Toomas Karmo: Part L: Perception, Action, and "Subjectivity"

Quality assessment:

On the 5-point scale current in Estonia, and surely in nearby nations, and familiar to observers of the academic arrangements of the late, unlamented, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (applying the easy and lax standards Kmo deploys in his grubby imaginary "Aleksandr Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut" (the "Alexandr Stepanovitch Popov Institute of Heroic Radio") and his  grubby imaginary "Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsalitsliku matemaatika instituut" (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute of Socialist Mathematics") - where, on the lax and easy grading philosophy of the twin Institutes, 1/5 is "epic fail", 2/5 is "failure not so disastrous as to be epic", 3/5 is "mediocre pass", 4/5 is "good", and 5/5 is "excellent"): 4/5. Justification: There was enough time to write out the  necessary points to reasonable length.


Revision history:

All times in these blog "revision histories" are stated in UTC (Universal Coordinated Time/ Temps Universel Coordoné,  a precisification of the old GMT, or "Greenwich Mean Time"), in the ISO-prescribed YYYYMMDDThhmmZ timestamping format. UTC currently leads Toronto civil time by 4 hours and currently lags Tallinn civil time by 3 hours.
 

• 20170905T1709Z/version 2.1.0: Kmo expanded the paragraph which begins The finding-it-yucky which will assail many /.../, adding two sentences to make his argument clearer. - Kmo added an admission of fault to the paragraph starting As in "Part J", so again tonight I stress that intersubjective comparisons /.../ - stating that he has been guilty in a "Part J" throw-away remark (tersely envisaging some intersubjective comparisons) of naive language that will later require partial retraction. - Kmo reserved the right to make tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours as here-undocumented versions 2.1.1, 2.1.2, 2.1.3, ... . 
• 20170905T0143Z/version 2.0.0: Kmo finished converting his point-form outline into coherent full-sentences prose. He reserved the right to make tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented versions 2.0.1, 2.0.2, 2.0.3, ... . 
• 20170905T0001Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo had time to upload a moderately polished point-form outline. He hoped to finish converting this into coherent full-sentences prose by 20170905T0401Z.

 

[CAUTION: A bug in the blogger server-side software has in some past months shown a propensity to insert inappropriate whitespace at some points in some of my posted essays. If a screen seems to end in empty space, keep scrolling down. The end of the posting is not reached until the usual blogger "Posted by Toomas (Tom) Karmo at" appears. - The blogger software has also shown a propensity, at any rate when coupled with my erstwhile, out-of-date, Web-authoring uploading browser, to generate HTML that gets formatted in different ways on different downloading browsers. Some downloading browsers have sometimes perhaps not correctly read in the entirety of the "Cascading Style Sheets" (CSS) which on all ordinary Web servers control the browser placement of margins, sidebars, and the like. If you suspect CSS problems in your particular browser, be patient: it is probable that while some content has been shoved into some odd place (for instance, down to the bottom of your browser, where it ought to appear in the right-hand margin), all the server content has been pushed down into your browser in some place or other. - Finally, there may be blogger vagaries, outside my control, in font sizing or interlinear spacing or right-margin justification. - Anyone inclined to help with trouble-shooting, or to offer other kinds of technical advice, is welcome to write me via Toomas.Karmo@gmail.com.] 

 I ended last week by setting a piece of homework:

 /.../ tonight's posting will have to end with a homework problem. Consider a distant parallel to the Sick and the Pain, respectively at the intersection of First Avenue with A Street and the intersection of First Avenue with B Street (as set up in "Part C", from 2017-05-29 or 2017-05-30). Suppose we find emotional disturbances to sweep through the human population of Europe, in ways that can be plotted on a map, even as the weather can be. For some reason or other - the natural thing will be to postulate underlying causal mechanisms, and to hope eventually to uncover them - everyone in the Loire Valley this week is strongly depressed. Next week, the "Depression" moves over to Alsace, and from there out to Germany. The week after that, it has migrated to Poland - now somewhat less intense, and with scattered "Patches of Mellowness" forming near the High Tatras, and with a "Mild Euphoria" now appearing over Switzerland, evidently on its way down to Italy.

The homework comprises two questions:

• To what extent is it appropriate to "objectify" the Depression, the Patches of Mellowness, and the Euphoria Wave, as I already in Part C, on 2017-05-29/2017-05-30 (following a Wittgenstein suggestion) have discussed the "objectifying" of the Pain at First Avenue and A Street and the Sick at First Avenue and B Street?
• To what particular aspect of a previous installment from this present essay is scrutiny of the "Depression", the "Localized Mellows", and the "Southward-Drifting Alpine Euphoria" specially relevant?

