Alfredo,

The mind-body dualism was posited by Descartes himself 100 years before Hume's time.  Hume's quote does not support in any way the non-materiality of Mind or the separation of Mind from the body.  It simply contribute the the confusion on the status of these sensations that cannot unabiguously attribute exclusively to the external object.  Many philosophers and cognitive scientists today suffer from the same confusion. 

Nowadays the mind-body problem is not presented as a immaterial mind - material body dichotomy but it is reformulates as subject experience-object/environment of now and past relationship and as a subject experience- body/environment relationship. The question of agency/will/freedom was central then and now.  The old cartesian way to maintain agency/will/freedom was to remove the subject agency from the material world and to reduce this agency to the intellectual only realm of experience.  Very few modern formulation of the problem are able to maintain a place for agency.  The first time the mind was separated from the body in the west was by Parmenides.  This separation allowed him to separate the knowledge coming from the mind which was a unchanging knowledge of an unchanging world from the knowledge coming for the sense which a knowledge of changing world and he deemed that knowledge as illusory.  Descartes is one of the first that realized that the Aristotlean images that were the object's form being transmitted by the object and received by the eyes did not exist.  The images were formed withing the eyes and he is one of the first that realized how different were these images on the retinas , (not 3d form but 2 flat projection not depending on object only but on light reflection) reinforcing the prejudice against the reliability of the sense of truly connecting us with the reality, a prejudice very strong with rationalist geometers.  Although the scotish empirists insists on the connection of the mind to the environment throught the sense and building up concepts from these senses, they did not overcome the prejudice that the information in the sense were very different from the objects which Descartes had uncover.  So since they falsely assumed that the order of the mind that reflect the order in the world through the sense but since they falsely assume that the information in the sense was degraded and not ordered in the way Aristotle's assumed they they imagine that the mind reconstructed the world like in a criminal investigation with a few clues.  They did not really investigate the senses but tried to build internal representation of the world from degraded sensual information discarding for this task the secondary unreliable quality.  They did not rrealized about the form/gestalt/structure within the senses.  

I answer from the point of  view of evolution through adaptations, starting with bacteria. Their interactions seem to be physico-chemical across all the examples given at the beginning of the question. The novelty in the humans, beyond the physico-chemical that they share with bacteria is that we can give names to the reactivity we present. Names are new tools, extensions of our bodies in spite of being able to construct a new realm of entities (ideas, theories); existence of this new realm does not indicate that it is composed by a new kind of energy or material. The burden of proof for the proposition that mind or consciousness are composed by some kind of new stuffs stays with the proponents. I understand that they take advantage of some still not well understood aspects of quantum physics; is this enough for justifying the proposition? 

Romeu,

Around a cell, the cell's interactions are phsycio-chemico- mechanical with relatively straightforward information coding into the signals.  Around frogs, ants, birds mammals the interactions is primary into retreiving/decoding information from the senses and projecting out information by the body.  To to that the old Aristotlean theory can be adapted: the imprinting of the form into the wax of the receiving mind.  The acheive this process of IN-FORMATION and the whole biological evolution was necessary to internalized the matching IN-FORMATION mechanism and to prepare the FORM-ATION mechanism of the body for the action in the world.  The same process as with the cells but at a higher level of form complexity.  The next level of interaction will be human narrative level.  It is a totally new mode of interaction in nature and it evolves culturally. The word are pointing more or less accuratly to the forms experience within our mammalian brain and used for the body-world interaction. When this narrative mode of interaction is concerned to how it is possible and reflect on itself, this is philosophy and science, then it tries to invent names which correspond to the form that the lower level are being informed and formed but this time through a narrative media that has to be understood at the lower level and produced at the lower level.  The disembodiement of the mind confusion stems for not understanding the connection between the interactions in the realm of narrative to ist realm of production and understanding in the mammalian-primate mind which had already a narrative structure but one without any conscious control for its production.

Very good that the argument has been enriched with Louis's intervention. Nice to highlight that the real issue is related to agency/will/freedom. I recall Hume's citation by Alfredo with the list of 'qualia' (hope I'm not mistaken here) and now the example of construction of visual images to add that allosteric proteins do exactly the same at building the correlation between an effector of the regulation and the reaction that is regulated with full 'freedom', which was called 'gratuity' by Monod (Chance and Necessity). Of course this is produced or constructed by adaptive evolution of organisms since the times of the origins of prokaryotes. Also of course the mental constructions have a lot of new rules introduced by cultural evolution. I only cannot agree with the demarcation and distinction that puts Aristotelic imprinting in the realm of 'lower' organisms, to be contrasted with conscious control in humans, on the basis of the present examples under discussion. I consider that the constructive process prevails in all realms of organisms, no imprinting. It may be more strongly Darwinian in the 'lower' and more strongly Lamarckian, cultural etc. in 'higher' organisms, and leading to the problem of evolution of consciousness. I would like to propose for evaluation the idea that consciousness might have evolved (was developed) already in the first cells, and each kind or species would have its own kind of conscious attributes.

