Why the vision argument is a very good one!

[Angrboda]

Jo, I am really busy these days. I apologize from not responding sooner. You're post of evolutions deals with the origin of value, that is another argument in the other thread, but not really to do with the vision argument.

I will try to explain why we need vision for value which your previous post did address.  When you say "amount of love" is there a certain amount of physical hard-wired cells that love? Or does it mean something else? 

I think it's quality amount, it's not a quantity that has no assessment. We assess, I call this "vision judgment", and I believe this is a true nature of love. It values through assessment. 

I asked about beauty, because I believe every person has a different type of personality that has a shape in perception.  The shape is no physical, the form is not physical, the hue of it is not physical, but it's perceived.  Metaphorically, we even have a scent, a taste... 

When we perceive others or ourselves, we do so in abstract way, not knowing all the details.  The same is true of our minds.  Are subconscious can't asses ourselves totally with all the details nor can we do so of others, nor can others do so, nor is there a personality way of measuring things scientifically that will awaken to us who we are.

You were saying well the amount will exist, the value will exist, whether something perceives it or not. I disagree, like you can't take a quantity type ruler, and measure someone personality or love.

There is evidence true in the world, in how people compliment you, your reputation, if it's you being true and not deceiving people,  there is more then yourself that asses true.

But I'm saying that objective value that you are trying to asses, it's self not a physical thing, and hence requires perception. Your actions also are not totally physical, they have physical aspect to it but also a concrete love/valuing or it's opposite, it has goodness or evil to them, and that value is not a physical thing. Since we don't know the details of that perception, we aren't the source. Something else is given us that reality we try to estimate with our vision.

Of course, you can say, well our judgement is a good enough estimate, to what would be an accurate value if there was one. But that is saying itself there is no accurate value, and I would argue further, without an accurate value, we are shooting darts with no target, while, at least our estimate of who we are is shooting at darts knowing there is a target if we perceive God perceives us as we are and nothing else but perfect judgment can properly give us that value, which we try to know over time.

For the sake of argument, the non-physical personality, let's call it a program. I believe the program is produced by God's command, but you can believe the physical mind generates it for the sake of argument, and that will be the common ground for non-physical.

It's not an issue of whether objective value is a physical thing or not, we both acknowledge that perceptions of value are conceptual and represent abstract things. That is not the same thing as saying that conceptual truths cannot be represented by physical processes, and indeed the evidence would seem to be against you on that score.

What you have is an intuition. An intuition that the type of thoughts which form the basis of our value judgements is in some way special and unlike any ordinary mental contents. An intuition by itself is not an argument. Intuitions by their nature are not transparent, as are the processes of reason, so it is impossible to say, solely on the basis of an intuition whether you have the truth of the matter or not. For my part, I have an equally forceful intuition that our value judgements lie well within the range of mental concepts we are capable of, are readily explained by the tools at our disposal, and are fully explained by imperfect representations obtained exclusively through mundane channels. In that, neither intuition is clearly correct, yet since you are making an affirmative case here, that is the ultimate failure of your argument. If you had more than an intuition supporting your claim, you would be able to explicate it as you have done the other parts of your argument, but so far you have not done so.

An additional point is your use of the analogy of vision in your argument. Such an analogy is what is known as an intuition pump (see below), and while useful for pedagogical purposes, they are less useful as methods of demonstration. As Dennett notes, they can be productively used, but they can also be abused. Given the great extent upon which your argument is being carried on the back of your analogy, your use of it tends more toward an abuse of such tools than a useful supplement to an otherwise sound argument. It's also worth noting that cultural concepts and the very values you are discussing can influence our intuitions, so intuitions and intuition pumps may, in a sense, be best avoided when trying to make a positive demonstration such as you have attempted here.

Khemikal has already responded to your argument concerning our not knowing, definitively, the source of specific values and value mentation. Not knowing, however, leads us to a conclusion of agnosticism, not the positive assertion you seem to imply. Doing so renders your argument little more than an appeal to ignorance, and your conclusion therewith does not follow.

A popular strategy in philosophy is to construct a certain sort of thought experiment I call an intuition pump. ... Intuition pumps are cunningly designed to focus the reader's attention on "the important" features, and to deflect the reader from bogging down in hard-to-follow details. There is nothing wrong with this in principle. Indeed one of philosophy's highest callings is finding ways of helping people see the forest and not just the trees. But intuition pumps are often abused, though seldom deliberately.

Wikipedia || Intuition pump

Searle's form of argument is a familiar one to philosophers: he has constructed what one might call an intuition pump, a device for provoking a family of intuitions by producing variations on a basic thought experiment. An intuition pump is not, typically, an engine of discovery, but a persuader or pedagogical tool - a way of getting people to see things ' your way once you've seen the truth, as Searle thinks he has. I would be the last to disparage the use of intuition pumps - I love to use them myself - but they can be abused. In this instance I think Searle relies almost entirely on ill-gotton gains: favorable intuitions generated by misleadingly presented thought experiments.

"The Milk of Human Intentionality," Daniel Dennett.