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...continued. Having (I hope) clarified these matters, let's move on to the argument as set out in your numbered sections: A thought can be right or wrong, bu

...continued. Having (I hope) clarified these matters, let's move on to the argument as set out in your numbered sections: A thought can be right or wrong, but right-ness implies likeness to reality, while wrong-ness implies un-likeness. To illustrate: suppose Bob has a thought about a tree. Let's say it's "this oak tree is made of wood". Now suppose his friend Bill thinks "this oak tree is made of copper". I take it we can premise that Bob is right and Bill is wrong. But for our premise to be true, their thoughts must be compared to the tree itself. There is no other way to judge their thoughts' right-ness or wrong-ness." The last sentence here is the first occasion in your latest post where you make a sweeping claim without offering any justification for it to be accepted. When you construct an argument, you can use, as a premise, any statement that is in the form of a proposition, but for it to be a sound argument, you have to show that it is a fact, and in epistemology and elsewhere, the generally-accepted basis for regarding a premise as being factual is the JTB criterion: it states a justified, true belief. Your say-so does not amount to either verification of the claim as being factual or justification for thinking it is. The first problem in attempting to verify this premise is that you have not given the slightest explanation of what it means to say a thought is like reality. What would it mean to say that Bob's thought of an oak tree is like an actual oak tree? Does it grow from an acorn? Does it have the genetic signature that is shared by oak trees? These are both facts about them that might be the content of thoughts - indeed, they are right now, as you read this! It gets even more problematic when we move on to a broader range of propositions. Take the claim "the highest mountain in the world is in Asia." In what sense does this thought have the property of being in Asia? Alternatively, if it does not actually have this property, then what does it mean to say this thought has a relevant likeness to the facts of the matter? When I learned the other day that Phil Lesh had died, was there something dead about my thought? Or there is this: "beta decay produces neutrinos." Does the neutrino component of this thought respond to the weak force? Furthermore, there was a time when neutrinos were postulated but had not yet been discovered - and then, when it was, did thoughts about neutrinos suddenly gain a likeness to neutrinos themselves? What's more, Bob's thought about oak trees, as you have presented it, is a sentence, rather than an ineffable feeling that an oak tree is made of wood - i.e., it is a sequence of words conforming to a grammar. Do the words "tree" and "wood" have a likeness to the things they denote? One can easily doubt it on the grounds that words seem to be arbitrary: except for the relatively few onomatopoeia (and not strongly even then), it seems that words are not constrained to be in any way like the reality they express: for example, when physicists named the charm quark, were they obliged to pick the word 'charm' in order to ensure that propositions containing it had the necessary likeness to reality? Of course not! The problem for you here is multiplied by the fact that there are a great many different languages, with wildly varying sounds at the level of both words and grammars, yet despite all this, we obviously are not in the situation you claim would come to pass if your thesis fails: we have not lost the possibility of rightness, and all thought has not become meaningless. Perhaps you think that this likeness is not to be found in individual words, but only in propositions as a whole - but this does not do away with the need to explain how this likeness comes about. Furthermore, this position is, ipso facto, one in which the likeness is emergent, so, in constructing an explanation along these lines, you will have to overcome your struggles with the concept of emergence and embrace it. There are other claims in the first section that are moot in the light of the clarifications above, so there is no need for me to address them here. This also applies to quite a few statements in section 2, but there are a few that give pause. For example, I am curious as to what you suppose follows from your statement that "A brain state is one result of a particular causal chain, but there is nothing special about it on that account." What does being special have anything to do with whether it might be part of an answer to our central question? I can see that things like falsifiability and consistency matter, but being special...? In fact, not being special seems to me to be a virtue: the chain-of-causality story is straightforward, has clear premises, does not require the acceptance of propositions for which no justification is given, and does not stray far from uncontroversial facts about minds and communication. I believe your objection "more specifically, a causal chain cannot in itself be 'right' or 'wrong'. It is possible that a causal chain will cause Bob to think a tree is made of wood, and cause Bill to think it's made of copper. This is not enough for Bob to be right and Bill wrong, because the chain has no connection to correct-ness." has been thoroughly addressed above: in short, it is the flow of information originating in the real world that makes it possible for thoughts about the real world to be correct. You go on to say "It can't give us reason for saying "Bob's thoughts are like reality, and Bill's are not"."My first response to that is until you can say what the similarity is between Bob's thought and reality, and give us a decision procedure by which we can tell that Bob's thought is similar to reality while Bill's is not, then even if we accepted your thesis, we would still not have a reason for saying "Bob's thoughts are like reality, and Bill's are not", because we would not have enough information to make the call. I propose that the way we get a reason for deciding whether a proposition is realistic is that we make use of