Romeo,

The real important in-forming process everywhere in nature where nature grow is occuring also at our level and it is occuring in the focus of attention but it is a spontanewous universal process of encounter of nature with itself.  Every act is an encounter, every perception is an act of encounter.  The processus of universal creation is just displacing itself at higher level where it has access to a bigger part of itself and occuring faster.  Evolution at all level of nature had to converge on the path of its acceleration and cultural realm is faster than the genetic realm and I guess we are heading for faster cultural realm of functioning through our electronic common nervous system.  You can formulate darwin natural selection mechanism as a mechanism that converge towards its own acceleration.  Selection of the more productive that survive only do that converging of body structure which are interacting structure towards the nexus of maximal stability in the production of itself.  All variation which accelerate the process are automatically selected from the acceleration factor of the process.  Cultural evolution already began to exist prior to humans when animals start to learn during their lifetime and learn by being in a group the mode of action of their group by participation in young age and play.  Evolution had to converge on learning because most of nexus of operation are located in fast changing potential mode of action that learning allow to access.  As soon as learning was in than most of the genetic process had to feed the transformation of the learning because it is where that the acceleration of the production of itself is maximal.  There is another dimension to the encounter process that I did not discuss and which is fundamental is that we think that we are the only one that understand nature and that nature is just blindly evolving.  To accelerate the encounter with itself the process of encounter is intrinsically historical.  Body structure which are historical repository of older encounter to new encounter are all active at the same time from the chemical to the narrative in our cases.  The mammalian evolution has been mostly driven by the development of self-enactment of the body for integration of all the different modal encountering mode.  Dreaming for learning is one self-enactment competence, Entraining the body through sound and detection of animal movement from sound, use of sound in vision are all possible through the self-activation of the body motor system for matching sound.  This is pre-music which will later the pathway for the transformation of the primate into humanity through the communal singing and dancing practice. (Singing Neanderthal) This will provice human with conscious access to the self-enactment room that was only used by primate and mammals sub-consciously in the narrative of their live in their natural setting.  The access to the self-enactment control room is the key to the new human narrative imagination encounter.  We access the behavior narrative mode of action scenario room and can thus interacted into theatrical world of interaction and also tell a story like this.

Sorry if the dense and nebulous plot of this story but it is how it came today.

Dear Louis, first you presented Aristotle as a representationalist and Descartes as a post-modern constructivist, but in a second post you corrected your view about Aristotle. The discussion of Louis and Romeu is interesting, but the main issue raised by the question is about Galileo not being a mind-body dualist. In the quotation of Hume, the widespread idea that secondary qualities are only in the mind of the perceiver is presented, but it does not imply that Hume agrees with it. In any case, I would like to stress that the good news is that -according to Buyse's study - for Galileo 'qualia' are instantiated in the body of animals. This is a position opposite to Descartes.

Giving a short answer I believe that, Beauty and goodness (and their opposites) are analogous to Lockean secondary qualities, such as colors, tastes, smells, and sounds, in that their existence depends somehow on the minds of perceivers.

Alfredo,

I am sure that I am making a lot of philosophical mistake given that I never got formatted by academic philosophical training.  I just guess my way the best I can.  And it is what I will do now as usual.  Galileo was in love with Euclidean geometry and as all mathematician he was a platonist and everybody quote him saying that the book of nature was written in the mathematical language.   Can you be more platonic than that,   Mathematician tend to be platonist because they mostly used the intellect to do math and the intellect is the side of our theory of mind which interact with inanimate object and which deal with the displacement of the body within the motor system, that control touch and even is relate to hearing through the motor system (dancing, music, entrainment, rythm).  So mathematician have an overtrain object relating theory of mind (not you Costas) and assume the universe to be a thing and all thing to be mechanical as mathematic and so the universe to be mathematical.  Just a professional deformation which they share by over formated scientists.

Dear Costas, Buyse shows that - for Galileo - the mind of the perceivers is the body of the perceivers, or in other words, the mind is not separated from the body, as Descartes thought.

Dear Louis, many thanks for your remark about Galileo's possible Platonism.

This may be a mistake, because Platonism includes not only the reality of mathematics, but also the idea that the mathematical reality lies in an ideal world that is separated from the phenomenological world (the world of "appearances").

