Reading Notes: April 29th, 2022

“In 1967 there was a monkey in my supervisory Larry Weiskrantz’s laboratory at Cambridge, named Helen, who had undergone a surgical operation to remove the primary visual cortex, VI, at the back of her brain, with the purpose of discovering more about the role this area of the cortex plays in normal vision. The operation had been done in 1965, and during the two years that followed the monkey had seemed to be almost completely blind, capable of discriminating little more than light from dark. However, I had reasons for thinking this might not be the whole story. As part of my own PhD research I had been studying the visual-responses of single cells in the superior colliculus of monkeys, and found evidence that this “primitive” subcortical visual system, which remains intact after removal of the visual cortex, might be capable on its own of supporting quite finely-tuned visually guided behavior. I wondered now whether in Helen’s case this secondary visual system could somehow be brought into action. Thus, one week when I had time on my hands and the monkey was not involved in Weiskrantz’s research, I decided to find out more. Over several days I sat by Helen’s cage and played with her. To my delight it soon became clear that this blind monkey was sometimes watching what I did. For example, I would hold up a piece of apple and wave it in front of her, and she would clearly look, before reaching out to try to get it from me. As the game continued, she soon changed from being a monkey who sat around listlessly, gazing blankly into the distance, to one who had become interested and involved in vision again….Helen was killed in 1974 so that her brain could be examined and the extent of the lesion confirmed. To be sentimental about her would be inappropriate. Nonetheless, I think we should acknowledge our debt as scientists and philosophers to a creature who, through a human experiment that deprived her of visual consciousness, has taught us so much about what consciousness is all about.” (Humphrey, “Helen: A Blind Monkey Who Saw Everything,” in The Oxford Companion to Consciousness, 343-344) [Underlining is my own]

Once self-reflection vanishes, vility, naïvety, and ignorance fill the void.

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34-38) 

“If we examine a flower, for example, our understanding notes its particular qualities; chemistry dismembers and analyzes it. In this way, we separate color, shape of the leaves, citric acid, etheric oil, carbon, hydrogen, etc.; and now we say that the plant consists of all these parts. “If you want to describe life and gather its meaning, To drive out its spirit must be your beginning, Then though fast in your hand lie the parts one by one / The spirit that linked them, alas is gone / And “Nature’s Laboratory” is only a name / That the chemist bestows on’t to hide his own shame” as Goethe says.” (Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of Nature, §246)

Reading Notes: April 28th, 2022

“One class of meta-theoretic questions that has figured prominently in the philosophy of cognitive science concern how best to characterize the foundational assumptions of the cognitive sciences….One very widely held view, for example, is that the information processing that goes on in the brain depends on the presence of mental representations, and that cognitive processes are, in some sense, computational processes….Another example of a foundational assumption that has received considerable attention in the philosophy of cognitive science is what we might call the mechanistic assumption. According to this very widely held view, the mind is indeed a mechanism of some sort—roughly speaking, a physical device decomposable into functionally specifiable subparts. Moreover, given this assumption, a central goal for cognitive science is to characterize the nature of this mechanism, or to provide an account of our cognitive architecture….A third broad class of issues in the philosophy of cognitive science concerns the clarification and explication of core theoretical concepts….For example, the notions of cognition, computation, representation, and consciousness have all been the subject of efforts at conceptual clarification…” (Samuels, “Introduction: Philosophy and Cognitive Science” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science, 10) 

“First, a common misconception must be put to rest. It is true, as many youngsters learn in school, that objects absorb some wavelengths of light and reflect the rest and that the colors we perceive “in” objects relate to the wavelengths of the reflected light. But color is not actually a property of light or of objects that reflect light. It is a sensation that arises within the brain.” (Goldsmith, “What Birds See” in Scientific American, 70) 

“Such representations need not share properties with the things they represent. The mental representation of redness need not be red, any more than the word ‘red’ or the numeral that denotes red in a painting-by-numbers kit.” (Frankish, What if your Consciousness is an Illusion Created by your Brain?, 5) 

“Of course, [Illusionism requires] that the representations themselves don’t have phenomenal properties. But, as I noted, representations needn’t possess the properties they represent. Representations of redness needn’t be red, and representations of phenomenal properties needn’t be phenomenal.” (Frankish, What if your Consciousness is an Illusion Created by your Brain?, 10)

Reading Notes: April 27th, 2022

“The modern idealist, and Professor Royce is my representative modern idealist, views, and must view, his life work as nothing less than an attempt to find and describe the itinerarium mentis in Deum.  And yet no one, at least in his role as idealist, ever supposes that in doing so he is giving to the world the only reliable Baedeker to the kingdom of heaven. The very magnitude of his aim insures his modesty. His philosophy itself compels him to regard every serious student as a collaborator in his undertaking, and to view the task which he has set himself as one which the ages alone can carry to completion. Nevertheless, he believes that he does possess even now a sure compass to guide him in his quest, certain fixed principles of thought and action, call them categories or imperatives if you will, which are such as are implied in the very effort to deny them, and are, therefore, the pre-conditions of all our interpretations. He believes, moreover, and for reasons that do not here concern us, that this complete vision, which is the goal of his endeavor, is no mere distant ideal but rather an ever-living force, the life and the light of the world today.” (Bakewell, Novum Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, 259) 

“Amongst the many contributions which Professor Royce has made to philosophy, there are three or four that stand out in special relief….Professor Royce has done excellent service in making it plain that idealism not only permits, but compels, respect for the facts precisely as experience reveals them; counsels docility in interpreting nature, and adopts the experimental attitude toward all specific plans and institutions. The absolute is not to be found all at once, and the philosopher, not taking to the klepsydra, as Plato would say, but having his eye on all time and all existence, can afford to be patient, and will surely be suspicious of all Utopias. He has also succeeded in cutting under the old Cartesian dualism of mind and matter, a dualism which has haunted all modern philosophy, and is still the fertile source of many of our misunderstandings. Mind is not all here within, objects yonder without; the unity of consciousness comes into being pari passu with the knowledge of the unity of experience; the interpreter is at once on the object as well as on the subject side of the subject-object relation. The object that one seeks is defined and selected in the idea that reaches out after it, and is indeed simply its more complete and individual embodiment. Again, by showing the universal presence of the practical in the theoretical, he has helped to bridge the Kantian gulf between these two realms, and to establish the thoroughgoing primacy of the practical—a pragmatism raised to the nth power.” (Bakewell, Novum Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, 259-260) 

“But I find a new note appearing in the Philosophy of Loyalty, and prominent in all his subsequent writings….In these works Professor Royce has bridged the gap which, in our fondness for abstractions, we are apt to set up between individuals. He has shown that the isolated individual does not exist; that we do not take our point of departure, as it were, in the prison of the inner life, and then argue ourselves into the belief in other minds on the basis of analogy, finding the behavior of their bodies like that of our own, and inferring the presence of a corresponding consciousness. The notion of a self-contained mind coming to believe in the existence of other minds in such a fashion is a pure abstraction. We cannot even state the argument from analogy without pre-supposing as its own terms a consciousness that takes us beyond the limits of our private personality. Our consciousness is, in truth, from the first, social, and one rounds to a separate mind only by defining his own interests and purposes within the unity of the mind of the community. The pursuit of truth is always a social enterprise where at least three minds are involved, one mind interpreting a second to another, or to other, minds. And the real world we seek is no other than the community of interpretation which can be found by no one except the spirit of the community dwell within him….The difference between individual human beings as we ordinarily regard them in social intercourse, and communities, is properly characterized by describing them as two grades or levels of human life.” (Bakewell, Novum Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, 260-261) 