information flowing on the chain of causality to draw our own conclusions. I get the impression that you feel this is not good enough, but the thing is we are in no better position than are Bob and Bill: the best we can do is to make the call on the basis of what we already believe to be true, or what we come to believe is true as a result of investigations into what information we have, whether it can reasonably be regarded as factual, what other information might be available and what effect it could have on our decision (for example, we might initially side with Bill, but change our minds after Bob explains to us why he thinks the rock is just pyrite. This is another example of a causal chain bringing about true thoughts, and it is, roughly speaking, the sort of process that Bayesian reasoning seeks to formalize.) The truth of any proposition about reality is not determined by whether or how we can determine that it is correct; it is either true or false from the get-go. The Collatz conjecture, for example, is either true or false now, and has been at least since it was first conceived of (mathematical Platonists presumably think it has always been either true or false) - the problem is just that we do not know which it is. There is no oracle that reliably sorts all propositions into true or false buckets; Gödel, Turing et.al. hammered the nails into that coffin, and it is obvious that we don't need an oracle in order to avoid the dire situation you claim would follow from your thesis being false (plus, if this oracle was an essential tool in making sense of the world, it would already have been used to find out if the Collatz and other conjectures are true or false.) It is not, therefore, a problem for chain-of-causality that it cannot do so, and if you think it is, it would be inconsistent for you to assert that it is not also a problem for your thesis. continued...

mannykannot 2y ago
...continued Moving on: "That someone has been caused to think something doesn't mean he has a reason for thinking something." True enough, and nothing in my position either implies or is predicated on the assumption that they would. On the other hand, in cases like this, there is a reason that they had the thought, namely whatever it was that caused the thought. I bring this up because I am wondering whether there is some unwarranted conflation going on between these two different uses of 'reason'. If not, could you explain more fully the significance you see in this comment? Next: ”The materialist view of the mind closes off any other way in which likeness can be achieved, because (if it's consistent) it postulates that brain states, ultimately reducible to fundamental particles, are all that objectively exist." If, by likeness, you mean some correspondence between a thought about the world and the world as it is, then information flow along causal chains might do that, and you have not said anything which shows that it cannot. On the other hand, it is not necessary to show that this must happen, as chain-of-causality provides a plausible answer to the central question without requiring any particular likeness. Another problem with this statement is that, as it stands, the clause following the 'because' does not appear to explain or justify the clause preceding it. If you think it does, please explain. As I write this, I see there might be yet another problem over what 'any other way' in the conclusion is referring to - it appears to be 'a chain' from the preceding sentence, presumably a chain of causality. Did you intend your conclusion to be ' the materialist view of the mind closes off any way, other than a chain of causality, in which likeness can be achieved?' If it is, I do not discern what this is intended to refute. Regardless, this is a metaphysical claim. I prefer to avoid using such things, as they tend to take the form of intellectual overreach into areas where nothing definite can be said. We can approach the question of whether the mind is a physical phenomenon without metaphysics, just as we can do the same with the question of whether the weather is a physical phenomenon. ”You claim "an understanding of causality may potentially lead us to being able to say... in what way thoughts are similar to reality", but you offer no details...” Well, there has been no pressing need for me to do so, as chain-of-causality offers an answer to the central question without involving similarity in any way, but I will happily offer a deal - you say specifically what sort of similarity you think you need, and I will see if I can explain or accommodate it within chain-of-causality. In addition, I can’t let this particular statement go without noting the irony of you chiding me for not providing details! "... I deny this is so -- causality can't rescue your position; it can't make there be some like-ness that is somehow both material and yet does not involve arrangements of atoms that are similar, which we've already ruled out." Frankly, I have no idea what you are saying here, but whatever it was, I suspect that it is moot now that I have clarified my position. If you think it is still an issue, could you provide more details? Finally, I don't think there's anything to say about the conclusion - obviously, I'm not persuaded that it is correct, for all the reasons above. There is, however, one more thing that I want to go back to, as it pertains to this discussion as a whole. You have acknowledged that your claim is very limited, in that you are not making any claim as to what this likeness may be like. One of the consequences of it being limited in this way is that no conclusion of your arguments can rise to the level of being taken for a fact - a justified true belief - until you can say enough, about what it means to say that thoughts have a likeness to reality, for that premise to be regarded as justified (to be clear, this is a necessary but not sufficient condition.) You cannot avoid critical analysis of your thesis by not making affirmative statements about what it means, as the absence of such claims is one of the bigger problems with it. If you remain aloof about this, anyone evaluating your claim on its merits would be fully justified in being equally aloof about whether your argument is sound.

