@Madness:

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a) Perception must be a meaningful representation of properties of reality as it is, otherwise science breaks.
b) Decisions between true and false propositions must be free (and refer to reality as is) and not determined by circumstance, otherwise science breaks.

How does this statement account for much scientific research using advancing technological prosthetics to test hypothesis, which we cannot with our (possibly)fiveish biological sensory perceptions?

Ultimately it is down to our biological senses. The ATLAS detector takes particle tracks in proton-proton collisions and writes huge amounts of data on tape, over which an analysis is run. But in the end, scientists have to read the result plot from a computer screen with their bare eyes. They have to believe that what appears in their mind correlates with the state of the detector. The whole calibration process of such machines proceeds from the known to the unknown - one first demonstrates that the detector responds to something which one knows as expected, then goes into the unknown. If you follow the chain, you end up by comparing detector readouts with visible particle tracks in a mist chamber.

We can extend and augment the biological senses, but all that requires that we can trust them somewhere. If the perception of the eye could not be assumed to refer to properties of anything real, no detector could ever be calibrated, nor could its data be read and understood.

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b) Decisions between true and false propositions must be free (and refer to reality as is) and not determined by circumstance, otherwise science breaks.

b) Could you offer some exposition? Like instances, which you found in my words (apologies for lack of clarity), I find this contextual and lacking coherency based on possible connotations...

As this is a conceptual point, it's only possible to come up with gedankenexperiments, so it's difficult. But what about this one:

Consider a people D with a very simple deterministic mind which is based on a set of rules. If a member of D classifies the scene as being outside, and if he detects a small, white moving object with fluttering motion in the scene, and if he has ever been told before about how to observe butterflies, he will be convinced that he is observing a butterfly. Now, given this set of rules, he will be convinced to observe a butterfly even if the object he's observing is really a small sheet of paper drifting in the wind, and he will hold to this conviction even if he can clearly see that the object has a rectangular shape rather than a body and wings --- because his mind is determined by circumstances. He has no choice to reconsider his classification, nor would he see any reason to. Many others of his people would readily agree with him, there'd be some who would not, but he would be convinced that they've never been told before how to observe butterflies, and once they would be educated, then they would agree with him.

It is terribly obvious what is going on when observing the problem from outside, having a human mind which is not tied to such simple deterministic rules. But even talking to any members of D, we could not convince them that their conviction to have truly seen a butterfly has really not so much to do with here being a butterfly --- they'd probably argue that we miss the obvious.

Honestly, I think Bakker's arguments, while seeming ultimately pessimistic, take acceptance as a matter of degree. Even if his methodology weren't assumed, Neil-it would still be the Jester, the ultimate Shaman of your example, because of the efficacy with which he might induce any experience, the sum of all, not the some of many.

I honestly can't even buy into Neil's bare reasoning. Suppose you can show with a suitable machine that you can artificially induce any perception or experience. What this proves is that perceptions and experiences can be deceiving insofar as their cause is determined - under certain circumstances you see an apple where there is no external reality corresponding to the perception, under certain circumstances you can feel causation where there is none, under certain circumstances you feel pleasure where there is damage to your body.

This doesn't prove that there are no real apples, no real causation or no real damage to your body. The ability of a conjurer to pull a rabbit out of a hat doesn't tell me anything about where real rabbits come from.

What Neil reasons is that because a system may deceive, it does deceive, so he goes de-actiavting it. But putting out my eyes because they may be deceiving isn't really such a good idea, because I end up not seeing anything. Neill sort of assumes he can get the illusion machinery of the brain out of the way and then sees things closer to how they really are - but I don't think that works, illusionary perceptions use the same brain structures as real perceptions, getting rid of illusions isn't so easy.

Are you assuming everything in relation to consciousness-as-experienced as fact?

I tend to be very careful with the word 'fact'. For me, it's a bootstrap process. Things have to be either evident, or justified by something evident, which leads to chains of things depending on other things to be true.

The existence of a conscious observer seeing a scene is evident. The existence of an internal stream of thought, a higher consciousness, is evident. Perceptions of an external world are evident.

These things lead to experiences. I have to assume that the perceptions and experiences are meaningful in relation to the external world, then I can start to built observation and reasoning techniques to infer properties of the external world from my experiences (if I were in the Matrix, I could not do that, I would be much mistaken).

