Facticity ?

@fresco,

fresco wrote:

Quote:
I have a very hard time agreeing that "reality" was in fact different when our perceptions were different

That's the naive realist bedrock position. It is is the non-constructionist view of "fact". It ignores the view that "reality" is an interaction between observer and observed. The frog who starves surrounded by what we call "dead flies" has its reality specific to its perceptual apparatus. And only "gods" have no perceptual limits.

If it is the case that reality is an interaction between observer and observed, then "The frog who starves surrounded by what we call "dead flies" has its reality specific to its perceptual apparatus" is specific to our observations, and hence we cannot say what its reality really is, specific to its perceptual apparatus. It is always "for us", unless your italicized "its" is meant to indicate that.

The whole use of italics and quotes is really annoying, btw. Say what you mean and mean what you say. And I swear to God if you deconstruct that last statement, I don't know what I'll do.

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@Ding an Sich,

God ? What's that ? Smile

I think you are confusing "perception" with "extrapolation" (quotes unavoidable I regret).

The frog data is empirical from a social agreement point of view.. Comparative physiology equally indicates that bird's vision differs from that of humans in terms of the dimensionality of their color perception apparatus. And, fish sense their neighbours through electric field disturbances with which we have great difficulty communing. What other extrapolation makes sense other than "reality is species specific" ? Add to that cultural "perceptual set" for humans and we can understand why in early Christian times the rainbow was seen to factually contain 4 colors in accordance with the four gospels. For all we know, birds might have been aware of 23 colors, and rainbows are unlikely to be part of a fish's reality !

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@fresco,

Matt wrote:

I find it highly implausible that a society would construct such an elaborate model for reality.

Fresco wrote:

Are you conditioned by "Occam's Razor" thinking here ?

Of course I am in some sense conditioned by it. It is in the air. I do realize it is an assumption. This I think gets back to asking what meta-logic do we with to appeal to.
Simplicity (Occam's razor),
Coherence (Law of the excluded middle or include the middle as in trans-dualism).
Very fundamental to my views is making an assumption one way or the other if basic constituents are continuous or discrete.
Do I take infinity to be everywhere as in "real numbers" or not.

Matt wrote:

Do you think that prior to an understanding of Newtonian Mechanics the "reality" was magical?

Fresco wrote:

All "God" premises, including Newton's and Einstein's could be called "magical".
What those geniuses did was to extend our powers of prediction and control i.e. they enhanced our range of potential functioning.

Why would that "understanding" extend powers of prediction and control?
It seems to me that if you want to extend powers of prediction and control, perceive a simpler world, not a more intricate one.
Enhance our range of potential functioning?
This just sounds to me like wishing for more freedom. Is there really more to wish for? Will wishing even make it so, if the freedom were there to grant?
I know that last sentence implies a granter, but don't all things only have meaning as a relationship, per the deconstructionist view? Wink

Matt wrote:

I have a very hard time agreeing that "reality" was in fact different when our perceptions were different

Fresco wrote:

That's the naive realist bedrock position. It is is the non-constructionist view of "fact". It ignores the view that "reality" is an interaction between observer and observed. The frog who starves surrounded by what we call "dead flies" has its reality specific to its perceptual apparatus. And only "gods" have no perceptual limits.

Yes that is the bedrock of naive realism. I think you go to far however if you suggest that scientific realism ignores the perceptual limitations of an observer, or that it ignores observer effects on the observed. There are some extreme versions of the Copenhagen interpretation which align well with deconstructionist views. The problem those views face or the strength they have (depending on perspective). Is that they are unfalsifiable, like Schrodinger's cat in a box.

Matt wrote:

You claim phenomena is all, because all we experience are phenomena.

Fresco wrote:

No, I claim "we" don't experience phenomena, our verbal reports of "a phenomenon" involve a we state plus things functionally related to that state. We are part of the phenomenon.

Well in that case scientific realism doesn't disagree.
I would contend then that, yes, from a human mind's perspective deconstructionism is a coherent interpretation of reality.

Matt wrote:

Why then ever try for understanding?

Fresco wrote:

Because attempt at enhanced prediction and control is an evolutionary advantage.

Why should it be? What are we predicting and controlling?

Matt wrote:

What is the existentialist argument against willful ignorance and/or nihilism?

Fresco wrote:

Probably too general a question requiring a doctoral dissertation !
The existentialists differ between themselves as to the nature of "existence" and "reality". Sartre, for example, goes towards the nihilist pole (notably in his novel Nausea which dwells on the (social) madness of being fixated on non functional detail like dust on bookcases). Heidegger holds the view that "authentic living" involves understanding the nature of "being" in the constructivist sense. Derrida ( a post modernist rather than an existentialist) dwells on the transient and dichotomous nature of reportage and hence the impossibility of segmenting "reality" into permanent functionally independent categories. (e.g "giving" necessarily involves "taking" on the part of the actor).

