Modern epistemology versus object categories

[Kuznetzova]

The following are posts made on another forum. They didn't go over well with the users there, either due to lack of knowledge of the subject or for some other problems having to do with interpersonal issues. Since this forum is connected to a published magazine, I expect to see some more ... intelligible responses here.

[Kuznetzova]

The world is an undifferentiated collection of substances. There are no boundaries or "objects" out there. Only by means of human language and "what causes pain" and "what is important to me as homo sapien" does this substance of the world get broken into objects.

The lower parts of the human brain deliver to our consciousness not a world of patches of color (what an AI robot would see), but instead performs enormous computing on the retinal scene (which is really only patches of color), and delivers to our consciousness a 3D scene of meaningful objects. Because the human brain does this effortlessly and automatically, many classical thinkers assumed that the world must come prepackaged in meaningful objects, de novo.

It does not. Epistemologists then get into lengthy, heated debates with each other about deer standing behind cardboard cutouts, and people accidentally passing a stopped clock just when it happens to be the time of day that the stopped clock is showing. (A person walks past a large tower with a clock face. The clock is stuck at 9:37. But the person walked by at 9:37 AM, and the clock accidentally showed them the right time. Their belief is a true belief, but is it justified? et cetera et cetera )

These epistemologists are having these debates precisely because they believe (falsely believe) that the outside world is made up of human-laden objects that beam their essence into human brains. This is utterly backwards, and wronger than wrong. The world is made of chemical substances which emit and reflect light, period. It is only inside the brain that the "objectness" of these substances is created. The brain is the one and only source of these object-categories. A realization of this truth destroys all of the above "problems" at their core; centuries of classical epistemology are thrown out the window.


Electromagnetic radiation has a smooth transition among its spectrum of frequencies. The human eye-brain system segregates it into a rainbow of categories.

[Grendel]

The world is an undifferentiated collection of substances. There are no boundaries or "objects" out there. Only by means of human language and "what causes pain" and "what is important to me as homo sapien" does this substance of the world get broken into objects.

If you delete the, pain and what matters to me, bit this is pretty much basic Saussure.

The lower parts of the human brain deliver to our consciousness not a world of patches of color (what an AI robot would see), but instead performs enormous computing on the retinal scene (which is really only patches of color), and delivers to our consciousness a 3D scene of meaningful objects. Because the human brain does this effortlessly and automatically, many classical thinkers assumed that the world must come prepackaged in meaningful objects, de novo.

It does not. Epistemologists then get into lengthy, heated debates with each other about deer standing behind cardboard cutouts, and people accidentally passing a stopped clock just when it happens to be the time of day that the stopped clock is showing. (A person walks past a large tower with a clock face. The clock is stuck at 9:37. But the person walked by at 9:37 AM, and the clock accidentally showed them the right time. Their belief is a true belief, but is it justified? et cetera et cetera )

These epistemologists are having these debates precisely because they believe (falsely believe) that the outside world is made up of human-laden objects that beam their essence into human brains. This is utterly backwards, and wronger than wrong. The world is made of chemical substances which emit and reflect light, period. It is only inside the brain that the "objectness" of these substances is created. The brain is the one and only source of these object-categories. A realization of this truth destroys all of the above "problems" at their core; centuries of classical epistemology are thrown out the window.

Again pretty much basic structuralism. Of course after structuralism along came post-structuralists and they pointed out that just as the structuralists are criticising the idea objects exists outside of language, the structuralists are making the same mistake by saying they exist within language, in fact they don't exist at all.

[The Voice of Time]

Objects obviously exist because we can reason with them. In what form they exist, is another matter.

Things may or may not be prepackaged before or after the conscious processing units, BUT, you couldn't prove it! Because we experience the world exactly AS a sum of objects, a sum of wholes with which we can focus on or ignore. If these wholes didn't exist, we would be completely indifferent to the world as we would be void of relationships with the world.

All physics contains objects, whether we or nature made them doesn't matter as we can't see things we ourselves haven't "made" in our brain and therefore cannot prove the existence of a non-object nature.

Another thought here is that nature seems to focus on things in that certain changes happens to the world and certain changes do not, and so obviously the world treats itself as containing objects as well.

[Kuznetzova]

Objects obviously exist because we can reason with them. In what form they exist, is another matter.

Well at least you admit that the actual physical existence of objects is not the same thing as how humans have named them. I'm going to demonstrate this below with an example.

and so obviously the world treats itself as containing objects as well.

I never denied the existence of substances which interact dynamically by laws. I only denied the existence of objects. The following example will demonstrate what I mean by this.

We can start off by imagining how to get a robot to recognize objects in a room. Consider the room you sit in now. It is awash in modern technological artifacts, (computer, mouse, keyboard, light bulb, electrical wires, etc). I will also assume that the vast majority of objects around you are the result of a "manufacturing process". This is definitely true in the room I occupy now.