These start out simple - correlating visual and tactile information with my mental picture of the scene - usually works (there it starts going wrong, there are perception illusions where it doesn't - so already at that level I have to be aware that my knowledge of the external world as reflected in the senses is incomplete and flawed). Making predictions based on recurring events (sun will rise tomorrow) - usually works.

Then it gets more complex (with the possibility of more flaws) - math and an axiom system (where again the axioms are taken to be true because they are obvious, not because they can be justified by other means). Consistency conditions that several perspectives must lead to the same result (I'm still not sure if they're real - the higher consciousness has consistency as a necessary condition to exist, but physics does not - so consistency may not be that important in reality as is but in reality as perceived). Science.

All relies on what has come before, and I always trust the lower building blocks more than the higher, because the higher have so much more room for error. Statistical analysis - do you know what probability actually is? Can you explain it? I know perhaps a handful of scientists who really know what it is, although many more can apply the techniques (and even more can't). Detectors - they do go wrong, and in fact experimentalists trust their eyes over the machine and look at actual event displays to see if the detector does what it's supposed to do rather than trust the machine-internal checks. I trust my ability to experience pain much, much more than a brain scan to tell whether I am in pain or not.

You can sometimes get a dissonance - higher-level reasoning contradicting lower level. So then I might dismiss an experience as wrong because of science telling me so - but then the only remaining guiding principle is consistency, I would only want to do that to make my picture of the world more consistent, not less so.

I don't go so much for facts as I go for likelihood - I try to investigate a problem from as many angles as I can, and then see if there is a coherent picture suggesting itself or not.

@Callan S.

I think you've been misslead to think science involves reasoning. Atleast reasoning in the sense of coming to a conclusion, rather than a conclusion coming to it. Do you think scientists reason a conclusion, then run thousands of experiments just for fun, even though they've already come to a conclusion?

May I gently remind you that I am an academy researcher at a university, and that it's therefore unlikely that I have been misled to think anything wrong referring to how science works?

How do you think experiments are planned? Do you really think people spend a few billions to build an accelerator and detectors just to see what happens? Experiments are done to test hypotheses, which in turn are based on conclusions drawn from past experiments. Of course reasoning features at every stage.

Also 'proof' and 'incompleteness theorem' in the one sentence seems a little jarring.

Evidently you have not read this up. Your loss - math can actually prove that it is incomplete and that there are true statements not provable by math.

In general: Admittedly I find the line of discussion if Neuropath is fiction bizarre. I may be dumb enough to miss out some experimental facts of neuroscience or psychology, and I am willing to learn, should this prove necessary, but I am not dumb enough to miss the fact that I am discussing a book, There's a whole chain of ideas related to 'willing suspension of disbelief' in discussing fiction - but I feel this gets tedious for me and I won't elaborate.

I am frankly not sure that I want to continue the whole discussion. I've tried to explain my points, I haven't seen anything which I would really recognize as a counter-argument (which may be my bias, or may not) and so I feel I am not really learning anything I haven't known before (which again may be my fault or not). I am not a Bakker fan and have moved to the next book a while ago, and I increasingly start to wonder if I shouldn't be doing something else with my time.

Personally I think Neil (aka Bakker) pulls a conjuring trick, and part of the trick is that the outcome is unpleasant, so if you reject the conclusion, there's always the 'But you only reject it because it is unpleasant.' - which distracts from the fact that the proposition should be evaluated for true/false, not for pleasant/unpleasant, and that there's no correlation. But I think I am done trying to illustrate that trick - if you don't see it by now, then you're either right, or you won't or can't see it.

When someone says 'What if it's this way?' - it's not really a counter to say 'No, it it's not'. It's just unimaginative.

Okay, the game here is:

Bakker in the guise of Neil makes a statement about the mind and science in the context of a future version resembling our world. I interpret this as a statement made about the mind in our world, because

a) Bakker doesn't indicate that science works significantly different in the world of Neuropath
b) Bakker refers to experiments done in our world and claims made in our world and
c) the limitations of science as we know it are universal

So I answer to the argument as if someone would have made it for our world.

Since Neuropath is a work of fiction, the author is entirely free to say 'Hey, but in my world it is all different and I am right.'  I concede that point that an author is free to invent a world in which he answers 'What if it's this way?' by 'This comes out'.

