reality as unintelligible chaos, Dr. Hoffman's dashboard, etc.

[lorenzop]

This is in reference to the notion that the world is unintelligible and chaotic, or, somehow much different than what we 'think' we see.
Donald Hoffman, and also BK, refer to this as the evolutionary development of a 'dashboard' - it's a dashboard that allows us to make sense of the world, make predictions, etc. Rather than evolve to a true perception of the world, we evolve to a better dashboard that aids in survival.
Also the PoF folks (also Barfiled) claim there is this thinking that occurs, pre logic, that shapes our perception of the world.
I may not be describing this notion correctly - but you get the idea.
However, if I use the camera/video recorder on my phone, or any camera analog or digital - the image I get on the device is very much like what I see, hear, etc.
It is far more likely that the world is as we perceive it, then to assume the camera captures unintelligible chaos and we instananeously evolved a dashboard to interpret 2 dimensional images on an electronic device.
It's more logical to preceed that reality exists on multiple levels; sub atomic, atomic, molecular, macro objective, etc.; and we human beings can perceive reality on various levels.
(This is independent of whether one is an Idealist or Materialist.)

[Jim Cross]

A camera is designed to produce an image recognizable for the human eye. That doesn't mean it is capturing everything. It certainly is missing major parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Birds can see part of ultraviolet spectrum.

[lorenzop]

true (but I think my point still stands) as even if a "camera is designed to produce an image recognizable for the human eye" - - it's unlikely we would have built the camera with the same algorithms of our alleged dashboard, or the PoF thinking.
Even if we used a basic pinhole camera, or shadow box the resulting image resembles what we see. and not unintelligible chaos.

[Cleric K]

It's more logical to preceed that reality exists on multiple levels; sub atomic, atomic, molecular, macro objective, etc.; and we human beings can perceive reality on various levels.

Lorenzo,

if I understand your argument correctly it practically says: "If the world was really unintelligible chaos, then a camera, which certainly can't think, would capture only noise. The fact that what we see on the photograph resembles what we see with our eyes, shows that the structure is within the world itself and not simply added through human thought by connecting random dots within a sea of unintelligible chaos."

I personally don't know whether BK and DH imply that there's no structure in the actual world. Since this view is actually Schop's mysticism, I imagine that they would say something like: "True reality is structured but it is and forever will be categorically unconceivable by conscious cognition. The two are like orthogonal to each other." In this sense true reality shouldn't really be called 'unintelligible chaos'. It is really something that is incomprehensible by cognition so it's not even chaos, because chaos is something that we can conceive of.

The PoF guys say something altogether different. Reality is structured and it only appears as unintelligible chaos as long as our physical and spiritual organization is not attuned to the world contents.

Consider this image:



This is one of the many undeciphered scripts. Since we're familiar with writing systems, it does look to us like some kind of script. But for someone who has never seen writing it will look simply like damaged surface of a stone. Now imagine how this looks for the one who has engraved the stone. For them it is all symbols of meaning, just like the words you're now reading are symbols of meaning. So we could say that the life of soul and spirit of the writer has been impressed in the stone. Yet we perceive only holes. And it's not even the stone but a photograph of the stone reproduced by light emitting pixels on the screen. We could cover the stone with clay and after it dries we could make a primitive copy. So in all cases we've managed to reproduce the perceptual forms such that when we look at the real stone, the photo on the screen, the clay print, we have the clear feeling "I'm looking at the same forms". But the forms themselves don't come together with the meaning. Otherwise archaeologists wouldn't be trying to decipher the script.

So think about it: putting aside the time gap, do we have a more comprehensive understanding of the totality of reality when together with the stone markings we also grasp the thoughts and feelings of the person who has engraved them?

This is at the core of what the PoF guys say. The contents of reality are structured but it depends on our physical and spiritual organization whether we cognize that structure as random markings or as meaningful script.