For Galileo, experimentation in the world of appearances (for instance, his famous boat experiment to prove inertia) can prove physical-mathematical laws. Therefore, for him there is only one world (nature) that is both ruled by mathematical laws and expressed in human perception.

His opposition to Aristotle is more related to the question of what are these laws. For Aristotle the fall of bodies is explained as a tendency to move towards the center of the universe (the center of the earth), while for Galileo there is a gravitational force that explains not only the fall of bodies, but also the relative movement of the planets, thus implying the truth of the Copernican system.

Regarding the mind-body issue, Galileo is often thought as being a defender of the thesis that secondary qualities exist only in the mind of the perceiver. As I answered to Costas, this belief may be wrong. As suggested by Buyse, Galileo does believe that secondary qualities belong to the perceiver, but not to an immaterial mind. The qualities belong to the perceiving body. This interpretation is close to contemporary views of mind-body-world unity. The perceiving body forms such conscious mental states (as seeing colors, hearing sounds, etc.) in the process of interactions with external objects and processes.

In escape from Descartes Dualism we should "… develop and defend a new conception of our being in the world, one that at once builds on and transforms the now standard conception (sometimes called the sideways-on view) according to which our experience of reality is the result of the merely causal impacts on our sense organs and ultimately our brains of physical stuffs that surround us, according to which “ inside” are meanings and meaningful experiences, while “outside” is merely brute, causally efficacious reality. The task here is to overcome that conception, to recover ancient insights into our being as the rational animals we are but in a way that incorporates also the insights of early modernity. None of these aims, we will see, can be achieved without the others. It is impossible to achieve an adequate understanding of the striving for truth in the exact sciences from within the standard conception of

ourselves and our cognitive relation to reality with its meaningful inside and meaningless outside; and the way to overcome that conception is through a more adequate understanding of the nature of mathematical practice together with the profound transformations it has undergone in the course of its more than two and a half millennia history, the history through which reason is first realized as a power of

knowing. It was developments in mathematics (we will see) that fi rst made the

sideways-on view possible and it is further developments in mathematics that

provide the resources that are needed to articulate its successor. We need, then, to

attend to mathematical practice, and in particular to its development and transformation over the course of history beginning with ancient Greek diagrammatic practice, through early modern constructive algebraic practice, to the tradition of reasoning from concepts that became dominant in Germany over the course of the nineteenth century. From: Danielle Macbeth Realizing Reason A Narrative of Truth and Knowing. Oxford 2014.

Philadelphia, PA

Interesting question. For myself, I'm extremely skeptical of the classical modern distinction between primary and secondary qualities. In contrast, it seems clear that the distinction functioned, historically, to emphasize the importance of the "primary qualities" in the new science of the modern period--and as a rhetorical means to escape the domination of ancient metaphysics and Aristotelian metaphysics in particular. This was closely tied to Christian orthodoxy by the Thomistic synthesis. 

Perception of color, say, played important roles in evolutionary history, I would assume, as in distinguishing red fruit from green leaves, or in identifying greener areas in the landscape as likely sources of water. Many examples could be given. In addition, it is well known that differences in color correspond to physical differences connected with reflection and absorption of light. So, our perception of color does allow us to detect and deal with genuine physical differences in the environment.

Instead of erecting an ontological difference between  genuine and "merely mental" qualities in the style of the classical distinction, the better course is simply to recognize that the so-called "secondary qualities" are less significant or salient in scientific explanations. Why go beyond that? If someone wants to maintain that the secondary qualities are not qualities of objects, then the burden of proof falls in their direction. 

H.G. Callaway

Dear H.G, many thanks for your excellent contribution!

The problem is, I think, that as far as we recognize consciousness as a central phenomenon of our lives, and formulate the project of a science of consciousness, the understanding the physical status of "secondary qualities" becomes equally or more important than the physics of "primary qualities".

The philosophical challenge is to approach both in a Monist perspective: how do qualitative experiences emerge in an embodied and embedded dynamical conscious mind (a conscious mind that is instantiated by the activity of a material body and obtains its information content from an interaction with the external world)?

Other alternatives are the Idealist or Dualist worldviews:

a) The Idealist approach is that consciousness is the true reality and the physical "primary qualities" do not matter for a science of consciousness;

b) The Dualist view is that there are two separate categories of concepts or properties, and as a consequence there are two kinds of science, physics (science of mindless bodies) and psychology (science of disembodied minds), which are independent of each other.

