Monday 30 October 2017

Toomas Karmo: Part Q: Philosophy of 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"): 2/5. Justification: Kmo's material this time was much sketchier than usual.


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. Tallinn reverted to its winter time on the last Sunday in October. Toronto is going to revert to its winter time on the first Sunday in November.
  • 20171031T0137Z/version 3.0.0: Kmo brought the work to a state that counted, given its very modest aspirations, as adequately finished. Kmo reserved the right to make minor, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented versions 3.0.1, 3.0.2, 3.0.3, ... . 
  • 20171031T0050Z/version 2.0.0: Kmo made some ongoing improvements of substance. He still hoped to bring this work to an acceptably finished state by 20171031T0201Z.  
  • 20171031T0001Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo had time to upload semi-finished work. He hoped to bring this to an acceptably finished state by 20171031T0201Z.


[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.]



This week I carry on with the "Philosophy of Perception and Action". But instead of answering the homework set last week, I attend to rather urgent housekeeping. The homework answer (I think of it as less urgent) will have to wait until perhaps next week. 

As a precaution against administrative accidents, I really should now write up, and upload to the comparative safety of the blogger-cum-blogspot server, my ideas on Wittengestein's "Private Language Argument", adding also a bit of context. 

And in fact doing this now not only preserves my ideas against accidents, but helps make the overall course of my writing predictable to readers. The more dully predictable my writing becomes, from week to week, the easier it becomes for my persistent little week-to-week handful of readers to digest it.

For the time being, it suffices to upload a mere a "philosophical fragment", detailed enough for those of my readers whom I imagine to be in Departments of Philosophy, without reaching the level of detail appropriate for the overall blog-reading public. I had three such Departmental "fragments" at the end of the posting of 2017-05-22/2017-05-23 (headed "Part B"). Here, then, is a fourth.  (I upload it as my "Part Q". Last week was already "Part P". So this project is dragging on and on, to the point at which I almost fear I might end up having something like a "Part Y", a "Part ZA", and a "Part ZB".)  


__recall the intersubjective comparison from Part H,
  2017-07-17 or 2017-07-18:

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".
 
  __in Part xx, 2017-xx-xx or 2017-xx-xx, I did put on record the necessary
    caveat, stating that this material would have to be looked at again,
    and would at the right juncture 
     have to be made the subject of something like a partial retraction
    __((quote caveat))))
__we are now at that juncture 
__spose u and i are looking at a glass of tomato juice     
  on a sunlit lawn
  __or again at 2 square of cloth, with wooden top-dimpled R
    and wooden top-dimpled Cyrillic Ya
__I have already suggested that no content to qn which
  of us is seeing the tomato juice and the grass "in their true colours"
  (_and similarly for R and Ya: but I will here just stick to
    greening and redding)
__now I make a more subtle point
__I can construct a hypothesis  re your greening and redding
__two COMPETING hyps re yr greening and redding
  (_in "Part H", 2017-07-17/2017-07-18,
    I only had ONE of these, namely the first of the 2 I am about to give) -
  that
  yr greening and redding are the same as my redding and greening,
  and that
  yr greening and redding are the same as my greening and redding
__now I suggest, rather radically,
  that in one sense there is not, and in another sense there is,
  content to the very question which of these
  competing hyps re "what the other person is experiencing" is true
  __this rather radical suggestion
    is what I isolate as the defensible, correctly clear,
    content of that sometimes opaquely explained thing which is
    Ludwig Wittengstein's private-language discussion
    (his puzzling "beetle-in-a-box" discussion)
__re "there is not":                     
  no true choice for a Deity who creates both of us,
  but has not done so yet
  (_no choice whether to "in future make these two subjects mismatch in their
    subjective experiences of grass and tomato juice"
    or to "in future make these two subjects match 
    in their respective subjective experiences")
__re "there is":
  suppose, having created me, the Deity then GOES ON to create you
__from my own standpoint - in the frame of reference
  established by my
  own greening and redding - I can ask, "does the
  greening/redding second of the two
  subjects created by the Deity match
  my redding/greening, or on the contrary match my
  greening/redding?"

****

__this point is admittedly subtle,
  and therefore hard to bring into sharp focus 
__trying as hard as I can here - perhaps not quite successfully - 
  I ask us to compare, as a parallel, a feature of
  the frame-relativity of space 
  (_it is a feature
    common both to an Einsteinean and to a merely Newtonian
    conception of space)                                         
__recall our own Milky Way Galaxy (in which our own
  solar system sits, quite some distance out from the
  centre) and its near twin,
  the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), about 2.5 million light years away 
  (_and easily examined with even the lowest-quality binoculars,
    from even the most light-polluted big-city site)
  __M31 and our own Milky Way Galaxy are falling toward each other,
    thanks to their mutual gravitational attraction
  __they are two large galaxies dominating our "Local Group",
    comprising a couple of dozen galaxies in all
    __the "Local Group" is vanishingly insignificant in the
      overall panorama of observable galaxies, 
      since this panorama comprises 
      perhaps over one hundred thousand million galaxies
  __although the cosmos overall is expanding,
    these two here-mentioned galaxies are too close to each other
    for their motions relative to each other to accurately reflect
    the overall cosmic expansion
    __to appreciate the overall expansion, one would have to look
      beyond the too-tidily-tight "Local Group"
__here, however, we ignore the grand topic of overall cosmic expansion, 
  confining ourselves to the cozy embrace of the Local Group 
__let us call "here" the place in fact presently occupied by
  the Milky Way Galaxy 
  and "there" the place in fact presently
  occupied by the Andromeda Galaxy
__then GIVEN the existence of the Milky Way Galaxy and the
  Andromeda Galaxy, the following is a contentful counterfactual
  supposition:
  * "It is the Andromeda Galaxy which is here, and the Milky Way
    Galaxy which is over there"
  (_call this the Counterfactual Possibility P)
  __indeed there is a physically possible situation in which
    the two galaxies exchange places: if the two galaxies
    were to receive a momentary impulse from
    a pair of short-lived appropriate forces, arranged
    approximately as 
    what classical-mechanics textbooks call a "couple" (forces
    antiparallel, with each force perpendicular to the line joining
    the centres of the two galaxies), then the two galaxies
    would begin - I imagine the forces soon gone - mutual circular
    orbital motion around their common centre of mass 
    (rather than, as in the actual cosmos, merely accelerating
    toward each other) 
    __after a suitably long time, they would actually trade places
  __even without supposing a temporally protracted process of
    exchanging places,
    we can say, "It COULD have been that the Andr Galaxy is
    the one that is here, and that the Milky Way Galaxy is the
    one that is over there"
__and yet suppose the Big Bang had never occurred
__no Deity contemplating what would have happened HAD there been
  a Big Bang could in that no-Bang contingency say,
  "Well, there are two coordinate possibilities:
  on the one hand the possibiliity that Galaxy A is in Place A
  and Galaxy B in Place B, on the other hand the possibility
  that Galaxy A is in Place B, and Galaxy B in Place A"
__the contingency P is itself only contingently existent
  (_requiring, for its existence, the existence of those
    eminently contingent entities which are Galaxy A and Galaxy B)

