Mental Entities and Causality

[MisterSwig]

1 hour ago, Eiuol said:

Quite literally, you are proposing a form of causality based on extrasensory perception.

To clarify, I'm proposing a form of introspection based on sensory perception of the mind. True, this would involve a sort of internal mental causation, with the mind affecting the supposed perceptual mechanism in the brain. But if we are talking about actual volitional causation and our mental control of the body, then that would also involve the will. Which is a topic I've barely mentioned, because I'd like to at least establish some common ground regarding introspection and mental entities first. Perhaps I'll start a new thread on volition, once I put some more thoughts together. But first I'm working on something regarding memory lapses which I'll try to post next week.

[Eiuol]

1 hour ago, dream_weaver said:

It is pretty clear that Mr. Swig is not proposing "mentities" as a physical thing.

Nope, I never said he did, because he proposes an alternate substance that they are made of. He didn't say substance, but he does propose a non-physical causality, that is, mental entities are entities literally perceived as possessing causal power -as- entities. Rand unequivocally stated that she used "mental entity" as a metaphor.

It is accurate to say kicks cause balls to roll. However, kicks are not things, and originate from metaphysically concrete entities. This is entity-based causation. It isn't -literally- ideas that change the world, your actions do, as performed by your body (spiral this back to the virtue of productivity). Ideas impact why and the way one is productive, unlike how a Marxist who says production is ONLY what your body does.

[Eiuol]

2 hours ago, MisterSwig said:

I'm curious to know your answer to my initial question about how free will would be possible if volition were physical causality?

See the paper I linked. It'd take a super long post otherwise.

But I asked you if you sense mentities as you sense wine? It isn't available to ANY other senses and ONLY you, while a physical entity is available to ALL senses and ALL perceiving entities! It has to be something else as far as I see (and no, I don't mean literally see!)

Edited December 4, 2016 by Eiuol

[New Buddha]

1 hour ago, Eiuol said:

But I asked you if you sense mentities as you sense wine?

Eiuol,

As I'm sure you are aware, perception involves both Feed Forward (incoming information) and Feed Back (memory).

If I ask you to visualize your car, the word "car" is Feed Forward information, and the resultant imagery you call to mind is the Feed Back information.  This is also true when you actually perceive the light reflecting off of your car.  Your perception is a composite of Feed Forward and Feed Back information.

As Binswanger notes in his book, perception is an ongoing process, not a snapshot of entities.

If you enter into your living room, which you've entered countless times before, and nothing is out of place, then the Feed Forward and Feed Back information essentially "cancels" and you pay no attention.  BUT, if someone, while you were gone, were to rearrange a piece of furniture, then the Feed Forward and Feed Back information would conflict and this conflict would trigger your attention.

This can be dramatically illustrated by music. Suppose a favorite song of yours, that you've listened to many times is covered by another band.  The discrepancy between the two performances can be very disconcerting.  This is Feed Forward and Feed Back at work.  Even though the two songs are conceptually the "same" song, they are absolutely perceived differently. 

If I said your car is red (Feed Forward) and you said, no, it's blue (Feed Back), this "conflict" would draw your attention to your car's color.  The same would occur if I said your car is a Mazda and you would say, no, it's a Toyota.

Mental entities are not "entities".  Perception is a consonantly on going process involving both the present and the past in an attempt to predict the future.  If you stand still, and are injected with a drug which inhibits saccades, then you will go blind.  Perception REQUIRES change and movement.

These are some of the reasons why Binswager moved away from Representationalism.

Edited December 4, 2016 by New Buddha

[MisterSwig]

33 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

But I asked you if you sense mentities as you sense wine?

No. Wine and hamburgers are very different from mentities. Though I do get the mental images of things, so there's a small similarity between the mind's eye and my actual vision. I don't taste or smell things in the mental realm. Does an emotion count as feeling a mental entity? I doubt it. And does the inner voice thing count as hearing? I don't know. A lot goes on in a dream. Not sure if I've ever had a hamburger in my dream or not.

