Although I think this is self-evident, you are almost the first to agree with me on this! I notice you didn’t include “thinking” in the list, but the same logic applies: if it’s conscious I must be perceiving it, so conscious thought must happen through sensations/perceptions/ proprioceptions or whatever we shall call them. This of course feels strange because we are generally not aware of experiencing sensations as we think. I only realized this last summer when I was actually able to see my thought process for a brief little while. Since then I’ve been able to access it more regularly, and I’ve seen and talked to many people who have seen much more (including Einstein, who claimed to think in visual and “muscular” sensations). The sensation-based nature of thought is my No. 1 interest.
This part is hard. I would say that at bottom we access all of these consciously through pure sensation, but what our subconscious does with this, how it processes them and how it feeds them up to our conscious awareness get increasingly into unknown and perhaps even unknowable territory. A few things we do know:
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We can only focus on a few things at once, because we have a very limited short-term memory (STM). I’d wager that STM figures prominently in how we perceive the flow of time.
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We get much faster at tasks with practice. What at first required laborious and careful conscious attention (say, using chopsticks), in time becomes something I can do while devoting nearly all of my attention to a conversation. I recently noticed that I can weave through a dense arrangement of pedestrians on my bike, while on the phone speaking Japanese, with enough mental ticks left over to wonder what people are thinking of me! I think the nature of practice is that, once certain patterns of movement and decision rules for eventualities are set through conscious focus, they eventually “take less and less time” = “slip further and further down into the fuzzy threshold that separates conscious from unconscious.”
My suspicion is that the line between conscious and unconscious is not clean, but in fact is just determined by speed. The faster it happens the more subconscious it is. In some sense I can be conscious of almost any one thing I do when riding a bicycle, if I think to notice, but mostly it just happens way too fast. Rather than say it is below conscious awareness, I would say the sensations are flashing in my mind so fast that I cannot possibly remember them. Since there is a limitation on the number of things we can hold in our STM, it would simply be impossible to hold even a small fraction of all the sensations of the process of riding a bicycle in my STM at any given time. When I am first learning and it takes all my concentration is when I am most aware of those sensations, but I am also most preoccupied with the learning task. So one way or another we hardly ever get to notice the sensations that are our thoughts, racing by.
- I also think we can take hints from psychology, even though we of course cannot rely on it for praxeology. I see no reason why it can’t inform our intuition, though, since that is a crucial part of how we actually come up with good ideas.
Time is something I’ve yet to seriously look into, but I will bet it has something to do with STM, as well as a kind of tagging system in the conscious-subconscious interface for labeling a sensation as (a) a memory, (b) a sensation that feels like it’s actually happening to our physical body right now, (c) a future imagined sensation, (d) a past imagined sensation, etc. For example, in NLP they claim that if you ask people to imagine a future event they will look up-left, and for an imagined past event up-right, for a real past even down-right, etc. (I don’t remember if the directions are correct, and I know different people are supposed to have different internal representational systems). [You can probably torrent Using Your Brain for a Change to get one of the classic NLP books that talks about many different people’s specific mental “tagging” systems. Note: My ideas on this are not from NLP, but I’ve noticed that NLP jives with them.]
I can imagine a pain in my hand, or seeing blue, or smelling watermelon. You can say it’s related to me, but then either that’s a statement made from a third party or “objective” point of view, or I’d have to wonder what we really mean by “relation.” It seems you’re saying that anything can be thought us as standing in relation to something else, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that that relation is inherent in the experience of the sensation itself. This perhaps goes back to dots and connected dots, which is what I PMed you about before. Perhaps you are talking about the connected dots (the model), not the dots themselves.
I’m guessing here by simple perception you do mean “dots” (not as in spatial points, but as in “raw sensory data” prior to applying a theory to make sense of it). It depends on at what level I am thinking of “A chair is in my room.” If I am just thinking “X is in Y” and am not at this precise moment concerned about what X and Y refer to, I might just see a diagram.* Even if the diagram could be used for other things it may still be that that is all that is perceptually present for me. Now I think you are making a slightly different point that, say, a picture of a chair in my room would not be simple because it is made up of visual “pixels” (a scientist might say, photons striking my rods and codes). I haven’t pursued that line of analysis, just because there are some messy issues about how much we really access those photons hitting our eye directly, how much the subconscious filters it, how much we really see and how much we think we see and is just being filled in by our imagination, etc.
*This isn’t as strange as it may sound; it’s just when I am turning my attention only to the “something-is-in-something-ness” aspect of the situation. I think this is what deduction feels like - a formless, mechanical process of basically reading off diagrams, just like how you can read off from the British Isles diagram that Scotland is in the U.K. The modeling side of thinking feels more like intiuting, being creative, having flashes of insight, etc. Logical error feels like what most people describe as “thinking” - a confusing, somewhat frustrating feeling of having to cut through semantic soup to get at actual thoughts rather than conventional fuzzy word-thought blobs.
I really have no idea. I’ve never employed the term myself, and I half-suspect it might just be an aspect of language rather than of experience itself. That would be radical, but I would not be too surprised if something like that were the case.
