Having (I hope) clarified these matters, let's move on to the argument as set out in your numbered sections:
A thought can be right or wrong, but right-ness implies likeness to reality, while wrong-ness implies un-likeness. To illustrate: suppose Bob has a thought about a tree. Let's say it's "this oak tree is made of wood". Now suppose his friend Bill thinks "this oak tree is made of copper". I take it we can premise that Bob is right and Bill is wrong. But for our premise to be true, their thoughts must be compared to the tree itself. There is no other way to judge their thoughts' right-ness or wrong-ness."
The last sentence here is the first occasion in your latest post where you make a sweeping claim without offering any justification for it to be accepted. When you construct an argument, you can use, as a premise, any statement that is in the form of a proposition, but for it to be a sound argument, you have to show that it is a fact, and in epistemology and elsewhere, the generally-accepted basis for regarding a premise as being factual is the JTB criterion: it states a justified, true belief. Your say-so does not amount to either verification of the claim as being factual or justification for thinking it is.
The first problem in attempting to verify this premise is that you have not given the slightest explanation of what it means to say a thought is like reality. What would it mean to say that Bob's thought of an oak tree is like an actual oak tree? Does it grow from an acorn? Does it have the genetic signature that is shared by oak trees? These are both facts about them that might be the content of thoughts - indeed, they are right now, as you read this!
It gets even more problematic when we move on to a broader range of propositions. Take the claim "the highest mountain in the world is in Asia." In what sense does this thought have the property of being in Asia? Alternatively, if it does not actually have this property, then what does it mean to say this thought has a relevant likeness to the facts of the matter? When I learned the other day that Phil Lesh had died, was there something dead about my thought? Or there is this: "beta decay produces neutrinos." Does the neutrino component of this thought respond to the weak force? Furthermore, there was a time when neutrinos were postulated but had not yet been discovered - and then, when it was, did thoughts about neutrinos suddenly gain a likeness to neutrinos themselves?
What's more, Bob's thought about oak trees, as you have presented it, is a sentence, rather than an ineffable feeling that an oak tree is made of wood - i.e., it is a sequence of words conforming to a grammar. Do the words "tree" and "wood" have a likeness to the things they denote? One can easily doubt it on the grounds that words seem to be arbitrary: except for the relatively few onomatopoeia (and not strongly even then), it seems that words are not constrained to be in any way like the reality they express: for example, when physicists named the charm quark, were they obliged to pick the word 'charm' in order to ensure that propositions containing it had the necessary likeness to reality? Of course not! The problem for you here is multiplied by the fact that there are a great many different languages, with wildly varying sounds at the level of both words and grammars, yet despite all this, we obviously are not in the situation you claim would come to pass if your thesis fails: we have not lost the possibility of rightness, and all thought has not become meaningless.
Perhaps you think that this likeness is not to be found in individual words, but only in propositions as a whole - but this does not do away with the need to explain how this likeness comes about. Furthermore, this position is, ipso facto, one in which the likeness is emergent, so, in constructing an explanation along these lines, you will have to overcome your struggles with the concept of emergence and embrace it.
There are other claims in the first section that are moot in the light of the clarifications above, so there is no need for me to address them here. This also applies to quite a few statements in section 2, but there are a few that give pause. For example, I am curious as to what you suppose follows from your statement that "A brain state is one result of a particular causal chain, but there is nothing special about it on that account." What does being special have anything to do with whether it might be part of an answer to our central question? I can see that things like falsifiability and consistency matter, but being special...? In fact, not being special seems to me to be a virtue: the chain-of-causality story is straightforward, has clear premises, does not require the acceptance of propositions for which no justification is given, and does not stray far from uncontroversial facts about minds and communication.
I believe your objection "more specifically, a causal chain cannot in itself be 'right' or 'wrong'. It is possible that a causal chain will cause Bob to think a tree is made of wood, and cause Bill to think it's made of copper. This is not enough for Bob to be right and Bill wrong, because the chain has no connection to correct-ness." has been thoroughly addressed above: in short, it is the flow of information originating in the real world that makes it possible for thoughts about the real world to be correct.
