Space, time, and physical objects are not objective reality. They are simply the virtual world delivered by our senses to help us play the game of life.

This theorem is counterintuitive. How can my perceptions be useful if they aren’t true? Our intuitions need some help here. A venerable tradition conscripts the latest technology—clocks, switchboards, computers—to be a metaphor of the human mind. In line with this tradition, I invite you to explore a new metaphor of perception: each perceptual system is a user interface, like the desktop of a laptop. This interface is shaped by natural selection; it can vary from species to species, and even from creature to creature within a species. I call this the interface theory of perception (ITP).

Hoffman, Donald. The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes . W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

It should now be perfectly clear the relationship of FBT theorem to IPT - the latter is an explanatory model of perception which naturally unfolds from the former. Hoffman is very clear that he believes FBT and IPT makes physicalist ontology incoherent and therefore it should be discarded.

Jim wrote:What's more, your quote from Hoffman demonstrates the absurdity of his extreme positions. Science cannot test and discard ontologies.

It most certainly can. If theoretical physicists who claim "space-time is doomed" are correct, then physicalist ontology is also doomed. Likewise I think Hoffman makes a very good case from Darwinian evolutionary theory. One can doom an ontology by showing its own accounts of Reality, which are necessitated by its ontology, lead to incoherent positions, and that is precisely what Hoffman does with FBT-IPT.

Jim wrote:BTW, FBT is clearly wrong anyway.

Hoffman's model does not model successfully how consciousness and perception works. It is much too simple.
Top

Since this is coming from the guy who doesn't even acknowledge the existence of 50% of all perceptions which can arise in the field of our consciousness, I am sure you understand why I suspect your opinions about what is "clearly wrong" are biased by materialist-dualist prejudices from the outset.

Re: Are there any SIMPLE books refuting what Bernardo calls "The materialism of qualities"?

Posted: Wed Sep 29, 2021 4:18 pm
by Jim Cross
Define the "truth" that fitness beats.

Re: Are there any SIMPLE books refuting what Bernardo calls "The materialism of qualities"?

Posted: Wed Sep 29, 2021 4:26 pm
by Jim Cross
Actually the "truth" is evident in Hoffman's desktop analogy.

The icons for files on my desktop really do represent underlying files stored on disk. Depending upon the nature of the file, the icon may tell me about the structure of the file (PDF, Word Doc, etc). It may have a title which will tell me something about what is in the file.

There are layers of truth. The arrangement of magnetic elements on disk isn't anymore a more truthful view than the icon itself. In fact, I know nothing about the type of file or its content from looking at the file at its lowest levels.
In the same way, we say that the file icon on my desktop is veridical when it stands in the appropriate causal relation to the actual file in the computer. And by design, I create that causal connection when I configure the properties of a desktop icon to point to an actual file within the folder structure of the computer's storage. Now, when I drag the icon to the trash or move it to a different folder, the actual file is deleted or is moved. It is precisely when I drag the icon to the trash and it is not deleted, or when I move the icon to a different folder and the wrong file is moved, that we say that the icon does not represent that file; that the icon is not veridical.

A second consideration about Hoffman et al's 'icon' analogy is that it reveals more than intended about the nature of realism. Just as we can peer behind the desktop icon to reveal the inner workings of the computer interface, likewise, we can dig behind our tree percept to uncover the inner workings of nature. With our desktop icon, we can investigate how moving the icon into another folder icon with our mouse changes the electrical patterns on the hard disc. Likewise, scientists investigate how the various colours of a perceived tree represent certain wavelengths of reflected light and how they interact with photoreceptors in our eyes and transmit electrical signals to our visual cortex. Our tree percept does not place us in an epistemological prison; no more so the icon on our desktop.
https://www.rationalrealm.com/philosoph ... page7.html