Boydstun

Yesterday I heard mention of a phenomenon called aphantasia , the self reported lack of 'innner' imagery. Oddly it seems "I have it", odder still a few weeks ago I was discussing this with my wife! But I thought the fact that what I was trying to explain to my wife and her reporting back of her phenomenal experience of imagination visually, in comparison to what I was describing didn't 'line up' was due to semantic misalignment.
I did not realize that when most people report 'seeing' 'things' in their mind's eye or imagination that they were not speaking metaphorically. I always assumed 'visual imagery' was a collectively agreed upon ambiguous concept to describe an 'inner' understanding or cognition(?) of an imagined 'thing', and not a 'quasi-actual' visual image.
If I were prompted to close my eyes and imagine say a pink elephant, I only 'see' the dark behind the lids, there is nothing 'there' that appears anything akin to visually apprehending a pink elephant, but the 'idea' of a pink elephant is present or experienced, perhaps better described as almost a state of awareness of being predisposed to 'accepting' a nonheretofore 'appearance' of a 'visual experience' of a pink elephant .. actually it is rather hard to describe, especially because I never thought I would have to describe this aspect of experience , going off the assumption that all youse all was just speaking metaphorically!
I do dream 'visually' and I sometimes mistake the experience of having read a novel as having watched a film of the story, but i don't seem to be able to bring up visual imagery 'on demand' , so maybe on the spectrum as it were, lol.
So , yeah AI imagery ain't never gonna live up to my expectation, but only because the bar is too low !
 
 

This reminds me of much, and brings up a thought or perhaps a sentiment...
a certain asymmetry...
 
Although "We cannot know things-in-themselves" is flawed
it is a certainty that
"things-in-themselves cannot know We... only We do." is true.

That is not my viewpoint, but a viewpoint not compatible with "Rand's substantial theory of truth".  I led off my message with "It" and the referent of that "It" was "Rand's substantial theory of truth" from the quote that was given immediately above in that post.  Long form writing and message board writing are very different, so my apologies for contributing to your confusion by not spelling things out more explicitly.   
To be clear, I agree with your "... unknown facts need not be characterized as a standing in some mind, specifically, as in a God-like omniscience-perspective."  I was making the point that arguments based on hindsight have similarity to arguments based on that God-like omniscience-perspective.  If the omniscient perspective is rejected then so should the hindsight perspective be rejected.

@Boydstun Actually, I bought Tylor in order to get more context for Bellah, which you recommended in a past post. I also went ahead and read Clifford Geertz’s essay, which Bellah takes as a starting point. I really appreciated his theory that religion is more or less ethics and metaphysics mutually reinforcing one another through emotion.  

I’m reading Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Culture and the first chapter - introducing evidence for his theory that civilizations typically evolve from lower states to more advanced ones, rather than degrade from an initial “divine” state - finishes with this bit:
“We may fancy ourselves looking on Civilization, as in personal figure she traverses the world; we see her lingering or resting by the way, and often deviating into paths that bring her toiling back to where she had passed by long ago; but, direct or devious, her path lies forward, and if now and then she tries a few backward steps, her walk soon falls into a helpless stumbling. It is not according to her nature, her feet were not made to plant uncertain steps behind her, for both in her forward view and in her onward gait she is of truly human type.”
Thought that was nicely put. 

