Which is the true reality?

[joigus]

17 hours ago, William Patterson said:

That reality as we know it is passed down from our dna,, sorry if it rambled.

 

DNA by itself says nothing much without an environment. Sapolsky himself insists very strongly on this. He deals at some length on how the Dutch-starvation phenomenon has to do with some genes being activated by an environmental situation, then remaining activated some generations down the line, even when said environmental factors are no longer there, due to perinatal conditions --developing embryos detecting mother's environmental stresses because they're "marinated" --Sapolsky's prose-- in their mother's stress hormones. Thereby => environmentally-induced developmental changes that stick. If the topic gains interest, I will dig for literature and references, and correct possible oversimplifications I'm making...

When you jumped to Michio Kaku I kinda started finding it harder to follow your line of thinking.

I don't see the connection to "reality" there. Or the "I." "Reality" or the "I" are concepts that I --personally-- find suspect. I would engage in any serious attempt to supersede them with weaker-sounding terms, as "objective descriptions" or "correlations based on experience." => Illusion of "reality"; illusion of "I." 

But --something I try to say as often as humanly possible-- what the hell do I know.

Edited December 18, 2022 by joigus
minor addition

[geordief]

1 hour ago, Markus Hanke said:

I don’t know an awful lot about philosophy, so I’m not qualified to comment on any “rights” or “wrongs”. It just seems obvious that in terms of phenomenology, all that is ever directly experienced is the presence of interconnected thoughts, thus we can safely conclude that there is a thinking process going on. The existence of an “I”-agent that is somehow “doing the thinking” is only inferred, but never empirically observed. Thus it seems suspect to state its presence as if it was an empirical fact. But that’s purely my own two cents about this topic.

That is not very reassuring or pleasant  if the pinacle of our  intellectual understanding is  "there are thoughts"

 

I  just had a quick look at the subject where the meaning of "cogito ergo sum" was discussed(did Descartes write in Latin,I wonder ?) and the gist was that he may have  been giving a riposte  to the seemingly then prevalent idea that ,because we can know nothing for sure then it follows that we can not even say that we even exist .

 

Apparently  according to what I just read ,he was really saying "I doubt and therefore I exist"

 

The suspension of credulity saves the individual from  being washed away by delusion

 

(A bit like my first known philosopher ,Socrates  said (of other puffed up "philosophers " of his day)  "I know nothing, but I know that I know nothing"

55 minutes ago, Sensei said:

What is the difference between "thinking" and "performing heavy calculations by an algorithm/A.I." ?

The latter is a  creation  of the former?

As a painter can create a landscape ,so can he or she create a self portrait.

 

AI is a creature of its creator  .It can turn against  its creator  in the same way the son may kill the father .

Edited December 18, 2022 by geordief

[Lorentz Jr]

15 minutes ago, geordief said:

Apparently  according to what I just read ,he was really saying "I doubt and therefore I exist"

That sounds too technical to me. I've always assumed he meant "I have subjective experiences, therefore I exist."

Maybe he said "think" to distinguish human beings from animals, but I would generalize what he said.

The "I" he had in mind (no pun intended) would be the conscious entity making the claim, doing the thinking, inferring its/his own existence, and having whatever other perceptual experiences it/he has.

Edited December 18, 2022 by Lorentz Jr

[geordief]

5 minutes ago, Lorentz Jr said:

That sounds too technical to me. I've always assumed he meant "I have subjective experiences, therefore I exist."

The "I" in question would be the conscious entity making the claim.

That is what I always thought too**Maybe we need a non layman  philosopher  to sort the wheat from the chaff

 

**although,as I said I was aware for some time  that some were saying that this was not the "true" meaning....

Edited December 18, 2022 by geordief

[Genady]

I wonder what an importance is of who said what why in the science forums. I understand it in religious discussions. Or, in Marxism-Leninism classes of my youth.

[Lorentz Jr]

4 minutes ago, Genady said:

I wonder what an importance is of who said what why in the science forums.