My answer to the first of last week's two questions is that there is no logico-semantic obstacle to "objectification", or as we might also call it, "projection" - however alien such objectification or projection might be to current speech habits. Current speech habits are not sacrosanct. Many extensions or modifications to them turn out to deliver clear meanings, and so prove legitimate. We have already noted the admissible neologism "greening", paralleling "hurting" (as when we say, "We see that sunlit grass in greening; we feel the toxic secretions on this leaf in hurting"). We have already, with Wittgenstein, noted the admissible neologism "pain patch", logically paralleling "green patch". (One possible form of speech, from a multitude of legitimate forms, is the following: "As there is a 'Green', a green patch, on this plot of garden soil - chemical analysis reveals it to be chlorophyll, held in chloroplasts within grass stalks - so also there is a Hurt, a pain patch, on this stinging nettle. Chemical analysis reveals the Hurt to be a histamine, held in cunningly fragile hair-like trichomes.") 

Last week's envisaged language of a "Depression" leaving the Loire Valley for Alsace (perhaps, I might add this week, via Champagne-Ardenne and Lorraine) and of "Localized Mellows" forming in the High Tatras, and of a southward-drifting "Euphoria" forming in the Alps, is (I now say, answering the homework question) no different. A projected, or so-to-speak objectified, "Pain" or "Hurt" might turn out to be something familiar in current physical chemistry. In the case of a leaf, it might be a histamine, cunningly dispensed by the rupturing of trichomes. In the case of the Hurt which we have imagined at First Avenue and A Street, it might (as I pointed out in "Part C", from 2017-05-29 or 2017-05-30) be something like a subsonic vibration in the local atmosphere, cunningly generated by a high-volume infrasound loudspeaker horn. Or, alternatively (we explored this in "Part C") the "Hurt" might prove to lack any evident basis in ordinary, baryonic, matter - perhaps therewith impelling people to speculate, in the style of the missing-mass astrophysicists, that some exotic "nonbaryonic entity" inhabits the intersection of First Avenue and A Street. Parallel possibilities arise in the homework problem. It might be the case (1) that last week's "Depression" is some readily ascertained baryonic-matter entity or process (involving, perhaps, a drifting cloud of one of the psychiatrically interesting toxins, such as benzene or xylene). And it might alternatively be the case (2) that the "Depression" gets consigned by its future investigators, in a frustration akin to the current frustration of Dark-Matter astrophysicists, to an exotic realm of nonbaryonic matter. 

We do, admittedly, have to be careful in our labelling, once we "objectify" or "project" onto the European landscape. Suppose that only the physically taller half of the Val-de-Loire population at this moment feels depressed (and only the physically taller half of Champagne-Ardenne a bit later, and so on eastward into Germany and Poland, as the days pass). Suppose that, by contrast, the shorter-stature half feels thirsty, without reporting any significant emotional colouring - or alternatively that they feel some emotion quite different from depression (say, a pleasurable excitement, resembling the nervous inrush from tobacco or black coffee). There then will be no answer to the question "To which segment of the population does this eastward-moving physical reality appear in the way it ought to appear, and to which segment does it appear wrongly?" - no content, in other words, to the question "Which segment of the population is feeling  'ce Truc Bizarre qui se Promène Peu-à-Peu vers l'Est' in the right way, and which segment is feeling it in a distorted way?" 

But nothing here (I continue, now wrapping up my answer to the first of the two homework questions) constitutes an objection to projection, in other words to "objectification". From the standpoint of conceptual architecture, the situation is no different from what was already noted for colours and shapes in "Part G" and "Part H", on 2017-07-10/2017-07-11 and 2017-07-17/2017-07-18. 

As for the second of the two homework questions, my answer is that our present discussion is relevant to my inspection of the "Darren Gloom"/"Dagwood Spume"/"DEFGH" Philosophy-of Causation, and of the "Havid Dume"/"HGFED" Philosophy-of-Other-Minds (in "Part C" and "Part D", on 2017-05-29/2017-05-30 and 2017-06-05/2017-06-06). 

