Your uncertainty and posturing proves my point, though. So now I can replace "would" with "does", since you weren't able to provide any coherent refutation besides an unsupported and not very believable denial.

You're still flailing. You make just as many presumptions as anyone else, you just aren't as aware of it, or unable to admit it.

>However, I know that many people underestimate e.g. Propositional Logic because their brain's can't comprehend what an exponential semantics is like.

An intriguing claim. I am of the mind that language, being something that everyone uses every day, must be rooted in mechanisms that don't require extensive study. But I can appreciate the perspective that our brains are doing a lot more computational processing than our minds are aware of. It just seems most probable to me that if Propositional Logic or similar formal systems were relevant, the last two and a half thousand years of philosophy (and civilization) would have been quite different.

>I don't think there is anything special about natural language, or any special property, which can not be used as an interpretation of some formal language. Now, the problem might be that what you consider some kind of "intrinsic quality" of natural language is hard to make precise, since you only have natural language to appeal to (I guess?). What do you think?

I think the truth is that everything about natural language is "special", that language itself is a special property; in general it is identical to and coincident with consciousness, an apparently unique emergent property of human brains. It is this very speciality, the ability to "interpret" things, which enables us to invent formal systems of logic and call them (mistakenly, in my opinion) languages. Without the intrinsic quality of natural language, which is about accuracy rather than precision, how are we to create, develop, and communicate computational code systems, or appeal about anything with anything to anyone? Every beast with a brain performs logic as an inherent capacity of having a neural network, why would natural language even exist if formal logic could provide any useful information without the foundation of arbitrary reasoning to communicate emotions and experiences well enough to develop civilizations complex enough to allow mathematicians and analytic philosophers to survive.

>I believe so.

So that would explain both why you interpreted the text as agreeing with your opinion, and why you didn't follow my conjecture about its import.

Thanks for your time. Hope it helps.

You're easily satisfied. I can (and do) presume it is because you're content with self-satisfaction, and prefer to not have your ideas challenged.

It is my understanding (possible naive, inadequate, or downright incorrect) that in formal logic, there is no "true" or "false", there is only 'necessary'. What in vernacular we would call "true" is something that is both necessarily true from the perspective of having to be true as the result of being based on true premises and necessary that it be true as a consequence of being relied on as a premise of true conjectures. In logic, as in math (I don't accept that there is a distinction between them) there is no true or false, just correct or incorrect computation.

It was my first inkling of a break with the perspective of Richard Dawkins when, after prevaricating a bit about the nature of truth (re: mathematics) he declared he was only a "90% atheist", that on a scale if 1 to 10, his certainty that God doesn't exist was only a 9. Once I accepted his uncertainty on that matter, I eventually was able to recognize the flaws in his theory of "adaptive altruism", and that set me on a course to reconstructing philosophy from the ground up, while trying to comprehend the implications of Benjamin Libet's work on cognition.

As for the bit about audio channels and Avatar, just to clarify, when I use the term "language", I mean only natural organic human language, not formal systems of logic or mathematics or computer programming methods or conventions, or metaphoric analogues of language like music or bee dances or whale song.

>I think we must define our terms then

All of your "definitions" seem mundane and conventional, so I don't see any need to quibble with them. All of my definitions are implicit and otherwise correspond to the ineffable meaning the words have in any arbitrary context.

>It's also worth noting that I would not say I'm conflating "subjective" and "opinion" but rather that an opinion is a straightforward example of a subjective truth

This is an example of the conflation I was observing. I don't believe "truth" comes in objective or subjective varieties. Your note reiterates the "clever" approach you started with, and is subject to the criticisms I've already expressed about that technique. Being an honest opinion is not the same, either colloquially or philosophically, as it being true. Rhetorically, of course, people are used to making their conjectures unfalsifiable by resorting to the ambiguity of whether a "true opinion" is merely honest or "is likely to align with generalizable truths". That makes it a practice I would guard against rather than encourage.

> Other subjective truths could include experiences. [...] I share your urge to not use subjective pejorativly.