If that is Bakker's answer, then logic doesn't really work too well in the world of Neuropath, because self-defeating arguments are somehow okay, but that's not interesting for me.

One might not be utterly convinced - but the only way to utterly convince of a speculation about technology is if Bakker went and invented the brain augmentation technology. Surely to require that is to show no interest in speculation at all?

You missed the point. Even if a real Neil could demonstrate all which he sets out to do, it would still not prove what he claims it does. He faces a conceptual problem, not a technological one.

I don't think that's getting into speculative fiction and trying out the idea - your folding the idea into your axe notion and not entertaining the idea of something that can carpet bomb the forest to hell and back.

Which would make it an eminently useless tool to cut branches, illustrating my point yet again.

What I am doing is illustrating the implications of the idea (which Neil doesn't for obvious reasons) - and they're not compatible with the assumptions on which the idea is based. Which is to say, there's a consistency problem. Now, you can chuck out consistency (and modern fiction even does that at times), but then the results get really strange.

In other words, my answer to 'What if it's this way?' is 'Then you're forced to believe at least two mutually exclusive statements to be true.'

But if you do think it could be conducted more rigorously...why attribute the half assed effort as being science?

Because Neil (and Bakker) do. I think science isn't applicable to some problems. An ax can be blunt, then it doesn't work well, and you can sharpen it, but it still remains an inadequate tool to cut down a forest.

We're primarily invoking language games, which I'd like to avoid as much as possible but you tend to hit on those meriting distinction.

No, I don't want to do that at all.

I think the issue is simpler and more fundamental. You have (presumably) been socialized with science, and learned to apply and accept scientific reasoning.

Imagine for a moment you meet someone from a hunter-gatherer culture and talk to him about your mode of truth-finding. When you start talking about statistical analysis, he will tell you something like 'Why should it matter for me if something happens for these other people I don't even know?' If you talk about brain scans, he will tell you 'Why do you trust this machine more than your own senses?' He will look at you strangely and ask 'Can't you feel the spirits of nature?' In short, he comes from a completely different system of thought.

You, being born into science and reasoning from within science, will find it obvious that he goes astray. But he, being born into a spirit-world, will find you equally mentally deficient and regard your inability to feel the spirits as some kind of insanity. For him, science makes no sense whatsoever, he will regard it as some dysfunction of the mind.

Science as seen from within science is self-justifying - but that's just circular reasoning, albeit a bit hard to spot. So is animism from within animism. What you really need to do in order to justify science is to step out of it, try seeing the world from different perspectives, understand how it is conceptualized from different perspectives, and then see where science wins out.

(As a side note, Moenghus the elder is a fictional example of that trap of never leaving one's own perspective. He is in essence a scientist (rational reasoner), finds his own set of rational beliefs quite justified from within his perspective of science, but then completely misses out on the fact that the Gods of Earwa appear to be completely real rather than a figment of people's imagination and that he will  be damned as a result. Kellhus, in contrast, does leave his own perspective (or probably rather is pushed beyond it by the circumfixion).)

What happens in cases of understanding or, even, imagination? Neural accounts seem to deal with embodied cognition, embodied simulation, or some account of neurons.

Well, I was sort of using 'making sense' in reference to 'truth'  - I readily agree that there is the additional complication that the feeling of 'making sense' as experienced by a mind may or may not correlate with any truth.

What about language? In the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis (which was primarily asserted by a student of Wharf's), it's suggested that we can't account for the existence of phenomenon for which we do not experience or interact with linguistically (describing) in some way.

I don't buy Sapir-Whorf. I can talk with colleagues all over the world (who come from completely different cultural context) just fine about Quantum Field Theory (which can't really be put in words) and all of this should not work. Poking holes into Sapir-Whorf is not really difficult.

How about the ways in which language warp our very perception of our environments (seeing more colours or feeling more or less emotions in relation to words in your language, cognition of time and space, or an example Wilshire brought up in chat the other day - which I will find as I'm starting to remember - about language and orientation,

There are lots of urban legends floating around, for instance you may have heard of the alleged timelessness of the Hopi language or the way the Piraha language contradicts universal grammar. I have bothered to read up in detail several of these cases, and it always boiled down to bad research. I am not aware of good evidence that languages would really warp the perception of the physical environment in a significant way. The social environment is a different beast.