“It is in the light of considerations like the foregoing that we must interpret such phrases as Esse is Percipi, which taken by themselves are susceptible of very different and conflicting constructions. If these considerations are true, when we say, or think, Esse is Percipi, our meaning can only be that the term percipi is the meaning of the term esse, or that esse (in its utmost generality or abstraction, including all its particulars, i.e., all cases of existere, under it) is the object of percipere, or of consciousness (in its utmost generality) in its character of knowing, not in its character of an existent; and percipere the evidence of esse, which is the object as a knowing. Our meaning cannot be (what it is often supposed to be) that the secret, or essence, or inner nature, in virtue of which Esse is Esse, or Being is Being, consists in Percipi, or is identical with the percipere of a percipient. The logical fallacy of this latter interpretation is, that it supposes us to have some knowledge both of esse and of percipere, before we have any perception, consciousness, or knowledge at all, that we know them as different from each other, and that (so knowing them a priori) we proceed to ask of one of them, viz., esse, not what it is, but upon what it depends, or in virtue of what it is esse. The phrase Esse is Percipi is then interpreted as if it was the answer to this illogically put question, and was an assertion that the inner nature or essence of Being was Knowing, instead of asserting that Being could only be thought of as the object of a Knowing.” (Hodgson, Reality, 59) 

“Briefly stated the truth is this. Esse is Percipi expresses neither (1) that perception gives us a knowledge of the whole nature of being, or of any being, nor (2) that being, or any being, depends upon perception, either for its nature or for its existence, but (3) that we must think of being, and of every being, as at least the object of perception, independently of the question as to the existence of such a perception. For, in saying esse is percipi, nothing depends upon the mere existence of the perception, but all depends upon its nature as a reflective or self-objectifying process, i.e., upon the fact that, as it proceeds, it differentiates its content, perceiving part after part as past, that is, as object, different in point of time from the then present moment of perceiving, which will in its turn be perceived as having been a present moment of perceiving, or content of perception not yet objectified as past. The fact that a perception, when it exists, is perception and objectification of a content, not the fact that the perception itself exists, is that which determines the meaning of Esse.” (Hodgson, Reality, 60) 

“If I had to do with somebody to whom I were compelled to prove the necessity of the idealistic view by one example, I should ask him: How can you ever attain a line except by keeping the points asunder, for else they fall together; and at the same time taking them together and annulling their being asunder, for else they never join each other? But you comprehend, undoubtedly, that this unity of the manifoldness, this positing and annulling of a discretion, can be only in knowledge; and we have just shown that it is the ground-form of knowledge. Now you ought at the same time to comprehend that space and matter consist, in exactly the same way, in such a keeping asunder of the points, but in a unity; and that they are, hence, possible only in knowledge and as knowledge, and that they are, indeed, the real form of knowledge itself. This is now, in truth, as clear and evident as anything possibly can be; it lies right before everyone who opens his eyes, and ought not first to be proved and acquired, but should be known so well that one ought to feel ashamed to have to say it.—Why, then, was it not seen? Because everything lies nearer to us than the seeing itself, in which we rest; and because we have been stubbornly clinging to that objectivating which seeks outside of itself what lies only in us.” (Fichte, New Exposition of the Science of Knowledge, 215-216)

Reading Notes: April 26th, 2022

“Upon examination, the causal law is found to have a most intimate connection with the temporal and spatial notions, so intimate in fact that at first sight it may seem that this law can have no real meaning when separated from action in space and occurrence in time….[The] formula: Every change has its cause…requires that between every case and its effect a certain interval of time shall have elapsed; otherwise we have an effect contemporaneous with the cause and no change has resulted. Yet here a difficulty for thought arises, for a cause which is separated from its effect from the smallest conceivable time is not properly the cause of the given effect. If between the cause A and the effect B a given time interval exists, reason will attempt to fill up the gap, as for example A, a, b, B; in which series a is the effect of A and the cause of b, which in turn becomes the cause of B. But again the same difficulty repeats itself, for between each member of the time series in the second formula a certain time is likewise supposed to have elapsed. Other members must be introduced and the process must be carried on ad infinitum. Thus reason at this point finds the temporal notion of causality inadequate.” (Colvin, Schopenhauer’s Doctrine of the Thing-in-itself and His Attempt to Relate it to the World of Phenomena, 12) 

“For us, the problem is not by what precise steps the mind comes to “feign” a unity in its objects which is not really there, but whether this conception of a feigned or subjective unity imposed by the mind upon a number of actually disconnected qualities is itself ultimately intelligible. Thus, the metaphysical issue may be narrowed down to the following question: Can we intelligibly hold that a thing is in reality simply a number of qualities, not in their own nature connected, which arbitrarily regard for our own purposes as one? In other words, can we say the thing is simply identical with its qualities considered as a mere sum or collection, and any further unity of the kind the old Metaphysics denotes by “substance,” a mental addition of our own to the facts? Now there are two considerations—both ultimately reducible in principle to one—which seem fatal to the identification of a thing with its qualities, considered as merely discrete. (I) There can be no doubt that it is largely true to say that a given group of qualities appear to us to be the qualities of one thing because we attend to them as one. And again, attention is undoubtedly determined by, or, to put it in a better way, is an expression of our own subjective interests. But these considerations do not in the least show that attention is purely arbitrary. If we take any group of qualities to form one thing because we attend to it as one, it is equally true that we attend to it as one because it affects our subjective purposes or interests as one. That group of qualities is “one thing” for us which functions as one in its bearing upon our subjective interests. What particular interest we consider in pronouncing such a group one, in what interest we attend to it, may be largely independent of the qualities of the group, but the fact that the group does function as one in respect to this interest is no “fiction” or creation of our own thought; it is the expression of the nature of the group itself, and is independent of “our mind” in precisely the same sense in which the existence and character of any single member of the group of qualities is independent. There is no sense in assigning the single quality to “the given,” and the union of the qualities into a single group to “the work of the mind,”; in one sense both are the “work of the mind,” in another both are the expression of the nature of the “given.” (II) Again, the insufficiency of the simple identification of the thing with its qualities, considered as a mere collection, may be illustrated by considering what the group of qualities must contain. The group of qualities is obviously never present in its entirety at any moment of experience. For the majority of what we call qualities of a thing are simply the ways in which the “thing” behaves in the presence of various other things, its modes of reaction upon a number of stimuli. Now, at any moment of the “thing’s” existence it is only actually reacting upon a few of the possible stimuli, and thus only exhibiting a few of its qualities. The vast majority of its qualities are at any moment what Locke calls “powers,” i.e., ways in which it would behave if certain absent conditions were fulfilled. Thus, the thing to which we ascribe a number of predicates as its qualities is never the actual group of predicates themselves….Most of a thing’s qualities thus are mere possibilities; the nature of a thing is to act in this or that way under certain definite conditions which may or may not be realized in actual existence. Thus, the collection of qualities with which Phenomenalism identifies a thing has itself no real existence as a collection. The collection is just as much a “fiction of the mind” as the unity which we attribute to it. Yet the fact that the thing’s qualities are mainly mere possibilities does not destroy the existence of the thing. It actually is, and is somehow qualified by these possibilities. And for that very reason its existence cannot be identified with the actual realization of these possibilities in a group or collection of events. We might add as a further consideration, that the number of such possibilities is indefinite, including not only the ways in which the thing has behaved or will behave on the occurrence of conditions at present non-existent, but also all the ways in which it would behave on the occurrence of conditions which are never realized in actual existence….The being of the things must be sought not in the actual existence of the group of sensible qualities, but in the law or laws stating the qualities which would be exhibited in response to varying sets of conditions. This is just as true of the so-called primary qualities of things as of any others. Thus, the mass and again the kinetic energy of a conservative material system are properly names for the way in which the system will behave under determinate conditions, not of modes of behavior which are necessarily actually exhibited throughout its existence. The laws of motion, again, are statements of the same hypothetical kind about the way in which, as we believe, particles move if certain conditions are fulfilled. The doctrine according to which all events in the physical world are actual motions, rests on no more than a metaphysical blunder of a peculiarly barbarous kind.” (Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics, 135-137)