mannykannot 2y ago

...continued Moving on: "That someone has been caused to think something doesn't mean he has a reason for thinking something." True enough, and nothing in my position either implies or is predicated on the assumption that they would. On the other hand, in cases like this, there is a reason that they had the thought, namely whatever it was that caused the thought. I bring this up because I am wondering whether there is some unwarranted conflation going on between these two different uses of 'reason'. If not, could you explain more fully the significance you see in this comment? Next: ”The materialist view of the mind closes off any other way in which likeness can be achieved, because (if it's consistent) it postulates that brain states, ultimately reducible to fundamental particles, are all that objectively exist." If, by likeness, you mean some correspondence between a thought about the world and the world as it is, then information flow along causal chains might do that, and you have not said anything which shows that it cannot. On the other hand, it is not necessary to show that this must happen, as chain-of-causality provides a plausible answer to the central question without requiring any particular likeness. Another problem with this statement is that, as it stands, the clause following the 'because' does not appear to explain or justify the clause preceding it. If you think it does, please explain. As I write this, I see there might be yet another problem over what 'any other way' in the conclusion is referring to - it appears to be 'a chain' from the preceding sentence, presumably a chain of causality. Did you intend your conclusion to be ' the materialist view of the mind closes off any way, other than a chain of causality, in which likeness can be achieved?' If it is, I do not discern what this is intended to refute. Regardless, this is a metaphysical claim. I prefer to avoid using such things, as they tend to take the form of intellectual overreach into areas where nothing definite can be said. We can approach the question of whether the mind is a physical phenomenon without metaphysics, just as we can do the same with the question of whether the weather is a physical phenomenon. ”You claim "an understanding of causality may potentially lead us to being able to say... in what way thoughts are similar to reality", but you offer no details...” Well, there has been no pressing need for me to do so, as chain-of-causality offers an answer to the central question without involving similarity in any way, but I will happily offer a deal - you say specifically what sort of similarity you think you need, and I will see if I can explain or accommodate it within chain-of-causality. In addition, I can’t let this particular statement go without noting the irony of you chiding me for not providing details! "... I deny this is so -- causality can't rescue your position; it can't make there be some like-ness that is somehow both material and yet does not involve arrangements of atoms that are similar, which we've already ruled out." Frankly, I have no idea what you are saying here, but whatever it was, I suspect that it is moot now that I have clarified my position. If you think it is still an issue, could you provide more details? Finally, I don't think there's anything to say about the conclusion - obviously, I'm not persuaded that it is correct, for all the reasons above. There is, however, one more thing that I want to go back to, as it pertains to this discussion as a whole. You have acknowledged that your claim is very limited, in that you are not making any claim as to what this likeness may be like. One of the consequences of it being limited in this way is that no conclusion of your arguments can rise to the level of being taken for a fact - a justified true belief - until you can say enough, about what it means to say that thoughts have a likeness to reality, for that premise to be regarded as justified (to be clear, this is a necessary but not sufficient condition.) You cannot avoid critical analysis of your thesis by not making affirmative statements about what it means, as the absence of such claims is one of the bigger problems with it. If you remain aloof about this, anyone evaluating your claim on its merits would be fully justified in being equally aloof about whether your argument is sound.