Thank you Fresco for all of your time in answering me thus far. I know that you have responsibilities outside of wittering back and forth with me. I truly do appreciate your efforts.
-----------------------------------------------
This is meant as an aside and should not be taken as an argument regarding the realist/deconstructionism positions.
I've been doing a little reading and the philosopher's along this vein seem like some truly unhappy people. Neitzsche, Wittgenstein, Derrida. Jeesh! Enlightenment must really suck. Laughing

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

There is a BBC Sunday programme called "The Big Question" which is a discussion forum for "religious" issues. Yesterday I watched in bemusement as participants (Muslims, Christians of all type, Jews etc) argued vociferously with each other over "the nature and reality of Hell".

You are too kind when you call those sorts of discussions "extrapolation". Extrapolation involves spotting a trend in known data (empirical information) and making educated guesses built on that empirical data about what we don't know directly from the data.

The way I see it, reasoned extrapolation is part of your constructivist view of the universe, which I'm sure admits degrees of facticity.

Naive realists, it seems, contend there's a reality beyond what we can observe and beyond what can be extrapolated from those observations. (Don't they?) It's not so much "extrapolation" as it is fantasy. Some of us (properly called agnostics, I guess?) are humble enough to understand that speculations on the "nature of Hell" (etc.) are exactly that -- idle speculation.

That's why when I think of God I never claim the superiority of my views over other people's. As a humble, agnostic sort of naive realist, I merely claim there's a reality beyond what we know. I never claim to know anything of its nature.

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@MattDavis,

Rather than go point by point, a few comments.

What we mean by "understanding" has something to do with confidence in prediction, and analogy with familiar mechanisms etc. This is probably why in the words of Feynman "nobody understands QM" despite its predictive power because its workings are counter-intuitive. It may be better to ditch the word "understanding" these days except in limited domains where a lay concept of "causality" can be assumed with impunity.

Note that QM does not actually consider "perceptual mechanisms", even though the act of observation can interfere with the object (by shining photons at it etc). The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is about the observer's choice of an event window which has mathematical consequences for the information set available to him. (Reference Fourier Transforms)

As for what we are predicting and controlling, that is subject to social negotiation. Consider for example medical science as a control over life processes. Longevity of individuals can have unforeseen social problems (ref Japan's aging population). In other words "the what" can mean one thing in evolutionary terms and another in ecological sustainability terms. My argument is that we appear to be biologically pre-programmed to attempt to enhance our survival individually by cognate activity via language, but from a social systems view it may be that the individual is expendable. (Echoes of Star Trek ...the Borg !).

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@Kolyo,

Well. I didn't actually call those discussions "extrapolation". I use that word to try to distinguish inductive reasoning from a perceptual process.
I agree that religious speculation appears arbitrary unless we examine its social functionality as a control mechanism and psychological palliative. This is why I claim "agnosticism " is untenable, because either religion is functional or not and that decision rests with the individual's concept of "self". My atheistic stance implies that "gods" have no function with respect to my own "self concept" and further they are dysfunctional at the macro-social level.

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@fresco,

Thanks Fresco.
I'll get back to you after a bit of thinking, and hopefully with a more thoughtful response.
My first (perhaps less thoughtful) reaction is that I have trouble seeing the meta-logical axioms taken in a deconstructionist position. I don't see a consistency in the meta-logical assumptions that are taken is some circumstances and not taken in others.
Don't feel the need to respond to this (initial reaction), I will try for a spell to reason it out for myself.

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@fresco,

Quote:

The frog data is empirical from a social agreement point of view.. Comparative physiology equally indicates that bird's vision differs from that of humans in terms of the dimensionality of their color perception apparatus. And, fish sense their neighbours through electric field disturbances with which we have great difficulty communing. What other extrapolation makes sense other than "reality is species specific" ? Add to that cultural "perceptual set" for humans and we can understand why in early Christian times the rainbow was seen to factually contain 4 colors in accordance with the four gospels. For all we know, birds might have been aware of 23 colors, and rainbows are unlikely to be part of a fish's reality !

If the "village lad" of an elderly couple entered a scientific laboratory, he'd have few concepts and terms for discerning, identifying, and understanding what he was perceiving. Perhaps resorting to generalizations equivalent to "meaningless junk" or "roomful of curious, unknown objects". Now granted, his problem does stem from not having acquired many conceptions as well as object-specific terms and their definitions from the conventions of a social community. In this particular instance, that of scientists and the specific discipline the lab concerns. His nominal "reality" therefore, in the "reflective thought" or understanding vein (distinguished from his sense reality discussed below), is not the same as the scientists' -- or is vastly less detailed / complex, also missing their guiding biases / methods.