I explored the question of colour at graduate level for five years from many angles.  The simple fact that some fruit eater, including ourself can relatively reliably distingued ripe fruits from the unriped fruits based on their perceived colour under a large variation of natural illumination is a proof that perceived colour of the fruit  is somehow connected to the reflectance property of the surface of the fruit.  What is this connection, how it is achieved by the vision system is partly understood nowaday but not totally.  When the lighting change on the fruit, we see a change in the perceived colour of the fruit but not enough for us to call it red, We do not perform and could not make this judgement only of the colour of the fruit but of all the other surface around it.  It is not a point property and it is not a surface property in insulation.   In the case of the form of a surface that we infer from vision or touch there is not (only apparently) this problem of having to really understand how vision or touch come to infer it.  We invented words describing these external surface form and there is (apparently)  no confusion in the communication about the meaning of these words in spite of the fact that we have no idea how we perceive these surface propeties.    We developed a mathematical language for the description of these surface property. But none of these surfaces really exist out there.  Take your skin surface and observe it with a microscope and then with electronic microscope and then with a particle acceleration and you not find any surface there.  The surface for our body when we see it and when we touch it.  It exist in our language and mathematical communications.  And there is much more to the surface of our skin that could be described but is not.  The mathematical language was design for describing surface in the first place but we never design a language for describing colour.  About one hundred years ago we began developing of science of colorometry but it only allow to specify the human perception of colour for a standard observer under a standard illuminant under a standard comparison task.  It can only say that these two two light spectrum  will look the same or not it allow to create standard catalogue of colours.  What are the perceived colour of surface of normal surface in normal environment it cannot say.  So the task of hidy the observer in the case of surface description allows to call surface form description: objective because they will be agreement of all observers.  But in the case of colour of surfaces, we have presently no standard way to specify on what we perceived because what is perceived is dependent not only of the surface but many other factors, the lights, the viewing angle, the geometry of the surface.   But some culture in need of more objective colour description such as the northen inuit can describe effectively the colour of the snow much better than we can we our colour system.  It work for them but it would not work for us unless we would live their live in the snow under the conditions these name are teached.  So they developed a objective colour naming system for snow that work for those educated in that system.  Objectivation for colour is more difficult than for surface but can be done to a certain extend.  But since the phenomena is much more complex than surface description, it cannot be done completely and there is no need to be done completely.  When the need arise, we can do it to the extend it is needed when practical.  O'Reagan is a computer vision scientist that came with interesting result explaining why the colour red has name in all culture and what is the physic of surface reflection that is specifically related to the red.  What is a science, it is convention of communication when we equipe our body with observational instrument and adopt a clear convention of measurement and communication and for that specialized community they can talk as if there is no human there, no instrument, no conventions and only speak of an objective reality.  It is only objective because every body agreed on a common unambiguous way to measure and communicate.  We can do with smell, colour or anything we feel a science as long as we adopt the same objectivisation procedure.  Doing that would not necessiraly usefull and might be a total was of resources.   Objectivisation is not the best way to interact with reality especially at the human relation levels but here we are quitting science.

P.S. I dropped the topic of colour and switched to the topic of perception of image as optical luminance surface, as topographical surface and based the analsysis on the internal differential geometry of such surface and there is much there to be seen.

Alfredo,

That Galileo did not separate the body from the mind should be an evidence even before reading what he said given that the consensus is to attribute to Descartes this idea.  If Galileo would have thought about it before would have been an innovation to give to his credit (althought this is an innovative error) but to say that he did not invent is strange.  Should we give the credit to everybody before Descartes of seeing the body not separate with the mind?  Here I will speculate but the reason Descartes came up with this idea is not that he believed it but it was a very convenient lie.  By doing that he de facto separate the new emerging realm of the natural science to the body and leave the church with the realm of god, the mind, and politic.  I agree that it is a speculation but he knew about Galileo's trouble with the church and he was always traveling abroad in place as far away from catholic authorithy and he had a lot of Jesuit's friend who shared the new ideals of sciences and saw them compatible with christianity but which were very totally submitted to clerical authority.  The magic solution is to create an epistemic separation of the world between the extensio and the cogito and viola science stay with the extensio and out of political trouble.

The real innovation of Galileo is its formalisation of physical time, the time of clock.  He even invented a mechanical clock but did not build it.  This is the biggest scientific invention of all time: time of physics, clock time.  The reason is that it extend the realm of geometry which until then was the realm of the static and extend it to the realm of the moving and so invented dynmanic by extending geometry to space time.  Also the biggest scientific illlusion of all time but this is another story.  Bergson also explored that story and his first realisation was that mechanical time was a spatialized time and did not capture our intuition of change and evolution: real time.

Alfredo,

My previous replied on colour explained why this conception of colour belong to the body's of the perceiver only is totally wrong.  It is as everything else an relation between the body and the world and this relation is usefull because it serves a need in the body in detecting something in the world.  Our difficulty is to discover all the intricaties of this relation.  It is not more in the observer than surface are or smell are.  Everything is a world observer relation.  

