Dualism

Most people are probably familiar with dualism. It is the claim that the mind exists as an immaterial substance. It is often called “Cartesian Dualism”, because of the way that it was formulated by Descartes. However, the idea of a spiritual soul seems to be much older.

Apparently, Descartes was familiar with the workings of a clock, and saw that the kinds of mechanisms used could possibly explain motions and other visible behaviors of animals and people. But he did not believe that it could explain thinking. So he argued for two substances. The physical motions would be explained by extended stuff (or material substance), while thought would be explained by thinking stuff (or mental substance), taken to be distinct from extended stuff.

Modern views

Since the time of Descartes, much has been learned about anatomy and about the brain. And our experience with computers shows how intricate behavior can be controlled without requiring any immaterial substance. As a result, dualism is now rejected by many people. However, many religious folk still like the idea of a spiritual soul, so continue to cling to some kind of dualism.

These days, most people of a scientific bent point to the brain as responsible for what Descartes attributed to an immaterial mind. And most academic philosophers agree, though there seem to be a few holdouts.

Passive perception

Descartes took the view that perception is passive. That is, we just perceived the world the way that it actually is. This seems a reasonable conclusion for a dualist such as Descartes. If the mind was assumed immaterial, it could do magical things.

The scientific and manifest images

As a followup to my previous post, I’ll note that Dan Kaufman has posted a second round in his proposals for metaphysics:

• Prolegomena for a Pluralist Metaphysics: The Scientific and Manifest Images

As background, I’ll note that I am sitting at my desk.  According to the manifest image, my desktop is solid wood.  According to the scientific image, my desktop is mostly empty space surrounding a sparse array of atoms.

The scientific image is how physics sees the world.  The manifest image is closer to how we see the world.  But sciences vary.  Biologists are concerned about individual organisms.  And those belong in the manifest image, rather than in the scientific image.  Likewise, most of the concerns of psychology fit better with the manifest image.

In my view, philosophy (by which I mean academic philosophy) is mainly oriented toward the scientific image.  And, in my opinion, it should be more oriented toward the manifest image.  I think that’s also how Dan Kaufman sees it, but perhaps I am misreading him.  Please go read his post to see what he says.

Where I come in

A little background about myself.  I started studying learning (or how humans learn) in the 1980s.  And I quickly found myself disagreeing with philosophers.  I imagined myself to be a solitary animal or organism on some planet, with little or know innate knowledge of the planet.  And I had to work out ways of learning about that planet.

Thoughts about metaphysics

Hmm, it’s been quite a while since I last posted anything to this blog.

Dan Kaufman is rethinking metaphysics, as indicated in a recent post:

• Prolegomena for a Pluralist Metaphysics: Initial Impressions

Judging by the relatively small number of comments, I don’t think there’s a lot of enthusiasm among readers.  But I will be looking forward for continued posts on this topic.

In agreement with Dan, I do want to see some rethinking.  And that’s why I started this blog.

I’ll use this post to give some of my own ideas on the topic.  I expect that some of them are very different from Dan’s ideas.

Basic realism

I am assuming some sort of basic realism.  That is to say, I assume that there is a reality which is human independent.  And we interact with that reality.

I’m calling this an assumption, because I see no possibility of proof.  But it does make clear that I reject Berkeley’s idealism.  I don’t think anything important depends on this assumption.

Knowledge of nuomena

A comment to my previous post asked an interesting question:

Do you yourself think that the noumenal world (The world “in itself”) is unknowable to humans?

This brings up issues which deserve a full post responding to the question.  In particular, it brings up questions such as:

• what do we mean by knowledge?
• what is the relation between the nuomenal world and the wolrd of our experience (the phenomenal world)?

Some background

Let me state, at the outset, that I am not a professional philosopher.  My background is primarily in mathematics and computer science.  So you should take this post as mostly reflecting my personal opinion.  I like to think that opinion is informed by my study of cognition and consciousness.  As best I can tell, nobody else is studying consciousness in quite the same way.

For background on the meaning of “nuomena”, I suggest the Wikipedia article.  Apparently, Plato used the term to refer to his ideal forms.  But, more recently, the term has been used for what Kant described as the thing in itself.  I take that to be a reference to the world undistorted by human ideas and concepts.  I should note that “nuomena” is plural, with “nuomenon” as the corresponding singular.  And I shall use the expression “nuomenal world” for the world of nuomena.

Consciousness — thinking

Today’s post is about thinking, and about what thinking really is.

People broadly agree that we think about ideas, and somehow we make decisions about those ideas.  But, beyond that, there does not seem to be a consensus on what thinking really amounts to.

I will be discussing my own view on that.  I don’t doubt that some people will disagree with my view.

What is thinking?

I see thinking as rehearsal of behavior or rehearsal of possible behavior.

