There are no material objects

[Jonesboy]

It is and it isn't "down to us".

The way we "carve up" reality depends on two things: (1) the properties of the external reality, and (2) the properties of our brains/bodies.

We do not have an arbitrary level of freedom.

We are completely free in the way we carve up the wporld. SCientoists are doing it all the time.

 

[Jonesboy]

What do you meant it "can't be found anywhere"? If that were true, it wouldn't exist.

The "sound" is the result of an interaction between movements in air (or water, or wood, or whatever) and the physical apparatus of your body.

Of course it can be spatially located.

Sooner or later the skeptic must come to grips with perceptions.

 

[Jonesboy]

I selected the instruments when I bought them. This is a concept that Jonesboy will find hard to understand.

so why didn't you select the kerbstone?

I will tell you.

It is because you already had a template in your head of what counts as an instrument, and an instrument that you like. The instrument never selected itself.

 

[Jonesboy]

Pick it up and move it! Its boundaries relative to the rest of the world are immediately apparent without ever touching on its function or its reason for being there.

Yes but by doing that you are appealing to a similar model of a TV that the alien holds.

So, why wouldn't the alien think that you were mad or that your "TV" was broken because you did not include the carpet?

 

[dafydd]

I see Jonesboy is posting on the drip again. Surely a genius would have worked out how to multi-quote by now.

 

[Jonesboy]

Thank you, but you seem to define color, sound, nervous system, mind in such a way as to produce the result you would like -- either toward some form of property dualism or idealism.

To a physicalist, both sound/color/etc. and nervous system are physical -- so there is no issue in their interaction and interaction is not simply a reference to metaphor.


Physicalists speak of physical 'things' that act in the world and part of that action is interaction between two physical 'things'. The deeper insight is that those physical 'things' are themselves actions or interactions. We do not have a proper definition of 'energy'.

If you want to speak about interaction between the physical and non-physical, perhaps you could provide a mechanism? How do such things happen? Isn't interaction defined in physical terms and so impossible for the non-physical? I've yet to encounter a proper explanation of mind body dualism if that is what you are after, so I would appreciate your explanation if you have one.

As to the physical limits of a TV, properly speaking there is no precise physical limit when examined at an extremely small scale. At the scale in which we carry out our daily lives the physical limit, for vision, is created by edge detectors that begin their processing in the retina and carry on their processing in our brains. That aspect of object/ground distinction does not depend on language or the concept of function. The function of the TV produces another aspect of how we distinguish such an object from others that surround it, though.

But we can still define objects that serve one function in one setting as performing another function in another setting. That, in itself, should tell you that defining the function of an object is not the sine qua non of determining what is and what is not an object. We already saw the rock as different from its background because of those edge detectors (and other processing) before we ever decided to define its function as a table.

And, just to drive the point home, a physicalist views the 'mental' processes involved in all those perceptions as physical and not non-physical.

I wasn't arguing for or against the idea that material objects or our understanding of them is only approximate. I was arguing that are none, that material objects are objects drawn upon materiality by our own templates, templates like a TV. These templates aren't found in materiality.
And some objects don't have materiality. Like colours and sounds.

 

[Jonesboy]

If there are no material objects what is Jonesboy using to post here?

THERE ARE MATERIAL OBJECTS.

But their status as objects is not a material property or is not identified materially. It's about how we carve up the phrase "material objects".

 

[dafydd]

I don't suppose that I am missing much.

 

[Jonesboy]

I see Jonesboy is posting on the drip again. Surely a genius would have worked out how to multi-quote by now.

I have tried. Multiquoting does not work.

 

[Jonesboy]

That is patently ridiculous. The TV has dimensions that are the same for everybody, even robots. Please step into reality, or peddle your elementary school philosophy somewhere else.



Nonsense.

But my question is, how is it decided when and where to stop measuring? I will tell you. You decide to stop measuring because you have an idea in your head about what sort of an object you expect a TV to be. There is no TV out there that informs you of this idea.

 

[Jonesboy]

And, if you take this to its last consequences, you cant talk about "physical limits", or "sentient creatures", because both are constructions.

Yes.
but the curious thing is that life-forms seem to be the only objects that are self-defining.

 

[Jonesboy]

Yes, you claim to be a chemist who has synthsized novel compounds. No special training or knowledge needed for that. All you need is common sense.

ferd

That's right. If you notice crystals forming in the sink when you throw the waste liquids away, you might suddenly hit upon a new method of purification.