Regardless, your disdain for many of these results seems to come down to inapplicable discussion on the part of the authors

Yes, I think that's what I said previously - I don't doubt that if one does these things, one gets the results quoted, I just doubt that the interpretation attached to them is correct.

Illusory correlation is almost the quintessential human problem, if we are to be understood in terms of pattern-recognizing machines - we see correlation where there is in fact none.

That's easy to say - how do you know where there is in fact none?  How many correlations do you miss which are in fact there? All you have is a discrepancy between two systems of reasoning where one claims a correlation and the other doesn't. For you, it seem obvious that one of these systems (science) must be correct for the problem at hand, but I don't see this as obvious at all.

Science isn't a fact-producing machinery. There are very, very few scientific results which have survived even 100 years without revision. It used to be 'fact' that the influence of the environment can't possibly inherited by the offspring. Well, now there's epigenetics - turns out that it can after all. It used to be 'fact' that there's an ether in which light propagates. Now we have Quantum Electrodynamics for the job.

Science is a description and predictive-model producing machinery - it does deal with better descriptions and more predictive models, but it doesn't ever deal with facts - assuming something fact may be a pretty dangerous error for a scientist because it means you will never be ready to revise it.

Let me ask a very simple question - can you name anything which you would consider 'real' and compare it with a different thing which you would call 'illusion'? So maybe we can get the definitions from there.

However, continued from the middle - you don't think there is evidence to suggest that our experiences as "I," as cognitive agents, isn't illusory insomuch as colours, perceptions, would not exist as they do without corresponding evidence of physiological changes (we're attracted to the redness of an apple because it has been beneficial towards our survival)?

It all depends on what you prefer to call 'real' or 'illusionary'.

I think normally the word 'illusion' is used to describe something which has a certain appearance, but you can verify that the appearance is not correct by remaining in a given framework by just changing perspective. For instance, mirror illusions don't require you to change to a description of the situation in terms of quantum theory - you can walk around the setup, and it becomes apparent that there is a mirror.

In contrast you (and Bakker) seem to be using the word 'illusion' here for something that is in a high-level effective theory (the mind as we ourselves would describe it, or psychology as used by Freud, Jung, Adler,...) but not in a low-level more fundamental theory (interactions among interconnected neurons).

This is, I think, a very important difference. Let me illustrate this with an example where it is well understood what happens.

A rock has mass. In a very high level effective theory (Newtonian mechanics) we can view it as a rigid body with a given mass and  use that to compute the trajectories of the rock when we throw it.

At a lower level, the rock is composed of molecules which have mass. Even more fundamentally, it is composed of protons and neutrons which have mass with electrons thrown in which have very little mass to comtribute. At the most fundamental level, the rock is described by the Standard Model of Particle Physics in terms of quarks, gluons, and photons. And in the bare Lagrangean of this theory, there is no mass.

So mass is a property of high level effective theories only, it is not a fundamental property of the world. The illusion of mass of a rock arises largely because there is a lot of field energy in the binding of quarks and gluons which makes an empty vacuum energetically disfavoured, and thus stuff plowing through the field energy contained in the vacuum effectively acquires mass.

Yet, this 'illusionary' mass is quite capable of killing you when the rock hits your head. Which goes a long way to illustrate that just because something is not a property of the fundamental theory, it can't be seen as meaningless or 'not real'.

The fact that a theory of the mind in terms of connected neurons doesn't have certain traits can not be used to argue that these traits would not be meaningful, or not real when seen on a different scale. There are dozends (if not more) counterexamples in physics where effective high level theories gain new properties or lose properties which the fundamental theory has.

The world behaves as if there would be mass when seen at a certain scale, this is what gives meaning to the concept. The world behaves as if there would be an 'I' when seen at a certain scale. and this is what gives meaning to the concept.

If you want to limit 'real' to 'what is contained in our most fundamental theory only', you declare pretty much everything as illusion, and you're left with a description of the world in terms of operators acting on Fock spaces having certain commutation and anticommutations - which manifestly isn't what is real, but just describes how the real world behaves. So in essence nothing is real then. Doesn't lead anywhere in particular to accept only the fundamental as real.

I'm not privy to which academic discipline(s) you practice but your post seems philosophical, especially in that your assertions don't encounter real-life examples (I actually think Reductionism had a better chance of countering the argument, in this post).