One might be led astray into thinking that geometrical categorization is a necessary and sufficient process to recognize these modern artifacts. One could simply train a robot with the so-called "invariant features" of said objects along with their names. One might be seduced into thinking that method is sufficient for general object recognition. I am about to show you that it is not.

We will invite an adult homo sapien from the year 367 B.C. into your room. (Let's do this exercise with a time machine.) Put this ancient person into the room in which you occupy right at this moment. He will see something that appears to be a box with "tubes" running out of the back of it. That is your computer. You could try to explain to this person what a "computer" is, and his eyes would glaze over. There are no poetic metaphors that could ever fully explain what that thing is or what it does to this ancient person. Further , he would have no idea what "wires" are, because he has no understanding of electricity. Where there are wires, his eyes would see "tubes" instead -- and no matter what you tried to explain to him, he would see tubes and tubes only.

The most interesting encounter is when you ask him to identify the lightbulbs in the room. His ancient mind would see only fire. Literally. No matter how much you tried to explain to him that those glowing orbs are not fire, but these electrical artifacts called "lightbulbs" he would never understand it. A similar frustrating exchange would take place when you tried to explain to him your cordless telephone.

You show this ancient person something with glowing LED lights on, showing a non-natural color, (such as pastel green) Let him touch the LED light and see that is is cold to the touch. He has never seen anything like this in his life, and would probably consider it magic. In his ancient language he might refer to it as "magical glowing stones".

So let's look at how well this Ancient Greek person from 367 BC did on our Object-recognition task .
Lightbulb. (answered "fire")
green LED indicator. (answered "magical glowing stone")
Computer wires. (answered "tubes")
Car engine (answered "floating chariot that roars")
plastic (answered "colorful and like tree bark")

He failed miserably on this task. A modern robot trained on "data sets" would do better than him at this recognition task.

But more importantly, why did he fail? He failed because objects all around us are determined by a vast history of cultural and technological knowledge. After this example, I don't think anyone can reasonably deny that the world around us is objectively made up of substances, not objects. Identifying objects is not a matter of visual or kinematic features, but derives only from an understanding of how those objects are used by humans who name them.

We should come full circle now and see what this fact means in the context of problems in epistemology. An implicit assumption is that knowledge is justified when it was received as data to the senses. Imagine a hunter who shoots at a cardboard cutout of a deer. He certainly believed there was a deer there. But in actuality he is only shooting at a cardboard cutout. But now imagine there is a deer standing behind the cutout. He ends up shooting a real, albeit hidden, deer. Can we say that he had knowledge of the real deer? Epistemologists find this problem perplexing precisely because they falsely assume that beliefs in the head correspond in a 1-to-1 fashion with the outside world of substance. They suppose it is "good enough" that he merely held a belief of some deer being there. But the alternative never ever happens. There is never a situation of "actual knowledge" of the "actual deer" because objects categories are created by the brain. The use of "Deer" and "hunter" is suspiciously misleading here since deer are such an ancient object category to humans. If you replaced "Deer" with "iPhone 5" a very plausible argument could be made that certain hunters from the 1920s could never actually know what that thing is (as per above) -- even if their eyes are perceiving it directly.

[The Voice of Time]

You failed to counter my argument that the world treats itself as containing objects. To me Objects are the sum of focuses of information accumulation, or in other words the result of such a sum, and when we talk about it we talk about it showing a display of information put into these wholes which becomes the Objects. The world accumulates information by adding it to itself. Every change occurring in our world must first occur before it can be accumulated by humans as information, and as such the world must first consist of Objects itself before humans can produce their own Objects versioned on the natural Objects.

With no chair there is no chair to objectify, and as such there must exist a proto-chair Object from which we copy (transfer-, fuel and produce-, recycle-) information from.

[Kuznetzova]

To me Objects are the sum of focuses of information accumulation,

I addressed that exact claim six different ways. An ancient person living in Macedonian Greece does not know that the world around him can be harvested and fashioned into an iPhone 5. (or an airplane.. or a microwave oven). His "information accumulation" cannot even fathom these objects in his imagination. Do you suppose then, that airplanes and microwaves ovens exist objectively? They are only an aggregation of substances in our environment (c.r. "manufacturing process"). The fact that these objects require manufacturing to come into existence should be a major hint. Human beings have caused things to come into existence that do not naturally occur, and then set about naming those aggregates which did not previously exist. The naming process refers to phenomenal function, not to accumulated features. (princess phones from 1954 look nothing like iPhones but both perform the "same function").

But this observation should extend naturally to all objects, including apples and clockfaces on campus that are stuck at 9:37 AM. And yes, even deer must be fashioned from protein in the environment. But then it gets worse. Even protein (amino acids) are themselves "fashioned" from hydrocarbons.