I want to butt in with a distracting point that may seem irrelevant but I argue is a central issue. The ancient Greeks did not have the idea “all animals are mortal”, as I understand it, the expansion beyond singular terms originates from William of Ockham. More to the point, the ancient Greeks did not have ideas about animals and mortal, but they did have concepts and perhaps ideas about θήρ and βροτός. Specifying the referents for these words is way above my pay-grade. The nit that I am picking is that one must first inspect the referents as a unit, and see what label (word) is assigned to that unit. Discussion of concepts in Ancient Greek have to focus on facts of Ancient Greek and ancient Greeks. As I understand it, the above terms more closely translate to English as “wild beast” and “mortal man”. All concepts are specific to a language, but the potential to create extensionally-identical units with some label is universal,
Let’s then ask whether concepts have changed in the context of English, but taking other terms like “press” or “arms”. The latter two figure in the US Constitution in the First and Second Amendments. When the document was written, newspapers were literally printed on presses (originally designed for pressing wine), and “arms” were all single-shot muzzle-loaded metal tubes. The concepts “press” and “arms” are not limited to the extant technology of the time, they refer more abstractly to the practice of disseminating “expressions”, and to weapons. Meaning is concepts and propositions, not a list of concrete instances – meaning is intensional, not extensional. Thus the meaning of these concepts has not changed at all.
There are cases where something other than technology or knowledge changes, for example “sick” has gained a new, positive meaning (at least for the time), and in British English, “boot” has been metaphorically extended first to mean “where you step to get into a coach” then “lower luggage compartment”, now “trunk”.
I have deluded myself into thinking that I have a tolerable understanding of the concept “concept” and “proposition”, and I also know what a “sentence” is. I know the history of the word idea but I can’t say very exactly what an idea is (what distinguishes it from a proposition). I would be strongly inclined to say that a proposition is a specific type of sentence, except that propositions generally have to be paired with additional information that overcomes the vagueness of natural language (for instance, “He said that Stephen spoke” does not say who “he” is except it cannot be “Stephen”). In one knowledge context “he” would mean “David”, and in another context it would mean “Fred”. It would be correct to say that a proposition is a pairing of a sentence a context. It is also advantageous to promote language, not just because of my professional interest in it but because sentences can be objectively inspected and are not abstract and unjustified constructs like Cartesian mental images projected onto our brains. This is what the technical concept “semantic interpretation” refers to.
A well-meaninged declaration that “He likes mammals, like lions and penguins”, it not and does not convert into a contextual truth when you discover that the person has a false belief that penguins are mammals. The declaration “He likes mammals, like lions”, is also not rendered contextually false because you can imagine there is some person whose pronoun is “he” yet who have most mammal species. Truth has to be about an objectively correct grasp of reality, unless we resign ourselves to saying that objectively false beliefs make false statements “contextually true”. I do not have a solution to the problem of distinguishing false beliefs, redefinitions of concepts, and “pronominal” terms like “I, that…”, but I would say that admitting false beliefs as contextually true solvent that creates truth from falsehood is not a good solution.

Hamas Network of Tunnels Under Gaza

Israel's War -- Update | Yaron Brook
 
 

Breaking News -- Israel Under Attack 
 
 

A neat guide to what is in OPAR is here.
Thanks to KP.

Kuhn's Intellectual Path <– a review by Howard Sankley of this book by K. Brad Wray
(My copy of that book of Wray's arrives tomorrow.)
Of related interest (which I have already):
The Essential Tension by Thomas Kuhn
The Road Since Structure edited by Conant and Haugeland
Reconsidering Logical Positivism by Michael Friedman
The Cambridge Companion to Carnap edited by Friedman and Creath
Scientific Revolutions edited by Ian Hacking
Interpreting Kuhn edited by Brad Wray
The Cognitive Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Anderson, Barker, and Chen
 
 

As an example of the popularity of this book, when I was in college in the late 1960s it was already part of the required reading for not only my History of Science course, but also the History of Economics and Sociology. 

Gravitational Effect on Motion of Anti-Matter Observed
 

Image by Arthur Rackham, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.As of this morning the poll at Drudge Report shows four double-digit performers in the second Republican debate. Currently, they clock in at Haley (35%), Ramaswamy (20%), DeSantis (19%), and Christie (16%). (Pence, whom I said didn't have a base and called "Trump-limited," finished dead last at 2%.) I called the race after the first (in which Ramaswamy and Haley's numbers were reversed) a sprint for Ramaswamy and a marathon for Haley.

One headline characterized the debate as "trading insults," and partisan media, left and right, have hastily written it off as irrelevant, charging that, with Trump leading Biden in the latest polling, that the "electability argument" has evaporated, and that with Trump leading among Republicans that his coronation -- like Hilary Clinton's in 2016? -- is inevitable.

Balderdash!

I submit that, since Haley polls best against Biden, there might be some wishful thinking behind any leftist outlet proclaiming that Haley can't hang her hat on electability, and double for any Trumpist saying this. Anyone else is likely being lazy or giving up too soon.

As for Trump's supposedly insurmountable primary lead, that's rich after the way polling largely missed Trump's win way back in 2016 -- and probably also wishful thinking. Leftists know that Trump is Biden's best bet to get reelected. And Trumpists? The fact that they're frontloading winner-take-all primaries shows that they fear an electorate taking any time to think through its options.

Seriously. Where's the fire?

If Trump is so ace, why hurry? And why not show up for the debates? If Trump is the Only Man Who Can Save America, what has he to fear from some piker being "unfair" to him at a debate?