Dear Brassard, 

Generally I am sympathetic to your approach, and I think it important to avoid the introduction of special objects, "sense data" or what have you, to serve as objects of awareness with regard to the so-called "secondary qualities."  Western philosophy has been down that road before. Its a mistaken path.

I did my dissertation on the topic of "intentionality," though this was chiefly concerned with Quine's attack on the concept of meaning, as my work developed. (I am no devotee of phenomenology or Husserl & etc.) Regarding perception in particular, I was more interested in the so-called "adverbial" theory and variations thereto. Basically, it is a mistake to expect the internal states (or contents) of the mind/brain to resemble objects in the environment. So, e.g., a sensation of a red flash is not itself red, any more than the mental image of Archimedes in his bath is itself wet and slippery. The lesson to be taken is that common sense borrows the language used in describing environmental objects to talk about our perception of them, and the meanings of the words must be understood in their appropriate contexts. Another way to think of this is that mental states involved in perception are not objects of those perceptions but instead modes of cognition directed outward; ways of being aware --usually accurate in discrimination but sometimes not. 

H.G. Callaway     

Dear Louis, I am in complete agreement with your post about Galileo and Descartes. Very well written!

The agreement is not complete on your second post above about color. This is of course one of the most difficult issues of science. My tendency is to say that color exists in potential states in the wavelenght (physical pattern) of the photons that meet the eye, but only exist as an actual experienced state in the body of the perceiver.

This conception is based on the idea of Triple-Aspect Monism: reality (Nature) is conceived as an actualization process that begins in the physical domain, and then evolves into the (unconscious) information domain and finally finds full actualization in the conscious domain.

Dear Romeu, I am answering your post with delay:

Romeu: "The novelty in the humans, beyond the physico-chemical that they share with bacteria is that we can give names to the reactivity we present. Names are new tools, extensions of our bodies in spite of being able to construct a new realm of entities (ideas, theories); existence of this new realm does not indicate that it is composed by a new kind of energy or material."

Alfredo: This picture is not false, but incomplete.

Beyond the physico-chemical aspect of nature, there are two other aspects present in living systems. One is information, which cannot be reduced to physio-chemistry. Names, ideas, concepts are human ways of conveying information, but there are other ways - for instance, in each cell, the molecular lock-and-key interactions that you know far better than me.

The other aspect is conscious experience. Of course, it does not imply new kinds of energy or material - as argued among others by Gilbert Ryle. It is a different kind of activity that occurs when information affects the matter/energy of a system.

Dear H.G.

I never really been interested by the analytical philosophy tradition and I think I know why I was not attracted by it. It is that from a very young age when I was learning mathematics I was learning it experientially and visually and I was not interested on the logical surface of it. I learned engineering and science mostly that way. I was fascinated by mathematics and even abstract geometry but always in parallel in an intuitive way and I never understood it from the formalism. So the insistence of logic and surface analysis of language in the continental tradition was very repulsive to my way to learn. As a result I am mostly ignorant of that tradition.

I am  ignorant of Quine (except the name). I totally agree that it is is a mistake to create an internal world at the image of our description of the external world. We are externalizer, so much so that we think that we live in the world we expressed. The problem of language. The problem of intuitively objectifying and not knowing what we really do and how it is related to our way of being aware of the world and this become a ghost in the machine. I tried to read Husserl, I like some aspects and the crisis but I find him mistaken in many respect. Against faile attempts to be closed to our experience. I think that I always been experienctial in my way of learning. This is the natural way to learn to do new action by children, artists, athlete and it works for discovering everything. It is not a method but the natural way that school formatting beat the hell out of peoples. A red flash has to be in a context to be seen red. If you enter a spherical room into which we would uniformly colour the whole surface I do not think that you could experience any colour. There are plenty of psychological experiments where we see that colour filled in the perceived surface even where the contours are so-called illusory. Surface perception, illumination and colour perception cannot be treated as separate phenomena except in lab conditions.Yes common sense borrow language but language is not stupid, it is an answer tradition of common sense pass on to us. Common sense never put the perceived object in the head but people see object out there, not in the head. You need quite a good amount of training to convince someone that its perceptions are all in its head. When I started my training in computational vision I was like everybody trying to inverse the imaging process and build internal representation inside the computer. Empiricist began that tradition. I agree that we have mode of cognition but I would turn it in mode of action involving mode of perceptions. Perception and Cognition are not separate and are part of the modes of actions. We do not observe randomly without any purpose. We have to see that with an inspector going on a crime scene and having an likely story of what happen there and then proceeding to get evidences from the crime seen driven by a clear verification agenda of a likely pre-establish scenario , here that would be the action mode.