There and in the PM. It’s just the whole business with the bee and flower connect-the-dots example.
Dots are raw sensory data, and I (my subconscious? my conscious? probably the latter first, then eventually - with practice - the former) connect the dots to make useful predictive models. It’s the so-called “inductive” aspect, although I disown the baggage of that term.
For another example, imagine a girl playing Super Mario Bros. for the first time on a really old TV that is cutting off the top part of the screen that would normally be showing how many lives she has left. She doesn’t know how the game works and doesn’t have the manual, so she has to figure things out for herself. Sometimes she hears a particular noise, but doesn’t know what it means. (Spoiler: The noise is the famous 1-UP noise meaning she got an extra life.) She learns from experience that she has to start over if she dies three times, but soon she notices that whenever she has heard that sound, she doesn’t have to start over after she has died three times, but instead four times. And she later notices that if she hears the noise twice she can generally count on being able to die five times before getting Game Over.
From the perspective of attempting to make sense of what use that noise (raw sensory data; “dots”) could be to her, she might “connect the dots” and form a predictive model that she deems useful to act as if, for instance: “Every time I hear that sound that means I have one more extra life.” So if she hears the 1-UP sound many times and she is eager to advance, she may be more cavalier; but if her model predicts she only has one life left, she may exercise particular caution despite her eagerness to advance, or she may adjust her strategy toward trying to harvest more 1-UP mushrooms. She deems it useful to act in accordance with this model, which is constantly being evidenced as being a more and more accurate predictor of her future sensations, hence more useful.
She doesn’t ever really know what the sound means; it could actually mean something like, “You just gained an extra life if there are no pipes on the screen right now; otherwise it means nothing.” It could mean that, but by Occam’s razor - which I think is a natural tendency people generally follow in their modeling unless prompted otherwise by ideology, etc. - it wouldn’t be the most efficient theory to posit until at least one data point contradicted the existing model. Make sense? I hope the context of video games, since praxeology also has to apply in it, can help us throw off some of the biases we might otherwise have in discussing human action.
Actually this a great example, because in referring to the things scaling up, that is, that we should be able to derive the macro-scale results - in principle - from the micro-scale ones, you are positing that the physical world behaves essentially like an idealized mathematical model. (Or at least a theory that is tantamount to the same.) In comprehending the physical reactions that take place, I of course will not be seeing just a video of water boiling. I will be seeing the thought process, however fleetingly, that I must see (and/or feel, hear, smell, taste) in order to consciously be aware of my assumptions about the physical world and my deductions on those assumptions as applied to this particular case. If anything, it would be more like a schematic “video” where the assumptions, laws, and data relevant to whatever I was ratiocinating would be represented in abstract, possibly diagrammatic form.
Just take everything you know about the boiling pot of water. Take all the premises about the physical would, about H20, heat, metals, etc., as the starting premises. I contend these can be put into some kind of sensual representation - probably all visual if necessary - perhaps in the same general fashion as with the British Isle’s diagram above, in which I can hash out the necessary deductions just like mathematical proofs can be done with diagrams. We arrive at the macro-level result as a logically necessary conclusion, although the schematic itself will not produce the normal-view video of boiling water, simply because there is much more going on in that normal view. But we can know just what we know from the verbal description (and probably much more): that the water will do all the macro-scale things we associate with the phenomenon of boiling. See https://forum.freecapitalists.org/t/why-modern-theoretical-physics-is-a-lie/14814/34 and also the follow-up post right below it for more clarification.
If this seems impossible, I reply first that we must do this - it is praxeologically necessary if you agree that all conscious experience is sensations. If we only have five sensations, this thought process has to - one way or another - be available to our conscious minds through sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. If this seems the ravings of a mad man, here’s at least some support from outside:
From the book The Philosophical Status of Diagrams, by Mark Greaves
The use of diagrams as permissible parts of formal proofs in logic and geometry encountered stiff resistance in the 20th century. Contemporary definitions of validity in logic are stated purely in terms of relationships between strings of a formal language, and it is now commonplace to observe that a valid geometric proof must not be based on any pictorial properties of an accompanying diagram. Yet diagrams have been a constant part of informal proof practice in both logic and geometry since antiquity, and it is a rare mathematician who can execute a formal proof in plane geometry without one. What accounts for the exclusion of diagrammatic methods from modern proof techniques?
This book explores the reasons why structured graphics have been largely excluded from contemporary formal theories of axiomatic systems. In particular, it traces how several systematic forces in the intellectual history of mathematics and logic drove the adoption of sentential representational styles rather than diagrammatic ones. This book shows the progressive effects of these forces on the evolution of diagram-based systems of inference in logic and geometry, stretching from the Greeks to the early twentieth-century work of David Hilbert. This exploration makes clear that the familiar prejudice against diagrammatic inference in logic and geometry owes more to history and philosophical context than to any technical incompatibility with modern theories of axiomatic systems.