Continuing with what's actually going on: The first state primary/caucus isn't until January. In the meantime, polling in early states shows that while, yes, majorities give Trump as the answer to the "if the election were held today" question, most of these people aren't political junkies or Trump cultists. More to the point, over three quarters of Republicans are considering someone other than Trump:It's not quite early days, but there is ample time for Haley to continue building momentum and for Trump to make an ass of himself, even without showing up for the debates.

I remain cautiously optimistic that Haley can win.

-- CAVLink to Original

Last week, I wrote:This scenario, which I already viewed as unlikely to occur, but the best shot of the Republicans nominating a decent alternative to Joe Biden, appears to be even less likely than I thought.

This is because Trump's disciples within the GOP have been pushing for earlier, winner-takes-all primaries:Perhaps because the rules are obscure and vary from state to state, the article is unclear about how much this tilts the scales in favor of Trump, but it does note that the strategy could backfire if Trump falters enough early in the race.

It would appear, then, that in addition to a smaller field of competitors to Trump, narrowing it down quickly will be necessary.

It is a shame that the Republicans have allowed a power-hungry liability like Trump to cause it to have to choose a candidate quickly, rather than deliberately.

-- CAVLink to Original

The Semafor, David Weigel opines that Nikki Haley is "riding a charming, focused, and consistent campaign to third place."

With polls all over the place, I presume Weigel is placing the former South Carolina governor behind Trump and one of DeSantis or Ramaswamy.

I think it is premature to consign Haley to third place: Aside from political junkies and Trump-worshipers, not that many people are paying much attention. This means that, while part of Trump's overwhelming-looking support is never going away, a significant amount remains persuadable.

In this context, Weigel's description of how Haley has been running her campaign sounds more like strategic patience than futility:Yeah, Gus, but this depends on Trump imploding, you might say.

I say that with all his legal troubles, he may have already imploded, and closer to election time, it's going to look uglier to the persuadable part of the GOP electorate. And with Trump's volatility, there's always the chance he'll scare away a few voters on top of that.

Haley is building her case now, and has neither alienated nor pandered to the Trump base. She has been running a frugal campaign, but stands to benefit when big anti-Trump GOP donors -- who have been backing away from DeSantis since he began his stupid war on Disney -- decide where their best chances lie.

Haley does best against Biden in polling of any Republican in the field now, and there is no doubt that if Trump ends up in jail, or is declared to be disqualified from office, she would have a decent chance of winning the GOP primary. She is ready, if things break her way, and more people paying attention might constitute breaking her way in this election.

I wouldn't write her off just yet.

-- CAVLink to Original

I should locate this work and its Addendums in this collection of works. I expect to be adding yet another addendum, this one on Descartes and Rand in their relations to Aristotle's metaphysics and philosophy of mechanics and biology.
Foundational Frames: Descartes and Rand

My main point is that “God”, in the Christian sense, is not a concept, it is a proper name, like Barak Obama. Proper names don’t have CCDs. However, “unicorn” is a concept, and it has a CCD, even though there are no actual unicorns which you can touch. Mathematical concepts are all completely abstract and untouchable, but they are concepts. If we talk of “god” in the anthropological sense, i.e. supernatural personified beings across cultures as we might discuss in an Anthro class, then there would be a CCD, even though the term refers to an idea and not a tangible entity. “God” and “god” are both labels for existents, but they are not entities.

I think his statement subsumes the process argument re thermodynamical and information-theoretic reasons.
As concept it seems 'all-knowing' would be akin to 'unicorn' , eg the concept is valid as its referent is 'knowingly' not really real.
I don't know anything about limitative theorems of logic , but intuitively it may point to the idea that a theorem or other could posit that a complete set of 'all the facts in existence ' could not be determined to be logically consistent in 'itself' based on some rational that determination of logical consistency requires some interaction with null sets and or the possibilities of unknown unknowns.
I think there is also a need to distinguish between information and knowledge.
It may be tangentially related that one of the ways 'they got' the chatbots to 'produce' more intelligible responses was to tweak 'up' the randomness of the relevance weights(?) , not sure what they did algorithmically/software wise but there seems to be a sweet spot for randomness at least for the results to appear more 'inline' with natural language comprehension.

How about the argument that knowledge is gained by a process, and no one can process everything?
 