[New Buddha]

5 minutes ago, MisterSwig said:

No. Wine and hamburgers are very different from mentities. Though I do get the mental images of things, so there's a small similarity between the mind's eye and my actual vision. I don't taste or smell things in the mental realm. Does an emotion count as feeling a mental entity? I doubt it. And does the inner voice thing count as hearing? I don't know. A lot goes on in a dream. Not sure if I've ever had a hamburger in my dream or not.

Swig,

If you were blindfolded, could you identify, by taste, a hamburger?  Yes.

But, what if you are blindfolded and eat something you've never eaten before?  Could you identify it?  No.  Because there is no memory  to compare via Feed Forward and Feed Back.

[MisterSwig]

43 minutes ago, New Buddha said:

But, what if you are blindfolded and eat something you've never eaten before?  Could you identify it?  No.  Because there is no memory  to compare via Feed Forward and Feed Back.

I'm not getting your point here. The name of some food item is not its identity. Its identity is its nature as a thing, of which I could probably provide a decent definition by tasting, touching, hearing, and smelling the item. Or am I deprived of every sense besides taste?

Using your own "feed forward/back" setup, I'd say that the feed forward is you asking me to identify a piece of food, and the feed back is me describing it using whatever senses you allow me to use. I could tell you its shape and texture using my hands, how it smells using my nose, whether it's sweet or bitter, chewy or crunchy, using my mouth and tongue, and how it sounds when I throw it against the wall in disgust.

Edited December 4, 2016 by MisterSwig

[MisterSwig]

2 hours ago, Eiuol said:

Nope, I never said he did, because he proposes an alternate substance that they are made of. He didn't say substance, but he does propose a non-physical causality...

In the first sentence you have me "proposing a substance" and in the second sentence I'm "not saying substance."

A is not A.

[StrictlyLogical]

MisterSwig

What do you mean by dividing reality into two realms?  Is this necessary? Why?

[StrictlyLogical]

Euoil

You state that there is only one kind of causality and that it is physical.

This makes sense presumably as nonphysical entities would have to be supernatural, hence non physical entities do not exist.  

At one point you've mentioned that "mental entities" are not causative.  This implies from your view they are non physical and hence supernatural.  I know you did not make up the term, but to what can you be referring in reality that cannot interact with existence? 

 

Edited December 4, 2016 by StrictlyLogical

[dream_weaver]

8 hours ago, Eiuol said:

Nope, I never said he did, because he proposes an alternate substance that they are made of. He didn't say substance, but he does propose a non-physical causality, that is, mental entities are entities literally perceived as possessing causal power -as- entities. Rand unequivocally stated that she used "mental entity" as a metaphor.

"Mental entities" is what she directed the metaphorical aspect to. She does go on to point out that it is still a "something" as opposed to a "nothing", with a "mental something" being the nearest to an exact identification. She also offers the caveat (my take on it here) that anything pertaining to the content of the mind has to be treated as the content of the mind.

8 hours ago, Eiuol said:

It is accurate to say kicks cause balls to roll. However, kicks are not things, and originate from metaphysically concrete entities. This is entity-based causation. It isn't -literally- ideas that change the world, your actions do, as performed by your body (spiral this back to the virtue of productivity). Ideas impact why and the way one is productive, unlike how a Marxist who says production is ONLY what your body does.

Human action without ideas to guide them would be what, precisely? Keep in mind, man has to act in order to live. Before he can act, that is, the prerequisite necessary for man to be able to act is: he must know the nature and purpose of his action. Ideas, quite literally, serve as the guide to action here.

[New Buddha]

8 hours ago, MisterSwig said:

Using your own "feed forward/back" setup, I'd say that the feed forward is you asking me to identify a piece of food, and the feed back is me describing it using whatever senses you allow me to use. I could tell you its shape and texture using my hands, how it smells using my nose, whether it's sweet or bitter, chewy or crunchy, using my mouth and tongue, and how it sounds when I throw it against the wall in disgust.