Regards

Danielle Macbeth, Realizing Reason A Narrative of Truth and Knowing, p. 22

''As Brandom reads Wittgenstein, the regress of interpretations that is generated by

thinking of rule-following as an action that is according to one’s conception of a rule

can be stopped by norms implicit in practice. As he writes (1994, 20),

‘’norms explicit as rules presuppose norms implicit in practice because a rule specifying how something is correctly done (how a word ought to be used, how a piano ought to be tuned) must be applied to particular circumstances, and applying a rule in particular circumstances is itself essentially something that can be done correctly or incorrectly. A rule, principle, or command has normative significance for performances, only in the context of practices determining how it is correctly applied.’’

To understand, then, the essential difference between a person’s saying ‘that’s yellow’ in the presence of something yellow and, say, a parrot’s (trained) squawk of ‘yellow’in the same circumstance, we need to consider the norms implicit in practice that for the person but not the parrot underlie her commitment to explicit linguistic rules such as that enjoining us to call yellow things yellow.'' END OF QUOTE

=============

 objectivation, or how any domain of practice can be normatived with operational terms which objectified this practice  is what a science is. We have already objectified or created science of colours in normatized contexts. But colour perception is not exhausted by a few normalization efforts because it is a very complex body world interaction. The classification of colour in quality stems from that it cannot be objectified in a simple manner.In this view of science, what is objectified is concrete into a well defined practice , that it does not need to be specified and so what is objectified end up existing in itself separated from the percularities of the practitioners which are abstracted away as the normalized practice game , everything become conceiled and some will claim these objective objects of that world as really existing without the player, without the practicing normative game.

Renato,

''Fermat 

argued in early 1662 that light travels not along the shortest geometrical path but

along the path with the shortest travel time. This is a signifi cant change in thinking

and one that inherently adopts the idea that the speed of light is both fi nite and variable in different optical media. For Snell’s law to hold true, for example, light must

travel more slowly in glass or water than in air – in contradiction, in fact, to the

claims of Descartes.''

 Chapter 2

A Very Brief History of Light

What I find interesting in Fermat reasoning is that he right there establish the first formulation of the principle of least action, and the same reasoning as light following the shortest path in empty space is the basis of general relativity.

This is one of my favourite topics that I often use to stimulate thinking in my students. One of my all time favourite questions is "If a big tree falls in a remote forest and no one is around to hear it, does the tree make a sound?"

Then after some amazed looks on the part of the students, I proceed to make a distinction between air wave and the sound that we hear. The two are not one and the same because air wave above certain frequency is not hearable by us but it's still air wave like the wave at the frequency that we can hear, only that they are of different frequencies. So we have no way to imagine what the wave above our range sound like, but it is still a wave. So air wave and sound are not the same thing.

But if they are not the same, then when the big tree falls, what is actually caused by it are the waves, but not sound, because there is no one to hear it.

Perhaps this is what Galieo meant when he said that " ... if one takes away ears, tongues, and roses, there indeed remain the shapes, numbers, and motions, but not the odors, tastes, or sounds; outside the living animal these are nothing but name" (quoted in Alfredo's opening question above). Outside of the 'living aniimal' which is us, there is no sound. Since the tree contains no living human beings within the hearing range, we can't say that there is sound. There's only air wave.

But Alfredo and Buyse argue a different point - that the mind and the body are actually integrated with each other so Descartes' way of radically separating the two is mistaken. That's a bold claim and perhaps the point Buyse is making might be the exegetical one of saying that Galileo himself believed that it is the "corpo sensitivo" that is responsible for the secondary quality, not the mind alone.

However, we look at the issue - whether the sound is located within the 'sensitive body' or in the mind, when the tree falls and nobody is there in the hearing range, there is no sound.

Soraj,

This problem is the problem of the difference between a human narrative about reality and reality itself.  Even the sound wave are representation into a human narrative and they do not exist in reality.  We cannot speak of reality without representation and any representation is a specific viewpoint on reality.  So any scientific description of reality at the limit is as subjective as the sound of the falling tree.  Remove the community of scientists educated to understand that description and the whole description become meaningless.

Dear Soraj, excellent post! Many thanks! You wrote: "However, we look at the issue - whether the sound is located within the 'sensitive body' or in the mind, when the tree falls and nobody is there in the hearing range, there is no sound.""