You go on to say "It can't give us reason for saying "Bob's thoughts are like reality, and Bill's are not"."My first response to that is until you can say what the similarity is between Bob's thought and reality, and give us a decision procedure by which we can tell that Bob's thought is similar to reality while Bill's is not, then even if we accepted your thesis, we would still not have a reason for saying "Bob's thoughts are like reality, and Bill's are not", because we would not have enough information to make the call.
I propose that the way we get a reason for deciding whether a proposition is realistic is that we make use of information flowing on the chain of causality to draw our own conclusions. I get the impression that you feel this is not good enough, but the thing is we are in no better position than are Bob and Bill: the best we can do is to make the call on the basis of what we already believe to be true, or what we come to believe is true as a result of investigations into what information we have, whether it can reasonably be regarded as factual, what other information might be available and what effect it could have on our decision (for example, we might initially side with Bill, but change our minds after Bob explains to us why he thinks the rock is just pyrite. This is another example of a causal chain bringing about true thoughts, and it is, roughly speaking, the sort of process that Bayesian reasoning seeks to formalize.)
The truth of any proposition about reality is not determined by whether or how we can determine that it is correct; it is either true or false from the get-go. The Collatz conjecture, for example, is either true or false now, and has been at least since it was first conceived of (mathematical Platonists presumably think it has always been either true or false) - the problem is just that we do not know which it is.
There is no oracle that reliably sorts all propositions into true or false buckets; Gödel, Turing et.al. hammered the nails into that coffin, and it is obvious that we don't need an oracle in order to avoid the dire situation you claim would follow from your thesis being false (plus, if this oracle was an essential tool in making sense of the world, it would already have been used to find out if the Collatz and other conjectures are true or false.) It is not, therefore, a problem for chain-of-causality that it cannot do so, and if you think it is, it would be inconsistent for you to assert that it is not also a problem for your thesis.
You confuse imperfect definition with complete indefinition. If Bob says that he will meet Bill at the "foot of the mountain", that provides meaningful definition about Bob's future location. It is not complete: it's not sufficient to provide GPS coordinates, and it leads open a range of possibilites (which trail? for example). But it is sufficient to convey some meaning, and equally to convey some meaning about where Bob will definitely not be: the summit of the mountain, for example, or half way up the mountain, or Times Square, etc etc. Bob's statement therefore provides definition; it defines; it draws lines around what he does and doesn't mean. It is not complete: further definition is possible. But its incompleteness does not negate the definition that it does provide.
If I said for the sake of argument "I can't describe this likeness in full detail, and I think it's impossible to do so even in theory, but nonetheless I know that some sort of likeness between thought and reality is necessary for thought to be valid: thought and reality cannot be completely unlike", that would be meaningful as far as it goes. It would be sufficient to define my claim to a degree, and would be opposed to certain contradictory claims.
Now you show you have some idea of what "likeness" means in your response. In particular, your rhetorical flourishes about acorns, genetic signatures, death, and neutrinos, and how thoughts cannot be like their objects in the sense that they're from acorns, have genes, etc, show that some sort of definition has got across. You have some grasp of what likeness means. This is not surprising. Often we use words like "be", "thing", "fact" and "like" where the complete definitions may not be known, but the words and concepts nonetheless contain meaning. That doesn't mean we shouldn't seek more detail and greater clarity in our concepts -- we most certainly should. But it does mean that not being able to thoroughly define a word precludes its conveying meaning. This is especially true for common, everyday words such as "like". We use the word all the time; perhaps we can't define it, but we use it meaningfully nonetheless.
My claim above was very limited: that a true thought is, in some sense, like its object. It was a limited claim, using a definition of 'like' which, while incomplete, is enough to convey some meaning. Precisely how a thought and its object are alike is one thing, but that they are alike is something else. We could theoretically know that the latter must be true while knowing nothing whatsoever of the former. (To be clear, this isn't my position -- my position is basically Aristotelian realism -- but for the sake of argument, it could theoretically be true.) My claim that thought and object must be alike is not undermined by a hypothetical inability to explain how they are alike, assuming I present other reasoning that is sound. Just as someone without knowledge of the earth's rotation could tell you that it was day or night without telling you how it was day or night.