Now dead

I know that these issues are a far drift from the topics in Binswanger 1990, the topic of this thread, and in particular the nature of teleology in organisms that are without consciousness or are under some direction by their consciousness, which is much less autonomous and discerning than human consciousness. But that is all right with me if we chat a bit on these interesting byways, because the intervals required for me to produce the substantial segments of the essay view of that book, including putting it into historical perspective, is long, at least weeks. I'll peg what is here so far, for convenience: 
Part 1, Part 2 – Aristotle I am working now on the remainder of Part 2, which is Suárez, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Part 3 will return to the layout in the subject book, which is cast in our contemporary biology.
Tad, on your two questions: No. No.
Neither Rand nor I would concur with the dualism of Descartes in his sense that thought (he means anything mental) and spatial extension are two fundamental substances, the only two we have, each depending on nothing else, aside from God who brought them into existence. Clipping it down, neither Rand nor I would concur with the dualism of Descartes in the sense of thought and extension being two fundamental substances, each depending on nothing else.
Rand stressed the distinction and fundamentality of existence and consciousness. "Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and consciousness—are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, . . . " (AS 1015–16). Both are present for one's discernment of them from day of birth to now, although, one would be on towards an age of being able to understand Rand's 1957 writing about it to get explicitly in mind those two things, existence and consciousness.
What Rand says there is fine by me and important, but I go ahead and incorporate what we know about the biological character of consciousness by modern science and make a somewhat more general distinction in place of that one of Rand's. She had the division: existents and existents that have consciousness. I wrote instead (in EW) the division: existents and existents that are of-existents. The latter includes the living activities that are consciousness (awareness of existence) but as well any living action whatever.
So in my terms, here is how I think about your second question. Potentials are featured only in concrete existents and only pertaining to them in their aspect of being not also of-existence. Possibilities are in existents that are of-existents, such as when we sort out the potentials of things for possibilities of our control and possibilities of our inventions and possibilities of our behaviors, or when we grasp the belonging-formalities of concretes and grow vast tooling-formalities upon them for use in our inventions and actions and for our satisfactions of mind, or possibilities are in our story-making entertainments, our fictions. So it's worth making this distinction I've labeled potentials and possibilities.
I don't think Rand would have thought of a line segment as not really real. I guess she could get into that sort of trouble with talk of only concretes being real and then denying that spatial relations are concretes (if she did). However, I should say also for Rand that she recognized that there are relationships in the world independently of our mental grasps of the world. Perceptual similarities are in the world, in her understanding. So are quantities, which we get under our scaled rulers.
I am with Descartes and with Newton on the reality of lines in physical space. Our procedure for bisecting a line segment using compass and straightedge reflects formalities of physical space around us and what it is possible to do with them. Hero of Alexandria said that a straight line is a line stretched to the utmost, and like him when I want to approach getting stones laid in a line, I stretch a string. The things we do in the mind in synthetic geometry, as in Euclid, are not without connections to the world, even though our method in geometry is quite different than our method in chemistry or geology.

Include in that also your own second opinion, a determinedly critical one, every day. I once suffered from paranoia for a couple of days (and other mental defects) due to metabolic encephalopathy, which in my case was due to a bladder blockage. To be sure you have not fallen into a paranoia, in the sense of a delusional belief that one is being persecuted in a systematic way, subject each negative thing going on to the critical possibility that it could be independent of the other negative things. For example, the theft of your auto. (By the way, when did that occur?)
Regardless of whether these negative events are largely an organized attempt to get you, if they continue, you might consider moving away from there. I've moved far away from where I was born and educated through college, and again moved far away from the place I had my commercial-work part of life. One loses direct company of family and loved ones residing at those old places, but indeed one can make a fresh start. (In my first move, I was without any assets beyond the $84 dollars in my pocket and my ability to do unskilled labor and be dependable. It is possible, and it can be worth the change of your world.)

Eddie believed that the oak tree from his childhood was so strong that "if a giant were to seize it by the top, he would not be able to uproot it, but would swing the hill and the whole of the earth with it". However, a lightning strike revealed that the tree's trunk was, in fact, hollow. In a similar way, Eddie subconsciously suspects that New York's trunk is hollow (for example, due to the stores going out of business).
Nevertheless, Eddie is unable to identify why he feels a sense of impending doom, or why he connects this feeling to the oak tree. So he shrugs it off, thinking he's just imagining things. No heroism here 😛
According to Jim, a feudal serf works for the prosperity of his employer, without caring if his employer is ethical or helps society etc. Eddie disagrees that there's a dichotomy between making money and being ethical, so he matter-of-factly accepts the moniker.

Sade