[QUOTE=II Gyan II]
No. Only that assignment of validity or absurdity are value judgments. One’s theory may be completely right or completely wrong or somewhere in between.
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So, you’re entirely discounting the type, quality, and consistency of our observations and information, with regard to assessing the validity of a theory, then? Since that’s a position I consider absurd. Based on that, you would have to be skeptical about your senses and reasoning. And not be okay.
[QUOTE=II Gyan II]
The issue isn’t strictly of perfect knowledge; it’s of objective knowledge versus (self-)mediated knowledge.
When you say, “When you discover that the speck is caused by the actual coloration of the surface, rather than an external speck resting on it, you can then conclude that in actuality, it’s a dot.”
What does ‘discover’ mean? I take it to mean ‘obtaining data via subjective observation’. So the determination of actuality is basically a consonant organization of one’s subjective experiences, which may or may not be true.
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So, you’re saying one cannot trust one’s senses enough to make a decision, no matter how closely one examines the object, no matter how much one expands one’s set of subjective experiences. Otherwise, once both people got closer, and noticed that the dot didn’t go away when rubbed at, and then when they broke out the microscopes and determined that the pigmentation of the actual surface was different at that location, as opposed to there being a dust speck stuck to it - at that point, they could all agree that it was an actual dot, and not a speck of dust. Unless they were adopting madness-level skepticism about their own senses, of course.
[QUOTE=II Gyan II]
But this interlude over dots has completely diverted the focus from my original illustration. I was talking about a series of black dots on a white paper that when observed for a certain time appear to trace out a dog. You responded that the dots were being dots irrespective of anything else. But in that example, the dog was the object, and the dots were the quarks. The dots didn’t “work together” to constitute a (paper-) doghood. That’s a synthesis of the human observer.
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Right. This was a red herring, a false analogy, just like all the other analogies where you speak of images as being ‘objects’, when everyone else (including you, really) is talking about objects that have component parts that interact to form larger objects, with complex interactions: cars and brains, for example.
Each and every time you try to point at ‘objects’ that are custom-selected for their lack of interacting parts, you underscore the fact that your rebuttals do not apply to the real subject under discussion, the human brain and it’s behaviors. You’re trying to prove that the brain can’t produce a mind. But you’re basically trying to do it by pointing at a photo of a brain, and announcing that the picture doesn’t think. While that’s true, it’s completely irrelevant.
I’ll tell you what. I’ll freely admit that “objects” that have non-interacting particles do not have emergent properties. With the caveat that, of course human brains (and cars) are not described by the above statement, and therefore they can, and do, have emergent properties. Thus I recognize and concede that all images produced on dot-matrix printers aren’t themselves sentient, and we can leave all discussions about such images behind and get back to something that’s not a red herring, smokescreen, or distraction. Hopefully.
[QUOTE=II Gyan II]
The whole point in a nutshell is this
1)However the world is, subjects perceive the world
2)it is generally agreed that the mind fills in stuff, binds, categorizes and otherwise processes sensory input
2)this argument is over separating which aspects of our perceptions are representative of raw input and which are the result of processing.
4)Given that as subjects, we don’t have noumenal access, assigning a certain perceptual input as actual due to emergence is a value judgment by fiat.
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This is of course an argument from ignorance - a “god of the gaps” arguement. Unlike most such arguments, though, it has to resort to inventing the ignorance - Statement 4 is “by fiat” announcing that we suddenly have to be madness-level skeptical about our senses or reasoning. Otherwise, we could (like we always do with everything in life) examine things to determine what the actual causes are, and which causes are made-up. Which we’ve done with the mind and brains: the mind is actually caused by the brain, and the external, libertarian puppeteer ‘soul’ is made up. Based on our best examination of available evidence, that is.
[QUOTE=II Gyan II]
My stated position has no pragmatic effect. Irrespective of whether the car I see possesses an external carhood or is just my mental processing, as long as I can drive around, I’m OK. If I was skeptical about my senses or reasoning, then I would have a problem.
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(bolding mine, indicating the portion of my original post that was lopped in the quoting of it.)
Well, like I said in the post you’re responding to, then you must be doing so for just this argument only. Which just underscores how inapplicable your argument’s position of “oh nos we can’t assess our perceptual input” is to reality.
(Note: when you find youself having to cut out portions my sentences and posts to prevent them ruining your point, just don’t bother. The original posts are still there for everyone to see, intact, the whole time, remember.)
) is PART OF the ‘emergence chain’ of a dog pattern, you just have to reduce the activity of pattern recognition in the brain to whatever goes on in the at the most basic physical level. In other words, theres another way to say what you’re saying.