“Considerations of this kind compel us to forego the attempt to find the substance or being of a thing in the mere sequence of its different states considered as an aggregate. To make Phenomenalism workable, we are forced to say at least that the thing or substance to which the various attributes are assigned is the “law of its states,” or again is “the mode of relation of its various qualities.” Such a definition has obviously a great advantage over either of the who we have just rejected. It is superior to the conception of the thing as an unknown substratum of qualities, since it explicitly excludes the absurd notion of a world of things which first are, without being in any determinate way, and then subsequently set up determinate ways of existing among themselves. For a law, while not the same thing as the mere collection of occurrences in which it is realized, has no existence of its own apart from the series of occurrences which conform to it. Again, every law is a statement of possibilities, a formula describing the lines which the course of events will follow if certain conditions are operative; no law is a mere register of actually observed sequences. Hence, in defining the thing as the “law of its states,” we avoid the difficulty dealt with in the last paragraph, that the collection of the thing’s states never actually exists as a “given” collection. Thus, for ordinary practical purposes the definition is probably a satisfactory one. Yet it should be evident that in calling the thing the “law” of its states, we merely repeat the metaphysical problem of the unity of substance without offering any solution of it. For, not to dwell on the minor difficulty that we might find it impossible to formulate a single law connecting all the ways in which one thing reacts upon others, and thus ought more properly to speak in the plural of the laws of the states, we are not left with two distinct elements or aspects of the being of the thing, namely, the successive states and the law of their succession, and how these two aspects are united the theory fails to explain. We have the variety and multiplicity on the one hand in the states or qualities of the thing, its unity on the other in the form of the law connecting these states, but how the variety belongs to or is possessed by the unity we know no better than before. Thus, the old problem of substance returns upon us; the many qualities must somehow be the qualities of a single thing, but precisely how are we to conceive this union of the one and the many? At this point, light seems to be thrown on the puzzle by the doctrine of Leibnitz, that the only way in which a unity can, without ceasing to be such, contain and indefinite multiplicity is by “representation.” Experience, in fact, presents us with only one example of a unity which remains indubitably one while embracing an indefinite multiplicity of detail, namely the structure of our experience itself. For the single experience regularly consists of a multiplicity of mental states, both “focal” and “marginal,” simultaneous and successive, which are nevertheless felt as one single whole because they form the expression of a coherent purpose or interest. And this conscious unity of feeling, determined by reference to a unique interest, is the only instance to which we can point when we desire to show by an actual illustration how what is many can at the same time be one. If we can think of the thing’s qualities and the law of their connection as standing to one another in the same way as the detailed series of acts embodying a subjective interest of our own, and the interest itself which by its unity confers a felt unity on the series, we can in principle comprehend how the many qualities belong to the one thing. In that case the thing will be one “substance” as the embodiment of an individual experience, determined by a unique subjective interest, and therefore possessing the unity of immediate feeling. Its many qualities will “belong” to it in the same sense in which the various constituents of an experience thus unified by immediate feeling are said to “belong” to the single experience they constitute. And thus, our idealistic interpretation of the general nature of Reality will be found to contain the solution of the problem of Substance and Quality.” (Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics, 137-139)

“Continuity is, strictly speaking, a property of a certain series, and may be defined for purposes of references much as follows. A series is continuous when any term divides the whole series unambiguously into two mutually exclusive parts which between them comprise all the terms of the series, and when every term which so divides the series is itself a term of that series. From this second condition it obviously follows that a number of intermediate terms can always be inserted between any two terms whatever of a continuous series; no term of the series has a next term. This is the peculiarity of the continuous with which we shall be specially concerned. Thus, the series of points on a straight line is continuous because (I) any point P on the line divides it into two collections of points in such a way that every point of the one is to the left of every point of the other, and every point of the second to the right of every point of the former; and (II) every point which divides the line in this way is a point on the line. Again, the whole series of real numbers is continuous for the same reason. Every member of the number-series divides it into two classes, so that every number of one is less than every number of the other, and every number which thus divides the series itself is a term of the number series….From the continuity of the series of real numbers it follows that any other series which corresponds point for point with the terms of the number series will be continuous. Now one such series is that of the successive parts of time. Every moment of time divides the whole series of moments into two mutually exclusive classes, the moments before itself and the moments which are not before itself. And whatever thus divides the time series is itself a moment in that series. Hence from the continuity of the time-series it follows that any puzzles created by this property of continuousness will apply to the case of Causation….We may state the difficulty thus: (I) Causation cannot possibly be thought of as discontinuous, i.e., as the sequence of one distinct event upon an assemblage of other events without gross contradiction. To think of it as discontinuous, we must conceive the cause A to exist first in its completeness, and then to be suddenly followed by the effect B. (That the cause A consists of a number of conditions, a, b, c, … which themselves come into existence successively, and that A is not there until the last of these conditions have been realized, makes no difference to the principle.) Now this seems to be what is actually implied by the language…that in all Causation the cause must precede the effect. But what can such precedence mean? It can only mean that after the complete realization of the conditions included in the cause A, there must intervene a space of empty time before the effect B enters on the scene. However brief and “momentary” you take this gap in the stream of events to be, the gap must be there if your language about the cause as being before the effect is to have any meaning. For if there is no such gap, and the entrance of B is simultaneous with the complete realization of its conditions A, it is no longer true to say that the cause A is before the effect B. A does not exist as A until a, b, c … are all present, and as soon as they are present B is present too. And thus, the relation between A and B is not that of the sequence of a later event on an earlier. They are actually together. In fact, the doctrine that the cause precedes the effect rests upon the notion that the time-series is one in which each member has a next term. And this seems inconceivable. For not only can you subdivide any finite time, however small, into two mutually exclusive parts, but the point at which the division is effected is itself a moment in the time-series lying between the beginning and the end of the original interval. Time therefore must be continuous, if causation is not equally continuous, we must suppose that gaps of empty time are what separate the first event, the cause, from the subsequent event, the effect. Yet if this could be regarded as a defensible doctrine on other groups, it would then follow that the assemblage of events A is not the totality of conditions requisite for the occurrence of B. The “totality of conditions,” i.e., the cause as previously defined would be the events A plus a certain lapse of empty time. And so the cause would once more turn out not to precede the effect, or we should have to suppose the end of the interval of empty time included in it as separated from the beginning of B by a second lapse, and so on indefinitely.” (Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics, 171-173) 

“The defects of the causal postulate as a principle of explanation may also be exhibited by showing the double way in which it leads to the indefinite regress. The indefinite regress in the causal series is an inevitable consequence of the structure of time, and, as we please, may be detected both outside and inside any causal relation of two events, or two stages of a continuous process. For it follows from the structure of the time-series (I) that there are an indefinite number of terms of the series between any two members, between which there is a finite interval, and (II) that there is also an indefinite number of terms before or after any given member of the series. Like the series of real numbers, the time-series, because it satisfies the definition of a continuous infinite series, can have neither a first nor a last term, nor can any member of it have a next term. Applying this to the case of Causation, we may reason as follows: The same reasons which lead us to demand a cause A for any event B, and to find that cause in an assemblage of antecedent events, require that A should be similarly determined by another assemblage of antecedent events, and that this cause of A should itself have its own antecedent cause, and so on indefinitely. Thus, the causal principle, logically applied, never yields an intelligible explanation of any event Instead of exhibiting the transition A—B as the logical expression of a coherent principle, it refers us for the explanation of this transition to a previous instance of the same kind of transition, and then to another, and so forth without end. But it is impossible that what is not intelligible in one instance should become intelligible by the mere multiplication of similar unintelligibilities. (II) Similarly, if we look within the transition A—B. This transition, being continuous, must have its intermediate stages. A becomes B because it has already become C, and the transition A—C—B is again “explained” by showing that A became D which became C which became E which became B. And each of these stages, A—D, D—C, C—E, E—B can be once more submitted to the same sort of analysis. But in all this interpolation of immediate stages there is nothing to show the nature of the common principle in virtue of which the stages form a single process. We are, in fact, trying to do what we try to do wherever we establish a relation between terms, to answer a question by repeating it.” (Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics, 177-178) 