I believe such usage is intrinsic in your perspective. I mention using it dismissively as an example of the results (and the cause as well) of using it ambiguously, and from my perspective, you continue to use it ambiguously. To be honest, outside of philosophical discussions about the term itself, I make it a practice to simply never use the word at all. It cannot be divorced from its pejorative connotations in postmodern (contemporary) language.

>Not for nothing, how else do we approach identifing what is objective?

Well, when we avoid using "subjective" at all, we rarely need to identify what is objective, per se.

>Peer review is all about identifying what holds up across multiple perspectives.

I would dispute this notion, but we may have different processes in mind when using that term. "Peer review" is about identifying what cannot hold up under any reasonable perspective. It is a process that precedes publication of a scholarly paper. I believe you may be referring to public scrutiny, the process which follows publication, when other experts with different perspectives can consider and criticize the thesis.

>So I appreciate the discussion

I'm glad to hear it. I too, as well.

There might be a hypothetical difference, but as far as I can tell (making allowances for the brevity and syntax of your contention) whether there can be a "very real" distinction between those two things is quite uncertain, to say the least. Could you explain your point, and your reason for interjecting it, further?

Since you probably have the same (problematic) notion of what makes something "objective" (confounded by an assumption that whether it is objective is the same as whether it can be known to be objective) that is not surprising. Can I ask whether you believe that the content of an opinion determines or can be determined by whether it is considered (presumably by either you or whoever holds that opinion) to be objective? My concern about the original text was not whether what is objective is more likely to align with generalizable truth (that much is simply a timid tautology) but whether "In that way, it is what makes it objective" is a supportable contention.

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

That's not what I'm saying. In fact, I don't think there is any contradiction engendered by that position: there isn't anything about being a "conscious piece of the world" and being inessential to it which would produce cognitive dissonance. Not that I think it is a happy thought, that as individuals we are each almost entirely insignificant. But that is the human condition, and always has been, so while the forlorn emotions it causes can be troublesome, it isn't a matter of cognitive dissonence.

The angst arises from knowing our thoughts to be reasonable, and being told they should instead be logical. In trying to get our thoughts to be "logic", like the math which we can so succesfully use to model everything else except our thoughts (and reasoning), we experience cognitive dissonance caused by the conflict between a natural desire to be reasonable and human and the expectation imposed on us from false teachings to be logical and robotic. We know we are more than biological robots programmed by evolution to replicate our genes, but we are told we cannot know that or even be that. The cognitive dissonance this causes is far more profound than simple personal anxiety, which is why I call it existential angst. It is the root cause of the monumental tide of anxiety, depression, religious fundamentalism, drug use and addiction, and even bigotry and political turmoil that has been rising to engulf our society for decades.

I know that sounds like an alarmist and pretentious theory, but it is far easier to dismiss than it is to deny.

>pointing out that the thought behind the opinion and the fact that the opinion exists is worth mentioning in my opinion

In many cases, you may be right, but the principle is more argumentative than generalizable. Saying "it is a fact that it is an opinion" might confound people who over-simplify the idea of subjectivity (generally folks who want to use 'subjective' as a dismissive characterization and 'objective' as an insinuation of omniscience) but as I said before, this technique actually amplifies the intellectual basis of the conflict while misrepresenting its cogency.

>But I would argue that the content of the opinion, if aligned with that outside state of affairs, is more likely to align with generalizable truths. In that way, it is what makes it objective.

I feel like you are working hard to declare that the content of an opinion (which is to say, the opinion) is either what determines, or can be determined by, whether it can be considered "objective". I believe this is motivated by a desire to use the term "objective" as a synonym for "right" (not an untoward substitution in all cases, but not an appropriate one in every case.) You're shifting around the dichotomy from 'objective/subjective' to 'fact/opinion' (or "more/less generalizable") in the same "clever" way, and end up being simply a contrarian, chasing your tail and encouraging others to do the same.

>whether the content of the opinion is objective depends on how much it is true beyond a certain point of view.