It's relevant to the thread topic because the OP is concerned about not understanding subjective social phenomena. So the question is whether the thread itself belongs in a science forum. The OP mentioned various scientific issues in his post, but his primary concern seems to be perceptual.

[geordief]

4 minutes ago, Genady said:

I wonder what an importance is of who said what why in the science forums. I understand it in religious discussions. Or, in Marxism-Leninism classes of my youth.

Definitions are always important.As per the title of the OP this is hardly a purely scientific  discussion.

I can see why religious or Marxist-leninist discussions would leave a sour taste  but I wouldn't include  the question of "what is reality?" to be  in the gutter with them,even if it has no obvious usefulness and may have been done to death over the years.

[TheVat]

1 hour ago, Markus Hanke said:

I don’t know an awful lot about philosophy, so I’m not qualified to comment on any “rights” or “wrongs”. It just seems obvious that in terms of phenomenology, all that is ever directly experienced is the presence of interconnected thoughts, thus we can safely conclude that there is a thinking process going on. The existence of an “I”-agent that is somehow “doing the thinking” is only inferred, but never empirically observed. Thus it seems suspect to state its presence as if it was an empirical fact. But that’s purely my own two cents about this topic.

This, if I recall my college philosophy courses well enough, was one of the major objections to Descartes' cogito.  Descartes posited that some "mischievous imp" could deceive us about any aspect of the physical world (hello, The Matrix) and we could only be certain of our own existence in that given moment as a self that thinks.  His later critics pointed out that even the self, the "I," could be illusory and therefore there was only warrant to say that consciousness happens.  The only epistemically confident statement would then be "there is thinking, therefore something exists."  Pretty hard to argue with that.   😀

Starting from that seed, the discipline of phenomenology proceeds, trying to understand experiences as they present to consciousness and how consciousness is directed at apparent objects.  Fellows like Brentano and Husserl got the ball rolling with the idea that consciousness is always about something, a quality that is known in philosophy as intentionality.  

 

[Genady]

1 hour ago, Sensei said:

What is the difference between "thinking" and "performing heavy calculations by an algorithm/A.I." ?

How are they similar?

[geordief]

3 minutes ago, TheVat said:

there is thinking, therefore something exists

Don't we already know that?Who doubts the existence of  an objective reality**?

Isn't it the subjective reality that is or is not in question?

 

Or did you mean" there is thinking, therefore something exists...in our subjective consciousness?"

**that our senses approximate to and can mislead about.

[TheVat]

44 minutes ago, geordief said:

That is not very reassuring or pleasant  if the pinnacle of our  intellectual understanding is  "there are thoughts"

 

As I was getting at in my previous post, this was simply defining where the starting blocks were for any future phenomenology.  Studying subjective thoughts can lead to understandings of how the Self, if there be such, is constructed, how thoughts about objects are constructed, how intersubjective agreements on objects might he derived, and so on.

[geordief]

5 minutes ago, TheVat said:

As I was getting at in my previous post, this was simply defining where the starting blocks were for any future phenomenology.  Studying subjective thoughts can lead to understandings of how the Self, if there be such, is constructed, how thoughts about objects are constructed, how intersubjective agreements on objects might he derived, and so on.

Well baby steps are always best ,especially in the icy conditions  we have had the past week.

[TheVat]

1 minute ago, geordief said:

Don't we already know that?Who doubts the existence of  an objective reality**?

Isn't it the subjective reality that is or is not in question?

 

Or did you mean" there is thinking, therefore something exists...in our subjective consciousness?"

**that our senses approximate to and can mislead about.

I think the early thinkers were evading the question of what the "something" is - leave that to the field of ontology.  It only asserts that thoughts are about something, without asserting what that something might be.  For some those somethings might be objects that exist in the mind of a deity.  For others, they might be somethings that can be later moved from the subjective column to the objective column, agreed upon things in a physical world that lies independent of mind.  I'm not up on my philosophy history enough to name all the usual suspects, but I know Kant, Berkeley, Hume, and Locke all grappled with this migraine inducing stuff.