“The mechanical theory of the universe undertakes to account for all physical phenomenal by describing them as variances in the structure or configuration of material systems. It strives to apprehend all phenomenal diversities in the material world as varieties in the grouping of primordial units of mass, to recognize all phenomenal changes as movements of unchangeable elements, and thus to exhibit all apparent qualitative heterogeneity as mere quantitative difference. In the light of this theory the ultimates of scientific analysis are mass and motion, which are assumed to be essentially disparate. Mass, it is said, exists independently of motion and is indifferent to it. It is the same whether it be in motion or at rest. Motion may be transferred from one mas to another without destroying the identity of either. The prime postulate of all science is that there is some constant amid all phenomenal variations. Science is possible only on the hypothesis that all change is in its nature transformation. Without this hypothesis it could discharge neither of its two great functions—those of determining, from the present state of things, the past on the one hand and the future on the other, by exhibiting the one as its necessary antecedent, and the other as its equally necessary consequent. It is evident that the computations of science would be utterly frustrated by the sudden disappearance of one or more of its elements, or the unbidden intrusion of new elements. If, therefore, scientific analysis yields mass and motion as its absolutely irreducible elementary terms—if these terms underlie all possible transformations—it follows that both are quantitatively invariable. Accordingly, the mechanical theory of the universe postulates the conservation of both mass and motion. Mass may be transformed by an aggregation or segregation of parts; but amid all these transformations it persistently remains the same. Similarly, motion may be distributed among a greater or less number of units of mass; it may be transferred from one unit of mass to any number of units, its velocity being reduced in proportion to the number of units to which the transference takes place; nevertheless the sum of motions of the several units is always equal to the motion of the single unit. It may be changed in direction and form; rectilinear motion may become curvilinear, translator motion may be broken up into vibratory motion, molar motion may be converted into molecular agitation; yet, during all these changes, it is never increased, diminished, or lost.” (Stallo, The Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics, 25-26) 

“Now, in any discussion of the operations of thought, it is of the utmost importance to bear in mind the following irrefragable truths, some of which—although all of them seem to be obvious—have not been clearly apprehended until very recent times. (1) Thought deals, not with things as they are, or are supposed to be, in themselves, but with our mental representations of them. Its elements are, not pure objects, but their intellectual counterparts. What is present in the mind in the act of thought is never a thing, but always a state or states of consciousness. However much, and in whatever sense , it may be contended that the intellect and its object are both real and distinct entities, it cannot for a moment be denied that the object, of which the intellect has cognizance, is a synthesis of objective and subjective elements, and is thus primarily, in the very act of its apprehension and to the full extent of its cognizable existence, affected by the determinations of the cognizing faculty. Whenever, therefore, we speak of a thing, or a property of a thing, it must be understood that we mean a product of two factors neither of which is capable of being apprehended by itself. In this sense all knowledge is said to be relative. (2) Objects are known only through their relations to other objects. They have, and can have, no properties, and their concepts can include no attributes, save these relations, or rather, our mental representations of them. Indeed, an object cannot be known or conceived otherwise than as a complex of such relations. In mathematical phrase: things and their properties are known only as functions of other things and properties. In this sense, also, relativity is a necessary predicate of all objects of cognition.” (Stallo, The Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics, 133-134) 

“First, as to the assertion of Riemann and Helmholtz: if space is a physically real object, it certainly is not a thing outside of, coordinate with, and different from, other physical objects. When we say that all things are in space, we do not mean that they are contained in it as water is contained in a vessel, but we mean that there is no objectively real thing which is not spatially extended, or, according to the usual form of expression, that spatial extension is a primary property of all varieties of objective existence. This fact is so obvious that Descartes was led by it to maintain that spatial extension was the only true essence of objective reality. In what way, then, and by what means, do we distinguish between space and physical things ordinarily so called? Certainly not, or at least not directly, by sensation. Different acts of sensation may present different properties of the same object, and these properties may thus be dissociated. But no act of sensation dissociates the extension of a body from all its other properties and presents the property of extension alone. The sensationalists, however, content that, although there are no physical objects without spatial extension, and although such extension is in a sense a common property of all physical objects, nevertheless these objects do not fill all space, there being pure space between them. The reply to this is that this assertion, if true, does not help the sensationalists. For acts of sensation are possible only when and where there is objective difference and change; we have direct sensation of different and variable physical qualities ordinarily so called, and not of that which is absolutely homogenous and invariable….It is precisely the fact of its homogeneity and unchangeableness, in addition to that of its invariable presence in all physical objects, which distinguishes the property of spatial extension from all other properties characteristic of a real thing, and enables the sensationalist to speak of the existence of space at all.” (Stallo, The Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics, 228-229) 

“Space is not, and cannot be, an object of sensation. The attribution of space of relations and sensible interactions of the kind reflected in sensations is impossible without the assumption of diversities among its constituent parts, the denial of which is the basis of every notion or concept of space, whatever may be the logical or psychological doctrine to which that notion is referred.” (Stallo, The Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics, 232) 

“Let us call something, X, “relatively” unknown when some but not all people fail to know propositional truths about X. Furthermore, we will call X “absolutely” unknown if, and only if, nobody knows any propositional truths concerning X. Now, it is clear that relative unknowns exist. Most people know nothing about the Cynic philosopher Hipparchia, but those who study ancient Greek philosophy surely know of her. Thus, Hipparchia is unknown relative to certain people at certain times. Suppose someone, A, does not know about Hipparchia at a time T. Given this, Hipparchia is unknown relative to A at T. It would, then, be a contradiction for A to know of Hipparchia at T. Hence, once it is admitted that Hipparchia is not known by A at T, it follows that she cannot be known by A at T. So, we can reasonably support the following epistemic theorem: whatever is unknown relative to someone at a certain time, is unknowable relative to her at that time. But, suppose that instead of being relatively unknown, Hipparchia is absolutely unknown. In other words, let us consider that Hipparchia is not known by anyone at any time. We might observe that this can be restated as the following: Hipparchia is unknown relative to any person at any given time. When combined with our discovered theorem, we can infer from this that Hipparchia is unknowable relative to any person at any time. Thus, we have reached a second epistemic theorem: whatever is absolutely unknown, is unknowable by anyone whatsoever.” (Thomas-Brown, Idealism and the Known Unknown, 2) 

“Granted our two theorems, we can move to demonstrate that nothing absolutely unknown ever exists. We know as certainly as we can that any given entity is either square or not square, for this is an instance of the law of excluded middle. In grasping this universal truth, we know a truth concerning all things past, present, or future. If an absolute unknown existed, we would have some knowledge of it by way of such universal truths. But, it is a contradiction for an absolute unknown to be known by someone or other. Hence, if we are to have knowledge of universal truths at any time, there can never exist absolute unknowns. Yet, we do, of course, possess such knowledge; and, thus, no absolute unknowns exist, past, present, or future. Whatever exists or comes to exist is, therefore, known by someone or other at some time or other. In other words, to be is to be known and existence implies knowledge. Once we understand that something’s existence entails its being known, we can further see that its existence depends on its being known. However, the presence of knowledge presupposes that of a knower. Hence, the existence of a given object depends on there being an intelligent self or selves.” (Thomas-Brown, Idealism and the Known Unknown, 3-4)

Reading Notes: April 25th, 2022

“Reductive functionalism asserts that the type identity conditions for mental states refer only to relations between inputs, outputs, and each other. It does not assert that such relations cause mental states but rather that they are numerically identical to (i.e., one and the same as) mental states. Thus, each conscious experience, being a species of mental state, is numerically identical to some such relations. Although in humans such relations are presumably instantiated in the nervous system, they could in principle be equally well instantiated in other physical systems, such as computers. Reductive functionalists typically deny that the experiences of one person could be scrambled from those of another without experimental consequences. For if conscious experiences are identical to functional relations, then to scramble experiences is to scramble the functional relations, and this would create measurable differences between the two persons in controlled experiments.” (Hoffman, The Scrambling Theorem: A Simple Proof of the Logical Possibility of Spectrum Inversion, 32) 

“At Cambridge I was indoctrinated with the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, but G.E. Moore and I together came to reject both these philosophies. I think that, although we agreed in our revolt, we had important differences of emphasis. What I think at first chiefly interested Moore was the independence of fact from knowledge and the rejection of the whole Kantian apparatus of a priori intuitions and categories, moulding experience but not the outer world. I agreed enthusiastically with him in this respect, but I was more concerned than he was with certain purely logical matters. The most important of these, and the one which has dominated all my subsequent philosophy was what I called “the doctrine of external relations.” Monists had maintained that a relation between two terms is always, in reality, composed of properties of the who separate terms and of the whole which they compose, or, in ultimate strictness, only of this last. This view seemed to me to make mathematics inexplicable. I came to the conclusion that relatedness does not imply any corresponding complexity in the related terms and is, in general, not equivalent to any property of the whole which they compose. Just after developing this view in my book on The Philosophy of Leibniz, I became aware of Peano’s work in mathematical logic, which led me to a new technique and a new philosophy of mathematics. Hegel and his disciples had been in the habit of “proving” the impossibility of space and time and matter, and generally everything that an ordinary man would believe in. Having become convinced that the Hegelian arguments against this and that were invalid, I rejected to the opposite extreme and began to believe in the reality of whatever could not be disproved—e.g. points and instants and particles and Platonic universals.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 12) [Underlining is my own]