Imagine that a caveman time travels into your room. In certain sense his eyes will be flooded with the same light reflections as your eyes but do you think that he'll have the same conscious experience as yours? Do you think you have the same conscious experience when looking at the stone above, as the person who engraved it? Pick even the simplest of objects from your room environment, say a paper clip, and think how incomprehensible that would be for the caveman. Sure - he will behold some kind of perceptions, but there are so many things that must be understood for that paper clip to make sense - paper, language, writing and so on. These are all things that must be conceived in the soul. Similarly, when you look at the stone you have some kind of perceptions but they are incomplete as long as the life of soul and spirit of the writer are not there to complement them.

So today we're like cavemen within the natural and intellectual worlds. We've mastered juggling with forms but we're still far from the higher order life of soul and spirit which impresses itself into the structures and is responsible for the elements, the kingdoms and so on.

The difference between BK/DH and the PoF guys is that the latter are on the path which gradually leads to the life of soul and spirit which makes the spectrum of reality meaningful by complementing it with the higher order life, which alone makes the natural forms fully meaningful, analogously to the way we need to enter the life of soul and spirit of the ancient man who engraved the stone, if the markings are to become meaningful.

[AshvinP]

This is in reference to the notion that the world is unintelligible and chaotic, or, somehow much different than what we 'think' we see.
Donald Hoffman, and also BK, refer to this as the evolutionary development of a 'dashboard' - it's a dashboard that allows us to make sense of the world, make predictions, etc. Rather than evolve to a true perception of the world, we evolve to a better dashboard that aids in survival.
Also the PoF folks (also Barfiled) claim there is this thinking that occurs, pre logic, that shapes our perception of the world.
I may not be describing this notion correctly - but you get the idea.
However, if I use the camera/video recorder on my phone, or any camera analog or digital - the image I get on the device is very much like what I see, hear, etc.
It is far more likely that the world is as we perceive it, then to assume the camera captures unintelligible chaos and we instananeously evolved a dashboard to interpret 2 dimensional images on an electronic device.
It's more logical to preceed that reality exists on multiple levels; sub atomic, atomic, molecular, macro objective, etc.; and we human beings can perceive reality on various levels.
(This is independent of whether one is an Idealist or Materialist.)

As Cleric's post referenced, it's helpful to keep in mind how things go wrong when epistemological distinctions/metaphors are made into ontologies. Who is to say the perceptual 'dashboard' is the same for everyone across all times? We know it isn't. DH often refers to people with synesthesia, for ex. Cleric mentioned the caveman who teleports into modern day. His 'dashboard' wouldn't interface with the objective, shared meaning of the world in the same way as the average modern person. Obviously non-human animals don't share our same 'dashboard'. So, in that sense, the 'dashboard' is simply a convenient fiction we use to condense a dynamic process of evolving cognition-perception, which varies across all species, groups, and individuals, into an easily accessible concept. Yet BK and DH, and practically everyone else in the modern world, have the tendency to mistake this easily accessible concept for the reality of evolving consciousness itself and therefore project it into a vague, generalized ontology.

PoF guys refrain from that and remember we are dealing with a dynamic evolving process, and therefore seek to understand that process itself - where it has been, where it is, where it is going. At all times considering how the process manifests within our own soul life, i.e. from the first person perspective. They also discern how it is our sensory organization which divides the world of shared, unified meaning into varied perceptions, which appear without our creative involvement, and concepts, which can only come from that involvement. It is only through our thinking, which is capable of perceiving something of the lives of soul and spirit which are responsible for the forms around us, that we can reunite the perceptions with their meaning in ever-expanding spheres, by becoming more conscious of our own creative involvement. Yet meaning doesn't just 'hang in the air' or float around - it is always attached to meaningful activity.