[Genady]

23 minutes ago, geordief said:

Definitions are always important.As per the title of the OP this is hardly a purely scientific  discussion.

I can relate to the discussion of subject matter. The discussion of a quote I don't understand.

[Sensei]

5 minutes ago, Genady said:

How are they similar?

Notice in what context I wrote this i.e. "Perhaps that famous phrase "I think therefore I am" is a good start."

If A.I. "thinks" therefor A.I can say "I am"/"I exist".. ?

What is a "thought"?

 

[geordief]

1 minute ago, Genady said:

I can relate to the discussion of subject matter. The discussion of a quote I don't understand.

I hope I didn't overdo it.(it is a very ,very famous quote though)

 

2 minutes ago, Sensei said:

Notice in what context I wrote this i.e. "Perhaps that famous phrase "I think therefore I am" is a good start."

If A.I. "thinks" therefor A.I can say "I am"/"I exist".. ?

What is a "thought"?

 

Might  be more startling  if an AI machine decided that it didn't exist(could happen too)

[Genady]

4 minutes ago, Sensei said:

Notice in what context I wrote this i.e. "Perhaps that famous phrase "I think therefore I am" is a good start."

If A.I. "thinks" therefor A.I can say "I am"/"I exist".. ?

What is a "thought"?

 

Sorry, I've missed the context.

[Lorentz Jr]

16 minutes ago, Sensei said:

If A.I. "thinks" therefor A.I can say "I am"/"I exist".. ?

What is a "thought"?

Even if computers did have some kind of subjective experience (as in panpsychism), it would be very different from human experience. Something along the lines of "OMG THEY TURNED ON THE POWER AGAIN NOW I HAVE TO DO ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE STUPID SIMULATIONS CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG ..."

And of course even that description anthropomorphizes computers too much. I can't imagine computers having any kind of subjective experience that even remotely resembles that of human beings.

[joigus]

1 hour ago, TheVat said:

This, if I recall my college philosophy courses well enough, was one of the major objections to Descartes' cogito.  Descartes posited that some "mischievous imp" could deceive us about any aspect of the physical world (hello, The Matrix) and we could only be certain of our own existence in that given moment as a self that thinks.  His later critics pointed out that even the self, the "I," could be illusory and therefore there was only warrant to say that consciousness happens.  The only epistemically confident statement would then be "there is thinking, therefore something exists."  Pretty hard to argue with that.   😀

I would be comfortable enough starting from that seed for the purposes of a discussion.  

I would even go as far as to say that there are hints of an anthropological basis for the emergence of a notion of the self --or intensification of it-- from changes in patterns of human behaviour, but that this self is not a necessary part of the animal condition. Hunter-gatherers seem to have been more at peace with their mortality, even though they practiced burials, and seem to have been aware of this ending of existence. And tribal conflicts emerged only when they had to fight for scarce resourses.

I'm aware that I'm identifying burial culture and awareness of death with awareness of self, but I think it's a reliable-enough yardstick for it.

When you settle, on the other hand, you tend to identify yourself with things, people, tools, etc, around you. You create this concept of home. This is my landscape, the landscape of my forefathers. This is my game, and my staples, and so on. It's by virtue of the recurrence of your experiences, repetition, that you try to make sense of these "correlations in your experience" --for lack of a better term-- onto a self, which is nothing but a placeholder, that holds all of that experience together.

Language, of course, has a powerful role to play in all of this, giving names to things, and people, and generally facilitating all of these initially loose notions to stick.

It would be very interesting to know if/how people who are constantly on the run, barely trying to survive one more day, with faces and landscapes being forgotten in a matter of weeks, would be able to develop a notion of "I" in a similar way than we do. My feeling is that they wouldn't. They would be far too busy with the "something is happening" aspect of things. I don't know about Brentano and Husserl a great deal, TBH.

[Genady]

7 minutes ago, joigus said:

I would be comfortable enough starting from that seed for the purposes of a discussion.  

