Pass me the salt and Packer, please.

[_zeezrom]

I'm stuck on the sneering comment. What are the chances this stranger was really sneering at poor old Mr. Packer?

[_keithb]

The easiest way to answer Packer:

"I may not be able to describe how salt tastes, but I can fetch some salt for you to taste. Can you do the same with god?"

H.

Putting on my Packer hat, "Yes, if you'll kneel down in prayer with me."

On another note, isn't it somewhat unfair from the prospect of a god to have a person's eternal fate in the afterlife depend somehow on a quantity that nobody even seems able to describe past the vague description, "You just have to feel it to know what it's like."

How do you know you've felt the spirit? How do you know that the Muslims, Scientologists, Catholics, and believers in Voodoo have not felt this spirit, also testifying that their religion is true? How do you know that you've felt the correct spirit and not the spirit of the devil? I have known Baptists that claim every Mormon in the world has been deceived by the devil and that they were really feeling the spirit of the devil testifying of the Mormon church. How does Packer know that didn't happen in his case? Is there some empirical test to examine if someone is feeling the spirit and which spirit they are feeling?

I think that the "feeling the spirit" test for religion fails due to ambiguity.

[_EAllusion]

Darth -

In Packer's "you only think you know what salt tastes like" he is being Socratic. He doesn't think that, but he likens the atheist's criticism of him to that kind of comment. So if the atheist thinks Packer is wrong in saying that, then supposedly the atheist's logic is faulty.

Regarding the realism of the anecdote, it comes across as fake as all get out. But I'm open to the possibility that it is based on an actual conversation that Packer thinks he fairly distilled. Imagine how subgenius recaps his conversations with you here. I'm guessing they only bear a passing resemblance to reality.

[_Tarski]

I think the notion of "direct epistemic access" to real external objects is incoherent, so it seems we are in agreement here.
.

"direct epistemic access" is dubious period and the distinction between internal object and external object breaks down the closer we inspect the situation.
I would say that it is all external but then that is no good because the question would be "external to what?". At the very least, I am denying cartesian dualism and any form of idealism.
When you look at a red ball you are not also looking at some immaterial "redness" in your mind or soul.

[_Tarski]

a brain by itself is no more able to process information than a stone or a lump of wood.

or a computer??


Information is a convenient concept that relates to the structure and complexity of patterns of matter and energy. It isn't a problem for physicalism anymore than is the notion of number or shape.

Information can and does enter a living brain in the same ontologically innocent sense that it enters a computer or telephone line. The important thing is the information that directly relates to the behavior of the human being. The information we are talking about must be used or available for use by the living human being. That is, it must "mean something".

[_Darth J]

Darth -

In Packer's "you only think you know what salt tastes like" he is being Socratic. He doesn't think that, but he likens the atheist's criticism of him to that kind of comment. So if the atheist thinks Packer is wrong in saying that, then supposedly the atheist's logic is faulty.

I know. I am turning it back on Packer.

But I am not sure that the Socratic method is the best way to teach the Gospel, since the teacher may arrive at a place the discussion was not supposed to go.

Regarding the realism of the anecdote, it comes across as fake as all get out. But I'm open to the possibility that it is based on an actual conversation that Packer thinks he fairly distilled. Imagine how subgenius recaps his conversations with you here. I'm guessing they only bear a passing resemblance to reality.

Oh, no, I'm sure Packer told things just as they happened. I bet that atheist was deeply troubled at being confounded by a living apostle of the Lord, and didn't sleep for days afterward.

You know that Mick Jagger story that has also been mentioned in this thread? Every single word of it is true! I'm sure of it!

[_huckelberry]

from blixa post,
"In a test, Himba were able to very quickly point out the standout color below"

I am puzzled. The article linked in your post speaks to learning color catagories and language. It speaks to memory of color and language. The conclusions are to me unsuprising. However with the yellow green squares I cannot make a distinction. I cannot get my mind around a suggestion that language is blinding me. The article says nothing at all about such a large and startling result. I am afraid I am going to suspect that the loss in distinction is occuring prior to my computer screen display instead of a function of my minds processing of visual stimuli. I can mix colors with pigments and perceive all sorts of variations beyond my language distinctions. What I see in the green squares is something a bit more yellow than most permantent green lights, having a bit less red component than the chrome in permanent green light contributes.

[_huckelberry]

DrW has interesting observations about learned patterns and making distinctions. I do think that influence on memory is the large part of difficulty distinguishing these K sounds. I would imaging an English speaker hears the sound ok but does not remember the specific so fails to make a distinction with an event, sound, happening some moments later in time.

It is not hard to find lots of ways that catagories we hold influence what data is understood how. Thinking of the opening post, Mr Packer observes he experiences something that he understands as God. Perhaps he could observe that somebody else not experiencing this does not negate Mr Packers experience. I think that makes some sense. A number of people above have observed in different ways that there is a possibilty that Mr Packer interpretes his experience as God due to prior expectations and the actual cause of the experience may be something other than God. I do not believe that it is possible to be absolutely certain about God
experience so believe it would be clearer if Mr Packer did not claim the sort of absolute knowleged he implies. But claims of absolute knowlege are more inviting to argue with than an observation that spiritual experience contributes to faith.