Much of the rest of your reply rests on the chain of causality theory which I address in my other post[0]. In short: a cause cannot explain truth in the mind, because any given cause faces the same question that the mind does about how it can be true, so unless you are going to attribute the cause's truth to its cause, and so regress into infinity, you need to find another explanation.
You claim that section 1 of [1] is moot. The first argument in support of this claim, that 'likeness' is too vague to mean anything, has failed. It does not get you off the hook to show that my argument -- that it's impossible for a thought to be both a) true and b) entirely unlike the reality it purports to be about -- is invalid.
More to follow on your other points when I get a minute.
I only recently noticed that you are replying to the parts of my post (split up only because of the limit on the size of comments) directly under each one. If continued, I think this would rapidly become difficult to follow, So I will respond at wherever the bottom of this thread has reached at the time. I will also try hard to keep comments within the size limit.
Moving on: "That someone has been caused to think something doesn't mean he has a reason for thinking something." True enough, and nothing in my position either implies or is predicated on the assumption that they would. On the other hand, in cases like this, there is a reason that they had the thought, namely whatever it was that caused the thought. I bring this up because I am wondering whether there is some unwarranted conflation going on between these two different uses of 'reason'. If not, could you explain more fully the significance you see in this comment?
Next: ”The materialist view of the mind closes off any other way in which likeness can be achieved, because (if it's consistent) it postulates that brain states, ultimately reducible to fundamental particles, are all that objectively exist." If, by likeness, you mean some correspondence between a thought about the world and the world as it is, then information flow along causal chains might do that, and you have not said anything which shows that it cannot. On the other hand, it is not necessary to show that this must happen, as chain-of-causality provides a plausible answer to the central question without requiring any particular likeness.
Another problem with this statement is that, as it stands, the clause following the 'because' does not appear to explain or justify the clause preceding it. If you think it does, please explain.
As I write this, I see there might be yet another problem over what 'any other way' in the conclusion is referring to - it appears to be 'a chain' from the preceding sentence, presumably a chain of causality. Did you intend your conclusion to be ' the materialist view of the mind closes off any way, other than a chain of causality, in which likeness can be achieved?' If it is, I do not discern what this is intended to refute.
Regardless, this is a metaphysical claim. I prefer to avoid using such things, as they tend to take the form of intellectual overreach into areas where nothing definite can be said. We can approach the question of whether the mind is a physical phenomenon without metaphysics, just as we can do the same with the question of whether the weather is a physical phenomenon.
”You claim "an understanding of causality may potentially lead us to being able to say... in what way thoughts are similar to reality", but you offer no details...” Well, there has been no pressing need for me to do so, as chain-of-causality offers an answer to the central question without involving similarity in any way, but I will happily offer a deal - you say specifically what sort of similarity you think you need, and I will see if I can explain or accommodate it within chain-of-causality.
In addition, I can’t let this particular statement go without noting the irony of you chiding me for not providing details!
"... I deny this is so -- causality can't rescue your position; it can't make there be some like-ness that is somehow both material and yet does not involve arrangements of atoms that are similar, which we've already ruled out." Frankly, I have no idea what you are saying here, but whatever it was, I suspect that it is moot now that I have clarified my position. If you think it is still an issue, could you provide more details?
Finally, I don't think there's anything to say about the conclusion - obviously, I'm not persuaded that it is correct, for all the reasons above. There is, however, one more thing that I want to go back to, as it pertains to this discussion as a whole. You have acknowledged that your claim is very limited, in that you are not making any claim as to what this likeness may be like. One of the consequences of it being limited in this way is that no conclusion of your arguments can rise to the level of being taken for a fact - a justified true belief - until you can say enough, about what it means to say that thoughts have a likeness to reality, for that premise to be regarded as justified (to be clear, this is a necessary but not sufficient condition.) You cannot avoid critical analysis of your thesis by not making affirmative statements about what it means, as the absence of such claims is one of the bigger problems with it. If you remain aloof about this, anyone evaluating your claim on its merits would be fully justified in being equally aloof about whether your argument is sound.