“[In] the years from 1910 to 1914, I became interested, not only in what the physical world is, but in how we come to know it. The relation of perception to physics is a problem which has occupied me intermittently ever since that time. It is in relation to this problem that my philosophy underwent its last substantial change. I had regarded perception as a two-term relation of subject and object, as this had made it comparatively easy to understand how perception could give knowledge of something other than the subject. But under the influence of William James, I came to think this view mistaken, or at any rate an undue simplification. Sensations, at least, even those that are visual or auditory, came to seem to me not in their own nature relational occurrences. I do not, of course, mean to say that when I see something there is no relation between me and what I see; but what I do mean to say is that the relation is much more indirect than I had supposed and that everything that happens in me when I see something could, so far as its logical structure is concerned, quite well occur without there being anything outside me for me to see. This change in my opinions greatly increased the difficulty of problems involved in connecting experience with the outer world.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 13) 

“I reverse the process which has been common in philosophy since Kant. It has been common among philosophers to begin with how we know and proceed afterwards to what we know. I think this a mistake, because knowing how we know is one small department of knowing what we know. I think it a mistake for another reason: it tends to give to knowing a cosmic importance which it by no means deserves, and thus prepares the philosophical student for the belief that mind has some kind of supremacy over the non-mental universe, or even that the non-mental universe is nothing but a nightmare dreamt by mind in its un-philosophical moments. This point of view is completely remote from my imaginative picture of the cosmos. I accept without qualification the view that results from astronomy and geology, from which it would appear that there is no evidence of anything mental except a tiny fragment of space-time, and that the great processes of nebular and stellar evolution proceed according to laws in which mind plays no part.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 16) [Underlining is my own]

“The light from a star travels over intervening space and causes a disturbance in the optic nerve ending in an occurrence in the brain. What I maintain is that the occurrence in the brain is a visual sensation. I maintain, in fact, that the brain consists of thoughts—using “thought” in its widest sense, as it is used by Descartes. To this people will reply “Nonsense! I can see a brain through a microscope, and I can see that it does not consist of thoughts but of matter just as tables and chairs do.” This is a sheer mistake. What you see when you look at a brain through a microscope is a part of your private world. It is the effect in you of a long causal process starting from the brain that you say you are looking at. The brain that you say you are looking at is, no doubt, part of the physical world; but this is not the brain which is a datum in your experience. That brain is a remote effect of the physical brain. And, if the location of events in physical space-time is to be effected, as I maintain, by causal relations, then your percept, which comes after events in the eye and optic nerve leading to the brain, must be located in your brain….What I maintain is that we can witness or observe what goes on in our heads, and that we cannot witness or observe anything else at all….[The] whole of what we perceive without inference belongs to our private world. In this respect, I agree with Berkeley. The starry heaven that we know in visual sensation is inside us. The external starry heaven that we believe in is inferred.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 25-27) [Underlining is my own]

“My first philosophical book, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, which was an elaboration of my Fellowship dissertation, seems to me now somewhat foolish. I took up Kant’s question, “how is geometry possible?” and decided that it was possible if, and only if, space was one of the three recognized varieties, one of them Euclidean, the other two non-Euclidean, but having the property of preserving a constant “measure of curvature.” Einstein’s revolution swept away everything at all resembling this point of view. The geometry in Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is such as I had declared to be impossible. The theory of tensors, upon which Einstein based himself, would have been useful to me, but I never heard of it until he used it. Apart from details, I do not think that there is anything valid in this early book. However, there was worse to follow. My theory of geometry was mainly Kantian, but after this I plunged into efforts at Hegelian dialectic. I wrote a paper “On the Relations of Number and Quantity” which is unadulterated Hegel….Although Couturat described the article as “ce petit chef d’oeuvre de dialectique subtile”, it seems to me now nothing but unmitigated rubbish.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 39-40) 

“I finished my book on the foundations of geometry in 1896, and proceeded at once to what I intended as a similar treatment of the foundations of physics, being under the impression that problems concerning geometry had been disposed of. I worked on the foundations of physics for two years, but the only thing that I published expressing my views at that time was the article on number and quantity already mentioned. I was at this time a full-fledged Hegelian, and I aimed at constructing a complete dialectic of the sciences, which should end up with the proof that all reality is mental. I accepted the Hegelian view that none of the sciences is quite true, since all depend upon some abstraction, and every abstraction leads, sooner or later, to contradictions. Whenever Kant and Hegel were in conflict, I sided with Hegel.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 40-41) [Underlining is my own]

“It was towards the end of 1898 that Moore and I rebelled against both Kant and Hegel. Moore led the way, but I followed closely in his footsteps. I think that the first published account of the new philosophy was Moore’s article in Mind on “The Nature of Judgement.” Although neither he nor I would now adhere to all the doctrines in this article, I, and I think he, would still agree with its negative part—i.e., with the doctrine that fact is in general independent of experience. Although we were in agreement, I think that we differed as to what most interested us in our new philosophy. I think that Moore was most concerned with the rejection of idealism, while I was most interested in the rejection of monism. The two were, however, closely connected. They were connected through the doctrine as to relations, which Bradley had distilled out of the philosophy of Hegel. I called this “the doctrine of internal relations,” and I called my view “the doctrine of external relations.” The doctrine of internal relations held that every relation between two terms expresses, primarily, intrinsic properties of the two terms and, in ultimate analysis, a property of the whole which the two compose.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 54) [Underlining is my own]

Nonsense—a total lie and blatant misrepresentation of Bradley’s views. Bradley (and Russell had to have known this at the time) rejected in toto the so-called “doctrine of internal relations.” Not only that, Bradley explicitly maintained that any attempt to arrive at an intellectually satisfactory conception of Reality as consisting in, or being a system of, relations enjoining, and enjoined to, relata (regardless of whether the relations be “internal” or “external”) is destined to end in inconsistency and ultimate failure. Unfortunately, few people today appreciate this crucial and much-overlooked aspect of Bradley’s metaphysic. (Vide Bradley’s Collected Essays, Essays on Truth and Reality, Appearance and Reality, etc.)

“I first realized the importance of the question of relations when I was working on Leibniz. I found—what books on Leibniz failed to make clear—that his metaphysic was explicitly based upon the doctrine that every proposition attributes a predicate to a subject and (what seemed to him almost the same thing) that every fact consists of a substance having a property. I found that this same doctrine underlies the systems of Spinoza, Hegel and Bradley, who, in fact, all developed the doctrine with more logical rigour than is shown by Leibniz. But it was not only these rather dry, logical doctrines that made me rejoice in the new philosophy. I felt it, in fact, as a great liberation, as if I had escaped from a hot-house on to a wind-swept headland. I hated the stuffiness involved in supposing that space and time were only in my mind. I liked the starry heavens even better than the moral law, and could not bear Kant’s view that the one I liked best was only a subjective figment. In the first exuberance of liberation, I became a naïve realist and rejoiced in the thought that grass is really green, in spite of the adverse opinion of all philosophers from Locke onwards. I have not been able to retain this pleasing faith in its pristine vigour, but I have never again shut myself up in a subjective prison. Hegelians had all kinds of arguments to prove this or that not “real.” Number, space, time, matter, were all professedly convicted of being self-contradictory. Nothing was real, so we were assured, except the Absolute, which could think only of itself since there was nothing else for it to think of and which thought eternally the sort of things that idealist philosophers thought in their books.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 61-62)  [Underlining is my own]

The irony is delicious. Russell abandons the idealism of Kant, Hegel, and Bradley—in part because of its (alleged) “stuffiness” and “subjectivity”—only to immerse himself in the palpable absurdities of physiological subjectivism. (cf. ibid, 25-27, 103) Indeed, if an impartial analyst were asked to assess the internal consistency of Russell’s doctrine of “private spaces” and “private worlds,” his insistence that sensa (e.g. patches of color, smells, textures, tastes, etc.) are the sole objects of empirical observation and “acquaintance” (i.e., the “objective accusative” of each and every perceptual event/occurrence is a sensum), and his admission that sensa are causally-dependent upon the brains and nervous systems of the organisms that happen to be “acquainted” with them, then it wouldn’t take long for our surveyor to arrive at the following conclusion: Bertrand Russell would have to answer the following question in the negative: “Is the truth of my metaphysic consistent with the fact that I know it to be true?”