****

__a further parallel, albeit a looser one, will help
  with this so-difficult topic, 
  albeit to just a modest degree
__cf Toomas Karmo contingent-nonidentity paper from Austr J Phil 1983,  
  and also Lloyd Huberstone reply Austr J Phil 1983
  (_http://aap.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00048408312340991?src=recsys&#.Wfe6nK3SO58)
  __my point in Austr J Phil is that
    although all identities are necessary, some nonidentities
    are contingent
  __"all identities are necessary" in the sense that for every S X,
    and for every S Y, if X is the same S as Y, then not possibly
    X is a distinct S from Y
    (_classic example: Hesperus is the same heavenly body
      (namely Venus) as Phosphorus, 
      and it is not possibly the case that Hesperus
      is a distinct heavenly body from Phosphorus
  __and yet some nonidentities are contingent:
    we can find Ss X and Y such that
    X is a distinct S from Y,
    and such that possibly X is the same S as Y
    (_the distinct twins which could have been born as the same human,
      had the zygote not split early in the pregnancy;
      the distinct tunnels which could have been one and the same
      tunnel, had the two boring machines been steered differently)
  __in such a situation, we have a contingency (that there is just
    one human, or just one tunnel) in which our own actual
    situation would NOT - since all identities are,
    to repeat, necessary - be an available contingency 
    __so we can so-to-speak "inspect a remote contingency" 
      without having our own situation inspectable, as a real contingency, 
      from that remote perspective
    __it is as though a "possible world" w in which X is the same S as Y
      is reachable from our world, whereas our world is NOT from
      the w standpoint a possible world   

****

__this leads me to a further rather radical suggestion re  subjectivity
__consider a situation in which two human animals,
  Alfie and Betty, are jointly positioned at the edge of a sunlit lawn,
  and are both in a state of temporary swoon - as it might be,
  from the temporary pollution of their shared local atmosphere with fumes
  of chloroform 
__let us take it as given in this scenario
  that when the chloroform wears off,
  you and I are going to be seeing the lawn and juice
  in seeing events in the Alfie and Betty bodies - with one of us
  seeing events in the one body, the other of us events in the other
__two competing hypotheses, within the scope of the scenario as so far given: 
  (a) that u are
  going to be seeing grass and juice in seeing events in the Alfie body,
  and I am going to be
  seeing grass and juice in seeing events in the Bettie body;
  (b) that u are
  going to be seeing grass and juice in seeing events in the Betty body,
  and I am
  going to be seeing grass and juice in seeing events in the Alfie body
__I suggest, again rather radically,
  that in one sense there is not,
  and in another sense there is,
  content to the question which of THESE competing hyps is true
__so here again, as already in the case of greening/redding, 
  we have a "in one sense there is not and in another sense there is"  
__re "there is not":
  no true alternative now,
  as the chloroform acts
__re "there is":
  upon the chloroform's wearing off, spose I am seeing grass and juice
  in seeing events in Alfie's body
  __then from my own standpoint - in the frame of reference
    now established by my now seeing events in Alfie's body - I can say,
    "Well, it COULD have gone differently: I COULD have awakened
    to find myself instead seeing Betty-body events"

****

__I want to put the situation for the first of my
  two radical suggestions in a slogan like this:
  "Just as 'hereness' is not a fully real feature of the cosmos,
  but only a feature which gets its reality from the
  given existence of frame-defining things like the Milky Way Galaxy
  and the Andromeda Galaxy,
  so the 'respective subjective qualities'
  of greening and redding are not fully real features of the
  cosmos, but only features whose reality derives from 
  frame-defining things, from actual greenings and reddings"
__I want to put the situation for the second of my
  two radical suggestions in a slogan like this:
  "Just as 'hereness' is not a fully real feature of the cosmos,
  but only a feature which gets its reality from the
  given existence of frame-defining things like the Milky Way Galaxy
  and the Andromeda Galaxy,
  so the 'respective subjective identities of you and me
  vis-a-vis those animals which are Alfie and Betty'
  are not fully real features of the
  cosmos, but only features whose reality derives from 
  frame-defining things, from actual experiencingss-by-me
  and experiencings-by-you"
__can some reader(s) take this idea further,
  making my two slogans clearer than I have here succeeded in making them? 


[This is the end of the current blog posting.]









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