But "the Lad's" incapacity or lack of interest in discriminating language-wise most of the lab background into specific things (even as "incorrect" speculative interpretations and meanings applied to them) does not mean his raw perceptions are minus their own automatic, "before reflective thought" scheme for breaking that environment down into interconnected, individual phenomena. (Or in Kant's case, also providing the very environment itself by spatiotemporal structuring of received data). The latter appearances are therefore already available for inspection by the focused interest or cognitive attention of the Lad, should he overcome the indolent tendencies of his intellect.

The Lad's sensible "reality" (the one manifested in external experience) should for the most part have intersubjective agreement with the rest of humanity -- that is, his perceptual system is regulated by general principles that are "distributed universally" (for lack of better way to put it) to most humans that are free of "defects" or non-trivial clinical conditions. This prior-to-intepretation "external world" deriving its objectivity from its interpersonal accessibility and likewise global reliability (conforming to predictable or rule-abiding expectations in the manner it is presented / occurs).

Whereas the planet Mercury or lesser types of "rocks" would exhibit no brand of reality whatsoever for themselves. Even Leibniz's panpsychism would hold that their "perceptions" are confused because their corresponding (noumenal) monads lack the logical equipment for disambiguating distinct phenomena from a "blurred" or condensed condition. Kant would just hold that they'd lack any proto-appearance because Leibniz eliminated a sensible faculty for organizing "noise" into structural patterns, speciously prior to application of the Understanding, even in regard to advanced rational beings like humans.

Accordingly, animals (frogs, fish, birds) are somewhere between that "no world at all" status for non-brained entities and that of humans, when it comes to the environment they "drape" themselves in via their sensory and interpretation schemes. When the scientists tries to conceive "what it is like to be bat", however, it is the context of what falls out of research into his/her natural conception of cosmos, and its subset of biological affairs. The bloody bat, in itself, may lack any interest of explaining and generalizing "what's going on" beyond its immediate life as a "reality" (or that there is a beyond to bat-life). And even if it did, it would probably be more akin to the jumbled, mystical, dream-like outlook of existence that pre-scientific human cultures had, not the philosopher's and the scientist's fixations with interconsistency.

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@MattDavis,

I sense what you mean. We have to start somewhere...perhaps at the level of "common physiology" which implies some sort of "independent reality"... in order to establish convergence of "agreement". But that starting point is itself a functionality inspired axiom, thereby begging the central question.

This is where the writer Merleau-Ponty is a useful reference because he examines naive realistic approaches to perception (including perceptual aberration due to brain damage) and discards them as untenable. As an alternative he proposes Heideggarian "reality structures". Thus uncommon physiology (brain damage) does not merely give failure of the perceptual process (as might be expected if you dropped a computer) but dissonant reality structures consistent in themselves, but contradictory to each other. (A typical example was the case of a brain damaged war veteran who could no longer remember how to salute when asked, but did so automatically if an officer came into the room. In Heideggerian terms, his current "self" was failing to thing a salute. His present "self" was separated from his war time "self" which was co-existent with thinging "an officer")

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@G H,

A brief response would be that the lad's"thought" is "internal dialogue", in other words a pseudo social situation involving different aspects of "self". But I agree that to talk about "reality for non-linguistic species" may be vacuous. The function of such talk is to suggest that we are merely another type of frog with no privileged knowledge of the nature of some "independent reality". Maturana is one writer who goes even further, by saying humans are nothing special, and that "languaging" is merely another form of adaptive behavior which assists social co-ordination. (His term is "structural coupling") . In his terms, language may be equivalent perhaps to chemical messages in a insect colony.

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The phenomenon of the frog's perception of ALL food as alive (i.e., if its dead it's inetable) evokes an interesting observation of the conceptual notion of nutrition as a more abstract way of categorizing food. I recall a movie in which a character played by Steve McQueen was being starved in a Devil's Island prison cell. He saved himself by eating cockroaches occupying his cell. He was saved because he ate objects belonging to the category: nutrition. This was distinct from his usual notion of what fits into the category: food. Here we see the evolutionary advantage that some humans have over frogs because of their broader notion of what constitutes "food" (i.e., anything containing nutrition). This, of course, is not what constitutes "cuisine." We are not likely to find roaches on the menus of any (many) restaurants. But it's not so simple. The Yanomani (Amazon dwellers) eat large spiders which they define as food, not just a functional equivalence because they are nutritious.