I was trying to draw a distinction between the recognition, via memory, of a food that you had previously tasted and one which you had not.  If you taste some thing that is unique to you, you would attempt to describe it along the lines of, "It's probably a fruit, and it tastes like blend of a cherry and an orange."  Once you were told the "name" of the fruit by the research, the next time you taste it, the name would come to mind.  Naming is, of course, a very important cognitive tool.

And, as I've stated elsewhere, either in this post or the other one, forming sounds (words) is a physical, anatomical act - no different than climbing a flight of stairs or riding a bike.  Words are not non-embodied entities.  They are perceived - including your silent, inner voice.  It produces micro-muscular movements in your speaking anatomy while you think.  You don't hear, via sound waves, your inner voice, but you do perceive the muscle movement which existed, in tandem, with the sound waves formed when you speak out loud.

Edited December 4, 2016 by New Buddha

[MisterSwig]

2 hours ago, StrictlyLogical said:

What do you mean by dividing reality into two realms?  Is this necessary? Why?

Don't think of it as dividing reality. Think of it as recognizing different classifications of reality.

Imagine that we weren't already so knowledgeable about nature and the differences between inanimate versus animate matter. We might notice that some things move around and some things don't. But occasionally those things that don't normally move will move, like a rock might occasionally tumble down a mountain. And sometimes those things that normally move will stop moving, like when a tribal elder doesn't get up again after going to bed at night, or a river becomes solid and hard in the cold time.

How might we break out of this ignorance? Well, for starters, by recognizing and conceptualizing two types of fundamentally different things, inanimate things versus animate things. In the early stages of this understanding, we might even consider them to be two different realms, requiring supernatural forces, like gods, capable of creating animate from inanimate and moving large objects like the sun around in chariots. We wouldn't be able yet to understand the natural forces that produced life or cause inanimate things to move. But it would still be crucial to maintain the idea of the two realms until we discover how they are connected by some common, non-supernatural aspect of reality. Otherwise we'd revert back to our prior, even worse ignorance about the world.

Likewise, we must recognize and conceptualize the differences between the physical and mental realms, until we figure out what is going on. You might not agree with my conception of it, but I hope we can at least agree that it's crucial to recognize that there is something fundamentally different between our mind and physical reality. And since we are Objectivists, I hope we can also agree that there must be a natural connection between these two realms.

[StrictlyLogical]

Why use the concept of "realm" for this particular division of kinds of things of reality?  There are massive and massless particles.  We do not use massless and massive realms when dealing with them.  We simply identify the fact that there are two different kinds of things.  As for living and non living I would also argue these are simply two different kinds of things in reality... and if anything reference to realm becomes dangerously close to reification ... 

what of Rand's razor?

 

 

Edited December 4, 2016 by StrictlyLogical
Rethink

[MisterSwig]

1 hour ago, StrictlyLogical said:

Why use the concept of "realm" for this particular division of kinds of things of reality?

Because realm suggests a part of reality that is distinctive and governed by unique laws or forces, without directly suggesting a supernatural aspect. Etymologically, its roots are in Latin and Middle English words for "government" and "kingdom." Philologically, the meaning has been applied to the wider context of "kingdoms" within nature, which are "ruled" by different "laws."

Addendum: Upon further consideration, perhaps realm is a favored concept because it doesn't identify the domain as being natural or supernatural, thus allowing both naturalists and mystics to agree upon terms while the debate rages.

Edited December 4, 2016 by MisterSwig
Added addendum.

[MisterSwig]

27 minutes ago, StrictlyLogical said:

Why are there not massless and massive realms and also living and non living realms ?

Perhaps because we've sufficiently integrated those ideas into the rest of our knowledge. It would serve no conceptual purpose to keep talking about the living versus nonliving realms. Such ideas belong in the waste basket. They would only clutter up our thinking.

[Plasmatic]

1 hour ago, MisterSwig said:

Addendum: Upon further consideration, perhaps realm is a favored concept because it doesn't identify the domain as being natural or supernatural, thus allowing both naturalists and mystics to agree upon terms while the debate rages.