Back on those dates, I wrote that I reject the DEFGH and HGFED analyses. Was I right to reject them? The anti-realist DEFGH regards the idea of one event's "making or not making" another event occur as a mere projection or abstaining-from-projection of a feeling of expectation. In a parallel way, the anti-realist HGFED regards the idea that the robot or animal (for instance, the gesticulating and vocalizing specimen of Homo sapiens currently sitting across the table from us, or again the vinyl-and-solenoids hailed in some Pennsylvania ecclesial circles as Groccor Buastoniensis Loquacissiuimus) is "aware or unaware", is "sentient or nonsentient", is "conscious or somnanbulist", to be a mere projection or abstaining-from-projection. For DEFGH and HGFED, I wrote, "Causal Links" and "Other Minds" are, where asserted-rather-than-denied, "merely projected" from within the observer, as tasting-bad might be projected onto Charlie Chaplin's Reichskanzlei buffet dish.

Is there perhaps, we must now ask, some inconsistency, when we juxtapose what I wrote back then regarding DEFGH and HGFED and what I am writing at present? For (I proceed, answering, and commenting on, my second homework question) am I not combining a rejection of DEFGH and HGFED with a repeated endorsement of "projection" (now, notably, in introducing the Depression, the Patches of Mellow, and the Euphoria Wave)?

But as far as I can see, my position is consistent.

The finding-it-yucky which will assail many, upon finding the Reichskanzlei to be inadvertently daubing strawberries with mustard, can itself, I concede, legitimately be "projected". We can say, in particular, that there is Yuckiness on the Tomanian leader's dessert plate. (The Yuckiness on that particular plate will on a rather straightforward chemical and physiological investigation prove to be something like a combination of acids, sugars, and essential oils.) Any who find strawberries with mustard delectable will be perceiving, via tastebuds, gustatory nerves, and cerebral cortex, that same combination of acids, sugars, and essential oils - even while, I admit, preferring in their own (legitimate) projection-language to say not that Adenoid Hynkel's dessert plate harbours a "Yuck", but instead that it harbours a "Yum". I can deny content to the question "Is it we normal gourmands or, rather, the culinary revisionists, who are right about the taste of the acids, sugars, and essential oils in those mustard-daubed strawberries?" and yet continue affirming, in dissent from DEFGH and HGFED, realism as regards both Causal Connections and Other Minds. The denial of content to the just-posed question is consistent with a realist stance regarding the composition of the colloidal mixture on the dessert plate. I embrace realism regarding the contents of the mixture; I embrace realism in opposition to DEFGH and HGFED; I take the same view in all the subject-matters I have brought up: if anyone at all is in conceptual trouble here, it is DEFGH and HGFED, who oppose realism, rather than those (like me) who endorse it.

Could I be missing something here? Is my position internally inconsistent, in some to-me-elusive way? I am pretty confident that all is well. Nevertheless, I do urge anyone who uncovers, somehow, some problem lurking here to compose an e-mail for Toomas.Karmo@gmail.com, using an appropriate attention-grabbing subject line such as I have some thoughts about your blog.

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Tonight's remarks about the two halves of the Val-de-Loire population, and about the objective-reality-that-some-call-a-Yuck-and-others-a-Yum, parallel a remark about intersubjective comparisons which I hastily threw out in "Part J" (2017-07-31 or 2017-08-01):

You (the Gentle Reader) and I, as two fellow specimens of Homo sapiens, are together seated at the edge of a sunlit lawn. You have no way of knowing whether my greening is the same as your greening, or on the contrary is the same as your, so to speak, "redding". But suppose (I write tonight briefly, almost as a throw-away) that your greening is indeed like my redding, and your redding indeed like my greening. Then there is no content to the question which of us has "accurate colour vision", and which of us has "systematically distorted colour vision".

As in "Part J", so again tonight I stress that intersubjective comparisons raise delicate questions, best postponed until some weeks from now, when we finally approach the end of this (already dauntingly long) multi-part essay. Indeed I have to confess now that my throw-away remark was worded recklessly, in naive terms that are in due course going to require a partial retraction. However, some readers will be helped in orienting themselves this week by my this week repeating (admittedly, in yet another breach of my "Igominy and Humiligation Precept") that my upcoming, official, correctly careful, I-now-presume-late-autumn, discussion of intersubjectivity will constitute an attempt to extract a clear kernel of truth from that opaque oracle who is Wittgenstein - specifically, from Wittgenstein's "Private Language Argument". I believe that some background on this can be had by Googling on the string (with its five words, and its judiciously deployed pair of internal question marks) Wittgenstein "beetle in a box".

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This finishes what I have to write about perception, as a multi-installment amplification of the first of my three philosophical fragments from "Part B" (2017-05-22/2017-05-23). Now it is time to start fleshing out the second fragment. I will do so in a manner suggestive of a clean break, by finishing off this present "Part L", and on this very same evening uploading "Part M".

[This is the end of the present, "Part L", blog posting.]