“To a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical.”—Emerson A useful metaphor for comprehending the meaning of abstract truth would be—‘Abstract Truth is Chemical Compound’. An abstract idea is composed of both individual concepts and other abstract concepts just as a chemical compound is composed of individual atoms and molecules. An example of a most abstract truth might be found in John Rawls book “A Theory of Justice”. Rawls concludes that an apt metaphor might be ‘Justice is Fairness’. I guess that every child develops many concepts of fairness as s/he grows up. “Mom, Chris is cheating.” “Mom, Chris always takes the bigger piece of cake.” “Pick on someone your own size.” The abstract concept ‘fairness’ would contain many other abstract concepts and individual literal concepts. There would also be additional abstract concepts making up the abstract metaphor ‘Justice is Fairness’. Of course one must examine the meaning of “a sound judgment”. I would say that Critical Thinking skills are a necessary but not sufficient component of sound judgments. Since everybody considers themselves to be a critical thinker I would have to define several different levels of critical thinking. A level one critical thinker is a ‘trust but verify’ critical thinker. A level two critical thinker is one who has taken the college course Logic 101 or has studied this subject matter on their own. The level three critical thinkers I call CT (Critical Thinker). This is a student of rational thinking who has mastered Logic 101 plus the character traits and attitude of sound critical thinking. Can you think of an abstract idea that might be more practical than ‘justice is fairness’?
Sauna Some ideas have a great deal of practical use and some have little or none. Fairness is an idea that has a great deal of practical application. The idea of God has a great deal of practical application. Both justice and fairness are abstract ideas. Emerson is saying that the more abstract an idea the more practical uses that idea will likely have. The reason this is a sensible statement is because abstract ideas are composites of many experiential ideas. Fairness is an example of an abstract idea that will have many ideas from experience that makes up that abstract idea.
An abstract concept is subjective and is not formed directly as an experience. The experience can become the subjective abstract concept after the experience. The mapping of the experience concept into the mental space of the abstract concept may be actuated either consciously or unconsciously. Children have many occasions for developing experiences about fairness. Children have experience about sharing with a sibling and the concepts developed in this experience become part of the abstract concept fairness. The child has experiences about fighting fair. The child is constantly comparing his or her experience with what others get or do not get to ascertain the fairness of the transaction. Fairness is a subjective concept it is an abstraction and is constructed by incorporating the concepts of many of these actual experiences that the child categorizes as being fair or nor fair. The abstract concept ‘fairness’ is constructed of the concepts of these and other experiences throughout life that are categorized by the child as fitting into the abstract concept of fairness. When we create the metaphor ‘justice is fairness’ we are including within this abstract concept called justice the other abstract which we call ‘fairness’. The concept ‘justice’ has also other concepts that deal with the law. If one could take apart the concept ‘justice’ we would find a whole file cabinet of concepts. Thus is the reason that I said that these abstract concepts are like a chemical compound. They are strings of various real experience concepts some of which are other abstract concepts. All of this explains why Emerson would say that the more abstract the concept the more practical because it contains so many life experiences.
Kill or be killed? The whole quote from Emerson is interesting: All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea of creation. We are now so far from the road to truth, that religious teachers dispute and hate each other, and speculative men are esteemed unsound and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. Now many are thought not only unexplained but inexplicable; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, sex. I think he was talking about abstract truths, like scientific truths. For instance, something that almost looks like an abstract painting, the refraction pattern of DNA's double helix. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Sauna What I think that I know about abstract ideas comes from my favorite book “Philosophy in the Flesh” by Lakoff and Johnson. When we have an experience we create conceptual structures of that experience so that we can then draw inferences from those structures. These structures reside in a ‘mental space’. Many experiences become what are called primary metaphors. They are so called because they act like linguistic metaphors. A child experiences his brother treating him badly and the conceptual structure of this experience can be mapped (copied) unconsciously from the original experience to a new mental space that becomes the abstract idea ‘fairness’. This means that the same conceptual structure is now contained in two mental spaces, one is the original and the other is the abstract concept ‘fairness’. Each such experience that a person then has can be copied onto this abstract ‘fairness’ concept and thus this abstract concept becomes an accumulation point for the concept ‘fairness’. This new paradigm of cognitive science I label as the ‘conceptual metaphor’. The conceptual metaphor produces much the same result as does the linguistic metaphor. This theory proposes that we have hundreds of primary metaphors that are mapped onto many mental spaces to become our abstract concepts by which we live our lives. Most of this action is unconscious and there are many different types of ways in which this action takes place. Regarding the matter of subjectivity and math: I think that the creation of a type of math is primarily a creative act that is subjective and is a formulation of an abstract concept. As we accumulate knowledge we slowly begin to develop a model that I call understanding. This model is formed by both conscious and unconscious accumulation. When I study math in school it is an experience and is not an abstract idea. For the creator it is abstract but for the user who learns it through the experience of study it is not an abstract idea but is like any other idea from experience. I would say that color is an experience and is not abstraction. I have not followed the qualia thread. An individual slowly builds a concept of fairness that becomes more sophisticated as time passes. I would say that comprehension is a hierarchy and can be imagined much like a pyramid. Awareness is at the base followed by consciousness (awareness plus attention). After consciousness comes knowledge followed by understanding, which is at the pinnacle. Understanding is the creation of meaning. It is a subjective model of what the individual has created. Unlike knowing, which is about truth, understanding is abstract and is about meaning. I do not know what is “not so abstract”. John Rawls in “A Theory of Justice” attempts to accentuate and define the nature of ‘justice as fairness’. Rawls develops the concept ‘veil of ignorance’ as a means to develop the abstract substance of justice. From this beginning he developed the fundamental principles of social justice. Under the veil of ignorance there exists no self-interest, there exists only common interest because all under the veil are ignorant of any individual reality, i.e. social position, wealth, intelligence etc. Rawls assumes that everyone would, while under the veil of ignorance, chose fairness as a measure of justice. These are the two principles derived by Rawls for justice. FIRST PRINCIPLE “Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.” SECOND PRINCIPLE “Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both: (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with the just savings principle, and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.”