Alfredo replies: In my approach called Triple-Aspect Monism, I claim that when the air wave is formed but nobody is listening there is a potentiality of sound. This is different of the situation when no air wave exists. When somebody is listening the potentiality becomes actual. Therefore, secondary qualities would exist in a potential state in a mind-independent context, and in an actual state when there is a conscious system (composed of mind and body) to consciously perceive them. Consciousness is  conceived as one aspect of reality where/when some qualities are actualized, and these qualities cannot be actualized by the other aspects (matter/energy and form/information). These qualities are actualized only when they are felt by someone.

Answering also Louis' reply, my understanding of "narrative" is in the context of philosophy of language. I wonder if just feeling a natural quality (e.g. the smell of a rose) could be considered as being a narrative.

Alfredo,

Sound is a transformation of air pressure signal. The former is a subset of the later.  The pressure signal is a high dimensional vector and the sound is a lower dimensional vector, a projection of the other one on a sub-space.  We are dealing all the time with representations meaningfull within our mathematical language.  

Dear Louis, it seems we have a definition problem here. For me "sound" is not a restriction on air waves, or a mathematical form in abstraction. For me "sound" is the feeling of the form of the wave. The feeling of the wave is actualized only in consciousness. Without the conscious receiver, only the form is actualized, the (possible) feeling(s) of the form remains in a potential state. And you did not answer my reply: is feeling a kind of narrative?

Alfredo,

I do not know how you use the word feeling.  Do you include in this word all forms of experience or do you restrict it to a subset of experience.  For example if I see a ripe apple and I am hungry, I has a visual impression of the appearance of the apple and a hungry feeling pushing me to go and eat it.  Here the feelings are related to steering effect on my action and perception are separated category.

When a narrator tell about the story of the falling tree and its sound.  All those reading this narrative assume that the narrator is like them and hear sound like them and all the description of the scene is made by a narrator with the same vision, the same language and it is why we can interpret and experience the narrative.  Trying to remove the narrator from the narrative by asking the question is there any sound is kind of paradoxal and against the a priori assumption of any narrative that the narrator is describing its experience.

Dear all,

Excellent discussion we are having. We should also not discount the phenomenon where some persons do hear sound which nobody else can hear. Persons having tinnitus do hear sound in their heads but the sounds that they hear come only from their brains. Or put somebody inside a completely sound proof room, they will start (according to reports) to hear all sorts of sound because the brain is not used to having no air waves coming in at all so it tries hard to compensate.

This seems to show that sound and air wave are different phenomena. I mean, there can be one without the other. In the narrative story that Louis is talking about, the narrator is inviting us to imagine being in a forest where a tree is falling. In that situation we certainly *imagine* that there is a sound caused by the falling tree. It is part of the whole imagination of the forest scene. But that possible only because we imagine ourselves to be within the hearing range in the first place.

Dear Louis, please read my replies below:

(Louis) I do not know how you use the word feeling. Do you include in this word all forms of experience or do you restrict it to a subset of experience.

(Alfredo) All conscious experience include a feeling; feeling is the mark of consciousness. Feelings include basic sensations, emotional feelings and qualitative experiences (qualia).

(Louis) For example if I see a ripe apple and I am hungry, I has a visual impression of the appearance of the apple and a hungry feeling pushing me to go and eat it.

(Alfredo) In this case you feel hungry and you also feel the drive to eat - two related feelings.

(Louis) Here the feelings are related to steering effect on my action and perception are separated category.

(Alfredo) Yes, they are two different, but mutually coherent feelings.

(Louis) When a narrator tell about the story of the falling tree and its sound. All those reading this narrative assume that the narrator is like them and hear sound like them and all the description of the scene is made by a narrator with the same vision, the same language and it is why we can interpret and experience the narrative.

(Alfredo) The conscious experience of the narrator and the narrative are two different processes. In the science of consciousness researchers use the narrative as the only way to access the conscious experience of the observed subject (as argued in the attached paper), but ontologically we know that the two phenomena are not the same. I can have conscious experience of smelling a rose without narrating it. In the philosophy of language, you may argue with Wittgenstein that there is no private language, but in the philosophy of consciousness you cannot argue that there is no conscious experience without a narrative! The narrative is just one way to communicate (a part of) the content of the experience to other conscious subjects.

(Louis) Trying to remove the narrator from the narrative by asking the question is there any sound is kind of paradoxal and against the a priori assumption of any narrative that the narrator is describing its experience.

(Alfredo) The discussed example is not based on any narrative. It is not an empirical issue, but a theoretical one.

Dear Soraj, the existence of conscious qualia (secondary quialities) in dreams and hallucinations proves that they are not just a response to environmental stimuli. However, one can argue that without previous exposition to each kind of stimulus (during the life of the individual and/or during the evolution of the species) it would not be possible to have these experiences. I would not dream about tasting green papaya and actually feeling the taste during the dream if myself or my ancestors had never tasted the fruit.