“Although I have changed my opinion on various matters since those early days, I have not changed on points which, then as now, seem of most importance. I still hold to the doctrine of external relations and to pluralism, which is bound up with it. I still hold that an isolated truth may be quite true. I still hold that analysis is not falsification. I still hold that any proposition other than a tautology, if it is true, is true in virtue of a relation to fact, and that facts in general are independent of experience. I see nothing impossible in a universe devoid of experience. On the contrary, I think that experience is a very restricted and cosmically trivial aspect of a very tiny portion of the universe. On these matters my view have not changed since I abandoned the teachings of Kant and Hegel.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 62-63) [Underlining is my own]

“The primary aim of Principia Mathematica was to show that all pure mathematics follows from purely logical premises and uses only concepts definable in logical terms. This was, of course, an antithesis to the doctrines of Kant, and initially I thought of the work as a parenthesis in the refutation of “yonder sophistical Philistine,” as Georg Cantor described him, adding for the sake of further definiteness, “who knew so little mathematics”.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 74-75) 

“When I assert all values of a function Fx, the values that x can take must be definite if what I am asserting is to be definite. There must be, that is to say, some totality of possible values of x. If I now proceed to create new values defined in terms of that totality, the totality appears to be thereby enlarged and therefore the new values referring to it will refer to that enlarged totality. But, since they must be included in the totality, it can never catch up with them. The process is like trying to jump on to the shadow of your head. We can illustrate this most simply by the paradox of the liar. The liar says, “everything that I assert is false”. This is, in fact, an assertion which he makes, but it refers to the totality of his assertions and it is only by including it in that totality that a paradox results. We shall have to distinguish between propositions that refer to some totality of propositions and propositions that do not. Those that refer to some totality of propositions can never be members of that totality. We may define first-order propositions as those referring to no totality of propositions; second-order propositions, as those referring to totalities of first-order propositions; and so on, ad infinitum. Thus our liar will now have to say, “I am asserting a false proposition of the first order which is false”. But this is itself a proposition of the second order. He is thus not asserting any proposition of the first order. What he says is, thus, simply false, and the argument that it is also true collapses. Exactly the same argument applies to any proposition of higher order.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 82-83) 

“It will be found that in all the logical paradoxes there is a kind of reflexive self-reference which is to be condemned on the same ground: viz. that it includes, as a member of a totality, something referring to that totality which can only have a definite meaning if the totality is already fixed.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 83) 

“The physiologist...makes it clear that there is an elaborate causal chain from the eye to the brain and that what you see depends upon what happens in the brain.” (Russell, My Philosophical Development, 103) [Underlining is my own]

 

Reading Notes: April 22nd, 2022

“All accounts of awareness other than intentionalism require objects of awareness to be actually existent or, as I shall put it, real. Central to intentionalism is the denial that the expression “is aware of” must express a relation between two entities. On this view, to speak of an object of awareness is not necessarily to speak of an entity that is an object of awareness; for some objects do not exist.” (Smith, The Problem of Perception, 234) [Underlining is mine]

“For according to a fairly widespread alternative usage—to be found, for example, in both Germanic and the Scholastic traditions—the term “object” specifically connotes being an object for a subject. The relevant German and Latin terms themselves suggest this: a Gegenstand is that which stands opposite, over against a cognizing subject; and an objectum is that which is thrown towards—towards a cognizing subject.” (Smith, The Problem of Perception, 236) 

“One immediate objection that many will have to the invocation of non-existents is that it cannot possibly do justice to the real sensory states that are involved in perception. Suppose you hallucinate a vivid green patch on a wall. You attend to it carefully, perhaps describing its particular color and brightness. Although intentionalism does not follow Evans and McDowell in claiming, absurdly, that in this situation you are aware of nothing, is it really any better to be told that you are not aware of anything that actually exists? Surely there is, in the situation just described, a concrete exemplification of green (or ‘green’). Surely something really exists, something that you are attending to. Although perhaps initially tempting, this reaction in effect simply ignores the analysis of perceptual consciousness developed in Part I of this work. “Something,” indeed, really does exist in the situation in question: you exist, and your visual experience with its sensory character exists. In particular, there is, actually in your sensory experience, something corresponding to the greenness that you see on the wall: namely, an instance of a chromatic quale. Neither this quale, nor the sensory experience of which it is a characteristic, is, however, the object of awareness—as we saw in Part I. Your object is a patch on a wall. It is only that that doesn’t exist.” (Smith, The Problem of Perception, 238) 

“Perception is the analysis of sensory input in the context of our prior perceptual experience of the world. The goal of such analysis in visual perception is to infer the identities, forms, and spatial arrangement of objects in the three-dimensional (3-D) scene based on our two-dimensional (2-D) retinal images. Computational approaches to perception seek to elucidate the theoretical principles and to model the mechanisms underlying these analyses and inferential processes.” (Lee, Entry on “Computational Approaches to Perception” in The Encyclopedia of Perception, Vol. I, 278) [Underlining is mine]

“Reductive functionalists claim that mental states are identical to certain functional states: The conditions that define the different types of mental states of a system, whether biological or not, refer only to relations between inputs to the system, outputs from the system, and other mental states of the system. The relations among inputs, outputs, and mental states are typically taken to be causal relations. However, the reductive functionalist does not claim that these causal relations cause mental states. Instead, this functionalist claims that mental states are certain functional states. In particular, states of consciousness are mental states and are thus, according to the reductive functionalist, identical to certain functional states….Nonreductive functionalists claim that mental states arise from functional organization but are not functional states. Consciousness, in particular, is determined by functional organization, but it is not identical to, or reducible to, functional organization. Nonreductive functionalism is, in one sense, a weaker claim than is reductive functionalism because it claims only that functional organization determines mental states, but drops the stronger claim that mental states are identical to functional states. But in another sense nonreductive functionalism is a stronger, and puzzling, claim: Mental states, and conscious experiences in particular, are something other than functional states, and therefore have properties beyond those of functional states. This proposed dualism of properties raises the unsolved puzzle of precisely what these new properties are and how they are related to functional properties….[M]ost arguments in favor of computer consciousness are based on functionalist assumptions. Thus, the possibility of spectrum inversion is still widely debated” (Hoffman, Entry on “Computer Consciousness” in The Encyclopedia of Perception, Vol. I, 284-285) 

“Although the input to the human visual system is just a collection of values associated with outputs of individual photoreceptors, we perceive a number of visual groups, usually associated with objects or well-defined parts of objects….The process of image formation, whether in the eye or in a camera, results in the loss of depth information. All points in the external three-dimensional (3-D) world that lie on a ray passing through the optical center are projected to the same point in the two-dimensional image. During reconstruction, we seek to recover the 3-D information that is lost during projection….Given a single image, many possible 3-D worlds could project to the image.” (Malik, Entry on “Computer Vision” in The Encyclopedia of Perception, Vol. I, 296) 

“Depth perception in general can be understood as a reconstructive process that interprets the retinal image in our eye such that a three-dimensional (3-D) object arises in our mind. Pictures and films can also provide vivid impressions of depth. This pictorial depth differs in nature. It is a constructive process of its own and presents an additional level of difficulty. Normal vision allows us to glean information about an object’s shape and color as well as about such things as its spatial relations, its mass, and its potential danger. Normal vision typically reconstructs the real-world object which gives rise to the retinal image with admirable precision. This is possible because our visual system is able to resolve the many ambiguities present in the retinal image. Pictorial depth is both more confined and broader than normal depth….In normal viewing, a large number of 3-D objects would qualify as permissible reconstructions that could be made on the basis of one given retinal image. To date, perceptual psychologists have not been able to agree about just how the mind solves this so-called underspecification problem and singles out the one reconstruction that ends up in our awareness.” (Hecht, Entry on “Depth Perception in Pictures/Film” in The Encyclopedia of Perception, Vol. I, 358-359) [Underlining is mine]