No problem - I'm afraid my posts are longer than they could have been with more thorough editing.
If I had spent more time on it, I might have noticed that in your reply upthread to thephyber, you had written "I'm obviously talking about the concepts we use to think about reality, not about the words we use to describe it." You are entitled to have some fun pointing out that you had already anticipated the paragraph in which I bring up the arbitrariness of language.
That is not to say, however, that there is nothing to see here. We represent, communicate and reason about concepts, including concepts about reality and the real world, with languages that are arbitrary in their syntax and grammar. In addition, large swaths of factual knowledge about the real world can be learned through language alone (for example, it is the only way that I have come to know anything about atomic and subatomic physics). Given these facts, a rational person is entirely justified in doubting your claim that neither arrangements of atoms, nor anything else physical, are capable of having (or giving to concepts) the likeness to reality that your argument is predicated on.
On reflecting on all you have said in this thread here, I have come to see that there is an argument to settle this issue once and for all. It goes like this:
1: If there is no way to distinguish true thoughts from false ones, all thoughts become meaningless.
2: Not all thoughts are meaningless.
3: There is a way to distinguish true thoughts from false ones (from 1 and 2.)
4: The only way to distinguish true thoughts from all others is if there is a correspondence between the thought and the reality.
5: There is a correspondence between true thoughts and reality (from 3 and 4.)
6. Nothing immaterial corresponds to reality.
7. Anything not immaterial is material (from the law of the excluded middle.)
Conclusion: True thoughts must be material (from 5, 6 and 7.)
Far from adding any specificity to what you mean by likeness, your Dec. 12 post [1] continues to avoid doing so. This seems very odd, as one hallmark of true theories is that the more one can say about them, the more strongly justified they appear (I suppose, under your thesis, you would say they become more like reality?) Why would you pass up on multiple opportunities to make your thesis as strong as you can? Or has it already reached that point? The direction of this discussion suggests the latter is the case - but you still have an opportunity to turn that around.
Your 'meet at the foot of the mountain' analogy falls flat, as no example of a situation where there is sufficient information does anything to establish that, in a different case, there is sufficient information.
The reason why what you have said so far is inadequate is that you have made a very strong assertion ("materialism makes rational thought impossible, and is therefore false" [2]) which you say follows from your claim that true thoughts have some sort of likeness to reality, but you have not offered any reason for a reasonable skeptic to think that your assertion states a fact - i.e. a justified true belief. As it stands, it does not meet even the 'justified' criterion. The fact that you have said literally next to nothing about how thoughts are like reality is just one of the things standing in the way of this assertion having any justification, though it is the one that we come to first, as the other big, so-far unjustified leap - to your anti-materialist conclusion - is predicated on it.
"Now you show you have some idea of what 'likeness' means in your response" - indeed, I have an idea of how one could say that true thoughts are like the reality they are about, and, in fact, I wrote "personally, I do not suppose that one could think meaningfully about reality without there being a correspondence, at some more-or-less abstract level, between the thoughts and the real world, and for all I know from what you have said about it, that may or may not be what you mean when you say 'similarity' or 'likeness'." [3] I do not know whether it is anything like what you mean, because you have been so opaque about it.
You could certainly say that my correspondence is no more specific than your likeness - and you would be right - but that is not a problem for what I am saying, because, once again, I am not claiming anything that is predicated on it.
Contrary to what you say here, my position is not dependent on whether my position on the 'central question' that you posed in the beginning (what is it that makes a thought be one about reality? ) is actually correct: I believe that information flow from the real world via chains of causality is sufficient to explain why true thoughts reflect the world as it is, but even if this is completely false, it would not mean that your thesis has been justified: it has to stand up on its own merits.