Not really, no. This approach conflates objective with popular, or risks doing so, and misrepresents what (if anything) distinguishes facts from opinions. In general (not to put too fine a point on it) your perspective (opinion) is a useful enough approximation of the truth for being argumentative in conversation, but not factually accurate enough for a philosophical consideration.

>many different aspects of any "fact" can be some gradient of more generalizable or less generalizable.

The same can be said of any opinion, though.

I apologize if my replies seem like hectoring. I intend no insult. These issues have more significance than just the matter of off-handed comments, and I like to explore them as a test of my philosophical perspective.

>So what's the difference between Objective truth and scientifically proven?

I think the real question is what are the similarities. The issue becomes fraught with both epistemic and metaphysical uncertainty, to varying degrees based on whether you are asking about a specific instance of fact or demanding a categorical declaration. Science is about searching for objective truth, and finding provisional truth instead. So I think the real issue depends on if we are considering whether something is scientifically certain versus whether the implications of it are as equally certain.

>Science has requirements that are basically cultural.

Scientists have requirements that are essentially cultural. "Science" as an abstraction does not, and cannot, or at least should not.

>Yes the scientific method is powerful, because it handles humans beings irrational belief in their own subjective truth.

This goes to the underlying inconsistency in both the postmodern materialist (scientification) and postmodern idealist (anti-realist) perspectives. Both adopt the postmodern premise concerning the term "rational" (or irrational). According to IPTM (the Information Processing Theory of Mind, the standard explanation of cognition all postmodernists share) good reasoning must be logical, and therefore rational, but bad reasoning is not logical, and therefor irrational. So "rational", when applied to human cognition, reduces to simply whether someone else's reasoning (or conjecture, or behavior) is the same as yours: when it is, it reinforces the IPTM model and is deemed "logic", when it doesn't, it reinforces the IPTM model and is deemed "irrational belief". A consistent theory of cognition would recognize that either all beliefs are rational (the term 'belief' simply equating to whether the speaker, or for that matter the believer, is aware of the reasoning for the conjecture) or that all knowledge (which I presume you will accept as a complementary contrast to 'belief') is irrational (indistinguishable from "beliefs" and merely conjecture, with the singular exception of cogito ergo sum).

>prove it in a lab, let someone else try to disprove [it] >That's a good system, but it's still based on arbitrary rules.

I don't see those rules as arbitrary in any way. They are both functional and necessary.

More or less my point.

>our brain responds and tries to find out what it means.

>This stimulus-response model separates our inner subjective world from an outer objective world. We can never know for sure what is going on objectively. There is no meaning in the world,

[Emphasis added.]

This passage reveals an ambiguity in the use of the word "mean"/"meaning" which demonstrates an internal inconsistency, a self-contradicting premise, in the author's reasoning and source material.

As an analogy, the contrast between 'stimulus-response' and 'affordance' models can be instructive in grappling with philosophical paradigms concerning consciousness and existential metaphysics. As an example, it is, if you will forgive the word, meaningless. Animals are also using visual systems comprised of not just eyes, but heads and bodies and ground, no more or less than we do. But animals do not spend thousands of years developing technological engineering projects like text and the Internet to discuss these things. So in terms of being informative about the human condition or what meaning is, I believe there is a good reason why Gibson's book from the 1970s has faded into obscurity, as it doesn't actually provide any explanatory ideas, it simply covers the same ground ancient philosophers did and circles the same drain of existential uncertainty. The essay rightly observes that Gibson's more comprehensive analogy has been cited and used by many designers and architects, but it isn't like buildings or smartphone interfaces provide any meaning in our lives. The observation that the form of an artificial object should communicate its function does not rely on this book or Gibson's analysis.