Galileo himself did not use the 'primary/secondary quality' terminology.  This terminology is better attributed to Boyle and Locke, though Boyle's primary/secondary qualities are distinct from Locke's.  It is correct, however, to attribute the distinction itself (minus the terminology) to Galileo for whom the relevant difference between the two groups of qualities was quantifiability.  Thus, what we call 'primary qualities' are quantifiable and mathematizable.  They are also considered objective by Galileo.  That is, they are not ontologically dependent on observers and disagreements regarding such qualities can be resolved via measurement.  The 'secondary qualities', on the other hand, are purely qualitative and not amenable to mathematization or quantitative measurement.  Disagreements about such properties cannot be resolved, in that the way a color looks to me can be legimitately different from the way it looks to you.  However, to call them subjective and relegate them to being only in consciousness is problematic.  One way of understanding Galileo's position may be to introduce the notion of relationality.  This language of relationality with regards to qualities is best attributed to Boyle but may help in understanding Galileo, in that secondary qualities are ontologically dependent upon the interaction between relata.  Though secondary qualities may not reside wholly in the observer, they are nevertheless relational properties that require the presence of an observer with appropriate sensory organs.  So, color is ontologically dependent upon the presence of and interaction between the physical object, the light, and the sensory organs of a perceiver.  So, there is something about the physical object that, in the presence of light and of the requisite sensory organs of a perceiver, will give rise to color.  The term 'consciousness' or 'mind' does not have to be introduced at all.  We only need to speak of sensory organs as one of the relata.  If any of these relata are absent however, color qua color does not exist.   I think the confusion rests in not taking the relationality of secondary qualities into consideration when discussing their ontological status.

Marina,

The science of colorimetry can be used to assigned to a light spectrum a color descriptor which quantify in a 3D space the perceived colour.  All human with normal vision will perceived light spectra with the same attributed colour descriptor as being the same in controled laboratory conditions.  So in these conditions, the perceived colour can be quantified or objectified.  Even the distances among colour descriptors correspond to perceived difference between these lights.  

Marina,

You may objected to my above argument that these colour descriptor is describing only specific human colour perception and not dog colour perception, nor bee colour percption.  Yes, they are objective descriptor of light pertinent to specific human pragmatic task: comparing light in unstructured context.  So given this human task, the color objectivation (attribution of a colour descriptor to a light spectrum) is a projection of the spectrum vector into the sub-space of the colour description.  The colour objectivization determined a classification/partition of the light spectrum space.  Each member of each class spectrum is attributed the same colour descriptor because all these spectrum are equivalent relative to the pragmatic of comparing colour by human in unstructure conditions.  It is an objectivisation of the light world relative to this human task. 

Lets compare this with the case of measuring lengths.  Measuring lenghts from constructing a building can be done with measuring instrument with a given accuracy that will not undermine the success of constructing the building.  But totally different instruments and accuracies will be necessary for other tasks.  So the process of lenght objectivization also depend on the task it is related to.

So objectivization has always to be related to a task and it is not a characteristic of the world by itself.  It has to be situated into a pragmatic context.  My claim is that in science, objectivization is always limited to a pragmatic context and so is never an objectivization of the world.  The pragmatic context a priori define equivalent relation in the world which are objectivisation of the world for this pragmatic context.  Each praxis determines what we have to pay attention and limit existence to what can be objectified in the context of this praxis.  So each praxis has its own objective world.

In the praxis of student evaluation, the teacher tell the students how they will be evaluated and establish marking critera that he/she applies uniformly and at the end of the term attribes an objective score to each students.  In the evaluation praxis of a specific course each student's performance is objectifies in that score.

In a market economies everything is objectified by its market value in the economic praxis.

Marina P. Banchetti-Robino gave an excellent answer, but did not reply to Louis Brassard

I think that Marina is right. The secondary qualities are the results of interactions.

I want to add only this: The primary qualities probably are just spatial and temporal determinants of the secondary qualities. Some color must be at some particular place and not at some other place, and must be somewhere in time; or the hardness of some object must be similarly localized and for example not be everywhere. Our world seams to be conceived by us as a thick mixture of singular entities. Probably such is also the nature of our brain. The World itself, without properties, probably does not have color, temperature, hardens, sound, is not heavy is not light, does not "look like" anything at all.

See this, that is not exactly what I write, but might help: F. H. BRADLEY: APPEARANCE AND REALITY, A METAPHYSICAL ESSAY, (1893) Chs 1 and 2.

http://krishnamurti.abundanthope.org/index_htm_files/Appearance-and-Reality-by-FH-Bradley.pdf