Consequently, I do not have to say anything more about chain-of-causality, but I am not averse to scrutinizing it, so I am happy to take on the infinite regress issue and show that it is not a problem. For example, you wrote "someone without knowledge of the earth's rotation could tell you that it was day or night without telling you how it was day or night", and that is true enough, if they could see daylight, or hear the sounds characteristic of day- or nighttime activity, or read a clock (or from their body's circadian rhythm, absent any better information, but that does not work for long.) In all these cases, the thought arises from information flow along a chain of causality that does not, in any circumstance, need to be followed back any further than the rotation of the Earth, so there is no infinite regress. Furthermore, there is no need for the person to know about the rotation of the Earth, as that rotation causes corresponding phenomena, which in turn feed information to our subject - information which allows them to deduce the fact of it being day or night so long as they have some knowledge about how to differentiate the two (the chain is there even for clock-reading and circadian rhythms, which are synchronized to the Earth's rotation.)
You seem to have come to your infinite regress conclusion because I occasionally used phrases such as 'factual information'. That is just a shortcut for referring to information caused by the actual state of the world, either directly or through a process of sound reasoning from direct information, and I should have been clear about that.
We can continue with this line of thought: a person might wake up, look at a clock reading, say, 13:00, and think it is daytime - but in one case the clock is working correctly, and in the other, it is broken, and it is actually midnight. This is no problem for CHOC, as in the latter case, there is no causal chain from the Earth's rotation to the clock's reading. According to your thesis, this thought is like reality in the first scenario, but unlike reality in the second - yet it seems to be the case (or at least it plausibly is) that the thoughts in the two scenarios are identical (they can certainly be expressed by the same proposition.) From this consideration, it seems that likeness to reality is not an intrinsic property of thoughts, but merely a correspondence between them and reality - and mere correspondence does not seem to be a problem for materialism, at least not without further explanation.
With phrases like "you need to find another explanation" and "it does not get you off the hook to show that my argument ... is invalid", I feel it is necessary for me to repeat what I said earlier about burden-shifting: "in order to show that your argument has failed to make its case, I neither need to show how there can be likeness that is not physical likeness if materialism is true, and nor do I need to show that likeness is not necessary for a thought to be about reality. On the contrary, you have chosen to make a strong claim - essentially that the mind cannot possibly be the result of physical processes [4] - and to sustain that, you need more than arguments grounded in appeals to intuition about how things either must or cannot be. In particular, anything resembling 'so prove me wrong' would amount to burden-shifting, and while we are about it, the alternative to 'the mind cannot be a physical phenomenon' is not 'the mind must be a physical phenomenon', it is 'the mind might be a physical phenomenon.'"
All of this is probably moot, however, given the sibling comment in which I show, using an argument revealed to me by this discussion, that materialism is correct;)
[4] After I wrote this, you made it quite clear how strong of a claim you are making: "materialism makes rational thought impossible, and is therefore false." [see footnote 2]
Ok, thanks for this latest reply. I thought your 7-point jest syllogism was a sarcastic response to my two most recent comments (made 2-3 days ago) so I didn't bother adding to what I'd already said; so if I seem to have ignored half of what you wrote, that's why.
I agree, let's keep everything here from now on. I will reply to this comment soon.
The 7-step argument for materialism I have presented above is not intended to be sarcasm. I might be guilty of presenting a parody, in that it closely resembles your argument in most respects, but it has a serious purpose - an attempt to focus attention on the need for statements to be sufficiently well-defined and justifiable that a reasonable skeptic could find them persuasive. The challenge it presents you with is to refute it with a non- question-begging, non- burden-shifting response that would not apply, mutatis mutandis, to your own argument.
Well I'll get back properly as soon as I can, tomorrow I hope, but premise 6 of your 7-point sequence is false (or, if you prefer, we don't agree on it). Indeed, it seems question-begging, but this is so obvious that I assume you have something else in mind...
Remember what I said: The challenge it presents you with is to refute it with a non- question-begging, non- burden-shifting response that would not apply, mutatis mutandis, to your own argument - and for that, it would be helpful if you list your premises as I have done. I mentioned a while back that you cannot justify your conclusion by being aloof (or vague, for that matter) about the argument for it.
Note that this nominal counter-argument does not render irrelevant the question of what you mean by 'likeness', and whether it differs from the sort of correspondence that information flow along causal chains can bring about. In fact, if you do not say anything definite, I can simply assert, as a premise, that they are the same thing, and rephrase this nominal counter-argument accordingly.
> Far from adding any specificity to what you mean by likeness, your Dec. 12 post [1] continues to avoid doing so.