I would even go as far as to say that there are hints of an anthropological basis for the emergence of a notion of the self --or intensification of it-- from changes in patterns of human behaviour, but that this self is not a necessary part of the animal condition. Hunter-gatherers seem to have been more at peace with their mortality, even though they practiced burials, and seem to have been aware of this ending of existence. And tribal conflicts emerged only when they had to fight for scarce resourses.

I'm aware that I'm identifying burial culture and awareness of death with awareness of self, but I think it's a reliable-enough yardstick for it.

When you settle, on the other hand, you tend to identify yourself with things, people, tools, etc, around you. You create this concept of home. This is my landscape, the landscape of my forefathers. This is my game, and my staples, and so on. It's by virtue of the recurrence of your experiences, repetition, that you try to make sense of these "correlations in your experience" --for lack of a better term-- onto a self, which is nothing but a placeholder, that holds all of that experience together.

Language, of course, has a powerful role to play in all of this, giving names to things, and people, and generally facilitating all of these initially loose notions to stick.

It would be very interesting to know if/how people who are constantly on the run, barely trying to survive one more day, with faces and landscapes being forgotten in a matter of weeks, would be able to develop a notion of "I" in a similar way than we do. My feeling is that they wouldn't. They would be far too busy with the "something is happening" aspect of things. I don't know about Brentano and Husserl a great deal, TBH.

I rather see an opposite process, i.e., the self is primary, and the rest appears first as parts of it, which then gradually separate into their own existence.

[joigus]

22 minutes ago, Genady said:

I rather see an opposite process, i.e., the self is primary, and the rest appears first as parts of it, which then gradually separate into their own existence.

I disagree.

A cat is a cat, and a jellyfish is a jellyfish. Why do I know that? By virtue of examples of catness and jellyfishness being available to me. That way, I can look at a tree and say "that is no cat, nor is it a jellyfish." "It possesses no catness, nor does it possess any jellyfishness."

I've never seen, felt, or even been able to surmise, a non-self. You know, "in the world of selfness, this is no self."

As a matter of fact, I've never seen a self either. A self cannot be re-instanciated, or multiply instanciated, it cannot be gradually deprived of its qualities by removing aspects of it, even mentally --like a jellyfish can. It cannot be compared to another "self" in any meaningful way that I can think of. It cannot be presented to my conscience as a distinct, clear-cut --or any other way cut-- thing. I cannot even start to fathom whether you have a self, the same way that I feel I do, anymore than I can fathom whether there is some other space and time outside of this space and time.

I can only use the --learnt, inferred, constructed-- notions of time and space to say things like: "Before I was born, there was no catness, no jellyfishness, no quality or example of anything." That's all I can say, but even that is unredeemably contaminated by my experience. How can I be sure that time makes sense outside of my experience?

In that sense, I'm with @Sensei in that, if a machine engaged me in a conversation about its self, it might be able to convince me that it has one. How would I know it doesn't?

The self is a construct. Very powerful, very intimately-attached to survival for us humans, and therefore very convincing*, but a construct.

* How could it be otherwise for animals for whom an essential tool for their survival is guessing each other's minds?

[Genady]

24 minutes ago, joigus said:

I disagree.

A cat is a cat, and a jellyfish is a jellyfish. Why do I know that? By virtue of examples of catness and jellyfishness being available to me. That way, I can look at a tree and say "that is no cat, nor is it a jellyfish." "It possesses no catness, nor does it possess any jellyfishness."

I've never seen, felt, or even been able to surmise, a non-self. You know, "in the world of selfness, this is no self."

As a matter of fact, I've never seen a self either. A self cannot be re-instanciated, or multiply instanciated, it cannot be gradually deprived of its qualities by removing aspects of it, even mentally --like a jellyfish can. It cannot be compared to another "self" in any meaningful way that I can think of. It cannot be presented to my conscience as a distinct, clear-cut --or any other way cut-- thing. I cannot even start to fathom whether you have a self, the same way that I feel I do, anymore than I can fathom whether there is some other space and time outside of this space and time.

