If by empiricist, you mean the kind of scientist who works from physical observation toward the abstract, then you might be right, but them being wrong doesn’t make it the case that we should sit around and act like the whole philosophical bit here is something to be figured out.
You’re not a dude? Sorry about that. I’m saying to the person who says there’s no knowledge before experience, that it’s been settled that there is. That’s all really.
I agree. It’s just, they are so ubiquitous on these forums. I will try to communicate as if it is already settled, though. I think that will be fun and irritating to those ‘behind the times’.
heck, I may be a dude. I just wasn’t sure if I was the dude you were responding to.
Good.
I’d say right. It’s the knowledge that creates the experience, like the experience of a ball and an orange bouncing ball at that. There are millions of frames of knowledge that fill places where memory is stored. The movement of thought acts like a projector ‘reading’ the frames as they pass by. Some knowledge is instilled deeply and become ingrained in perception, while others are difficult to recall. So, more repetition of experience brings about the reinforcement of the knowledge which in turns builds up the foundation of thought. In that process, a separate self that utilizes the thought is also strengthened and becomes a solid point of reference with other things all around it. That’s why I’ve proposed to Amorphos that it is the objects (knowledge of) that creates the subject (projector of the knowledge) and not the subject (by itself void of knowledge) that goes around creating the objects.
It’s the noumena-phenomena argument. The rest is semantics and perspective points.
finishedman
In experiments people shown images thought they were making decisions concerning those images, and yet it was shown that in many cases the decision had already been made in the subconscious. It seems that the entire process including that of the images, is thus occurring irrespective of weather or not the consciousness is joining in or observing at least.
Moreno
See earlier replies and below. Innate knowledge or information and an ability to perceive what that is ~ which is not the same as a priori knowledge.
Smears
It cannot have been already settled, not only do we not know how the brain works no, but much of what we do know has only recently occurred.
My timeline is saying that the knowing is the result of pattern mapping, functional mechanism, perception and memory based recognition. We don’t know something until that process has occurred.
This may be a different topic?…
I’m starting to wonder if knowledge is a quale like sound or colour. Which contradicts my point somewhat, although usually quale only occur as emergent properties when informations are communicating. The knowledge you consciously know are possibly quale? …but still only arise when physical info is presented to the mind by pattern mapping etc.
I mentioned something of this in my ‘three boxes conundrum’ /thread
Info in our minds is not the same as physical info.
_
By subconscious are you referring to the same thing as when I say I did something subconsciously or by force of habit without realization or awareness of it? We all do many things like that.
a prori knowledge obviously exists or we wouldn’t have the concept. to know the the definition is to know it’s true. All husbands are married men. All swans are fowl. all circles are round. those are a prori truths.
finishedman
That may come into it, but many workings of the subconscious are simply that of the instruments of the brain, we don’t know about that in any way.
I too have my doubts about such lines of questioning, the consciousness doesn’t want or need to be pressing buttons for every decision made, so of course minor and automatic decisions are made for us.
Metacrock
The concept could be a description of something assumed, or a false correlation.
Those are discovered truths, you don’t have geometry and logic when you are born.
I think you do have some logic when you’re born. As in, you can at the very least determine if two objects are identical.
There may well be some essential means to understanding objects, pattern matching and stuff like that.
If we go through the development of a foetus, where would knowledge arrive from? Maybe DNA but that itself is patterns, which is part of why I think the brain works in such.
If we are saying that DNA and similar pattern constructs contain knowledge, then I guess there is a priori.
Capacity is surely there and an alacritous one at that. The senses seem to have an independent career of their own sending signals through their respective pathways to the brain. Other parts of the brain have to be functioning and able to participate in pattern recognition as sensory data repeats itself over and over so as to be instilled and imbedded. Hippocampus plays a major role in learning new things.
Once memory and association get their acts together, the idea of a ‘knower’ comes into play when thinking abstractedly about you have acquired in knowledge. Abstraction requires the so called entity that knows. Actually there is no entity there – just the movement of knowledge is.
I think every pattern, or structure is something, and therefore is not what it is not. From that I have knowledge, at the very least that it is what it is and it’s not that it’s not.
The fundamental problem with proving empiricism and disproving rationalism, is that it’s very, very difficult to explain how a blank slate has any organizational capacity. The brain does stuff, because it knows what to do.
that appears to completely agree with my position here.
I would go out on a limb and say a ‘determiner’ has to be established first: the separateness of an ‘entity’ that is doing the determining. Without the separation, everything is all indistinguishable.
Well, does it require an experience to become a determiner? If so, is it that experience that puts the categorizational structure in the mind? Or was it already there?
I think the experience is the final level of organisation, though the brain can probably do everything without consciousness [sleepwalking/zombie]. It has to be able to do everything the consciousness would do with it.
…but I think that consciousness is the final level where quale [the largest patterns on the scaling fractals - let us say] meets the other levels of patterns, and that is where something becomes knowledge. Knowledge which is then stored in the memory as the kind of pattern that when it comes in contact with the consciousness again, remembered, it then becomes knowledge once more.
We can’t talk about mind as if it has an absolute categorical existence as something that’s worthy in placing you in a position that reflects truth or reality. Yet, we are using something like mind to try and experience what we are committing to words. So there is a totality of experiences there contained in memory and, when we extract something in the form of knowledge from memory to answer a question, it seems there is a coordinator that puts together all applicable mental (neuronal) operations. We call that process of coordination or organization thought, thinking, ideas, philosophy, judgments, and so on. It’s a process that involves translation and interpretation of impulses and signals in a brain along with which an experiencing structure provides foundation and grounds.
What do all these mechanisms have to do with one’s identity as an experiencer or determiner in a mind? Can you separate yourself from that whole mechanistic activity? You can separate yourself from it and look at it only through the knowledge. Whether the knowledge is provided by a physician or by cultural input, you are projecting this knowledge on what you are looking at/into, and that knowledge is creating or producing these experiences.
So all these questions arise from the knowledge we already have acquired; you can’t bring up a question in your mind from something that is not contained in your memory. Your past tells you if something is new or known and once you come to know a thing, it becomes the past. IOW if you were to be somehow freed from the knowledge you have of mind, then, for you, there would be no mind. Even though something like be mind would be operating there, you wouldn’t be aware of it or bringing it up in conversation.
I think you’re saying you can’t have a posteriori knowledge before experience. I agree with that. I’m saying that the organazational structure of the mind contains knowledge from the start, which facilitates the ability to categorize information as it comes in through the senses. a priori=a posteriori=understanding.
If we look at other animals, we can clearly see tht they know stuff when they are born. Our skills and knowledge unfold more slowly and we are more malleable - iow more empiricist. I would add this to what you are saying which I agree with.
Yeah, I think the a priori stuff has to be the smallest set of most basic principles or something along those lines, making up but a small percentage of overall knowledge, but being necessary for the empirical stuff to be processed.