I am a theoretical physicist by profession, working mostly in applied quantum field theory (Quantum Chromodynamics mostly).

The applicability of logic is a very deep one. How do you decide on something being true? Where do the logical deduction rules come from? Why do we think a principle like Occam's razor ('If there are several competing explanations, take the one requiring the least amount of assumptions.') is good for establishing truth?

You can't say 'Well, I just know it's true' - history tells that in the past people used very different criteria based on the same 'I just know - it's obvious'.

You can't argue 'Science must be true, because so many brilliant people are doing it and society spends so much money for it.' - in the past, brilliant people studied theology and society invested money to build churches.

If you start up-front from the position that science must be true, then you're no better than someone starting from the position that scripture must be true. Scientific principles aren't really self-justifying or self-evident - they are justified from somewhere, and I think this somewhere is experience.

Occam's razor is in my view a good principle because in my experience it turns out to be true most of the time. The whole set of scientific principles applied to physics is justified, because it actually works out for me - I can calculate a phenomenon, and my experience tells me that I successfully predicted what I will experience.

(As a side note, modern physics is all about what you experience and not at all about what things really *are* - all Quantum Field Theory is concerned with are 'observables', and it is very clear that we don't have a clue what nature is, only how it behaves when we look at it).

If you follow the chain that sometimes we discard experiences because of science, but science is ultimately justified by experience only, things start getting very very murky. I do not think one can automatically assume that the same deduction principles continue to hold - they have to be justified anew if applied to the mind. Especially because the mind is self-referencing, but several principles are known to break when applied to self-referencing systems. If psychologists would test the foundations of their own field with the same level of rigor they apply to, say, religious experiences, they'd be in for a bad surprise.

Or, to be slightly mean: Imagine one of the experimental papers supposedly disproving the notion of free will is sent to a journal. The referee recommends not to publish the paper. I am prepared to bet a lot of money that the researchers do not think 'Well, the referee has no free will, he is determined by circumstances to come to this decision to decline publication, so there's nothing we can do.' I am very sure what they will no is to make an appeal to the free decision-making ability of the referee to change this decision based on new arguments. Because science requires the ability to decide between a true proposition and a false one. If we could not make that decision because we'd be compelled by circumstance to believe something, science wouldn't work conceptually. So that's why researchers disproving free will don't act in any way as if their research would actually be true.

I've written a longer text about 'belief in evidence' in a discussion of Dawkins' The God Delusion in case you're interested - it's the second part.

You've treated this like a logic problem - my first thoughts are a couple of strange examples from neurological studies.(...)While these might support your Reductionism metaphor, I don't think it helps the Applicability of Logic.

I know these cases do exist, but what can we really deduce from them?

I have no doubt that there is a deep connection between mind and body at some level. A very simple example is the experience that when I drink alcohol, my mental experience changes.

Yet, on the next day, my mind reverts back to how it was.

But then there seems to be something as mind-internal experience -  I might have a crucial insight, or come to a major decision in my life. And on the next day, my mind does not revert back but remains changed from that point on.

So could this not suggest a hardware/software model in which in the first case I temporarily change the hardware, and as a result the software runs differently, but reverts back to its normal operation once the hardware operates normally, whereas the second case represents a change in the software which isn't easily revertable?

I would assume that if someone over night severs the neural connections to my leg and attaches the same nerve bundles to my arms, then my intention to move my leg will lead to some motion of my arms. In a similar way, I would assume that wrong wiring of senses can lead to all sorts of weird perceptions - like pleasure where pain would be expected. Such rewirings would be, unlike in the case of alcohol, more permanent hardware damage, with little change of the software to resume normal operation.

Yet, in many cases the mind seems to be able to work around damage. I vaguely remember an experiment in which people were asked to wear mirror glasses which showed the world upside-down, and while this was initially very confusing, their mind learned to undo the effect, and after a few days they saw the world normally again - and then inverted once they took the glasses off, until again after a few days the perception adjusted to normal.

The point seems to be that being able to prove that changes to the body/brain change the mental experience isn't the same thing as proving that there is no software equivalent and that the hardware is all there is to the problem.

Also, aside - I'm ecstatic that you've found your way here

Thanks - I appreciate that. I am reading the White-Luck Warrior at the moment, so I wanted to read up on the details of my Metaphysics (and partially languages) - so then I started looking again for where the discussions are.