And why would you want to proceed on such agnostic terms on the subject of the invalid concept of supernature? 

Thorough responses incoming.

Edited December 4, 2016 by Plasmatic

[MisterSwig]

3 hours ago, New Buddha said:

Words are not non-embodied entities.  They are perceived - including your silent, inner voice.  It produces micro-muscular movements in your speaking anatomy while you think.  You don't hear, via sound waves, your inner voice, but you do perceive the muscle movement which existed, in tandem, with the sound waves formed when you speak out loud.

While interesting, I don't see how subvocalization or micro-muscular movements weakens my position. It's not seeing the word that produces the bodily reaction. It's reading the word, which then affects your brain in such a way that compels it to send signals to your larynx. Your mind is trying to tell your body to vocalize whatever it's reading. So the inner voice precedes the automatized muscle twitches. It's your mind trying to will yourself to talk the words. And it takes an effortful standing order to suppress the speech.

Consider what happens when you try to read language symbols that you don't even know how to pronounce, such as Chinese characters or ancient hieroglyphics. They are words. But looking at them does nothing but produce a stare. Your larynx won't react, because there is no brain signal going to your speaking muscles.

Edited December 4, 2016 by MisterSwig

[MisterSwig]

7 minutes ago, Plasmatic said:

And why would you want to proceed on such agnostic terms on the subject of the invalid concept of super nature? 

It's not agnostic. It's neutral. We use such neutral terms to reach a common ground upon which we can then argue for our opposing views. Agnostic would be like saying there is no way of knowing one way or the other whether the mind is a natural or supernatural phenomenon. Neutral means that we are agreeing that our base concept takes no specific position either way. We are agreeing simply that the mental is fundamentally different from the physical, and now we will argue whether it's natural or supernatural.

[Plasmatic]

On December 1, 2016 at 8:42 PM, MisterSwig said:

, I consider his most important position to be that "if volitional causation is not physical, then it's literally unreal." For, if this is true, then mental (non-physical, immaterial) causation is simply impossible, rendering any further discussion pointless.

I specifically chose the term agnostic because I wanted to nod to Dr. Peikoff's point about epistemological agnostics:

Quote

 

The agnostic viewpoint poses as fair, impartial, and balanced. See how many fallacies you can find in it. Here are a few obvious ones: First, the agnostic allows the arbitrary into the realm of human cognition. He treats arbitrary claims as ideas proper to consider, discuss, evaluate—and then he regretfully says, “I don’t know,” instead of dismissing the arbitrary out of hand. Second, the onus-of-proof issue: the agnostic demands proof of a negative in a context where there is no evidence for the positive. “It’s up to you,” he says, “to prove that the fourth moon of Jupiter did not cause your sex life and that it was not a result of your previous incarnation as the Pharaoh of Egypt.” Third, the agnostic says, “Maybe these things will one day be proved.” In other words, he asserts possibilities or hypotheses with no jot of evidential basis.

The agnostic miscalculates. He thinks he is avoiding any position that will antagonize anybody. In fact, he is taking a position which is much more irrational than that of a man who takes a definite but mistaken stand on a given issue, because the agnostic treats arbitrary claims as meriting cognitive consideration and epistemological respect. He treats the arbitrary as on a par with the rational and evidentially supported. So he is the ultimate epistemological egalitarian: he equates the groundless and the proved. As such, he is an epistemological destroyer. The agnostic thinks that he is not taking any stand at all and therefore that he is safe, secure, invulnerable to attack. The fact is that his view is one of the falsest—and most cowardly—stands there can be.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/agnosticism.html

 

 

To pretend to be neutral as to the validity of the supernaturalist claim by substituting a different word is a mistake. You don't think you are doing that but your position is exactly like that of supernaturalist in the respect of unjustified categorization.