The activity of reading is something like the quintessence of the same process that subtends all cognition. To write something, we must transcribe meaning into ordered series of glyphs. These themselves are, in themselves, just as unintelligible as pure percepts. After all, they are only sequences of shapes and figures. Nevertheless, it will be immediately clear that legibility, just like intelligibility, consists in restoring or recognizing a meaning in something from which that meaning had necessarily been split off as a condition of its sensible appearance. If text could not be sundered from the speaker, it could not be text. To present epistemology as a hermeneutics of the percept naturally invites the comparison of the world to text and perception to textual interpretation. This analogy might seem to risk implying too much. It is clear that a text presents our attention with something like a set of instructions as to how it is to configure itself to participate in the writer’s intention. But this presupposes the author as an intelligent and intentional agent that wrote the text. To extend this comparison to the sensory world might invoke a great deal of resistance in some people. Are we to suppose that there are intelligences behind the manifestations of nature?

For Steiner, the answer is “yes,” and though he does not expand on this dimension of his theory of knowledge in The Philosophy of Freedom, a great deal of his work in his greater Anthroposophical corpus is dedicated to just this task of characterizing the various beings and intelligences that are responsible for the world that appears to us and that we take for given.2 Clearly, the notion that there are intelligences behind the world of appearances is anathema to the scientific paradigm of today, together with all of the disciplines that adopt the postulates of the scientific outlook. But this is just what the proposition that “there is no intelligence behind the laws and manifestations of nature” is: a postulate. It is not a fact or finding or discovery. It is a theory by which findings are interpreted. The view implied, though not explicitly advanced, in The Philosophy of Freedom—that there are intelligences behind the appearance of the natural world—has the advantage that it is consistent with what we know about the origin of those things and objects that are entirely familiar to us. We know that a book does not produce itself. We do not know where the tulip comes from. The Anthroposophical view begins with what we can see and attempts to move to what we cannot. The scientific view, by contrast, moves in the opposite direction by positing hypotheses about things that are unknown to us and then attempting to fit what we do know into the mold of those hypotheses. This will immediately become clear if we consider the present debate about consciousness and brain processes. It is imagined that the latter are comparatively well-understood and that consciousness is something mysterious or elusive, or even illusive. For Steiner, this approach is looking at the issue through the wrong end of the telescope since it overlooks the fact that any knowledge about brain-processes, or anything else for that matter, presupposes a trust in the consciousness that has that knowledge and the thinking that won through to it.

[Jim Cross]

true (but I think my point still stands) as even if a "camera is designed to produce an image recognizable for the human eye" - - it's unlikely we would have built the camera with the same algorithms of our alleged dashboard, or the PoF thinking.
Even if we used a basic pinhole camera, or shadow box the resulting image resembles what we see. and not unintelligible chaos.

You should actually read Hoffman on this. It's extremely likely we would build a camera to generate images we would recognize. Otherwise, nobody would be interested in the photographs. In other words, photographic images are nonveridical in the same way that our vision is nonveridical.

At least, that is Hoffman's view.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.37 ... 90-8#Sec14

Despite the evidence from evolutionary games and genetic algorithms that militates against veridical perceptions, a hard-nosed critique might still be unfazed: “Look, it’s still the case that what you see is what you get. If it looks to me that a rock is round and 5 feet away, I can verify this with rulers, laser rangefinders and a host of other instruments, and then confirm it with other observers endowed with similar instruments. So my perceptions are in fact veridical.”

This argument is prima facie plausible and has two key parts. The first part, the measured world argument, claims that our perceptions of the world are veridical because they generally agree with our careful measurements of the world. The second part, the consensus argument, claims that our perceptions are veridical because human observers normally agree with each other about their perceptions and the results of their measurements.

Both arguments fail.

.One problem with the measured world argument is that there are obvious cases where our perceptions radically disagree with our careful measurements.

...

A second problem with the measured world argument arises even if the results of measurements agree with our perceptions. We express our measurements in terms of predicates that our perceptual representations use.

...

The consensus argument fares no better, for the simple reason that agreement among observers does not entail the veridicality of their perceptions or measurements. Agreement can occur if, for instance, the perceptions and measurements of observers are all nonveridical in the same way.