Very good.
My "theory", if you must call it that, is Aristotelian moderate realism. A full discussion of what I mean by "likeness" would necessarily invoke concepts from that worldview. So it would therefore involve debating the truth/falsehood of said worldview. I don't want to do that for two reasons: first because it'd take the scope of the discussion far beyond whether thought can be material or not, and time is a big constraining factor. And secondly, we'd just be re-inventing the wheel. You'll find moderate realism ably defended by several authors who I can recommend if you're interested, and no doubt you'll know of your own list of attempted debunkings.
But as a compromise, I can propose the following partial definition: Two objects are alike if they are the same in some respect.
So an apple and a banana are the same in that they are both fruit (and this works even if categorizations of this sort are merely conventional), but different in that one is red and the other yellow.
More formally, we could say that A and B are alike if we can predicate X of both A and B. As a corollary, A and B are entirely un-alike if we cannot predicate anything of both A and B.
If you're good to go with that we can proceed. It would then be necessary to ask
(1) Whether a thought must be like its object (using the definition just given) in order for it to be about its object;
(2) If so, in what manner it must be like its object;
(3) Whether said manner can be material.
I don't think "the same" can be usefully (verbally) defined, since there is a point at which verbal definitions involve defining words whose meaning is more-clear in terms of those whose meaning is less-clear.
> The challenge it presents you with is to refute it with a non- question-begging, non- burden-shifting response that would not apply, mutatis mutandis, to your own argument - and for that, it would be helpful if you list your premises as I have done.
It is possible I misunderstand you, but it doesn't appear to present me with a challenge. Premise 6 is false in any interpretation that could be given it. That is not question-begging, nor is it burden-shifting, and whether this response applies to any aspects of my own argument is precisely what we're debating. Points 1 thru 5 are unobjectionable, assuming some unusual meaning has not been assigned to any of the terms.
Is your point that I'm stating the opposite of premise 6 in my argument without justification?
The latest reason for not saying what you mean by likeness is that you don't want to do what it would take. While I can understand your reluctance to go there, it does not make the problems created by the absence of any specifics about this likeness go away.
You say that doing so would take the scope of the discussion far beyond whether thought can be material or not. This is surprising: this likeness, and claims about what follows from it, are key premises to your argument, and so, surely, establishing what this likeness is and how it leads to your conclusion is central to addressing the question of whether thought can be material or not has been answered by your thesis?
Your assertion that this would be re-inventing the wheel does not seem to fit with your concern about the scope of the ensuing discussion, either - if it's all been worked out already,how come it hasn't been written up already in, say, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, all packaged up and demanding little more of your time than some commentary (it is also implausible that if this wheel has already been invented, philosophers would still be about equally divided over the question - and yet they are.)
As it stands, your claim that the answer is already out there is yet another one made without justification, and any suggestion that skeptics of your bold claim should figure this out for themselves would amount to another form of burden shifting.
Examining your compromise, "two objects are alike if they are the same in some respect" seems to me to be a good definition of 'alike' (better than those in the couple of dictionaries I looked at, IMHO) and likewise, I have little to say about "more formally, we could say that A and B are alike if we can predicate X of both A and B. As a corollary, A and B are entirely un-alike if we cannot predicate anything of both A and B", except that we need some sort of restriction on appropriate predicates (I don't think it would be helpful to say that a horse is like a dogma on account of their English-language names both having five letters.)
With regard to your three questions: there's nothing wrong with 1, though the definition of 'like;' that you have just given is so broad as to give little or any guidance; 2 is both the one I think might be answered by information flow via CHOC and the one you have resolutely avoided addressing (you still have not even said whether or not my CHOC-mediated 'correspondence' is your 'likeness'), and at 3, we can equally ask whether said manner can be immaterial.
You go on to say that you don't think "the same" can be usefully (verbally) defined,which I find surprising, as philosophers seem to use the word 'identical' with great abandon - is that not more or less the same? I might get your point if you said which more-clear and less-clear words you are thinking of here.
After this you seem to abruptly switch topic, leaving me puzzled as to what you are driving at in the six paragraphs beginning "But, as a compromise..." Is there something missing? It feels as if there is.