Sauna The authors Lakoff and Johnson have coauthored the book “Philosophy in the Flesh”. Lakoff is a linguist and Johnson a philosopher. This book represents the summation of some three decades of work of a large group of linguist, philosophers, neuroscientists and perhaps others. This book details the new paradigm in cognitive science. I first acquired this book plus “Where Mathematics Comes From” by Lakoff and Nunez about six months ago and have been studying them since. I ideas in these books are, to me, totally revolutionary. I had never encountered such ideas before. I find the ideas expressed in this new paradigm to be the best ideas I have found for explaining the human condition. The book P in F has a bibliography list that extends for some 15 pages with about 15 references per page. The other book WMCF has about the same. If you are interested in these matters it might be worth while to borrow this book from your library and check out the authors ideas for yourself. I do not think you will regret the time spent. I can well comprehend your difficulty in comprehending what I say and especially in agreeing with it. All I can say is that I have spent many hours trying to understand this matter and it represents the most sensible paradigm I have yet encountered. The following is a short essay I wrote about this matter We have in our Western philosophy a traditional theory of faculty psychology wherein our reasoning is a faculty completely separate from the body. “Reason is seen as independent of perception and bodily movement.” It is this capacity of autonomous reason that makes us different in kind from all other animals. I suspect that many fundamental aspects of philosophy and psychology are focused upon declaring, whenever possible, the separateness of our species from all other animals. This tradition of an autonomous reason began long before evolutionary theory and has held strongly since then without consideration, it seems to me, of the theories of Darwin and of biological science. Cognitive science has in the last three decades developed considerable empirical evidence supporting Darwin and not supporting the traditional theories of philosophy and psychology regarding the autonomy of reason. Cognitive science has focused a great deal of empirical science toward discovering the nature of the embodied mind. The three major findings of cognitive science are: The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. “These findings of cognitive science are profoundly disquieting [for traditional thinking] in two respects. First, they tell us that human reason is a form of animal reason, a reason inextricably tied to our bodies and the peculiarities of our brains. Second, these results tell us that our bodies, brains, and interactions with our environment provide the mostly unconscious basis for our everyday metaphysics, that is, our sense of what is real.” All living creatures categorize. All creatures, as a minimum, separate eat from no eat and friend from foe. As neural creatures tadpole and wo/man categorize. There are trillions of synaptic connections taking place in the least sophisticated of creatures and this multiple synapses must be organized in some way to facilitate passage through a small number of interconnections and thus categorization takes place. Great numbers of different synapses take place in an experience and these are subsumed in some fashion to provide the category eat or foe perhaps. Our categories are what we consider to be real in the world: tree, rock, animal…Our concepts are what we use to structure our reasoning about these categories. Concepts are neural structures that are the fundamental means by which we reason about categories.
Concepts are neural structures? A tremendously flawed view, on account that it cannot be demonstrated to be so. There is nothing inherent about neural functions - or indeed, the entirity of the neural system - that has been demonstrated to be linked to thought in such a way that the connection is obvious. Moreover, the development of a first-person viewpoint, including the experience of qualia irreducible to electric impulses in neurons, seriously imperils any model that reduces the mind to the machinary. I'd also challenge the finding that "Thought is mostly unconscious". For one, that is a contradiction of terms. Thought which is unconscious is not thought - thought, by definition, is a conscious process. Whereas clearly there are brain proecsses which we are not aware of, thought we are intimately aware of, for if anything, we are the thinker.