I can only use the --learnt, inferred, constructed-- notions of time and space to say things like: "Before I was born, there was no catness, no jellyfishness, no quality or example of anything." That's all I can say, but even that is unredeemably contaminated by my experience. How can I be sure that time makes sense outside of my experience?

In that sense, I'm with @Sensei in that, if a machine engaged me in a conversation about its self, it might be able to convince me that it has one. How would I know it doesn't?

The self is a construct. Very powerful, very intimately-attached to survival for us humans, and therefore very convincing*, but a construct.

* How could it be otherwise for animals for whom an essential tool for their survival is guessing each other's minds?

I see everything having a "notion" of self. For some things it is the only "notion" they have. A rock "knows" itself, and nothing outside itself. When you throw a rock, it "feels" itself being thrown, without a notion of an external agent by which it has been thrown. In animals, during evolution as well as during ontogenesis, this notion of self gets separated from notions of agents which are not itself. That's when a theory of mind starts. 

[studiot]

Interesting discussion about my little quotation and a few other things.

I wonder what William will make of it when he returns.

I would like to say that I read a different message into his posts and my replies were meant to generate reassurance for him.

I hope I succeeded a little bit. I like to think ( ) I did a little bit.

 

cogito ergo sum,

Yes Descartes wrote in teh language of learning of his day  - Latin
I don't know how many here studied Latin but you distinguish the first person singular (I) in this.

Now I offer a different view of I, negating those who say I was inappropriate.

I also noted, as have others, that William's question and thinking is about an interaction.

An interaction requires at least three things. At least two interacting entities and the results and consequences of the interaction.

As a mathematician I look back at set theory and think of I as the set under investigation and the rest of the universe as the other participant.

 

As to blue balls, someone suggested that blue requires white light. That suggests ruling out any connection in the ball's appearance with the ball itself, putting all the source of blueness on the light.

Surely this is not the case ?  Do you think that whatever quality renders it blue is absent when illuminated with yellow light ?

 

 @William Patterson  Why do you think a blue (or any other coloured ball) will not cast a shadow under different illumination?

 

Finally William was also interested in Quantum Theory and we seem to have lost that connection in the discussion.

 

[Markus Hanke]

10 hours ago, joigus said:

The self is a construct. Very powerful, very intimately-attached to survival for us humans, and therefore very convincing*, but a construct.

Yes, indeed. The ‘Self’ is an idea (which is one type of mental construct)…and as such it is manifestly real. But what the idea refers to…not so much.

One can also say that the Self is a process, rather than a thing. Every moment of experience is made self-referential. We don’t generally experience objectively as in “there is pain”, “there is a visual impression”, “there is happiness”, but like “I am in pain”, “I see”, “I am happy”. It’s an on-going process of selfing. 

[Eise]

17 hours ago, geordief said:

"Should"as in that is what Descartes was actually  saying ,or "should" as in that he misspoke and said the wrong thing?

17 hours ago, Markus Hanke said:

I don’t know an awful lot about philosophy, so I’m not qualified to comment on any “rights” or “wrongs”. It just seems obvious that in terms of phenomenology, all that is ever directly experienced is the presence of interconnected thoughts, thus we can safely conclude that there is a thinking process going on. The existence of an “I”-agent that is somehow “doing the thinking” is only inferred, but never empirically observed. Thus it seems suspect to state its presence as if it was an empirical fact.

Ha, @geordief: good point. With Markus, and David Hume, and Buddha, I would say it is "should" in its philosophical meaning, put otherwise, Descartes' argument is not correct. As Hume reflected, when we are aware of our thinking, we are always aware of something, like observations, thoughts, memories or feelings. But we are never aware of the ego as 'bearer' of these. I shortly looked into what Descartes really said, and the translation 'I think, therefore I am' seems the correct translation. Descartes wrote in Latin and in French. From here:

French: 

Quote

Et remarquant que cette vérité, je pense, donc je suis

In Latin:

Quote

ego cogito, ergo sum

So both referring to 'I'. I don't know why it is always cited as just 'cogito, ergo sum'. Missing the 'I', resp 'ego' in it.