“In particular, to say that the perceiver is aware of an internal representation sets up a logical regress, implying an inner perceiver (homunculus) who must create an inner representation of the representation….The regress can be avoided by claiming that awareness of an external object is constituted by having an internal representation of it; the perceiver is not aware of the representation itself, but of what it represents (its content). Thus, one perceives the tomato (the object of awareness) in virtue of possessing an internal representation of it (the vehicle of awareness). This move satisfies some philosophers that perception is direct in the traditional sense, yet on this view, the perceiver experiences the content of a representation rather than the living tomato. The representation must somehow be derived from the visual input by a process that establishes its content….If perceptual awareness consists of having representations, how does the perceptual system determine the environmental entities to which they correspond? Without some independent, extrasensory access to the world, there appears to be no way to establish which internal states indicate which environmental properties, or which representations stand for tomatoes and which for elephants.” (Warren, Entry on “Direct Perception” in The Encyclopedia of Perception, Vol. I, 367) [Underlining is mine]

“The indirect solution is inference to the best explanation: The perceptual system infers a representation of the world that best accounts for the order in sensory input. For example, a particular sequence of gray blobs with an extended protuberance may be best explained by the presence of an elephant, rather than a tomato. However, as Hermann von Helmholtz understood by the mid-19th century, this inference process presumes that the perceptual system already possesses knowledge about (1) the structure of the world, including the sorts of entities that exist and predicates to describe them, and (2) how the world structures sensory input, such as a theory of image formation and transduction. The trouble is that such prior knowledge must somehow be acquired, again in an extrasensory manner….A common response is that prior knowledge has evolved via natural selection or learning, but…this seems to require an organism that already has a working perceptual system—including the requisite prior knowledge—as a precondition. The indirect position thus appears to be circular. There is a further problem with treating perception as a process of inference. Inference is a logical relation that holds between conscious mental states (beliefs, thoughts, statements) corresponding to premises and conclusions. But as we have just seen, if we are to avoid the representationalist fallacy, perception cannot be based on conscious awareness of internal states. If the perceptual process is unconscious, then whatever else it may be, it cannot be inferential; the same goes for related terms such as hypothesis, clue, evidence, and assumption. The notion of perception as unconscious inference…is thus inconsistent. Computational theories seek to avoid this objection by treating perception as a process of computation over representations, but this leaves [the] problem unresolved.” (Warren, Entry on “Direct Perception” in The Encyclopedia of Perception, Vol. I, 368) [Underlining is mine]

“Another argument against direct perception holds that perception is underdetermined by the available information. The stimulation at the receptors is said to be inherently impoverished or ambiguous, insufficient to uniquely specify environmental objects and events. A tomato is a three-dimensional spherical object, but its retinal image is just a two-dimensional circular form; working backward, this image could correspond to a flat disk or various ellipsoidal objects stretched along the line of sight.” (Warren, Entry on “Direct Perception” in The Encyclopedia of Perception, Vol. I, 369) [Underlining is mine]

“How are events in the external world transformed into perceptual experiences via electrical coding in the brain? This simple question forms one of the most basic and long-standing problems of perception. Magnetoencephalography, or MEG, is one of several noninvasive brain imaging techniques that allow scientists to explore the link between neural activity and perception. Like the related technique of electroencephalography (EEG), MEG essentially measures electrical currents generated by neural activity. MEG measures these electrical currents indirectly, through their magnetic fields. (It is a basic principle of physics that moving electrical currents produce magnetic fields.) MEG has excellent temporal resolution, on the order of milliseconds, allowing noninvasive real-time recording of neural activity. Therefore, this technique is well suited to examine the time course of perceptual processing in the brain. However, in contrast to its high temporal resolution, the spatial localization of MEG is relatively poor. That is, MEG can indicate when neural responses occur with great precision, but not exactly where the activity takes place. Nevertheless, its millisecond temporal resolution makes MEG a valuable tool for both basic research and clinical applications. As previously described, MEG measures magnetic fields associated with neural activity…. Recorded MEG data represents changes in magnetic field strength as a function of time.” (Harris, Entry on “Magnetoencephalography” in The Encyclopedia of Perception, Vol. I, 543-544) 

“Neurons communicate throughout the brain using spikes of activity, known as action potentials, on the order of one millisecond in duration. These spikes are caused by a transient change in ion concentrations across the cell membrane. This leads to a change in membrane voltage that can be picked up by electrodes inserted near the neuron. Although there are methods of measuring neural response collectively (such as [fMRI], [EEG], optical imaging) single-unit electrophysiology offers an accurate means of measuring individual neural response both in time and space. For example, imagine trying to understand human speech by listening to a crowd of voices. EEG measures electrical impulses from the scalp. It is temporally precise but averages over space—like a microphone above a crowd. The analogy for fMRI, which measures changes in blood flow to a particular area following neural response, would be moving the microphone closer to a smaller group, but giving the average sound level every second. Single unit electrophysiology, in contrast to these other techniques, places a good microphone next to a particular speaker. It may not tell everything about the crowd (or even the other half of the conversation) but it gives detailed information about the individual person/neuron. A full understanding of neural representation involves relating this response to the outside world. Early studies by Stephen Kuffler and others demonstrated that neurons in visual areas have receptive fields: regions of visual space where patterns of light can influence the firing of the neuron. The receptive fields of retinal ganglion neurons (whose axons make up the optic nerve) typically demonstrate a center-surround organization, where a central region might excite (or suppress) a neuron, while a surrounding region would do the opposite—these neurons respond best to differences in light levels.” (Albert, Entry on “Neural Representation/Coding” in The Encyclopedia of Perception, Vol. I, 627-628) 

“Later work by David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel measured the receptive fields of V1 neurons, which have significantly different responses to stimuli. These neurons fire more strongly to particular orientations of lines, along with other stimulus features. One class of neurons (simple cells) was shown to have oriented regions of alternating lighting preference. In contrast to retinal ganglion neurons, which have a circularly symmetric, center-surround structure, these V1 cells find the difference between two or more nearby elongated regions. Later work mapped these receptive fields and showed how the particular pattern of light and dark preferences could be fit by a particular mathematical function, a two-dimensional (2-D) Gabor function—the details of which are not discussed here. A simple cell’s selectivity for particular stimulus features, such as line orientation and position, are evident from a map of its subregions, or equivalently, the mathematical parameters of the Gabor function representation. However, it is well understood that such models are idealizations that account for only a portion of the neural response in these cells, and later visual stages are more difficult to characterize.” (Albert, Entry on “Neural Representation/Coding” in The Encyclopedia of Perception, Vol. I, 628) 