For most people involved with their relgious faith spiritual experiences are compared to other kind of experiences, compared to others experiences ,and best treated with some respect for the limitations of our understanding of these experiences.

[_Samantabhadra]

a brain by itself is no more able to process information than a stone or a lump of wood.

or a computer??

Or a computer!

I have many, variegated and deep problems with Searle, however his "Chinese Room" thought-experiment is helpful here. Computers do not process information, they manipulate meaningless placeholder-symbols according to pre-defined algorithms. There is no ontological difference (in terms of information-processing capacity) between a computer and an intricate system of water that flows down according to the arrangement and type of channels and gates. (Obviously that is more or less exactly what a computer is, just replace "water" with "electricity" and "gates" with "transistors.")Is a physical system of water flowing through channels and gates "processing information" just because water put into point A that flows through the system to point B happens to yield a result that is intelligible for the human observer? No, of course not, and the only sense in which it is "processing information" is the sense in which the result of the operation is intelligible for the human observer. Computers, stones, and lumps of wood are all insentient. Human beings are sentient. This is a crucial distinction.

I agree 100% with your statement here:

The important thing is the information that directly relates to the behavior of the human being. The information we are talking about must be used or available for use by the living human being. That is, it must "mean something".

"Knowledge" must include a teleological component: knowledge for what. Where I disagree is here:

Information can and does enter a living brain in the same ontologically innocent sense that it enters a computer or telephone line.

Brains do not simply transmit or manipulate "information" in the manner of a computer or telephone line. A functional, living brain is an essential support for cognitive information processing, something of which neither a computer nor a telephone is capable. I agree with you that "information" is a convenient shorthand for referring to the structural complexity of matter-energy, but this only throws the distinction between brains and computers into sharp relief: computers can manipulate information, but they cannot understand it. The "complexity" referred to by "information" may or may not still be there in the absence of a conscious observer, but any amount of information is quite literally meaningless in the absence of such an observer. Hence my statement above. It is absurd to claim that computers "know" the "meaning" of the symbols or information they manipulate, just as it is absurd to claim that telephones "know" the "meaning" of the sounds they transmit, simply because they process an electrostatic signal into a compression wave.

Thus when you say:

Information is a convenient concept that relates to the structure and complexity of patterns of matter and energy. It isn't a problem for physicalism anymore than is the notion of number or shape.

I agree with you: "information" is exactly as problematic for physicalism as "number" and "shape," which is to say that strict physicalism has no way of dealing with any of these.

[_Samantabhadra]

"direct epistemic access" is dubious period and the distinction between internal object and external object breaks down the closer we inspect the situation.

I agree. The takeaway of this for me is that duality as such (especially subject-object duality) is only apparent and not in any sense real.

I would say that it is all external but then that is no good because the question would be "external to what?".

Again, I agree. Past a certain level of analysis there is no point positing a distinction between "inside" and "outside" the mind.

At the very least, I am denying cartesian dualism and any form of idealism. When you look at a red ball you are not also looking at some immaterial "redness" in your mind or soul.

I agree with your conclusions, but not your premises. But that is most likely because I am coming from a Buddhist epistemological paradigm with which you are (most likely) unfamiliar, and which proceeds quite differently from most Western systems.

So, in brief: given that there is no such thing as "direct epistemic access," what we do have "epistemic access" to are cognitive representations, "images" that are produced via the interaction of sense-faculty with object of sensation. From a physicalist perspective, or more generally an ontological paradigm in which external objects are real, what is being represented in consciousness are the causal capacities of individual partless particles acting in concert. Thus when we see red, "what it is" that we are seeing are particles with the causal capacity to produce the judgment "red" in consciousness. But we don't "see" those particles, at least not "directly": what we "see" is our cognitive representation of the causal capacities of those particles, which has been produced (we assume) from those particles. This is where the teleology comes in: our judgment "red" is reliable as knowledge, if and only if the judgment allows us to act effectively (e.g. pick the strawberry, identify the mistress' lipstick).

On the other hand, if a priori all we ever have access to is our cognitive representations, then leaving aside for the moment any ontological problems with idealism, doesn't some form of idealism make sense as an epistemological stance? In other words, given that the only need we have of those particles is that they have the causal capacity to produce the judgment "red" (in Buddhist epistemological literature it's most often "blue" but whatever), then wouldn't anything that has the causal capacity to produce the judgment "red" or "blue" be just as effective as a particle with that capacity?

So, for example, when we are dreaming, our prior habitual tendencies lead us to experiences of "red" and "blue" that are just as phenomenologically valid as waking experiences of "red" and "blue," whether or not we are aware that we are dreaming. There is no "real" "external" particle producing the judgment, but we arrive at that judgment anyway, despite the lack of any "real" "external" basis for the perception. The point being, it is the same cognitive framework in both instances, and we never have any guarantee that it is really-existing external particles (as opposed to habitual tendencies) that are producing our waking perceptual judgments. So why not jettison the idea that we need particles in order to account for perception at all? All we ever have access to are representations anyway, so I would argue that such a stance hews closer to ontological parsimony.