The idea that it is rehearsal of behavior is not original with me.  I read that recently, but I don’t remember where.  I had previously been thinking of it as a simulation of possible behavior, which is a similar idea.  But I really like the term “rehearsal” here, as it better captures my ideas.

The scientific and manifest images

In 1960, Wilfrid Sellars gave some lecturers on the Scientific Image of Man and the Manifest Image of man.  These were later published, and seem to be available on the net as a pdf file.  Roughly, the scientific image is how the world looks to science (particularly physics), while the manifest image is how it looks to us.

Right now, I am looking at a table (actually, my desk).  And it presents itself to me as a solid object with a smooth surface.  That solid object can be said to be part of the manifest image.  However, science describes it as mostly empty space, but with an array of atoms.  The atoms are separated by space.  To science (that is, to physics), there really isn’t a surface nor anything particularly smooth.  This array of separated atoms in space is part of the scientific image.

Why the difference?

I will mainly be looking at the differences between those images, and discussing why there is such a difference.

In recent posts, I have been discussing how we get information about the world by means of carving it up into parts.  The way that we carve up the world gives us the manifest image.  The way that science carves up the world gives us the scientific image.

Sharing concepts with the culture

In my previous post, I discussed carving up the world.  The idea is that we carve the world and give names to some of the parts into which we carve.  Those named parts become the concepts that are part of the true statements we make about the world.

In an earlier post, I indicated that how we carve up the world needs to be a social convention.  And the naming that we use also needs to be a social convention.  That these are social conventions is what allows us to communicate with one another.

In this post, I will be discussing how these social conventions can be established.

The culture

By the culture we mean, roughly speaking, the society and the social practices of people within that society.

We cannot share  things with the culture until there is a culture.  Picture the problem for young child.  She needs to learn how to carve up the world in order to fill her world with details.  So the need to carve up the world starts before the child has much of a world.  In particular, the child needs to start carving up the world before she can become aware that she is part of a society.  In other words, the carving up must begin without access to any carving conventions from the culture.  The child must initiate carving by herself, and not wait until she learns what are the social conventions.

Carving up the world

It is said that we carve up the world at its seams.  I doubt that there are any seams.  We carve up the world in ways that are easy enough and that we find useful.  But those requirements — that it be easy enough and that it be useful — underdetermine how the world is to be carved.  So it is a matter of pragmatic decision making.

As we saw in my last post, carving up the world is what gives us the entities that we can talk about and is what allows us to say true things about the world.

I should say at the outset, that carving up the world isn’t an entirely conscious and deliberate activity.  Much of the work is done behind the scenes by our perceptual systems.  So, in part, this post is related to how perception works.  So when I talk about us carving up the world, I am not restricting this to conscious activity.

Why it is hard

We cannot just look around and see what are good ways of carving up the world.  To be able to look around and see, then what you are looking at has to have a lot of detail.  But the detail that we see gets there because of how we carve up the world.  So we cannot presuppose that it is available before we do any carving.

Information systems

As suggested in the previous post, I think of a cognitive system as an information system.  In this post, I want to look at a particular information system, namely a video camera.

Let me be very clear here.  I do not think that a cognitive system is very much like a video camera.  Rather, I see them as very different.  However, by looking at a video camera, we can examine some basic principles that seem to be common to all information systems, including human cognitive systems.

In particular, we want to look at:

• the input phase, where data is gathered;
• the organization phase, where the data is assembled together;
• the output stream — the final output information.

The input phase

For the video camera, the data is gathered into a pixel map.  I am going to describe this as categorization.  That might seem a strange term to use for generating a pixel map, so I should first explain why I am using that term.

Searle’s design thinking

While reading Searle’s perception book, I came across this passage:

Think of the problem from a designer point of view. Suppose you are God or evolution and you are designing organisms capable of coping with their environment in spectacularly successful ways. First, you create an environment that has objects with shapes, sizes, movements, etc. Furthermore, you create an environment with differential light reflectances. Then you create organisms with spectacularly rich visual capacities. Within certain limits, the whole world is open to their visual awareness. But now you need to create a specific set of perceptual organizations where specific visual experiences are internally tied to specific features of the world, such that being those features involves the capacity to produce those sorts of experiences. Reality is not dependent on experience, but conversely. The concept of the reality in question already involves the causal capacity to produce certain sorts of experiences. So the reason that these experiences present red objects is that the very fact of being a red object involves a capacity to produce this sort of experience. Being a straight line involves the capacity to produce this other sort of experience. The upshot is that organisms cannot have these experiences without it seeming to them that they are seeing a red object or a straight line, and that “”seeming to them”” marks the intrinsic intentionality of the perceptual experience. (page 129)

I’m not surprised by that kind of design thinking.  I have long thought that such design thinking is the background to much of philosophy.  It is, however, a little strange to be calling on evolution as a designer and as having a designer point of view.  Even worse is the idea of evolution wanting to “create organisms with spectacularly rich visual capacities.”