Meaning does not derive from constructing models of the external world, or the internal world for that matter, which afford us survival advantage. It relates to the explanatory power of those models for non-utilitarian purposes, not the accuracy of the models themselves. We do not invent meaning, we observe it, and yet we are the only creatures (biological objects) capable of observing it. To say "we can never know for sure what is going on objectively" denies that there is any value in the affordable model, and Gibson's perspective admits as much by reducing the goal of that model to the same limitations of a stimulus-response system: physical survival. From a human perspective, simply surviving is not meaningful, it is the very absence of meaning. A philosophy which equates "meaning" with "what it can afford us" is a pitiful lack of philosophy which denies the existence of "meaning" to begin with.

The cognitive dissonance within us (existential angst, I call it) doesn't come from desiring an "objective perception" while being part of the world we percieve, but in expecting that there could be an "objective" world absent the ability to "percieve". Our 'subjective' perceptions are the only kind of perceptions there can be, not just the only ones we have. Awareness requires observation, but observation doesn't require awareness: in teaching that we are no different from other animals (which also have vision systems and brains capable of integrating observations into useful information) modern/postmodern psychology and philosophy simply dismiss the conscious awareness we possess which other animals do not. Animals observe the world, but they are not aware of observing it; they are not conscious of either the world or themselves. They are simply stimulus-response automata, reacting to their environment according to the genetic programming of natural selection and the neural programming of operant conditioning, without being aware they are doing so.

We, of course, are still animals: we have genetic and neural causes for all of the most basic activities we share with animals: eating, sleeping, reproducing. But just because we are animals does not mean we are just animals: we are and can become aware, conscious, of the world and ourselves in a way which animals cannot, and all of the actions and behaviors we execute are self-determined, even the most basic ones. So we can choose to not eat, or decide whether to not reproduce. The postmodern insistence that we remain only animals, that our thoughts, feelings, intentions, and activities are "really" just more complicated forms of biological imperatives and avoiding danger, different in degree but not in kind, is what produces existential angst, not the fact that we remain physical beings "trapped" (or rather, empowered) by the unyielding and merciless laws of physics.

>What matters still has to do with the language or the image: these are logically articulated, which needn’t mean reducible to language. What it does mean is: properly interpreted, it is responsive to true or false propositions about it.

I notice the art historian qua philosopher, throughout the interview, is routinely inconsistent with whether language should be categorized with logic (computation) or images (art). I find this ambiguity revealing, both in terms of his philosophy and what might be considered a more accurate one.

I quote this passage to clarify the issue, as I see his proposition as being utterly backwards. Art (whether text or painting) is linguistically (concretely for text, metaphorically for painting) articulated, which needn't mean reducible to logic. The need for something to be "properly" interpreted in order to be "responsive to true or false propositions about it" is assuming a conclusion, and arrogantly so.

I'm not sure there is any real difference.

My perspective is that it isn't even different. Everything that is "subjective" objectively occurs, as neurological impulses in our brains that are in every (other) way equivalent to the objective (but non-subjective) things which also cause such impulses. The things (like "ugly") that we consider subjective aren't any less objective, they are simply more complex. Every thought and feeling you have objectively occurs: it isn't whether it corresponds (usefully, logically, or accurately) to some state of affairs outside of your brain that make it "objective".

Your explanation says the same, of course, but is just a "clever" trick based on a bit of misdirection involving the words "fact" and "thinks". I believe it is problematic in that regard, and insufficient. It utilizes a fallacy to suggest that anyone would claim it is not a fact that someone has an opinion about whether something is ugly, and ignores the important question of whether any opinion could possibly have more validity than any other. In that way your 'cleverness' uses postmodern reasoning to promote more postmodern reasoning rather than provide any useful reasoning or understanding.

A tremendous amount of philosophical contention these days occurs because some people want to focus on the fact that everything which is objective is always subjective: we know of it only through our (supposedly not objective) perceptions, while others want to focus on the idea that anything which is subjective is supposedly not objective: our description of something is not true if it is not accurate. And still others (Hoffman, Kastrup, et al) wish to insist that being subjective is a necessary prerequisite for being objective. But this distinction between subjective and objective is a false dichotomy and an assumed conclusion: they are not the mutually exclusive categories modern and postmodern philosophy assumes they are to begin with.