The invention of measurements and perception

So that’s why they always flew the shuttle in orbit with the doors wide open, better sonics in micro g.

stevecham, What I believe in is a thing called reading comprehension. The ability to read and comprehend the meaning in the writing. Comprehend means understand. Like, understand that "organism" does not necessarily mean "human" maybe it actually means, you know, "organism". 

Capiche?

kosst

I *think* I generally understand the point you are trying to make, but I think you are rightly being taken to task because you are making a bit of a mess of it, but making mostly assertions, not arguments, and with some sloppiness involved in the assertions.

So....

"In the strictest scientific sense, there is no such thing as music, or sound, or color, or hot or cold, or pain or pleasure. "

This is off on the wrong foot, or at least it’s unclear. It could mean "according to our strictest science, these things don’t exist."

That would be wrong for the reasons people have pointed out. Science is about the quantifiable and testable, and things like color, sound, music, human perception, human reactions to those etc, can be and have been quantified. Comprehensively? Not at this point. But if we are talking about the strictest science we would by definition be pointing to the quantifiable/quantified aspects.

OR...you could have meant: "these things don’t exist in a way that can be quantified, scientifically."
Which I think seems to be what you wanted to say? In which case it might have been more accurate to state "philosophically, there is no such thing as music...."


But in either case, the claim is dubious, as science does study these things.

They’re abstractions produced by the brain to allow consciousness to interpret them.

Really? How do you know that? Can you provide scientific evidence for the claim? If so, it seems we ARE in the realm of that which can be vetted with science.

If it’s instead a philosophical claim, I’m say we are still waiting for the argument to support it.

There can be made correlations between quantifiable phenomenon, but there’s no direct causal link between the phenomenon and the abstraction of conscious experience.

What’s your actual argument for this claim? Because it doesn’t seem acceptable prima facie.
Why not? Because it at least suggests you are helping yourself to special pleading in how, just in the case of consciousness, you are demanding more than correlation.

There is an important lesson about drawing inferences in the old phrase "correlation does not imply causation," but it’s not the whole story.

After all, what are our inferences of causation drawn from, if not from reliable instances of correlation? (And prediction). We didn’t even need a chemical theory of combustion to have drawn the reasonable conclusion that fire causes our skin to burn if we hold our finger in the fire. When something is reliably correlated we infer cause. And in science, one seeks to control variables in an attempt to discern which "A" is RELIABLY correlated with phenomenon "B."

So, applied to human perception: we can find through testing for an individual, or group of subjects, that "light frequency spectrum or wavelengths spanning X" is reliably correlated with their perception of "Yellow." Hence we can posit it as a *cause* in the chain of causation resulting in the subjective perception of "yellow." And it’s a direct cause insofar as you can turn on and off the perception of "yellow" by presenting and removing that wavelength to the eyes of the subjects.This is evidence for a "causal" phenomenon in the same way we have evidence for any other causal phenomenon. So I think you need more justification for your claim that causation can not be inferred.

Likewise, the quantifiable conscious experience doesn’t directly correlate with the quantified physical phenomenon, only indirectly. The indirect nature of correlation leaves two questions to be asked. What is the nature of the correlation? And, what is the quantifiable value of the conscious experience. Those two questions need some sort of answer before the question of quantifiable measurement can take on any sort of meaning.

Again, this seems to contain some self contradiction. You seem to be saying on one hand "we don’t have scientific reasons to believe in the said causation," and yet you keep asserting claims about the nature of the physical world and our perception. Where are you getting this knowledge, if not from quantified science? And even in your last sentences you start saying the nature of the interaction of the quantifiable and the perception is unknown...and yet you started off confidently making claims about this: that we know that the things as we perceive them don’t really exist, and that we make abstractions.

So I do find that, at least as you’ve stated them, your claims seem to need better arguments.

Cheers.

@millercardon:  

Yeah, capiche. Since when aren't there organisms in a forest? Get real.