The point of the alternative argument is not so much that you are stating the opposite of premise 6 (arguably what you have said, in various ways, is not quite the opposite), but that both of them depend on leaps of faith for which no justification has been given.
One other thing I am still curious about is whether your likeness is intrinsic to thoughts (I gave my reasons for doubting it could be in my first Dec. 14 post, beginning "We can continue with this line of thought...")
I have been thinking more about the section that I felt was incomplete: are you saying that 1) as you don't think 'the same' can be usefully (verbally) defined, and 2) as you have defined 'alike' as essentially 'the same in some respects, but not all', then 'alike' itself cannot be (verbally) defined? If so, then that seems to add to the difficulties in accepting your argument as sound.
I also do not get the significance of 'verbally' in parentheses. Are you suggesting there is another way to define sameness, and if so, what is it, and why not use it here?
I think this conversation has reached its end. The requisite goodwill appears to be lacking. We'll agree to disagree: you leave me with my Aristotelianism, and I'll leave you with what I think is your stated position that your thoughts don't need to bear any resemblance to reality for them to be real.
Well, that's too bad, as I had come to look forward to these exchanges in much the same way that my wife anticipates the Times crosswords - i.e. as a challenging but ultimately inconsequential mental exercise (I say inconsequential because this sort of debating shows no sign of solving the puzzle of what minds are.)
It seems to me to be an unfortunate choice for you to retire with a somewhat serious, yet passively-voiced, allegation, but if that is how you want to present yourself, then so be it, and people can make of it what they will. Best wishes to you!
> and I'll leave you with what I think is your stated position that your thoughts don't need to bear any resemblance to reality for them to be real.
Just for the record, I will point out something I wrote in the very post you are replying to: in response to your question "in what manner must [a thought] be like its object", I wrote "[this question] is both the one I think might be answered by information flow via CHOC and the one you have resolutely avoided addressing (you still have not even said whether or not my CHOC-mediated 'correspondence' is your 'likeness')."
As you have repeatedly refused to address the question of whether it is what you mean, I will just say this: you have not shown that anything more is needed in the way of likeness in order for someone to have true thoughts.
Why are you avoiding this issue? Pretending I haven't answered your question is not helping you.
Having (I hope) clarified these matters, let's move on to the argument as set out in your numbered sections:
A thought can be right or wrong, but right-ness implies likeness to reality, while wrong-ness implies un-likeness. To illustrate: suppose Bob has a thought about a tree. Let's say it's "this oak tree is made of wood". Now suppose his friend Bill thinks "this oak tree is made of copper". I take it we can premise that Bob is right and Bill is wrong. But for our premise to be true, their thoughts must be compared to the tree itself. There is no other way to judge their thoughts' right-ness or wrong-ness."
The last sentence here is the first occasion in your latest post where you make a sweeping claim without offering any justification for it to be accepted. When you construct an argument, you can use, as a premise, any statement that is in the form of a proposition, but for it to be a sound argument, you have to show that it is a fact, and in epistemology and elsewhere, the generally-accepted basis for regarding a premise as being factual is the JTB criterion: it states a justified, true belief. Your say-so does not amount to either verification of the claim as being factual or justification for thinking it is.
The first problem in attempting to verify this premise is that you have not given the slightest explanation of what it means to say a thought is like reality. What would it mean to say that Bob's thought of an oak tree is like an actual oak tree? Does it grow from an acorn? Does it have the genetic signature that is shared by oak trees? These are both facts about them that might be the content of thoughts - indeed, they are right now, as you read this!
It gets even more problematic when we move on to a broader range of propositions. Take the claim "the highest mountain in the world is in Asia." In what sense does this thought have the property of being in Asia? Alternatively, if it does not actually have this property, then what does it mean to say this thought has a relevant likeness to the facts of the matter? When I learned the other day that Phil Lesh had died, was there something dead about my thought? Or there is this: "beta decay produces neutrinos." Does the neutrino component of this thought respond to the weak force? Furthermore, there was a time when neutrinos were postulated but had not yet been discovered - and then, when it was, did thoughts about neutrinos suddenly gain a likeness to neutrinos themselves?