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

A brief response would be that the lad's"thought" is "internal dialogue", in other words a pseudo social situation involving different aspects of "self". But I agree that to talk about "reality for non-linguistic species" may be vacuous. The function of such talk is to suggest that we are merely another type of frog with no privileged knowledge of the nature of some "independent reality". Maturana is one writer who goes even further, by saying humans are nothing special, and that "languaging" is merely another form of adaptive behavior which assists social co-ordination. (His term is "structural coupling") . In his terms, language may be equivalent perhaps to chemical messages in a insect colony.

...one step closer to my liking...the coupling might just as well be deemed as spontaneous and not directed by any will in itself...normally we call that geometry and evolution.

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@fresco,

My general impression is that you have replaced a solipsism of the 'self', with solipsism of the 'we'. Of course, as I have complained before, this solipsism is irrefutable but is also unfalsifiable.
The only thing that makes a solipsism of the self less tenable is explaining the sensory information. The perception could be that all of the world around you is a construct, or you could perceive that you are sensing "something" else.
You and I might agree to share a solipsism and construct our world in terms that grant only ourselves existence, and view the rest of the inputs at "something" else.
My impression is that deconstruction simply extrapolates this trend to create an infinite number of infinite permutations of realities each dependent upon who is inside or outside the solipsism.
From this we declare, "How absurd! There is obviously no 'true' reality, all of these realities are only dependent upon each other. It's all perspective, it's all relationship."
This is simpler than thinking our consensus regarding a material universe may actually be because we are all sensing the same thing?

My robot brain doesn't compute.
Self is never explained, it is taken as axiomatic.
All of these nested or recombinant solipsism never explain this fundamental self that is involved in each and every one.
To explain this down far enough I don't see it as any different than an atomism with the selfs as the atoms. I don't see this as any different than materialism. It's just a different perspective.

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@JLNobody,

Yes. I think that was Papillon.

More gruesome perhaps are the tales of contemporary cannibalism, especially those of concentration camp survivors. It is not hard to understand "reality shifts" for the latter.

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@MattDavis,

Refer to Maturana for deconstruction of the term "sensory information", or perhaps check out this interpretation.
http://www.oikos.org/vonobserv.htm

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@MattDavis,

Matt, I suspect that your "solipsism" of the self actually overlaps with a "solipsism" of the we. Individuals operate within cultural matrices from which they obtain and modify their working and changing inventory of values and understandings--their worldviews.

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@fresco,

Thanks for the paper Fresco. Very Happy

Apparently Maturana does not purport to answer the question that is my primary objection. I don't see a reasonable ontic reality in deconstruction. Maturana does not feel the need to answer. I don't mean that to sound pat.
I think that deconstruction is a very good epistemology, and if I measure it by it's "operational effectiveness" it is by my admission factual.
I suspect your answer is that wanting of an ontology is a misperception brought about by the materialistic narrative.
If a coherent ontological explanation for consciousness were presented, do you feel as though this would make deconstruction less "operationally effective". Is there any way to falsify deconstruction (even hypothetically)?
----------------------------------------------------------------
As an aside, I watched an interview with Derrida last night regarding animals. If you wanted to play on my "conditioning" you should try that angle. His views on that are very similar to my own. Wink

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@JLNobody,

JLN (I changed your handle so you can't deny realism) wrote:

Matt, I suspect that your "solipsism" of the self actually overlaps with a "solipsism" of the we. Individuals operate within cultural matrices from which they obtain and modify their working and changing inventory of values and understandings--their worldviews.

I agree this was sort of the concept I was trying to get at by saying that the "solipsisms" can be myriad due to all of the possible combinations/permutations of groupings for [self][not-self].
Not to get back on one of my favorite hobby horse of paradox within dualistic frames or anything. Wink

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@MattDavis,

From a linguistic substrate point of view, I don't commune with the word "solipsism", since language axiomatically implies a community from which it is acquired and in which it has currency. But, I think it is Rorty who argues that there can be no epistemologically privileged position from which to argue for such a substrate (or indeed any other e.g. ""materialism) and even systems approaches (nesting etc) are bi-products of our conditioning (Greeks onwards) by visual metaphors.

If we take Rorty at his word we might indeed be left with "silence" on these issues ! Sad

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@fresco,

That is central to my hesitancy regarding deconstructionism. Like Rorty's admission of silence regarding ontological explanation. I still feel compelled toward an objective understanding (as a goal) even if it is not ever epistemologically possible to achieve the completion of the goal. To use a calculus metaphore, the ontology being the limit of the function of epistemology.

Thanks Fresco for all your efforts toward my education.
You have been truly (or at least factually) helpful in directing my efforts.
I have picked up Capra's book that you recommended (The Web of Life) and also a philosophical survey book by Timothy Chappell (The Inescapable Self).
I don't know if you have any familiarity with the second selection, or if you have a more compelling recommendation.
Thanks again for your help. Very Happy

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