Personally I think vision and other senses are partially veridical and partially not. I think relationships are somewhat veridical and can become more precise through learning and experience.

[lorenzop]

You should actually read Hoffman on this. It's extremely likely we would build a camera to generate images we would recognize. Otherwise, nobody would be interested in the photographs. In other words, photographic images are nonveridical in the same way that our vision is nonveridical.

At least, that is Hoffman's view.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.37 ... 90-8#Sec14

It may be that I don't understand how Hoffman is using the 'dashboard' . . . for example a group of individuals viewing the moon; one thinks the moon is very far away, another thinks the moon is close, another thinks it's a piece of floating cheese, and another sees (the moon) yet names it and sees it as a goddess.
If the 'dashboard' is the moon being being far away, being close, being cheese, being a godess, etc. then I misunderstood Hoffman's dashboard.
But I don't think this is the case - Hoffman uses the analogy of an icon on the computer screen (trash can), and sliding a file to it. In this analogy reality is 1/0's and the dashboard is the icon. Hoffman appears to be open to even (almost) 0 truthfulness in perception - and certainly open to 0 truthfulness in measurement\interpretation.
Needless to say, the brain, neurons and their firing, are also of the dashboard/visualization tool.
The brain, moon - all physical objects, colors etc. exist when we render (reconstruct) them - and don't exist when we don't render them.
BTW, I NOT thinking I got Hoffman on something he missed - but rather there must be something I'm missing.
Re "It's extremely likely we would build a camera to generate images we would recognize" - yes our cameras capture the same spectrum of light as our eyes (not UV) . . .
I see a train approaching at 200mph, I video the oncoming train, on playback the video camera captures largely what I see and hear:
1) there is a train approaching, with charcacteristics largely like what I observe.
2) the oncoming object is a reality quite different than what I see, and yet somehow the camera renders the train as I do.
3) the camera captures reality, whatever that may be; and yet when I watch the 2D image on playback I somehow render the image the same way as I rendered the oncoming reality.

Of the 3 options above, #1 is the only believable.

[AshvinP]

BTW, I NOT thinking I got Hoffman on something he missed - but rather there must be something I'm missing.
Re "It's extremely likely we would build a camera to generate images we would recognize" - yes our cameras capture the same spectrum of light as our eyes (not UV) . . .
I see a train approaching at 200mph, I video the oncoming train, on playback the video camera captures largely what I see and hear:
1) there is a train approaching, with charcacteristics largely like what I observe.
2) the oncoming object is a reality quite different than what I see, and yet somehow the camera renders the train as I do.
3) the camera captures reality, whatever that may be; and yet when I watch the 2D image on playback I somehow render the image the same way as I rendered the oncoming reality.

Of the 3 options above, #1 is the only believable.

Why are you discarding #3? What is a camera other than an extension of the human cognitive-perceptual faculty, which adds another layer of abstraction to the image rendered?

[lorenzop]

#3 would require the camera captures reality as it is, and then, when we view the device screen, we render from this 2D image of reality an image very much like we preceive. I would expect the camera to capture 'gobblety gook' - and we not able to render from this captured image as we render reality.

#2 would require that the camera renders\thinks reality into the dashboard icons in the same manner we render what we see.

#1) states there is no 'dashboard', our perception is highly veridical.

[lorenzop]

The PoF guys say something altogether different. Reality is structured and it only appears as unintelligible chaos as long as our physical and spiritual organization is not attuned to the world contents.

I would agree with this, although the language 'spiritual organization is not attuned to the world contents' is a bit fuzzy to me.
I would state it more like William Blake does: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” Or, this quote from Cezanne "“The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.”
Or as the wisdom of the East might suggest, "Knowing of the world is structured in consciousness'.
The above is what we experience each day, if we're drowsy, angry, grief stricken, or asleep, dreaming . . . these states effect our perception.
But yes I find your answer more useful than the 'dashboard'.