In this way, presuming the world does correspond to the mathematical model-like assumptions you seem to be starting with, the macro-scale effects will present themselves exactly according to the micro-level premises and deductions from them. This is really no more striking than saying that the premises of a mathematical system can allow us to derive high-level theorems by pure deduction; in fact it is essentially the same result, just with the starting premises specified by observation of the physical world instead of human choice of axioms. (That’s exactly what a mathematical model is.)
Visually we can do that, too: . . . . Of course, since people understand that “2” is basically something like " . . " we don’t ever need the dots or similar except for teaching young children. My point is that that is how* I at root comprehend numbers. (*Not that this is the only way I do it, nor that other people necessarily do it that way. At times I think of numbers as having colors, maybe even flavors and smells. All for different purposes. My main thrust here is just to show that thinking of numbers in a purely visual/sensual manner is both possible and quite feasible.)
And if you mean for higher than 4, humans can subitize up to 4, and after that we can utilize a base-5 scheme for pretty fast addition and multiplication. I actually see stacks of five blocks in my head when I add, with one or two pieces missing or added on to the top. So when I add 7 to 29, I see the 29 as “ending” with a stack of 4 blocks (25+4) - one block missing from the top - and then slam the stack of 7 blocks (5+2) against it, one block gets caught on the stack of 4 to make a nice round 5 (a 30) then 6 blocks (5+1) are left over to add on top, yielding 36. All the while I am working with subitizable “moving parts” of 4 or less. This is why I think the base-10 system is fairly comfortable for us, because it breaks down into nice 5-block chunks where only 4 pieces added or subtracted ever have to be considered in the final digit.
Above 4, we are of course using Arabic numerals or whatever, although people trained in abacus probably do see it all in pure “pictures,” since many abacus users have learned to do it all in their heads (they still have abacus dojos in Japan).
Anyway, from that point on we are working with symbols and then only our formal rules of math - which can all, I posit, be diagrammed sensually (if they are valid*) - govern how we consider them, along with some eclectic pieces of intuition we have about certain “key” numbers, like a mental picture of a classroom of 40 kids, or the knowledge that a million dollars would be a “heckuva lot” (likely a bodily sensation; I’ve noticed emotional content is all physical - such as in the chest, back, etc. - for me) of money. So I see no problem for math, and certain diagrammatic systems have already been shown to be rigorous, logically sound, and complete methods of mathematical proofs.
*Quine thread has more discussion on this. There is in fact a strain of mathematics that rejects ideas that are supposed to be “unthinkable,” such as Riemann’s point at infinity, existence proofs, proofs by contradiction, etc. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuitionism
For anything, I can’t necessarily tell you how to put it into sensations - that’s my life’s work! for now at least - but I can tell you that it must be arrangeable in sensations, or else it cannot be consciously thinkable.
Yes, that is necessary - that is what thymology is. Praxeology is concerned with what can be deduced. Thymology with the specific models and data. Instead of saying empirico-deductive above I could have said thymo-praxeologic. The role of praxeology, as I see it, is to elucidate those logical deductions that are deductible from premises which are self-evident to everyone, but whose deductive results are nonetheless hidden from view. You might be wondering why the deductions are hidden from view. You have probably heard philosophers say that philosophy is mainly a negative discipline, where the game is to clear away what is preventing us from seeing the obvious. You may have heard of Max Stirner who had a lot of success simply rejecting every other kind of theory.
Mostly what I think happens is people have a pretty good idea of what is going on when they don’t think too much, but it is not perfect. They have myriad assumptions and misconceptions handed down from their parents and society in general, and through the distorting effect of language itself, so they must think to some degree to reach useful conclusions and discard other “spooks” in order to be better than the average if they are to prosper as thinkers. However, these theories they develop to cope with the broken conceptions and the noise they started with (in the case of philosophers, the main source of the noise is probably other philosophers!) can easily just lead them more off track, although they may be better than nothing.
Praxeology basically says to me, “All right, STOP. Just think about what you know is self-evidently true and can be deduced from there while making no assumptions (other than the self-evident, but since it’s self-evident it perhaps doesn’t count as an assumption - depends on your specific starting points). You might learn something! And oh look, you do! Law of diminishing marginal utility. Thought it wouldn’t work, and would only lead to useless tautologies, didn’t ya? What you didn’t realize was that a tautology is no longer worthless when you realize it’s in direct contradiction to some commonly held theory!”
In one sense it’s a mental hygiene issue. You might have a whole complex of conclusions deduced from certain starting assumptions that are less than self-evident (but still reasonable under the circumstances in which you adopted them), but you may also have more self-evident assumptions whose deductions you have not elaborated as far. If you did undertake to elaborate the deductions of the more self-evident assumptions, you might find the results conflict with the results derived from higher level (less self-evident) assumptions. In such cases, you’ll want to seriously think about rejecting those higher level results. Some would say you must reject them if you want to be logical. That is, for example, if some economic theory works pretty well but is overturned by praxeological insights, it would be consistent to reject it, so long as you are sure you did your praxeology right.
About voice, do you think it’s necessary only because language is linear/sequential?
There are several important things I didn’t get to cover, but rather than add to the length of this - and eat into my sleep time any more - I will leave off here, hoping what I left out won’t distort what I have said too much.