Edited December 4, 2016 by Plasmatic

[New Buddha]

34 minutes ago, MisterSwig said:

While interesting, I don't see how subvocalization or micro-muscular movements weakens my position. It's not seeing the word that produces the bodily reaction. It's reading the word, which then affects your brain in such a way that compels it to send signals to your larynx. Your mind is trying to tell your body to vocalize whatever it's reading. So the inner voice precedes the automatized muscle twitches. It's your mind trying to will yourself to talk the words. And it takes an effortful standing order to suppress the speech.

Consider what happens when you try to read language symbols that you don't even know how to pronounce, such as Chinese characters or ancient hieroglyphics. They are words. But looking at them does nothing but produce a stare. Your larynx won't react, because there is no brain signal going to your speaking muscles.

Reading activates several regions of the brain:  Broca's region, the occipital lobe, the amygdala, hippocampus, basal ganglia,  thalamus, the cortex, etc.  It's the combination of regions that allows understand to take place.  When any region is damaged, then unusual things can happen.  Someone might, for instance see a word and have no idea what it means, but they can, if asked, point to the object the word represents from a group of objects before them.

Edit:  The larger point I'm trying to make is that, just because we are still learning about cognition, there is no reason to posit another "realm" or some type of "special sauce" or vitalism when discussing the issue.

A great deal of exiting work is being done in various fields.  It's an interesting topic.

Edited December 4, 2016 by New Buddha

[MisterSwig]

11 minutes ago, New Buddha said:

Someone might, for instance see a word and have no idea what it means, but they can, if asked, point to the object the word represents from a group of objects before them.

Yes, brain damage results in weird behaviors. In this case, I would say that the subject must have previously automatized knowledge of the word and its related object. Therefore he needn't be able to define the word intellectually for his brain to automatically link it with the correct object. Not all human behaviour is volitional.

[MisterSwig]

39 minutes ago, Plasmatic said:

To pretend to be neutral as to the validity of the supernaturalist claim by substituting a different word is a mistake.

But the whole point is to find a neutral ground from which I can attack the supernatural position. I'm not neutral regarding supernaturalism. I'm neutral regarding the battlefield, which is the mental realm. And the opposition doesn't have to be a supernaturalist either. He could be a materialist or determinist, or whatever other brand of thinkers want to join in the discussion. 

[Plasmatic]

On December 1, 2016 at 8:42 PM, MisterSwig said:

If Plasmatic is correct, then I am doing something very wrong. I don't want to be in the position of pulling a Platonic, spiritual realm out of the physical one. My intention is not to posit any sort of transcendent realm of perfect Forms. On the contrary, my goal is to describe a dependent realm of fallible, human origination. It is a realm which must be discovered through a process of introspection and rational, scientific consideration. It cannot be understood by remembering a prior life in Form Heaven.

Your position does not have to be identical to Platonism to be essentially platonic in a certain respect.  The similarity is in that your "mentities" are a proposed "realm" that ideas inhabit that act on the minds of conscious actors.  Amanensis and perfection are not essential to that context of similarity.

On December 1, 2016 at 8:42 PM, MisterSwig said:

Perhaps I can best answer Plasmatic by attempting to clarify what I mean by a concept as a mental entity. Which is this: a concept is a concrete thing in our mind that, due to its complex mental nature, we cannot retain without the aid of a perceptual, representational symbol, such as a word or picture. I believe my view here is basically consistent with Rand, who explained: "So the word is not the concept, but the word is the auditory or visual symbol which stands for a concept. And a concept is a mental entity; it cannot be perceived perceptually. That's the role played by words." (ITOE, p. 1

The word is not the concept AND a concept is not a mental entity until symbols are substituted for the concretes the concept is a device for referring to.

I object again to your literal use of "concrete" to categorize concepts. More on this below.

 

On December 1, 2016 at 8:42 PM, MisterSwig said:

It's a very particular distinction, and there are seemingly conflicting passages regarding it in ITOE: "Words transform concepts into (mental) entities." (p. 11) And in OPAR: "A concept without a word is at best an ephemeral resolve; a word without a concept is noise." (p. 79) People, including myself, often blur the line between a concept and the symbol representing it. So, to be more precise, when I claim to perceive a concept introspectively, I mean that I'm aware of the symbol representing the concept, similar to how I'm aware of it extrospectively. Only, in the mental realm, I'm silently imagining the symbolic word or picture, instead of seeing them with my eyes or hearing the word with my ears.