[Kuznetzova]

and as such the world must first consist of Objects itself before humans can produce their own Objects versioned on the natural Objects.

Nonsense. This is the entire point. The world only ever existed as substance and only ever exists as substances now. The "object" thing happens only in the brain. Because some primate on a planet needs "objects" for spurious reasons such as:

• 1) Hominid brain needs a simpler model, so it makes one and utilizes it.
• 2) Hominids have needs, pain, desire, and responsibility to reproduce offspring. So hominid projects value onto the "objects" from 1).
• 3) 112,000 years later, hominid logs into philosophy forum to declare the world actually contains objects which beam their "information" magically into brains.

Rest assured, said hominid is projecting his categories onto the world, because he needs to drink water, eat, and keep his body safe from harm. He is not an impartial observer of "information". He has personal needs, and he is gonna reshape the substance to fulfill those needs. I see no particular redacting from the original point.

[The Voice of Time]

The example you are showing only shows that without additional information, the mere physical to-us-here-and-now-Object called Iphone 5, will not be interpreted as we interpret it. It only shows that without the same background of information people will form different versions of the Object. But having roughly the same background we would hold the Object the same, we would enumerate the same information when talking about the Object, we would communicate speaking and talking similarly, pointing towards the same thing, building a working common understanding.

However, people would not interpret and think that the Iphone is a dinosaur, and that's because the natural Object of it doesn't allow such interpretations least the word "dinosaur" has been cultivated to refer to Objects similar of this Iphone, but then that wouldn't be dinosaurs as we, us, call it, and we would call the usage of the word false.

If focuses of information accumulation exist, so does Objects.

[Notvacka]

Of course things do not exist as "things" outside human consciousness. Identifying "things" is something that we do when we try to make sense of the world.

A qoute from another topic:

If objects exist in nature then there must be some natural process or substance that establishes their physical limits. An analogy is the drawing of a line around a cartoon figure. No such process or substance has ever been identified.

Oh yes, it has. It's the process of human consciousness. Humans are part of nature just like everything else. The process of identifying (establishing) objects is a human process, but that doesn't make it anything other than a "natural" process.

The only problem here is that you use the world "nature" as if humans and human behaviour were somehow excluded from it.

[The Voice of Time]

Of course things do not exist as "things" outside human consciousness. Identifying "things" is something that we do when we try to make sense of the world.

Nature puts limits on the objects we make in our mind, and objects are just boundaries carrying information, and as such nature has to make a proto-Object, a proto definition of boundaries, before we can make ours.

[apaosha]

I would describe it like this:

Interaction is a fundamental prerequisite to existence. To affect and be affected allows an observer to ascertain whether a phenomenon can be considered "real". But to be under such a condition of constant interactivity necessitates constant mutability; a phenomenons condition is never static or fixed, rather it is the ongoing (present time as it is always moving) manifestation of past interaction.
The human mind however must freeze perception of this changing phenomenon and consider that frozen perception (already inaccurate because it describes the past condition of what has already changed) as a Thing, a platonic ideal. This Thing is then used in comparison to perception of the phenomenon at later or earlier dates and the assumption is made that these differing perceptions are of wholly different Things which are switched out when a change occurs.... rather than themselves being manifestations in the same ongoing process but at differing times.
This leads to the assumption of a dichotomy between cause-effect, which I have gone into in another thread.
For example: apple->seed->tree
These are stages within the growth process of an apple tree, which an observer has picked out as being distinct and has labeled as wholly different phenomena, such that one can be the cause of the other, the effect.
This is a simplification of reality in order to make it more readily conceivable to the one attempting to understand it. The mistake is to take this simplification as accurate.

[Satyr]

Boundaries are man-made ambiguities making it possible for a mind to generalize/simplify a dynamic process by eliminating all extraneous dimensions (space being a projection of possibility) and (inter)actions which the mind cannot process.
As such, "things" are human abstractions referring to a static mental-model which, in turn, must refer to a dynamic, process.
I say "must" because the degree that a mental model refers to a phenomenon outside its abstractions, via sensual stimuli, determines how real it is.

[Kuznetzova]

Boundaries are man-made ambiguities making it possible for a mind to generalize/simplify a dynamic process by eliminating all extraneous dimensions (space being a projection of possibility) and (inter)actions which the mind cannot process.
As such, "things" are human abstractions referring to a static mental-model which, in turn, must refer to a dynamic, process.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/whitehead/

[Advocate]

[quote=Kuznetzova post_id=117452 time=1346499310 user_id=8093]
The following are posts made on another forum. They didn't go over well with the users there, either due to lack of knowledge of the subject or for some other problems having to do with interpersonal issues. Since this forum is connected to a published magazine, I expect to see some more ... intelligible responses here.
[/quote]

HAH!

OK, i'll go read the content how.