🚀 go-pugleaf

[Martin Taylor 950228 11:20]
>Bill Powers (950227.2000 MST)

>If we go by rules of demonstration and evidence, the solipsistic
>position doesn't have a chance (and I don't understand why anyone ever
>>considered it a serious argument). What a solipsist is happy to assert
>is up to the solipsist, but since anyone can assert anything, we need
>not take all assertions as propositions to be coped with. The solipsist
>has made a claim; let him support it.

Why should he?  YOU DON'T EXIST.  And you know it, since you are inside
the solipsist.  Oh--sorry--I don't exist either.  I should be quieter...

> To offer evidence for the
>solipsistic point of view is by definition impossible, so we either must
>dismiss it out of hand, or give up relying on evidence. I prefer the
>former.

To offer evidence against the solipsistic point of view is by definition
impossible, so we must either dismiss it out of hand, or give up relying
on evidence.  I prefer the former.

But I agree with your statement, too.  Now we both exist.

>I think the problem is that the solipsistic position can be asserted,
>but it can't be defended. Any defense relies on a statement of fact
>which is assumed to be true independently of the observer: the statement
>that we are generating the experiences ourselves.

How could a solipsist assert that there could be a fact that is true
independently of the observer, when there is no other observer?  The
solipsist position can't be defended--true--but neither can it be attacked.
As I said, it's like creationism.  Every possible observation you could
make can be argued as "that's the way I (or God) imagined it."

>>>I think it is important to stay with your choice (1), modified to
>>>admit that we can infer existence without knowing form, because doing
>>>so forces us to be clear about the distinction between perception and
>>>imagination, between observation and inference.
>
>     That contradicts my (1), but I see no difference between it and my
>     (2).
>I will try to explain the difference. Your (1) deals only with the
>EXISTENCE of an external reality, claiming that we cannot know whether
>it EXISTS.

True.

>Your (2), on the other hand, assumes, for convenience, that perception
>represents both existence and form.

Not as I intended it to read.  I think you put that "and form" in there,
and refused to remove it when I said that it was not intended (in the
message to which.  That proves you exist only in my head.

You can't very well make a taxonomy of possibilities, as I was doing, by
carefully leaving out the one that you want to found the rest of the set
on.  I could have said (1) maybe there's no existence; (2) Maybe
what we perceive relates to a reality (a) transparently and exactly,
or (b) by an unknowable transformation, and then said that 2b is the
basis for the rest of it.  But I thought that 2a was unnecessary to
state separately, since the rest of the original taxonomic discussion
was on the extent to which one _could_ determine the transformation.

I believe exactly what you said before, as well as now: "the case where we
perceive one form, but it is a transformation of some quite different --
but still existent -- form."  We cannot know that transformation, but by
our successes and failures of control, we can put some constraints on it.

And I'd like to re-emphasize a point you made explicitly in your previous
posting: not only can we not know the transformation, but also we cannot
know what aspects of "reality" there may be to which we are not sensitive
at all (as you put it, there are more degrees of freedom out there than
we can know--or something like that).

=====================

A separate issue, if it is that...

>When we infer, we are thinking about those perceptions. It is not hard
>to tell the difference. Thinking is one kind of activity and perception
>is another. If I see an apple with a brown spot on its surface, I am
>perceiving. If I see a rotten apple, I am inferring something I can't
>perceive. That's all I mean.

At the risk of developing another thread, I'm not at all sure that there
is a fair distinction here.  If I see an "apple" I am inferring in just
that same way as if I see a "rotten" apple.  To go out on a limb, here,
I expect that much of our perceptual apparatus is the way it is because
it allows us to see (hear, feel, smell) things that are good to eat,
poisonous, dangerous to be near, and so forth.  So there might even be
less "inference" and more "perception" about the rottenness of an apple
than of its appleness.

The word "inference" is slippery.  Helmholz used "unconscious inference"
to refer to all of perception.  It gave the moral authority a century later
for people to use computer programs to "infer" from sensory data what was
in a scene, and to argue that the "AI vision" might be the same as biological
vision.  I'd prefer to use "inference" in situations that involve logic,
at the very least.  But that's a question of word usage.  For me, "inference"
has the connotation of sifting through a number of possibilities, probably
by iterating some choice procedure.  Perception, at least below the
program level, doesn't do that.  What you see is what you get, so's to speak.
To apply "inference" to everyday perception, as Helmholz did, seems perhaps
to extend the range of meaning of "inference" a bit far.

But the reason for using words is communication, and if we reach a convention
that allows "perception" to include "inference" or vice-versa, we can
always justify it :-).

Martin