Do you generally assume there must be some special magic behind anything you do not understand, or is it only in the case of thought and consciousness that you have decided to make an exception? Your requirement that a physical explanation for consciousness be given before you'll consider the view acceptable is strongly reminicent of the so-called "God of gaps."
Pryzk: I do not consider a theory established on firm grounds before it be presented alongside a means to verify its claims. Neural structures being linked to our capacity to think, to have a mind, to be as we are, is undeniable. But to claim concepts are neural structures when such is not obvious and that consciousness is reducible to that which has not been demonstrated to produce such things, is a fallacious line of argument. Let it be demonstrated that a neural structure can give rise to the mysteries of a first-person perspective, to the no-to-be-found-in-any-object qualia, and various other such things and we'll discuss. Until then, it is not a line of thought that can be declared truthful.
There's also the approach you're taking. You're seem to be implying that "something else" is required, beyond good old science, to explain conscious life. I'm always reluctant to jump to such a conclusion. Well it's fallacious to make any definite claims of course, but I'd still say it's a reasonable assumption to work on. Anywhere I suspect there to be consciousness there's a neural system, I have never encountered consciousness without an associated neural system, and there's no tangible evidence that anything else is needed. What you are asking to be shown to be a consequence of a physical system is something that you have neither defined nor given a means of detecting, meaning it's only of intuitive significance to you. The only reason I can have this converstation with you is because I happen to share that same feeling. It's not a line of thought at all; it's just consistency. Treat your mystery of consciousness like any other mystery: something potentially analyzable and understandable with what we've already got to work with, and only bring in something new when a need for it becomes apparent.
Pryzk: I do not conclude that there is "something else" besides science/philosophy, only that some aspects of mind give credence to the possibility of metaphysical dualism as opposed to materialism. That is to say, there seems to be nothing in the mind - as admitted, albeit it with a disgusting anti-knowledge fatalism, by Steven Pinker in "How the Mind Works" and Douglas Hoftstadder Hofstadter in "Goldel, Escher, and Bach" - that explains consciousness as a first-person phenomena, replete with qualia, in a brain which is held as a neural Turing Machine. There is no tangiable evidence that anything else is needed for a mind but a brain, you are correct. But whether or not a mind can be reduced to a brain is another thing entirely. The mysteries of the first person perspective and qualia do not, at this time, admit of a reduction to neural structures. In fact, if we allow (although I am not wont to do so) that artificial intelligence, following a rough version of a human mind, is ever created, we'd be left with the huge question of: Why are we different? Why are we not (philosophical) zombies? Moreover, I also disagree that I have not defined what I am asking for proof of. But to be crystal clear: What is the proof that a the experience of consciousness from a first-person perspective, including physically irreducible qualia, can be explained by a neural system that does not have thoughts running through it? What is the translation method that allows for a mind to create an entire image of the world - indeed, even a manipulatable image, as our mind has the capacity to imagine and otherwise conceive of thoughts - out of electrical impulses that have, at best, a pure syntaxical foundation? What turns an electric charge into these thoughts? Into these images? Where, in essence, is the Cartesian Theatre that is ever filled with the actors of our minds? Note: I am not asking for a soul to be presented, as it were. Only for a justification of the "neural paradigm" as being sufficient to provide evidence for consciousness. Of this I am yet unconvinced, as it should be clear.
Sounds like "something else" to me. Well, imagine a perfect simulation of a human, or at least a human brain being run (which could be an inefficient way of implementing an AI). There are basically two possibilities: 1) The behaviour of the simulation resembles human behaviour. 2) The simulation does not reproduce human-like behaviour. 2) Implies that there are 6 billion 3 kg lumps of grey matter, made of very common materials, that are breaking the laws of physics. Do you have a reason to expect this, or hold that the brain is an exception until shown otherwise? This is exactly what I would call the "god of gaps" approach. Given the complexity of and technology required for this task, it is not surprising that such an AI has not yet been demonstrated. You would first have to establish that there is a difference. Before that, asking "why are we different?" is premature. If an AI turns out to be capable of everything a human is, do you really have a case for claiming the human still has something the AI doesn't, or looked at the other way, that the AI is still missing something? Even if there is a difference, it would appear to be something tacked on and inconsequential. What are "physically irreducible qualia"? I've seen you use this phrase a few times and I'm not sure what you mean by it. Manipulating data in and of itself is nothing special - it's what we built computers for in the first place. Building up a mental image is just our version of running a simulation. What's more interesting for psychologists and AI researchers is the motivation behind running these simulations. It's not difficult for a computer to manipulate organized data constituting an internal representation of something, but you'd have a hard time deducing that the computer was actually doing this just by looking at its CPU and memory state over time. I'm wondering, do you have much experience programming computers?