 

[Jonesboy]

It's all a construction--all definitions are arbitrary, attempts to define a universe as yet beyond our comprehension. Time is a direction, consciousness is an illusion, and everything is just weird vibrations whacking against each other.
But none of that changes the reality of what is being defined. The Buddhists nailed this in the BCs--there are two truths. One for contemplating the idea of a rock and the nature of self, and one for responding when yourself is about to get hit with a rock.

Definitions aren't arbitrary...sorry to keep disagreeing with everyone here...
Definitions are words in the shared public domain, with shared meaning. The only thing that is arbitrary about them is the sign we hook our meanings up to. Time is an illusion, consciousness creates objects, and nothing is weird.

 

[Jonesboy]

Shorter Jonesboy:

"Words mean what I want them to mean, nothing more, nothing less."

Words are in the public domain.

 

[Jonesboy]

Originally Posted by Jonesboy View Post
EVERYTHING has recognizably distinct properties. What you have to say is why you chose THESE particular properties. The properties themselves don't choose themselves for you.

I chose them because they are the ones that make a difference for me. An object may have other properties, which I ignore, or are unaware of, because they appear to have no bearing on my relationship to the object.

Hans

Yes, and the "object" you refer to is itself assembled from the particular properties that you have chosen.

 

[bruto]

Yes but by doing that you are appealing to a similar model of a TV that the alien holds.

So, why wouldn't the alien think that you were mad or that your "TV" was broken because you did not include the carpet?

Seeing objects as part of a set doesn't mean the objects cease to exist in their own right. A place setting is broken if you take away the fork, but the fork and the knife are not a single object. You can break the knife in half and it becomes two objects, too, neither of them a knife any more. Whether or not the alien sees the TV and the carpet as conjoined or functioning together, they are separable. You don't need any model of function to perceive that two things exist independently of each other.

 

[bruto]

I have tried. Multiquoting does not work.

Yes it does.

 

[yy2bggggs]

Yup, but I'm not talking directly about all the photons I'm talking about the light reflected from the apple, a particular photons of a particular wavelength being reflected off the apple and hitting our photoreceptors. I don't understand how that is being understood the way you're thinking it is, that I refer to spectroscopic wavelength in the singular.

It's because at a minimum, you're using the wrong words, and the wrong example. Spectroscopy studies the effects of material on spectral distributions, which is not a single wavelength. A prism might be used as a spectroscope, and if you're performing a spectroscopic study, you'd be looking for something like the missing bands in the spectrum, or the bands that are present in the spectrum. The adjective "spectroscopic" clashes when you try to use it to modify the singular noun "wavelength"; wavelength per se sounds fine, but spectroscopic wavelength sounds wrong already.

This is compounded by your example, where you're talking about the wavelength (singular) of the light coming from an apple; in particular, in a context in which you're explaining why that apple is green. I can assure you that no normal apple is green because it emits 500nm wavelength photons... I would put my money that any natural apple you yourself choose, under any sort of normal lighting conditions, will be reflecting light pretty much all across the visible spectrum.

If you're simply oversimplifying it, then you're not only cutting corners in a specific way that favors your viewpoint that you need not refer to a reference brain or similar criteria; but you're cutting corners in such a way that only the inaccuracies supports this view.

I brought up the color wheel mostly because you proposed (or rather implied) that there is a dilemma to the color "blue" versus 460nm and 461nm and I am just saying you have the same problem with a color wheel too. That's all.

But I don't try to use color as spectroscopy, nor do I use 19th century color models.

As for naive realism, I really think you're trying to label me that and I just think you're wrong =\ if naive realism were summed up as "needing reference brains for meaning" then the wikipedia page for it is wrong.

I summed up naive realism for you in a previous post--that's not what it means. Naive realism is the notion that our perceptions somehow measure the world directly as it really is. This is precisely the point of our disagreement--I say that there's no way you can say that a particular color that we see is the "wrong" color, without referencing at least some sort of criteria for wrong. The only opposing view I can think of, is that "just wrong" simply means "not seeing the light the way it is 'supposed' to be seen", which looks pretty much like your objection.

Cute exercise, but all you're saying is that your perception is consistently correct for all the wrong reasons mechanistically.

No, quite the opposite. I'm saying that if my perceptions are consistent, and they correlate to a particular pattern, and that pattern is where the meanings lie, then they are ipso facto right.