So you are saying that the mental imagery of introspection, with the aid of language is "concrete" because it is apprehended directly by consciousness. I say to use this sense of "concrete" to make a metaphysical argument for another ontological "realm" is a context dropping formulation. It is a formulation uncontrained by proper hierarchy where the metaphysical is separated from the man made so as to keep causal order clear. Yes, Rand made infuriatingly careless statements in the appendix but that is because she was not publishing her statement as edited finalities, speaking extemporeaneously as it were. Your position that the cases therein are more authoritative despit all that and despite the larger body of Oist literature giving context to these imprecise instances is a mistake. 

 

On December 1, 2016 at 8:42 PM, MisterSwig said:

Plasmatic insists that: "There is no such thing as a mental concrete. You fundamentally misunderstand the role of words/language as providing concepts with concreteness." But this too misses the subtle distinction that words don't actually provide concepts with concreteness. Remember that we are talking about concretes in relation to abstractions. Abstractions don't exist. But concretes do. And a concept exists in the mind of man, not as an abstraction, but as a real mental integration. It is a mental thing. Words, therefore, are only perceptual concretes symbolizing the mental concretes (concepts).

This is a great example of ignoring the larger context of the Oist literature.  Abstraction is part of the conceptualization process which creates mental integrations. You can find tons of statements in the literature to demonstrate that Rand agreed.  Particularly the context of the statement "abstractions as such do not exist". "We substitute a concrete for the unlimited, open ended number of concretes which the new concrete subsumes."  A concept gets its concreteness from language. 

 

On December 1, 2016 at 8:42 PM, MisterSwig said:

But even if I'm wrong, and it is the word that ultimately makes a concept an entity, the concept's nature would still be that of a mental concrete, according to Rand. "Prof. D: Now every entity, mental and otherwise, is a concrete existent. AR: That's right." (ITOE, p. 171) So why should we haggle over this terminology, when we could be considering each other's introspective evidence and conclusions about it?

The word is the concrete that makes the concept into a mental entity. You want to drop the context of the specific use of symbols/language AS concretes to perform the substitution. You want others to communicate with the Mystics criteria of "experience" as a testimony based argument and forego the constraints of objective hierarchy. Existence has causal primacy and not consciousness. Your whole method is askew. 

 

On December 1, 2016 at 8:42 PM, MisterSwig said:

I suspect that Plasmatic and I are working off two different interpretations of what Rand had to say in ITOE. It seems that some of what she wrote about words and concepts in the original work, particularly chapters 2 and 3, needed to be reformulated and clarified in the Appendix. I favor the workshop material, since it came later in Rand's life, and I suggest reading the section titled, "The Role of Words." (p. 163) Though I fear this will be a point of contention between Objectivists for some time to come.

As long as people don't try to look at statements from the Appendix in relation to all else that the literature contains, this type of contention will persist. Particularly if they take extemporeaneous comments that were not edited by the author as primary. 

Edited December 4, 2016 by Plasmatic

[New Buddha]

35 minutes ago, MisterSwig said:

Not all human behaviour is volitional.

The issue is not so much "volitional" as it is that we learn to automate behaviors.  The attentive mind can only focus on one thing at a time, and yet, we can both walk or ride a bike and carry on a complex conversation at the same time.  The brain is always trying to economize behavior, too free up our attentive mind.

Steph Curry can pull up in an instant and drain a 3-pointer with very little attention (if any) paid the the mechanics involved.  Too much attention is also not a good thing, and can disrupt these learned behaviors (also know in some circles as Fixed Action Patterns) from executing.  Golfers who have the "yips" are often "over-thinking" their shots.

The same region of the brain which is instrumental in "storing" these behaviors is also deeply involved in speech.  Diseases such as Parkinson can impair the automation of new behaviors, execute older, automated behaviors (climb stairs) AND the ability to speak.