“Using spots, bars, and gratings as stimuli is helpful, as they can be fully described by a small set of numbers—such as position, orientation, and size—but often these stimuli do not provide enough variation in examples to fully probe how stimuli can affect the behavior of the neuron. Unstructured noise stimuli (like the “snow” on an old TV set that wasn’t tuned properly) can also be presented to a neuron and related to the resulting neural response. For example, if all the random stimuli that produced a neural spike are collected and then averaged together, the result is called the spike-triggered average (STA). This produces a receptive field as the simplest method of reverse correlation. However, such models require a great deal of data and have only a limited ability to characterize a neuron’s response; because of this, it is clear that the response to a set of simple stimuli does not provide a straightforward prediction of how the neuron will respond to more complex stimuli. As previously noted, a number of methods are used in an attempt to characterize “what” causes a neuron to respond. Such methods can give us succinct mathematical descriptions that offer some predictive value for individual neurons. However, as the mathematical models become more complex, it becomes more difficult to understand the behavior of the neuron in a coherent way. Even if we could fully describe and predict the response behavior of a neuron, the question remains: “Why” does the neuron respond in that particular way? For our visual example, why do V1 simple cell receptive fields have the particular pattern of light and dark preferences (2-D Gabor functions)? The ecological, efficient coding approach states that the goal of sensory processing is to efficiently represent the information that is behaviorally relevant to the animal. In the case of V1, the incoming visual information is coming from the natural world. There are particular properties of natural images that would suggest some codes are better than others. For example, light intensity often only changes at contours, so encoding primarily those changes by responding to lines/edges would be more efficient. What occurs in the left eye correlates with what occurs in the right eye, so receptive fields in each eye should be related for a particular neuron. In general, natural images are highly redundant, and removing these forms of redundancy in natural images would allow animals to use the information efficiently. Work by a variety of researchers, discussed next, has demonstrated that many goals of the early visual system directly relate the behavior of these neurons to the mathematical properties of natural images.…One can place coding strategies along a spectrum from local, grandmother cell codes to distributed codes. A local code uses one neuron or relatively few neurons to represent a single, relevant piece of information. The traditional example is a grandmother cell code where the firing of one particular neuron represents information, such as whether or not your grandmother is present. Such neural responses would be easy to learn from and react to (approach or avoidance, for example), but clearly this code has disadvantages. For example, there are not enough neurons in the brain to represent every potential combination of visual features.  On the other extreme, a distributed code uses many neurons to represent a single, relevant piece of information. For example, compression strategies can often result in highly distributed codes because part of the goal is to fully utilize the response range of every neuron. Taken to the extreme, a fully distributed code would be unreasonable in the brain as learning from and decoding such representations can be cumbersome. It would be difficult to respond to a neuron’s firing if you need to sample input from every other neuron to interpret what that response means….The efficient coding approach argues that the ultimate goal of any neural representation is to be useful ecologically. The type of representation should increase the animal’s evolutionary fitness.” (Albert, Entry on “Neural Representation/Coding” in The Encyclopedia of Perception, Vol. I, 629-630) 

“A person’s entire life experience—everyone, everything, every experience he or she has ever known—exists to that person only as a function of his or her brain’s activity. As such, it does not necessarily reproduce the physical reality of the world with high fidelity. Nonveridical perception is the sensory or cognitive discrepancy between the subjective perception and the physical world. Of course, many experiences in daily life reflect the physical stimuli that fall into one’s eyes, ears, skin, nose, and tongue. Otherwise, action or navigation in the physical world would be impossible. But the same neural machinery that interprets veridical sensory inputs is also responsible for one’s dreams, imaginings, and failings of memory. Thus, the real and the illusory or misperceived have the same physical basis in a person’s brain. Misperceptions (that is, perceptions that do not match the physical or veridical world) can arise from both normal and pathological processes. Everyday perception in the normal brain includes numerous sensory, multisensory, and cognitive misperceptions and illusions….Sensory misperceptions are phenomena in which the subjective perception of a stimulus does not match the physical reality. Sensory misperceptions occur because neural circuits in the brain amplify, suppress, converge, and diverge sensory information in a fashion that ultimately leaves the observer with a subjective perception that is different from the reality….In visual illusion, the observer may perceive a visual object or scene that is different from the veridical one. Alternatively, the observer may perceive an object that is not physically present, or fail to perceive an object that is extant in the world….In an auditory illusion, the listener may perceive sounds that are not present or that are different from those physically present.” (Martinez-Conde and Macknik, Entry on “Nonveridical Perception” in The Encyclopedia of Perception, Vol. I, 637-638) [Underlining is mine]

“Thus, in a way, we all live in the illusory “matrix” created by our brains. [N]eurologist and Nobel laureate Sir John Eccles wrote that the natural world contains no color, sound, textures, patterns, beauty, or scent. Thus, color, brightness, smell, and sound are not absolute terms, but subjective, relative experiences that are actively created by complicated brain circuits. This is true not only of sensory perceptions, but of any other experience. Whether we feel the sensation of “redness,” the appearance of “squareness,” or emotions such as love or hate, these are constructs that result from electrochemical impulses in our brain.” (Martinez-Conde and Macknik, Entry on “Nonveridical Perception” in The Encyclopedia of Perception, Vol. I, 642) [Underlining is mine]

“A central assumption of sensory neurobiology is that the neural substrate of perception is the electrical activity of the sensory neurons activated by a given stimulus, that is, that understanding how sensory neurons respond to sensory stimuli will lead to an understanding of how organisms respond to sensory stimuli. But no less important than which stimuli are effective is where stimuli must be located to elicit neural responses. The receptive field of a sensory neuron is the region in the sensory periphery, for example a portion of the retina or of the body surface, within which stimuli can influence the electrical activity of that cell. The concept of the receptive field is central to sensory neurobiology in providing a description of the location at which sensory stimuli must be presented to a neuron to elicit responses….The receptive field of a sensory neuron anywhere in the nervous system is defined by its synaptic inputs; each cell’s receptive field results from the combination of fields of all of the neurons providing input to it. Because inputs are not simply summed, referring to the receptive field properties of a neuron commonly means what stimuli the cell responds to….The characterization of the receptive field properties of neurons informs us how single cells analyze the sensory world. The question remains: How are their collective responses put together to form sensory experience?” (Levitt, Entry on “Receptive Fields” in The Encyclopedia of Perception, Vol. I, 860-862) [Underlining is mine]

“Schopenhauer attempts to reinforce this theoretical position by an argument based on empirical observation, thus falling into the most gross and self-evident of contradictions. “…that which is immediately [and empirically] known is limited by the skin, or rather by the external end of the nerves which lead out from the cerebral system. Without lies a world of which we have no other knowledge than through pictures in our head.” Here the subjectivity of the impressions of sense is attempted to be proved by a process of reasoning based on the physical construction of our bodies, but unfortunately for Schopenhauer’s contention our bodies…it is evident that such an argument could have weight only when we assume we possess a knowledge of the construction of our bodies not derived through empirical means….Thus Schopenhauer, following the most radical of the French materialists, reduces the intellect to a simple function of the brain, while at the same time asserting that the whole [empirical] world hangs on a single thread, consciousness.” (Colvin, Schopenhauer's Doctrine of the Thing-in-itself and His Attempt to Relate it to the World of Phenomena, 18-19) [Underlining is mine]

Reading Notes: April 21st, 2022

“Internalist representationalism says that the phenomenal qualities are representational properties of brain states. Representational properties are properties that represent some representational content. For example, a newspaper has a certain representational content and it represents this content in virtue of the representational properties of the letters written on it.” (Östman, It’s All in the Brain, 42) 

“Representationalism is currently the most popular theory of perception. A core idea among representationalists is that perception is a form of representation. There are many different versions of representationalism, or intentionalism as it is sometimes called. Let us use the following taxonomy to distinguish them. Weak representationalism is the claim that every perception necessarily has representational content; representational content is a condition of satisfaction on experiences that for each experience is either fulfilled or not fulfilled. Thus, just as beliefs or sentences can be true or false, experiences can be either correct or incorrect. For example, an experience as of a red square might have the representational content that there is a red square at a certain location in front of the perceiver. The content is satisfied and the experience correct if there is such a red square in front of the perceiver. Weak representationalism is a sort of minimal representationalist claim and so is included in all forms of representationalism. The position is false if experiences lack such a condition of correctness, for example if they only present perceptual items without representing anything. Strong representationalism states that in addition to the former claim, there is a change in phenomenal character of experiences only if there is a corresponding change in the contents of the experiences. This means that which phenomenal qualities we experience in an experience cannot vary independently of the experience’s representational content. Thus the phenomenal qualities we experience in an experience depend on the representational content of that experience in the sense that the former does not change if the latter do not change. Some versions of representationalism claim that the ground of this dependence-relation is that the representational content of experience explains its phenomenal character. A particular sort of strong representationalism is reductive externalist representationalism, or as I will call it, externalist representationalism. It is reductive in the sense that it identifies the qualia in an experience with properties included in the content of that experience. It is externalist in the sense that it claims that the properties included in the content of experiences generally are properties of external objects….For example, say we have an experience of a red square. According to externalist representationalism, the experienced phenomenal redness and phenomenal squareness in this experience are properties of external objects which are represented by the experience; in this case perhaps a surface reflectance property and a geometrical property.” (Östman, It’s All in the Brain, 53-54)