You are saying, if I'm not mistaken, that the perceptions are only right if I have the right one when I look at a particular stimulus. That's entirely different from saying that the perceptions are right if they're merely consistent and they correlate.

Alright, I don't know how else I can try to explain this because I agree with most of what you say, you don't seem to address it. Okay we'll have a million dollar contest. Photons are reflected off an object at 510nm. If I'm up there, I'd call it green. Do 490nm and it'd be more blue. I'd win a million dollars.

if someone else went up there, received the same stimulus of 510nm and 490nm and called them red, which is NOT the wavelength of light consistent with green or blue, then they'd NOT win a million dollars.

Well, again, the problem here is quite the reverse--you're working in an artificial world that favors your viewpoint; and that artificial world that favors your viewpoint is in all relevant ways a complete fiction. The real world is nothing like that.

If you take a real, genuine green apple and put it in front of me, and that apple is only reflecting light at 500nm, then I can pretty much guarantee you that the entire environment is lit with a monochromatic light source with photons of 500nm. Under this light source, everything appears to either be green, or a shade of green, or black--no matter what color it "really is".

Introduce realistic light sources, and you're forced to contend with the reality that color vision in us humans is a feature of the way us humans are built, which is precisely my point. You have to face the fact that there are spectra that our trichromatic makeup simply cannot distinguish. You have to realize that there's no such thing as a reference light source; that materials of different compositions actually change colors relative to each other simply by going from one light source to another. Or, you have to talk about colors in a context in which it has nothing to do with anything we give color names to.

Or you simply have to invent something that nobody uses.

Now I understand that you'd call this naive realism, but I doubt that's really what naive realism is because I understand that the brain generates a perception, which may be accurate to reality,

But there it is again; in the same sentence in which you tell me that you don't think this is naive realism, you are telling me that there is such a thing as a perception that is "accurate to reality".

There is no such thing. There may be perceptions that correlate well with how "normal" people perceive things; and there may be perceptions that correlate to a particular pattern reflected in reality. But the perception is never the same thing as the reality, and as such, it is meaningless to say that a given perception is the "proper percept" of reality.

The perception doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is the correlations; if whatever I perceive, I am capable of judging to be the same in whatever particular way the concept you're describing demands the objects to be the same.

If a Z is a particular shape, and I perceive it to be a grapheme, I have to be able to recognize that it's the same category of graphemes when you show me a "different Z that is nonetheless still a Z". Whether I see it simply as a grapheme, or as a grapheme with a tinge of color in my "mind's eye", shouldn't matter--at least in principle. In practice, it does matter, because we're a lot faster in color judgments than shape judgements; and, as a result, color-grapheme synesthetes have an advantage when it comes to tasks of this nature. (So whose brain is the broken one again?)

and probably should be only because the chemistry of opsins and the chemistry of the pigments IS consistent. There is nothing mechanistically that should change color all the way up until you hit the brain.

Not exactly. Before that signal even leaves your eye to travel up the optic nerve, ganglial cells combine the signals between the cones from the various photopsins into the opponent color channels. Furthermore, our eyes are not exactly RGB displays either--blue signals are fairly weak since S cones are few and far between (or, as in the case of our foveolas, entirely absent). So if you've got a cable hooked up to the optic nerve before it reaches the brain for processing and you somehow manage to actually find the pixels and decode them, you have to do a lot of work that requires specific knowledge of the layout of the eye in order to reconstruct a reasonable color facsimile of the image on the retina. (Incidentally, you shouldn't say "opsins and pigments"--color vision in humans doesn't use color filters; the opsins themselves probabilistically photoisomerize according to their respective chemical makeups and the frequency of the photon that hits them; should you want to refer to the opsins themselves, that would be sufficient).

 

[Craig4]

But my question is, how is it decided when and where to stop measuring? I will tell you. You decide to stop measuring because you have an idea in your head about what sort of an object you expect a TV to be. There is no TV out there that informs you of this idea.

What's the application for thinking of the TV this way?

 

[Ron_Tomkins]

THERE ARE MATERIAL OBJECTS.

But their status as objects is not a material property or is not identified materially. It's about how we carve up the phrase "material objects".

So in other words: "Yes, there are material objects but they're not really material. "Material" is just a word we made up"

That was my best shot at trying to make sense of what you said.