What's more, Bob's thought about oak trees, as you have presented it, is a sentence, rather than an ineffable feeling that an oak tree is made of wood - i.e., it is a sequence of words conforming to a grammar. Do the words "tree" and "wood" have a likeness to the things they denote? One can easily doubt it on the grounds that words seem to be arbitrary: except for the relatively few onomatopoeia (and not strongly even then), it seems that words are not constrained to be in any way like the reality they express: for example, when physicists named the charm quark, were they obliged to pick the word 'charm' in order to ensure that propositions containing it had the necessary likeness to reality? Of course not! The problem for you here is multiplied by the fact that there are a great many different languages, with wildly varying sounds at the level of both words and grammars, yet despite all this, we obviously are not in the situation you claim would come to pass if your thesis fails: we have not lost the possibility of rightness, and all thought has not become meaningless.
Perhaps you think that this likeness is not to be found in individual words, but only in propositions as a whole - but this does not do away with the need to explain how this likeness comes about. Furthermore, this position is, ipso facto, one in which the likeness is emergent, so, in constructing an explanation along these lines, you will have to overcome your struggles with the concept of emergence and embrace it.
There are other claims in the first section that are moot in the light of the clarifications above, so there is no need for me to address them here. This also applies to quite a few statements in section 2, but there are a few that give pause. For example, I am curious as to what you suppose follows from your statement that "A brain state is one result of a particular causal chain, but there is nothing special about it on that account." What does being special have anything to do with whether it might be part of an answer to our central question? I can see that things like falsifiability and consistency matter, but being special...? In fact, not being special seems to me to be a virtue: the chain-of-causality story is straightforward, has clear premises, does not require the acceptance of propositions for which no justification is given, and does not stray far from uncontroversial facts about minds and communication.
I believe your objection "more specifically, a causal chain cannot in itself be 'right' or 'wrong'. It is possible that a causal chain will cause Bob to think a tree is made of wood, and cause Bill to think it's made of copper. This is not enough for Bob to be right and Bill wrong, because the chain has no connection to correct-ness." has been thoroughly addressed above: in short, it is the flow of information originating in the real world that makes it possible for thoughts about the real world to be correct.
You go on to say "It can't give us reason for saying "Bob's thoughts are like reality, and Bill's are not"."My first response to that is until you can say what the similarity is between Bob's thought and reality, and give us a decision procedure by which we can tell that Bob's thought is similar to reality while Bill's is not, then even if we accepted your thesis, we would still not have a reason for saying "Bob's thoughts are like reality, and Bill's are not", because we would not have enough information to make the call.
I propose that the way we get a reason for deciding whether a proposition is realistic is that we make use of information flowing on the chain of causality to draw our own conclusions. I get the impression that you feel this is not good enough, but the thing is we are in no better position than are Bob and Bill: the best we can do is to make the call on the basis of what we already believe to be true, or what we come to believe is true as a result of investigations into what information we have, whether it can reasonably be regarded as factual, what other information might be available and what effect it could have on our decision (for example, we might initially side with Bill, but change our minds after Bob explains to us why he thinks the rock is just pyrite. This is another example of a causal chain bringing about true thoughts, and it is, roughly speaking, the sort of process that Bayesian reasoning seeks to formalize.)
The truth of any proposition about reality is not determined by whether or how we can determine that it is correct; it is either true or false from the get-go. The Collatz conjecture, for example, is either true or false now, and has been at least since it was first conceived of (mathematical Platonists presumably think it has always been either true or false) - the problem is just that we do not know which it is.
There is no oracle that reliably sorts all propositions into true or false buckets; Gödel, Turing et.al. hammered the nails into that coffin, and it is obvious that we don't need an oracle in order to avoid the dire situation you claim would follow from your thesis being false (plus, if this oracle was an essential tool in making sense of the world, it would already have been used to find out if the Collatz and other conjectures are true or false.) It is not, therefore, a problem for chain-of-causality that it cannot do so, and if you think it is, it would be inconsistent for you to assert that it is not also a problem for your thesis.
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